Why do people like Apple computers?

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Apparently. Personally I'm OK with Mac Pages.

I bought my first Mac back in 2008, for online banking and stock trading. I was interested in good security in a laptop computer.

Apple hardware is good and their technical support in outstanding. However, their business paradigm has changed toward transparent functionality from the iPhone to the big desktops. The net result is, more and more, the desktops are becoming limited to what an iPhone will do.

Before you buy an iOS device, use one for an hour or so. The new visual effects and transitions make a lot of people queazy. If I use my iPad for more than an hour, I start feeling a bit seasick. And, I never get actual seasickness or airsickness. The new effects came along with the last iOS update. I'm sorry I upgraded.

I bought iWork, Apple's own office suite, for my Macbook Pro and you can get it for a price much less than you can get MS Office for. The only problem is that, as I soon found out, the spreadsheet program in iWork, Numbers, turned out to be complete and utter crap. The problem is that you cannot use it to import ascii files with space-separated data, which is what I needed for my scientific applications (I dare you to try but Numbers only has the option of recognising two different characters for data separation, either a comma or a semicolon). In Microsoft Excel and even OpenOffice spreadsheet, you can actually import space separated data because in both of them you even have the option of choosing what ascii character to use for data separation. iWork Numbers also doesn't recognise data formats that are commonly used in engineering either, so Apple's spreadsheet program is utterly useless for scientific and engineering purposes. So, after having bought and installed iWork, I simply decided to install OpenOffice because I didn't want to use MS Office and it was more expensive.

This is one of the main problems I have with Apple products. They try to make their products "user friendly" to the point that they actually become more limited in functionality, and while this is fine for non-technical users, for people like me, who like to tweak, tinker, mod, and upgrade, it just makes things more of a pain in the ass.

OK Apple haters, I got a copy of Win 7 and loaded it on to my Dell today. It took over 4 hours and now I can't connect to the InterWeb with it. Previously Vista connected to the InterWeb OK, such as it was, stumbling like an drunk. I've tried to troubleshoot why it won't connect and now I guess I have to call the bloke who sold me Win 7 on Ebarf. This is SUCH a good example of why I HATE MicroSquish. The software loaded OK, but won't tell me why oh why it won't connect. IDIOT SOFTWARE ! !!

How are you connecting? Do you have your network drivers loaded?

The software package included drivers so I loaded those. Finally gave up on the network card and bought a wireless adaptor. That won't connect either. I have to call the company again to see if its a problem with their copy.

I didn't have any problem with it on my Dell Inspiron. There was an IPv4 conflict with some of the other clients in the house, but I fixed that problem, and after that, everything ran pretty well. Windows 7 was well ahead of it's time back in 2009; without the godawful Aero frontend, it's still quite good.

There are a few reasons people use Mac

-It just works"
-Lots of so called design people prefer the design
-Fashion statement

Personally I both Linux and Windows, but never Mac. Mac is not very customizable, and I like doing things myself.

Also; for text editing, I've started using Google Docs.
-It works nicely, and I don't have t worry about wonky programs ( never liked any of the open source text editors. )
-It'll display every file correct, regardless of OS.
-It can convert the files to .pdf
-It's a way to backup documents and easily send them using gmail
-Several people can edit the same document.

Only thing I miss in Google docs is that it's bad for source code. It needs a vim-style editor

Because they don't use Microsoft products as software.

What model is your NIC?

Assume the software didnt provide all drivers and search network drivers on the manufacturers website from another computer

Most computer users don't care all that much about customizability, and the ones that do have the option to build a hackintosh (like me). The main reason is I strongly prefer the OSX operating system to Windows 7 or 8, the UI is cleaner and smoother and they're doing a good job of integrating mobile features into the desktop OS, unlike Windows 8 which awkwardly crammed in a ton of bloatware that was obviously designed exclusively for tablets. I don't know about "better supported" but I've never had trouble finding programs on the net that can open any type of file I need (most of the time for free, and without offers to install adware). Serious gaming on mac is obviously going to be a problem, but it's something that's been shifting quite a bit in recent years.

After trying Windows 8.1 on a small laptop with a touch screen I felt compelled to buy a cheap tablet computer... An Android tablet. I love the tablet and it gets lots of use.

On the other hand, Windows 8.1 is a user-interface disaster. It is a train wreck between the traditional Windows UI and a tablet UI and totally unsuited for use on a laptop or desktop computer. Windows 8.1 is the worst MS operating system I've ever used; worse than Vista and worse than Windows ME.

To add insult to ongoing injury, the Windows 8.1 update feature has stopped working too - it gives an unspecified error message when it tries to do an update, but complains every time I turn it on that there are updates waiting to be downloaded. So this Windows 8.1 laptop, only a few months old is now effectively at the end of its useful life! Using it online would risk malware infection due to its inability to patch itself. I've used every MS operating system since DOS 3.1 but now I'm done buying any more Windows computers/laptops/tablets.

Never tried any Apple products; they always seemed overpriced to me and historically lacked application software compared to Windows. I write applications for Windows computers and even today people still contact me and ask if I do a version of my specialist (Windows) applications for Apple computers; so that lack of specialist software must still be a problem for Apple users. I'm going to abandon writing applications for Windows and switch to writing for Android and maybe Linux too at some point in the future.

Going forward, I'll probably try Linux again, assuming I can find all the relevant drivers, which has been the sticking point in the past preventing me from adopting Linux as my primary operating system. I discarded Ubuntu last time due to hardware compatibility issues.

I could never understand why this is the case. I personally can't stand to use a computer without some degree of customization and personalization, but it seems that whenever I hop on someone else's computer, everything seems to be lock-stock standard, even the desktop wallpaper! I mean, is it just laziness, a reluctance to change, a fear that they might accidentally nuke their system by clicking the wrong button in the control panel? Oddly, a lot of these same people don't seem so adverse to downloading spyware toolbars or useless crap like that McAfee scanner that sometimes comes with Flash updates if you don't untick the dialogue box...

Last edited by mr_bigmouth_502 on 05 Jul 2014, 9:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Ditto that. The features I tend to want to use the most are often buried or inaccessible. User interfaces tend to be dumbed down nowadays to the extent that anyone wanting to do more than run a few popular programs/apps isn't adequately catered for. I've found that with each release of Windows, that it becomes progressively more time consuming to do the things I did on the previous version. Some aspects of the operating system are so dumbed down I've had to write my own applications to replace the lost functionality e.g. Windows Explorer or the file search facility. Other aspects of the operating system simply don't work e.g. treating zip files as folders - when windows hits one of these files it crashes if it is a large zip file, so the registry has to be hacked to stop Windows exhibiting this behaviour. There are various other dodgy features that I have to disable or remove too just to make a computer usable (for me).