A lot of times, I get the impression that people believe in the “Cult of Mac” bullshit – that the majority of Mac users are absolutely rabid about liking Macs and Apple to the extent that they will defend every bad move the company does in existence. Zealotry, pure and simple.
I’m not going to deny that there is a “Cult of Mac”, but no more so than there is a “Cult of Windows PCs” or “Cult of Xbox 360” or “Cult of Your National Team in a specific sport”. What people miss is that a lot of Mac users are among the hardest critics of their own computers. (That certainly couldn’t be said about Windows users, for what it’s worth – do you think anyone would stomach repeated spyware attacks and general piss-poor security? The Mac’s not immune from those flaws, and there will be OS X viruses, but the fact is that in the real world today, Windows is down by a million to one, and most people who use it tend to operate in the real world, not in for-the-sake-of-an-argument worlds.)
So, without further ado; things I personally really hate about Apple products.
QuickTime Pro. In order to (legitimately) play QuickTime movies fullscreen, export a file or generally do lots of useful things in QuickTime Player, you have to buy an extra license for something called “QuickTime Pro” at $30. Ostensibly, this foots the bill for MPEG patent licensing costs, but even so it’s absolute bullshit. Apple should know to cover this cost — there’s just no excuse for this, especially considering how they bundle games and utilities I’ll never use for a greater retail value with most Macs.
Format incapability. This too belongs to QuickTime. It won’t play OGG Vorbis or FLAC natively. It won’t play OGG videos, DivX or Xvid natively. Much of this shit is free; the rest is cheap and heavily requested. Just do it.
A second mouse button. It’s over. You “lost”. Yes, having a one-button trackpad in your laptops (every desktop machine that ships with any sort of mouse ships with the kinda-sorta multi-button Mighty Mouse) makes developers think twice about not sticking everything in a shortcut menu. We get it. I get it. However, shortcut menus are still useful. We want a second mouse button. Give it to us.
Update (2006-05-13): I’m aware that the single mouse button is a proven model that’s not broken per se. However, Apple has also kept improving its shortcut menu support and encouraging its developers to do so, and using a modifier key to bring up a shortcut menu is a bullshit idea in the first place. In my day job, I spend some time designing Windows applications, and I’m not new to Mac development either, so I do claim some experience here.
Good software design uses the shortcut menu as a shortcut for useful items (shortcut being just that; the feature is still available elsewhere), and in that role, it’s a very good thing to have. It’s true that a shortcut menu can easily turn into a dump-features-here deal, but apps featuring that also tend to be shackled by numerous other flaws. It’s my long-held opinion that it’s no longer a useful proposition to hold back a sensible and expected feature for the sake of tricking developers into good software design.
Besides, the terrorists have already won – the useful “Show Package Contents” menu item in the Finder only exists in the Action (cog) menu, and is thus immune to such dreadful things as user-assignable shortcuts, which Mac OS X has, and which would help me numerous times daily. Sigh.
Apple Mail. Give. Me. A. Left. Hand. Mail. List. Now.
The Finder. The Finder is the Mac equivalent of the Windows Explorer (the thing with your folders, not the big blue e), and it mostly stinks. It’s a lot better than Windows Explorer in some cases, but it still mostly stinks – aka the default behavior of replacing a whole folder and its contents and not simply merging when you copy one folder over another. No, I don’t know why you’d possibly want to do that either. Yes, bundles are a special case where it doing that would be good, because bundles act like files, not like folders.
Spotlight. Spotlight is the search function in OS X. It’s reasonably okay with indexing metadata, but it makes syrup look fast if you try to actually use it. An indexed searching system shouldn’t work that slow.
Applescript. Applescript is a great idea. It’s about letting applications say “here’s what I can do, call these things and you can get control over me or get me to hand out some of my data”. Sadly, in a lot of cases, a great idea is also where it ends. Applescript is designed to be english-like, which sounds okay but means that it’s dreadful to write for as a programmer. And since it’s just ambiguous and not actually english-like, “mere mortals” aren’t going to be able to write something anywhere near useful without spending a day and cursing every Cupertino-originated fixture in the room doing it.
It’s also a real pain in the ass to provide support for Applescript functionality as an application developer, although this is most likely a case of poor docs, docs having recently been spruced up. The documentation for the actual language, though, continues to languish. It not only looks like something from 1999, it is from 1999.
There are a million small things I like and hate about Apple, and I resolve to keep adding to this page when I come up with something constructive.
I agree with everyting except for the mouse. Fact: The one-button-mouse has worked. It still works. It’s the single most important cause why you don’t have to right-click on every damn interface element in an application to figure out how the application works (and for the record, I develop windows applications. I know how that goes: New feature? Let’s avoid the cost of doing any real interface design. Just put in a context menu and hope people will find it).
For 95% of users, one button is enough. For the rest, tough luck. buy a mouse. get used to the ctr key if you have a powerbook, or buy some add-on which makes a tap a right-click.
By LKM · 2006.05.13 15:43
I completly agree about QuickTime, support for ‘free’ things is a no brainer and it wouldnt hurt their own formats as for most people they dont know the differnce or similiarities between divx, xvid and h.264, the just pick small, medium and large.
Also the mouse thing, I have several mice, a mighty mouse, a bluetooth Apple mouse, a hocky puck mouse my 2 year old plays with, and a logitech 8 button mouse. Right now the only one I use other than my trackpad is the mighty mouse, the scroll ball is a god send and Apple really needed that, however the rest of the mouse is useless, I prefer the ctrl + click as I tend to be using a modifier key also. I.e. alt + drag to copy or whatever so for power users I dont quite see the argument, we all use a lot of modifier keys with our mice right? So what does the right button on a mouse really add for regular users? Anyway you have two button mice, its built into the OS so let it go ;)
My biggest gripe about my Mac’s are the noise. I am a real analalist and buzzing, humming, chirping, mooing, or general noise is annoying. While all my machines are quiet they all produce some sounds that, when the surrounding environment is pretty quiet, drive me a little nuts. My MacBook is great untill its 2 am and it chirps for example… I really wish Steve Jobs want a little hard of hearing, i bet then we would not see these noises ;)
By John Anthony Evans · 2006.05.13 16:32
I’ve responded to most of your criticisms in the post itself, but I will add that to many people, buying a mouse is simply not an alternative. Laptops were built to include pointing devices for a reason, and if they are missing a good feature – and I will call right-clicking a good feature – I’m going to criticize Apple for it. (The trackpad is otherwise wonderful – so many other trackpads feel like glass or have odd buttons, and almost no other trackpads come with the absolutely awesome two finger scrolling.)
I consider your assertion malformed. 95% of the time, one button is enough, not 100% of the time for 95% of the users. But I doubt that as many as one in twenty are going to never have the easy shortcut menu access introduced with a second mouse button be a convenience worth the tradeoffs.
By Jesper · 2006.05.13 16:41
This simply does not match with my (and I’d expect most people’s) experience. Many of my friends use Macs. That’s roughly 20 or 30 people. Of those, a grand total of two use an external two-button mouse. One person uses an extension on her PowerBook which simulates a second button on tap. The others don’t care about the second button, and never said anything about it. Most Mac users do not even notice that there’s only one button, because there is simply no obvious situation where you might want to use another button.
And, quite frankly, my parents have enough trouble figuring out where to click as it is. They don’t need more trouble because they don’t know which button to use when clicking.
For 95% of all Mac users, one button is enough 100% of the time. If this were not the case, I’d know it.
Also, there’s a second question: Are people use use two-button-mice really faster, or does it simply feel faster to use two-button-mice? Research done by Tog has shown that what people perceive to be more efficient is quite often slower when actually measured (Tog measured using the mouse versus using keyboard shortcuts).
By LKM · 2006.05.13 18:56
John: My beef with two button mice has never been the built-in support. Whenever there’s been a discussion among people who don’t know better about how “the Mac only does one button mice”, I have been one of the first to point out that the Mac built in does “several-button” mice, offers scrolling support and has done so since before OS X. That’s not the point. (However, (and with no regard to any usability guidelines; just speaking my own personal opinion) I actually quite like Microsoft’s approach here – allow modifier key+drag to copy/create shortcut, and also allow right-dragging to bring up a menu (in all its imperfections) of all options.)
LKM: I’ve read Tog, and I agree that it’s likely that a lot of strong opinions about mice and keyboard (such as the infamous “which is faster, keyboard shortcut or using the mouse” deal). That doesn’t dilute my point. My point — as well as yours — is simply about what one’s comfortable with. Saving a second or two doesn’t add up to anything that’s worth more than simply working the way you like better, even over a lifetime.
All in all, what I’m saying is not that it’s impossible to do something without a second button. I’m saying that it comes as a great inconvenience for those of us who are used to two-button mice that there is — at the very least — no option for two-button trackpads on Apple laptops. Come to think of it, that option really would be the best, and would allow us all to win, so to speak.
By Jesper · 2006.05.13 20:00
Actually, I’ve found Spotlight to be pretty fast when it comes to actually searching the hard drive — the problem (in my opinion) is the insistence on trying to search the hard drive as you type, rather than waiting for you to press ENTER. If it would let you finish typing the frickin’ search term and then return a result set, I’d have very little problem with it.
By Watts · 2006.05.19 00:23
I agree. The new MacBooks have a kind of optional second button: They allow for a gesture (clicking while holding two fingers on the pad) to initate the context menu. This has to be turned on in the System Preferences. Hopefully most second-button-afficionados will be happy with this solution.
By LKM · 2006.05.21 09:07
LKM: From experience with the iScroll2 utility, I can tell you that it doesn’t feel very natural and you often start scrolling before clicking. But maybe this is handled better in Apple’s driver.
By Jesper · 2006.05.21 10:33
Check it out: Left. Hand. Mail. List. Now. http://harnly.net/software/letterbox/
By gene · 2006.06.15 15:38
gene: Thanks.
I’ve tried it and it didn’t work well enough mentally for me. Outlook does this well by putting the info on two lines, and Letterbox can’t offer that. I’m not complaining because I know how hard that’d be to hack in, but I’m not using it without it either.
By Jesper · 2006.06.15 23:14