The Mac has issues.
For example, every year there’s an update to macos, which usually consists of irrelevant inanities, many of which are undone the following year or so. This is mostly because the core of macos, the bit that actually does the work, was designed in the 1960s, stabilised in the 1970s, and decorated in the 1980s. Apple can’t really change it now, but have to pretend to do so to give themselves another mechanism to con people into buying new macs. Their approach works a treat: a combination of security fixes (which, to be fair, reflects to state of computing as a craft, rather than any particularly nasty intention on the part of Apple), and carefully introduced inefficiencies gives the average user little choice regarding updating their kit.
Of course, nifty users get round it by installing open source systems on their older macs. This is why the iPhone walled garden makes no sense from the user’s perspective, but makes perfect sense from Apple’s perspective: block open source and so keep forcing users to buy new iPhones rather than allowing them to replace the deeply hobbled, poorly designed, iOS, with something even slightlyy grown-up. Governments could break this abuse by requiring phones to be usable with alternative operating systems, but, at least in the case of the USA, the home of Apple, the political system is far too corrupt to allow that to happen (corporates buy representatives with humungous donations).
Having said all that, it remains true that the basic design and quality of the mac is good. Macos, and its predecessors, have had sixty years of refinement, and the mac itself has had forty years of the same, so it’s hardly surprising that most of the problems have been ironed out. Most, but not all: there are clear exceptions. For example, the mac is badly let down by its mouse.
Button issues include:
- When clicking, most of the time, the mouse gives the audible click feedback, but doesn’t bother to send the signal to the computer. I often have to click four or five times for one actual click to be seen by macos
- When left-clicking, or right-clicking, you sometimes get a right-click, or left-click. In other words, the mouse appears to think that part of its left is on its right.
The idea of interpreting finger gestures on the mouse is good, but its implementation is a mess. Gesture issues include:
- there is no concept of a resting area (imagine a manual car designed by an automatic car user, and you’ll understand the problem).
- It is quite normal for other activity, such as selecting something, to be entirely misinterpreted, resulting in random scrolling, resizing, zooming, and all other kinds of misinterpretations of user activity. For example, if I use a scroll bar to scroll down a window, it’s not uncommon for the window contents to be randomly zoomed, or scrolled sideways, despite the blatantly obvious detail that I’m working with a vertical scroll bar. E.g., the mouse inserts random actions, and those instructions leak to be wrongly applied to random different component elsewhere.
The mouse is oversensitive. For example:
- When repositioning a cursor, the mouse (drivers) often randomly select a line of text instead.
- I often have to resort to the keyboard when repositioning a window view, for example, which screws up cursor positioning, because, sometimes, and I haven’t worked out the underlying pattern, it won’t scroll a text window by individual line of text.
The core problem with the mouse is that the design seems unfinished at best, and half cocked at worst. It is a prototype that has been shipped rather than fixed.
I think the mouse is a classic example of what happens when a company gets too strong. The fact that Apple still ship this half-cocked bug-ridden product and feel no need to get rid of the many remaining errors shows, to me, that they have a monopoly.
SFAIK, there is no alternative mouse on the market for the mac. If there were, I would buy one in a shot, I find the mac mouse’s design errors fucking annoying. It has taken over from Microsoft word as the primary source of me swearing at a computer. Given that Microsoft Word mysteriously improved when the open source Open Office, now Libre Office, came along, forcing Microsoft to finally sort out all the glaring design errors in Word. I hope the same will happen to the mac mouse.