Save it. If you are an Apple fanatic, that is.
And if you are Steve Ballmer, the only remaining Microsoft fan, that is reading this... “I am probably just going through a phase Mr. Ballmer so you can buzz off too”.
I just cannot get along with Apple.
I think I already said that... and out loud too... and in a blog post... to be indexed and stored by search engines for ever and probably read by the Apple fans everywhere!
But sometimes you have to get it out of your system.
I recently bought a Macbook which is my first Apple product. I used to use Windows on a Dell before and I still have it.
But, like I said, I am not comfortable with the Mac. I don’t look forward to using it these days. In fact, I find myself wishing my windows booted up faster so I could end up using it.
There are several things which baffle me about the Macbook. You cannot maximize windows! Even after hitting what appears to be a “maximize” button! It just gets annoyed and reluctantly expands to a random size of its own choosing, as if it knows you are probably not looking anyway and thinks that the extra window size is not good for you. Sometimes, it just makes the window taller without doing anything about the width. Give me girth, if you are stingy that way and are only going to expand in one dimension.
I have resorted to try and maximize a window by dragging and resizing it manually. Do you guys ever get the drag and resize of a window right? Where it is fully expanded from left-to-right and top-to-bottom on your screen? I can sometimes, if I have about 10 minutes to spare and have a non-apple-designed magnifying glass at hand.
The scrollbar, in one word, sucks. It’s about 3 pixels wide and I always miss it when I click it just the way it was probably intended by whoever designed it at Apple.
Since I keep maximising the windows manually, I end up leaving a pixel or 2 of space next to the window where the scrollbar is and I always end up clicking on the empty space when I reach for the scrollbar which brings up the application behind it to the top!
Alt+Tab behaves worse. I cannot Alt+Tab between 2 chrome windows. Try it now if you are on a Mac. If you are on Windows, just go buy a Mac and try it now and see for yourself. It’s unbelievable. Try copying some text between 2 chrome windows without using the mouse.
When you open a new application it doesn’t show up on top like it was asked. It just appears clumsily in the background when there are other windows present and you have to now find it and invite it once more into the foreground.
Resizing is not left alone with the level of difficulty already inherent in it as discussed above, but when you do resize, sometimes the entire lower system menu pops up on you and you are now left trying to figure out a way to trick it to not appear when you sneakily approach the now almost invisible “resizable corner” from another angle.
I will put in a word about the system menu now. Simply put, there is no place where you can put the system menu which makes it less annoying. Whether you dock it to the top, bottom, left or right of the screen, it always manages a way to interrupt you when you are clearly reaching out to click something else. In fact, after finishing this article I plan to completely disable it (oh Apple, please tell me I can) and just invoke applications I need using the search option available on the top-right. I mostly have no complaints about the search thingie so far!
Notepad is wonderfully weird. It does not allow you to save documents! How sweet! Instead use the always un-resizable and stupidly named TextEdit. Don’t forget to copy and paste the stuff(which works) you just wrote in notepad.
The close, minimize buttons (are ROUND in shape!) and look too slippery to inspire any confidence and there is no way, I am told, I can increase the size of them, or flatten them or GOD forbid, try to change the colors of the super-corny red, orange and green buttons.
TextEdit acts drunk when fed with too much text. I am yet to find a reliable way to scroll down the document because once you have scrolled down, the moment you start typing, TextEdit proudly sends you back to the beginning of the document. That is pure Genius.
Query: Can I buy extra keys on the keyboard? Was that a part of the plan from the beginning? To sell extra keys as needed? Put me down for a set of “Page up” and “Page down” keys, PLEASE.
And does the Caps Lock key have its own separate booting process? No? Then why the hell does it take that long to change state when I press it?
There, you would think I am all ranted out by now - but wait... Why doesn’t the delete key DELETE the files? Or is that a property of a separate “delete delete” key that I forgot to buy?
When opening folders, the Enter key does not allow me to ENTER into them. It suddenly decides to behave the way a “Rename” key would behave and offers to rename the file for free. Can I please buy the part of the source code that does this in the Mac and modify it myself?
Now, I would have had good things to say about the inbuilt wireless connector had it ever connected at a range beyond 10 meters from my router. My Dell does way better and does not keep timing out and does not keep asking me for the password that it clearly knows it knows already!
The Apple fans might come after me with “answers” to the above complaints and that’s exactly what is wrong with Apple. It’s just that the fans are so over-the-top and so gaga over the “greatness of Apple” and Steve Jobs that it is all a bit overwhelming and you are never left alone to discover the realistic merits of the products yourself. In fact, you are almost under pressure not to disagree - but these are my ACTUAL experiences and I find that it is simply not very good at even the very basic usage level even after trying very hard to like it. It’s the same annoying feeling I get when people talk about how “great” the Dark Knight movies are and how great “it will be” when the new one is released, but let me leave that to another day.
