I Am a Mac User
A bit of background first, if that's OK: I've been an Apple fan since 2001, and a mac user since 2006, when I got my first mac. I had it for years, and it was an amazing computer that never let me down, that is, until the poor thing broke. It ran OS X Tiger, an amazing operating system.
I borrowed a relative's disused netbook for a while, until I could afford to get a new computer. A mac, of course. Yesterday, I finally got it, a new 13" MacBook Air.
It looks amazing, is unbelievably well-built, the screen looks gigantic next to the netbook screen I'd gotten used to, and performance-wise, this computer would have utterly put to shame my last mac. And at first, I was impressed with many of the new features in the latest Mac OS, version 10.8 Mountain Lion.
But as I got to use it, I've come across *tons* of various kinds of issues with the operating system; disappointingly uncharacteristic of an Apple product. I mean, the OS actually *froze* on the first day of my having it, and I had to force a reboot. In the 6 years that I had my last mac, it probably only did this 3 or 4 times in total, and in all but one of those cases, it was after I'd activated some experimental feature in OS X that was known to cause that sort of issue.
The difference in the user experience between the older OS X Tiger and Mountain Lion is enormous. The UI was designed to be straightforward to use, and when you wanted to change a setting for example, you never had to refer to the help page to understand what it meant. And if you changed that setting... *it changed*. No surprises like things functioning like before, and then when you went back to the settings window, it turned out that the checkbox you checked somehow mysteriously reverted back to how it had been before.
Window management was easy. Now there's that Mission Control monstrosity. That you toggle with some trackpad gesture that you need to repeat sometimes.
Diagonal trackpad scrolling worked in 2005... not anymore in 2012 (!) Also, right now, as I'm typing this, the OS is set to American English, but it keeps trying to correct words that I write in the American style (minimize) with the British spelling (minimise). There's a lot more I would cover on the OS side. But all I'll say is that it's confusing the hell out of me, and keeps surprising me with new things that don't work the way they should. It's almost the opposite experience of the one I had when I got my first mac.
And, of course, you can't just install the old OS version - it doesn't have the drivers needed to run on this newer machine.
On the hardware side... there's this ambient light sensor that the computer has, and it's used to control the brightness of the backlit keyboard, and of the display. It seemed to work OK this morning when I tested it out (seemed like a cool feature), but since then, something must have happened, because now the auto-adjusting keyboard backlight has the *opposite* behaviour. In a dark environment, it dims to nothing, making it so I can't see the keys (which I would if the dang thing worked the way it should) and in a bright one, the brightness goes up, unnecessarily using up battery power. So now I'm manually setting the brightness of this and of the screen, which thankfully is easy to do. And at least works.
I think that the reason for this change for the worse is the fact that Steve Jobs isn't running things anymore. He was the final Decider on how good a product should be before it ships. And he had very high standards. I'd be extremely surprised if things would be the same today if he'd never gotten sick, and if he were still in charge.
I borrowed a relative's disused netbook for a while, until I could afford to get a new computer. A mac, of course. Yesterday, I finally got it, a new 13" MacBook Air.
It looks amazing, is unbelievably well-built, the screen looks gigantic next to the netbook screen I'd gotten used to, and performance-wise, this computer would have utterly put to shame my last mac. And at first, I was impressed with many of the new features in the latest Mac OS, version 10.8 Mountain Lion.
But as I got to use it, I've come across *tons* of various kinds of issues with the operating system; disappointingly uncharacteristic of an Apple product. I mean, the OS actually *froze* on the first day of my having it, and I had to force a reboot. In the 6 years that I had my last mac, it probably only did this 3 or 4 times in total, and in all but one of those cases, it was after I'd activated some experimental feature in OS X that was known to cause that sort of issue.
The difference in the user experience between the older OS X Tiger and Mountain Lion is enormous. The UI was designed to be straightforward to use, and when you wanted to change a setting for example, you never had to refer to the help page to understand what it meant. And if you changed that setting... *it changed*. No surprises like things functioning like before, and then when you went back to the settings window, it turned out that the checkbox you checked somehow mysteriously reverted back to how it had been before.
Window management was easy. Now there's that Mission Control monstrosity. That you toggle with some trackpad gesture that you need to repeat sometimes.
Diagonal trackpad scrolling worked in 2005... not anymore in 2012 (!) Also, right now, as I'm typing this, the OS is set to American English, but it keeps trying to correct words that I write in the American style (minimize) with the British spelling (minimise). There's a lot more I would cover on the OS side. But all I'll say is that it's confusing the hell out of me, and keeps surprising me with new things that don't work the way they should. It's almost the opposite experience of the one I had when I got my first mac.
And, of course, you can't just install the old OS version - it doesn't have the drivers needed to run on this newer machine.
On the hardware side... there's this ambient light sensor that the computer has, and it's used to control the brightness of the backlit keyboard, and of the display. It seemed to work OK this morning when I tested it out (seemed like a cool feature), but since then, something must have happened, because now the auto-adjusting keyboard backlight has the *opposite* behaviour. In a dark environment, it dims to nothing, making it so I can't see the keys (which I would if the dang thing worked the way it should) and in a bright one, the brightness goes up, unnecessarily using up battery power. So now I'm manually setting the brightness of this and of the screen, which thankfully is easy to do. And at least works.
I think that the reason for this change for the worse is the fact that Steve Jobs isn't running things anymore. He was the final Decider on how good a product should be before it ships. And he had very high standards. I'd be extremely surprised if things would be the same today if he'd never gotten sick, and if he were still in charge.
By:
WhatIsLeftOfMe
Age:
22-25
