Why I am Dumping my Mac and Switching Back to Windows
I was a "switcher" - I bought the hype and ditched my XP laptop for a Mac Mini desktop setup at home. Big mistake.In November, I needed to replace my home computer. I had always used my laptop at home, but realized it would be much nicer to have a full computer to make evening and weekend work easier. I decided to buy my first Macintosh. I purchased a Mac Mini (1.83 ghz, superdrive, 1g ram, 80g hd) with 20 inch monitor and bluetooth keyboard and mouse.
Initially, I was very excited. The monitor is beautiful and a pleasure to work on. The computer connected smoothly with my home wireless network. Foldershare seamlessly kept my files synchronized between my home, work and laptop computers. I installed Office for Mac 2004 and Entourage to work with our Exchange email server. I even was able to use eyeTV to connect to my wireless media server to play music and watch video through my home theater.
I expected an initial period of learning and figuring out how to do things on a Mac that I had do on my PC - but that learning period has never ended. I am continually having to buy software or google to figure out how to do tasks that were simple on my PC. So, here are ten reasons I am selling this mac and getting a pc for my home:
1. What the hell is with the right click button on the wireless mighty mouse? Why doesn't it work 70% of the time? To me, this is Apple's big folly - everyone recognizes the two button mouse is superior, but Apple refuses to adopt it fully. In fact, I might not even have started to think about reasons I didn't like my Mac if I didn't fight the mouse issue every time I used the computer.
2. iTunes sucks. It does one thing well - it makes it easy to buy music from the iTunes store, but it does not manage music well. If I want to manage my own music collection (import, delete, edit the meta info) it won't recognize any of the changes - I have to manually tell it to rescan the library. If I have deleted songs, I have to delete them again in iTunes. By default iTunes tries to copy your entire library over again on your hard drive - why? Trying to keep a music library of mp3's synced between my windows machines was easy - adding the Mac caused all sorts of chaos because of iTunes song management.
3. Lack of software from people other than Apple. My business is wine - there are hundreds of Windows applications for wine enthusiasts but only a handful of Mac applications. How many similar hobbies/niches are there where people use software written and sold by small businesses who don't sell a Mac version. There are so few installed Mac users it doesn't make sense to port most of this software. My guess is gamers face the same problem.
4. Parrallels is not the answer. Why pay over $300 to make my PC do what it does natively? Why shouldn't I just run XP?
5. Entourage is OK, but it is no Outlook. Mail, Address Book and Calender are not enterprise ready. Any serious business user needs a fully synchronized PIM - IMAP doesn't cut it. Calender doesn't sync at all with Exchange. Address Book sync's only hourly. I think the people who think Mail, Address Book and Calender are sufficient are the same people who think an out of the box Treo is a serious business device. Use a BlackBerry or Goodlink device for a week and then claim that.
6. Why is it sooo slooooowwwwww... applications take 15 seconds or more to load, spreadsheets take time to manipulate...
7. Quicktime can't play half the video available online.
8. I can't run any of the major web conference clients (webex, gotomeeting, etc).
9. Why is quitting (not just closing) an application 2 click procedure?
10. Mac's are expensive. Though a few studies have shown the high end Mac workstations are comparable to similarly configured Dell workstations, the Mac Mini was 20-30% more expensive than a similar XP machine. Why am I paying a premium for something that doesn't do everything I need it to do? The price disparity increased as I kept having to buy software (eyeTV, Parrallels, etc) to make my Mac do things a PC can do out of the box.
I admit, some of the items on my list are trivial (right click, closing applications) - but if you do them everyday, they become very annoying. I will also say the design of the hardware itself and the look of the software on the screen of the Mac is really nice - but that is only cool for a few days. If the applications run slow, I don't care how nice the system looks. I plan to keep the keyboard (but not the mouse) and 20 inch monitor when I dump the Mini for a small form factor PC.
Two issues are the real meat of the problem for me - lack of solid Exchange support and the right click problem - I dealt with them every time I used the machine. It is really unacceptable. A good tool should just work - I don't want to have to research a work around every time I want to do something new on the machine.
Thanks for listening to my rant. Next week it is back to wine - I promise!
posted by Michael Stajer at 4:48 PM
18 Comments:
As for reason #5, Outlook on the PC only pulls a copy of the Address Book once a week by default.
1. buy a cheap 5$ usb mouse from a pc
2. Itunes does dozens of things well and it runs on Windows as well and seems to have 65% of the market. I love it on either platform Windows media player sucks cause it doesn do RSS and it doesnt do Podcast.. that is the pits
3 There are literally thousand of non apple based applications and utilities . I find new stuff ever week and enjoy the high quality of whats available
try a podcast called the Mac attack thats all it does new apps and utilities every week reviewed
4 Paralles is awesome but honestly i run it only to run IE on odd occasions because I am finding more and more i dont need windows apps as there are some many great OSX apps that do the job extremly well.
5 Fun that the MS app you mention is ok but not that great. I use other mail and various apps and yes your blackberry works perfect if you use the right program with it under OSX a google serch will list a bunch of stuff.
6 I suggest there is a problem with your system if it is slow my Mac mini and MB Pro are as snappy as any of those apps on a Windows PC
7 Load DIVX and Flip4Mac both are free and it will play 99.9% of all video formats from online content. also VLC (video lan) plays anything and is available on the mac and PC
8 not familiar with this one but parallels will run it no doubt
9 Quiting.. if you quit with the quit command or Apple Q (same as ALT Q on a PC it will quit a program. seems like a tinny thing to adjust.
10 Macs are NOT expensoive . the new intels are as cheap as the same specification Dell and cheaper than some other brands. They just dont produce bottom end system . eg every system comes with a inbuilt webcam and remote (except the mac mini but it has the remote) they all have blue tooth, wireless, megabit LAN and firewire ports. add those to your PC and you'll see .
HJope that answers some of your complains and puts a more accurate spin on your blog entry.
If you want to go back to a PC . sure no worries , I just wanted other to know the truth
These little rants always amuse me. You complain about the Mac as if it's the problem and then list all the Microsoft products that you don't like or can't adjust to. Entourage, Flight Simulator, come on. It's a different platform. You can accomplish the same tasks, but of course you'll need different solutions. However, some of your gripes are silly or easily fixable...
1. Well I've never had an issue with the mighty mouse, but why keep a lame default mouse anyhow? I'd never keep a bundled mouse from any OEM - buy something decent and the issues vanish, just like on any platform.
2. iTunes is not a Mac, it's software. Would you bitch about Windows by bringing up Windows Movie Maker? Regardless, I've never heard of these issues you mention. I edit ID3 tags all the time in iTunes and others and it's all read just fine. And if you want software to do what you want, you have to configure it. Windows Media Player has similar sucky defaults. You have a custom setup, use custom settings.
3. Mac can't run Microsoft Flight Simulator? Next let's blame Windows for not running Apple's Final Cut. And if Parallels can't do it and you really need it, A) Petition MS to port it. Or more likely B) Dual-boot using Bootcamp (free) and run Windows natively instead of in emulation. There are always apps on any platform that only run on that platform, but there are plenty of apps on both Windows and Mac that get the same things done. Naming what's on one and not on the other is moot.
4. No one ever said it was. It's not made by Apple and it's not $300 - it's $79 and if you get an OEM copy of Windows ($99) then you have a computer with both OSes. Even if you run XP on a PC, you still pay for XP, so what's your point here? Use Bootcamp (free) and no emulation crap.
5. Blame Microsoft here. They make the products you're complaining about and they lock down the system you want to connect to (Exchange).
6. Do you have an Intel based Mac? If so, MS Office is running in emulation and thus quite slow on it. The next version will be snappy again. And again you're complaining about MS products and if other apps are running slow, look at other possibilities. I've never heard of the speed issue in recent years.
7. Well, not the typical file sharing stuff that's encoded with DivX or 3ivx, no. Nor can it play AVIs encoded with other odd codecs. VLC (free and open source) can play almost any video codec ever made. Then there's Perian (also free) which is a set of codecs for playing any video via QuickTime. Then there's Flip4Mac which took over playing WMVs after MS backed out (again, free). These same issues exist with Windows Media Player and others as well. This is the nature of video on the internet.
8. So these guys made software for one platform only and you blame the other platforms yet again? Nice. There are sites and services that are cross platform. Use one of those. Breeze for instance, or others.
9. This is just different from Windows. Are you saying this is worse? I use CMD+Q as a combo - one click and once you're used to it, it's faster than finding the X with your mouse. Just different, not better or worse IMHO.
10. You speak like this is just an objective fact. Check this out: http://www.zerologik.com/2007/01/mac_haters_are_often_just_igno_1.php
I'm not saying Macs are a better choice for you. It's clear they're not, but why would you try to "switch" when you're clearly so tied in to software that Microsfot makes and does not port to any other OS? That'd be like a Mac user who relies heavily on Final Cut, Garageband, and Xcode, suddenly moving to Windows or Linux and then complaining that it can't do what he/she needs.
All platforms can accomplish the same "types" of tasks, but to expect them to do these things with the same apps is unreasonable and will always leave you disappointed.
1. The MM registers your left finger if you as much as touch the left side of the mouse. You'll have to LIFT the left finger to register a right click properly. Sucks. But as previous user said, use any two-button mouse you have.
2. Let iTunes manage the file deletions, metatagging and file renaming. Don't muck about in Finder/Explorer to manage that kind of data, that's so last century.
And iTunes copies the added files because you have it set so in preferences. Have a look at Preferences/Advanced/General.
3. Go to http://www.versiontracker.com for all the software you need. And as for games, you can run all the games you need via Apples Bootcamp.
4. Parallels IS the answer for those who want to avoid the daily chores of Windows housekeeping but still run the odd Win application/tool.
5. We try to steer customers away from Exchange with it's Windows-only-centric solutions. Kerio and other collaboration software are better suited to most of our customer.
6. Slow? Are you talking about non-Universal applications? Excel/Word/Entourage all run under emulation you know.
7. WinMediaPlayer can't play half the video available online. What's you point? As above, at least get VLC, that'll cover most formats.
8. Well, it's not for a lack of browsers to choose from anyway. Safari, Firefox, Omnipage, Camino, Explorer 5, Opera, Shiira, iCab etc etc. Maybe, just maybe, the site developers tested their stuff on ONLY Internet Explorer 6 and ignored all other solutions.
9. File/Quit is one click.
10. Macs are cheaper in the long run.
11. There is no point eleven.
#5 - I use Outlook and Entourage at my office. Both connect to the exchange server and work equally well.
#3 Try X-Plane. X-Plane is the world's most comprehensive, powerful flight simulator, and has the most realistic flight model available for personal computers. http://www.x-plane.com
Ok, well, I was going to do the numbered list as well, but since it's overdone, I'll just to one paragraph. As you see here in the comments, you have plenty of options. I have been a multi-platform user all my life. I use a Mac daily because of my job, but I am just as familiar with a PC, yet when it came time to purchase a new computer, I went with the MacBook. It was more expensive, but there is value in my purchase. I believe a lot of your problems could be easily helped with some visits to the Apple Forums. MacGeeks are the minority and we're in this together. If you haven't already made that new purchase, stick around, ask some questions of people that know and I guarantee you'll feel better about it. I can't say a Mac will cure all the PC woes, but it'll do a pretty good job. Good luck whatever you decide.
I could answer you point by point, but other than agreeing with you that Mighty Mouse sucks (every I know loves it, I hated mine, despite buying it specially, and I reverted to my old Logitech one) I just feel kind of sad for you.
It doesn't really seem to me as though you ever really understood how to use your Mac.
All in all though it sounds to me as though you are probaby best off with a PC. You have two pieces of software that are clearly critical to you that are not major Mac applications (wine and FlightSim) and it doesn't seem like creative/video is really your thing, which for many of us is a major reason for loving OSX. The fact that you never seem to have discovered VLC says a lot. Even on a PC it's a vital application - Windows Media can be just as useless as QT, if not more so. I have all three of them on my Mac, as well as a couple of other video players, and I find that there is no one "perfect" plays. VLC is best for format and codec support, but QT gives you a lot more playback control.
The one thing that concerns me is how slow your Macs seems to be. It sounds to me like something is wrong: like part of your RAM has died, or there isn't enough Virtual memory space, or there are too many apps loading at Start-up - I really am not sure but although 1gig isn't a huge amount of RAM these days, your experience does not sound normal. I am running Tiger on an ancient (five/six year old) Powerbook with just 512mb ram and an 800mhz PowerPC processor, and while some things get sluggish (a lot of Flash in web pages for example) generally things are way quicker than you report.
I would suggest that you try a faster Mac, but with your software requirements, maybe sticking with PC is best if you don't like Parallels.
Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair.
I suggest you make sure and eliminate any input device actuator malfunctions.
Some great info here. VLC does seem to solve the QT problem. I do see that the mighty mouse issue is documented - it would be nice to have a fix.
I would point out that Apple is selling these machines as business machines. In the commercials and apple site they talk about how well mac's work in a business enviornment. I guess that can network fine, but the lack of real Exchange or Lotus support does seem to be a problem.
Also - thanks for the xplane rec - that looks really good, better than Flight Simulator.
Well I suppose since you allowed comments to this entry that you actually wanted some commentary on the matter. I personally don't subscribe 100% to one computer brand or OS so maybe I can shed some balanced response as I pretty much use everything out there either at work or home.
1.) the mouse... yes this is the #1 comment from long time PC users. I don't blame you.. just as many long time mac users comment that 'you don't really need two buttons'. It was once explained to me by an early apple engineer that one of the reasons apple stuck with the one button mouse approach after the 'second coming of Apple' with the iMac in 1999 is that Apple want to still be the early education computer and capture that small market. From every early on in Apple Inc.'s history the education market has been almost a passion for their identity. I guess it makes sense...get em while they're young right. Anyhoo, small tiny hands don't articulate the two buttons of standard mouse very well, so they stuck with the one button design. I have heard equal comments that its a one button mouse because thats just the Zen of Steve Jobs. Personally I like a couple mouse buttons, but on my MacBook I don't really bother hooking one up. WIth trackpad gestures and whatnot its not worth it.
2.) iTunes.. yeah it doesn't work 100 percent does it, but this is the same agrument folks have against Windows really. iTunes is a huge market and a wide user base( wider than the mac OS itself). Just like Windows, just to keep the product up to date and secure is a hard enough challange. But I agree.. I wish it was better personally
3.) This point I just disagree with. There is tons of Apple software out there, but at first it can be hard to get the skinny on it all since there is a smaller user base than windows. But by and large anything I can functionally do on my Mac I can do on my PC. ( sans MS Access).
4.) Parrallels is cool, but it is still virtualization. I run run the flight sims using Apple BootCamp. Works great.
5.) nothing stacks up to Outlook on the mac side. so I agree with you here quite a bit. I don't like Mail.app.. I tend to use Thunderbird which gets the job done for email pretty well, but scheduling etc is not built in.
6.) Could be your machine. My mac mini loads that stuff pretty fast. Got all your updates? check the Activity Monitor in /Applications/Utilities/ to see if something is hooked constantly.
7.) VLC is the power media app on mac and PC IMO
8.) nope... you cant, but I dont do that stuff. WebConferencing is a rotten technology. I use iChat with iSights and an AOL account for free.
9.)It isn't really. I just hit the Apple+Q keyboard shortcut.
10.) To the price thing I call shenanigans. I run a tech shop for a dept that is about 50/50 mac/pc. You PC may cost 200-300 dollars less, but the dept spends way more on keeping the PC's running than the Macs. I could pull a pie chart from our job ticketing service if you're interested, real world results beat out printed articles and opinions in my book any day.
P.S. I hated the mightly mouse too... I use the Microsoft bluetooth mouse, so much nicer... just not for lefties.
I would second most comments here. A Mac's not for you if what you need is only on a PC. I'm CTO at a creative firm that runs 50/50 Mac/PC. My PC users have software that only runs on a PC (mostly specialized vertical market stuff) and my Mac users have software that only runs on a Mac (or runs best on a Mac).
But I do want to address some points.
- We can debate whether closing a window should also close the application (many have). But there are plenty of similar details that I find maddening on a PC. For example, once you get accustomed to having the up and down arrow keys move a cursor to the beginning or end of a text entry field, you'll wonder why no one at Microsoft ever thought if it. But you love what you learned, and on Windows, closing the last window quits the app. Not what I'd prefer, but the best shortcut is the way you know.
- We use both Entourage and Outlook with an Exchange server. We sync mail, calendars, and contacts in Entourage with no problems. I have assistants as delegates for their managers. There may be high end features I'm missing out on, but so far, it hasn't affected us.
Finally, I find it amusing that you bemoan the lack of Exchange support in Apple's bundled apps, then use Blackberry as an example of an "enterprise ready" device in contrast to the Treo. We use Treos here, and have no problems syncing wirelessly with Exchange. Last I checked, Blackberrys require a special server to act as a front end to Exchange (list $3,999 for 20 users). If you're going to criticize Apple for not providing out-of-the-box support for Exchange, and hold that up as an example of Macs not being ready for business use, how can you claim that Blackberrys are better than Treos when they also lack out-of-the-box support for Exchange (POP and IMAP support are not the same as Exchange support)? Obviously, because there are other aspects of the Blackberry "experience" - hardware, form factor, UI, performance, battery life, whatever - that outweigh the lack of Exchange support for the tasks you use a Blackberry for, and that are the primary reasons you prefer a Blackberry.
Can't you see that those are the same reasons some might prefer a Mac?
Regarding speed issues: you might try launching Activity Monitor and having a look at what your apps are doing. Typically, if an app isn't doing anything, it will use 0% of the CPU.
You will notice however, that some apps do. The most obvious culprit is MS Office. However, it's not all bad news: go into Office's prefs on an app by app basis, turn off everything unnecessary, particularly "Live word count" and live spelling and grammar. (Office isn't a native OS X app, so it can't use the system wide spell check.) In Excel you could turn off Quartz Rendering. That seems to slow things down a lot too.
It can sometimes be frustrating using a Mac in a cross platform/device environment like the internet, as many people develop exclusively for Microsoft, ie. using proprietary formats, ignoring standards in favour of the quirks of IE, etc. I was once stuck using a CMS that only worked on IE on Windows. The same company tried to get us to stop using PDFs and switch to some a proprietary version of PDF! (hehe)
There's a player-independent version of Mpeg4 video available for the internet (.mp4). Users can then use any player software for playback: QT, Real, WMP, whatever. The format is designed to end the need for multiple players for multiple video types, ie. making user's lives better. It would make videos as playable as Mp3s. But Microsoft doesn't support it (Hahahahaha...)
You should probably have Firefox handy for things like WebEx. It once only worked with IE, but times have changed and I guess they were forced to make it work in at least one standards compliant web browser. By now, it might even work in *any* standards compliant browser! It does work though, and has done for many years.
I agree with you about Mac Minis being the more expensive Macs. An iMac would undoubtedly be much cheaper and faster. Mini's really only make sense if you already have a monitor, keyboard, and mouse - or plan to connect it to your TV in the living room.
i understand your concerns about entourage and have complained about the lack of FULL exchange support.
i hope this is taken care of soon but it was not enough of a reason for me to switch back to the win world exclusively.
btw - i use both platforms frequently.
no offense but you didn't see the whole picture of the mac interface. they want people to use their hands more often just doing the clicking all the time. I have to say I used to like the two click-things but i work faster with all the keyboard short cuts. good luck on your pc.
perian, flip4mac, divx and you dont even need VLC... then u can just fire up frontrow to enjoy
only one exception: for HD .ts u'll still need VLC
Oh man, the lack of a right mouse button is one of Apple's biggest continued blunders. I did the exact same thing as you and could not deal with a single mouse button. I almost got comfortable with the two finger right-click (I had a macbook pro). But it's still half-assed. What drove me even more nuts was the lack of dedicated Page Up/Page Down buttons. I use them all the time. It shouldn't be a two-handed procedure.
Also, it's deliciously ironic that Apple claims superior ease of use with simpler controls when they keep that Option or Command or whatever-the-hell-they-call-it-today button down there confusing me all the time. I never got fluent in knowing when to use it versus Control or Alt (I use keyboard shortcuts all the time).
All of that being said, I still have some Mac envy even though I switched back. Macs just fall way short of the hype (and the price).
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