Working with files and folders
- There is no way to selectively delete files in the Trash. It's either all or nothing
- When opening folders in the Dock, there is no way to manipulate them in any way (i.e. dragging them out, calling up a right click context menu) except opening them. You need to open the folder in Finder to do anything useful with it
- In Finder, each window can only work with one drive at a time, complicating inter-drive file management (in Windows you can use tree view to copy files from folder foo in C Drive to folder bar in D drive)
- When dragging files into folders, you must drop them over the name of the folder. If the folder is expanded and you drag the files onto the list of files in the folder, they won't be copied
UI shortcomings
- There is no onmouseover tooltip to get information on files. You need to "Get Info" (Apple + I) which wastes time
- Confusingly, there are 2 delete keys which do slightly different things. What's in a name? That which we call a backspace key by any other name would do the same thing
- Neither delete key actually *deletes* files [Addendum: I am informed that to do this, press the Apple key at the same time]
- There is no easy way to mute the speakers from the GUI - you must slide the volume bar to the end. And yes, I know there's a mute button on the keyboard, but if you want to use this reasoning we should abolish menu and toolbar items for commands that have keyboard shortcuts
- Although Expose (what happens when you press F9-F11) is nice, it has some design flaws. For example, when you want to drag files across windows, you'd expect dragging and dropping a file over an Expose thumbnail of the other window (e.g. to move the file into it) to have the same effect as doing the same to the window itself, but doing this just opens the window in question. You need to wait for the window to open after hovering over its thumbnail - which wastes precious seconds
- When you select items in a list and want to drag them elsewhere, you must click on either the first or less of the items to be selected, or your selection may be lost and the list item you clicked selected
Crappy applications
- The 'Preview' application is horrible. The 'next' and 'previous' buttons don't advance or backtrack among files in the folder in question. Instead, you need to drag the files you want to view into the sidebar (and sometimes they inexplicably refuse to be dragged in)
- Safari doesn't search inside text boxes
Hardware issues
- The eject button on the keyboard doesn't always work (eg when the system is slow or has hung), and since there's no hardware override you're screwed if it doesn't work for some reason. I have no idea what happens if you have more than one CD/DVD drive
- Even the power cables are proprietary (inexplicable response: "better cool proprietary than plain shit!" - ???)
Crashes
The BSOD exists on the Mac too!
- The Mac's Grey Screen of Death is only slightly less annoying than the Blue Screen of Death. And as usual, much attention is paid to aesthetics, as the grey curtain slides elegantly down - which just makes the crash more irritating
- Mac crashed on me more often than Vista, even though I was using either programs which come with the OS or Final Cut Pro (commercial software from Apple) (i.e. presumably more stable programs), as opposed to freeware from various small companies/open source nightlies on my Vista rig
External hard drives
- If you plug in an NTFS-formatted external hard drive that has not been disconnected from a PC properly, MacOS chokes up and is unable to read it until you use a PC to reconnect and then properly eject the external hard drive. If I need a PC to ensure that I can use my external hard drive with my Mac, why don't I just junk the Mac and use only the PC?
- When I tried to copy files from an external hard drive, the operation failed with an extremely informative message: "There is a problem with the file and it cannot be copied". Gee, thanks
- When you copy files across drives, it doesn't copy the file dates properly: "date created" is empty and "date modified" and "date last opened" are set to the copy time, rather than that of the original files
- When you select files and press Apple + I to get information on them, it doesn't tell you both the size of the files and the size of the files on the disk (I forgot which one it omits), making it hard to work with disks formatted differently (e.g. NTFS and FAT32, or NTFS disks with different cluster sizes)
Final Cut Pro
- When the program is open and I try to overwrite a closed project, it insists that the project is in use
- While Microsoft Office has many quirks and eccentricities seemingly inserted to drive users bonkers, so does Final Cut Pro
- The export function is very broken. I tried WMV and only 30s of footage got exported. It couldn't even deal with simple uncompressed AVI, giving me a 11gb unplayable AVI
- Estimated time remaining and the progress bar are extremely inaccurate. A task can jump from 52% complete to done.
There were a few saving graces (but hardly enough to outweigh the problems):
- USB ports on keyboard
- Volume control on keyboard
- It is easy to eject thumbdrives and the like from the Finder and see when you can take them out from the Desktop
- Built-in screenshot-taking