I’m Dumping my Mac

Mac has this little window that pops up for you to send helpful info to Apple whenever an application unexpected closes (“Your report will help Apple improve this software”). Here is the report I just sent to Apple:

I was reading something in Firefox and it just shut down. Actually, Firefox stalls or quits on me on a daily basis. I have almost never successfully shut Firefox down because it stalls.

I have decided to switch back to PC and give my Macbook away. I was hesitating on the decision at the Dell website, then Firefox crashed. That sealed the deal. (I restarted Firefox and then ) I quickly made the purchase.

For more more reasons why I hate Mac, click here.

The Last Straw – My Rant on Macs

When I bought my first mac last September, I was drawn to it because of its reputation for speed and stability and moreover because so many engineers I respect are mac addicts. The initial glow wore off quickly after just a couple of weeks. I noticed several things that are just ridiculous to me, including:

• It crashes all the time: Firefox, the one application that I use whenever I’m logged in, crashes on me often. I have almost never successfully closed Firefox on my MacBook – I have to force quit out of it just to shut my computer down. This is absolutely shameful. And Adobe hangs. And OSX freezes when I navigate around the file system. So much for a crash-free Mac.
• The most illogical file system: Speaking of file systems, this is the first time I have used a computer in which the file system I am navigating doesn’t reflect the real underlying file system, with the effect that nothing is where I think it should be. I will install applications and have no clue where they go. I can’t believe they hand out patents for this.
• Don’t mind those 1.3B people: Chinese character processing is absolutely horrid on my Mac. When I email friends in China, I never type in Chinese anymore because it was such a half-baked feature.
• Slow UI: I had heard so much about how the MacOS UI is so wonderful once you get used to it, and it is nothing but inferior to Windows. I’ve worked in investment banking where people are encouraged to operate without a mouse because aiming-and-clicking slows you down. I used to research companies online, build financial models in excel, respond to emails, and navigate between everything using ALT-TAB and Windows hotkeys and well-positioned folder Shortcuts. I can’t do any of that now in MacOS without using a mouse pointer. I couldn’t even ALT-TAB properly in MacOS before installing Witch, which Apple shamefully doesn’t include in its OS.
• Lack of software: I never realized how little software is written for Mac until I owned one. Microsoft Office is slow and unwieldy on a Mac. Google didn’t release a desktop package for Mac until quite a while after they released it for Windows. I was so excited to try the media software my friend’s startup had been working on until I realized it was only released for Windows. Gah, I can’t even play the classic video game I bought (Myth: The Fallen Lords) because OSX is not backwards compatible. Rather, it’s incompatible, like Apple and Chinese… or logic.
• Memory hardware problems: I had bought 2GB of RAM, but my MacBook has only ever registered 1GB. I sincerely don’t think I did anything wrong, and I can’t figure out why this never registered. I’m blaming Apple for this too.

But the last straw came when I tried to set up a Java project for a side programming project. I downloaded the source code, found the build.xml file, ran the build ANT task and failed to compile. There were several compile errors complaining that it couldn’t find Arrays.copyOfRange() and LinkedBlockingDeque, TimeUnit.HOURS and TimeUnit.MINUTES, and this normally is not a problem because these resources are in Java6, meaning that I simply needed to upgrade to Java6. I looked around and found that the latest released version of Java for Mac is Java FIVE. ARGH!!!! This was really the last straw that a computer company that prides itself on developer tools doesn’t even support the most recent version of Java. Thankfully, I was able to find a preview release of Java 6 for Mac, but the beta status of this product doesn’t exactly inspire admiration.

So I installed Java6 and turned my attention to editing the JAVA_HOME environment variable so that the ANT task would know where to find my newfound Java resources. After a few hours of reading helpful blogs like this and this and this and this, I finally found my way. WindowsXP allows you to easily set environment variables on the Control Panel. I would think that MacOX has something similar on its System Preferences panel, right? But NOOOOO!!!! I had to go download something that should have been included in the operating system anyway.

Is it really this ridiculous, or do I just have a knack for trying all the things Steve Jobs doesn’t think is important?

Now I can finally get started, but right now, this hilarious video shows exactly how I feel.

EDIT 12/14/07: Four months later, the saga ends and I am dumping my Mac.