Apple-Sauce – And Other Computing Cheek

Comments on Mac OS X that I entirely agree with:
“I feel as if a loyal and loving partner of 16 years with whom I have shared a great deal of pleasure and adventure, worked through some difficult times and established a great relationship, has been kidnapped and replaced by an arrogant, patronizing, unsympathetic, tyrannical sex goddess.”
Alf Megson, MacFormat Nr. 104 (June 2001), p. 128
“Well, I thought I’d see what Apple’s new generation operating system was like, so I installed it [...] and had a play. And I have to say that I don’t like it. [...] The reason I liked Macs was that you could comprehend such things as Control Panels, Extensions and Preferences folders. Everything seemed to make sense, unlike DOS or Windows, where everything seemed to be written in an alien language. And this is where we seem to have gone with OS X.”
Philip C. Tyler, MacFormat Nr. 105 (July 2001), p. 128

This is Larry Harris, a professional developer, on OS X:
“The dock is over-worked. I have no idea what Apple was thinking. The dock contains the trash, running apps, minimized application windows and any favorite things to which you want access. So it’s kind of like you poured the trash, the Apple menu, the application menu and WindowShade into a big box and called it the dock. And it floats over all windows. Between what it represents (the loss of all those things it’s intended to replace) and the way it works it’s probably the most annoying thing in OS X. I’m surprised you missed the opportunity to blast Apple for the degree to which former NeXT people have influenced OS X. This is why Apple’s official position on type and creator meta-data is that they are moving away from it. NeXT didn’t have that. They didn’t have the Apple menu either, and that’s gone as well. OS X doesn’t even have a trash can on the desktop! [...]
Personally I don’t like OS X either. [...] I have it installed on an external 4 GB SCSI drive I had lying around gathering dust. I use it when I must for developing, and the rest of the time I’m very content to drop back to 9 and breathe a sigh of relief.”
And Apple does damn all to keep its most loyal work force happy:
“The docs back in the ‘Inside Macintosh’-days were verbose compared to what’s available now. For many of the toolbox calls the only official documentation says: supported in Carbon. Not even a one-line description of what the function does. So you end up living on the developer mailing lists to learn what’s really going on.”
(Email, December 2001)
“OS X is clumsy, counterintuitive and slow. All the niceties of OS 9, all those years of refinement have been trashed.”
Andrew Payne, Macworld 10/2002, p. 19

My own comment:
For 10 years I was an ardent Macintosh fan (from 1996 till 2006). I spent my nights with CodeWarrior and Resorcerer. The most stable and elegant Operating System in those days was OS 7.6.1. It was simple, snappy and lean. Its total size with all extensions was about 20 MB. (A modern Operating System weighs in around 20 GB.)
What followed in the line of OSs after the Mac went Unix was complete crap in my view. The whole system seems to be Mr. Jobs’ personal choice. The dock is an obvious reincarnation of his beloved spring-loaded folders. The animated icons may suit infantile gamers; I don’t want them. Total UI customization – a cinch so far – is impossible now. Suffixes and default locations rule.
The Unix kernel basically promises stability, but Linux has been offering that for some time. And, unlike Linux, Mac OS 10 is not Open Source. If it were, I would give it a shot because that would be a step in the right direction. I am sick and tired of proprietary stuff that one cannot get any information about.
Software developers as gods, buyers as beggars – this is fucking crazy!
Hardwarewise Apple made sure that the enslavement of the user is perfect: The new flash ROMs contain all kinds of barriers against old systems; one can only boot from the latest system CDs. The former hardware ROM was foolproof.

Snippets
Dying dotcoms, wavering software giants, fading Internet acceptance – my advice is simple: Stop patronizing the user. Start respecting your customers.

NZZ Nr. 38/2002, p. 77: “Microsoft hat Zugang zu XP-Rechnern
Microsoft [hat] im Januar in den Lizenzbestimmungen zu Windows XP einen neuen Passus eingeführt. Dieser soll dem Unternehmen erlauben, automatisch auf den PC des Benutzers zuzugreifen, um die Version der benützten Software zu prüfen [...]”

Microchips for dogs – how insane can one get?
Politicians should get microchips implanted in their butts, not our dogs.
My dog gives me pleasure because he represents nature. The very idea of turning dogs into electronic transmitters sickens me.
Does informatics stop at nothing? Can’t we just use it to better our lives? Does it have to become a tyranny?

I don’t want to interact with every goddamn toaster in my house.

“Macworld” – my morning reading. These guys are out of their fucking minds. They expect me to give up perfectly good, editable and easy-to-use software for newer software with a few extra frills (and usually a few extra flaws)!
The extra frills sound just great – until you take a closer look. In actual fact they may consist in more spying features, more activation hassles, more modification obstacles, more patronizing, more complication, more incompatibility issues, more copyright crap.
They promise you an orgasm a day, if you use that new stuff. But if you do, you end up with a nervous breakdown twice a day.