My Mac Mini
A few months back I broke down and bought a Mac Mini. My cofounders all use TextMate (Mac only, unfortunately) for coding in, and after watching them it became apparent that if I want to mess around with Rails, OSX is pretty much the only way to go. I’ve also been curious for a while about OSX, though I was a little hesitant about Jaguar, which had just dropped at the time, given that even Apple fanboys were complaining about it incessantly. This is a group of people who would normally shrug it off if Steve Jobs poked them eye with a rusty fork and just say something bad about Microsoft like “well, Outlook 2007 uses the Word HTML rendering engine.” So I figured if they were complaining, there must really be something wrong.
But I was told I could easily downgrade if necessary (in fact, the mini came with the previous release installed and a Leopard CD for upgrading) so I headed on down to the Apple store. That experience was almost enough to make me turn away. A girl with some sort of mullethawk and a tattoo creeping up her neck asked me if I needed help and I almost said “no, but you do.”
After telling them what I was there to purchase, I was directed to the Genius Bar. No joke, they really have something there called the Genius Bar. Luckily for me I hadn’t eaten recently. I don’t think I can endure that much pretentiousness on a full stomach without losing my lunch.
I wasn’t really sure what I’d find there. I figured maybe some physicists sipping martinis and working on their doctoral thesis on string theory. Or maybe Dawkins having a Tom Collins and writing his next treatise on intelligent design. Instead what I found was some douchey twenty-somethings who get paid $9 an hour to help people pick out iPods. Genius Bar? Yeah, you’re fucking Einsteins. “Excuse me Mr. Heisenberg, does this mp3 player have a replaceable battery?”
The “genius” at said “bar” then proceeded to try to sell me so many warranties and miscellaneous accessories with such a high pressure sales pitch that I started to wonder if I hadn’t just accidentally purchased a Ford Focus. I sat there scratching my head, waiting for the manager to come over and negotiate the price with me, and debated whether or not I was willing to go more than 5 percent over invoice or walk out and test drive a Gateway instead.
So I left the Apple store hoping the user experience for the computer would be better. Setting it up definitely was. The Mini is so small and unobtrusive that it’s easy to find room for it on any desk. The power brick is huge, which I found odd since the brick for a Macbook Pro is much smaller, though it seems as if it must use more power. But you can stash it on the floor, so who really cares? Best of all, it’s dead silent, except when there’s a CD or DVD in the drive, and even then it’s not too bad.
It was easy enough to get it started and set up. I played around happily with some of the included apps like iPhoto and iChat, which are much nicer than the crap Windows OEMs typically bloat their installations with, until I ran into my first snag.
Installing programs on OSX is extremely counterintuitive and labor intensive. The whole process is very poorly designed. First you download a dmg file which, when clicked, creates a virtual drive. On the virtual drive is the program, which you then have to drag into your Applications folder. Then you have to unmount the virtual drive and delete the dmg file from your desktop. It sounds laborious here, but it’s far worse when you have no idea what’s going on and are used to Windows, where you simply click the file you downloaded and then click yes or no to answer a question or two.
There’s no way that anyone could guess this procedure, and nobody reads manuals. I thought I had installed Firefox but found out the next day that I had only ran it from its virtual drive. Different installers seem to do different amounts of this work for you (some pop up an easy little window for dragging) but none seem to do the job completely. It’s always far more work/confusion than installing any Windows program has been since 1992. For all everyone hypes up the intuitiveness and ease of use of the Mac OS, it seems that one of the most basic and perhaps important operations one performs is extremely and unnecessarily complex.
Also the fonts are much different than windows, and frankly I don’t care for them. I may get used to them at some point. I doubt it though. The blurriness is disconcerting. My understanding of why they are that way is that Windows, which I’m used to, forces the fonts to conform to pixels on the monitor, making them less pretty but never blurry. Mac remains as true to the font as possible.
Having done the vast majority of my reading over the last 10 years on a computer rather than a magazine or book, I prefer Windows fonts. I really don’t give a flying fuck about what the letters would look like if they were in a newspaper, I only care what they look like on my screen. It’s 2008 and I think we can safely say it’s time to eradicate all fonts that weren’t designed specifically for monitors. Using fonts designed for printing presses on a monitor is like saying “yeah those tires on your car really have no traction and burst every 2,000 miles, but if you put them on a Conestoga wagon, wow would you be impressed.”
Another major gripe I have is window maximizing. When I click that button on any program on Windows, it takes up the whole screen. This is invaluable for people like me who use dual monitors (which, by the way, you shouldn’t even bother attempting on a Mac. My cofounder has to close the lid when he hooks his MBP up to a monitor). On a Mac you click the maximize button and anything can happen. From what I understand, OSX leaves it to the application developer to decide, which means that sometimes it maximizes vertically, sometimes horizontally, and sometimes it rotates 90 degrees to the left and sings La Cucaracha. It’s a gamble, but it almost never does what you’d want or expect it to.
Other than those things though, I like the OS. There are a lot of nice little things. Icons are easily resizable which is nice when you’re using a big monitor at a high resolution. Uninstalling programs is as easy as installing is hard. You just delete it from your Applications folder. No registry or dll concerns, which saves you from having to reinstall your OS as frequently as you might with Windows.
Driver support isn’t Windows, of course, but it is better than I thought it would be. Apple seems to have made their own driver for my Logitech DiNovo Edge, which is awesome. Inability to use it probably would have meant me returning the Mac or selling it on eBay.
There are some pretty sweet third party apps as well. Adium is a pretty awesome chat client. I use Miranda on Windows, and after a few plugins and hours of configuration I probably still prefer it, but Adium is almost as good right out of the box. The included office productivity programs are atrocious, especially compared to Word/Outlook 2007, so I won’t be using them, but Microsoft does make Mac products which I hear, with the exception of Entourage (email) are almost as good as the real thing. I wasn’t planning on doing more than coding and maybe web surfing on that PC anyway. Safari seems nice enough (certainly far better than IE6 or 7) but I prefer browsers that crash every 15 minutes, so I installed Firefox.
I’ve had the machine crash a couple times, so I can’t say much for its touted stability. It doesn’t seem as reliable as Windows is these days, but at least Apple replaced the dreaded blue screen with something much more pleasant. I didn’t even know it was crashing until my cofounder told me, and that has to be worth something.
There’s lots of little stuff that I can see why programmers love. My cofounders liken it to “Linux but with a good user interface”. Hotkeys seem to be more consistent from one application to another, and I probably generally prefer doing stuff with the Apple key to the Ctrl key. And TextMate is pretty awesome, as is Quicksilver and a few more geek tools I played around with.
But for the most part, I just don’t see it being as user friendly as Windows for Joe Sixpack. Basic operations like program installation and window maximizing (and what the hell is a keychain?) are all so convoluted and counter-intuitive that it just isn’t worth it. So my final verdict is pretty much that if you know what a command line is and what to do with one, buy a Mac. Otherwise, you’ll be much happier with Windows.
April 28, 2008 at 9:25 pm
uh, just because you don't feel like reading up on some stuff, macs suck? hmm. Maybe you suck and are just to lazy. Were you born knowing how to do everything on windows? Doubt it.
April 28, 2008 at 9:54 pm
Hilarious! I read excerpts of this out loud to my wife as we both laughed.
April 28, 2008 at 9:55 pm
To borrow one of your own phrases, “tech journalism at its finest here.”
Program Installation:
Clicks required to install an application with the above described process on OS X: 4
Clicks required to install an application on Windows: 6 on average ([1] open installer, [2] 'next' at the inevitable welcome screen [3] 'next' at license screen [4] 'next' at installation location' [5] 'ok' after installation to close the installer [6] drag file to the recycle bin). This is assuming the minimum of normal installer steps – it could easily be many more.
This is not to say OS X is perfect in this area, but come on – RTFM.
Fonts: Personal preference there, I won't quibble.
Window maximizing:
The generally accepted practice here is that a shift-click will expand the current window only to the size it currently needs – i.e., a shift-click on the green button will resize the Safari window to fit the current web page (assume your page is 800px wide and 600px tall, the window will resize to fit the viewport to that dimension) Personally, I never work with maximized windows – why take up more screen real estate than necessary?
Dual monitors: Clearly, your cofounder either prefers using his laptop in clamshell mode (a feature designed for folks who prefer to use their laptop as a tower when they're at their desk) or also needs to RTFM (though I suspect the former) – the default behavior when you plug in any external monitor is to mirror the displays, which is easily changed in System Preferences. In my experience this rarely fails to work as designed.
Keychain: stores your passwords system-wide – any application that you allow to have access to your Keychain can store its authentication information there.
Productivity apps: I'm not going to get into an iWork vs. Office debate here, but honestly – exactly how much did you -try- iWork? How many of the “features” in Office (which I use every day, FYI – 'tis the curse of being in the Mac Minority) that you -actually- use are not found in iWork?
I hate to sound like a troll, but come on, man – RTFM before you start bashing a platform based solely on your lack of familiarity with it.
April 28, 2008 at 10:11 pm
Umm. I use 4 monitors on my mac.
I'm a convert from Windows as well, 15+ years as a windows developer/.NET consultant, now I'm entirely rails/PHP/objective-c. I still use a Windows laptop but after six months of using a mac, I find myself less productive and more annoyed with Windows each passing day.
You'll get to that point as well, some day. Takes some time, but once you get there you'll wonder why you hadn't done it sooner.
April 28, 2008 at 10:14 pm
The post made the laugh a couple times…
And Shane and Alex, I know where you're coming from, but you sound like typical mac fanboys.
Everyone on the net and on tv always talks about how easy and stable macs are and how easy the switch is.
Matt posted his thoughts (which mirror mine) that this is a bunch of horseshit. Any time you are used to one thing and switch to another there is pain. Saying anything else is a lie.
April 28, 2008 at 10:24 pm
I like my Safari full size too despite what the haters say. (I also like 1024×768 on my giant 21″ CRT.
) You can get Safari to fullsize with the bookmarklet on this page:
http://www.jydesign.com/safari/
Also I've never experienced a hard crash randomly. (the pretty you must turn off computer screen) I've done it on purpose though. To diagnose it though, you have to dredge through system.log. (Go to Applications->Utilities->Console, and start looking to see what caused the crash.) I'm almost willing to bet it's the DiNovo drivers. Logitech has been spotty on Leopard drivers.
You also get used to the blurriness. You can turn it off through the command line:
“sudo defaults write CoreGraphics CGFontDisableAntialiasing YES”
It's somewhat not recommended since it'll make text spacing a little ugly.
April 28, 2008 at 10:26 pm
“Any time you are used to one thing and switch to another there is pain. Saying anything else is a lie.”
I agree – thus the final sentence of my comment:
“I hate to sound like a troll, but come on, man – RTFM before you start bashing a platform based solely on your lack of familiarity with it.”
My issue with some of the comments in this post has less to do with the fact that there's a learning curve than the fact that he seems unwilling to accept it.
April 28, 2008 at 10:32 pm
You are wrong that joe six pack is better with windows. All joe six pack wants to do is watch his porn and listen to tunes and do email and web. And for that, mac is better cause Joe sixer doesn't have to deal with antivirus or a load of crapware.
April 28, 2008 at 10:36 pm
You have to admit the the TV ads and most people make the switch seem as easy as changing underwear, when it's more like going from briefs to boxers.
April 28, 2008 at 11:28 pm
There are plenty of Mac programs that have normal installers. A lot of them (mostly the smaller ones, obviously) use the “drag this to your Applications folder” method because, well, that's all you should need. Everything the program needs in order to run is in one file – like you said, no DLL's. Anyway, if you use Safari, it automatically mounts the dmg's, so that's one less step.
I agree that it's sort of a weird system, but I prefer it to the “download exe, run installer, click through several screens, click okay when it's done, then delete installer” route.
I've been using Macs consistently for fifteen years and I barely ever use the maximize button, so…. you're just weird. Or maybe I am, I don't know. I just clicked it in Safari to see what would happen and it made the window tall but not wide. It figures.
I don't understand the dual monitor problem. I've never had trouble with it.
I could go on for hours about what annoys me about Macs, Apple products, OS X, etc. (iTunes freezes up when I add mp3's as it tries to sort out album art, also freezes up for a few seconds when I start to update my ipod, quicktime has no idea how to handle movies with odd aspect ratios and doesn't support as many formats as Final Cut Pro, Safari used to have a weird bug that would make it hang for minutes at a time if I opened a new window after not using the program for a while, it's impossible to undo certain Finder actions that are too easy to perform by accident, too many files of unix origin are still hidden from the GUI and require Terminal to get to, environment variables and various other unix stuff doesn't work exactly the same in OS X, but the differences are small enough to be confusing, my sound card makes my speakers make loud popping noises when I open VLC, etc., etc. etc.)
So given all that, I find it strange that you are annoyed with those specific things. And yes, after all those complaints, I still prefer OS X to Windows.
Also, yes the genius bar is stupid. I ordered my Mac online – no hassle.
April 28, 2008 at 11:31 pm
I think you adjusted to (and thus forgot) all the arbitrary crap that you have to go through with windows. Whenever I'm teaching my mom stuff, there are some times I just wished I could put her on a mac and skip a wholeeee lot of training.
And if you just went to OSX for rails development, you should of just used the Netbeans rails IDE. It's so much better on so many levels than textmate. It has textmate bindings in it and you can embed vim into it with jvim if you wanted to.
April 29, 2008 at 12:19 am
You'll fall in love with Quicksilver (sounds like that's already happened) and then it'll crash on you. Just wait.
April 29, 2008 at 2:07 am
>This is a group of people who would normally
>shrug it off if Steve Jobs poked them eye with
>a rusty fork
I guess you set the tone of the article early. But seriously, did you really buy a Mac mini just so you had an excuse to write this diatribe detailing your obviously preconceived hatred (nay, disgust!) of Macs, the people who sell them, and (by mere association) the peole who use and like them? Admittedly, that deserves /some/ kind of recognition…
April 29, 2008 at 2:34 am
“Installing programs on OSX is extremely counterintuitive and labor intensive…”
There is indeed a standard installer for use on OS X, they have the .pkg extension and do what you are used to in Windows – that is, they pop up a wizard and do some magic in the background, when they're finished you get an app put in your Applications folder. You're right that much software isn't packaged this way however, and does come in the form of a .dmg file. The reason for this is that it's really not that much more complicated after you've done it once, and Mac users are very much more used to knowing exactly what's going on when they install an application. It's a nice feeling to know that to uninstall an app you do the inverse of what you did to install it, that is; drag it out of the applications folder. Manually dragging an application into the apps folder is a powerful physical representation of your actions on the file. Clicking 'next' in an installer isn't. I would much rather just drag an app to Applications than trust an installer not to waltz all over my system.
“Having done the vast majority of my reading over the last 10 years on a computer rather than a magazine or book, I prefer Windows fonts. I really don’t give a flying fuck about what the letters would look like if they were in a newspaper…”
You will as we move towards higher DPIs on screen. Windows bastardises fonts in an effort to jam them into pixels. This is a curious decision, and a disastrous one if you are any kind of designer. I think your initial reaction to the font smoothing has a lot to do with it just being different, I am confident that in time you will come to appreciate the OS X anti-aliasing.
“Another major gripe I have is window maximizing.”
This is a contentious issue. Personally I like the way the environment encourages any single application not to take up the screen. This nurtures ease of multi-tasking, a better feeling of spatial awareness, and easier access for drag and drop. If you must have a full screen app you can certainly resize a window to fill the screen.
“My cofounder has to close the lid when he hooks his MBP up to a monitor…”
Your cofounder is alone in having to do this. My MBP does not have such behaviour and I believe your cofounder is either incorrect in believing he must do such a thing, or his hardware is faulty in some way.
“The included office productivity programs are atrocious…”
I don't believe that any included apps are intended for anything approaching standard 'office productivity' and so am not surprised you find them 'atrocious' for such work.
“I’ve had the machine crash a couple times, so I can’t say much for its touted stability…”
If you've had the machine kernel panic more than once in such a short amount of time I would be very concerned that there may be a hardware issue (bad memory for example) involved. I would run some hardware diagnostics. This is certainly not standard behaviour. Once every 6-9 months is standard for most users.
On the whole I feel this is a a rather disingenuous article, and if the two main complaints you have about OS X is the different program installation, and window maximising then I can't really see what the main issue you have is. I strongly suspect you have become over-used to the arbitrary way Windows does certain things and are not willing to entertain a period of adjustment and open-mindedness in moving to the Mac. As such you were destined to have a negative experience from the beginning. I suspect that if you use this machine as your primary workstation for 3 months you will find your opinions have started to change.
April 29, 2008 at 6:20 am
“if I want to mess around with Rails, OSX is pretty much the only way to go”??? rly?!
April 29, 2008 at 6:46 am
I don't understand how anyone could consider having to use an installer as superior to drag&drop.
Application management under Windows is a huge pain, they can not be moved, they drop debris all over the hdd which is never completely removed and if anything happens to the registry (like, say, a OS reinstall) you get to reinstall all the application again.
The core of your complaints seem to be “Mac OS X does not behave like Windows”. Indeed it does not. But one could hardly call that a fault, because equivalent Windows does not behave like Mac OS X either.
The mistake you make is that you have learned the Windows culture, which is more then only a skill set, it's also an expectation of proper behavior. Mac OS X has however it's own culture, and when this violates you expectation you rush to the conclusion that it's improper, wrong.
The same thing happens when a long time Mac has to use Windows. To a mac user the Windows interface is loud, ugly, stupid and stubborn. Windows is in-your-face the whole time, the only way to get some peace is to full screen every app (the need to do this is a sign of problem, it's not a cure).
April 29, 2008 at 7:35 am
“Uninstalling programs is as easy as installing is hard. You just delete it from your Applications folder. No registry or dll concerns, which saves you from having to reinstall your OS as frequently as you might with Windows.”
Actually, you might want to check out a little app called “App Zapper” – turns out there's a ton of extraneous information written to various parts of your HD, and removing the Applications folder is rarely enough to delete the insidious fingers of most applications.
April 29, 2008 at 8:17 am
All App Zapper usually does is remove the preference file, which is typically a few kb. It's not needed for applications which don't come with uninstallers anyway.
April 29, 2008 at 8:39 am
Insidious fingers? As far as I know, while apps do leave preferences and other miscellany, none of it affects the way the computer actually runs or causes conflicts. The exception to this is apps that require preference panes or drivers, but those are very rare indeed.
I do occasionally go clean up my prefs folder, deleting prefs for demos and games I don't play anymore, but I prefer that to possible DLL conflicts and what not.
April 29, 2008 at 9:04 am
holy crap I did exactly the same thing with firefox. I felt so stupid.
April 29, 2008 at 9:11 am
This article reads like someone who's realised he has … you know, certain … urges and realises he needs to go to the Gay^H^H^H Genius Bar to get them resolved, but inside he hates himself and everyone he's been forced to “interact” with as he does this dirty, secret little thing.
But he'll be back, just like all the others. Once you've tried it, it feels good in a feels-so-bad kind of way, and before you know it he'll have an iPod, an iPhone, an iTouch, he'll be organising his coming out party. Is there such a thing as a Mac Pride march? If so, I'm sure we'll see him there too. You just need to get in touch with your inner Mac user and stop hating yourself so much
It's quite natural really.
Big anger + strong helping of Sense of Entitlement = Poor article.
April 29, 2008 at 11:25 am
You missed the point. I'm bashing it's intuitiveness (or lack thereof) which is the ability to do things without RTFM. That was the point. I know what a keychain is because I did RTFM.
With Windows, You don't have to.
April 29, 2008 at 11:27 am
Antivirus is for suckers. All you have to do is have a firewall and not open random attachments and you're fine.
April 29, 2008 at 11:29 am
Happened.
April 30, 2008 at 7:34 am
You Mac freaks are hilarious. Seriously, do you even listen to yourselves?
“Macs don't suck, you suck.”
I tried a Mac a few times and hated it. I need a right-click. I also like maximizing my windows. But that's not Apple's problem, I just suck, right?
I'm going to keep using Windows XP because I know how to use it and it does what I want.
I also prefer to spend $500 on a computer rather than $2,000, but that's just me.
April 30, 2008 at 6:25 pm
Also, most porn is found in wmv format. I remember reading an article about it not too long ago, it's overwhelmingly in that.
April 30, 2008 at 6:28 pm
That misses the point. I'm not unwilling to accept it. I just think that the learning curve makes it counter-intuitive. Just one thing I find to be wrong with the OS, which is ironic because it's what they seem to hype the most.
May 1, 2008 at 12:54 am
Weird about the dual screen thing. On my macbook (and the powerbook before it) I just plug in the little adaptor and it works. It even remembers to rejig my dock and menu bar onto the bigger external monitor.
I agree about program installation being a pain. You do get dmgs that launch a .pkg (installer) file, but no-one (mac experienced) seems to trust .pkg installers, preferring the dragging kind.
Multimonitor on Linux or *BSD – *that's* a proper challenge though…
I don't think I'd want to go back to a Windows laptop now, and although both my desktops are currently WinXP, one may well become a new mini sometime soon.
May 4, 2008 at 4:37 am
This learning period is longer for you because you are used to the way it is on windows. Everyone who make a transition from windows to mac os has these problems (right click, mouse acceleration, keyboard, window maximization, drag-drop installation, font antialiasing), it is just because you used windows first. When you say interface is not intuitive, your previous experience is in your way, not your instincts. After using mac os for a good amount of time, I found it very hard to get back to windows, and I think this will be the case for you as well.
I don't agree that mac os is the only way to go for Rails development, you have everything necessary on windows as well. But I must say Textmate is one of the reasons many developers are switching to mac.
I think that you're going to spend more time in front of that mac mini than your windows machine.
May 4, 2008 at 10:58 am
Yeah, you're wrong. Things like the window maximizing and install procedure just are not intuitive at all. Even had I never used Windows I wouldnâ??t have guessed how they work because they function in such an illogical manner.
Everyone keeps saying something like “use it for longer and it will grow more intuitive.” People need a dictionary.
May 9, 2008 at 9:57 am
> Things like the window maximizing and install procedure just are not intuitive at all.
I don't think window maximizing *can* be “intuitive.” It's not something you do in the physical world. If you've never seen it in a computer UI before, how would you have any expectation as to what it would do? I think your expectation as to what a particular button does was formed by a particular UI that you're accustomed to. I agree that the Windows maximizing behavior is more useful, but I don't see any metric by which to compare their intuitiveness.
The install procedure — that you install a program by copying it somewhere, and uninstall by deleting it — seems perfectly intuitive to me. The first time I did this after I got a Mac, I thought, “Wow, that's so much better than running an installer program that does who-knows-what!”
I'm kind of confused by your complaint about font anti-aliasing. Hasn't Windows done that for years? I'm pretty sure even Windows 98 did. Maybe it's a check box that I've always checked it and then forgotten.
May 9, 2008 at 11:01 am
It can be intuitive when you hover over it and it says the word maximize. I expect a button that says maximize to fill the screen. Otherwise I think you're correct.
May 20, 2008 at 11:51 am
I was almost about to place an order mac mini at apple.com, but after this post I wish to stick to ubuntu (only), not worth the hassle. And I am not sure about mac but windows sucks for rails development. Though I hear TextMate is great, Netbeans is pretty good and have good support for ruby on rails. And no complains with Linux (Ubuntu) for rails development.