This post was born out of a conversation I had with a friend, so I would like to thank @alexlipa for inspiring me to write this post.

I have not liked Apple for a long time. This article is to allow me to have a place where I can refer others, so that when people ask me why I’m “still using Windows”, I have a place to direct them and say, it’s not just because I don’t like Apple, they had a chance, and blew it.

I did some iPhone Application development back in university and bought a Mac Mini which I used for a year and a half, so please before you criticise me and think this is just overheard nonsense, and made up, bear this in mind, I did own a mac and I did enjoy it for about a year.

After using this device for that period I came to the following conclusions, but please do be aware that this was a while ago, and some of the problems I had may no longer be an issue:

• Some websites wouldn’t work properly
• Office was not full-featured on the mac – I constantly had to use my PC in order to complete my timesheets for work because the formulas didn’t work.
• Couldn’t play games – I know this is not much of an issue any more, but PC’s do have more games than OS X.
• Had issues with photoshop
• Struggled to use NTFS devices
• A few of the NTFS devices I was actually able to use, were corrupted, and when they were plugged in to a Windows PC were just viewed as a RAW device
• My Logitech Keyboard and Mouse (although the were made for pc), they didn’t work fully, (as in all buttons)
• The Hardware costs roughly double the price, and upgrading yourself voids the warranty, (I am unsure of how true the warranty void is, if you know better than me please comment below)
• Also upgrading yourself was not an easy task
• The user interface relies on keyboard short cuts and delving through menus, and the menus themselves seem almost deliberately different to windows.
• I had to learn to use the command key, which when going to work proved to be annoying as we used PC’s there
• I dislike being forced to use iTunes, and absolutely despise that I can no longer just install iTunes without Quicktime. I don’t use either of those products and having to install them just so I can use my iPod seemed like massive overkill.
• Mac peripherals were all more expensive
• My 64 bit hardware was not supported by the OS until a year after I got it. I then had to pay for the OS upgrade to support the 64 bit chipset, which made next to no performance increase anyway
• My favourite, it never slows down, starts up in a second, all that drivel, my mac slowed down over time and never started in just a second.
• I love checking out forums and finding out how to “fix” things that aren’t meant to break because they’re superior. My mighty mouse scroll ball had started sticking, and I had to go and find out how to clean the damn thing. My mouse I had before I used the mighty mouse, has never been cleaned, never been maintained, I may have wiped it down once or twice, but I have never had to maintain it.
• Apple has started using proprietary connectors on their new hard drives, meaning you’ll have to buy their product no matter what.
• I have never had to use a mac to do something I couldn’t do on a PC, I had to at least once a week (my timesheet for work), use a PC because I couldn’t do it on a mac.

In the end, the only thing I liked about my mac mini was how quiet and cool (temperature)  it was. This was not enough justification for me to buy another Mac product. The device has since been donated to my parents and is running Windows, because the one site that they used used some active-x controller that wasn’t supported on the mac, and wouldn’t play back anyway. So in the end Snow Leopard couldn’t even be used just as a bloody web-browser.

Further to this Apple as a company consistently have shown to be a crooked company. They constantly seem to be ripping people off and people just keep flocking to them. My favourite claim by Apple is that they never get viruses.  Never? Yeah right, just this week there was a new one, Mac Defender, and you can find out about it here, that has now brought malware to the mac. But this is not the first, and in fact Apple had the title of the most security vulnerabilities last year, (I am unsure of at the moment),  here is the evidence, and they were actually able to overtake Oracle who was reigning champ since 2006.

But luckily with all the Apple stores, you can just take it to one of the “geniuses” and get some help, WRONG, Apple in fact has instructed their geniuses NOT to assist customers, but hey, just have a read of the article here.

And finally it is the air of pretension that seems to come with owning  one. I was sick of hearing how great it was. Oh it’s so good it does this, everything just works, this that and the other. I get asked all the time to assist people with their computers, some are macs and you know what, sometimes it doesn’t just work. I was trying to map a drive last week, went and found the guide on the apple website and every time I rebooted the machine it would lose the mapping. So don’t come here and feed me this “it works” crap, it doesn’t, it’s a computer, born with vulnerabilities, bugs and issues.

I will give Apple is that they have the best style. They make beautiful machines, pity they seem to have based their design on Braun, so even that is not unique.

Innovation is probably their best quality. The magnetic power connectors, laptops without vents underneath so you can leave them on your bed is genius. The way they pushed forward the touch-screen phone, the mp3 player, and established the tablet market. These are all things they did, but sadly not enough for me to want to fork out double the price of a PC, just so I don’t use windows most of the time, I could get Linux for free and do that.

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