My annoyances with Mac.

Recently I built a Hackintosh. Wasn't all that difficult. I had a spare Intel machine and Mac OS X costs only $30. (You hear that Micro$oft?) After a couple of days of downloading various Linux distros used to install Mac on a PC I found the right one. I got annoyed.

My mouse has a back button on it. Instead of moving the cursor to the back button on whatever explorer or browser window. Or even just hitting the backspace key. I just tap the back button on the mouse with my thumb. Not with Mac. Hell, XP has had this feature for 10 years.

Closing programs is a hassle. Even in Windows the most you do is hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete if a program hangs up. In rare cases hold the power button. (A few time I actually had to unplug the power cord.) Mac on the other hand. Hit the red button, Itunes keeps playing. Do what? You have to click on the menu and then click quit Itunes?

This isn't the result of the vulgarities of a Hackintosh. I went to an Apple store to fact check this. I even went into preferences menu to find the check box that says to quit a program when the big red button is pressed, not there.

Even Microsoft is falling for this. Adding in all kinds of extra steps to everything. Ctrl-Alt-Delete now has an extra step to it.

This one isn't a Mac annoyance, but it's Apple's fault, mostly. You know Quicktime? I'm sure we all do. I have it just because. On some random sites that I download podcasts from, instead of just opening up the download manager, out poops Quicktime. Adding all kinds of extra steps to listen to listen to my favorite bunches of goof. It's not all Apple's fault. Sometimes it's the web designer, and of course Firefox which doesn't make it easy to calibrate that damn Quicktime plug-in.