I hate Apple Macs

I hate Apple Macs. A large part of this is the perception that buying one makes you cool and arty, and your life more fun. Quite how buying a pretentious, pointless, over-priced living-room sculpture does this is beyond me. This would all be OK if Macs actually had anything going for them, but they don't. So, here's exactly why I hate them:

• Myst. This one's top of the list, because Mac users will not stop banging on about how great this 'game' was, and how brilliant Macs were for having it. If you've never played it, it's like this: a poorly-rendered bit of video plays, you click randomly around the screen until another bit of poorly-rendered video plays. Repeat this for hours to the backdrop of an irritating sub-Tubular Bells soundtrack (and that’s saying something) that slowly ebbs away your will to live. When the boredom makes you claw your own eyes out, you’ve got the essence of Myst. What did PC owners have in the same year (1993)? Doom, the most influential and ground-breaking game of all time. Fifteen years on and the PC is about a billion, trillion years ahead of the Mac when it comes to games.


• The mouse has one button. What the hell was this all for? The only way that one mouse button could possibly be more usable than two is if you have webbed fingers or flippers. "Well, you can plug in a two-button one," say Mac fans. True, but why should I have to? Only having one mouse button is a stupid, stupid decision that hampers every interaction with a Mac. Apple even goes some way towards admitting that this is a mistake (but not all the way, of course), as its awful Mighty Mouse can act like a two-button mouse if you press it in the right way, and it’s Mac books have a right-click if you press the touch pad with two fingers; both are significantly worse ways of right-clicking than just providing a second button.


• The keyboards are rubbish. Again, in a triumph of style over substance, Apple produces countless keyboards that look nice but are incredibly awful to use; this is presumably, because its users don’t have time to type anything because they’re spending their time frustratingly trying to use the awful mice. The transparent keyboard with white keys was bad enough. Not only did using it feel like you were typing on an unresponsive sponge, but the see-through plastic meant that after a while you could see all of the crumbs, dirt and other scum that had fallen on it. The new keyboard fixes that by being a long bit of flat metal that appears to have been designed by someone that has never used and will never use a keyboard for any length of time. The stupid flat unresponsive keys are only slightly better than those on roll-up rubber keyboards. Again, Mac users say, “You can change the keyboard.” How many do, though? The fact is that people who own Macs would be too scared to get a keyboard that doesn’t match for fear of being looked down on by the Mac coven of kaftan-wearing, frothy-mocha-china-drinking wannabe designers.


• Steve Jobs. The definition of irony: people who buy a product for its style, but buy it from a man with none. Looking every bit like a French existentialist philosopher’s Dad dressing down for a youth disco, he lacks all the style and dress sense that his products are supposed to have. It doesn’t help that he’s also the single most annoying man in technology. The most annoying thing of all is the constantly repeated story about how he only gets paid $1 for being CEO of Apple. It’s always reported in such a way that we’re supposed to believe what a great thing this is and ignore the fact that getting paid $1 a year isn’t actually that tough when you’ve got millions in stock options and you’re Disney’s largest individual share holder. This is hardly philanthropy at its best. For that, you need to look to Bill Gates who has donated more than $28bn to charity.


• There’s no physical eject button. This has long been an annoyance with Macs. In the old days the way to eject a disc or floppy disk was to drag its icon on to the recycle bin (like that made loads of sense). Now, there’s either a button on the keyboard (no good if you change this for a decent one) or an icon on the desktop. Brilliant, but what happens if your Mac won’t start and you need to get a disc out? Smashing it apart with the surprisingly sturdy flat metal keyboard usually works for me.


• Mac OS handles applications in an annoying way. The fact that Mac OS doesn’t let applications have their own window is hailed - by Mac owners, obviously – as a triumph of design. Wrong, it’s a stupid way of handling things for several reasons. First, if you should so much as accidentally click on the desktop when you’re trying for a button on one of the mess of toolbars and the whole application disappears. Secondly, what if you want to run two monitors? Do you really want to transfer each floating Window to the second monitor? To us, this free-flow design means that you can pretend to be busy by arranging all of your floating windows and toolbars - it’s the computer equivalent of revising by printing out loads of schedules and colouring them in.


• Macs can’t network properly. This is quite possibly the most frustrating thing about them. If, like an increasing number of people, you’ve got network storage, you’d be forgiven for occasionally wanting to open and edit files directly from it. This is fine unless your network connection is interrupted or lost. Rather than give you an option to save your file to a different location, Mac application crash. This is a slight step up from a few years ago where the whole Mac would crash, but in terms of usability this is unbelievably rubbish.


• The myth that Apple invented the desktop and mouse. It didn’t, Xerox did. In any case, who cares? Doing something first, doesn’t make it the best. If it did, no one would buy a Dyson vacuum cleaner would they.


• The file system is annoying. Have you ever tried unzipping a file that someone’s sent you from a Mac? If you have you may get the option, “Do you want the data fork or resource fork?” How about both in one easy-to-use file? How about you stop asking me stupid questions? Before anyone tells me how brilliant this system is when used on Macs, let me stop you. Recently, we had a situation that some fonts copied to a file server from one Mac, turned up as 0-byte files to every other computer that tried to access them because of some stupid permissions problem that Mac OS couldn’t be bothered to tell us about.


• They chime when you turn them on. This isn’t a quaint throwback to when they were first released, but a warning sound that something annoying is going to happen.