I’m probably going to be ostracized for saying this, but: “I don’t find Macs to be intuitive, at all”. Maybe it’s because I cut my digital teeth on Dos prompts and command lines, but it’s true. We recently purchased a Mac for church presentation use, and I’ve had the privilage of getting it all ready to go. Now, I’m not an elitist, this post isn’t about about how PCs are better than Macs, its simply an explanation of my early enteractions with the Mac. Here are some of my issues:

  • There isn’t a delete button. Ok, techinically, there is a delete button, but it’s really a backspace button. Why’d they have to call it delete? It’s backspace!
  • The touchpad lacks a right click button. To right click you have to put two fingers on the touchpad.  Come’on Apple, join the 20th century, get a two button mouse.
  • Shortcut keys are a pain. I really didn’t expect to be able to use my old ctrl + b, i, u, etc. standbys, but on the Mac you have to use the Command Key instead of the Control key. The problem is that the Command Key is very awkward to reach from the home keys.
  • There are archaic looking runes on some menus that aren’t even printed on the keyboard. One kind of looks like a tilde, but weird. Well, even weirder than a ~ normally looks.
  • Do the window control buttons have to be in the upper left hand corner?? That just makes no sense.
  • When I alt+tab I don’t see every instance of a program (every Firefox window, for example), just one program icon. That’s just frustrating.
  • Why do I have to drag things to the trash to eject them? I’m confused.
  • Why can’t I just click a button to install a program? Why do I have to drag an icon over to my applications directory? Just give me a button to press that says: “install”.

Those are some of my observations, I’ll try to come up with some positives for the next post :)