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What are some common Mac annoyances that you face day to day?

11 points by ideamonk ↗ HN
I'm seriously giving thoughts to getting a MacBook Pro for myself, I spend most of the time doing python, php and web development related stuff. I was wondering what sort of annoyances bother a macbook user ? and has anyone faced problems with installing Ubuntu on it (not a VM) ?

98 comments

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brk
Why would you get an MBP just to install any other OS on it?

I've owned a couple (15" MBP currently), and I think there is more durable hardware out there that can be had cheaper.

I don't really have any annoyances with OSX or the MBP hardware. That is not to say it is perfect, just that I knew what to expect going in, and that there is no all around perfect OS or hardware. I do find the overall annoyances much less than when I've had to work on plastic (Thinkpad) laptops with Windows.

cliffdickerson
I agree, If you are going to install Linux, even something as "it just works" as Ubuntu there are better laptops to choose for hardware support. I still think there are fan sensor/control issues that require a bit of a hack to get working even semi correctly.

Several of the OSX annoyance I have faced came from switching to a mac from Linux using a tiling windows manager. I found some software "SizeUp" http://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/ that lets me do similar keyboard controlled tiling of windows and with few other cheap apps I'm almost 100% keyboard :)

megaduck
More durable hardware is hard to come by. The Apple stuff is usually pretty sturdy. There's exceptions, but I generally trust Apple hardware over Dell, HP, Toshiba, Acer, etc. The Thinkpads used to be as good or better, but standards have declined somewhat since Lenovo took over the line.

For me, the real winner is AppleCare. Apple has the best support that I've encountered for consumer hardware. It's also valid anywhere in the world, which is a lifesaver if you do a lot of international traveling.

jtillery
Not having a MAC to begin with.
ptomato
Inability to resize windows from any corner except the bottom right.
philwelch
Heh, one of my Windows annoyances is the inability to drag windows from any edge except the top, since dragging from anywhere else either rearranges toolbars or resizes the window.
bcl
I can't think of any common annoyances. I come from the Linux desktop world, so having a GUI that works right is great. It was hard to get used to the close in the top left and drag in the bottom right only at first but I don't even notice that anymore.

Under the hood it is Unix, includes Python and wxPython by default, Xcode is free and an awesome development environment so I can do as much and more than I can with a Linux box.

If you need to run Ubuntu, just do it in Parallels, otherwise your annoyance is going to be having to reboot into OSX.

cpr
Ditto, but I can't recommend Fusion enough.

Tried Parallels, and had too many problems.

JeremyChase
VirtualBox is very polished virtualization software released under GPL. I have run this on my MPB for a year with Debian, and XP as clients. It runs great.

http://www.virtualbox.org/

mediaman
I recommend VirtualBox as well. I haven't used Fusion but have used Parallels, and VirtualBox has become my default VM. Being free and GPL doesn't hurt at all.
ttam
Like other have said before, both Fusion and VirtualBox are great. Fusion is awesome if you need to work in windows since it can use your bootcamp partition.

VirtualBox is a very good alternative and open source which is always a plus.

arrrg
I had tons of hardware problems.

It’s just that I could be an outlier, these kinds of stories are always so freaking anecdotal and not really a help when deciding what to buy.

My screen failed and was exchanged. Then my main board failed and was exchanged. Now everything seems to be working fine. Oh, yeah. I nearly forgot, my DVD drive was unable to burn anything so it was exchanged. The exchanged drive was also unable to burn anything and was exchanged again. After those two tries it finally worked. And I already destroyed two batteries. After mere 110 cycles both were unable to hold much charge (they lasted for 30 min or less). Both were exchanged.

All this, and the MBP is not even two years old. Since I have Apple Care I didn’t have to pay for labour or parts, but I had to pay for transport to and from the few places in Germany where Apple hardware is repaired and I didn’t have my laptop for several weeks in the span of those last few months.

I hope that’s all for now because I actually still like my MBP. I planned to buy a new one at the earliest in three years, but after all those failures I don’t have much hope that my MBP is going to make it.

But: it simply cannot be the case that every or even a big percentage of Macs fail like this. With Apple having to pay for two batteries, one whole screen, a main board and two DVD drives plus all the labour they certainly didn’t make any profit from my purchase.

carbon8
Definitely an outlier. They have long been more reliable than average and have often topped reliably rankings throughout the past 10 years. :-/
arrrg
It definitely sucks to be a outlier :)

(Oh, I nearly forgot, the "F" key on my keyboard failed, too. It – i.e. the whole keyboard – was also replaced.)

JeremyChase
Not an outlier.. I have had three hardware problems with my MBP:

1) Hard drive had IO errors and was replaced (2 months)

2) One of my keys stopped working. (9 months)

3) The right fan died. (10 months)

The last company I worked at had a small fleet of MPB's and hardware problems were a regular occurrence. Far more frequent than when I was at an IBM/thinkpad shop, but drastically less than when I worked with Dells.

Jeremy

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GHFigs
Data is not the plural of anecdote.
fatdog789
Anecdotes are still data.

You have 2 verified MBP users with a total of 4 problematic MBPs. That's raw data right there.

Do not confuse data with statistics.

carbon8
The custom "framework" system for Ruby and Python is a minor annoyance when you want to customize or upgrade them. Apple puts python in one place, the python community installers put it in another, and neither is where you'd install it on your own. Although installing most things and building from source are pretty much the same as with linux, if there is already an apple-installed version you might find you need to so some minor surgery (make a symlink or two) after an initial install. In most cases, using macports works just like any other package manager and, as a bonus, keeps everything segregated into its own directory tree, so many people use that when possible.

Still, these issues are minor and infrequent. Linux installs aren't always painless and will require triage from time to time, too. But compared to doing the same stuff on windows, well ...

progLiker
I think this is the worst about owning a Mac. The Open Source Anarchy is very well established on the Mac platform. To many repositories and sometimes forks from repositories which aren't totally compatible with the repository it once came from and this sometimes results in configuration nightmares. Both with latex and a forked version of Vim for my part. I think Apple really should make some guidelines in this area. Or that the different repositories should sit down together and agree over some standards. Installing is one thing but 6 months later when you need to overhaul your configuration ...
dmlorenzetti
One thing I miss from Windows-- the ability to easily access any menu item from the keyboard (not just items that have a defined keyboard shortcut). Yes, it can be done, but not "out of the box" using individual keystrokes to navigate each level of the hierarchy.
ggruschow
CTRL-F2 puts focus on the menu bar and you can use cursors from there. The &Accelerator keys common on windows menus though.. often aren't around, but at least in some apps have a zillion hotkeys assigned.
progLiker
It's a good idea to leave out the &Accelerator keys anyway, as there isn't much gain in them. I try the shift the option and the command key while looking at menu in every app I use. Sometimes something interesting happens ... At least in most of the apps I pay for. And there are ways to overcome such shortcuts with other shortcuts, as long as the app is scriptable and you have a keyboard enhancer. Rumors has it that there are many scripts at places like macscripter.net and others with scripts to start with. If it nags you that much ... I lift my fingers ... :-)
kingsley_20
The ease of menu access on windows is eons ahead. Compare alt-f to reach the file menu with pressing ctrl-f2 to focus on the menu and then using arrow keys to reach the menu you want to get to.
GeneralMaximus
The best way to quickly access a menu item is to hit CMD+?. Then just type in the name of the menu item. That, IMO, is a much faster way of accessing the menu than the ALT+foo shortcuts from Windows-land.
mediaman
I've been using the Mac for some time and didn't know about this feature. Thanks for the tip. I'd been missing a way to do this behavior as well.
lon
No cut and paste in Finder... you have to move your files from one window to another...
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mmc
A friend of mine just got his first mac recently, and he mentioned this same complaint to me - I had no idea, because I almost never use the Finder for file management. (I assumed you could do cut & paste)

I always just use 'mv', etc. from a terminal. So this is genuine curiosity - is there something that other people do for which a Finder window and cut and paste is better/faster/less prone to mistakes, or is it just that the shell is not as familiar for them?

tsuraan
Sure, if you need to move a bunch of files whose names don't match any particular pattern, then using a GUI tends to be more efficient. Suppose you have a directory with a hundred documents in it, and you want to categorize them into subdirectories. With a shell, you'll probably actually need to have two terminals open, one to keep the full list of files available, and one to type commands. You'll mv file1, file3, file4, file7, etc using tab-autocomplete, but it's still going to take a bit of typing and a bit of time. With a GUI, you look at the full directory contents in the file manager, control-select each file you want to move, and then drag them into place. If there are a lot of files, and they don't have filenames that match shell patterns, then a GUI can be faster.
bretthoerner
I agree. But in the rare case that I need to move a bunch of weirdly named files - I have no problem hitting Command+N to open another Finder window, get it to where I want to be, and drag the files to there.

I just can't imagine a hacker workflow that involves doing that even once per week, much less day.

I'm not saying I don't miss Cut/Paste on those occasions, but it comes up so rarely and I feel like I gain so much more by using OS X that I just don't care.

mmc
OK, I'll buy this.

At first I couldn't think of a real use-case that matched your description, but then I realized one that might be close - Say I want to copy some pictures in a directory that relate to a craigslist posting over into another directory. I've done that. And since I only ever use those photos once, I prefer not to import them into something like iPhoto or the like.

So that's a case for having a GUI file manager, but (back to the original point), I'm not sure it's a case for cut n' paste.

mr_cheese
You can copy and paste, but not cut and paste. Moving with the mouse isn't so bad though -- you can select the files and start dragging them on top of folders. If you hover over a folder for a few seconds, it will open, and then you can hover over another folder to open it, etc., until you get to the place you want to be.
GeneralMaximus
Also, drag a file over a folder and hit <SPACE> to open it instantly.
cpr
You really want to run OS X on the hardware, to take advantage of all the details of the various hardware nooks and crannies (power management, wireless hardware, etc.)

There's no real downside to running any Linux distro in a VM. (Again, I recommend VMware Fusion.) You can put each VM in its own full-screen space and switch around between them (and Mac OS X) with a keystroke.

Highly recommended.

(BTW, the way that Fusion works it that it essentially goes "under" OS X, when Fusion is running; it becomes a hypervisor, running OS X and the other OS(es) as virtual guests on an equal footing.

I heard a great talk at C4[1] from one of the VMware Mac engineers, who said that the Apple engineers weren't very happy to learn the details of how virtualization works (since it replaces their precious OS at the lowest level), but they didn't really have any choice, either. ;-)

tsuraan
Running linux on a Mac laptop is a bit of a pain, mostly because of the keyboard/touchpad. The control and alt keys are in strange places (at least on my powerbook), and having only one button on the mouse is pretty irritating when you're not in OSX. I actually replaced my powerbook with a Linux laptop primarily for those two reasons; I'm always working in a terminal, so not having reasonably placed control and alt keys pretty seriously slowed down my ability to navigate on the command line and in an editor.

I'm not sure if this applies to the MacBooks, but on my Core2 Duo Mac Mini, the left audio channel frequently gets a lot of static when playing music; it seems to be a random thing on boot; either you will have static on this boot or you won't. It's a common problem of the Mini with Linux, but I have no idea if it ever happens on any other Mac.

If you're a KDE user, then OSX's finder will drive you mad. They don't have IOSlaves, but they do now have Fuse, which can allow you to browse remote file systems over ssh. If the ssh connection goes down, every finder window (including the desktop) freezes until the fuse connection times out, and it never feels quite as nice as KDE's IOSlave system, but it does make browsing of remote systems possible.

Spaces is a little flaky if you try to use it the way you use a normal multiple desktop implementation. With spaces, you can have either all windows of an application on the same virtual desktop, or you can allow them to be on multiple desktops. If you do multiple desktops, then alt-tabbing to a running application won't ever switch your current desktop. Since OSX generally only has one instance of each application running, this can make switching between windows of the same program on different desktops a bit of a pain. It's not terrible, but it isn't as smooth as it could be.

To be honest, I'm not really sure why a developer would use a MacBook at this point. When I bought mine, Linux's wifi support was a sick joke, which made it pretty pointless for a laptop. OSX is very polished and clean, but their developer tools for python, php, etc are going to be the same tools you'd be using under any other OS, I would think. Is TextMate a killer app for OSX now? What does OSX offer that's really good for web development?

djehuty
You'll find that with only a little practice using tap gesture for button press becomes second nature. From there it's only a 5 minute learning curve to double-tap equals right button. So if you're serious about putting Linux on there, and frankly I think that's just silly, don't let the touchpad put you off.

I'm perfectly happy with Coda for web development, although I wish it had function collapsing.

tsuraan
Is that tap gesture stuff in the hardware, or would Linux have to emulate it itself? My powerbook predates the multitouch stuff, so I've never played with it.
megaduck
I do most of my web development using the terminal and emacs, so there's nothing intrinsic to OS X that's an advantage there.

The real advantage of OS X is that the rest of the system gets the heck out of your way so that you can get work done. There's a million tiny little touches in the system that make life easier, so you spend more time doing actual development instead of wrestling with the email attachment that Aunt Edna sent you.

It's also the most popular *NIX out there, outnumbering everything else by an order of magnitude (or two). That means that virtually all recent UNIX software has been either been tested on the Mac, or written on one. That's nice.

moe
It's also the most popular NIX out there, outnumbering everything else by an order of magnitude (or two). That means that virtually all recent UNIX software has been either been tested on the Mac, or written on one. That's nice.

Sorry to rain on your parade but both of these statements are wrong.

kleinsch
The green button has inconsistent behavior by application - firefox maximizes to whole screen, safari sizes to the window, iTunes goes back and forth from mini-Player

No cut and paste between windows - But I use the command line for most things, so it's not that big of a deal

jseliger
Yeah, I hate the inability to maximize windows. In addition, I wish "paste plain text" had consistent keyboard commands across applications.
GHFigs
You can make the keyboard commands consistent in the Keyboard pane of System Preferences. I find it best to do it per-application as the menu item title isn't always the same, e.g. "Paste and Match Style" in Apple applications, "Paste With Current Style" in some others.
mr_cheese
Firefox and iTunes are the broken ones. Most other apps handle the zoom button correctly -- they resize the window to be just big enough to fit the contents.
ghshephard
Terminal.app - if there was one app that I wished would resize itself to handle the widest possible line, that is it. Alas, it just zooms to fill the entire screen - which is somewhat comedic at 10 pt Courier on a 2560x1600 30" Monitor whose longest line in the scrollback-buffer is 75 characters.
cliffdickerson
Not to keep pushing this software, but SizeUp allows for a keyboard shortcut to do full size windows (for any window) and then snap back to previous size, plus a whole mess of other great features. Its literally the app that kept me using OS X after switching from Linux. And its name your own price licensing.

http://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/

weaksauce
That looks like a great piece of software! I have been bugged by the lack of maximize for a while now. This looks like it will fit the bill nicely.

Out of curiosity, what is a typical "donation" to the developer in this style of licensing?

cliffdickerson
He asks for $2.99 min so his paypal fees are payed, etc. I gave a bit more and got a personal thank you. It does have a demo mode as well.
weaksauce
The posts from the people that are releasing the sales data are extremely interesting to me. Thanks!

As an aside, does anyone know of an agregator of blog posts concerning sales data for ISV's?

Irradiated
Some developer blogs might show graphs so you can see the trend of their sales, usually with a line showing where they finally become a viable business, but few release hard numbers. I'm happy to share more hard numbers if anyone asks, since I feel this is very valuable data for anyone considering ISV or the "name your price" model. Feel free to contact me via the site: http://www.irradiatedsoftare.com/contact
stonemetal
Apple has Balkanized their OS's API. Most software out there only supports the latest release. The rest only supports two releases back. In fact with 10.6's release imminent it is hard to find software that supports older than 10.4 anymore.
cpr
What's the point of running older OSes?
ams1
i'm a fan of newer hardware with older software for speed reasons.
philwelch
Newer Mac OS X versions don't tend to be any slower than older versions, though. But I definitely agree with you when it comes to Windows.
stonemetal
I have a power pc mac so 10.5 is the end of the road. Maybe I don't feel like shelling out 130 to apple for nothing.
docmach
That's because Apple provides new API features in new releases of the OS and software developers take advantage of them. It's not that hard to write software that runs on many versions of OS X, but it does limit the features you can take advantage of. I think it's worth not being able to use some apps on my older computers if they provide something worthwhile, so this doesn't seem like a bad thing to me.
teilo
Windows does the same thing. DirectX 10 is only available on Vista, for example (Unless of course you hack around this, using something like Alky, but then again, with enough work the same could be done in OS X).
stonemetal
For games sure, but most software in the windows world still lists win98 as a supported platform.
kingsley_20
The lack of good keyboard shortcuts for window manipulation. Window management in general is a pet peeve of mine.
carterschonwald
one tiny thing is that the analogue of ctrl + left or ctrl + right, with cmd, skips to the end of the line instead of to the next word, which is a smidge annoying.
GeneralMaximus
Use Option+Left and Option+Right. Also, hit Fn+Left and Fn+Right to go to the beginning and end of a file, respectively.
erlanger
Security warnings all over the place.
andrewf
You don't have a set of packages that is as broad, well integrated and easy to use as Ubuntu's or Debian's packages. MacPorts is a lot better than nothing though.
miles
I wrote this back in early 2007, and it still applies:

Four things OS X can learn from Windows 95 http://www.tinyapps.org/weblog/mac/200703210700_four_things_...

You would think that after all these years, Apple would have copied these simple yet essential abilities from Windows 95:

1. In Spotlight's search result window, files should be able to be deleted, copied, moved, renamed, etc.

2. Spotlight should offer an "In Folder" or "Location" column rather than forcing the user to press the tiny "i" symbol for each result.

3. The Trash should have two more columns: "Date Deleted" and "Original Location".

4. The context menu in the Trash should offer a "Restore" option to return files to their original location. This is especially useful in putting back the 20 or 30 files from 10 different locations that Adobe asked you to remove and then realized they shouldn't have.

docmach
Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) offers feature 4.
GHFigs
1 & 2 are both in Leopard. Apple ditched the weird Spotlight results window in equally weird but more functional views in Finder windows. 4 is in Snow Leopard.
miles
"1 & 2 are both in Leopard"

Sorry about that - you're right about the deleting and copying in Leopard. As with the Finder in general, files cannot be cut/moved, and renaming is not available from the Context Menu or by pressing Enter (though it is available by clicking the file names).

As for #2 ("In Folder" or "Location" column in Spotlight results), can you please tell me how to display such a column?

cjlesh
OK -- I might be alone on this, but I have a 30" Dell monitor, and the single top menu bar concept simply does not scale to large monitor sizes.
cpr
Funny, I've got both 24" and 30" Apple monitors, and decided that the 30" was just too large for my field of view (plus the newer 24" LED displays are just too beautiful not to use).

But your point is well-taken.

Fitt's law helps here, though--you can ram your pointer up top and generally hit the menu bar.

cpr
If you're an Emacs user with (3!) decades old-finger habits like me, Mac OS X is a dream come true--you can customize the Cocoa text environment to be a quite decent subset of Emacs, available in most system apps now (most importantly, Safari).

Oops, this is an anti-annoyance. ;-)

rmason
For me the email client and finder for file management. I am going to try entourage but its not outlook, its outlook light. Apple should look at the fact there are five separate mac products that emulate windows explorer, that alone should tell them that Finder is lacking for file management.
vesan
Finder is pretty horrible. Keyboard shortcuts are all over the place and overall I find Finder really unintuitive.
progLiker
Here is a list over all keyboard shortcuts in Mac Os X : http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1343 It's hard to memorize all this, but I put them into a learning by repetition program named Genius.App. Genius can be found here: http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/13938

I enter only those shortcuts that I tend to need from whatever App I use. I spend the odd 10 minutes each day repeating keystrokes. The shortcuts seem to stick in the grey matter after a while.

GHFigs
The Cut/Paste in Finder issue comes up a lot, because in people that use the GUI for file management the basic action becomes a deeply ingrained habit with a specific mental model.

Windows-style "pick up here, drop there": - make selection with mouse - cut with keboard - navigate to destination with mouse - paste with keyboard

Mac-style "carry from here to there": - make selection with mouse - drag with mouse - navigate to destination with mouse - drop with mouse

You can learn to use the other kind, but if you have to switch between them often you'll likely grow frustrated with one or the other. With the Finder for lacking Cut and for others lacking spring-loaded folders and Expose.

spudlyo
I miss focus follows mouse.
romulob
The mouse speed algorithm. I'm using an iMac for three days and want to throw it out off window. I just keep missing the clicks! Or the mouse go too fast and pass the controls, or too slow and don't reach them.

But the worst thing is that when I switched to my Dell Notebook (ArchLinux), I was too used to the iMac's mouse =\",

johanl
I agree. The mouse speed has to be altered. It's frankly horrible. I've been using osx now for about 5 years and I'm still not friends with the mouse pointer on my laptop. (On my iMac I don't have the same issues for some reason) I hate using the trackpad, it actually weariers my wrists.

I think I use USB overdrive on my iMac which might explain why I don't have the same problem with it. Or it might just be that I use a Razor-mouse.