What about PostScript (related to the LaserWriter)? How about full 32-bit color years before PC? What about Microsoft Office years before PC? What about Photoshop years (and at least three versions) before PC? What about CD-Rom years before PC? What about the Internet? The fact that you no longer needed Mac versions of stuff because you could just go online helped save Macs.
Actually, though, you are right...without DTP, I think Mac would have been toast. The problem writing Mac off to just DTP, though, is that the print industry (and associated other industries) was (and still remains) big enough to support a specialized computer system like Mac OS. Good thing the Internet came along to make our Macs even more useful.
All the while raking in the dough and gaining $4 a share on the same day the rest of the market tanked. There's more to being successful than market share.
"Brand" is not only developed by marketing, but also by the perception developed by users actually using the product. More importantly, "brand" evolves from the corporate culture. It's ok to hate hipsters. It's not ok to say every MacBook wielding coffee-drinker is a hipster. It's really not fair is to say MacBooks suck because hipsters use them. What most people are opposed to about Apple is the culture, not the product, which is not a fair criticism of the quality of the product.
Fair enough. However, a personal preference is just that...personal. So, if there are thousands and thousands of studies that show the proper placement of a cancel button, and you prefer it elsewhere, that doesn't make the proper way incorrect. That's my entire point in this discussion...those who rail against Mac OSX do so out of personal preference, not out of glaring deficiencies in the design of the UI element, which is EXACTLY what you have done by calling OS X the worst OS out there.
Lemme try to explain it this way. I love the movie "Cable Guy" and the movie "Casablanca" bores me to tears. What I am able to do though, is accept that Cable Guy is nowhere near the caliber of movie that Casablanca is, EVEN THOUGH I like Cable Guy and hate Casablanca. In other words, I have an open mind, and I don't try to push MY egocentrism on everyone else.
No, good design works, whether you believe it or not. More realistically, whether you WANT to believe it or not. Just because YOU like to do something a certain way, doesn't mean there aren't best practices in place that are better than your way.
An improperly designed door handle (one that is designed to be pulled, but the door pushes to open, for example) doesn't work. The same goes for every single design element in a GUI. To call an entire field of academia "BS" says a lot about you and tells me this conversation is going nowhere.
Considering there are entire schools that award professional degrees in Information Studies and Graphic Design, I would suggest that good design isn't nearly as subjective as you think. That's the problem with people who have bad taste...they have no idea they have bad taste.
And with a BMW 3-series, you get the choice of the smaller engine, or the bigger better one for more money. For some of us, having only 2 engine choices for a BMW is well worth it compared to having 15 options for a General Motors junker car. (I haven't seen a car analogy in this thread yet).
Only because you've grown accustom to having to hit F5 over the years. Otherwise, it makes no sense, when OSX does it just fine.
That's fair. I'm just saying it isn't a deal maker or breaker.
It's also fair to say that taken one line-item at a time, nothing in Windows is really a deal-breaker. 1000 little annoying things really start taking their toll on a user though.
(Alternately, I might add prefixes to the names and then sort alphabetically, but only if I really wanted to be able to scroll through the whole list easily.)
Except then you run into the problem of Windows not thinking like humans and placing 10, 11 and 12 ahead of 1, 2 and 3. Unless of course you really love labeling all your files 01, 02, 03, 04 just so that when you get to 10, Windows keeps them in numerical order for you;-)
I wondered if you perhaps had a laptop, but I forgot that many laptops have the irritating "feature" where they go to sleep when the screen is closed... get rid of that, please-thank-you. Just my two cents.
What would be your alternative? Shut down? Stay running (and burn through the battery in record time? Not that I have a savvy solution, unless you consider just dimming the screen and only going into sleep mode if left closed for 5 minutes or more.
I'm not a developer, but I don't understand how anyone could develop around letter drive file path names. It IS a weakness of the OS, and abandoning it causes legacy apps to have problems. At some point, Microsoft will have to start from scratch, and run legacy stuff in a VM.
Oh, trust me... they can. The concept of "portable applications" is, sadly, relatively foreign to Windows-based PCs. I once tried to get Apache/PHP5 to run from a flash drive... I succeeded, although my sanity took a real beating.
You mean kind of like putting one copy of Photoshop on one firewire drive (circa 1998) and running it on 20 networked iMacs in the Apple store I used to work for? What's this "install" business all about anyway?
List 'em off, if you want, and I'll be happy to consider them. At the moment, though, I break it down like this:
Mac OS has the worst GUI of all the major operating systems.
Nothing else matters.
Yes, because Vista is such a stunning UI success of a replacement to the Fisher-Price OS it replaces? Show me a reputable Information Studies program that lauds the accomplishments of the Windows GUI and I'll eat my hat. Perhaps you should spend more time online hanging around UI oriented sites, as your opinion about good design seems to be based on, well, your opinion, as opposed to years of studies of use-cases.
Apple brand loyalty and customer enthusiasm and whatever other metric you want is off the charts. In other words the "fanboy" affect is very real.
You don't sit consistently at the top of customer satisfaction surveys just by having a bunch of Fanboys. Just because YOU don't understand the allure of the brand, doesn't mean it is without merit, which is a consistent meme on Slashdot. Egocentrism is a bitch.
EVERY brand of everything has its share of fanboys, which are far too few to have any significant impact upon customer satisfaction survey. That is to say, for every one fanboy, there are hundreds of highly satisfied customers. Unless you suggest that the random samplings somehow just magically pick out the fanboys from the otherwise normal customers?
Interestingly enough, I find the most rabid Mac fanboys to be the most recent converts, who really know nothing about the platform yet.
File names update their position in a file list immediately when moved/changed without need to F5 update
Meh
Only because you've grown accustom to having to hit F5 over the years. Otherwise, it makes no sense, when OSX does it just fine.
Ability to apply a user-defined color label to file names (red are in progress, blue are original/backups, etc.
No thanks. That's what I use folders for.
Then you miss out on the ability to sort files within those folders based on their user-defined color. Imagine, if you will, you are an audio specialist charged with wading through hundreds of audio clips to select a few candidates to use on a test you want to give to your students. I could move all the candidates to a "candidate folder", or, like I do now, I could just label them BLUE, poor audio files as RED, and potential ones (need someone else to take a listen) to YELLOW, then sort by color.
Elegant and uniform application installer
Maybe.
My experience with switchers is that they are amazed that they've wasted so much time in the past installing Windows apps.
Elegant "force quit" that actually, I don't know, works?
Yes... although I can't say I've had a lot of issues with it not working. At least since XP it shows you all the processes, not just the ones that opened windows...
In Windows, it can take agonizingly long periods of time for something to finally force quit. In OSX it is instant (and far less frequently needed).
Fast user switching
Wait, Windows has this already...?
Not compared to OSX. Go to an Apple store and switch users. Less than one second is pretty nice.
NOT taking forever to turn off? I'll give a pass on booting up, but a computer should turn-off within seconds, not 1/2 a minute
Startup = sit and wait... yeah, irritating. Shutdown = go away. Out of sight, out of mind, and it'll finish whenever it pleases. Now if it just didn't have to reboot all the f*cking time for updates...
Not if you have a laptop and want to close the lid. You've gotta wait for it to shutdown before you close the lid or it will go to sleep instead. And yes, reboots suffer from the long shut-down period as well. I can boot up OSX launch mail, close mail, and shut down all in the time it takes my PC to shut down.
Get rid of the stupid letter drive dependancies, and stop making the desktop such an "illogical" place to store files and executables
I'd love to see drive letters go bye-bye. However this problem would be just as adequately solved, for me at least, if application developers would stop making software rely on them. Taking away the drive letters will hopefully force them to code better applications, but in all fairness it's not really the operating system's fault.
I'm not a developer, but I don't understand how anyone could develop around letter drive file path names. It IS a weakness of the OS, and abandoning it causes legacy apps to have problems. At some point, Microsoft will have to start from scratch, and run legacy stuff in a VM.
Enforce consistent dialogue and window behavior, regardless of 3d party application
You mean make iTunes look like a Windows application instead of looking like a damn mac window? I'm all for that. Unfortunately there's a lot of software that (legitimately!) needs an unadorned or oddly shaped window, and this would break that...
I agree that Apple fails there. I use Safari on my PC and I find it hilarious that you can double click in the top left corner and close the window, even though the button to do so is hidden (lazy approach to making it PC like I guess?)
So in other words, you diminish the technical merits of Apple hardware because a bunch of people like it? That's sort of like when I was 18 and stopped liking my favorite band because they went mainstream. If you can't see the well-documented and tangible benefits of OSX for home users, then we have nothing to talk about.
I bought a Motorola StarMax and my buddy had the UMAX clone as well. Although they spec'd out as being faster than the Apple equivalents for a little less money, both had serious quality issues. To this day I'll ALWAYS pay a little more for better quality.
Erm, my work laptop, a Dell Latitude D630 maxes out at 1280 x 800. What's your point? Imagine that, a consumer level lap-top gets an average (but still pretty good) resolution to keep costs down...
For once I'd like to see a mature rebuttal against the current successful state of Macintosh that doesn't have to revert to the term "fanboi". If you can do that, I'd give your arguments credit. Until then, your insistence on using "fanboi" shows that you have no real credibility behind your otherwise immature claims.
While the commercials don't accurately display the computing industry in general, they do qualify as fair satire in my book. Apple isn't in the market of accurately depicting the state of personal computing--they are in the market of making money.
The satire works because there is a bit of truth in the stereotypes portrayed in the commercials that EVERYONE can relate to.
I whole-heartedly dismiss any claim of Apple's current success on any sort of "cool facade". If anything, their success comes from making outrageous claims against the competitor, promising a better solution, then delivering on those promises (for the most part..not for everyone, but for MOST people who give it a shot). No amount of "cool" is sustainable without first having a quality product.
Slashdot Mirror
[Steve Jobs] was the one who led Apple into failure initially.
That's strange--did Steve change his name to Gil Amelio for a few years?
What about PostScript (related to the LaserWriter)? How about full 32-bit color years before PC? What about Microsoft Office years before PC? What about Photoshop years (and at least three versions) before PC? What about CD-Rom years before PC? What about the Internet? The fact that you no longer needed Mac versions of stuff because you could just go online helped save Macs.
Actually, though, you are right...without DTP, I think Mac would have been toast. The problem writing Mac off to just DTP, though, is that the print industry (and associated other industries) was (and still remains) big enough to support a specialized computer system like Mac OS. Good thing the Internet came along to make our Macs even more useful.
If OSX is "hideous", what in the hell do you call the Fisher-Price OS (WinXP)?
All the while raking in the dough and gaining $4 a share on the same day the rest of the market tanked. There's more to being successful than market share.
"Brand" is not only developed by marketing, but also by the perception developed by users actually using the product. More importantly, "brand" evolves from the corporate culture. It's ok to hate hipsters. It's not ok to say every MacBook wielding coffee-drinker is a hipster. It's really not fair is to say MacBooks suck because hipsters use them. What most people are opposed to about Apple is the culture, not the product, which is not a fair criticism of the quality of the product.
Cable Guy is a guilty pleasure. I know it sucks, but I don't pretend that it doesn't suck either. The same thing applies to Windows.
Perhaps old Republicans should learn that Czechoslovakia hasn't existed since the early 1990s before we deem them worthy of learning new tricks?
Fair enough. However, a personal preference is just that...personal. So, if there are thousands and thousands of studies that show the proper placement of a cancel button, and you prefer it elsewhere, that doesn't make the proper way incorrect. That's my entire point in this discussion...those who rail against Mac OSX do so out of personal preference, not out of glaring deficiencies in the design of the UI element, which is EXACTLY what you have done by calling OS X the worst OS out there.
Lemme try to explain it this way. I love the movie "Cable Guy" and the movie "Casablanca" bores me to tears. What I am able to do though, is accept that Cable Guy is nowhere near the caliber of movie that Casablanca is, EVEN THOUGH I like Cable Guy and hate Casablanca. In other words, I have an open mind, and I don't try to push MY egocentrism on everyone else.
No, good design works, whether you believe it or not. More realistically, whether you WANT to believe it or not. Just because YOU like to do something a certain way, doesn't mean there aren't best practices in place that are better than your way.
An improperly designed door handle (one that is designed to be pulled, but the door pushes to open, for example) doesn't work. The same goes for every single design element in a GUI. To call an entire field of academia "BS" says a lot about you and tells me this conversation is going nowhere.
Considering there are entire schools that award professional degrees in Information Studies and Graphic Design, I would suggest that good design isn't nearly as subjective as you think. That's the problem with people who have bad taste...they have no idea they have bad taste.
And with a BMW 3-series, you get the choice of the smaller engine, or the bigger better one for more money. For some of us, having only 2 engine choices for a BMW is well worth it compared to having 15 options for a General Motors junker car. (I haven't seen a car analogy in this thread yet).
Only because you've grown accustom to having to hit F5 over the years. Otherwise, it makes no sense, when OSX does it just fine.
That's fair. I'm just saying it isn't a deal maker or breaker.
It's also fair to say that taken one line-item at a time, nothing in Windows is really a deal-breaker. 1000 little annoying things really start taking their toll on a user though.
(Alternately, I might add prefixes to the names and then sort alphabetically, but only if I really wanted to be able to scroll through the whole list easily.)
Except then you run into the problem of Windows not thinking like humans and placing 10, 11 and 12 ahead of 1, 2 and 3. Unless of course you really love labeling all your files 01, 02, 03, 04 just so that when you get to 10, Windows keeps them in numerical order for you ;-)
I wondered if you perhaps had a laptop, but I forgot that many laptops have the irritating "feature" where they go to sleep when the screen is closed... get rid of that, please-thank-you. Just my two cents.
What would be your alternative? Shut down? Stay running (and burn through the battery in record time? Not that I have a savvy solution, unless you consider just dimming the screen and only going into sleep mode if left closed for 5 minutes or more.
I'm not a developer, but I don't understand how anyone could develop around letter drive file path names. It IS a weakness of the OS, and abandoning it causes legacy apps to have problems. At some point, Microsoft will have to start from scratch, and run legacy stuff in a VM.
Oh, trust me... they can. The concept of "portable applications" is, sadly, relatively foreign to Windows-based PCs. I once tried to get Apache/PHP5 to run from a flash drive... I succeeded, although my sanity took a real beating.
You mean kind of like putting one copy of Photoshop on one firewire drive (circa 1998) and running it on 20 networked iMacs in the Apple store I used to work for? What's this "install" business all about anyway?
List 'em off, if you want, and I'll be happy to consider them. At the moment, though, I break it down like this: Mac OS has the worst GUI of all the major operating systems. Nothing else matters.
Yes, because Vista is such a stunning UI success of a replacement to the Fisher-Price OS it replaces? Show me a reputable Information Studies program that lauds the accomplishments of the Windows GUI and I'll eat my hat. Perhaps you should spend more time online hanging around UI oriented sites, as your opinion about good design seems to be based on, well, your opinion, as opposed to years of studies of use-cases.
Apple brand loyalty and customer enthusiasm and whatever other metric you want is off the charts. In other words the "fanboy" affect is very real.
You don't sit consistently at the top of customer satisfaction surveys just by having a bunch of Fanboys. Just because YOU don't understand the allure of the brand, doesn't mean it is without merit, which is a consistent meme on Slashdot. Egocentrism is a bitch.
EVERY brand of everything has its share of fanboys, which are far too few to have any significant impact upon customer satisfaction survey. That is to say, for every one fanboy, there are hundreds of highly satisfied customers. Unless you suggest that the random samplings somehow just magically pick out the fanboys from the otherwise normal customers?
Interestingly enough, I find the most rabid Mac fanboys to be the most recent converts, who really know nothing about the platform yet.
File names update their position in a file list immediately when moved/changed without need to F5 update
Meh
Only because you've grown accustom to having to hit F5 over the years. Otherwise, it makes no sense, when OSX does it just fine.
Ability to apply a user-defined color label to file names (red are in progress, blue are original/backups, etc.
No thanks. That's what I use folders for.
Then you miss out on the ability to sort files within those folders based on their user-defined color. Imagine, if you will, you are an audio specialist charged with wading through hundreds of audio clips to select a few candidates to use on a test you want to give to your students. I could move all the candidates to a "candidate folder", or, like I do now, I could just label them BLUE, poor audio files as RED, and potential ones (need someone else to take a listen) to YELLOW, then sort by color.
Elegant and uniform application installer
Maybe.
My experience with switchers is that they are amazed that they've wasted so much time in the past installing Windows apps.
Elegant "force quit" that actually, I don't know, works?
Yes... although I can't say I've had a lot of issues with it not working. At least since XP it shows you all the processes, not just the ones that opened windows...
In Windows, it can take agonizingly long periods of time for something to finally force quit. In OSX it is instant (and far less frequently needed).
Fast user switching
Wait, Windows has this already...?
Not compared to OSX. Go to an Apple store and switch users. Less than one second is pretty nice.
NOT taking forever to turn off? I'll give a pass on booting up, but a computer should turn-off within seconds, not 1/2 a minute
Startup = sit and wait... yeah, irritating. Shutdown = go away. Out of sight, out of mind, and it'll finish whenever it pleases. Now if it just didn't have to reboot all the f*cking time for updates...
Not if you have a laptop and want to close the lid. You've gotta wait for it to shutdown before you close the lid or it will go to sleep instead. And yes, reboots suffer from the long shut-down period as well. I can boot up OSX launch mail, close mail, and shut down all in the time it takes my PC to shut down.
Get rid of the stupid letter drive dependancies, and stop making the desktop such an "illogical" place to store files and executables
I'd love to see drive letters go bye-bye. However this problem would be just as adequately solved, for me at least, if application developers would stop making software rely on them. Taking away the drive letters will hopefully force them to code better applications, but in all fairness it's not really the operating system's fault.
I'm not a developer, but I don't understand how anyone could develop around letter drive file path names. It IS a weakness of the OS, and abandoning it causes legacy apps to have problems. At some point, Microsoft will have to start from scratch, and run legacy stuff in a VM.
Enforce consistent dialogue and window behavior, regardless of 3d party application
You mean make iTunes look like a Windows application instead of looking like a damn mac window? I'm all for that. Unfortunately there's a lot of software that (legitimately!) needs an unadorned or oddly shaped window, and this would break that...
I agree that Apple fails there. I use Safari on my PC and I find it hilarious that you can double click in the top left corner and close the window, even though the button to do so is hidden (lazy approach to making it PC like I guess?)
So in other words, you diminish the technical merits of Apple hardware because a bunch of people like it? That's sort of like when I was 18 and stopped liking my favorite band because they went mainstream. If you can't see the well-documented and tangible benefits of OSX for home users, then we have nothing to talk about.
I bought a Motorola StarMax and my buddy had the UMAX clone as well. Although they spec'd out as being faster than the Apple equivalents for a little less money, both had serious quality issues. To this day I'll ALWAYS pay a little more for better quality.
Apple has never really manufactured the guts. They do, however, engineer the cases and the placement of said guts within those cases.
Well considering the fanboi is right, looks like YOU are the moron.
Erm, my work laptop, a Dell Latitude D630 maxes out at 1280 x 800. What's your point? Imagine that, a consumer level lap-top gets an average (but still pretty good) resolution to keep costs down...
For once I'd like to see a mature rebuttal against the current successful state of Macintosh that doesn't have to revert to the term "fanboi". If you can do that, I'd give your arguments credit. Until then, your insistence on using "fanboi" shows that you have no real credibility behind your otherwise immature claims.
While the commercials don't accurately display the computing industry in general, they do qualify as fair satire in my book. Apple isn't in the market of accurately depicting the state of personal computing--they are in the market of making money.
The satire works because there is a bit of truth in the stereotypes portrayed in the commercials that EVERYONE can relate to.
I whole-heartedly dismiss any claim of Apple's current success on any sort of "cool facade". If anything, their success comes from making outrageous claims against the competitor, promising a better solution, then delivering on those promises (for the most part..not for everyone, but for MOST people who give it a shot). No amount of "cool" is sustainable without first having a quality product.
I made another post in this thread highlighting the poor file management of Windows. Perhaps a new Windows Explorer altogether would be in order.
my supposed biases don't change the fact that OSX still only costs $129.99
The fact you think our country is in need of a revolution shows that the far right kooks don't hold a monopoly on stupidity.