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KevySaysBeNice
[H]ard|Gawd
- Joined
- Dec 7, 2001
- Messages
- 1,452
Well, here is a repost.
I guess linking to this text is not allowed (for whatever reason), so I'll repost it here.
I'm not "looking for help", I'm mainly just wondering if other MBP/Apple/OSX users out there find themselves having the same experiences.
I'm a totally dedicated Mac/OSX user and don't see myself switching at any point, so I'm not just bashing Apple or MacBook Pros for no reason, I'm really just looking to see if I'm totally off with my experiences.
(this all from my "switcher blog" @ http://switch.shoelessone.com)
I guess linking to this text is not allowed (for whatever reason), so I'll repost it here.
I'm not "looking for help", I'm mainly just wondering if other MBP/Apple/OSX users out there find themselves having the same experiences.
I'm a totally dedicated Mac/OSX user and don't see myself switching at any point, so I'm not just bashing Apple or MacBook Pros for no reason, I'm really just looking to see if I'm totally off with my experiences.
(this all from my "switcher blog" @ http://switch.shoelessone.com)
Well, I haven't updated this in a while, but I feel motivated to do so now.
I switched to Apple/Mac (and more importantly OSX) in large part because of the sex appeal of the OSX OS, because I knew the hardware was top notch, and because I felt like it might be fun to try something new. I was not (and am not) disatisfied, annoyed, or otherwise unhappy with Windows XP OR Windows Vista, in fact my experience with Vista was that video drivers seemed to suck for "normal" things however it was still very stable for me.
Now, after quite a few (6ish) months of owning my MacBook Pro SR 2.2 I have to say I'm both happy and sad and annoyed. I still enjoy using my Mac and the hardware still feels very solid. But I'll just come out and say it, in my experience I've found OSX to be unstable, and in general unreliable. I'm going to spare my normal blabbering and cut right to a list.
[10.4/10.5]
Expose with multiple monitors is sluggish. I remember when I was using windows at home I tried a few "Expose" applications that simulated the same expose features. Most of them worked fairly well with few windows, but never quite as smooth (performance/frame rate) wise as a real Mac running OSX. I used OSX at work (photo editor at a campus newspaper) on a single monitor and really liked what I experienced. Believe it or not, the way expose helped my "work flow" while editing multiple image files at once was one of the reasons I chose to buy a Mac. Well, turns out that when I have my 22" LCD hooked up to my MBP and I have multiple windows on each display expose lags and chokes when I show all windows. Is it still usable? Yes, it is. Is it AS usable? No, not for me. The delay is annoying. I've always been a power user, and never before have I had to deal with dropped frames or sluggish UIs before, and I don't like doing it now. Perhaps if OSX didn't render all of my windows real time performance would improve a bit, however there are no options (that I'm aware of) to change settings for this type of thing. Of course I could just avoid the annoyance and not use expose, but as there is no taskbar (which is more than fine if I have expose) this would basically destroy my computing experience. Of course i could just minimize everything to the dock, but I don't find that practical.
[10.5]
Spaces is sort of the same. With lots of windows open, swapping between "spaces" is slow. I wish there were options that would let you optimize it for best performance, even if that meant I could only have two spaces at a time, or the second space could only have five windows open on it, etc, whatever it took to get rid of the slow.
[10.4/10.5]
Crashing. I've had a few kernal panics in the past 6 months, but nothing really worth worrying about and nothing really that I'd consider a real "problem". I can handle a kernal panic every 3 months. What IS worth worrying about is the fairly regular crashing of finder/firefox. At least once every few days I have to force quite Finder. Sometimes I'll be doing normal everyday stuff (transferring files, unzipping files, etc) and I'll get the ol' Pinwheel of death. Last time I did this for some reason once Finder started back up again Expose seemed to not work (hot keys or my "hot corners" did nothing) so I had to restart my computer. Does anybody know how incredibly annoying this is? Here is a simple fact: I never remember HAVING to restart my windows machine more than once a month, TOPS. Sure, every once in a while firefox or some other application would spring a leak and I'd have memory usage issues and so I would restart on my own, but I didn't NEED to restart. [note: I'm not even mentioning the fact that when I installed Leopard on top of 10.4 Finder would crash and then NOT restart several times a day. These problems are all with a perfectly fresh vanilla install of Tiger OR Leopard]
[10.4/10.5]
USB seems to be shit. Not only do I seem to have hardware issues with one of my ports, but I have issues mounting drives in both of my ports. I literally have four different hard drives, and not once have I gotten all of the hard drives to mount at once. At best I'll get two, normally I can only get one drive to show up (via a USB 2.0 hub of course). In either port, the drives won't mount, so I open disk utility to see what's up. They both show up as they should, but when I click "mount" I get an error about how they could be damaged and to run disk helper or doctor or whatever it's called. Of course that option is grayed out (Thanks a lot OSX!) and I know the disks are just fine anyway. Three of them are FAT32, the other is HSF+ or what-have-you. And it's not the HSF+ drive that always mounts, it seems to be random, or basically whichever drive I turn on first. One of my drives (FAT32) recently stopped showing up in OSX at all, including in disk utility. I plugged it into my headless XP Pro server and it works 100% perfectly. WTF?
[10.5]
I've really only noticed most of these issues with Leopard so perhaps they are just early bugs in which case they are forgivable as XP wasn't perfect when it came out, nor was(is) Vista. Anyway, there are lots of minor little bugs that drive me crazy. For instance, if I am playing a video in Quicktime (normally I use VLC of course, but sometimes I use quicktime just because it's what opens) and I want it to go fullscreen on my second display you'd think that if I moved the video over to the second display did Apple+F that the video would play full screen in the LCD with the video player in it. Of course it doesn't, instead it has a fancy animation that makes it full screen in the primary display. Maybe there is a setting that I need to click somewhere, but I shouldn't have to.
[OSX in general]
Here is something that is not a bug (at least I don't htink it is?), but that I'm really having a difficult time with. My photo workflow is as follows: I have Adobe Lightroom open on my 22" LCD for viewing images and sorting through them, and I use my MBP display for editing in photoshop. Sometimes I switch this around, but generally I prefer the larger image and higher resolution on the 22" for initially viewing photos so I can quickly tell which are keeps and which are not. Anyway, here is the issue: The menu bar for Lightroom/Photoshop is always on the primary display. So if I want to use a filter in the filter menu in photoshop and I'm working on a photo on my second display, I need to mouse all the way over to my MBP display to go to the Filter menu. This might sound rediculous, but for anybody that's done a LOT of computing, having your menus handy is important. Perhaps there is an option to move the menu bar to the active window or something?
[10.5]
Sometimes when I start a spotlight search I get a spinning wheel of death. This happens fairly often. It's happened enough now that I really hesitate and make sure I don't remember where I put my stuff before I risk using spotlight. Again this is on a clean install of Leopard with all updates and patches installed.
[10.5]
In general, there seems to be more random bugs with 3rd party applications. For instance, quick silver always shows up in my Dock now. I don't want it to show up in my dock. It's always running, 24/7. There is no reason for it to be in my dock. But it is, and it wasn't in Tiger. In CS3 I have a few minor issues, for instance when I'm putting in cropping dimensions sometimes CS3 will free and bug out and give me an error that I have not put in a valid number. You might say, "You can't blame OSX for these things, it's a third party issue!" and you'd be totally right. The issue is that compared to my switch to Vista (which was also a totally, totally new OS) I have more third party issues. It might just be the fact that OSX has a much smaller install base and so bugs are fixed in Windows first, and that's fine, but it's still annoying.
With all of these complaints there are still a lot of things about OSX that I like. Expose is still nice (especially on one LCD) and my MBP still looks very sexy. The LCD is still very bright and I'm still very happy with the battery life I get from it. In fact the battery life is very very good in my opinion. I managed to watch 4 hours of TV on my MBP (with low brightness and no wifi) while driving on a trip. Obviously it's not bad enough that I've stopped using it, but I have to admit that every time something crashes or is slow or lags I feel a bit embarrassed to have been so totally sucked into the idea that Apple computers are somehow these perfect machines.
Finally,
[Apple marketing]
Although I do find some of the Apple vs PC commercials funny, I also find them somewhat insulting. Every time I see the pretentious Mac dude talking about viruses and stability and making photos from his last vacation and then I hear how terrible the virus infected and sluggish the windows PC is I think, "wow, maybe Apple should make Finder not crash and fix their USB controller drivers and then make some commercials".