Rant time.
On the divide between Mac and PC people I (as is widly known) come down firmly on the Mac side. I have been using and breathing Apple products for pretty much most of my working life and I love ‘em like I love bacon and eggs or the dip in my sofa. Probably more.
Sometimes in my almost religious ferver, I paper over the cracks to make the point that it could be worse, it could be Windows.
Mac OS X is a nice looking OS but I am fast realising that you can’t really trust it to be reliable.
Let me explain. When I open my fridge the food is cold. When I dial a number on my phone, another phone somewhere rings.
I dont have to have a degree in thermal dynamics or have BT engineer on call for me to use these devices, they are appliances, they just work. I want to have the same level of service from my computer.
Why can’t Apple get the simple stuff sorted.
OK, this is not unique to Apple and in fairness they go further than anyone else in making all the complex stuff under the surface of the user interface hidden, but even Mac OS X is flakey sometimes.
For example, if I want to copy some files around, I expect them to copy reliably. In the same way as I dial that number on the phone, I should be able to tell it to do a function and leave it in the safe knowledge that when I get back to the machine it has finished the job with an air of quiet superiority not waiting to mention that something may be open by an application that isn’t running anymore. If there’s a problem, like a file has permissions that prevent the system performing the function you asked it, why doesn’t the machine finish what it can and report all the problems after and provide a method of correcting the issue at the end?
This is the second draft of this posting and previously I wrote “Mac OS X Finder is creaking, its crap”, A little harsh maybe however basically true. OS X finder is not all it could be and should (will) be improved in leopard. I guess we’ll see the changes at WWDC in August.
10.5′s new Finder, should be written in Cocoa and fix all the niggles that 10.4 has at the moment, that little voice in the back of my head is telling me that they the fixes are less of a priority than putting more features into an already overblown system.
Mac OS is not an enterprise level OS, it is a consumer OS that has been modded to work with some enterprise features. They are following not leading in this environment. Consumers tend to put up with bad software for some reason. Although they pay for their software they are in a position of little influence with the manufacturers because they only represent one unit sale. Corporates have mass purchasing power that gives them some clout and a voice with their vendors.
Apple have a catalogue of software horrors; Workgroup Manager is barely good enough for Education and works (just) despite Apples efforts. It is nasty and I don’t trust it as much as I should or need, Apple Remote Desktop – all versions up to 2.2 are flakey and work when they want to.
I could turn this into a list of Apple disasters but I won’t because it is too depressing.
There is a reason that in the Apple Ts & Cs you are instructed not to use the Mac to run anything more important than a lightswitch, they know that the OS is flakey and dont want to get sued when the nuclear reactor melts down because the plist for MacNuke v1.5 has corrupted.
Where’s that Linux disk?