My First Mac: First Impressions
My university laptop has died and by a remarkable turn of luck my mother gave me her old Mac Mini, so here I am working on My First Mac ™ and my first intro to OSX.
I have seen a marked shift in platform use from my social network over the past 5 years, with many hardcore users moving from Windows or Linux platforms to OSX as their main OS. Some of these are HCI professors, others are hardcore linux spods, and both groups are most certainly clueful and highly experienced individuals.
So, having spent 24 hours with this Mac Mini I have to admit I’m blown away and totally underwhelmed. I REALLY can’t see what the big deal is:
- the two button mouse is painful to use - clicking is so much more effort than needs to be and feels like a really heavy clutch in a car. Considering clicking is integral to a WIMP interface I’m surprised that this is considered the optimal solution. Am definitely going to replace it with an MS mouse.
- the keyboard feels like an RSI-inducing nightmare already. It’s all too cramped and typing a few words causes my forearms to tense up - and I’ve never had this issue with PC keyboards before.
- it’s all too simple….too Fisher Price for my liking. Yes, it might be fabulous if one has no clue on how to use a computer, but I do. It just feels all shiny and moron - it might not be, but that’s how it feels. Almost like I have one hand tied behind my back and font size set to BIG.
It’s still early days, but my forearms are burning as I type this. I can’t see how this is so much better…especially considering this stuff costs so much more…
N
p.s. Someone please explain to me why Microsoft’s versions of Word differ so much between Windows and Mac? There are fundamentally different interaction paradigms in some of the features, and I can only assume that these are Mac influenced. I thought the Mac was meant to be the don for usability, but to be honest I can’t see myself converting at this rate…