andrew carter

Over the weekend, Russell Beattie of Yahoo! caused quite a stir with his post Why I Might Switch Back. I have no idea who Russell Beattie is or why people care what he says. But his post is sheer lunacy. He basically lists 33 reasons why he’s going back to Windows.

Here are some examples:

Anyone who says that Macs are more stable than Windows are smoking dope. I have two brand new Macs and they regularly go wacky and need reboots.

So what exactly did this guy do to his Mac’s? XP is pretty stable now but I swear the only time I ever reboot any of my three Mac’s is to apply a system update or move it. Quick check of uptime is like 15 days, 30 days, and 41 days. How many days is XP up? Oh yeah, no uptime command.

I don’t like Mail or Safari. I much prefer Thunderbird and Firefox, both of which don’t get much attention on the Mac platform.

What kind of BS is this? Thunderbird and Firefox are nearly identical on the Mac.

Like it or not, it’s a Windows world, and interop has to be a priority. If I take a few screen shots, paste them into a PowerPoint For Mac presentation and send them off, and no one can see them because the images have defaulted to some wacky Quicktime tiff? That’s bad.

Are you serious? If you can’t figure out how to send a screen shot, maybe you should just go back to pen and paper. I can’t even remember the last time I had a problem with transporting a document across platforms.

Yahoo! Products work better on Windows: Yahoo! Messenger and Yahoo! Music Engine are awesome on the PC. Yes Y! could concentrate more on Mac products, but they’re hardly alone here.

Isn’t this more of an issue with the crappy software Yahoo! produces than Mac’s? So bitch to your company instead of blaming Apple for your crapware.

The widescreen on the Powerbook is completely overrated. Web pages and documents are tall, not wide. Because the wide screen lowers the viewing center of the screen, I end up getting a crik in my neck looking “down” at the wide screen, rather than more straight ahead on PC based laptops.

This one is priceless. I guess this idiot can’t figure out that the screen is the same friggin’ size vertically as 4:3 aspect ratio laptops. I guess he also never watches DVD’s on his laptop. Or does pro audio.

What is the friggin’ deal with the .dmg files? The install process is so broken. Unzip .dmg.gz, mount .dmg, copy to Applications, unmount .dmg, delete .dmg, delete dmg.gz. Bleh.

Yeah, drag and drop install is unbelievably hard to handle, isn’t it? Messing with the registry is so much easier.

I thought having “Unix” underneath would be an advantage. But it’s not Linux. Linux is what I know, the wackiness that is OSX confuses the hell out of me. I can barely figure out what’s running and not running. I installed some HP Printer software drivers months ago and the control panel starts up automatically every day and sits in the Dock, despite my best efforts to track down where the HELL it’s started from.

Let’s see. I want to see what is running under Linux. How about I use the command ps aux. Now, on OS X, I want to also see what is running. How about ps aux. Wow!! Those are really similar but not the same. By the way, what is this POSIX thing?

Spotlight isn’t great. It’s slow and doesn’t seem to find what I’m looking for.

Yeah, I really hate actually finding files on my machine. I hear the dog in XP will help you find your stuff.

Hitting F11 by accident is a wonderful way to lose your mind. “AHHH!”

Ok. I guess you have explained the origin of this post now.

Also, all this makes me wonder if Linux will ever get to a decent position on the desktop. Mac has all the advantages Linux doesn’t have in terms of a fanatical fan base, developer support, etc. and I still feel daily pain by using it. And Linux shares the same disadvantage as the Mac in that it’s simply Not Windows. Which religiously may be a good thing, but I’m thinking about the mass market. Or, I guess you could look at it the other way - if people are willing to move to the Mac, then hell, why not Linux? But I’m thinking neither is bound to happen any time soon.

I’m not going to pretend that OS X is perfect. It has plenty of shortcomings. But how about pointing out something that really is broken? And using Windows as the example to follow is sheer lunacy considering that almost every UI paradigm in Windows is a poor imitation of Macintosh.

I suppose my post has just helped gain more attention to this idiot. If his mission was to get under the skin of Mac users, he certainly did it. My response to him is to go ahead and switch back to Windows XP. I’m sure in 6 months he’ll be posting how there are 33 things wrong with Windows and why he is switch to something else.