[FredTheOldGuy]

I've been using PCs for many years. Then suddenly this summer I purchased an iMac to break away the hell hole that I thought, based on all the press and the and the enthusiastic endorsement of Mac users, was the exclusive domain of Windows-based PCs. But now, for a multitude of reasons, I question the wisdom of that move. Here are just a few:

1) Ease of use. Based on what I heard, the Mac had a corner of this attribute. Not so. In XP (and I'm sure Vista as well) you can resize screens no mater which side or corner of the Window you grab. With a Mac, you have to be sure the lower-right corner is available if you want to resize the window. Where's the ease and convenience in that? Plus, where are the insert/overwrite keys and the navigational arrows on the number pad? I've seen people argue that those things aren't needed. Well, perhaps they aren't required, but why not include them. More flexibility and options are always better than less flexibility and fewer options, aren't they?
2) Entourage. In a word, it sucks. It is roughly half the program Outlook was. There is no native support for tables or, apparently, html code, and you'd better resize your pic before you paste it into a message because you can't resize it afterwards. Apple's own Mail is the same way: no tables, no resizing of graphic elements. (BTW, is there any calendaring program for the Mac that is comparable in functionality to Outlook that will also interface with MobileMe?)
3) iCal. While iCal seems to be mostly serviceable, if you want to copy a large, formatted block of text into the calendar, forget it. Instead you get a "note" section for unformatted text. The way around it, I guess, is to maintain a separate file and associate with the calendar's entry by making it an attachment. But if you see what you momentarily think is a stray file cluttering up a folder and you delete it . . . well, tough.
4) MobileMe. Yeah, I fell for it hook, line, and sinker. Even bought an iPhone to help keep my calendar synched with my computer. Between the iMac and the iPhone, it works great. But it is also touted to work great with PCs as well, and neither my PC notebook nor my PC desktop can sync with the MobileMe calendar.
5) Fusion. A quick look tells you it's going to work flawlessly and all your critical Windows apps will continue to function just as before, even on your Mac's desktop. But when it comes down to the nitty gritty, it just ain't so, not if you use some specialized USB hardware in to interface with specialized Windows software, and not when your keyboard works in the Windows window but seems to totally lose connectivity in the Mac environment. It seems that that Boot Camp is the only real way to make Windows work on the machine given my own requirements, and I had been hoping to avoid that.
6) Word. For the most part it works, but I like to record macros to enter some repetitive keystrokes in some rigidly formatted text because Type4Me and the Word's own Autocorrect insist on inserting spaces where I don't want them. The alternative? Apple Script. In other words, learn to program. Does Apple or Microsoft really expect its customers to hunker down over the arcana of a dry and tedious programming tome just so they can record and assign to the keyboard a short but repetitive string of text? That's what Apple calls ease of use? Sheesh.
7) Limited software options. There's just not as much software available for the Mac, and the paucity of freeware and shareware seems to be even greater.

So with respect to my business interests, the Mac is pretty much a bust. But that's not to say that it isn't a terrific toy, albeit an expensive one. I love scanning old family photos and creating photo albums with the Mac. The ease of iWeb and its great design elements even inspired me to create and publish a website (though, in exchange for ease of use, customizability on those pages is sorely limited).

Is Apple's version of Unix really that superior to Windows as an operating platform? Maybe, but I'm no geek, and from what I can tell migrating to the Mac environment is not unlike donning a straightjacket. Yeah, you can do a lot in a Mac so long as what you want to do is available within the confines of the hospital. But the walls of that hospital are thick and high, and you can't break out.

I was told that it's no longer true that the Mac is good for students, publishers, and graphic artists while the domain for the business world remains the PC. I think I now disagree with that. The PC, while it is plagued with all sorts of problems that make it frustrating for different reasons (viruses, malware, the slowdown of performance over time because of software overload, etc.) still offers greater flexibility and the best mass market software packages for general business purposes. At least that's how I perceive after a month or so of seriously trying to get the Mac under my belt. So even though I didn't want to have to resort to Boot Camp to run my critical apps and I didn't want to reboot to switch back and forth between the Mac and the PC, Boot Camp here I come.

[rickcarl]

You must be a troll. Don't talk down Apple hardware or software especially after just one month of use. Talk business tasks. Name a task and then compare the platforms for what they will do to complete the task. Talk business planning and forecasting. Talk budgeting and financial record keeping. Talk communications and publicity. Compare the platforms. Remember, the platforms are just tools. Pick the one that does the job. I've found room for both platforms since I have a variety of jobs that need doing.

[Tom_Diola]

Yea the moderators should have a special forum: Trolls/Diatribe/Venting

[Chris Breen]

OTOH, it's possible that Fred is just happier with Windows and that's fine. It's unlikely he's going to get much sympathy here -- I'm sure there are any number of Windows-centric forums would be more supportive -- and it's likely to do little good to try to convince him that the Mac is anything but an "expensive toy" so maybe we should all save our collective breaths.

Fortunately, with Boot Camp, that Mac is a perfectly fine Windows PC. I'd suggest he run it as such.

[FredTheOldGuy]

Goodness. What a strange response. I thought at first you were calling me ugly, but since I didn't post a photograph I have to assume you mean "troll" in the sense that fishermen use it, as if I were casting bait and seeing if I could get a fish to bite. Did you write some of the Apple/MacIntosh code? Are you responsible for the software that works with it? You seem to take personal offense that I've found so much of the software on the Mac to be insufficient and narrow and so few of its promises to be fulfilled. And rather than cite specifics as I did, you seem to prefer that I speak in broad generalities, such as "budgeting and financial record keeping" and "business planning and forecasting." You want me to "compare platforms." Why don't you do that if you have those skills. I don't know anything about the platforms. All I know about is the experience that I've had so far with the software running on PC and Apple machines and, for a variety of reasons relating to ergonomics, efficiency, and program flexibility, my experience with the Mac has been an enormous disappointment.


So if you want to "talk communications and publicity," go ahead. Apparently I communicated, and you didn't like it so insulted me. Thank you for your helpful and incisive response.

[Chris Breen]

FredTheOldGuy said:

Goodness. What a strange response.

Ah, then maybe you're new at this. The idea is this: You choose to participate in a forum where people are enthusiastic about their Macs. You take a contrary position, which is fairly aggressive. How did you expect people to respond to your post?

"Gosh, that Fred, he's got something there. I think I'll dump this Mac and get a PC!"

No, what you got is pretty much what one would expect.

So yes, that kind of baiting is known as trolling and those who engage in it, trolls. Accepted practice is to not feed the troll in the hope that those who enjoy such diversions will find more bountiful grounds for their entertainment.

My hope is that you're not intentionally trolling and simply expressing an opinion likely to be greeted with, at best, skepticism.

[FredTheOldGuy]

These reactions are making me wonder whether I'm dealing with a cult rather than just a group of people using computers. If you want to critique Windows, go for it! I couldn't care less what you think about Windows. Heck, Windows is why I bought the iMac. I'm just wondering why the software that I've tried, some of which I paid additional $$ for, isn't better or as full-featured as analogous programs in Windows. Yet I'm getting the sense that criticism is frowned upon and discouraged and that outsiders who don't toe the party line are ostracized. I came here to express ideas, not to demonstrate theological purity to high priests. Sheesh.

[Chris Breen]

Fred, no one with any sense wants to engage in a Mac versus PC argument. It's pointless and does nothing but stir ill will.

And that's what we're trying to avoid here. Ill will generated by someone who appears to be trying to stir the pot. If you don't care for the Mac, there are plenty of places on the Internet you can gripe about it. But your opinions aren't going to receive a big welcome here as those who come to a site called MACworld generally have positive feelings about it.

So enough, please. If you have questions about the Mac, there are any number of people who would be happy to help you with it -- me included. But if you just want to gripe, please do it somewhere else.

[FredTheOldGuy]

Chris, my intent here never was to engage in a "Mac versus PC argument." Nothing could have been further from my mind, but I see that I must have trod onto some very sensitive turf. I have never personally known another Mac user, and for business reasons I was always careful to use the operating system and software that had the widest following in order to ease the the exchange of electronic information and documents. For years I harbored a yearning for a Mac but couldn't make a business justification for the purchase. The intel-based iMac provided me with a justifying rationale.

On all the PC forums I have ever engaged in--and admittedly I don't often post to forums--the discussion has always been open, both pro and con, regarding either the operating system itself or the programs that ran on it. And to my knowledge never was there a consensus on the "right" position to take with respect to any subject under discussion. There were only differences of opinion.

In posting to this forum, I was hoping to stumble upon people who were fluent in both the PC and the Mac worlds, who understood some of the frustration I've been experiencing, and who knew what programs were available for the Mac that were comparable in function and performance to, say, Outlook. I find Entourage, a Microsoft product, to be lacking in a number of ways, but I don't find the combination of iMac's Mail and iCal to be better except for the fact that iCal will synch with the calendar on my iPhone.

And, as I said, I am enjoying the iWeb program, iPhoto, Photoshop Elements, Photo Booth, and the built-in camera. But none of the features that I like most about the Mac are ones that address my need for an Outlook equivalent or to create macros in Word. Since the performance of Fusion is less than perfect for my needs, I shall have to run this computer with Boot Camp and keep an impervious wall between the two faces of my Jekyll-and-Hyde machine.

I suppose my underlying misunderstanding of this forum is that Mac World is evidently a fan club, a group for Mac enthusiasts, while the other forums I have posted to have been for the purpose of answering questions and resolving problems. One's like or dislike of a program or even of the operating system itself wasn't really the focus or even of great interest. Here one's positive regard for everything Mac almost seems to be the price of admission.

[Peter Cohen]

Hey, Fred. Congrats on your iMac.

You're more than welcome to talk about whatever you want to, but exercise some common sense.

When you go to the zoo and fling poop at the monkey cage, just what exactly do you expect the monkeys to do? And what do you expect the zookeeper to do with you afterwards?

Again, welcome to the party. Got questions about your Mac that aren't loaded like rock salt buckshot, we'd love to help you out.

[Chris Breen]

We actually have a fairly broad range of opinions here. I've been labeled both a fanboy and Apple basher, depending on what I've recently written and the phase of the moon. We have our share of fanboys but it may not be as big a percentage as you fear. Your initial post was somewhat combative (throw words like "suck" around and call the Mac an expensive toy and you're going to get a reaction) and you're an unknown entity so if you get a prickly response, that may help explain it.

I think you can find some perfectly reasonable discussions here ? and some agreement on some of the points you've made (though I might suggest that some of what you're experiencing is a matter of taste ? what you're used to versus a different implementation of something being worse).

I'm just suggesting that phrasing your objections along the lines of "I'm unhappy with Windows under virtualization, what can I do instead?" or "Why can't an email program made by Microsoft provide the same kind of Exchange support I get in Outlook?" might lead to more reasoned responses.

[Glenn_Fleishman]

Fred, I think you've been captured by the trap of edge cases: you list a whole number of things that (I believe) most people don't care about or aren't using. For instance, I've been using Windows since version 3.1, even though I'm mostly a Mac guy. I always have at least 1 or 2 working systems for testing or other work (typically a desktop and a laptop). RIght now I have a Dell laptop designed to work with Vista that I'm quite pleased with; I have seen none of the trouble with Vista people report because the laptop had all the minimum configuration needed and was never upgraded from XP.

But I've nearly never had specialized USB software that wasn't interchangeable with a Mac. Right now, I have scanners, hard drives, flash drives, a spectrum analyzer, and other gear that works just as well under Windows XP and Vista as on a Mac. So when you say that Fusion won't work because of USB devices, I have to say you're an edge case (a case in which you aren't part of the mass of people) because you've got something particular that's a problem. (Also, I don't know if you've encountered Boot Camp, which is native Windows booting from a Mac. This is needed for some kinds of tasks, especially particular hardware that lacks Mac drivers or that can't be shunted through virtualization in Fusion or Parallels. Microsoft and Adobe both have some software that they specifically recommend or require you to use Boot Camp with because virtualization won't cut it.)

Also, when you make a statement like this, it's hard to take you seriously: "There's just not as much software available for the Mac, and the paucity of freeware and shareware seems to be even greater."

I've heard this for years, and with the exception of very specific high-end software for specific vertical industries, like financial markets or healthcare, or very specific utilities, I've nearly never found that to be the case. I don't need 15 freeware FTP clients (although there are probably that many for the Mac) when there are five that are terrific. (On the Windows side, there are 2 or 3 really great FTP clients that I know of.)

This is part of why you're getting labeled a troll: it has been true at different times in Apple's history that critical, useful, and entertaining programs just weren't available on the Mac. Now, I'm hard pressed outside of certain games and certain technical software to make that case. I'd love to know what you're not finding; in fact, by noting that, you'll get a lot of help from this forum.

[rickcarl]

> {quote:title=...}{quote}In posting to this forum, I was hoping to stumble upon people who were fluent in both the PC and the Mac worlds...
[/quote]



I'm reasonably fluent. PC and Mac hardware and software are tools. Pick the right tool to do the task. Don't tell me you used the Mac tool for a month and it doesn't have ease of use or has limited software options over a PC. Your comments say more about you than they do about Mac or Macworld readership. It's a poor workman who blames his tools.

[mdawson]

As others have noted, you initial post is quite antagonistic. Therefore, it stands to reason that such a post on a Mac enthusiast?s forum would result in you being labeled a troll and handled accordingly, particularly as most of your points of argument have little to do with the platform.

Ease of Use

It is very easy to sit here and state that OS X is no easier to use than Windows after you have been conditioned to work the Windows way over the however many years you have used Microsoft?s operating system. Few people come into the computing world from a clean slate and if a person is conditioned to work counter to instinct, that which should be intuitive no longer shall be. As one of my prior chemistry professors liked to say, ?Knowing how to do something the hard way does not make it the easy way.? You are used to doing things the way Microsoft wants you to and, due to inertia, resistant to OS X because it is different.

When Windows 95 was introduced on many levels it paled in comparison to the original Mac OS (from 1984) because in order to be different Microsoft failed to follow many of the basic tenants of good GUI design. Apple pretty much got things right out of the gate and as a result, even with the OS X migration the Mac OS has been more evolutionary over the past 24 years than revolutionary. More features have been added over the years and OS X gave Mac users a better kernel under the hood, but little has changed in the way that you interact with the Mac OS.

So yes, in the past 13+ years, Windows has in many respects caught up to where the Mac OS has been for quite some time. As a dual platform user, I could easily write an entire post about the operations in Windows that are either non-intuitive or require more steps than is necessary. But, one clear example of the former is the need to go to a Start menu to quit using one?s computer. Nothing about that is intuitive, people have just been conditioned to work that way. In the case of the latter, creating new folders using contextual menus in Windows is a two-step process. First you have to find ?New? in a desktop contextual menu, as it is often not the first item listed, then you have to select ?Folder? from a submenu. ?New Folder? is always the first item in contextual menus within the Finder on a Mac.

Entourage

Entourage is Microsoft?s software and therefore any complaints you have about this mail client should be directed at Microsoft and not Apple or the Mac experience.

iCal

OK, this is Apple software, but it is also preinstalled freeware. If iCal does not suit your needs then you can easily find or inquire about a replacement.

MobileMe

I never used .Mac or its current replacement MobileMe, so I cannot say much here beyond the fact that it has been noted by others that it is not up to par.

Fusion

Again, this is not Apple branded software and it has nothing to do with the Mac experience. Fusion is virtualization software allowing you to run a second operating system from within the Mac?s native operating system and that is an extremely complex operation. As such, it is a miracle that it works at all. If you have strong direct hardware requirements, virtualization is not the route you should be taking and that has nothing to do with Apple as Apple does not develop or market virtualization software.

Word

Again, this has nothing to do with the Mac. How any Microsoft product stacks up on the Mac compared to its Windows counterpart is solely up to Microsoft. Microsoft has repeatedly chosen, to not pour the resources into their Mac Business Unit to insure that the Mac version of Office has exact feature parity with the Windows version, sans those features that rely on platform-specific technologies. As the largest and wealthiest software developer on the planet, there is no legitimate reason for Microsoft to not only make sure that their software has feature parity between the Mac and Windows versions, but they should also offer most, if not all of their applications for the Mac. Microsoft has chosen to do neither.

Microsoft alone made the conscious decision to halfheartedly implement VBA in previous versions of Office:mac, and Microsoft alone made the decision to drop VBA support from Office:mac 2008.

Limited Software Options

This point alone was enough for people to view you as a troll. As Glenn_Fieishman stated, Mac users have been hearing this bilge for a long time and it is straight out of the book of FUD in the anti-Mac bible. The number of applications that exist to perform a certain task does not make a given platform better than another. What difference does it make if there are 200 applications available to perform task A in Windows if 197 of them are crap? As Glenn has already stated, no one needs to have that many options when only a small few are even worth bothering with.

I would rather have a few good options that I can research in short order than a myriad options that takes for ever to search through just to wind up still not finding or selecting good software. As an individual user, I seriously doubt that there is any task that you are trying to accomplish for which Mac software does not exist. The exception, as again Glenn already noted, is software for very vertical markets where the Mac has never had a foothold.

-----

In all, you have been using a Mac after a month or two after using Windows for years. Coming here and bashing the Mac by referring to it as an expensive toy before you have even had adequate time to learn the ropes is not going to earn you any friends.