Valentin's Blog

I finally took the plunge to buy a new Apple computer (a MacBook), after quite a few years of abstinence (a Performa 5200 and a Power Book from the 500 series were my last Apple computers) in which I only maintained some Apple computers from relatives. And I must say, the first few days have been infuriating! In addition to the fact that its really crashing more often than my trusty WinXP Dell, I'm very much annoyed by the "Apple knows better than you" attitude embodied in every part of their software:

• Apple knows that there is no reason to turn off your laptop screen when the laptop is open. Hence, if - in my stupidity - I still want to do it, I need to attach the monitor, close the laptop (which sends it to sleep - again a function that apple decided I should not be able to change), then wake the laptop with an external keyboard and only then open the laptop again .. But, as I think about it, Apple is probably right: I simply should not turn off my laptop screen because attaching an external display is a mysterious and unreliable process. Not only do current apple laptops use three! different non-standard monitor interfaces (DVI mini, DVI micro and mini Display Port), but adaptors from display port to DVI are currently not in stock anywhere and the Display-port-VGA adaptors (which are also hard to come by) are barely functioning (while I'm typing this my Monitor has gone black and resynced four times - a very common problem that most users of Samsung Monitors seem to be having - if they succeed in connecting their monitor at all).
• Apple knows that the only way I could ever want to sort my podcasts is by when they appeared; sorting by title works for music and movies, but in its greatness Apple decided to deactivate it for podcasts.
• Apple knows that I'm to stupid to frame my pictures correctly and hence that pictures should be zoomed and moving around randomly when they are shown in the hope nobody will notice (I'm talking of FrontRow here, not IPhoto where I can at least disable it).
• Apple knows the best folder structures for pictures and hence IPhoto can do very little without importing the pictures into this perfect structure (very annoying if you have a cross-platform store with thousands of pictures, trust me).
• Apple also knows that I cannot be trusted to choose the content I want to be listening too, and hence pre-filters everything I can choose from (well - unless I leave the Apple software ecosystem; but then I lose a large part of that shiny Apple world).

I'm not claiming its a very bad computer; its beautifully build, extremely quiet, OSX really looks and feels nice. But I must say I'm shocked at the unreliability (software, the adaptor mentioned above and also Bluetooth connectivity) and at how little customization is possible within the Apple software ecosystem. Probably my much more Mac savvy colleague was right when he said that one should simply not buy an Apple shortly after a new line has been introduced - but that's a sad statement about a computer manufacturer where you pay a few hundred dollars/euro extra so you get something that "Just works".