Peeve Farm

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Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
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Friday, September 20, 2002

17:32 - So it's a wash at worst?
http://www.bcentral.com/articles/komando/104.asp?cobrand=msn&LID=3800

(top)

Here's what happens when an MSN bCentral columnist tries out an iMac, Coursey-style, to see whether or not the "Switch" ads are just hype.

She does try to be fair, I guess. She has more than the usual share of weird misconceptions (she thinks the Mac equivalent of the Windows Explorer is called "Macintosh HD", which I guess is what an OS gets for putting its disks on the desktop where you can access them directly). And her conclusions are that the iMac suffers from the following three disadvantages:

� A one-button mouse. Actually, the entire mouse is the button. I'm used to using the right button and scroll wheel on my Windows mouse. Really, Apple, you could do better than this.

Why? What good is the right button in an OS that's designed to avoid the contextual-menu madness of Windows? The whole point of the one-button mouse is simplicity for new users, who don't know what weird functionalities lurk in the right-button menus of this or that Windows program. The Mac's big design guideline on this subject is to make all functionality available either in clear UI elements (e.g. buttons) or in the menus; contextual menus can only mirror functions that exist in the standard locations, as a shortcut-- the contextual menu can never be the only place to find something. That way, a beginning computer user won't be confused by all these bizarre buttons everywhere. Did you know that a majority of PC users don't realize what the right button is even for? A study found that most thought it was just some sort of "alternate" button for left-handed people; or they never touched it for fear of breaking something.

Scroll-wheels and multi-button mice are indeed useful. I use one myself. Support for them is built into the OS, including sensitivity controls for the scroll-wheels on third-party mice. If you gotta have one, go buy one. Apple's engineers did do better, however. They put their effort into making the extra buttons unnecessary.

� The 15-inch monitor. Apple has begun shipping iMacs with 17-inch screens. I'm used to using a 21-inch CRT monitor, and the 15-incher was just too small.

Fine, that's fair enough. So why are you complaining about the screen size on an entry-level machine, when what you're used to is a top-end monitor? Next on Non-Sequitur Review TV, we bring you a Formula 1 driver who warns buyers to stay away from the Chevy Cavalier, because the engine's too damn small.

� No floppy drive. I know 3.5-inch floppies aren't used much anymore. But the need does arise occasionally. The iMac should have a floppy drive.

And put it where? And why? The original iMac had no floppy in 1998, and we never looked back. Floppies are used so seldom these days that they're just impediments to design. If you've gotta have floppies, there are USB floppy drives to be had for dirt cheap. (Remember, that's why the iMac popularized USB in the first place-- no floppy drive, but hey, lookee here, you can hot-swap one in if you want!) But this is the 21st century. Burn a CD. Send an e-mail. The "Mac has no floppy" argument has gotten about as old as the "Xb0X iz really Hy00ge LOLOLOL!!!!11``" postulate. C'mon, people. Get over it.

She also has a beef with the iMac's speed. In fact, yes, it's her major gripe. That's a perfectly fair thing to complain about, and nobody will fault the harsh mistress that is real-world perceptual interface lag (at least, putting aside the fact that IE on Windows and IE on the Mac are completely different animals-- one's an optimized kernel process that's inextricable from the OS interface, and the other's a bloated and decidedly non-optimized application running in user space). But, hey, Apple's working on that. We've all got our drawbacks.

But I'd have liked to see her really give the iMac "every opportunity" to impress. Like, for instance, doing some multimedia stuff. The stuff that it was designed for. Surfing the Web and writing Word files is one thing, yes. But how about ripping a CD into iTunes? How about editing a movie? How about burning a DVD? How about hooking up a digital camera, no drivers necessary, and making a picture book you can order with a click?

Or did those kinds of things simply not occur to her, because she doesn't do them on her Windows machine? Huh. Wonder why that might be.

Meh. As lukewarm-on-Apple columns go, this one's pretty mild. But maybe it says something about Apple's fortunes of late, that this is the worst we're hearing.