Apple sucks iBalls!

Tiger gives me few more reasons to stay a dog person.

Tuesday, May 10, 2005 by mormegil | Discussion: OS Wars

Today was a great day of disappointments for me on the computer front. After much pondering, for reasons I will explain, I decided to take a trip to the Apple store and Upgrade my Mac to OS-10.4 "Tiger".

I have had a Mac for 3 years now. I spent $3000 on it, and have used it probably a grand total of maybe 80 hours. This is my own fault. There is nothing really wrong with it. It is just that I find myself using my PC. I'm a windows fan, even though that's not something most people will admit. As a skinner and a customizer there is much more possible in windows. This, along with a long list of reason why I don't use my Mac much, have caused it to be a bit neglected. Today I wanted to remedy that. So with much to-do I drove to the mall - a place I try to avoid at all costs - went into the Apple store and to my surprise managed to get a copy of "Tiger" without any of the sales people talking down to me. (This is something that I have become used to at the Apple store). $129 later I left the mall and aside from a great disappointment when I find out that Wetzel Pretzel is out of Grateful Garlic pretzels (I cried only a little), I start home with joy in my heart, and a fancy pull string bag full of OS-10.4 .

On a side note; I could not help but notice that the nice Apple black box with the big brushed silver X that Tiger ships in is almost an exact duplicate of the 1990's teaser poster for "Malcom X". Coincidence..... well, probably.

Now I get home, and the annoyances begin.

First a bit of background. I bought my Dual G4 Power Mac Right when OS 10.2 had just been released. 10.2 was a big improvement over 10.1 so I was pretty happy with it. It did what I wanted and I do not use the Mac much so I never updated to 10.3 "Panther". I still had iMovie, and iPhoto, and iDVD installed. They had been updated several times and worked fine (when I found the time to play with them). A year or so ago they quit giving away iDVD and I hardly noticed. I still had the version that came with 10.2 and I had never actually used it, so I did not care much. I remember Steve Jobs saying in his Keynote at the time, "You can still get iMovie, and iPhoto, and iTunes, for free, and if you buy "iLife" you get iDVD as well, plus a bunch of crap." OK so that's not quite a quote, but that was the gist of it. Shortly after that I became quite busy with my new job and much more interested in the PC side of things again. In short, I quit paying attention to what was going on with Apple. Sure I caught the highlights, "Garage Band" comes out and "Dashboard vs. Konfabulator", but over all my Mac attention span was about as short as the amount of time that my Mac was on. This, I discovered today, was a bit of a mistake for me.
 

First problem:

I get home and open the box. Humm...nice box, nice disk, look an intro manual, pretty... Apple sure knows how to polish the products. Oh and nice a trial version of "iWork". Well I won't install that because I have office on my PC and I will never use it. I take a break to backup a few things and all is well. I have never done a nice clean install and I still have OS.9 something installed so the Mac can run in classic mode - the wife needed to be able to run that free version of ProTools. I was never a fan of OS 9 and she doesn't do much sound editing anymore, so I want to dump that. That's right, this calls for a Clean Install. So I slip in the disk. humm how to do a clean install? Oh look you can launch Disk utilities form the installer, sweet! I'll just wipe the main drive... That was simple, Apple sure is cool... ok now I just click install. Seems to be working fine. Boy Apple sure is cool, Microsoft could sure learn how to do an installer from them... With that I take a 20 minute break while it installs.

I come back, run thought the pretty 3D Cube setup wizard and bam, OS 10.4 is up and running. That was pretty simple. Well, lets get everything set back up. First I'll reinstall the few apps I have. "Candybar". Oops.. dose not work in OS 10.2. Well free patch form Panic solves that. Now Pixidex. That one seems to work. Nice. That's all I need I guess. Hey wait a sec, were is iPhoto... oh, hey iMovie is gone as well. Hummm, perhaps I need to download them from Apple... I quickly run system update. "No new updates at this time" That's odd... Then it hits me: could it be that they don't ship with the OS anymore?.... Nah... well... Then I look in the back of the Intro Manual and sure enough "iLife Applications do not come with the OS, but can... bla bla bla....." Don't come with the OS. F##K. This make me realize that I have just deleted 2 of the only useful programs on this $3000 dollar paper weight. Now now, perhaps I can download the older free versions... I'll just look around the Apple web site a bit... Humm perhaps I will look a bit better.... Humm nope........................................well. If I remember right iLife is only like 50 bucks, maybe I'll just upgrade.... What... $79 dollar... F##K... With that I leave momentarily to rant to my poor wife of the injustice I am being put through. About a hour later I come back more collected.

Now, it seams that I have lost some software. I am a bit pissed, but I don't use the iApps often except iTunes, and that one primarily on my PC. So I decide to suck it up an live with it. I suppose if I cared enough I could do a fresh install of 10.2, then upgrade it to 10.4. But I don't quite feel up to that.

Second Problem.

I have just moved, and one of the things I wanted to do in my new house is set up a nice central file server for myself and my wife to use. Now the Mac seems the perfect computer for this; it's BSD backbone is very stable and you can leave it on for months with very few problems. Perfect, I can finally use my Mac. Or so I think. As it turns out, there is no simple why to share a drive on a windows network. Now luckily I have some UNIX friends and they teach me how to get into the smb.conf file and add a "sharepoint" and I get it working. There is an entirely different annoying Apple story here, but I am already running long so I will keep it to myself. Lets just say that I was hoping 10.4 would make SMB sharing easier. In fact, one of the reasons I upgraded was for the "Improved" windows file sharing. Well as it turns out they did not change a thing when it comes to sharing outside of your home folder. Well, that's disappointing. So thanks to a great little app from HornWare. http://www.hornware.com/sharepoints/ I can get OS 10.4 sharing as well as it did with 10.2, I send the programmer 10 buck for saving me the trouble of having to remember how to edit the SMB files and I move on.

At this point the file sharing is precisely as useful to me as it was in OS 10.2 and now that I think about it, precisely  the same as it would be if I just installed Free BSD. But then I would not have the pretty polished Mac graphics would I?
 

Dashboard, or as I like to call it, "The Great Anti-Climax"

Moving on. Now lets check out these cool new apps. First, since I am a skinner and I was one of the first people to start messing with DesktopX, I have to check out DA, DA, DAAAA, Dashboard. Now Dashboard was getting a lot of airtime, because on the surface it seams a blatant rip-off of Konfabulator, which is more or less a Mac version of DesktopX. (Another debate all together; we won't get into it here). Well the good news is that Konfabulator should not have much to worry about. Dashboard pretty much sucks. Now this is my opinion only but I can tell you what: I'm not impressed. Sure the graphics are nice, sure they have some nice widgets. BUT, and this is a big but, YOU CAN NOT LEAVE A WIDGET RUNNING ON THE DESKTOP. They only appear on the "Dashboard". The dashboard is essentially a full screen window that darkens the rest of the screen, and with nifty effects pulls you widgets out to be visible. So essentially you are task switching to reach them. At this point you can just switch to the real app. I realize that this means that if you want to see any one Dashboard widget, you have to show them all. You can't, for example, leave a to-do list up on you desktop and work in an app; its all or nothing. This should be Apples slogan. OK OK, but the widgets are so pretty.... So are Konfabulators. Well, that is also disappointing, but perhaps I am overlooking something. I go to the Dashboard configuration. Humm what can I change... I can change the keys it uses, I can set up hot corners to call up the Dashboard. That's it. OK I'm still annoyed by this..... Lets move on.

Now still sticking with Dashboard I click on the Icon in the dock and it slides up this nifty tray of widgets. All of the provided widgets are very polished and work well. I try a few and am impressed by their cool spinney 3D effects that make it so the configuration for the widgets are on the back of each widget. You have to see this to under stand but its pretty sweet and makes me long for Longhorn to get its compositor working 100%. Hear that Ian? That sadly is about all that impressed me with Dashboard. When you go to the "More Widgets" webpage you find some nice widgets and some crap in about the same mix you find at WinCustomize or the Konfabulator gallery, but nothing to rock my world. Needless to say I don't need a "Next Episode of Stargate" countdown widget. That's what my PVR is for. One last thing of note: not all widgets are free. This is not surprising, but something to remember next time you see a pay suite or theme.

Well...one last bitch about Dashboard: I was assuming that since Apple makes dashboard and they have full control of the OS that it would be very well integrated. So I check out the weather widget. Its pretty sweet. Nice graphics. New shiny weather Icons, nice. Let me change the zip from the default of Atlanta to mine. Look there the 6 day forecast, that's nice. I continue playing with Dashboard and when you call up the bottom tray these little X's appear in the corner of all the widgets. One of the early problems we had with DesktopX is that people did not know how to close objects, so I am glad to see that they have included that. So I close the weather widget. This turns out to be a bit of a mistake. It seams when you close a widget it is as if it was never run. That's right, when I run the widget again I have to change the zip, position it, as well as set it to show the 6 day forecast, all over again. Now I don't know if this is the case with all the widgets, but it seems that Dashboard only remembers settings for widgets that are running. You can't open and close them at you leisure and expect to keep the settings you have established. You have to leave them running ALL THE TIME. Well like I said, you cant have them visible while you work in any other app, so I guess it is not really a drain on memory, but let me just say if I made a widget for DesktopX that behaved like that I would get flamed with complaints, and I would deserve it.

On the bright side of Tiger I was impressed by the new "Smart Folder" there - pretty cool. "Spotlight" is a damn fine desktop search and Automator is very cool. I would love to have something like that for Windows. Are these nice enough things to make me start using my Mac more? Not at all, but they are fine examples of Apple polish.
 


As far as I can tell leavening a Widget open, while you work
in a application, like I am doing here with DesktopX. Is imposable with Dashboard.

 

Well, it is late, and I have been ranting too long. I shall try and summarize my OS 10.4 "Tiger" experience.

The loss of my iApps was my fault for not reading the manual first but still, come on Apple, this is the kind of bait and switch that you would be screaming at Microsoft for doing, and everyone would be screaming for court action. Luckily Apples market share is so small that they can get away with things like that. (Well lucky for them at least). I assume that eventually I will crack an buy a copy of iLife that I will never use and Apple will be a little closer to being popular enough to start suing.

I am sure there have been tones of usability fixes and such, but the one thing that I was looking for, better Samba sharing, was still not there. Come on Apple, can't you have one of you programmers take a day to come up with a GUI for the smb.conf file? I have been able to right click on a folder or drive in windows and share it since windows 3.11. You just took Samba for UNIX, can't you afford to at least give it a pretty face?

As for Dashboard; very pretty at first glance. For a skinner or widget user it is pretty much useless. I will be keeping Konfabulator on the Mac and have already begun the search for a way to disable Dashboard. This is a great example of how an idea can be taken, yet not understood at all. I could be wrong. I'm sure some people out there are wild about Dashboard. I can just say I'm not one.

Lastly, Apple, what's up with the 10.X updates? I know that the "Big X" is sexy but this naming convention is about the biggest cheese on the planet. I am sure that you will come out with 9 point release of OS 10, but come on Apple, if Microsoft charged for point release you would wet your pants. Just give up on the X and move on. If you are going to charge $129 at least make it a .5 release. At this rate it is going to cost me 700 dollars by the time we get to 11. All I know is 10.4 is now running on my system and I spent $129 dollars to "Upgrade" to an operating system that works just about as well as the old but has less useful software. I keep hearing people say that "Tiger is the OS of the future". I sure hope they are wrong...

 

First Previous Page 2 of 5 Next Last
iDrink iKoolAid
Reply #21 Tuesday, May 10, 2005 11:02 AM
Some people positively hate the Mac, and there is no way to win them over. It's a free world, and there is more software on the PC and PCs are cheaper and more configurable which computer geeks will never forfeit. If one wants to know why people still use overpriced, underpowered Macs with substandard graphics and one-button mice, I refer to the book 'Emotional Design: Why We Love (Or Hate) Everyday Things', by Donald Norman. Tiger does feel much slower (and sluggish compared to Windows XP) on my 1.5GHz PowerBook G4 with 1.25GB RAM than Panther but I find the Smart Folders one can use in the Finder and Mail highly useful. Automator actions, which can be used as plug-ins system wide is also very cool. The 'RSS Visualizer' screen saver is just gorgeous and has got to put a smile on one's face, hopefully even the most Mac-apathetic people.
Frogboy
Reply #22 Tuesday, May 10, 2005 11:05 AM
Jeff, you wouldn't know professionalism if it bit you in the ass.  I removed your comments in an apparently vain effort to keep you from embarassing yourself.  Your comment was not legitimate and to the point. It certainly was not professional. It was just nasty and uncalled for.  For a person who throws tantrums at the first sign of even the most mild criticism of anything you do, your hypocricy is stunning.
TheSkinsFactory
Reply #23 Tuesday, May 10, 2005 11:53 AM
Whatever Brad. It's called a "forum" for a reason.

But you know all about censorship. And i'm sure we'll see more of it in the weeks and months to come after you deal goes through with that other site won't we?
TheSkinsFactory
Reply #24 Tuesday, May 10, 2005 11:56 AM
...
Zoomba
Reply #25 Tuesday, May 10, 2005 12:04 PM
Who the hell cares if there are typos or formatting errors? You cry professionalism and then act like a brat on the very article you're criticising for being unprofessional. Hypocrite comes to mind here.

This isn't a corporate communication, it's not an advertisement for a product or anything. It's Paul posting his thoughts on OS X. Would you have these same complaints if someone else had said the same thing? Or if it had been posted on a different site? I don't see how it's fair to hold non-corporate postings from Stardock people to a different standard. They're allowed to blog here just like the rest of us.

Another thing, it's all available for FREE. It's not like you're paying for the article content. You're paying for software and better access to OTHER site features. The forums and JoeUser articles are a secondary bit that are provided 100% for free. There's no real right to "expect" anything in such a case.
Judge
Reply #26 Tuesday, May 10, 2005 12:06 PM
So. As the resident 'hypocrite' I can only say that I'm glad that Dashboard is a piece of s**t. Konfabulator can breathe a sigh of relief. On the other hand I'm glad that Dashboard exists. It makes everyone else strive to improve their own similar offerings. Objectbar + DesktopX sounds like cool combo for windows and having spent the better part of two years coding my own humble offering (SysStats) I can only say that I have a better appreciation of the effort that goes into all of this stuff (hm.. I must stop saying 'I can only say' since clearly I can say more ).

Anyhow here's the rub: My wife is looking for a laptop to read her emails and do all of her onlinne stuff to replace the aging 21b (weight) vaio running XP in 128MB RAM. Will I get a Mac? I'd like to but the chances of her being able to access all of the websites she needs to (online banks, bill payment, credit cards, flight trackers etc. etc.) and have them actually work is about zero. Somme of them don't even work in FireFox! So I'll probably be sticking with windoze and there goes my only real justification for getting a Mac.

I can only hope that Longhorn lives up to my hopes - but then what are the chances of being able to use its fancy compositor on a laptop weighing 21bs anytime before hell freezes over.

Technology eh? Its never quite good enough.
Zoomba
Reply #27 Tuesday, May 10, 2005 12:10 PM
IE is available for OS X... I've never had any trouble accessing any online banking sites, or most sites in general running Firefox on MacOS.
TheSkinsFactory
Reply #28 Tuesday, May 10, 2005 12:14 PM
Zoomba: You sound like a neocon. People aren't allowed to express their opinions right or wrong now? Reminiscent of the democrats who were dubbed "traitors" or "unpatriotic" when they spoke out against the war. Sorry but yeah free or not i expect a bit more from admins. Doesn't matter what site i'm reading. Again Paul explained what happened and this isn't about him anymore but the fact that Brad will do his best to censor now and in the coming days anyone or any company that either goes against what he believes in or is a threat to his company. Should be interesting.
Zoomba
Reply #29 Tuesday, May 10, 2005 12:22 PM
WAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! *pant* *cough* WAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA hoo... hehehe... heh... woo... *dries tears from his eyes* Me being called a neocon... *giggle*

You're one of those kooks who claims first ammendment rights and protections in forums and chat rooms aren't you?

I'm not saying you can't express your opinion, it was just that you were a complete brat about typos and misspellings in the first place. That's what sparked this whole mess. Your expectations are unfounded in this case. By your reasoning I should be able to expect you to be fluent in Swahili... sure you don't actually owe me anything, but I can have certain expectations right?

Also, he has every right to censor his own site. On my JoeUser blog I have certain users blocked out-right and am more than happy to delete trolling posts. You were trolling, and you're still trolling.
John Hamp
Reply #30 Tuesday, May 10, 2005 12:34 PM
HAHA. The Skins Factory, the skinning world's resident spoiled infant talks about professionalism. Oh poor guy, the adults made your tantrum disappear. At least you're making the most of the opportunity to show the world how big of an ass you are.

AND.....as for the article..I'm still thinking of getting the Mac Mini. I haven't had a Mac before so I won't miss the iLife stuff. It sounds like it's the Mac fans who are getting the royal screw job from Apple. New users seem to get the royal treatment.
Corky_O
Reply #31 Tuesday, May 10, 2005 1:35 PM
As we slide on back to the original path of this thread...

Paul, or anyone who knows, can you outline what a user ends up with after purchasing and doing a clean install of Mac OS 10.4 "Tiger"?

Do we get?:

- A file saving structure
- A streamline search feature
- A "something" for MultiMedia interactivity
- A dock for links
- A "something" for browsing
- A "something" for text editing
- A "something" for graphics creation
- Dashboard for widgets while bored? (not sure I understand providing a platform for using information objects that can not be available at all times).

Anyway, can someone create an outline? You know like the Windows IE, WMP, Paint, Notepad, etc.

Just trying to get a glimpse at what can be expected out of the box and onto the machine.

Thanks.
Zoomba
Reply #32 Tuesday, May 10, 2005 1:46 PM
What you get out of the box... this isn't a comprehensive list, just what I can pull off the top of my head:
-iCal - A pretty darn good calendar program
-Mail.app - E-Mail client
-Safari - Web browser
-Text Editor - Generic notepad like thing
-Address Book
-iTunes & Quicktime - Play multimedia files
-Dashboard widgets and such
-Excellent integrated search functionality

Nothing like Paint that I remember. There are actually a ton of little applications socked away with the OS that I never use. In general, OS X comes with more "stuff" than Windows does, but the usefulness of much of it is pretty questionable.
Frogboy
Reply #33 Tuesday, May 10, 2005 1:57 PM
As someone else mentioned, the OS itself is solid.  The issue is that Apple seems to be jerking around its own users with this $129 upgrades that giveth some and taketh away other things.
k396
Reply #34 Tuesday, May 10, 2005 2:08 PM
Excellent review. Thanks for the info. I'm not even an Apple user but I was thinking of it for my wife... needless to say, I'm not anymore. Sure, Windows is a massive, security-risk product that requires too much hardward to run effectively, but at least I'm comfortable with it AND I get to keep everything that Windows used to do.

Go figure.

-Kelvin
Corky_O
Reply #35 Tuesday, May 10, 2005 3:50 PM
Thanks, Zoomba.
Tarkus
Reply #36 Tuesday, May 10, 2005 4:52 PM
Apple is falling victim to its own sort of success here. It can't just release pedestrian upgrades anymore, we expect each and every product released by them to blow our socks off.


Especially when they charge $129 for it.


Posted via WinCustomize Browser/Stardock Central
paxx
Reply #37 Tuesday, May 10, 2005 5:49 PM
I don't get Apple'S logic in removing iLife from the OS. The appeal of OS X for new users has always been that it has everything you need right out of the box. I remember my uncle (a totally newbie computer user) telling me how much MAc was better for him because everything was right there and easy to use. He could organize his digital picture and print them, create a slide show on DVD, save the songs on his CD's to his computer...

Now it seems that his whole argument would be void.
Jafo
Reply #38 Tuesday, May 10, 2005 6:02 PM

The appeal of OS X for new users has always been that it has everything you need right out of the box.

I agree....once they mess with that it's a slippery slope to mediocrity...

Island Dog
Reply #39 Tuesday, May 10, 2005 8:30 PM
Reminiscent of the democrats who were dubbed "traitors" or "unpatriotic" when they spoke out against the war


And this has nothing to do with a post about Appple. Just gotta put some defense for democrats in a thread I guess.
EventHorizon
Reply #40 Tuesday, May 10, 2005 8:40 PM
Just gotta put some defense for democrats in a thread I guess.


Aye...They need it.

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