My parents got a mini, and as the designated computer person it's my job to explain why things don't work, or don't work the way they would like. Unfortunately, I don't know macs all that well. Here's a list of gripes I've been having with the OS. Are there ways around these problems that I just don't know about?
You can't--ever--see hidden files. What if you really, really need to? Tough. Find won't search for them, and there's no view option to see them.
Burning a CD? It automatically closes the disk...even if you're only burning 10MB or so. You CAN go through the long, complicated process of making a new disk image in Disk Utility, burning that, and then making another one and burning that...hardly as convenient as the Windows way, and much slower...AND, when you mount a CD burned in this manner, it spawns all sorts of random folders all throughout your computer, that remain after you eject the CD and until you click on them, AND it creates undeletable aliases under Macintosh HD with the names of your disk images. What's wrong with just having ONE CD icon, which you can open to view all the files, whose sessions are transparent to you (you're just adding more files)?
Finally, multisession disks burned under Disk Utility are unreadable in Windows. Did they really think that no one uses multisession CDs? Was this OS designed ten years ago?
Playing a movie? Want to full-screen it? You gotta pay. Wait, didn't I already pay extra for the "convenience" of a Mac? And it won't even do half of what WinXP will, right out of the box?
Let's say you have a memory stick with some stuff on it you want to delete, and a trash bin with some stuff on it you don't want to delete YET. You can move stuff from the memory stick to the trash...but you haven't actually freed any space until you empty the trash. So, you have to create a folder on the desktop, move everything in the trash out, delete the stuff on the memory stick and empty the trash, and move everything back in.
A number of times I've tried to connect to another computer via IP. Say, a PC. I can ping it, it can ping me. But the instant I click "connect to server" I get the "server is not responding" dialog. Even though there's no way it had enough time to do a real check. Other times, for no apparent reason, it actually DOES try to connect, and gives me the 120-second timeout countdown. Then other times it works fine. Sometimes I just have to leave it a few minutes. Sometimes I have to restart. Sometimes nothing works. It seems to me that if you can PING the other machine, and there is a shared folder on it with the right permissions set, you should be able to connect.
Those CD drives, with no buttons and no pinholes, sure are sexy looking, right? What if there's a CD stuck in there, and I want to get it out without booting up the computer? Tough. No pinhole for you. What if I have power, but no keyboard? Nope, you can't just boot it up and hold down the button until it ejects, like on a PC. Even if you have power and a keyboard, you have to remember some very odd key combinations to get it to eject if your OS is corrupt. Heaven help you if the BIOS ever gets corrupted...you'll never see your CD again unless you dismantle the drive or plug it into a sensible PC.
I don't know if this is a Mac issue or just bad luck, but for some reason text files appear different going from Mac->PC, even when they work perfectly the other way around...also, the basic text editor in OS X ONLY saves in rtf format. Not .txt. Why not? What if I want to edit raw html in a Notepad-style setting?
This could be the Unix underpinnings, this COULD be considered a sensible security feature, but you can't drag a file directly onto the Mac HD without inputting your administrator password. Great for computers on a domain or with sensitive information that need the security measures...not so nice for someone who isn't even on the internet and just wants to put files where they always have before.
Minor complaint: the left Locations bar sometimes shows up when you open a folder, and sometimes not.
I think the CD burning issue is my biggest complaint. Do I have to buy a third-party program to let them actually burn multisession CDs they can use?
You can't--ever--see hidden files. What if you really, really need to? Tough. Find won't search for them, and there's no view option to see them.
Burning a CD? It automatically closes the disk...even if you're only burning 10MB or so. You CAN go through the long, complicated process of making a new disk image in Disk Utility, burning that, and then making another one and burning that...hardly as convenient as the Windows way, and much slower...AND, when you mount a CD burned in this manner, it spawns all sorts of random folders all throughout your computer, that remain after you eject the CD and until you click on them, AND it creates undeletable aliases under Macintosh HD with the names of your disk images. What's wrong with just having ONE CD icon, which you can open to view all the files, whose sessions are transparent to you (you're just adding more files)?
Finally, multisession disks burned under Disk Utility are unreadable in Windows. Did they really think that no one uses multisession CDs? Was this OS designed ten years ago?
Playing a movie? Want to full-screen it? You gotta pay. Wait, didn't I already pay extra for the "convenience" of a Mac? And it won't even do half of what WinXP will, right out of the box?
Let's say you have a memory stick with some stuff on it you want to delete, and a trash bin with some stuff on it you don't want to delete YET. You can move stuff from the memory stick to the trash...but you haven't actually freed any space until you empty the trash. So, you have to create a folder on the desktop, move everything in the trash out, delete the stuff on the memory stick and empty the trash, and move everything back in.
A number of times I've tried to connect to another computer via IP. Say, a PC. I can ping it, it can ping me. But the instant I click "connect to server" I get the "server is not responding" dialog. Even though there's no way it had enough time to do a real check. Other times, for no apparent reason, it actually DOES try to connect, and gives me the 120-second timeout countdown. Then other times it works fine. Sometimes I just have to leave it a few minutes. Sometimes I have to restart. Sometimes nothing works. It seems to me that if you can PING the other machine, and there is a shared folder on it with the right permissions set, you should be able to connect.
Those CD drives, with no buttons and no pinholes, sure are sexy looking, right? What if there's a CD stuck in there, and I want to get it out without booting up the computer? Tough. No pinhole for you. What if I have power, but no keyboard? Nope, you can't just boot it up and hold down the button until it ejects, like on a PC. Even if you have power and a keyboard, you have to remember some very odd key combinations to get it to eject if your OS is corrupt. Heaven help you if the BIOS ever gets corrupted...you'll never see your CD again unless you dismantle the drive or plug it into a sensible PC.
I don't know if this is a Mac issue or just bad luck, but for some reason text files appear different going from Mac->PC, even when they work perfectly the other way around...also, the basic text editor in OS X ONLY saves in rtf format. Not .txt. Why not? What if I want to edit raw html in a Notepad-style setting?
This could be the Unix underpinnings, this COULD be considered a sensible security feature, but you can't drag a file directly onto the Mac HD without inputting your administrator password. Great for computers on a domain or with sensitive information that need the security measures...not so nice for someone who isn't even on the internet and just wants to put files where they always have before.
Minor complaint: the left Locations bar sometimes shows up when you open a folder, and sometimes not.
I think the CD burning issue is my biggest complaint. Do I have to buy a third-party program to let them actually burn multisession CDs they can use?