Why I Hate Macs

Let the flame wars commence! Okay, first read the post, THEN flame, capice? That's better. I wrote this up ages ago, and just never bothered to post it, because I didn't feel like having people scream at me for a week straight. Well hey, I'm in a self-abusing mood.

So yeah. I hate Macs. As in absolutely loathe and refuse to own a current Mac, period. Why? I've got a whole list of reasons, but let's step back a moment. Remember when Macs shipped with SCSI disk and 68k processors, then later PowerPC 603's and 604's? I loved Macs back then. Owned two. Because they actually differentiated themselves from Windows PCs, offered value for the dollar, and were superior for the tasks I needed to do on them.
These days? The Mac population consists largely of rabid zealots who think you're the anti-christ if you don't like Mac for any reason. That's a big reason I hate Macs and refuse to own one. The other part of it is the same zealots who refuse to accept or acknowledge that Macs and OS X are not the superior platform for every single task imagined. Let's put this all into a nice neat list though.

OS X cannot run software I need daily. Do not give me bootcamp or Parallels excuses. If it can't run it natively, then it can't run the damn software. Here's a list. Software that is totally unavailable or unworkable is in red, with severe limitations in yellow. Severe limitations includes lack of plugin availability or cross-platform compatibility issues.
Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Visio, TweetDeck, vim/Gvim, NFS, CIFS, Pad2Pad, Pidgin, Zune, Steam, VMWare Workstation, Ableton Live, Propellerheads Reason 4, City of Heroes
Ableton Live is in orange because it's there. But half my needed VSTs do not have a Mac version available, or do not work at all on Mac, making it nigh unusable. And a complete lack of Visio means it is completely unusable, because I abuse Visio in depth, daily.

"It's the software, stupid" arguments from Mac zealots. Hello, see immediately previous point. The very existence of Fusion, Parallels and Bootcamp all destroy that argument in nothing flat. If it was the magical OS X, then why do you have to run Windows on your Mac with virtualization software so you can access applications that aren't available on it? Yeah. It's totally everyone else's fault entirely and they're idiots for not maintaining multiple code trees and development teams just for Mac. Sure. And you know what? If I'm just going to reboot the damn thing into Windows anyways, then why the hell would I buy OS X at all?


The hardware is out of date and overpriced. No, you are not getting a "superior" product, you are just paying a ridiculous brand premium for a fashionable chassis. To meet my requirements requires a Mac Pro which costs well over $7,000.00 USD before the 3 year warranty (required thanks to Apple's continuing string of QC and QA problems.) For this $7,000.00 pricetag I get a SINGLE last generation Xeon Quad Core 3.33GHz based on Intel's abandoned 5000-series chipset with only 16GB of nigh unavailable Fully Buffered DIMMs, a $700 non-hardware non-BBU RAID card which I can buy elsewhere for around $100, an ATI Radeon HD4870 512MB at $200 which is not only a generation old but available in the proper 1GB configuration at a little over half that price, a pair of middle of the road DVD drives, iWork, about half of Microsoft Office, and a mediocre warranty with support where I still have to buy the OS upgrades out of pocket with no discount. THIS IS NOT A GOOD VALUE BY ANY MEASURE. For under $7,000 I can build a dual socket 12/24 core system which is not only watercooled but packing two Radeon HD5870's in CrossFire, an SSD and two 500GB/32MB drives in RAID0, and 24GB of DDR3. And there's not one bit of difference except that A) I'm using CURRENT generation hardware B) I don't have the brushed aluminum chassis. Oh wait, I do, except it's black and has hotswap drive bays and is quieter. Hell, I charge under $7K for that built and shipped to your door with half the parts packing 5 year manufacturer warranties!

Apple loves to lock in their vendor lock-out. Nobody gets to just write applications for OS X. You have to pay your special Apple taxes. It's not just an iPhone thing, either. You must pay Apple for documentation, for licenses, and so on. And if they decide they aren't happy with you, they can cut off any developer with no notice, leaving the users in the lurch. Want to use anything non-Apple that isn't an external thumb drive? If they didn't pay their Apple taxes, it's a crap shoot if it'll work or be supported. When was the last time you plugged in a keyboard or mouse to your PC and found that it was completely and utterly incompatible because of the software?

I play games. Get over it, Mac heads. Apple is not a gaming platform. If it was a viable, popular gaming platform, then popular games would be released for it. Instead, you have a handful of MMOs with Mac clients as an option, and some older games. Mass Effect 2 is nowhere to be found, nor is Steam, much less Modern Warfare 2 or Bioshock 2. ME2, MW2 and Bioshock are 3 of the absolute most popular, best selling games out there. They have massive, incredibly large budgets. Yet there is no OS X version of any of these games. Take the hint; if you enjoy playing a variety of games to relax, then Apple is definitely not for you. And World of Warcraft doesn't count, when the vast majority of LUA-based addons don't work on Macs.


The attitude of the company and the "community" just SUCKS. "Look at us in our faded jeans and black turtlenecks and OHMYGODNEWIPHONE MUST HAVE NOW!" Yeah, because a guy with 20 years of system design and building experience is the kind of guy who goes out and buys the latest 1.0 because somebody put a shiny Apple logo on it. But gods help you if you should rationally explain why you don't like iTunes or the iPod or the iPad to most Apple users. Seriously, I've had one actually take a swing at me for suggesting that an old G4 Xserve with significant performance problems was not the best answer, because of the performance problems. I have found on dozens of occasions that Apple users have absolutely zero interest or focus on whether or not the job is done right, or even if the job is done - their only concern is rabid support of a shiny white logo. And the only "appropriate" response to any question of the usefulness or functionality of any Apple product is to shout the person down and insult them.
Please note, this isn't a blanket statement about all Apple users. I know several that are perfectly reasonable and rational, and completely understand and support my refusal to use a product that doesn't work for me. ("Why should you, if it doesn't do what you need? That's silly.") However, as I said, I have had Apple fanatics actually swing at me for questioning Apple. And more often than not, that is exactly the reaction I get when I point out that an Apple product doesn't do what I need or want - screaming, insulting, and swinging. I want no part of any organization or community that considers shouting down acceptable behavior.

The presumption that because I'm a Unix guy I must love OS X. Look. It's an operating system. Get over it. AIX is an operating system. Solaris is an operating system. Windows is an operating system. The notion that any one of these does not suck is a complete fallacy. All operating systems suck, just in different ways. It's a fact of computing. It shouldn't be, but it is, and I deal with it every day. Just because I'm a Unix guy does not mean I prefer or even necessarily want Unix on my desktop. My operating system does not give me any sort of self-gratification or pleasure whatsoever, no matter what it is. I don't flipping care if it's Unix-like! It's an operating system, not a damn religion.
If I wanted Unix on my desktop, then I would use FreeBSD or AIX. But see, the thing is that I don't. I want to get things done and I do not want to waste time beating them into working through emulators like WINE or rebooting to a different OS so I can play a game. I want to turn on my computer, get work done, close it out and go play some games, then shut it down at the end of the day. That's it.

So, I figure I've explained sufficiently why I hate Macs personally. Calmly and rationally. This of course means, that I can expect irrational screaming and death threats from a select few who frankly have no business giving me advice or making demands about what hardware and software I use. Those of you who want to scream and yell at me, go hang out with the people who agree with me that an iMac completely fails to meet my disk requirements and a Mac Pro is horrifyingly overpriced and learn from them. Please.

On Unemployment, briefly

Things I do like about not having a job:

• More time for personal projects.
• Finally time to clean up all my personal files.
• Free to work on theoretical engineering projects.
  (I can fit 2,500 PeopleSoft Financials users into one rack!)

Things I don't like about not having a job:

• Not having money to fund personal projects. (The car languishes again. Sigh.)
• COBRA. Just, ouch.
• Not having resources for engineering projects.