Eight months ago, after 22 years of using a Windows PC as his primary work machine, Eric Knorr publicly declared he would switch to the Mac.
“Looking back over my eight months as a full-time Mac user, one thing stands out: OS X and Windows have borrowed so much from each other that the transition was anticlimactic. Sure, the Command key and menu bar took a while to feel natural, but I wasn’t a total Mac newbie, so it wasn’t hard,” Eric Knorr writes for InfoWorld. “Of course, I found lots of things to like, from the Dock to iCloud to Spotlight search to Time Machine to the lovely Cover Flow view in the Finder.”
Knorr writes, “As a public service to Windows emigrants like myself, I am obligated to list all these annoyances while they’re still fresh in my mind.”
8 cranky complaints about the Mac from longtime Windows sufferer:
• Microsoft Office for the Mac: The worst problem with the Mac in business is Microsoft’s fault.
MacDailyNews Take: Okay, Microsoft’s fault, not Apple’s.
• Switching windows within apps: Sounds trivial, but it kills me that I can’t flip through every open Outlook email message with Command-Tab (that switches me from app to app only). I discovered that Command-`(the Accent key under Esc) will switch among windows within apps — but it doesn’t always work.
MacDailyNews Take: Again, Microsoft’s fault, not Apple’s.
• Obscure Multi-Touch trackpad gestures
MacDailyNews Take: Every gesture beyond pointing is obscure until you learn it. Not Apple’s fault.
• No Apple docking stations:There are third-party MacBook docking stations, but my company won’t touch ’em.
MacDailyNews Take: Your company’s fault, not Apple’s.
• Cost of Apple peripherals
MacDailyNews Take: You get what you pay for.
• Complicated keyboard shortcuts:Command-Shift-Control-3 to capture a screen to the clipboard? The Office shortcuts are worse…
MacDailyNews Take: Puleeze. And, again, Microsoft excretes Office, not Apple.
• Who made the eject button a keyboard button? I’ve come to hate the sound of the optical drive ejecting a disc.
MacDailyNews Take: We’ve honestly never mistakenly hit that button… and optical drives are dead.
• iTunes: This clunky, aggressive relic blew past its freshness date years ago. (Although a new version is supposedly due any minute now, so I may have to eat my words.)
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: That these are the eight “complaints” of a longtime Windows sufferer who’s finally upgraded to the Mac, should tell Windows-only sufferers all they need to know and remind all of us Mac users just how good we have it!
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “CognativeDisonance” for the heads up.]
So almost all the complaints are about a piece of Microsoft software… Hmmmmm.
Complaining about the screenshot shortcuts??
Why doesn’t he just change it?
System Preferences — Keyboard — Keyboard Shortcuts
Click on the one you want to change and make it what you want.
If you don’t want to remember keyboard commands, get a widget called Screenshot Plus and add that to your widget bar. Takes screenshots and portions of the screen instead of the whole screen.
Agreed. I use the free Jing that’s activated with control-J. you get a cursor that lets you sketch the area you want to snap (including drop-down menus and such), snap the image, then you can add text, arrows, rectangles, and highlighters with several colors. I use it all the time to illustrate problems I’m experiencing with one app or another, which I send to the developer. Devs are quite happy to get screen shots that show what’s happening.
I’ve always preferred using the Grab app, which also comes free with your Mac.
And if he didn’t use MS Office on the Mac, he wouldn’t have any REAL complaints, right?
I don’t use Outlook with my MS Office. If Apple had a real Excel equivalent, I would drop MS Office too.
Actually there are 2 shortcut keys for screen capture;
Cmd+Shift+3 take a shot of the entire desktop
Cmd+Shift+4 gives you a set of crosshairs so you can click and drag to choose what part of the screen to grab.
Also, in Cmd+Shift+4 mode, move the crosshairs over any window and press space, that will grab the window your crosshairs are over.
Add the Ctrl key to all that and the image is copied to the clipboard, not saved as an image file in the desktop.
You have a great mind.
Very useful keyboard shortcuts.
Add the control key as you click, and instead of creating a file, you’ve copied the screen shot to your clipboard. Paste where you want.
You can use SnapPro also.
First off, the screenshot short cut is awesome. Yes it’s a lot of keys, but once you learn it, you’ll never forget. Your hands will just do it out of habbit. And windows doesn’t have the option at all to do some of the flexibility that the short cuts do.
I used to hate the command+tab switches applications and not windows. However, after using the Mac for several years I have learned that it’s much better to switch apps then switch windows between the app. Command + ` always works perfectly for me…if you know how it works. It switches from the most recently used window from the current window. So the order can change. A switching menu similar to the command + tab overlay would be helpful.
Except fo the MS related issues, I don’t have the same problems he does.
iTunes valid point. Hopefully fixed soon. His list is a lot shorter and less consequential that my Window list.
iTunes needs help but the Windows equal is ???
So how can you grouch about iTunes when there is no Windows equal???
The Windows equivalent of iTunes is…
…Wait for it…
…iTunes.
iTunes, can’t say anything about the windows version, have not used it in a few years, but I am SO ready for an iTunes update. The larger the iTunes library gets the more glitches iTunes seems to have.
•You don’t HAVE to use Office.
•Command tilde will switch windows within an app. I don’t use Office, so I can’t speak to it.
•In System Preferences, there are short videos of gestures.
•Get the thunderbolt display. Best docking station there is.
•It’s command shift 3 for a screenshot.
•How many discs is this guy using? I can’t remember the last time I needed one.
•iTunes is always growing and quickly, so it’s always going to go through changes.
•Try to do some more hit whoring.
Windows is dying, Mac (as we know it) is dying… let’s talk about the upcoming iOS features… but Surface is underground. Articles about PC vs Mac is ridiculous nowadays.
If Mac is dying, then so too will Apple. iOS is not a productivity computing product, period.
iOS is great for consumers, but some of us need a real OS to do serious work. Apple must refine its Mac OS for improved productivity or it will eventually be just another consumer has-been hardware maker. i.e., Sony. Pioneer. Nokia, etc.
… oh, and Apple can’t just hope for Windows 8 to kill Microsoft. Losing the consumer market didn’t hurt IBM quite as bad as people like to think. The bigger profit margins are in enterprise anyway.
Really? I hope that was all sarcasm.
Not, Apple won’t die. Apple sells more mobile divices than Macs. Yes, OSX for PROs only, it means no games, small apps, iTunes, iWork, iLife, remove 99%… OSX is a truck… and iOS is indeed a produtivity computing… it’s only in the begining as one day was the Mac. It’s obvious.
“• No Apple docking stations:There are third-party MacBook docking stations, but my company won’t touch ‘em.”
just Wrong. get a Thunderbolt monitor to go with that MacBook. then just one/two cords to plut in (TB/power) and your done.
most don’t realize that hardware costs are not the deciding factor for companies. leased over 5 years a TB monitor is maybe $15 per month – chump change. training and IT support are the real big costs, and employee productivity is the big reward on smart captial investment.
How are the trackpad gestures obscure? In System Prefs, where you set them, there are even videos showing exactly how to use them!
Screen shots are only command shift 3 or command shift 4
There’s no control key necessary.
Control key puts it on the clipboard instead of saving it on the desktop..
With the Ctrl key, no picture file is saved to the desktop and it’s instead copied to the clipboard. The switcher guy put it clearly.
The main Windows feature I miss is the ability to mouse over program icons in the menu bar (um, dock) and see all of the open Windows for each – and that includes live views – if there’s a video playing, you can watch it in the icon. When you have several programs open and 7 or 8 browser windows (perhaps with multiple browsers, as sometimes its handy to compartmentalize content or websites), it can be quite hard to find the one that has the active video.
That’s what Mission Control is for: I have mine set so that when I put my mouse cursor in the lower left corner it shows me all the windows of the current app. That would do exactly what you want and you don’t even have to click.
Pay $9 and buy a utility called HyperDock. When you mouse over the app icon on the Dock, all open windows with content are shown in miniature.
as for trackpad gestures, Apple has been introducing a few new ones with each iteration of the OS. It’s been easy to add them to my practices as the new ones come along. They’re incredibly useful. I couldn’t do without them.
Two of the “complaints” listed:
Corporations use docking stations for laptops in order to provide access to an extended keyboard, mouse, monitor and other peripherals at one’s office or workstation. There are 3rd Party companies that make them. The cost is not unreasonable. Someone needs to give his IT department a clue.
As for pressing the Optical Drive eject button, there are several PC laptop or desktop keyboards where the backspace key is positioned right where the Optical Drive Eject key is located on a Mac. It’s just reflexive behavior that has to be unlearned. Again, not Apple’s fault.
The “eject button” doesn’t make ANY sound if there is no CD in there. I can’t remember the last time I left one in there.
BTW – Please keep the eject button, I like it.
This is referring to slot loading CD/DVD’s
Tray loading, never accidentally hit that button on my G5.
I agree – I use the keyboard eject button all the time…on purpose, even.
What’s wrong with command-Shift-4?
Didn’t know about command-accent, thanks!
You have to hold down the Eject key for 2-3 seconds before the Eject command is executed. I highly doubt he’s “accidentally” pressing the key and holding it down until the CD tray comes out. He probably just assumed that is what would happen, having no frame of reference for Apple’s attention to the little things.
My only complaint about the 3rd party docks are that all of them are not really designed with the hardware.
That is the one area where PC laptops are better from a hardware standpoint.
I don’t have to plug anything in besides my laptop at work and my dock allows me to drive 3 separate displays. Its nice if I forget about the fact that I’m still using windows during the whole experience. lol.
The absolute ONLY thing I like better in Windows (7) is that you can click on an icon in the tray to make that window live, and then if it’s not what you want, click its icon again and it pops back down to the tray without having to mouse up to a “minimize” gumdrop in the corner of the window. Otherwise, everything I do in Windows is clunkier and less elegant than on the Mac.
Pay $9 and get an app called HyperDock. It allows you to mouse over any open app on the Dock, view its contents and open the app’s window by clicking on it or close (quit) the app by clicking on the ‘x’ that appears on the top left corner.
One must learn to use applications to obtain desired results. The author is merely complaining about his ignorance and faulting the software.
Why use crappy Office when this joker should use iWork? So much better.
Screenshots do not include a control key.
Command+Shift+3 = Full screen(s)
Command+Shift+4 = Crosshair that you can drag a selection
Command+Shift+4 and then spacebar = Camera that captures single windows, menus, dropdowns, etc.
How about 8 Cranky Complaints from a Longtime Mac User….. Or doesn’t anyone want to hear….
This guy is a jackass!! Has a hard time learning shortcuts? Why doesn’t he just make his own. True enough that M$ can’t make software that works decently on Macs. The price? Well, as was said previously, you get what you pay for. As for third party hardware, it’s their fault that they can’t make stuff that works with Macs.
Bottom line: This guy’s arguments are weak, and he’s lazy to boot. Maybe he ought to complain to some of his Windows buddies. For sure they’ll listen to his whining.
How about the right-click refresh option? I thought that was the first question that a windows users migrating to Mac always ask.