Can an operating system sue for libel?

Wow. This is the stupidest article on the Mac I have ever read.

All quotes are from Commentary: Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree.

…I bought a boat anchor that can’t view Web sites properly, is not compatible with Microsoft Word and can run only dumbed-down versions of regular software.

Well that’s your first mistake. Boat anchors will not run Mac OS X, nor Word. It will run NetBSD, however.

An actual computer running OS X can view Web sites properly, is compatible with Word, and can run regular versions of regular software (whatever that means).

I realized it was time to unload the silvery box of frustration when I had to buy a “Dummies” book on how to operate it. I’m smart; I shouldn’t need this. Aren’t Macs supposed to be intuitive and easy to learn? My mistake.

Have you heard of Google?

You know Windows because you’ve used it. No, Macs are not psychic. You will have something of a learning curve. Steve will not pop up and explain everything to you.

Take two people who have never used computers and give them a Mac and Windows and see which one they can use more readily out of the box. Comparing years of knowledge of Windows with the utter refusal to search the web for a few answers?

I pretended that I liked the one button mouse. I quickly started using click + command keys (and other keyboard shortcuts). I really missed the little scrolling wheel in the center of the mouse.

So take your scrolling wheel mouse out and connect it to the Mac. Please.

I put up with the fact that the HP printer, which I had purchased on the recommendation of an Apple Store, would work about 50 percent of the time with the Mac. I was constantly deleting print jobs and starting them over.

In 2.5 years I’e never had this happen once.

I noticed it was slow

How much RAM did you have? Macs were shipping with not enough RAM until recently. Which is, admittedly, a problem. Did you buy a Windows machine with the default amount of RAM in it?

What drove me nuts was that I would open Word for Mac and couldn’t delete files while I was in Word. There is no File | Delete option. So the documents took up space on my hard drive, until someone told me I had to find the document in Finder and then move it into the trash from there. This seemed stupid to me; I just wanted to highlight a file and tap “delete.”

Wow. Those Word documents must have taken up kilobytes of space. You’ll need a bigger hard drive soon.

Word files transferred from the Mac were missing pictures. PowerPoint files transferred from the Mac would lose their formatting. PCs and Macs are not compatible, regardless of what they say.

And yet thousands of people have been using Macs and Windows together without problems. And it’s not as if Microsoft Office is always even compatible with itself.

To do a “fast print” required clicking File, Print, find Copies & Pages, click Paper Type/Quality, click Normal and finally clicking Fast Draft. And there was no way to leave the setting as the default. I had to do it manually every time.

No you don’t. See the presets present in every print dialog:

Doing a simple screen capture was an immense chore. On a PC you just press Alt and tap PrtScr. With the Mac I had to download and launch special programs to accomplish this simple task.

Google “screen capture mac os x” and the first hit will tell you:

Mac OS X comes with built-in capability for capturing screen shots. To capture the entire screen, you can simply press Command-Shift-3.

To capture a region of the screen, press Command-Shift-4, then click and drag the cursor to mark the area you want to capture. When you lift your finger from the mouse button, Mac OS X will record that real estate and place a .pdf file on your desktop.

If you use the built in Help in OS X it will also tell you about Grab.app which comes with every Mac.

I didn’t even bother with the Mac’s iCal or Mail, which required me to buy an @mac.com address.

*cough* *cough* bull*cough*

Neither iCal nor Mail requires you to buy a .Mac address. That is absolutely and utterly false and suggests that the author did not spend any significant effort investigating Mac, but used whatever knee-jerk reaction came to him.

Instead, I went straight to Outlook for Mac.

Why on earth would you do that rather than use Entourage, which comes with Microsoft Office which you clearly had? It is highly regarded and is on par with Microsoft Outlook, and includes some features not present in the Windows version, notably the Project Manager.

A lot of the software for Mac — such as AOL for Mac OS X — was dumbed down and missing may features of the current PC versions.

Isn’t AOL dumbed down by definition? What other apps are “dumbed down”? Are there no other alternatives for those apps?

For me the killer was the Web browser. Safari simply cannot read Flash. It is, quite simply, a second-rate browser.

Bull cookies, part 2. Safari can read Flash just fine.

I even called Apple headquarters and asked when a better version would be available and was told that Apple is in no hurry to improve it.

This smells like bull cookies part 3. Apple told you they were in no hurry to improve it? Who told you that? What number did you call and who did you talk to? Because you can get a “better” version at http://nightly.webkit.org/ if you’d like.

On the suggestions of friends, I downloaded Netscape and Firefox, which were no better.

Right… Be sure to tell Asa that.

I scraped along with Internet Explorer 5.0 for Mac, and then discovered in 2006 that Microsoft would no longer support the Mac version.

Which is no loss whatsoever since they hadn’t done anything with it for years (which is sad in a way since it was, at one point, such a good browser).

You can’t do WSYWIG on Typepad (where many folks create their blogs), which you can on a PC.

One presumes you meant WYSIWYG. On Googling WYSIWYG typepad firefox the first link leads me to read that Firefox, Mozilla 1.3+, Netscape 7.1+, and Internet Explorer 5.5+ for Windows can do WYSIWYG at Typepad. It is true that Safari cannot, yet.

What is true is that you can’t get spyware installed on your computer via ActiveX on a Mac. Them’s the breaks.

I run several Web sites, all optimized for IE 5.5 or higher. I couldn’t operate my own Web sites with the Mac.

One can only conclude you design lousy website s. Try web standards, you might like them. It will be particularly interesting when IE7 or IE8 breaks all of your sites.

Then the hard drive croaked on me after only three months of owning the machine. I couldn’t tell what was going wrong and had to hire someone for $125 an hour to come over and tell me what the heck was happening.

Wow, the same thing happened to me with a Dell laptop. They must all be crap too!

Apple replaced it for free

The bastards.

but I became leery of what other hardware would fail unexpectedly.

The world is a scary place. My 2 year old TV refuses to turn on. I definitely need to go back to radio.

I let the repaired shiny Mac sit on the floor for weeks, and instead used my reliable IBM ThinkPad, and rediscovered how much I enjoy it.

One might ask why you ever left it if it worked so well for you.

I switched to a Mac after years of using Windows and have found it easier in nearly every way. I haven’t needed a single book and know the answers to all the “problems” raised in this post. Plugging my Mac into my wired network meant that I was on my network. No “wizard” necessary. WiFi security, easy. Reconnecting to WiFi networks. Easy. Installing most applications is a simple drag and drop. No anti-virus or anti-spyware necessary. No “critical updates” which aren’t actually critical (WGA anyone?). No confusing matrix of versions of Windows which are tied to the computer that you buy.

Migrating from one Mac to another is a simple matter of connecting the two via Firewire and running Migration Assistant. All your settings and registrations will carry over. Windows users can simply drag their computers to Best Buy and pay someone to do it for them and then hunt down all their registration information.