Welcome to OS X Vista

Snide comparisons were inevitable but now they seem to stick.

Get It Try It

CUPERTINO (Rixstep) — They were going to bring the best of the PDAs back to the desktop. Initial reviews were lyrical: the underbody was more secure than Microsoft could ever dream of.

Then people started downloading it and running it. OS X 10.7 Lion.

The tone changed in a short time. Most unsettling were the reports of kernel panics - something that's never supposed to happen on a system with MACH. Clearly something was very wrong.

Now the blog 'How good is that?' summarises the woes of Apple's computer OS. There's a link at the bottom of the page so you can scoot over and read the whole thing. It's worth it.

The essential points the blogger wants to make are the following.

√ Control + scroll screen zooming randomly turns itself off.

√ Even basic Spotlight searches in a window (Command-Shift-F) crash Finder.

√ Mail crashes all the time.

√ 'Safari has been replaced by a pile of turds. When it isn't refreshing inactive tabs from the network instead of cache, so you lose everything you're uploading, it's secretly closing windows for no rhyme or reason when you're not looking.'

√ iTunes boot time is measured in aeons.

√ The 'something has crashed, send a report to Apple' window might as well be your desktop picture.

√ Finder periodically decides you don't need to see all your windows any more.

√ The list of applications that no longer work, if printed out, would stretch from here to the moon.

√ 'Launchpad is pointless. Utterly and completely pointless.'

√ Opening Mission Control is like walking through molasses with cream cheese in your socks. It doesn't support a second display and the graphics layer tears through the UI like a hammer through porridge.

√ Fullscreen apps have a habit of just vanishing. They're running, but they're not showing.

√ Video playback in iTunes defaults to fullscreen but the playback controls go missing if you switch to another app without coming out of fullscreen first. Handy.

√ Command-Control-D pop-over dictionary takes a week to load and mysteriously insists on spinning up all your USB hard drives - as does unmounting all your USB drives.

√ Garage Band now hates you. So does Steam. And Pages. And Photoshop. And Automator. And Call of Duty. And TweetDeck. Oh and you know how half the reason you put your Mac in your spare room was so you could use FrontRow as a media centre? 'Yeah that's gone now. You can't do that any more. Sorry. You have to buy an AppleTV.'

√ Question: Most of us would agree, without sounding sycophantic, that the MacCast is one of the premier Mac podcast anywhere on-line, yes? So, in the last, say, two years, how many Mac users who comment here, e-mail Adam and otherwise engage in the extended Apple community on a regular basis, have you heard say something like 'I hope Apple subtly change all the things that are already perfectly fine, before they fix all the things that have been broken since OS X Tiger'?

√ Drag and drop a selection of JPEG files you want to upload to your image hosting service of choice, from Finder into the 'open' box in Safari. If the wind is blowing from the north and it's the second Tuesday of the month, the destination path will change to the location you're dragging the files from and the selection you want to upload will be highlighted, so all you have to do is click 'send' and wait for the transfer to complete. But if it's half past 4 and your second cousin twice removed is called Jennifer, they spring back into Finder and Safari looks at you like 'pfft, since when have I been able to do that?' So you try it again. Same thing. You try a third time. 'Oh!' says Safari, 'THAT kind of drag and drop! I thought you were losing your mind, you silly user! Sure, I'll do that for you!'

'Someone somewhere at the world's largest computer maker signed off on each and every one of these things as if they're ready for prime time. Senior department heads and top management looked at each of these pointless tweaks and decided they're good to go.'

The author points out that a few of the issues were fixed in 10.7.1.

See Also
How good is that: OS X Lion: Apple's Vista moment