They’re almost as annoying as windows. They just fail attractively and with a white-themed glossy je ne sais quoi about it.
Rosetta doesn’t work. It’s worse than the “OS 9 under OS X” stuff, because it’s all black boxed away so you can’t figure out why Quark 6.5 or photoshop 7 crashes when you access an AFP share over a slow network, or whatever. Instead you get numbing error messages like “There has been an error” or “The application has unexpectedly quit.”
What is it with Apple and completely useless error messages? If OSX powered that plane that crashed in Kentucky, the black box recorder they’re fishing out would have a log that said “The Plane has Unexpectedly Landed. Would you like to send an error report to Apple?”
But thank the LORD for Bootcamp. I have turned my fashionable, brushed-nickel toy computer into a real one.
P.S. I kid, I kid! I’m actually liking it lots. I just want it to work, and “just get it working” is the one thing I’ve never had problems before with macs, until I got one myself!
What is it with Apple and completely useless error messages?
My favourite is the login error. The login box fucking shakes…and that’s it. Did you type your username or password incorrectly? Is your account disabled or locked out? Is the domain controller reachable? Fuck if I know! And damned if Apple will tell you. That shaking screen sure is cute though, right?
Yeah, cos it’s so tough to tell if your username is spelled wrong, and if it isn’t, retype your password. How many times have you had the login box shake and not been able to tell what was wrong, oh bodhisattva?
I like that it doesn’t make you click a pop-up box out of the way to fix a simple typo.
You’re both onto something with the login box examples. Windows (and Unix/linux, I guess) have clunky mechanical interfaces that penalise and inconvenience the user when minor problems present themselves. On the other hand, major problems are easier to figure out, because all the crap that’s dumped on you suddenly becomes useful.
With macs, when it runs smoothly, it’s a work of genius: cues and hints and intuitive interfacing! Setting up a (modern) printer in OSX is a single click process which you can do from the print dialog! But when a serious problem presents itself, the OS becomes like the glazed-eyed, stone-faced fanaticism of a scientology cultist refusing to tell you where your little sister is, of even whether she joined the church or not.
“Yes, there seems to be a problem, but I couldn’t possibly tell you what it is. How do we really know if there’s a problem at all? Maybe the problem doesn’t want to speak to you, sir. Have you considered that? Have you?”
Yes, correcting a typo with your username and password is a relatively simple affair, but what about the other examples I listed? Perhaps you’ve never used a Mac on a corporate domain; I have to support 300+ of them. When I show up to service a problem with a login issue, all I get is a shaking window to indicate the error. What might the problem be? Is the domain controller down or otherwise unreachable from this computer? Is the network down in this room? Is Active Directory not configured properly on this Mac? Does the computer account not exist on the Domain Controller? Is there a duplicate computer account on the network? Is the user account locked out or disabled?
Windows would tell me exactly which of those is the culprit in 2 seconds. On a Mac, I have to use trial and error until I stumble on the issue.
Aw, see that? Just a quick, undocumented terminal command and you can have OSX display the same common-sense information that’s enabled by default in Windows and, yes, even fucking Linux. Brilliant.
Somehow I thought this thread was named “frank macs” which led me to believe there might be some sort of new hot dog mcdonalds meal. Sadly, I was wrong.
No need to do any terminal stuff, that’s only if you want it to always show a specific thing on start – just click on the computer name if there are problems.
There’s a little greasy spoon restaurant near my house that sells a “hamdogger,” which is essentially a cheeseburger with a hotdog crammed in there. It’s amazing. You can almost hear your arteries slamming shut.
