There’s a terrific thread at Tech Issues at the MFI forums. With all the assurances in the world to Apple that they respect, use, love, and support OS X, they nevertheless want to raise certain issues that they would be grateful if Apple would take a look at. Once they get rolling, you can see some of the most basic aspects of OS X being questioned by the same X-Men who will spit in our faces if WE dare to point out the slightest imperfection.

It’s both interesting and a hoot. Click here for Letter to Apple: Users’ Major OS X Issues.

Markle

There seem to be some good criticisms and ideas there. But don't they know that Tech Issues isn't for drumming up all that old stuff? OS X is a done deal. Live with it.

Oh my god, how did I miss this topic?

Of course I can't go check that thread... but holy crap, what a bunch of pussies.

I can smell the respectful tone from here. Sorry, I'm just ANGRY. I'll be respectful when this whole mess isn't a giant con. When stuff starts working, and when the operating system software isn't total bogus crap.

You heard it here first: you don't catch more flies with honey than vinegar. You catch more flies with flypaper and fly swatters and friggin' pesticides. Plagues of frogs.

We don't need to hold Apple's hand and approach them with our hats in ours. They are a multi billion dollar corporation who is currently in advantage-taking mode. Where the heart and soul of the company has been absconded with, by the friggin' marketeers, and playing nicey-nice isn't going to get their soul back.

User revolt is.

And if EVER there was a time for user revolt. It's now. Because the Mac OS is at an all time low. A level of suckitude that has Jef Raskin spinning in his grave. And he ain't even dead.

I'm sick to death of bait and switch, bread and circuses... form over function, and supersize bloat. Nothing works, everything is half-assed, and bass ackwards.

OS X is still flaky, easy to break, SLOW, and visually superabundant. Ill conceived and inadequate for pro use.

"Dear Apple, please consider..."

Fuuuuccck.

No, nah-ah. Howl at the moon. Shake your fists at the sky. These guys HAVE to get their asses in gear before they turn the Mac into a total frikkin' joke. It's more than half way there already. Time for continued tough love and criticism.

Pull no punches, take no prisoners. They're big boys, they can take it.

I don't get it. I was given a laptop upgrade by Apple for having a lemon Ti-Book. I intended on buying a PC in the future. My needs are rather simple - no pro here. But I have to admit, I'm running Panther's latest update and so far, I've had far less crashes and trouble than w/my beloved 9.1 or even 8.6.

I'm a fairly critical person, although not computer savvy.

I hate Safari - how it fails to load certain pages, and I'm not fully impressed with other browsers - although Omniweb 5 seems ok but lacks a global reset.

I have 768 ram, and otherwise like Panther. What's wrong with me? I suspect that if I were a professional user I'd notice every nuance.

So I'd say for one with modest needs - word processing, spreadsheets, internet, maybe stats, it cuts the mustard. And surprisingly, I thought it would be counterintuitive but it made a lot of sense re: HIGs'to me.

(But I'll never forgive Apple for encouraging putz' pay for the privilege for being beta testers. ).

Best, muddy

This message has been edited. Last edited by: muddy,

Hey, brother muddy,
if your needs are modest, they're modest. I can't fault ya for that. But WEB SURFING is a modest need. And that doesn't work. It doesn't work as well as surfing does on cheaper (Windows) machines with IE. There's no excuse for that. Apple should be leading the way, and they're way way behind.

Apple software should be as finely tuned as a symphony orchestra... and instead it's a child's toy piano. And a broken one at that.

Here's my latest Safari issue: I'm at thalo.net, posting... and my fonts all suddenly look different. No bolds. Wrong typeface. I mean, just stopped working. No bolds? Huh? What the hell is that? Glad you asked. Buggy is what that is.

I'm sick to death of crap. I'm sick to death of crap-SETTLING for piss-poor software. Sick to death of stuff that doesn't work, when the folks at Apple are singing its praises as if it's the best thing to hit the computer world since iTunes. That hit, can't cover this miss. OS X is a terrible, weak operating system that fails me daily. X-Men tell me, but thalo, you can't BLAME OS X for every little thing that goes wrong...

Know what? I can. Hey, don't get me wrong, I also blame developers, big software companies who write the apps... but most of all I blame Apple and the operating system. Because an OS that doesn't run apps well, is not worth squat.

Let's review the feature-set of OS X: slow, easy to break, and a visually superabundant GUI that's counterintuitive and ridiculous. Inconsistent and poorly conceived. Choked with eye candy, but very unfriendly to pro workflows.

Font rendering that's weak and blurry, and font management that's so bad, you have to try and run the system with as few fonts as possible, or it breaks.

Disk usage that's fraggy and unreliable. A finder that's slow to update. I can't tell you how many times I go to the desktop, or a directory, and with the window open, staring me in the face, the file I just saved TO THAT DIRECTORY is not visible.

Slow. Slow. Slow. Slow to update. Every day I get tons of e-mail. Using Apple Mail. The messages arrive. I read them. I trash them, sometimes respond. I send. Ding. Ding? The friggin' program chimes. "What the hell IS that?" I go. Know what it is? The operating system telling me mail has arrived.

Minutes late. Sorry, brothers, that doesn't cut it with me. This OS has shown me its ass time and time again. And I'm one of the few people on this planet who sees through the hype and knows what we really have here. Bad software.

I'm one of the few people on this planet who goes to my Services menu and expects Services to work. Or goes to my Help menu and expects help to work. I am one of the few people on this planet who loves Apple enough to demand better of them. And I think the way to do that, is to be crap-intolerant.

Apple is up against a friggin' MONSTER of an operating system, and I say whatever they do, they can't wus out. Yes it's a dragon. They have to be St. George and fight it. And they can't fight it with music alone.

Hi Thalo,

Sorry for long-time no responez-vous. Thanks for your thoughtful reply and still I'm unsure about how often to defrag w/Tech Tool Pro despite a million threads on this.

Btw, I notice you have a Powebook. I think there's a little problem w/its clutch assembly in that when you hear a creaking noise opening/closing the screen, if warranty, have Apple fix it asap; if damaged in what stuff starts falling apart, you w/be to blame. Had my clutch assembly replaced: no creaks, glides now.

Cheery Chow,

muddy allan

hey brother muddy!

I think most defraggers out there tend not to fix OS X enough to make defragging worth the effort. That is not to say that OS X isn't the most fragalicious OS I've ever seen in all my born friggin' DAYS... but it's not DESIGNED to run lean and mean. It's designed to be a mess, and as much as I hate to say it, it behaves better when you let it be the beast it's meant to be.

More important than defragging, is doing routine maintenance with program like Cocktail or MacJanitor. Especially if you don't leave your machine on 24 hours a day. If you turn off or sleep your machine at night, the OS never gets a chance to run its scheduled cron tasks. So you have to nursemaid your system more.

I defrag about once a month these days. But I'm religious about system maintenance, and restart my computer at the first sign of buggy, odd behavior. Especially after heavy scratch-disk use with Adobe Products. Extended use of GoLive often results in degraded system performance too. It's not as much a frag issue, I believe, as it is a bloated cache or journal that causes that program to wig out if you pound it.

On my new PowerBook (1.5Ghz 17"), I don't seem to have any trouble with a creaky hinge. On the whole, I've been pleased with the hardware. Runs quite hot with extended use, but it's basically a good machine. My beef is really with the stupid operating system. Still not adequate for pro use.