How Did Mac Users Survive?

I have been using a Macintosh at my new job for several weeks now, and I have no idea how Mac users survived.

This one is running MacOS (rhymes with “Bacos,” as far as I’m concerned) 9.2 — all these comments relate to pre-OSX Macs. Because OSX is just Unix with a darned nice interface, many if not all these complaints don’t apply.

But OSX is relatively new, and Mac users must have been suffering greatly before then.

It’s not a matter of anything huge; it’s a combination of lots of little annoyances that make it clear to me why A) 90+% of the world uses Windows, and B) Linux has surpassed the Mac on the desktop.

Further, I’m not talking about ‘religious’ issues — cases where I’m simply used to one way of doing something and the Mac is different. I accept that there is a learning curve between operating systems and I shouldn’t complain that a Mac uses different keystrokes. (Except, perhaps, for screen capture. On a PC, you hit “Print Screen” and you capture the screen to the Clipboard. On the Mac, you have to hold down FOUR keys to accomplish the same thing.)

First off, everything is slow, like it’s in goo. I’m not talking processor speed, I’m talking about the interface. On a Windows machine, you could make the mouse pointer move so fast you couldn’t control it. On the Mac, even the fastest setting makes scrolling repeatedly just to get from one side of the screen to the other.

Second, the one-button mouse is the dumbest idea ever. Heck, the first mouse ever made had three buttons! PCs now have at least two buttons plus a wheel for scrolling documents. Macs are still using a single button. Blech.

My friend Tommy once quipped to a Mac-using friend, “Do Macs even have keyboards.” Well, it’s not so much a joke. Sometimes it seems that everything requires the (slow) mouse.

For example, if I get a dialog box with “OK,” “Refresh,” and “Cancel,” on a PC I can usually hit the first letter of my choice — or at least use the arrow keys to change selections. On the Mac, I have to use the mouse; there are no keyboard shortcuts.

On a PC, if I want to select everything in a dialog box — the current URL in a Web browser, for example — two clicks will do it. On the Mac it’s at least three, and half the time I have to start over. It’s clunky at best.

On a PC, if I need to click a button on a page that’s not in focus, I just click on it. Period. On the Mac, first I have to click just to put the other page in focus, then I can click the button. It’s an extra step that gets really annoying.

I’m told that Mac OS9 has better memory management than Windows. Maybe so. But I’ve crashed the Mac several times, and I’ve crashed my PC several times. [shrug]

There’s more, like the few times there’s a keyboard shortcut you need to think about Shift, Control, Option, and Command keys (instead of just Control and Alt on the PC). You can’t assign different sounds to different events, like on a PC. There is one sound for all of them, unless a specific program has its own.

I’ve used OSX a couple of times, and the improvements are many. It looks like a great OS. But it strikes me as way too late. If Mac users had to put up with OS8 and 9 for this long, no wonder they’ve defected to Windows.

I await your flames.