Those dickwads are always defying comventions that THEY put in place.
Want to have a window come back to the same size as you left it? Anything but Notepad.
Want to use cut and paste off the screen? Anything but the Windows pop-up error messages. And they also usually block the “print screen capture” at that point too, so you are forced to copy down line after line of “status hex bytes” that may-or-may-not prove useful to the tech.
And what’s the only program that can defy a Double-ctrl-del-alt to bring down the system? MS Outlook. You don’t even get a chance to use "Not Responding - Kill Anyway? NOOO… you have to clear a bunch of warning messages, and specifically click on the close box. And why? because it has to empty it’s trash bin.
Plus they let you change every icon and it’s name but their own.
And you can remove any icon but their own dopiest ones.
When they take a tumble (and they will, remember when IBM called the shots? and before them CP/M?) I’ll be first in line to get the replacement.
I’m bilingual – I can use both PC and Macs with equal deftness. Thus, I’m a huge Mac fan. (Here’s hoping a hijack Mac vs PC debate doesn’t start…)
PC’s suck and it’s all Bill Gates’ fault. In fact, I blame everything that has ever gone wrong with the universe on Big Bill…
The software is clunky and difficult to re-learn every time they upgrade. The upgrades rarely address the real problems encountered in the last version. Usually just smoke and mirrors and a whole bunch of new buttons you don’t even need.
The Office products gobble up WAY too much memory so you have to have a gagillion mgs of RAM if you want to run Word and Outlook email at the same damn time…
I can go on and on, but instead…
Q: How many Microsoft engineers does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: None. They just call Bill Gates and he declares Darkness the new industry standard!
Funny, I’m running Windows 2000, loading up only FreeMem Pro and an anti-virus. Guess what? Win 2k leaves me wth more RAM, about 12MB, free than Windows 98 at startup with the same start programs.
The problem with leaving MS is that your competition, Linux and Netscape-AOL, are beginning to dish out bloatware as well.
Programs take way too long to load and execute probably because many programs are written in languages which, though very flexible, are slower than BASIC. The CPU speed sometimes cover program sloth, sometimes not. The CPU’s are getting fast, but the increased speed is virtually useless against sloppy and bloated programming.
Apples are easier to use, but are still expensive, and refuses to run Windows apps and games unless one has an expensive emulator. If Apple makes its computers run Windows apps smoothly, smoother than the programs running in Windows9x, NT/2K or CE, then Steve Jobs will have the last laugh after all.
This is one of the weirdest criticisms of the Macintosh I’ve ever seen. How Windows-centric can you get?
It also has nothing to do with the OP.
How can any platform’s inability to run a different platform’s software be a valid criticism against it? Are you saying you think we should live in a one-OS world? Surely you realize the serious disadvantages of such a scenario.
If it’s cross-platform compatibility you’re arguing: Macs can open PC files without emulators such as SoftWindows and Virtual PC. Many Mac apps come with conversion capabilities. There are even shareware programs that can open and convert PC files to Mac-readable files. I myself use ResEdit, which is free, to convert PC files. Macs can also open and write to PC floppies.
These capabilities may not be even close to running Windows apps without an emulator, but they sure as hell top the strides towards cross-platform compatibility that Microsoft’s made. Which, essentially, are zilch.
BTW, why isn’t it incumbent on Microsoft, rather than Apple, to do all the cross-platform bridging? They’d have an easier time, given their market share, don’t you think?
If the Macintosh could run Windows apps more smoothly than Windows can, then Steve Jobs would own Microsoft.
Re the OP:
Why doesn’t MS follow anyone’s standards? Because they don’t have to. It’s one of the many ways they’ve used their dominance to do as they please. Heck, they can’t even be consistent within their own apps (as Fonz has already discovered on his own).
“There are exceptions to every rule.” Sheesh, whoever said that a company always has to be completely consistent? Apparently you don’t realize just how limited modern technology is.
Dogzilla…
Perhaps you’re misplacing blame to the easiest (read: richest) target. Do PC’s suck because of market manipulations from Microsoft? Or, rather, do PC’s suck because of demands from the consumer base?
AudreyK…
To put it another way, Macs can’t run the majority of programs on the market. If they deliberately excluded the majority of the software out there, they deserve criticism. The fact that they’ve begun synchronizing their hardware with more software shows that Apple’s finally realized this. How I long for the day when a Mac is fully compatible…
Because it was Apple’s choice to not design their systems to be compatible with all the other systems on the market. Microsoft has no direct control over Apple’s manufacturing policies.
SPOOFE responded to a question in the following manner:
I have sympathy with Mac-lovers, but this is the one thing I don’t understand about their devotion. Surely, if Apple’s hardware is so much better than PC hardware, if Apple had synchronized their software with the PC we’d all be using Apples within months–even Big Business recognises the advantages of running industry-standard software on a faster machine. So, why has Apple resisted for so long?
Who’s the largest maker of Mac software? Microsoft.
What is the best version of Microsoft Office? The Mac version. It does many things that the PC version can’t.
Consider that the main reason that Apple has done as well lately is Marketing. Their marketing sucked for YEARS, and their sales showed it. Plus the tend to be higher priced than most other computers on the market. But they are the preferred platform for music and movie companies. Why the resistance? Anti-PC bias within the company and the customer base, mostly. I use both… a PC at work, and a graphite iMac at home.
Not to mention that THEY are the software company…
I guess I would be more accepting of this criticism if this inability to run Windows software hindered Mac users’ productivity. In a broad sense, it certainly has not. You can draft a letter, create a spreadsheet, create and manipulate graphics, surf the net, host websites, and so forth, just as well on a Mac as on a Windows machine. Of course, being unable to open an .exe file on my Mac doesn’t exactly do wonders for my productivity, but IMO that is more an issue of file conversion between the applications themselves rather than the platforms they run on.
Microsoft is also guilty of introducing incompatible technologies. Yet it’s not looked down upon as much. The reaction is almost the opposite- some people consider it progress.
Microsoft could (and is in the best position to) make cross-platform capabilities because of its considerable presence in both PC and Mac software. As lawoot said, they’re the biggest developer of Mac software. (This is addressing only a software-side fix, though; you’d probably need both a software-side and a hardware-side fix for anything decent.)
If real cross-platform compatibilty was even possible, the best opportunity for it is long gone. It would have been back when both MS and Apple held little market share and would have benefitted from a collaboration. Collaborating, of course, could have led to either one capitulating to the other and becoming essentially a single company. It also doesn’t eliminate the possibility they would have eventually split off anyway.
As it is now, it’s a pissing contest. MS and Apple have had years’ worth of opportunities to make complete cross-platform capabilities a reality. But neither would budge.
Mac-lovers? Devotion? Sheesh, that makes it sound like a cult or something!
You want to see some Windows interface problems? Try the Interface Hall of Shame. There are some Apple examples there, but not nearly as many.
But FWIW, rumors are that the upcoming Mac OS X has been successfully compiled to run on the Intel platform, just in case Apple decides it would be a strategically good thing to do. Right now, it’s probably not.
But you can take any company from any industry, not just the computer industry, and come up with a good list of crappy products for every single one of them.
In my opinion, the idea behind BOB was just expanded too far, and the MS Home concept was just pushed in the wrong direction.
I would like to know why my Aptiva looks for Windows Updates every five minutes every day from now until the last syllable of recorded time. I keep setting it to “Never” but every start up there it is in my Task Scheduler, checking every five minutes.
Not only does this annoying feature assume that I have constant direct access to the internet, but it also assumes that Microsoft posts Windows updates more often than I take a leak.
Crimony. If I really want that “Fashion Desktop Theme” I’ll download it when I want to. And I’ll officially become gay.
First reaction: that’s a silly thing to say!
Second reaction: I bet lots of folks think in those terms because they don’t know any better.
Oh, let’s see…all right, way back when in the early days of ATM machines, Citibank had lots and lots and lots of branches in the NY metro area that had their own proprietary ATM machines, and nearly all the other banks that provided ATM services belonged to an interconnected system called ‘NYCE’. I can recall cursing when I’d be looking for an ATM machine and I’d go past a Citibank: why the hell can’t they be compatible like everyone else? (And, indeed, they have long since joined NYCE and are now compatible.) Similar sentiment?
Dissimilar situation. Macs are NOT to PCs as Citibank ATMs were to NYCE ATMs.
For a situation more similar to the Mac / PC situation, consider the Mack truck. It has wheels like your Chevrolet, it has a steering wheel like your Chevy, gas and brake pedals are basically in the same place, but dammit, it uses that harder-to-find DIESEL fuel!! Why the hell can’t a Mack truck be compatible with the vast majority of road vehicles? Well…because the engine does its fuel-burning thing in a fundamentally different way, that’s why.
The Macintosh computer is not merely good hardware that just happens for some silly proprietary reason to run an OS different from and incompatible with what everyone else uses, it is different hardware altogether. The CPU and all of the supporting chips such as those that control ports and drives and memory management are not latter-day versions of the original IBM Personal Computer and its overall architecture; it performs many of the same functions, often in roughly similar ways, but everywhere you look there are differences that are not easily reconciled.
I am not enough of a low-level operations kind of geek to give you totally accurate and/or highly detailed examples of the differences, but there are things like the PC doing several different types of activity on the same channel and relying on a request for attention in order for that process to get hardware-system attention, whereas the Mac’s activities flag themselves so that they are recognized amidst the noise and chaos of other processes by the intended recipient of the signal, so that certain types of interrupt requests are unnecessary; and there are things like the way that the processing unit picks up a block of bytes for processing and, if PC, assumes the starting point is on this end, but, if a Mac, thinks of the starting point as being on the other end, sort of akin to right-to-left languages like Hebrew being compared to left-to-right languages like Spanish (got a good word processor that will let you type both languages in the same document?); and the CPU’s themselves expect a certain instruction language for upper-level programming such as the operating system and the other software that runs within it. The PC still uses what is essentially the 386 instruction set with MMX and a few other expanded instructions; the CPU’s themselves are highly specialized little engines that tear apart those instructions and break them up into more digestible parts of equal length and pops them into an instruction pipeline in the order that it thinks it will need them. The Mac uses a vastly different instruction set which is essentially the IBM POWER instructions with AltiVec and various refinements that have occurred during the development of the PowerPC chip.
So what would have to occur in order for the Mac to ‘become compatible’? It would have to be able to process the modern x86 instruction set. To do so in hardware, in the CPU chip itself, would add a huge overhead to the G4 PowerPC chip (kind of like building a high-performance gasoline engine INSIDE your Mack truck’s diesel engine so it could burn gasoline as easily as diesel fuel). To do so in software is less intimidating, design-wise; in fact, the Mac OS already emulates another CPU’s instruction set as part of what it does: the older Macs were built on the 68000-series Motorola processor, and the PowerPC Macs can run the programs designed for the older Macs by running them in transparent emulation. Emulating the 486 or the Pentium in software is a bit more difficult due to messier dissimilarities between PPC and Intel x86 versus PPC and Motorola 68K-series, but definitely doable.
But suppose you’ve got that much, and your Mac is interpreting the x86 instructions when you tell it to open and read PC executable code–what is that code telling your Mac to do? “Yo, Mac, check for interrupt requests from the parallel port, and would you mind sticking this here set of data into your {PC-architecture-specific} chunk of reserved memory for later use?” It is as if you had translated printed Chinese into phonetically rendered syllables using the Roman alphabet common to European language, and now you can pronounce what you see on the page, but can you read it? The Chinese restaurant up the street does that on its menu: I can order Chow Har Kew, it says so (and presumably the Chinese characters also are pronounced “Chow Har Kew” if one can read Chinese characters), but since I don’t know Chinese I don’t know what the phrase “chow har kew” MEANS just because I can now pronounce it.
So in addition to interpreting the x86 instructions, we’d need to make some kind of map of equivalent meanings and hire a translator to sit in there and read off the x86 instructions which assume an Intel-standard architecture and tell the Mac hardware environment “Check for I/O activity indicating the presence of a device and hold this here set of data in your {Mac-architecture-specific} memory address range for later use, OK?”
If the code in question is a a software program–and that’s the whole purpose of compatibility, to be able to run PC programs, right–we have the additional level of Windows. You open Access or AutoCAD and it expects to be able to say “OK, I need a document window, so do the built-in Microsoft Windows draw-a-window thing with the following {MS Windows-specific} window-description parameters”. So even if your Mac can interpret x86 code and parse its hardware instructions and convert them to equivalent Mac-hardware-appropriate instructions, it also needs to take Windows-specific instructions and either map each of them to a MacOS-equivalent instruction or else (far easier; why reinvent so many wheels?) simply run Windows as a process within the MacOS environment
Here is a good article on how Connectix build Virtual PC, an excellent implementation of such a strategy:
So in that sense the Mac is already compatible. It could become more compatible in an illusory sense if Apple were to buy VirtualPC from Connectix or write their own emulator and embed it invisibly in the Mac OS along with some interface tricks so that PC executables would APPEAR to be running as Mac programs when in fact they were running in a copy of Microsoft Windows in which the Windows desktop was hidden and on top of the interface elements of which a Macintosh “skin” was grafted to keep the environment consistent. But you’d probably take more of a speed hit.
The existing solution is by no means unworkable. Put VPC on your Mac and you have a hell of a lot of compatibility; you run native PPC Mac programs fast, you run old legacy 68K Mac programs slower in emulation in a Mac environment, and you run PC programs by emulating a PC environment and running them in Windows (or for that matter DOS, OS/2, NT Server, or whatever other PC OS you want to run) also somewhat slower. Get a fast enough Mac and you have an adequately fast-enough PC in emulation. (Besides which, when you catch a PC virus you’ve only lost a virtual environment you have to reinstall).
For a while, a couple of vendors (Orange Micro in particular) were selling an entire PC chipset on a card that you put in your Mac. This did not emulate a PC but literally put an entire second computer’s chips in your Mac (with some kludges to let it borrow your Mac’s video circuitry, use a virtual hard drive, and use the Mac mouse and keyboard). That didn’t compete well because four years after you buy your emulation software, you move it to a faster Mac and have a faster PC as well, whereas four years after you buy your much more expensive PC-on-a-card, you have two out-of-date machines to upgrade.
The only other alternative would be to make the Mac PC-compatible by making it Mac-INCOMPATIBLE. Why the hell would Apple want to do that?
No offense, but what the fuck are you talking about? Mack trucks? ATMs?
From what I can gather from that horridly-long post is that you think that Apple can either be compatible with their software, or compatible with all other software (based mostly on your last sentence). Here’s why that’s utterly ridiculous:
The latter would be preferable, as the products made for the Mac are in the minority, take longer to put on the market, and generally cost more.
They’ve already begun integrating their systems to be more compatible with PC/Windows-based software, while at the same time remaining compatible with their own software, showing your statement (and, as far as can be discerned, your entire post) to be FUBAR.
In short, your post would have had more accuracy if you had posted a listing of John Tesh songs.
I understood what AHunter wrote. (Well, most of it - I am not much of a techie.) And I understood the analogy between Mac Trucks, diesel fuel, and the like. I appreciated AHunter going to the trouble of explaining it (thanks AHunter.)
I think Apple has made great strides to be “compatable” but there is only so far it can go. Because it is a different kind of computer, and that is why many people want to use it. Just like some people want to use a diesel car, instead of a car that burns regular gas. There are good reasons for wanting one type of machine over the other.
A Windows emulator is a great thing on the Mac. Though, I don’t need one, since I use my Mac and PC side-by-side. Sure, there are programs that are only available for Windows (Paint Shop Pro, HomeSite, etc. etc.) but usually the top-notch programs are developed for Mac. Besides, do we really need a kajillion different word processing programs, or umpteen graphics programs? A lot of these Windows programs that competing for the market are crappy. I know, I have tried a lot of them out. And messed up my registry in the process. (No, I’m not saying that it isn’t nice to have a lot more to choose from!) But Mac users will tell you that they have all they need in the way of word processing applications, graphics applications, etc. etc., for the Mac.
The problem with Apple isn’t just its incompatibility with software, it’s incompatible with hardware, as well. Yet hard drives are basically the same on both sides, RAM is basically the same on both sides, CD-ROM drive, DVD, monitors, sound and video cards…
Is there any reason why Apple’s motherboards and processors can only use Apple hard drives and CD-ROM drives, while all products for PC/Windows systems are, for the most part, interchangeable?
They are different kinds of machines. You can’t expect a diesel car to run regular unleaded, can you?
For the record, I believe the latest Macs can use standard PC hard drives, and I’m not sure, but I think they can use standard PC-100 RAM too. (But I’m not sure.) As far as motherboards and processors go - THEY ARE DIFFERENT KINDS OF MACHINES. The Mac G3/G4 processor is vastly different from an Intel or AMD processor. But I am not enough of a techie to explain it to you. AHunter is far more qualified!
Not as different as diesel fuel is from unleaded, which is why the analogy in this case just doesn’t work. The difference is, surprise, in the processor architecture, allowing the G4 to make more calculations per second. However, the architecture of the Pentium chips and the Athlon chips and the Cyrex chips and the Celeron chips and the Duron chips are all different, yet they all work with the same products on the market (for the most part).
The point is that Apple has refrained from conforming (bad for individuals to do, good for corporations to do) to the marketplace for so long that it’s now incredibly difficult for them to do it now. But they are doing it (fortunately). My original beef was with this:
…which implies that it’s not Apple’s fault that their products are incompatible with the majority of the market.
