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, which makes no sense from the user’s perspective, 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 slightly 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 is designed to presume that part of its right is on its left. Given all the testing apple does, there’s no way such malicious design is accidental.
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, half cocked in probability, and maliciously broken 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.
LATER: well, I’ve replaced it with an arc mouse. The latter doesn’t support all the gestures of the apple mouse, but, delightfully, when I click the mouse button first time, the computer responds. The arc mouse in imperfect; it’s actually worse than the Apple mouse at understanding right is not left (suggesting a duopoly of bad design), and it doesn’t support multi–finger gestures. But, who cares, clicking actually sodding works, and the power on–off design is really rather lovely.
Having said that, this mouse is truly appalling at mixing up its left and right. More often than not, when I right click, it carries out the left click action. I realise Microsoft and Apple have a long history of competing with each other, but do they really have to compete on who can get left and right fucked up the most? All the same, beyond that, this mouse is much better: at least when I click, a click happens on screen too.
ADDED: well, it turns out my Apple mouse were failing: the buttons were slowly borking. This is the first time an Apple mouse, or indeed any modern mouse, has dropped out for me. I had such problems with early Amiga mice, they would often fail, but that was 40 years ago, and I’d forgotten the experience. Anyway, I had to move my new Arc mouse to a new test laptop, so I temporarily borrowed my old 2010 Mac’s Magic Mouse, the type that takes batteries, and connected that up to my contemporary Mac. It all worked.