Why do people think OSX is so great?

[NathanE]

My 13" Retina MBP will happily let me browse the web in Safari for 9 hours on the battery. I don't use Chrome on the Mac because it's a badly coded piece of junk, fortunately the OS publicly shames applications that are eating up resources to hopefully convince the developers to do a better job. The reason you're having issues with Chrome is because it's Chrome, not because developers aren't allowed to make apps that can efficiently use the hardware they are running on.

Not being funny but Chrome uses WebKit, no? Same as Safari. And Chrome works fine on Windows.

Google's ability to write software in general is reasonably bad - Google Drive on Windows has a bug in it that leaves a 40MB folder in Temp every time someone logs in if they didn't shut Google Drive down before logging off (who does this?), and then it sits there preventing the machine from shutting down until Windows forcefully kills it before it can delete the garbage it created at login.

Yup. On that note, why doesn't OSX support the ability to timeout and kill apps which are holding up a shutdown or restart? So annoying.

A lot of your issues sound like you have faulty hardware or are just personal preference issues. Resizing windows works exactly the same in Mac OS as it does in Windows - drag from any corner or edge.

Faulty hardware? Realllyy? Come on dude... This is a brand new machine. I spec'd it out to 16GB and 500GB SSD. It came direct from the China factory since it was a custom build. It's not been sat on a shop shelf for months. If it was bad RAM or something then I'd be seeing far more crashes and segfaults as well.

I think the issue with window resizing is that the windows don't seem to have any visible edging chrome, which means there is literally a pixel or two of which you mouse cursor must be precisely over before it offers the resize cursor. It's not a major issue no, but you would have thought Apple, the masters of UX, would have sorted these fundamentals out by now?

I don't really do enough in Finder to run into any of the limitations that other people seem to have with it. If I need to move large volumes of data around I will use rsync.

Fair enough.

I think you'd have had a better response by posing your questions as questions though, rather than dropping a "OS X isn't as good as Windows" thread into the Apple forum.

Maybe. Response has been pretty good though. I thought I was going nuts but seems not as a couple people have said they've experienced similar issues.

The keyboard layout being different to Windows is exactly that, a difference. It's not broken. You can connect a Windows keyboard if you want and use that, just pick the "British - PC" layout.

You've misunderstood. I have a PC keyboard hooked up by USB, and I've set it to use the British PC layout and yes 90% of the keys work as expected but the ones I highlighted do not. There is no possible explanation for this other than: bug.

The OS X equivalent of the notification area is the notification area that can be invoked by two finger dragging in from the right of the trackpad. This is far superior to anything that Windows has. The icons next to the clock can often be removed by holding down Cmd and dragging the icon out of the menu bar. If they can't be dragged out and there is no option in the application that put them there to disable the icon then feed that back to the developer.

I can't seem to get this to work? The two finger drag from right?
The area I'm talking about is left of the clock, next to all the WiFi and Volume stuff. It's currently full of Dropbox, Chrome, VMware, Skype, Time Machine and Bluetooth icons. I only use one of them; see the problem here?

I am a lot more productive in OS X than I am on Windows, hence why I buy Macs.

I'm not saying you aren't. I like my machine but if I could resolve some of these issues I would like it more.




This evening I had a new problem. My keyboard and touchpad stopped responding to all input. Had to hard-poweroff in the end. Not good. Seems it is a known issue but one which was supposedly fixed with a EFI update. Well, I assume I've got that update since it's not showing up as available to me on the App Store Updates. So looks like another OS bug for the list. FWIW I had just plugged in my phone to charge it via USB...

 

[Hxc]

I don't believe that two finger drag thing is true. It certainly does not work for me, you have to go into options and turn off the icons. Dropbox/Google drive do not have this option, you need to use Bartender or the like, annoyingly.

I am more productive in OSX than in Windows now, but never in a vanilla osx install; I 100% need to install SoundBunny, BetterSnapTool, Hyperdock and Bartender. All of which add functionality that should already (perhaps bar Hyperdock) exist in OSX.

 

[Caged]

Not being funny but Chrome uses WebKit, no? Same as Safari. And Chrome works fine on Windows.


Yup. On that note, why doesn't OSX support the ability to timeout and kill apps which are holding up a shutdown or restart? So annoying.


Faulty hardware? Realllyy? Come on dude... This is a brand new machine. I spec'd it out to 16GB and 500GB SSD. It came direct from the China factory since it was a custom build. It's not been sat on a shop shelf for months. If it was bad RAM or something then I'd be seeing far more crashes and segfaults as well.

I think the issue with window resizing is that the windows don't seem to have any visible edging chrome, which means there is literally a pixel or two of which you mouse cursor must be precisely over before it offers the resize cursor. It's not a major issue no, but you would have thought Apple, the masters of UX, would have sorted these fundamentals out by now?

Fair enough.


Maybe. Response has been pretty good though. I thought I was going nuts but seems not as a couple people have said they've experienced similar issues.

You've misunderstood. I have a PC keyboard hooked up by USB, and I've set it to use the British PC layout and yes 90% of the keys work as expected but the ones I highlighted do not. There is no possible explanation for this other than: bug.


I can't seem to get this to work? The two finger drag from right?
The area I'm talking about is left of the clock, next to all the WiFi and Volume stuff. It's currently full of Dropbox, Chrome, VMware, Skype, Time Machine and Bluetooth icons. I only use one of them; see the problem here?


I'm not saying you aren't. I like my machine but if I could resolve some of these issues I would like it more.




This evening I had a new problem. My keyboard and touchpad stopped responding to all input. Had to hard-poweroff in the end. Not good. Seems it is a known issue but one which was supposedly fixed with a EFI update. Well, I assume I've got that update since it's not showing up as available to me on the App Store Updates. So looks like another OS bug for the list. FWIW I had just plugged in my phone to charge it via USB...

Wow that was detailed. Yes Chrome uses webkit, but that doesn't really prove anything. Chrome used to constantly kick machines with dual GPUs over to the more powerful one and leave them there until it was closed, it's not a well polished piece of software.

Just because it's new doesn't mean it can't have a problem. Honestly a Mac with an SSD doesn't/shouldn't beachball to the extent you are describing. Hence why I suggested it might be hardware.

Home/End mean different things on a Mac to Windows, that's not a bug, that's a difference. Start and end of lines is Cmd+left or right arrow. I've just plugged a Dell keyboard into my MacBook Pro and backtick, tilde etc. are all mapped perfectly.

To get the notifications up drag left from off of the right hand side of the trackpad with two fingers. To get the icons off the menu bar hold Cmd and click and drag (or tap and drag or however you've set the trackpad up to do a drag) them off. Time Machine comes off this way, every single Apple-related icon can be removed in this way. Some third party apps don't do this, but as said Bartender will take care of them.

 

[D.P.]

I'm with you on this.

Osx is pretty dire overall, it has one saving grace which is a proper BSD back end so I can use a terminal to get work done. The lack of which in window makes it windows utterly useless dog excrement for actual work so OSX needs to be commended for that.

But it is silly that a supposedly easy OS ends up forcing you to do everything through the terminal if you want any control. As you said, the file manager is worse than windows 3.1 and is basically useless and can be uninstantalled. I hate doing file management in a windows most of the time which is why I never touch windows but at least in windows it is relatively easy. I had an issue the other day when I wanted to sort files by types but I had my baby in one hand and thought I could do it with the mouse one handed. Complete failure of an OS, I had to spend several minutes on google searching for proper file sorting. I can't remember the bizarre procedure involved. It's default sort is by categories, so JPEG and pigs would mix together rather than giving a list of jpgs then a list of pngs.

And that is just one example of an uncountable set where OSX just is insanely backwards. I wanted to then view a slide show of some images and this again involved having to use google to find a solution. So it turns out you have to select all the photos and press some odd keyboard combination like space + control + shift or command or some such. This is just so typically of OSX, you want to do something simply and you end up with some key combination of 5 keys which require 3 hands or discolcated fingers when on any other OS it is just a right mouse click or press the delete key.


Then there is the stability issues, it makes windows seem like a dream which is saying something. And the memory usage is through the roof.



It's a damn shame because I would love for it to work. I typically use Linux for anything serious but sometimes have to use windows for things like lightroom, or for gaming. People try to sell OSX as an optimal combination of the best parts of windows and unix. It's not, it's an awkward combination of most of the worst parts of each but with a mostly usable terminal thrown in to keep you sane. There are more or less as many software issues as Linux (I still have to have windows for several software packages, even design related stuff, as well as gaming) and the terminal and BSD core is not as convient as Linux.


Basically windows plus Linux dual boot is a far better setup than OSX, which is pretty much how I use my iMac 90% of the time!

 

[D.P.]

Not being funny but Chrome uses WebKit, no? Same as Safari. And Chrome works fine on Windows.


Yup. On that note, why doesn't OSX support the ability to timeout and kill apps which are holding up a shutdown or restart? So annoying.


Faulty hardware? Realllyy? Come on dude... This is a brand new machine. I spec'd it out to 16GB and 500GB SSD. It came direct from the China factory since it was a custom build. It's not been sat on a shop shelf for months. If it was bad RAM or something then I'd be seeing far more crashes and segfaults as well.

I think the issue with window resizing is that the windows don't seem to have any visible edging chrome, which means there is literally a pixel or two of which you mouse cursor must be precisely over before it offers the resize cursor. It's not a major issue no, but you would have thought Apple, the masters of UX, would have sorted these fundamentals out by now?

Fair enough.


Maybe. Response has been pretty good though. I thought I was going nuts but seems not as a couple people have said they've experienced similar issues.

You've misunderstood. I have a PC keyboard hooked up by USB, and I've set it to use the British PC layout and yes 90% of the keys work as expected but the ones I highlighted do not. There is no possible explanation for this other than: bug.


I can't seem to get this to work? The two finger drag from right?
The area I'm talking about is left of the clock, next to all the WiFi and Volume stuff. It's currently full of Dropbox, Chrome, VMware, Skype, Time Machine and Bluetooth icons. I only use one of them; see the problem here?


I'm not saying you aren't. I like my machine but if I could resolve some of these issues I would like it more.




This evening I had a new problem. My keyboard and touchpad stopped responding to all input. Had to hard-poweroff in the end. Not good. Seems it is a known issue but one which was supposedly fixed with a EFI update. Well, I assume I've got that update since it's not showing up as available to me on the App Store Updates. So looks like another OS bug for the list. FWIW I had just plugged in my phone to charge it via USB...

There is a USB driver issue with OSX. I've had it a few times when plugging I a. USB device the keyboard and mouse stops working and I have to hit the power button.

 

[D.P.]

Thank you for that. I was beginning to think I was going nuts and being too picky.

I should probably clarify that the "multi coloured spinny orb" thing isn't every day. It's more like maybe once a week and doesn't usually last more than 5 seconds. But last night was very annoying where the whole machine froze hard whilst doing the spinny orb. I had just got home and found the machine in that state...

I also get the spinning orb once or twice a week, normally goes within 5-10 seconds. It once in a while will require a reboot.

Something that made this way worse was leaving an external HD connection. Some applications would pause for 5 seconds waiting for the external disc to turn on even when they had nothing to do with file IO but of course the Finder was the the worst. Which is another damn shame because I like time machine but if I have to manually plug in and out the external drive to stop 5 second waits then it is useless and I will just do the backups myself.

 

[Blackhawk47]

Yup. On that note, why doesn't OSX support the ability to timeout and kill apps which are holding up a shutdown or restart? So annoying.

Come off it. You can force quit applications that are not responding or crashed quite easily through finder.

I would say half the things you have listed in this thread is down to user error or just not knowing how to do certain tasks. It's fair enough, even I google stuff from time to time, the same goes for windows.

 

[Hxc]

Come off it. You can force quit applications that are not responding or crashed quite easily through finder.

That is not the same as auto prompting on shut down. It requires interaction, as opposed to the Windows method where it informs you and then allows you to force it closed there and then.

Gotta agree about the slide show; having to select all the images you want in, before pressing option+space is weird and much worse than the Windows image viewer method of opening one and being able to go through all within the folder.

Sorting by file type is again unintuitive.

Whilst some of the comments made are personal preference problems, the awkward usability of some parts of OSX are very much reality, and this comes from someone who uses OSX as their primary OS, and plans to for the future.

 

[barnettgs]

Got to agree on a few things, Windows Explorer is easily the superior if handling with large number of files, although Mac OS X has a few nice features such as colour tags.

However, the reason I got my first and current Macbook Pro in 2007 was that Mac OS X is very easy on eyes with any monitor. Because I was on the screen for hours every day so it was very important to me that the screen is not hard on my eyes.

I had old PC with 19" TFT - the texts are blurry so I upgraded to much higher resolution Dell 2007WFP which is 1680x1050 but the problem was the texts were so tiny! Increase the DPI, many applications even Window's own UI look out of the place! Lower the resolution, it becomes blurry and fuzzy! No win.

In the end, I decided that Windows does a poor job of scaling on the monitor even to this day and I had to get Mac for this reason. Connect MacBook Pro to the Dell monitor, the text is a bit small so changed the resolution to 1280x800, it still look great and clean which is something Windows is still poor at.

Again Mac OS X isn't brilliant apart from the screen scaling and even Linux is as good with scaling the screen, unlike Windows.

 

[Caged]

Just to put things in perspective here, I recently discovered that Windows 8 requires you to use the command line to set the priority of wireless networks, so if you decide that you'd rather connect to your own office Wi-Fi instead of The Cloud, well, tough. This isn't some strange niche requirement, this is Wi-Fi networks, and setting their preference in the year of our lord 2014 requires typing commands into a prompt.

This was an option that was exposed in the UI of Windows 7. So yes, while Mac OS has some quirks that the seasoned Windows user might find irritating, some of the design decisions Microsoft have made recently are utterly ridiculous.

 

[flying grouse]

Not completely true for win 8 wi-fi. You can open Networks pane and Hold & Release on connection you want to update.
The context menu options will let you Forget this Network and you can choose another

There is also connection properties for any network you have joined from the same menu, and you can change the network security key

You can use Cmd prompt for more in depth changes to network properties

 

[Logsi]

Not really read any replies yet but it properly sounds like your machine is dodgy.

You have an SSD in there and it shouldn't ever beach ball. The main culprit of beach balling is paging. How much RAM do you have in the machine and do you have a virtual machine up whilst it does it? 8GB is really the bare minimum in my opinion and even more so if you have a VM running.

Being the IT guy at work and also a Apple Certified Technical Coordinator, I find most annoyances people have with using a Mac are their own ignorance.

EDIT - Seen 16GB.

 

[Caged]

Not completely true for win 8 wi-fi. You can open Networks pane and Hold & Release on connection you want to update.
The context menu options will let you Forget this Network and you can choose another

There is also connection properties for any network you have joined from the same menu, and you can change the network security key

You can use Cmd prompt for changing Security only if required

None of those are related to changing the preference order.

 

[Logsi]

Get BetterSnapTool for quick snap window resizing like windows. That's a godsend.

I can't say I ever have any external monitor problems and I use a MacBook Air at work.

Have you tried repairing permissions in Disk Utility?

 

[flying grouse]

Just to put things in perspective here, I recently discovered that Windows 8 requires you to use the command line to set the priority of wireless networks, so if you decide that you'd rather connect to your own office Wi-Fi instead of The Cloud, well, tough. This isn't some strange niche requirement, this is Wi-Fi networks, and setting their preference in the year of our lord 2014 requires typing commands into a prompt.

This was an option that was exposed in the UI of Windows 7. So yes, while Mac OS has some quirks that the seasoned Windows user might find irritating, some of the design decisions Microsoft have made recently are utterly ridiculous.

True, but from quote above "deciding to connect to your own office wi-fi instead of cloud, well tough...............
You can choose Forget this Network, then choose another you can join again later, admittedly you need wep key again

I agree this is not setting priority but you can change networks

 

[Logsi]

I've never understood the hatred for finder. It does everything I want at home and at work.

Not sure I get why one would complain about sorting. It's pretty simple...

Click on here


Option click that for secondary sorting


Right click here


Or even right click, show view options

 

[Caged]

Excellent, so every time I want to use a public hotspot I need to find it and re-connect, I can't just have it connect in the absence of other networks by setting it to the lowest priority.

It's a setting that existed in the UI in Windows 7, removing it is indefensible.

 

[Logsi]

* The close/minimise/maximise buttons don't work in a consistent fashion across applications.

Which applications would the red button not close the window?

The only application where minimise wouldn't work correctly for me is Photoshop and that is due to using the CMD+M shortcut. The button works.

The green button is not a maximise button.

* The aforementioned buttons cannot be resized, not even as an Accessibility option, and the immutable size Apple has chosen for them is not particularly user friendly; they are incredibly small. That's the first thing my (retired) mum commented on when she had a go on my machine so I'm not just making stuff up.

It is personal preference to use the buttons but using shortcuts is a hell of a lot quicker. CMD+W to close, CMD+Q to quit application, CMD+M to minimise.

* Resizing windows is more difficult than it needs to be.

You could tick the option to always show scroll bars and it makes the area larger.

* The built-in firewall was not enabled by default. Seriously Apple?

I questioned this in a 10.9 Support/Servers course and they just said it wasn't necessary due to most routers having firewalls...i don't buy it and have mine turned on with stealth enabled.

* Battery usage is appalling compared to Windows. Even my previous non-Haswell HP EliteBook had better battery life. Apparently if you use a non-Safari web browser the OS is too rubbish to schedule threads appropriately in a fashion that doesn't rinse the battery. I am led to assume that Safari contains "hacks" to work around OS design flaws but Apple has not disclosed these to the likes of Chrome?

Is this with a virtual machine going?

I get 12-13 hours out of my MacBook pro. I did used to get 9-10 hours but that was from a migrated install that stemmed back from 2008. Maybe try a fresh install.

Also, flash is terrible on OS X, as is silverlight.

* The Activity Monitor tool reveals that OSX is using around 5-8% of CPU time constantly. Some "kernel_task" and "WindowsServer" processes are the main culprits. And that's from a fresh boot; once given some time for the machine to settle down.

That doesn't doesn't right. I currently have Activity Monitor open and the kernel task is nowhere to be seen when sorting by CPU usage. WindowServer and Kernel are fluctuating between 0.0-1% over here.

* The OSX equivalent of the "Windows notification area" does not collapse so when you have installed enough applications it just dominates your menu bar with lots of rarely used "junk" icons.

Yep, this is bad. I CMD drag them all away so i just have the time. I don't need anything else as it all just works!

* The "British PC Keyboard" input mapping is broken. Most notably the back tick and backslash keys are not mapped to the correct symbols. Home/End keys also don't really respond normally.

Get a Mac keyboard for your mac.

* "Finder" is like using Explorer on Windows 95. It is diabolically rubbish. Simple file and folder management tasks become massive chores. To such an extent I have several times just reverted to using my Windows VM to, you know, "get **** done".

As said above, i don't understand this. What sort of things do you need it to do, i may be able to help. Have you set to column view? If you have, remember that option and dragging the columns changes the spaces evenly among all and saves the width. Always showing scroll bars can help here to make the area larger.

* Sometimes when I have disconnected an external monitor, all of the windows/workspaces that were left on that monitor prior to disconnection will seemingly remain on that monitor. The windows/workspaces do not show up on Mission Control. The only way to recover the lost windows/workspaces is to either reboot the OS entirely or plug the monitor back in. This has happened maybe about 4 times now.

Also mentioned above. Never had any problems with my Air so I can't help. Have you tried setting the configuration in System Preferences?

Dragged the white task bar to each monitor and see if that changes it's behaviour?

* Sometimes you get a "multi coloured spinny orb" mouse cursor. When this is shown the machine effectively becomes unusable until the annoying orb has disappeared. I assume there is some background operation occurring that is so damn important that the system wants to stop you doing anything else. In 16-bit Windows such as 3.11 this was called the "global lock" and it was really annoying even back then. So it is surprising that a supposedly modern OS still suffers from a fundamental flaw in its design like this.

* Further to that, last night I encountered the darker more evil twin of the "multi coloured spinny orb" mouse cursor which I shall call "multi coloured non-spinny orb of death" mouse cursor. Because the machine froze hard and even after 10 minutes of waiting was still unresponsive; couldn't even move the mouse cursor and the cursor was not its animated spinny usual self. This "freeze" alone is enough to put OSX back over 15 years in my mind because I simply cannot remember having a software-induced freeze like that since like Windows ME!

Your computer shouldn't be doing this. This sounds like dodgy software hanging or a lot of paging going on. Have you got an external hard drive connected that you're getting a lot of data from?

Have you checked Activity Monitor for this;



Sorry to go through all this again after making a few replies. Just thought i may be able to share some knowledge. Some of the best tips are;

• Don't use like a Windows PC
• CMD and Option are amazing Modifiers
• Shortcuts are your friend! CMD=CTRL

EDIT - Just to make sure. Repair your permissions and the next time a application hangs maybe check out console for some error logs and see what's causing it.

 

[Hxc]

I've never understood the hatred for finder. It does everything I want at home and at work.

Option click is not intuitive. You also cannot easily sort by Type, only Kind, which is not the same.

 

[Adrianr]

I've never understood the hatred for finder. It does everything I want at home and at work.

Not sure I get why one would complain about sorting. It's pretty simple...

Click on here


Option click that for secondary sorting


Right click here


Or even right click, show view options

I'm not sure if there is something similar for windows as I only use it for games and general non-work things, but the column view in Finder is for me the absolute ultimate in productive folder viewing/navigation/interaction. It's worth using OSX for alone IMO.