I HATE APPLE

WHAT DID HE EVER DO TO YOU??????????

All too true.

Apple replaced my new iBook's motherboard while I was in Japan. That's hundreds of dollars worth, at no charge to me. Of course, it shouldn't have failed within six months in the first place...

That's why they charge you double upfront!

Because I don't believe in a company making you pay for a warantee that should be offered for free upfront. I was under the impression that a one-year warantee meant that if something goes wrong in the first year, they actually fix the thing, not put you on the phone with several douchebags who are trying to sell you additional warantees.

Shit, when the first warantee doesn't seem to work, why would I want to buy another one?

But it does sound like you have a problem with your serial number, Jay.

tho when i was waiting there, i did see todd oldham.

My tech experience with Apple has been sensational. A friend called me today to tell me that his mini iPod was replaced in less than five business days, and he also got the new generation mini in place of his old one that had died. No charge.

I've dealt with Dell and Gateway and their CSRs are no better than Apple's. HPs can blow me, they've sucked.

the desktop I have at work running XP has been up and alive for 2 years with barely any reboots. It does everything I want it to do, does it quickly, and I can navigate painlessly without ever touching the mouse if I feel like it.

I was raised on Apple and my first job was DTP on a Mac, followed by audio editing on a Mac, more DTP, and so on. OS 7+ had more than its share of problems and stupid quirks but the hardware was rock solid and at least its behavior was predictable.

Since getting my latest-edition powerbook I've put it through little more than I ever tried to do with my old OS

...OS

My old Quadra used to have a TV Tuner in it and be able to do image captures from live cable broadcasts, then I could import them into my cheap, incredibly easy to use paint program and do whatever with them. I believe it cost approximately half of what my laptop did! My laptop lets me chat and surf the internet. And rip CDs.

Well today it decided it wasn't going to wake up again, ever, as I'm being greeted with a totally white screen.

What's funny is that like doing searches on my own to try to figure out wtf this computer is doing right now (I mean not even the sad face x-eye Mac or the question mark Mac! NOTHING AT ALL! WHITE SCREEN! I know how to handle the other things!), everyone who is reporting similar issues to me is like bitching about how they have all this important blah blah blah they were doing with the Mac prior hand. Is it that no one who has this failure who is only using their Mac for chat, porn, and MP3s can be bothered to get in on the discussions, or is it because they don't die if that's all you use it for? Because yeah, it seems like my sleep problem increases tenfold whenever I've been using my iBook more for writing or photo work. If all I've done on the damn thing is use iChat for two weeks, no problems whatsoever with starting it up, back when it, uh, started up.

What does this imply??? Is there like some inherent instability in the majority of the "native" programs that come bundled with OSX or is this just really fucked up coincidence?

Also it seems that this particular issue with the iBook G3 was so bad they threw the whole "your warranty is expired, give us $500" shenanigans out the window, and searching on this same issue with "Powerbook" has not given me the same results--ARE IBOOKS PIECES OF SHIT? wtf?

*with the exception of my ancient PowerMac that I had when I was 14-15-16, which only died because my sister is a dick.

I am pretty close to deciding to become the female Punisher, except murdering computer firms, instead of bad guys.

And then kind of ran away????

That was pretty funny.

If Apple store in Clarendon cannot do anything for me worthwhile like, I will be coming back up to NYC and hitting u up on the favor, though. I like desperately, desperately need this to work ASAP.

Graphics are nonsense; I had that system and just customized the entire thing with graphics of my choice. Of my choice, since I was like 14 at the time, was like a bunch of lame ass Monty Python cartoons and/or Madonna album covers but what the fuck ever.

You know what else? This lamp-shaped iMac is stupid. There's no reason the screen needs to be this adjustable, and in fact with an LCD screen that has color-shifting problems, it's best if it doesn't move at all. It's only to make the computer more anthropomorphic, more... cute. So people will fall in love with the computer like it's a kitten. Crafty to the point of being kinda evil.

I have thought, on a few occasions, that OS7/8/9's desktop was more customizable than OSX's.

Maybe they are trying too hard to make things look pretty or cute and not spending enough time on making things sensible and working, anymore.

When I've been put off the G5 iMac as my next desktop computer because I hear too many stories about the power supply overheating thanks to them shoving everything in a thin white IKEA slab, it's time to reconsider the role "award-winning design" plays in your product development.

I kind of hate the OS X desktop. I have a menu bar, and a hard drive icon. I don't want a fucking DOCK, I never asked for a fucking DOCK, the whole rest of the computing world gets by without a DOCK. take that shit away and let me pick my own fonts. Dickholes.

In an office where multiple people are using the same computer and there's limited desk space the lamp iMacs have been terrific.

Hold down the trackpad button on startup.

I will be at a loss forever, though, as to why pressing F12 (the eject button) worked to eject The Marriage of Maria Braun not ten minutes earlier, but refused to work just now.

Any suggestions on the other stuff, besides setting the thing on fire?

massive xpost

Font management/selection/preview is atrocious in OS X. I got Suitcase but all that does is move fonts into and out of your Font folder, rather than you going and doing it yourself. Uh alright thanks I guess.

You know what I've never understood about computers? Why should anyone have to "save" anything, ever? Why isn't it just all on there all the time? I spent 3 hours working on some document, you tool, you think I don't want to "save" it? I mean really now.

xpost: you could try shooting it.

Download Yasu, let it run everything.

http://www.laptops4me.com/images/pict/SNY-TR3AP1_LG.jpg

And yeah, Tracer, I'm kind of hoping that this is a display issue somehow, not a computer-itself issue, but everything I'm reading indicates this is not the case. :(

I didn't notice the all-white screen hassle upthread. Did you try booting into open firmware and reseting the NVRAM?

(cmd-opt-o-f on bootup, then type "reset-nvram" "set-defaults" "reset-all" )

so I can just walk into the apple store with this thing and someone will help me out?

xpost

tracer otm. i often have totally differing degrees of success w/customer service if i just take a different approach.

I like a little glitz. The trouble with OS X is that it's not likely to be *your* glitz, just theirs, which is arrogant on Apple's part (shockah!). Like Tom says, you can't even change the system font. I don't much care for Lucida Grande, but guess what? Apple likes it, so I get to stare at it every day for several hours.

I do want my desktop to be prtyy though, since I spend so much time there. It's like my apartment -- in a way it's even more personal. I mean honestly, cooking and watching TV and sleeping, how glamorous does it need to be?

This is only for particular models. I looked it up before buying a G5. I don't have any problems (yet).

This lamp-shaped iMac is stupid. There's no reason the screen needs to be this adjustable, and in fact with an LCD screen that has color-shifting problems, it's best if it doesn't move at all.

Well, no, I don't think so. In fact I have a hard adapting to the non-moveable G5. :-(

(xpost oh never mind, you got a card, PROBLEM SOLVED)

10 PRINT "SALESDUDER IS A SCSI DONGLE  "
20 GOTO 10

Haha wtfever I just feel like s crewing them cos I hate their OSX.

I had something else to say but I forgot so instead I'll say that I passed BASIC class by having some dorky boy do all my work. TRACER HAND LOOKIN AT YOU.

A) There was NO RECORD that I had previously called Apple customer support or taken my computer into a store with any complaints, ever, prior to my warranty expiring, which would've made a difference, apparently. Lesson 1: physically bring the computer to an Apple store and ask for proof that they have actually entered your complaint into the system.
B) The only people who showed up at the Genius Bar (which was a good amount of people--the queue was up to 4pm within an hour of the store opening) had iBooks, iMacs and the ubiquitous iPod battery problem. Lesson 2: try to avoid purchasing any Apple product beginning with cutesy "i" and focus on those beginning with fascist "Power".*
C) The overworked tech (there was one dude there, the second dude, also nice, was an hour and a half late to work) was very nice about the whole thing, but would not stop staring at my boobs. Lesson 3: bring boobs to Apple store.
D) After lengthy discussion of all the things I had done to the computer and my own self diagnosis and "I think this is what you need to do" being totally correct, plus thrown in comments about how awful G3s were and how this is doing the same thing, guy was even more sympathetic to my problems. Lesson 4: Do some research, if you can get online, before going into Apple Store.

RESULT:
They knocked down price of fixing computer significantly despite my lack of warranty and the fact that it looks like a few v. pricey components need to be replaced. The actual computer itself is in perfect condition and is loading just fine but there's something seriously wrong with something in the Logic board, basically, that means the connection to the LCD is dead and my computer has wakey-wakey issues. Problem being that I haven't backed up my data in about a year. They offered to do so for me--but it would've taken an additional week on top of the 7-10 business days EST for computer repair because of how backed up they are in Clarendon. Instead I ended up purchasing the external hard drive Tom's been "meaning to get" for a few months now and the guys did it for me, while I stood there, for free. Well for free plus the $179 for the drive. In total, this is going to cost about $400 to fix. Add the price of later adding an Airport Extreme card (one of the reasons I picked an iBook over a Powerbook was that part of the price difference was the optional Airport card in iBook versus mandatory in Powerbook--at the time, I had no foreseeable need for wireless access), plus this repair, and I could've bought Tom's PowerBook G4 + upped the RAM on it on purchase.

Final Lesson: Just pick the most expensive thing you can find on purchases like this because you get what you pay for.

FIN.

* not quite FIN, errr Tom I just noticed there is something v. off about your LCD as well and now I am PARANOID to use yr computer, more so than normal.

I was still jealous of him, him and his horribly scarred computer.

Pour some wine on it.

10.3.8 sucks a dick

MAYBE I AM THE MAC LCD DISPLAY KILLER.

XPOST OH IT'S JUST A COMPLETELY RETARDED "FEATURE" NEVER MIND I FEEL BETTER NOW, ABOUT MYSELF ONLY THOUGH NOT ABOUT THE WORLD IN GENERAL.

In Craig's words, which I am going to repeat as often as it takes for people to stop inventing useless features: "A Bluetooth extention that opens my car windows for me? Who the fuck wants that? Call me when you invent a Bluetooth extention that drives my drunk ass home after a night out, fucking idiots!"

Now what I don't understand is why Apple has v. quietly invented an actually useful feature that seems only available on its most recent PowerBooks. Why don't they make a big fuss about their bloody new style trackpads that allow you to scroll mouse-style instead of clicky-style on webpages??? Why do they make this big deal about AMBIENT LIGHT DIMMING but not about scroll trackpads from 2313?

"I BESTOW UPON YOU AN INCREASINGLY COST INEFFICENT AND UGLY RANGE OF IPODS! YOU KIDS LIKE IPODS! THEY COME IN VOMIT GREEN AND PREGNANCY TEST STYLES, NOW! HEY! PAY NO ATTENTION TO THAT USEFUL TRACK PAD BEHIND THE CURTAIN! PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE AWESOME WIZARD! LOOK AT THE OLD MAN WITH THE COMPUTER THAT RESEMBLES THAT CAT TOY THAT IS MADE OUT OF A SPRINGY TUBE WITH A FUZZY BALL ON THE TOP! CLOSE THAT CURTAIN!"

Seriously what the fuck, at what point did these people jump the shark?

xpost I've had no problems with my iPod, amazingly! I imagined it'd like disintegrate as soon as I tried to use it but my battery has held up amazingly well.

I missed that the first time. hahaha

hotcha!

ihttp://mcosre.sourceforge.net/screenshots/x_classic.gif

I like OSX but it is orphaning older machines too quickly and Apple's build quality has slipped a great deal recently.

http://www.bensbargains.net/ktalk/1110895419,1631,.shtml

http://www.bensbargains.net/ktalk/1110876590,21579,.shtml

There is something of a cult following for the Color Classic. They are quite rare on the used market -- and some users have managed to hack in 68040 boards and even G3 upgrades into the smallest color Macintosh.

Shit! Why did I give this away? Why?

Perhaps that why he calls it 'bastard' and 'oh you motherfucker' so often?

Also this is secondhand information, but I would suggest that the Sony VAIO line is just as "overpriced" performancewise and just as likely to have some kind of stupid hardware failure in the first two years as any Macintosh product.

I wonder how long before Linux runs and is usable with WiFi on it. It'd be cool to netboot it and use it as an X terminal.

YO STEVE WHERE ARE MY SWITCHABLE WORKSPACES THAT I CAN ASSIGN DIFFERENT BACKGROUND GRAPHICS TOO AND NAME STUPID THINGS

There's actually an API for this in OS X that a ton of the free workspace switchers use. I saw one particularly good workspace switcher that added a folder named "Desktops" to your home directory, allowing each desktop to have items unique to it as well as the global "Desktop" items.

but back on topic
I mean seriously though why do I have to go download an extra application to make all my files visible on OS X? On Solaris I just told it to stop hiding shit and boom, even .. becomes a clickable directory. THAT'S HOW IT WORKS STEVE

Most LCD monitor warranties require you to have a certain percentage of dead pixels before you can claim. It's usually about 5%, which is a hell of a lot given that one or two pixels in the centre of the screen can be damn offputting.

Thinking about it, I don't think it's a flat percentage figure - and there are separate limits for dead and miscoloured pixels.

The general point - that there have to be quite a lot of dead pixels before you can think about sending the monitor back - is true, though

(and 1600x1200 TFT monitors are still vv expensive, so might have different warranties - all the TFTs I've come across in the past year or so have been 1280x1024)

xpost: well, yes. But as i said, I'm too lazy to do, like, *research* myself.

(why do you think I've got a blog?)

-- The Ghost of Dan Perry (djperr...) (webmail), March 16th, 2005 10:20 AM. (Dan Perry) (link)

What are you talking about specifically?

But being able to acess X apps remotely would be cool. I wonder if the DS can do OpenGL.....

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/images/newdasher.gif

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/DasherSummary2.html

I don't manage /usr/local/bin using Finder.

Dan, yr totally OTM.

This is the only thing on Mac's entire website that I can find that specifically references the LCD issue: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=22194 I was actually searching for the "solution" the tech offered the girl which involved "massaging" the affected area with a q-tip??? He said "the instructions on how to do it are all on the website though" and I cannot find them! Maybe he meant some other website, and not Apple's.

And yeah, I know, LCD's, they ain't gonna replace them for one or two pixels out, right? But it struck me odd that there wasn't like a 5% type of figure being thrown out, that the thing would have to be pretty much DEAD for them to even be willing to do anything at all.

http://slagheap.net/etherspoof/
http://wiki.ethereal.com/CaptureSetup_2fCapturePrivileges
http://www.macguru.net/~frodo/Tripwire-osx.html

JON WILLIAMS HAS NOT ANSWERED MY QUESTION

Jon, there is one problem with OSX that you never, ever, ever get on these threads and it leads you to argue with me or Tracer or Tom or basically anyone else who doesn't feel like having to open Terminal and remember UNIX commands and go through lengthy compile processes just to get control of their own goddamn computer that they paid $3000 for. You DON'T have to go through these hoops on Windows (post like 2000ish). You DIDN'T have to go through these hoops on older Mac OSes. You DON'T have to do this with other systems. If you WANTED to do that you could just FUCKING LOAD RED HAT INTO A MUCH CHEAPER MACHINE. That's the problem here, Jon, not whether or not you could, theoretically, go into UNIX and go through a series of commands to do xyz if you know quite a lot about UNIX. I know it's theoretically possible. I also know that I didn't have to do that on OS9 or on my PC to get it to do things I wanted to do. It shouldn't take me hours to make iTunes work the way I want it to, is what I'm saying. I shouldn't have to search the help function to figure out how to double space paragraphs in iWork. By making things "easier" they're making it harder.

Mac OSX basically has two modes: complete retard or computer scientist. For everyone who falls in between--which is the majority of what seems to be their market, old Mac users and switch over fairly-knowledgable Windows 2000/XP users--this is really super gay balls bullshit and I hope they change this little smugness phenomenon on their next OS because I'd really like a Powerbook or Powermac but quite frankly if I'm going to have to use UNIX commands and shit in a terminal app ANYWAY to get what I want done on a regular basis on the computer, I'm not going to buy a fucking Mac.

xpost because he's already spent $4000 on a computer that acts like a flakey tempermental coke head?

the build quality could be a whole lot better. but I have an uncle who works at apple so I get it all cheap (maintenance &.) fr free anyway < /flounces off, smug as all hell>

at least, off the top of my head, except oh wait Jon is going to turn all my programs into .pkgs for me and put them on .dmgs that are in .sits so it is all easy and doubleclickable

so just
rm

well maybe

rm
cd
ls

in case I want to look at the files in some of my directories BESIDES HOME for troubleshooting reasons but wait OS X always runs like a dream, troubleshooting isn't necessary! Invisible files should always stay invisible! You shouldn't be able to see that, it never needs to be touched!

When have you had to "look somewhere" for "troubleshooting reasons"??

my mom? she uses the iTMS and iPhoto a lot. She your typical end user?

haha the one time I have had to investigate some invisible files to troubleshoot things was when I realized gcc was broken and I couldn't use CPAN. Oh and a week ago when the iShockXDriver flooded my logs and flung shit everywhere.

So I guess you're right, Jon, either I should devote myself to *nix and just get my next OS for free or I should just use iTunes and iPhoto and be a happy little imbecile with no interest in any functionality other than that Apple built in. I don't see what standpoint you're even arguing from besides rabid, drooling Apple fanboy. It doesn't matter though! you win! I use MAKE, I have no right to expect that Apple let me use the Finder the way EVERY OTHER *NIX WINDOW MANAGER WORKS.

Have you ever noticed how annoying female college students who are into Franz Ferdinand are, Jon?

xpost could very well have.

http://users.bestweb.net/~jdowney/images/sad-mac.gif

except minus the easy change customizo fonts thing for your GUI :( :( :(

http://users.bestweb.net/~jdowney/images/sad-mac.gif

I have to admit that I kind of thought the end of Mac was a long, long time ago, long before iPods and iWork and iCute and all that. It was when they released the EMAC for the first time. That was when I realized I would soon not be happy with their developments.

THINGS WERE ALL BETTER, FOR ALL OF US, IN 1994.

JON WHERE WERE YOU LAST YEAR, TO TELL ME ALL OF THIS SMUG NONSENSE???

For good measure
http://users.bestweb.net/~jdowney/images/sad-mac.gif

I ask you, what do you have to do to get same functionality level??????????????????

I hardly ever use my terminal application for anything other than ssh to real UNIX systems. My system runs (nearly!) flawlessly for months at a time.

When I ran a free UNIX, I had constant headaches with crappy x86 hardware and Linux. Package upgrades breaking things; OpenGL not workingp; blocking operations in graphical programs preventing GUI redraws, etc. Linux is SO FAR BEHIND OS X for normal desktop use.

I think Ned Ludd was onto something.

yes

gah I've just done a complete 180.

(Though to be fair the PC next to me is "Piss, bollocks, poo")

I just want a computer which allows me to customize its functionality in a relatively simple fashion which is constructed from reliable hardware. I think most of what is being implemented now, by all vendors, amounts to a lot of bells and whistles and doesn't improve my user experience really much at all. I think that OS and hardware design should be about creating a solid foundation, and functionality beyond basic administrative/file mgmt/config tasks should be left up to third party developers. I dislike the fact that Apple has taken the competition out of the arena w/r/t iTunes and iPhoto et al. and think it bodes ill for the future of the platform.

Yes, I used to be.

Hahahahahaha Tom you don't even have a caps lock key.

This is also OTM, individual parts purchased all seem to have better warranties than a plain ol' computer straight outta teh box! WTF.

As for "normal end user functionality", here's the simplest, stupidest, most pointless one to have removed I could think of, and one that, if my mom switches back to a Mac, would irritate the shit out of her (since I think we decided "moms" are the bench mark of "normal end users" for Macs earlier??): http://aroundcny.com/technofile/texts/mac111004.html

I'm not saying this is typical, mind you, just saying there's no perfect solution in building-your-own, either, as Jon points out above w/r/t Linux hardware support and such.

Honey, would you download and install TinkerTool onto my/our laptop when you get a chance? I'm kinda boggled I haven't already.

It's already done, you still can't change that ugly ass font that is under the icons but teh programs and clock are all PRETTY now

Smaller folx tend to be a lot less evil than your HPs. But yeah, it's only a "perfect solution" if you know what you're doing.

Of course Spencer isn't dumb enough to run any of these OSes, he's installing Windows on it, so what's the point here?

Caps-Lock (or anything else) as a sticky "bold" key - try Butler, I'm not sure if it will do that but it might, it does just about everything else.

Personally, I'd like to see some kind of stab at way of managing things and activating things that doesn't rely on this desktop/file folder model that we've been going with ever since the first Mac came out. Why should I ever have to know the "path" to where something's been saved? Why should I ever have to "save" anything at all? It's all so dorky, I feel like I spend half my time drilling through folders, it can take so long that I forget what I'm even doing half the time.

Amen to Tracers last point.

I don't have a problem with this "path" nonsense you speak of; what I dislike is that on certain programs recently released by a certain computer manufacturer who should not be releasing photo and music applications as far as I can tell and should be focusing on making their hardware nice as it used to be instead, files that are not saved in the "correct" path are treated differently by certain programs than files that are saved in the "correct" path. IE the old style Windows DO IT OURRR VAY OR VEE VILL BLOW UP YOUR COMPUTERRR. Saving I kind of agree with you theoretically except, err, I think there's a lot of people who don't want their computer to automatically save and archive every single thing they do on it.

But anyway I basically agree with you.

Fonts w/Tinkertool A) restart your computer B) it doesn't work on all of the screen fonts, only certain ones and certain programs, it's being BLOCKED on some of them. Change all of the fonts in the font screen, restart, and then open system preferences and see the new fonts in their glorious capacity!

And it is a good point to be made that strangleholding the amount of customization one can do to a system that used to champion its complete customizability is kind of a backwards step, esp as other OS's have gone towards the other direction.

Uh, come on ... now you're just being cranky.

Personally, I'd like to see some kind of stab at way of managing things and activating things that doesn't rely on this desktop/file folder model that we've been going with ever since the first Mac came out. Why should I ever have to know the "path" to where something's been saved? Why should I ever have to "save" anything at all? It's all so dorky, I feel like I spend half my time drilling through folders, it can take so long that I forget what I'm even doing half the time.

Like spotlight?

Tracer is completely on point here. Bullshit like Sherlock and Spotlight is NOT THE ANSWER and has never been. What's needed is a way for user to be able to ARRANGE THEIR FILES THE WAY THEY WANT and SURPRISE all of a sudden stupid fucking thumb stuck in the dyke revolutionary searching and indexing technology is TOTALLY UNNECESSARY.

the REASON people like covering their entire Windows desktop with files and shortcuts and never deleting them is because THAT'S HOW THEY FIND THINGS. it's a shit ton faster than searching the goddamn hard disk. you look at an icon and click it. twice. this is the way MY computer USED TO WORK.

Tracer you could take the files you need to use a lot and make aliases of them in the dock and use that but after a while that gets ugly and confusing too.

My main problem here, which I will reiterate again because, you know, spotlight and dashboard (uh didn't Windows try to do this integrated embedded browser/"active desktop" thing too? Dashboard, I mean. Wasn't that, uh, a problem?) will not fix my problem with OSX: they've taken some integral functionality features, "petty" ones or not petty ones, and removed them to give the user less ability to customize their computer. SEE ALSO: MICROSOFT, A FEW YEARS AGO BEFORE DOJ STEPPED IN AND SUDDENLY THEY MADE THEMSELVES A BIT MORE MAC LIKE. I'm going to pick again on the simple cosmetic issues because it seems to be the only thing that I can get people to agree on, without a judgement call as to whether or not xyz would use this feature, has definitely changed from previous versions of the OS to now. Adding a feature like that--and the slew of far more useful customization features that came with it--was like an integral part of why the OS was so great. You could make it react exactly how you wanted it to without having to use command line not-exactly-hacks of the system or third-party programs that don't always work. This wasn't a feature that caused any drain of the system and it wasn't a bug that needed to be fixed due to instability or computer-destruction issues. It was a feature that a lot of people liked. So why get rid of it? Why is Steve Jobs being quoted as saying customization is dead and why are they forcing people to use exactly this theme?

I absolutely, without reservations, despise Helvetica and Lucida Grande. A lot of people don't. On my old Mac, I deleted those fonts. I can't do that now. That was my very first, quiet disappointment when I opened up my iBook. Going to system preferences and realizing this system preference no longer existed. Yeah, this is a minor issue but it goes along with about 20 bigger issues of things I used to do a lot on my old Macs to customize programs and the way it reacted to certain things that seem to require a rather obtuse level of hoop jumping to get to now.

So basically, what I am asking here is why? Why have these features, which were a really large bonus of previous systems and features that are slowly being added to other OSes, been removed from OSX? Mac was a pioneer in this department--why are they going backwards, why are they going cagey and proprietarial and territorial, and what does this say for future developments?

No one ever wants to answer this question for me at all, but I think it is a perfectly decent question to ask. These features were NOT system drains. They did NOT cause computer/OS instability. They were GOOD. Why do they no longer exist?

If I could get a good reason as to why the system is becoming more dictatorial and less user-trusting, that might change my mind. As far as I can see though there isn't a good reason for this.

Spotlight looks fantastic, but I'm wondering if it would be a serious resource hog.

They should have implemented this already. I think it's a great idea.

Ally, where you and I differ; I have a T-Shirt with the slogan 'USE HELVETICA' on it, although Johnston would be better than Lucida grande which is an unpleasant font I'll grant you.

I'm kind of in love with this "Hollywood Hills" truetype I downloaded but strictly because it makes all my official documents really amusing and stupid looking.

Johnston and Gill Sans are superior and more beautiful sans serif fonts but helvetica has it's place.

Haha Tom, that's what I loved about the old easy switcheroo font crap on Mac, you could make, like Budmo Juggler your default list-view font, it was hilarious.

I would like to know what the name of the font used for place names on french 1:25000 maps is called. See bottom right of the above image.

You know what I hate though? Optima. Can't say why, exactly. It's the "Joy of Sex" font, and the "Planned Parenthood" font, and I can't look at the shampoo bottle in my shower now without being reminded of either those awful nude sex illustrations from the 70's or birth control.

Probably not as much as people are fearing. Basically, Spotlight is a front end to Tiger's database file system which allows for files to have metadata tags. It's very similar to the file system used in BeOS. Quoting from that article:

For the everyday user, though, BFS has much more tangible advantages. Any file or file type on a BFS volume can have arrays of metadata associated with it, in the form of "attributes." There is no limit to the amount, size, or type of attributes, and attributes can be displayed and edited, sifted, sorted, and queried for directly in the Tracker (Be's equivalent of the Finder). Because most attributes are indexed, search results are nearly instantaneous, regardless the size of the volume or the number of files being searched through. By default, BeOS ships with reasonable sets of attributes for common file types, but users are allowed to extend and customize these, and to create entirely new file types with entirely new arrays of attributes. In other words, the Be File System doubles as a database.

Users can use built-in filetypes with existing attributes, or create entirely new filetypes with custom collections of attributes. These files were used to deliver a dynamic web site out of the BFS database without using 3rd-party database software.

It is difficult to describe to users of other operating systems just how advantageous an operating system built on top of a virtual database can be. Only other BeOS users really seem to understand the power and flexibility of the database-like file system, and it is the single feature I miss the most from BeOS.

Copy your MP3 files' ID3 tags to Artist, Title, Year, Genre attributes. Sift and sort through your collection in the Tracker in almost anyway imaginable, or build playlists from MP3 attribute queries with far more flexibility than you get in other OSes.

BeMail messages store Subject, From, To, CC:, Date, etc. in attributes. Create virtual mailboxes based on live, instantaneous query results. This lets you obtain views of your email store that are irrespective of the actual folder locations of BeMail messages on disk.

Years ago, I created a custom file type based on text, with attributes for author, title, email, URL, etc. Then I wrote a CGI script in perl to extract and dish up these attributes over the web. In other words, I was serving up a database-backed web site without having to install or learn any database software whatsoever. That site now runs on LAMP, but you can see how the site was created here.

The OS-level metatags in BeOS was really really cool and I can't wait to see how it's implemented in Tiger.

xpost

I'm intrigued by the legal difference between Johnston and Gill Sans. Transport For London still claims ownership of Johnston and, especially, New Johnston - does the Strategic Rail Authority have any rights over Gill Sans?

I'm intrigued by the legal difference between Johnston and Gill Sans. Transport For London still claims ownership of Johnston and, especially, New Johnston - does the Strategic Rail Authority have any rights over Gill Sans?

Definately Original Johnston. I believe on Johnston the copyright has lapsed, Johnston himself having died more than 70 years ago but I don't know if a font can be trademarked as an entity in itself or whether it is is just the usage (Roundel, signage, map styles etc.) that is trademarked. I believe that New Johnston is under copyright and the move to new johnston was as much about having an important part of the coporate identity under copyright as improving clarity.

I shall persuade Ambrose to ask his Dad who knows about thses things.

As for Gill Sans, it's not been used on the railways for years. I'm not sure what is the type face is nowadays but it's not proper Gill Sans nowadays.

(*somewhere* I have a 1970-something issue of Modern Railways magazine with a "Ten years of the Design Panel" article)

* this may not have been what it was actually called - I'm sure it was Corporate Something, though.

I'm pretty happy w/the ST1040/TOS box I use for midi sequencing, heh.

standard font on my SUSE box = Black Chancery.

I was thinking about getting one of those mac minis, loading it up w/a 8x8 midi interface, a MOTU firewire 8x8 audio interface and using it as a replacement for my atari/hdr setup. Maybe I'm not so sure now. Ally + tombot on this thread are great!!

Arial is good for small font sizes on non-anti-aliased screens. If you don't have ClearType turned on and you're reading a small sidebar, Arial is what you want. Otherwise it's pretty ugly.

If you could push a feature request, or perhaps a bug on your
wish-list to the top of Apples' radar for OSX, what would it
be?
Kill Finder X. It's really that bad. But don't just
resuscitate Finder 9 -- do better. Finder 9 always needed a
toolbar, for example. Finder 9 needed a plugin architecture.
Finder X does trounce Finder 9 in terms of built-in search,
though.
There are people out there who know what the next Finder looks
like. Apple needs to get out of their way and let them deliver
it.
You seem like a guy who prefers to refactor rather than
rewrite, so I'm going to assume you wouldn't say that lightly,
and we'll just proceed on the assumption that Finder X is a
complete clusterfuck. How does a company known for its
innovation, craftsmanship and software skills let something
like Finder X out the door?
Finder X is the compromise between the Mac OS folks and the
NeXT folks. Neither won, everybody lost.
Oh my god, the entire bastardized notion of switching from
metal to aqua and hiding the sidebar when clicking on the
toolbar chiclet in the upper right-hand corner.
Bonus: notice how if you click on the extreme right of the
chiclet and try to switch back, you fail -- the window theme
switch moved the chiclet slightly to the left and now you've
got to follow it. Gag. Folks, this type of stuff makes Gnome
look good.
I don't know how Finder X shipped. Someone high enough must
be in love with it that the normal human interface vetting+
feedback process didn't/couldn't take place.

the thing in the upper right

Anyway, Tog says: http://www.asktog.com/columns/060MonsterMac.html

People need to stop being such cranks. Iterative improvments are going to come along.

Um. So I'm not saying there couldn't be a better Finder, but... is that really all the guy can find to complain about?

(maybe it's a joke)

I would say applecare is important for laptops, less so for desktops.

AppleCare is pretty essential for laptops. They're expensive, they get beat up, and if the screen fails you're already way ahead of the game in overall cost.

I've actually had to use it once and it saved plenty of time being able to leap-frog ahead to the front of the support line. To be fair though, if I don't have my laptop I'm not able to work at all - making that "does it pay for itself" question pretty easy to answer.

(they seem to run xp happily enough 8)

Agreed. My solution was to buy a g4 tower on eBay. I think there's a sweet spot in price/performance right now from the "Digital Audio" models up to the early Mirrored Drive Door g4s. Unless you're doing really processor-intensive stuff, they should be snappy for a few years still. The last batch of g4 towers are still overpriced on ebay, though.

AppleCare almost pays for itself in resale value for laptops even if you never need them to replace the screen or anything.

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/apps/cs2.ars

seems to suggest CS2 runs as fast or faster than CS1 on same hardware

What a RACKET! I HATE APPLE!

(are there any other independent applecare-type insurance plans that i can look at or is that it?)

I HATE ADAM

Listen to what I am going to say very carefully: I. Poured. Beer. Into. My. Powerbook!

And Renter's Insurance paid for a whole new one WITHOUT raising the premium! Everybody - Renter's insurance WORKS! It is good! I could kiss them!

So maybe I don't need Applecare anyway.

This is not so annoying (since after the first time you turn off energy saver), but what's wonderful is that Apple's vaunted support site (that the tech support guy from India told me about several times while on the phone) doesn't mention a goddamned thing about the process.
back to the beginning

I check my ebay auctions, go to take a shower after work, come back and it's frozen in sleep. Fuck around with everything I know for a while (hold in the power button, hold in the power button a little longer, unplug it, unplug it and leave it out a while), nada. Spend more time looking on their support site for hints: nada. Finally call tech support, sit on hold for 15 minutes, spend time going through all the processes I've already gone through (and told him about) before he decides to tell me how to reset the PMU. Thanks buddy, could have saved yourself some time there.

It seems to be working fine, I can put it to sleep and wake it just fine. Leave it on, go to the store, come back: dead. So now it's just energy saver fucking up. Reset it, call tech support, sit for 15 more minutes, rudely interrupt the surfer dude who answers when he wants me to go through the steps again. His big suggestion (guess we're off-script now) is that I need to go in and turn off the setting that sleeps hard drives whenever possible.
I get kind of pissed because I'm not a techie and I know that's unrelated - that setting is for them to sleep when they computer is working NOT WHEN IT'S GOING TO SLEEP COMPLETELY.

So I tell him I'll do that, but it's not going to work, so what do I do next? He mumbles for a while about turning off energy saver completely and I get a little pissy - I'm not paying $2300 for a desktop so I can cripple one of its features a week after it arrives. How do I make the damn thing work? He doesn't know and says something about the power supply. I cut him off and ask if I need to take it to an Apple Store, he says yeah, I hang up.

I'm sure that Dell's and HP's (etc.) customer service is no better, but I bought an Apple because it's streamlined, efficient, easy, etc. I expect that premium I paid to go for tech support, too. I shouldn't have to burn a Saturday driving to Dallas because they couldn't bump me up to someone with an idea how to solve the problem.

http://www.tuaw.com/

They have a script they won't deviate from, and they're happy to give/force you into trying anything to get you off the line, even if you've tried it before, so that when you call back (when, not if) you speak to someone else.

These are just as bad:

PC World
Pipex Internet
BT Business Dial Up
.
.
.

90% of my contact with Indian people is now them lying about their name as they parrot an unhelpful script at me, and it's usually when I'm annoyed to start with cos some equipment or process has gone wrong!

xpost - (shhh)

Operation System Christ.

I bless you.

(Psst by the way Silas - mind explaining to me how Aussies are "racial underdogs"? I must confess, I am confused.)

Also, Itunes is a pile of shite. Such a pain in the arse. Why isn't there a way to update your library without having to go and add all the folders again manually?? Why can't you add a folder to a playlist instead of having to drag all the songs in individually? I end up making playlists in Winamp, saving them as m3u files and importing them to Itunes.

The thing I hate is looking up every possible fix for my ipod online so that I don't call tech support until I've done everything, and then spending hours being put through the steps of things I've already done that didn't help. And then being told, "hmm, dunno what your problem is, go buy a faster usb card" even though it worked with the slow usb port until a couple weeks ago! so now i have to go spend more money to prove that something actually is wrong with the superexpensive ipod itself.

This is the second one that's bombed on me in a year; when I sent the first one in for repair, they sent me a new one. That's lovely as long as I have a warranty but the second two years is up I'm going to have to go looking for a new mp3 player. So has anyone found one that lasts longer than six months?

my second is two years old and still works beautifully. so, er: "yes, the iPod" would answer your question :)

It works for me! on my MAC@!! :D

Apple website was broken when I was trying to get my fucked Ipod (which arrived that way in the mail) replaced and it wouldn't set up an account to register the Ipod to, and the phone operators needed my account details before they would do anything.

In the end I wrote a bitchy email, and to their credit they did get it sorted pretty quickly.

Re Itunes,

I figured Mac users would have it better. It's so stupid, you can add folders to your Library, but not to Playlists. So if you have a folder with, e.g. your fave hardcore punk songs, that you want to put on your Ipod, you'd have to add the folder to the Library and then go through the Library searching for each song individually by artist! WTF!! Unless I go through and retag each song and change the album to "Fave punk songs" or something.

[sniggers like a six-year-old at juvenile out-of-context fnarr-ness; composes self]

see, being very old-fashioned and paranoid [1], i've never run with my iPod. indeed, i bought a Shuffle expressly for the gym. i kind-of figured that jogging about with a small and delicate hard disk wasn't a good idea.

but then everyone else in the world seems to exercise with their iPod, so ... i'm sure i'm just overly paranoid.

i also bought some of this after i broke the first one. i heartily recommend it.

[1] although stupid enough to let my drunk friends fuck about with my powerbook at 6am on monday. gaaah. i came so close to losing you, by beloved.

Unless I go through and retag each song and change the album to "Fave punk songs" or something.
This is the insane shit PC users do that makes me mental.

http://home.egge.net/~savory/wolfschf.jpg

best chest-thump ever

I'd heard good reviews from my friends and was tired of the constant crashing of Windows XP, so I finally broke down and bought an iMac. It arrived today, and my whole family gathered around to watch me open it. My mother and father--who hate Apple, although they don't really know why, and had fought me tooth and nail to buy another Dell-- actually oohed and ahhed and as I extracted the sleek, self-contained desktop from the box.

Setup took less than a minute, and I was so excited to start it up it felt like fucking Christmas. Of course, something went wrong. No matter how many times I rebooted it, all the screen displayed (in truth, all it would ever display) was an error message in four languages on a dull grey screen.

I spent several hours on the line with a condescending Applecare representative who mumbled constantly and in one instance told me which key to hold down by pronouncing the sound of the letter rather than its name (note: "ssssssss" does not really carry well over the phone), and then berated me for misinterpreting his instructions. After zeroing the hard drive and reinstalling twice, he finally concluded that my brand spanking new computer was totally fucked. I'm moving to Brooklyn in less than 7 days, and come Monday I'll have to ship it back to Apple and pray the new one arrives before the moving van.

It is a such cocktease, sitting there on my desk, taunting me with its terrible, inoperable beauty. I hate you, Apple.

They had better be able to rush the new iMac.

I am looking forward to buying a Mac Mini so I can get rid of mp3 stuff on this one.

can't seem to reset PRAM (no idea why it won't do it).

would like to smash it with a hammer, and might even have to suffer the expense and final humiliation of getting someone to look at it JUST SO I CAN REINSTALL OSX & THEN SELL IT.

Mac 'problems' are SO MUCH more intractable than Windows it's not even funny.

Going to bed at maximum pissed off.

How do you know the PRAM isn't resetting? Have you tried resetting it from Open Firmware?

I agree that 'problems' should be in quotes.

Going to bed with a girl.

holding down option at power on give me a nice padlock though. Something amiss in open firmware? That'll be fun to break.

Cheers stet, I am BACK IN CONTROL. That felt bleak :(

(intractable problems also, sometimes, means *good security* that is unfortunately un-userproof -- like all *nixes)

Waht exactly that accomplishes security wise when I have been able to wipe & reinstall the machine many times without being asked for it(??) I am not sure, but it said "security" so I added it.

That above post is a shining example of "things not to try when you should have been going to sleep already"... embarrased.

Anyway, in the process I finally realised (after some googling) putting Linux on this thing isn't going to be feasible after all. The WIFI will NEVER work, because Apple/The airport card manufacturers simply won't allow drivers to be written for it for other people.

So finally I have my definitive reason to sell it. Goodbye iBook.

APPLE ARE YOU READING THIS? THE 'FINDER' IS *SO* BROKEN THIS EX-WINDOWS USER CANNOT, AFTER MONTHS OF TRYING TO ADJUST, LIVE WITH IT ON A DAILY BASIS WITHOUT -EXTREME- FRUSTRATIONS AND IS ACTUALLY (NOW i CAN'T USE LINUX INSTEAD) GOING TO GO AS FAR AS REVERTING TO THE INTEL/WINDOWS WORLD WITH A LOSS OF MONEY TO MYSELF & PUT UP WITH VIRUSES & INSTABILITY & CRAP OF WINDOWS... BECAUSE IT'S _STILL_ A BETTER ALTERNATIVE TO TRYING TO USE THE (OTHERWISE GREBT!) OS X OPERATING SYSTEM WITH A *MIND-BOGGLINGLY AWFUL FILE BROWSER*. AND SOME OTHER PROBLEMS, BUT THEY ARE SMALL BEER IN COMPARISON TO THE 'FINDER' ISSUE.

(the finder 'alternatives' ALL suck massively too)

there used to be a cute "genius" but i don't see her around today.

Without it being fixed, replaced or viable alternatives becoming available. It actually IS enough to make me switch platforms unfortunately. The whole Apple users always downplaying it's importance (and the importance of anything else wrong with OS X - see,hear,speak no evil about it) is something I find kind of hilarious.

http://daringfireball.net/2003/05/steaming_pile
http://daringfireball.net/2002/11/that_finder_thing

If it works for you, I'm happy! But I find it genuinely un-liveable-with. Ho hum.

have you tried pathfinder, fandango? i think it's sweet. you can even quit the finder while you're running it.

xpost ?

Pathfinder didn't really solve all my issues Tracer, it felt to me like what it was: a buggier, overfeatured & inconsistently thought-out, third-party replacement for something that shouldn't need replacing.

I mean I know some people have problems with (for comparison) Windows Explorer's performance & bugs... but I never ever got to the point of desperately wanting to try alternative shells like I did with 'Finder'.

Do you have a logitech mouse?

What's probably happening to you Tracer is that when you click on the file, you're telling the window to redraw it's contents, which often will change file positions, and always creates a weird second copy of the file for a second, so if you just double click, things are moving around, you'll get files you don't want.

the most pervasive problems with OSX aren't issues once you realize that that the window contents don't update right away.

this is fucking stupid too

This IS ass-backwards, but it's fixed in Tiger apparently.

jon, i'm not using a mouse at the moment, i'm using the trackpad.

xpost right.

Picking the selection up by the icon in this view always works.

eh? i always view files this way, and i never have any problems moving them around.

it's called "[tracer] - hard disk - 1998 - mac os"

what struck me was how neat and organized everything was. everything in subdivided folders. everything in its place. i had added little icons to everything. i think i know why. because i got to choose where everything went. with os x you don't get to choose. it chooses for you. now i've got like 80 files on the desktop, two different "tmp" folders... yeesh.

where i think apple went wrong in the beginning is not offering a quick guide to the fundamental differences between OS9 (and below) and OS X. i knew just enough about unix to be very wary of moving anything in X; where a lot of users went wrong in the early days was by blithely shifting vital folders from place to place and renaming them, then wondering why their entire system had fallen over.

i'm not saying the finder's perfect: it annoys me the way icons on the desktop occasionally get moved around, for instance. but, er, this happened before X as well. i mean, i'm writing this on an OS9 machine at work - i can't do any work because uShare has just died, meaning we've lost access to all our unix mounts - and i would give anything to be using X.

fandango, if you're really going to go back to a windows box: i wish you luck. but i think, in the long term, you'll have made a big mistake. still, like i've said to you before: horses, courses etc ;)

ooh: that's the servers back up. back to work.

exactly. this is what made the original mac os so wonderful and what inspired such bizarre loyalty. as long as you didn't mess around with the mysterious "system" folder you could do whatever you damn pleased.

Dan: Nice idea, but aliases don't resolve correctly between cocoa/carbon -- and cocoa does it by fucking STRINGS, so you can end up with folders that won't open. The finder is really, really woeful and I won't defend it for a minute.

exactly. i navigate nimbly through the unix-ness with a series of aliases that take me exactly where i want to go. and i'm running two machines, each with two users and all the shared items/permissions stuff that brings.

(i have just thought of something i HATE about the way it handles aliases to files on shared mounts, but fuck it. i don't expect perfection, yet with OS X i think i'm about 80 per cent of the way there. OS 9 was 60%. windows is in the low 40s.)

As for aliases, they're a *complete joke* -- you can't make them to anything other than local disks, and they resolve to the file-in-that-place first, unlike the OS 9 ones, which kept track of the actual file and where you'd moved it. The brain-dead behaviour is now universal ... EXCEPT ONLY SOMETIMES, because apps using FSRef (the good old OS 9 system) WORK CORRECTLY. The inconsistency is the worst bit. Grrrr. For the v. technical: http://rentzsch.com/macosx/pathmaxBlackholing

Stationery: also fucked. If you set something to be a stationery pad, then open it, it creates a copy first then opens that. No more folders of template documents then, Apple?

fandango, if you're really going to go back to a windows box: i wish you luck. but i think, in the long term, you'll have made a big mistake. still, like i've said to you before: horses, courses etc ;)

In the long term, they might have switched over to an intel architecture, and, FIXED THE FUCKING FINDER. Maybe they'll even allow me to do something about the bizzare window management *chuckles* :-)

However, until hell freezes over, I'm far more content typing this from a Windows box and have had NO REGRETS about switching back.

isn't that what it always did? i know i could check, but i'm busy.

The new way, it copies it then opens it. So if you Apple-S, it saves to, say, "GF'S Bad Service Template -1" in the "GF's Complaints Letters" folder without asking. If that folder is locked -- like the Designer Masters are at work -- it fails! Silently!.

xpost

While we've got the hedz here, anybody have a good solution for fucking FONTS? I use Suitcase, but all my fonts are on an external drive. Suitcase forgets what it's activated, for some reason, so I have to go turn on the sets I want every time I restart. That doesn't happen for fonts on the local drive.

Yes, why are fonts on an external drive? And if suitcase is forgetting, either your suitcase is fucked or the preferences are set wrong. Whatever fonts I open stay open untill I close them.

Now I have a problem with autoactivation with Quark, but am pretty sure it's a bug with Quark, which is a TRULY problematic application I've come to learn to live with.

http://www.targus.com/us/product_details.asp?sku=PA241U

http://www.apple.com/support/powerbook/doityourself/17al/

http://www.assistedlivingstore.com/

I've never felt such a mug in all my life. God just imagining the prospect of using Finder (or whatever bullshit "search" function, gadget or app they try & present to make it appear like the file browser is a trifling nonsense to be ignored) and iTunes again, with no good alternatives make me want to stick redhot needles in my scrotum (sorry Momus).

My feelings when I sit back in front of a Windows PC "Ah, good. Now I can stop pissing about pretending to be streamlined and efficient and actually f*cking get something done, as the operating system isn't permanently working against me so hard"

I can't even face unpacking my boxed up iBook to watch a DVD :( My sister apparently wants to buy it, but even that seems like keeping it in my life too much now (god no, not 'family' tech support for the evil f*cking thing).

xpost

the fix the finder stuff rilly can get irritating.

on the other hand, with the side-shelf & the right cmd & option combos, etc., navigating the finder is still waay faster than windows -- just took a little getting used to.

fail to see how volume madness is a "feature."

First off, throw out Suitcase completely. Extensis' developers have been completely out to lunch when it comes to proper OS X development and are currently racing with Quark as to how fast they can alienate their user base.

Second, download a copy of Font Explorer. It's free and it works fantastically.

I haven't been really happy with any of the Finder augmentation apps, but Path Finder seems to be pretty good - and it will sort by date in column view.

Apple don't include enough RAM for how their OS runs. this thing cost me 2 grand ffs!

tears before 7pm EST.

They're all non-issues unless you like to painfully nit-pick over things or are affronted that Steve Jobs didn't personally call you for your input in development. I'm a programmer, database developer, network cop, iPod owner, p2p user, etc. and I'm 85% satisfied with my set-up. If I sat down and thought about it some more I could probably work up a good series of complaints about that remaining 15% but since that 85% satisfaction is responsible for 100% of my income I don't really have the time.

hence, my latter-day lack of reasons to hate Microsoft anymore, and instead be perturbed at Apple because just-as-reliable ugly Dell gear comes with 1.5x better price/performance/compatibility ratio.

I think it's the coming-home-to-relax factor as opposed to working-with-it factor that's responsible for a lot of my OS X Finder et al. animosity. It's just not as easygoing or fun(ctional) as I remember it being.

xpost
I'm not sure about that 1.5x price-to-performance ratio. When I was buying my G5, I looked pretty close at Windows machines and saved very little money for the same quality.

this is one of those philosophical questions, isn't it? besides l'interweb-retina fusion, yer basic Word-based notepad-type stuff, plus I guess lots of music (and photo? dvd?)-downloading/storage type stuff, which i'll be totally new to.

gabby, just buy shitloads of RAM from a third party and never use the volume keys.

WHAT?! I CAN'T HEAR YOU!

They're all non-issues unless you like to painfully nit-pick over things

ok, that's what i was looking for

one thing i've noticed on my parents' OSX - these sidebar application icons that JUMP. OUT. AT. YOU. when you get within half a mile of them. is this what i have to look forward to?

*opens up Font Explorer and counts fonts*

I've got 2672 fonts loaded of which 314 are active right now. FWIW, a designer at one of the places I consult at has 5500 or so fonts loaded in Font Explorer and hasn't reported any issues with it (they were running Suitcase which caused problems daily)

-- grimly fiendish's scrotal sac

I didn't get much (any) sleep last night, was posting ... with nothing much to add.

The level of hate though is generated by the fact I would LOVE to use the thing. There are plenty reasons why Windows sucks too you know! And I'm sick of fixing desktop PC's, and Windows laptops are often fugly and poorly thought/laid out in comparison. I would love to use it but... it makes me tear my hair out in frustration. So I don't. Yes I'm crabby! I fell for the hype and I feel like a fool.

The piss-poor state of the finder though is something that I just can't ignore (and believe me I've tried!!) in regular use, it just gets in my way and confounds me at every turn. It really is the elephant in the room. It took me what... five minutes? to get my head around Windows Explorer's folder tree. SIX MONTHS struggling with the finder and I still wasn't really sure if I was using it right, and was mostly just AWARE of it being there.

This isn't a "geek" rant. Or an anti-Apple screed (mostly). I couldn't give a shit about brushed metal, I don't even mind the dock... I really like my iPod (but they NEED to fix the LAME VBR bug asap!)

I'm just a fairly competent PC user who is plain amazed that everyone else can get along with something so wrong and broken on a basic usability level. It isn't even the slowness of the thing that grates. And frustrated that it'll basically NEVER be fixed because Apple seems to think bells, whistles & PR will somehow bridge the gap. All I see in the future if I was to hang onto this thing is lies, self-denial, and excessive further costs to come. I dunno about "long term" but I still feel I'm doing the right thing by jumping off now before it gets worse. I hate them for putting me in this position.

"I can find my files okay" is SUCH a 'mac' response too. As if that's ALL a file browser does. ffs.

I'm not trying to be knee jerk here, nor am I invalidating your crappy iBook/iPod but there's a lot of "Macs don't do this one thing EXACTLY so it SUCKS!" talk in this thread that bothers me. Most likely, that iBook G3 you had was just crap and from looking at the results of this iBook and PowerBook survey quite a few people had problems with it...

"The iBook G3, which sold quite well, had the most failures of any Apple laptop we surveyed and the failures were critical (the motherboard). Some other Mac models have had quite a few failures as well, but they generally were due to specific component problems. The iBook G3 simply appears to have been a flawed design, but it took a long time for Apple engineers to get a handle on the problem and fix it."