Macommunism
Friday, May 29, 2009
Macs. Macintoshes. Apples. These words mean more than just trucks, noodles and cheese, raincoats, and braeburns. They’re synonymous with video, photo, page layout and a variety of other content manipulation software. For me, however, they’re synonymous with something else. They’re synonymous with suck. All year I have had to deal with these insufferable machines, calling in experts to fix their problems. Proprietary hardware designed by the “experts” at Mac that overheats. Frequent crashes, user-control access issues: inDesign files created on one Mac are locked from all other Macs, something like at least once an hour we need to reset the access rights on all of the Macs just to get them to talk to each other. To this day these Macs up here at The Commuter don’t work right. There is a culture that surrounds Macs, a culture of elitism and mystique. They have their own special stores, they’re own special “Mac people.” I call these people communists. Or, more aptly, Macommunists. The world of the Macintosh is entirely proprietary. If it were not for Linux kernels running on PPC and CISC architecture, the platform would be as locked-in and specific as your average gaming console. Microsoft at one point owned a lot of shares of Apple Computing, Inc. However, their estimated ownership now is 0.04%. Links to Apple software can be found on www.microsoft.com. My biggest issue with Macs is the software. A majority of Mac software needs to be found on www.apple.com/downloads, because there’s a dearth of third-party developer and end-user created applications. Apple has gone out of it’s way to find whatever software is available and put it on their “Apple” menu in easy access available in Finder. Ask any Mac user what games they’re playing. There are two answers: “World of Warcraft” and “Photoshop.” My second biggest complaint is OSX. Yes, you can actually put your Mac to good work now with a fancy command-line interface thanks in part to Unix. But versions of OSX don’t play well with each other. Software made for OSX 10.3 often doesn’t work on OSX 10.4. Because OSX 10.5 is so vastly different than OSX 10.4, software is developed for OSX 10.5 exclusively. Yay! There seems to be no effort put into backwards or forwards compatibility either in OSX or by the smattering of people who actually develop software for Macs. And what the hell is up with iMacs? It’s like an overpriced laptop that you can’t take with you. Why are Macs so expensive these days, anyway? For the same amount of processing power you seem to pay double what you’d pay for a PC. Meaning you can get double the PC for the same price as a Mac. I am not entirely convinced that Macs perform better for photo or video editing to begin with. With a Quad-Core CPU, 4 GB of RAM on a 64-bit OS utilizing either Windows or Linux, all editing software I’ve used performs amazingly. The same cannot be said for any Mac I’ve ever used, even with the Dual-Core Intel CPUs we have up here in the office, they seem to struggle when multitasking even four programs and take a freakin’ decade to load Photoshop and inDesign. Another thing with Macs, they seem to lack any multi-tasking end-user effeciency in the form of keyboard shortcuts and the cumbersome interface is awkward and slow to navigate. I always kept my distance from Macs. And this last year at The Commuter has done nothing but make me hate them: questionable machines. I think I’ll save some money and stick with *Nix.
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