Comment by Patrick_Devine
12 years ago
I'm looking at the Dock at the bottom of my MacBook Pro and I can't help but think that most of the apps are half baked and most of them I don't even use.
I've replaced Safari with Firefox. I haven't fired up iChat in a while because I just use GMail chat instead. iTunes is really wonky when you want to play music off of an NFS server. I've never fired up FaceTime or PhotoBooth. The X11 app is so buggy it's ridiculous. I use Terminal all the time, but it's got some serious memory leaks. Time Machine breaks half the time in unexpected ways. Calculator works pretty well, although I find myself using the R console more and more instead.
I feel like the Mac software side of things just doesn't get any love anymore. Apple is so focused on iPhone/iPad that the OSX applications are stretched completely thin and rarely get any love and attention. The machine has really just turned into a glorified terminal and browser where I run the occasional Linux virtual machine or the odd game in Steam. Any serious heavy lifting is left for Linux, and most applications have migrated to the web.
I don't believe those applications are half-baked as much as your needs are more advanced than the target of those applications. Those applications work extremely well for the typical mac user. Firefox would just confuse my sister, and she wouldn't even know what an NFS server is. Linux would just make her stop using a computer.
And how is iChat half baked because you use Gmail chat? I could say the same for Gchat when I use iChat. (Not saying that ichat can't be improved, but your line of logic doesn't follow.)
In re-reading my post, yeah, I guess it's a little "power user" centric. You're right in that most people wouldn't be comfortable with Linux, an NFS server, or even R.
I think the point I should have made was that I don't find a lot of the apps to be that useful because there are good web equivalents (mail, chat, docs, etc.) and I don't find the other apps that compelling. I would suspect, even being the "power user" that I am, that most other people are of the same opinion. That, or they're just using a tablet or their phone instead.
As for Firefox, I'm not sure how it would confuse your sister any more than Safari does, unless she finds it confusing for web sites to render correctly and not crash constantly.
My sister probably would have trouble finding and installing firefox, and then wouldn't get more out of it than she would Safari. I'm not sure what websites you have problems with, but I can't remember the last time I had Safari crash on me (anecdotal I know, plus I bounce back and forth between Safari and Chrome).
And I agree that there are better versions of Apple's free software, but it's free, and does exactly what it should, which is lubricate the novice user's experience. Once you pass novice, it's easy to go find software that fulfills your needs.
And I would disagree that most other people are of the same opinion. My guess is that you live in a bubble of mostly experienced computer users (as do most of us on HN). Go spend a day at an Apple store somewhere besides the Bay area and you'll see most of the people that make up the bulk of Apple's user base. They, like my sister, probably don't even know there are other options out there (some are using iPad and iPhones, sure, but plenty are still using iMacs and Macbooks).
Looking at mine...
I prefer Safari over all other browsers, due to speed and better UI, although it loses on security to Chrome. Firefox, meanwhile, didn't have Retina display support until half a year after that MacBook Pro was released, still doesn't have disappearing scrollbars, and has no smooth zoom, and I have many other sorts of complaints about it.
iTunes, despite all the various crappiness, doesn't have much good competition and usually works well. Playing music off an NFS server is not a normal use case.
Preview is a brilliant PDF reader.
I use Gmail chat, but if I weren't using a Mavericks beta with broken Messages.app, I would also be using that for iMessage. FaceTime also works well.
Mail.app is pretty great; it has some flaws, but is better than most of the competition not named Gmail.
Terminal is a great terminal app (you'd think this wouldn't be hard to achieve, and I think iTerm is roughly on par now, but the latter used to be quite terrible).
edit: oh, and QuickTime Player is nice; might not support all the codecs of other players, but the seeking/frame stepping is nice and smooth, compared to VLC which can't step backwards at all.
YMMV, but I think the suite of default Mac apps is not bad at all.
Regarding the Terminal application, check the scrollback settings. My colleague wondered why it took 20 seconds to start and ate up 2 gigs of memory... turns out Terminal was storing scrollback all the way back to when he first bought the machine, eating up just a little bit of memory every day as he used it more.