Someone else’s impressions of a Mac

Here’s an odd essay in the Huffington Post (one might call that a tautology), a rant by one Joshua Kors, who calls himself an Investigative Reporter, about why he’s returning the iMac he just bought.

I say that it’s odd because it seems that anyone who’s paid any attention to recent technology would know a few things that Mr Kors seems not to: that Mac computers are different from Windows machines, that there are usually ways to accomplish what you want, if you’re willing to look into it a bit (investigate, one might say), and suchwhat.

When I got my first (and, so far, only) Mac, three and a half years ago, I knew there’d be differences between it and Windows, and I knew there’d be things it’d take me a while to learn. I wrote about some of those differences here and here. My overall impression was (and is) that Macs aren’t better than Windows machines, nor are they worse; they’re just different. And the differences in either take some getting used to, if you’re accustomed to the other. From my first impression, after only one day:

There’s a lot that seems like it’s wrong until you find out that it’s really there, and you just need to learn how to do it. I’ve found quite a few of those so far (the Dock is much nicer than it first seems, for instance). We’ll see how I like it as I learn more.

And that’s the thing: Mr Kors didn’t seem to be interested in learning the differences, or in figuring out what works better for him and what doesn’t. He says he was really excited to buy an iMac, but then, after two weeks, he returned it, annoyed:

Two weeks later I’m back at Apple headquarters — my teeth worn down, my face prematurely aged from endless hours of sleeplessness and technological frustration — certain that the iMac was the worst purchase I’d ever made.

His account, though, starts off with hyperbole and goes from there:

My iMac and I got off on the wrong foot. Turns out there’s a video camera embedded in the screen, and before I could boot her up for the very first time, she wanted to take my picture. For identity purposes, she said. I stumbled to the bathroom, brushed my hair (and my teeth), exchanged my raggedy Raiders t-shirt for a professionally ironed button-up and returned to my desk, smirking at the turn of events. My old PC didn’t care if I called the Pentagon in my bathrobe. My iMac apparently had registered with Match.com.

Come on, Mr Kors. Just put your cat in front of the camera, and move on. I do agree that the overly familiar tone of things is annoying, at least to this techie, but it’s also not rocket science to understand that it’s just fluff. Windows, too, wants a personal image for the login screen. Only, Windows starts off with some canned images — a chess piece, a flower, a skateboard, and so on. Whatever.

He goes on to complain about the mouse and the keyboard, before getting used to them. He complains that not all the software he wants is bundled with his machine (was it really so on Windows?), and that the software he’s used to doesn’t work (had no one clued him in about needing new software?), and he implies that he knows of no alternatives.

He says he knew that he wouldn’t be able to transfer files from one computer to another over the network, something that’s news to this Mac-and-Windows user, who does that all the time — Mac to Mac, Mac to Windows, Windows to Mac... it all works fine. In copying files using an intermediate external drive (a canoe, in his metaphor), he’s frustrated at the manual bookkeeping he has to do because he can’t figure out that copy; move to trash is the equivalent to move (yes, I find the two-step requirement mildly annoying as well, but it’s hardly critical).

Migrating settings from iTunes, Thunderbird, and so on is much easier than he makes out, with or without an ocean of Mac dork chat boards. Changing display fonts is also easy, and you don’t have to change the font size in your sent mail in order to do it.

All in all, it appears that Mr Kors didn’t want to try something new, but just wanted to write a rant. And so he did. Only, he comes across as an idiot in the process.

Well, he writes for the Huffington Post, so maybe that’s enough to make him come across as an idiot all by itself.

Apple service follow-up

I got my repaired MacBook back yesterday, and I’m back in business again — one week without the machine, instead of the possible two weeks. That matches the long end of the second-tier IBM service, and isn’t too bad. In the end, the service went well, and the cost was reasonable.

They also did not wipe my hard drive, and that’s as I expected. But they did change some (but not all) of the settings back to factory defaults. I don’t like the illuminated keyboard, for instance, and I have it turned off; it was back on. My alternative keyboard selections had been turned off (I use the US extended keyboard, and also have some other keyboards enabled so that I can occasionally type a word or two in a language such as русский, ελληνική, or עברית. I have the boot-process default set to be verbose, and that had been turned off. On the other hand, the options for things like desktop, exposé, and spaces were as I’d set them.

And, of course, I have no idea whether they might have made a copy of the data on my hard drive, which is the most troublesome aspect, and the reason one should want to avoid sending one’s drive out. I understand that they want my hard drive so that they can make sure the repaired machine works with my drive, and they can update my software if the repair requires a software change (perhaps an updated driver for a newer version of the system board).

So, my two main complaints are still there: I was not offered an overnight replacement option, even for an extra fee, and I wasn’t given any option where I could keep my own hands on my hard drive. Next time, I’ll try Jim’s suggestion of going to an authorized service shop other than the Apple store. And this time, I look forward to being surveyed about it.

Apple service

Here’s a reason not to buy a Mac: Apple’s service, at least how I’ve just experienced it.

On Friday afternoon, I closed my MacBook Pro and went out to run errands. When I got home and opened the computer’s cover, I found that it had not gone to sleep, and that, while it was still running, the screen was dark. That is, as we say, not good. I connected an external display, and nothing appeared there either.

Since the computer was still running, I connected the backup drive and gave Time Machine the time to take another backup. Then I forced a power down. When I powered it back up, I got the “happy chord”, and the computer appeared to start (judging from the sound of the disk drive), but still no video, either on the laptop’s screen or on the external display. Sigh.

On Saturday I made a Monday appointment with the Genius desk at the local Apple store.

My experience at the Apple store was a good one; it was very busy, of course, given the time of year, and I got there early and waited. They thought they might get me in early, and that didn’t happen, but someone was available to see me just a few minutes after my appointment time. Nice. That isn’t the problem — and I’ll stress that the folks at the store were all great.

The technician ran a test or two, and decided, as I expected, that the computer needed to be sent back for a logic-board replacement. It would be $300 — not bad, I thought — but it would take seven to ten business days. I’ll have to be without a computer for two weeks. No loaners nor rentals available. And, they might wipe the hard drive, even though that has nothing to do with the problem. (I have a backup, as I said, but it’ll still be inconvenient to have to use it, and there’s always the danger of problems with the backup. Of course, most likely they’re just covering themselves, and that the disk will not actually be messed with. But see below.)

I appear to have no better option, so I went with it. They’ll ship it back to the store or directly back to me, but they’ll use FedEx for the latter, so, given the problems I’ve had with FedEx delivery, I had them send it back to the store.

With IBM (now Lenovo) systems, I had much better service, with two options:

1. They would express a refurbished replacement machine to me, without memory or hard drive. I would move the memory and hard drive from my broken machine into the replacement, put the old machine into the same box, and return it, using the pre-paid label they included. Perfect, and I’d get the box the day after I called, if I called in the morning. Almost no down time.
2. For less expense, I could remove the hard drive from my laptop and express it to them. They’d repair or replace it, at their option (in the latter case, with a refurbished machine), and express it back, with a turnaround of three to five business days — twice as fast as Apple is offering.

And in both cases, the hard drive never leaves my hands, so it can’t be damaged, erased... or copied.

When you depend on a computer, as I do, the difference is significant, and will certainly matter when I’m looking for my next laptop.

Another Macbook comment: wireless woes

Oh, here’s a great one. All along, there’s been an issue with my Macbook that’s only shown up when I’ve been plugged into the office wired LAN... it doesn’t happen when I’m at home, or anywhere else that I’ve used it. The system periodically bogs down horridly, the most noticeable effect of which is that the mouse freezes for a second or two, and again, and again, for ten seconds or so, each time jumping suddenly to where it would have gone had it not frozen. That makes it pretty much unusable for the ten seconds. And then it’s fine for several minutes, until it happens again.

A co-worker thought the problem might have to do with some probing or polling that’s going on on the office LAN. I was going to bring in a router to test that theory, since the router would firewall my machine.

But I’ve just recently figured it out. It’s not got to do with the office LAN, but with the fact that I’m using the wired connection... and it keeps periodically trying, and failing, to connect the wireless anyway (my office, at a corner of the building, is poorly served by the wireless network).

Why doesn’t it see that it has a wired connection and doesn’t need the wireless? I’m told how great the Mac is with these sorts of things, but, hey, the Windows software that handles this stuff gets it right. And the ThinkVantage Access Connections software (formerly IBM Access Connections) even does the extra nicety of turning the wireless radio off and on automatically as needed, saving battery power in the bargain.

Now that I know what’s causing this, I can work around it easily enough in one of two ways:

1. Manually turn the AirPort off when I don’t need it, and on when I do.
2. Manually switch the “location” to one that doesn’t use the AirPort, or to one that does.

Neither is very cumbersome, but either way is a manual process that shouldn’t be necessary if Apple did it right.

While I’m complaining about how MacOS handles wireless networks, I should point out something else that’s lacking: the “location” feature lets me select whether or not the AirPort should be used at each location (and would let me select a different dial-up number for each, if I still used dial-up), but doesn’t let me tailor the preferred network list by location. That’s really annoying. When I travel to a conference, say, I’d like to be able to make the conference’s network the preferred network for the duration of the trip, disabling my home network, which it won’t find there anyway. When I get back, I’d like to switch back. Again, Access Connections makes this easy on Windows, but I don’t see any way to do it on the Mac.

Maybe both of these issues are fixed in Leopard, and I should upgrade tout de suite. If that’s the case and someone knows about it, please post a comment and tell me.

One more Macbook thing

Oh, in this post, I forgot a third item about the Macbook hardware that drive me bats:

Mac computers started out with one-button mice. I get that: simplicity. Thing is, two-button mice have been supported for some time now, and the OS X user interface makes important use of the second button.

So why on Earth did they design a laptop, in these days of OS X and two-button support, with only one mouse button?

You get the “right click” with a two-finger tap on the track-pad, but it's still not as easy as having two buttons. There's just no excuse for the one-button design.

Settled into the Macbook

About two months ago (has it really been that long?), I posted an item about my new Macbook. I've been using it exclusively since then — I still have to sync my BlackBerry with Lotus Notes on the ThinkPad, because I can't get the Lotus Notes sync to work on the Mac, even under Parallels, but other than plugging the BlackBerry in, I haven't been using the ThinkPad — and I'm mostly used to the differences.

Mostly.

There are still a few things about MacOS and the way applications work that bother me, and a couple of annoyances with the Macbook itself. And by the way: one thing people always tell me about the Mac, as opposed to Windows, is that it's rock solid, and doesn't crash. Camel chunks. It's frozen on me a number of times in the two months, in a state where the mouse moved but nothing else happened. I had to power it off and back on, just like with the Windows blue screen of death. And, in fact, Windows XP is quite solid, and I can't remember the last BSoD I got there.

So, on the Macbook:

1. You can't close the lid without putting the machine to sleep. The ThinkPad has a configuration option in which you tell the computer what to do when the lid is closed, and one of the options is “nothing”. I had always used that option, which let me close the lid and walk into another room with the laptop, or close the lid and leave it next to me on the sofa arm or leaning against the chair on the floor. When I wanted it again, I'd open it and immediately use it. The Macbook comes awake pretty much instantly, and if that were all I wouldn't mind. But it has to reconnect to the network (a few seconds, usually, not bad), reconnect to the VPN if I'm using that (several seconds, maybe as long as 30), and re-establish any Internet connections (several more seconds, at least, maybe another 30, and some applications don't deal well with reconnecting and it has to be done manually). Taking the computer off the network is disruptive and unnecessary. And having it go to sleep also means that I can't start a program or download, and then shut the lid and get it out of my way while it runs. Ick.
2. The button that unlocks the lid to let me open the computer has a little light on it. When the Macbook is in sleep mode, the light pulses. Cute, but unnecessary, and surprisingly annoying sometimes. I've found that when I have it in a hotel room, especially, I have to make sure the light is covered or the pulsing will bother me. Just having the light on at its dimmest point would be fine — it would tell me it's in sleep mode, but wouldn't be bothersome. But if there's any way to do that, I haven't found it.
3. Update, 17 Aug: The single mouse button.

MacOS and application issues:

1. As I mentioned in the June entry, the single menu bar is an odd bit of design, and it's still annoying to me. I have to move the mouse (and my attention) too far away from the window I'm working in. And this makes dual-display mode nearly useless, except for giving presentations. If I have a window on the second display, I have to move the mouse all the way to the primary display to get to the menu. That's especially bad if the two displays are using different resolutions, because then I often bump into the edge of the display rather than moving to the other display. I do sometimes use the keyboard shortcut to get to the menu bar (ctrl-F2), and navigate the menu with the keyboard, but that doesn't work too well if I'm going through a long menu list, such as the Bookmarks menu in Firefox.
2. Related to that, I've found that I often can't use the keyboard to get through menu items quickly. This is an application issue in MacOS, but the OS ought to be doing it instead. In Windows, the window manager takes care of zooming to a menu item if I type its first character (and that can be overridden by the application). In MacOS, it appears that the application has to enable that function, and many don't, so I have to use “down, down, down, down...” to get to an item on the menu with the keyboard.
3. In MacOS, you can close or hide (minimize, in Windows) all of an application's windows, and that application will still be the active application and will control the menu and the keyboard. There are probably times when this is a good thing, but it most often confuses and annoys me. Suppose I'm in the Finder and I use the keyboard to navigate to a jpeg file, and press command-O to open it. The Preview application will open and show me the file. I then press command-W to close the Preview window, and it disappears, showing me the Finder window again. Except it's still the Preview application that's active, and when I try to move the cursor to the next file, it doesn't work. I have to press command-tab to switch back to the Finder first. This bites me often. Yes, I could use command-Q to quit Preview (instead of command-W to close the window), but I'm only going to open Preview again right away on another file, so that wastes a lot of time (it takes much longer for Preview to restart than to just wake up and show another file).
4. As I also mentioned in June, there seems less consistency in how applications use the modifier keys in conjunction with the arrow keys than there should be. I get different results in different applications when I use, say, command-down or fn-down or ctrl-down or command-right, etc. I might get to the end of a line or to the end of a file or to the next page of a file or to the next window in the application... I have to remember, for each application, what each combination of the four modifier keys (command, option, ctrl, fn) does with the four arrow keys. And it's actually worse than that, because you can combine the modifiers (in Firefox, fn-ctrl-down moves to the next tab, if you have multiple tabs in your window).
5. This one is causing the biggest slowdown in my use of the computer, and I'm trying a different mode of operation to compensate for it. In Windows, a minimized (hidden) window is treated the same as a visible one, and when you use alt-tab to go through the active windows (or when you look down on the task bar for them) you find them all. In MacOS, that's not the case. Visible windows appear only on the desktop. Hidden windows appear only in the Dock. I've found no way to get both sets together, which means that I have to know whether I've left the window I want visible (but buried under other windows) or I've hidden it. This is causing a lot of delay in finding other application windows quickly. Just today I've decided to try an alternative way to work: I will never hide a window, but just leave them all visible (as I type this, I have twelve open windows; I figure I might have as many as twenty at times). That way, I should always be able to use exposé mode or command-tab and command-` to find what I'm looking for. I prefer a “clean desktop”, but I suppose it doesn't really matter. Well see if this helps.

If any Mac users (well, or anyone else, for that matter) know ways to better cope with the things I've listed above, please comment here or sent me email. I'd love to know a better way....

And it was evening, and it was morning, the first day

OK, maybe the biblical reference is a bit much, though some might start things out with, “In the beginning, Jobs created the Apple and the Mac.” I've just been through my first day with a new Macbook, the first real experience I've had with a Mac.

Apple just announced new Macbook Pro models last week, just incremental upgrades to the old ones. I got one of those: the 2.4 GHz model with a 15-inch screen and 160 GB hard drive. Slightly faster/higher/stronger than the old model: slightly faster processor, a little more hard drive, more main memory, nicer (and “greener”) screen.

So far, I've got lots of the software installed that I'll need, and things are mostly working. I note that it's a little disconcerting that some things “just work” without telling me so — the fact that they just work is good, and I suppose that once one gets used to that idea, one doesn't want to be bothered with the notifications and the progress windows. It's just that when something's new, those progress windows and the “OK, it's working now” bubbles are nice. Instead, I wonder when it's going to connect itself to my network... and it had already connected, almost instantly.

The keyboard's going to take some getting used to. There are no “insert” and “delete” keys (the one marked “delete” works like the “backspace” on a Windows keyboard), the “home” and “end” are in different places and work a bit differently, and, most maddeningly for someone who's switching, the key marked “ctrl” doesn't do what the corresponding Windows key does — what does that is the key marked with the funny quatrefoil symbol (the “Apple” key).

OS X 10.4 (“Tiger”) seems very nice, and there are cool things about the OS and the user interface (I especially like the “exposé” mode, which lets you see all the open windows at once in order to easily select the one you want). Alas, it doesn't support the A2DP Bluetooth profile, so I can't use my stereo headset. That's reportedly coming with “Leopard” (OS X 10.5), due out in the fall (no, I'm not about to install a pre-release version when I barely know my way around!).

I'm not convinced about the single, context-driven menu at the top of the screen. It's fine when the top of your application window is near the top of the screen anyway, and so it saves having to have every window waste space on its own menu bar. But if you have a small window that's near the bottom of the screen (as my main email window is), or all the way over to the right (as my IM contacts window is), it's annoying to have the menu bar be so far removed from the application window. I'll have to see whether I get used to that over time.

There's a lot that seems like it's “wrong” until you find out that it's really there, and you just need to learn how to do it. I've found quite a few of those so far (the Dock is much nicer than it first seems, for instance). We'll see how I like it as I learn more.