10 things i hate about my mac (not really)

[dbizzle]

I am a new convert to mac a few months ago, where I was previously a windows user. though I love mac, there are a few things that I don’t like about it. it really was hard to think of ten things, and that’s saying something, but here they are. (sigh).
What I don’t like about my ibook G4:

1. narrow hardware support. I have had 2 scanner/copier/fax/printers, and neither of them have worked with mac. they have been recognized by mac, but the drivers could not be found or downloaded. from what I hear, even if they had been found, many of their features would not have worked (like the scanner). I have also had a bit of a problem having one of my digital camera memory cards mount as ‘volume’. It will show up in iphoto and let me import photos, but will not mount as a volume. I had another digital camera that did both (would work in iphoto and also mount as a volume). the camera that wouldn’t used an SD card, the camera that would mount used a MemoryStick. I don’t know if that matters. did I just get the short end of the stick, or is this narrow hardware support a bit of a trend, like I have heard?

2. mac / windows network integration. when I used a windows machine, I took for granted how easily they made networking. now that I have a mac, I have found it nearly impossible to transfer files over a Ethernet or wireless network to a windows machine. please tell me if you know of an easy (free) way.

3. I have had problems with my external hard drive. I use a 2.5 inch, 80 gig laptop harddrive connected via usb2.0 for my large (40 gig) itunes library, and I run my music library directly from the external hard drive. I don’t know if it is just me, but I constantly have problems with it freezing and crashing (both the hard drive and itunes trying to use it). I have had to reformat it once before, and it looks like I will have to do it again. please tell me if there is something that I need to know to help ease my pains.

4. limited options. I miss having something like a hardware manager, that I had in windows. I miss some of the extended menus and options that windows gave me. I know that the whole Idea of mac is to keep it simple, but I wish that there was some way to keep it simple and somehow have these kind of ‘advanced’ options available if you wanted them. again, if these exist, please tell me.

5. imovie. I don’t know if it is just because I have worked with programs like adobe premiere, but I tried to use imove to make a little movie for myself and it drove me crazy. it sucked so bad. I don’t know. I just thought that it was way too simple for some things (like not being able to easily change the length of photos that you import, not being able to add an extra video or audio track for overlapping music and voice, etc.)

6. no multi-protocol chat client that supports voice chat. Adium is great, but I cant use my nifty built-in microphone. I know, im getting kind of specific, but I was saddened when I couldn’t find one for the mac (trillian and gaim do this for windows, as far as I know – correct me if im wrong)

7. my battery. I have read up on it a bit, and tried to treat my ibook’s battery right, but I still cant seem to get more then 2:30 – 3:00 hours of battery life out of it. the box it came in said it would get 5-6 hours. now, granted, I am usually using my airport, listening to music with itunes, surfing on firefox, and have a couple little programs running in the background (quicksilver, konfabulator, growl, adium,) but still shouldn’t I be getting around 4 hours most of the time? does anyone else have this kind of problem?

8. more plugins. not really something I don’t like about my ibook, just something that would be nice. I could always use one or two more usb2.0 slots, and I wish that apple put a plugin to be able to show your screen on a tv or something, without having to buy a separate special mac cable.

9. well, I would say that I wished mac was a little quicker and didn’t bog down as much, but I think that my wish came true when they switched to intel processors. we will see soon if my new mac has got a speed lift.

10. iphoto. not being able to be more selective when importing photos into iphoto from my camera. you plug in your camera and you can either import all your pictures or none of them. you can delete them all off your camera or keep them all on. I wish I could see what photos are on my camera and be able to import certain ones, while deleting others from the camera that I don’t want. it also bugs me that there arent some basic options in iphoto that will let you do the things that the program ‘preview’ will let you do, (such as zoom in on the picture, show it full screen, etc). I also want to be able to sort my photos much like I sort my songs in itunes, by their title, date, description, rating, etc. you can do some of this in iphoto already, but I think that It could be improved.

That really is everything I can think of that I don’t like about mac. and I strained on a couple of them. That truly is amazing. the list would never end if I did one of these for windows. it would also never end if I did one on the things that I love about mac. I appreciate any input and responses.

[istyan]

about remark No6: try skype. Skype audiochat works just great (even with PC users) or iChatAV (with AIM screen name that pc users can have too and download on www.aim.com )

[minckster]

I have a hint for #2, re Windows/Mac networking. I usually have my Windows box off and when I'd turn it on, it wouldn't show up reliably under "Mshome" in "Network" in the Finder. Now I click on the desktop, press Command-K, and connect via IP address (in my case smb://192.168.1.101/shareddocs). Fortunately, my router always assigns the same IP address to the XP box and the "Connect to Server" dialog saves IP addresses, so I've only had to type in that IP address once.

[fryke]

1. narrow hardware support. I have had 2 scanner/copier/fax/printers, and neither of them have worked with mac. they have been recognized by mac, but the drivers could not be found or downloaded. from what I hear, even if they had been found, many of their features would not have worked (like the scanner). I have also had a bit of a problem having one of my digital camera memory cards mount as ‘volume’. It will show up in iphoto and let me import photos, but will not mount as a volume. I had another digital camera that did both (would work in iphoto and also mount as a volume). the camera that wouldn’t used an SD card, the camera that would mount used a MemoryStick. I don’t know if that matters. did I just get the short end of the stick, or is this narrow hardware support a bit of a trend, like I have heard?

There are hardware developers who adhere to USB/FW standards. Those devs' products work just fine on the Mac. You can use a standard memory card reader for the cards and they should just show up in the Finder as well as in iPhoto. But if the developer uses a strange format for the card, the system would probably need a specific driver in order to know what to do with it. Might be that iPhoto supports that developers' format, but the Finder doesn't. Many hardware developers think the Mac market is too small to care about. Others don't. As far as I can see, the more _important_ hardware developers _do_ make their products compatible with the Mac or there are third party drivers/solutions.

2. mac / windows network integration. when I used a windows machine, I took for granted how easily they made networking. now that I have a mac, I have found it nearly impossible to transfer files over a Ethernet or wireless network to a windows machine. please tell me if you know of an easy (free) way.

FTP springs to mind. As well as Windows file sharing. You should be able to simply access a Windows computer with file sharing open from the Finder. You can also "Windows-share" _your_ Mac user account in order to access it from the PC.

3. I have had problems with my external hard drive. I use a 2.5 inch, 80 gig laptop harddrive connected via usb2.0 for my large (40 gig) itunes library, and I run my music library directly from the external hard drive. I don’t know if it is just me, but I constantly have problems with it freezing and crashing (both the hard drive and itunes trying to use it). I have had to reformat it once before, and it looks like I will have to do it again. please tell me if there is something that I need to know to help ease my pains.

I'd look in the iPod forum on macosx.com for a solution. If there isn't already a thread about it, create one.

4. limited options. I miss having something like a hardware manager, that I had in windows. I miss some of the extended menus and options that windows gave me. I know that the whole Idea of mac is to keep it simple, but I wish that there was some way to keep it simple and somehow have these kind of ‘advanced’ options available if you wanted them. again, if these exist, please tell me.

It *is* Apple's choice to keep it simple. What specifically are we talking about here? I find Apple gives me all the options I need in all the right places. I find Windows' hardware manager a bad excuse for the lack of better handling of third party hardware.

5. imovie. I don’t know if it is just because I have worked with programs like adobe premiere, but I tried to use imove to make a little movie for myself and it drove me crazy. it sucked so bad. I don’t know. I just thought that it was way too simple for some things (like not being able to easily change the length of photos that you import, not being able to add an extra video or audio track for overlapping music and voice, etc.)

It comes free with your Mac. To compare it with Adobe Premiere (how much is that again?) is a little unfair. iMovie _is_ restricted. Look into Apple's Final Cut products for better video editing. I also hear that iLife '06 (with iMovie '06) is much better in some aspects. http://www.apple.com/ilife has some info.

6. no multi-protocol chat client that supports voice chat. Adium is great, but I cant use my nifty built-in microphone. I know, im getting kind of specific, but I was saddened when I couldn’t find one for the mac (trillian and gaim do this for windows, as far as I know – correct me if im wrong)

I know, this _is_ a bit of a problem. However, you *can* of course use Skype for voice chats, iChat for voice and video chats and Adium for all the rest...

7. my battery. I have read up on it a bit, and tried to treat my ibook’s battery right, but I still cant seem to get more then 2:30 – 3:00 hours of battery life out of it. the box it came in said it would get 5-6 hours. now, granted, I am usually using my airport, listening to music with itunes, surfing on firefox, and have a couple little programs running in the background (quicksilver, konfabulator, growl, adium,) but still shouldn’t I be getting around 4 hours most of the time? does anyone else have this kind of problem?

My experience with G4 iBooks is that I get 5-6 hours no problem when I'm merely writing text. I _think_ you should get more than 2:30 to 3:00, but of course watching videos and listening to iTunes does constantly stress both the harddrive for reading the files and the processor for decoding them.

8. more plugins. not really something I don’t like about my ibook, just something that would be nice. I could always use one or two more usb2.0 slots, and I wish that apple put a plugin to be able to show your screen on a tv or something, without having to buy a separate special mac cable.

Would be nice, but somewhere one has to accept that the iBook is the *low-end* Apple notebook. More ports: PowerBook, MacBook Pro. On the other hand: I think all ports one needs are there, really. If you need more USB ports, I'd use a mini-USB-hub. They're quite good.

9. well, I would say that I wished mac was a little quicker and didn’t bog down as much, but I think that my wish came true when they switched to intel processors. we will see soon if my new mac has got a speed lift.

How much RAM have you got? More RAM improves performance greatly. 512 MB is the absolute minimum for me in Tiger. 768 MB is better, 1024 MB is suitable. More is better, simply put. You'll notice a *big* improvement when adding RAM and using more than one or two applications at the same time.

10. iphoto. not being able to be more selective when importing photos into iphoto from my camera. you plug in your camera and you can either import all your pictures or none of them. you can delete them all off your camera or keep them all on. I wish I could see what photos are on my camera and be able to import certain ones, while deleting others from the camera that I don’t want. it also bugs me that there arent some basic options in iphoto that will let you do the things that the program ‘preview’ will let you do, (such as zoom in on the picture, show it full screen, etc). I also want to be able to sort my photos much like I sort my songs in itunes, by their title, date, description, rating, etc. you can do some of this in iphoto already, but I think that It could be improved.

Well: Simply choose *not* to open iPhoto when connecting a camera. Then you can look at the content of the card/camera in the Finder, select all photos and ctlr-click on the selection. Choose slideshow. In the slideshow, you can send single photos to iPhoto. Of course *I* just let iPhoto handle it. I let it import everything and then delete what I don't need.

That really is everything I can think of that I don’t like about mac. and I strained on a couple of them. That truly is amazing. the list would never end if I did one of these for windows. it would also never end if I did one on the things that I love about mac. I appreciate any input and responses.

I'm glad you so far generally like the Mac and hope that this site can be of further service for your experience.

[powermac]

For #1, check out vueScan. It is a universal driver/app for scanning. It supports almost any scanner out there, and has advanced features, even some beyond the stock app you may have received with the scanner.
I purchased a CanoScan few years back. Canon supported it for the first few versions of OSX. If it wasn't for vueScan, the purchase would have been useless.

[dbizzle]

Well: Simply choose *not* to open iPhoto when connecting a camera. Then you can look at the content of the card/camera in the Finder, select all photos and ctlr-click on the selection. Choose slideshow. In the slideshow, you can send single photos to iPhoto. Of course *I* just let iPhoto handle it. I let it import everything and then delete what I don't need.

But see, that is the problem. Two of the three cameras that i have worked with work with iPhoto, but will not show up in finder. it looks like the cameras with memory stick show up, but not the ones with SD cards.

[Lt Major Burns]

my ixus has an SD, and does not show up.

[ElDiabloConCaca]

You can also try using the "Image Capture" application instead of iPhoto to download photos from your camera. It may offer more features than what you're used to with iPhoto.