Macs are revered. But they are not always as intuitive and well designed as diehards claim. A few quirks here and there are tolerable especially knowing that the next version will probably have a solution. But the following design fails are ones we’ve live with for years!! I’ll update this post as I encounter/remember more annoyances. Here are a few examples:

Text to speech – There’s an option to have text read aloud (in that computer-y voice). But there’s no option to pause! If you want to use this function to read anything longer than a paragraph, say an article, you will most certainly want to pause it in case of an interruption and continue later. Where’s the pause function Steve??

Screen capture – Command-Shift-3 or 4. Need I say more?

Icon view of files – This option is very handy when viewing images, especially in combination with the zooming slider. But I never use it because naturally I actually use the zoom slider, zooming out to view a lot of files and zooming in to view several in more detail, and as you zoom in, many of the images go off to the right hand side and a left-right scroll bar appears. Why can’t the files just arrange themselves to the width of the finder? When I use a computer with a Walcom tablet or one without a mouse with a scoll ball instead of a scroll wheel, navigating up-down and left-right is very very frustrating. This just turns icon view completely useless, thanks God for Adobe Bridge.

The green “maximize” button – This button sometimes feels like it can be replaced with a slot machine lever because it results in random screen resizes, only fully maximizing the window on a lucky day. It maximizes browsers, giving us a clean view of the Internet without clutter peaking from behind. But on most other applications, it simply resizes the window in what always feels like a random configuration!

iMac headphone and USB jacks – Really Apple? The only place you could have placed these jacks to make them harder to reach is at the bottom of the base of the iMac, where users would have to lift up the entire computer to access them (and then would be unable be  to put it back down!). Every time I have to use one of these ports (all the time!) I have to leeeean over, peak at the jacks, then hope I get it on the first try. Annoying!

iMac CD/DVD Drive – Scratches up discs if they are not inserted and removed perfectly strait. The edges are too sharp and made of aluminum, which on last check was a stronger material than the plastics that discs are made of thus resulting in scratches.

Front Row shortcut – I use shortcuts a lot so I hit the default shortcut for launching Front Row waaay too often. On my home computer I have turned off that particular function, but when I go into work or use someone else’s Mac once in a while, there’s that shortcut again. The screen goes dark and I feel like the time I saved using all the shortcuts just went to waste as the screen slowly goes dark and then slooowly goes light again as I hit ESC fifteen times.

Finder preview replace – I can’t write over a file when Finder happens to have a preview of it open. This is a major annoyance when making PDFs of a certain document. I make a PDF, I go in Finder, preview it, and oftentimes I find a small mistake. So I go back to my program (in my case InDesign) and fix the change and want to save it as a PDF again, with the same name as before, I go through the required menus, and at the end I am prompted by a message saying that the document is already open. I have to go in Finder, click on another file and then the file wouldn’t be considered “open.” And isn’t the whole point of a preview not to have to open the file in the first place? This happens to me at least twice a day, aaaarg!!!

All that said, I love most everything about Macs, especially the spirit in which Apple approaches computer problems and comes up with innovative, elegant solutions