Out of the way

The operating system is the only reason I am still using a Mac. It does the things that are non-negotiable requirements reasonably well:

Finding and connecting to any network - more automatically correct more often than the alternatives

Adapting to any screen or projector automatically. This is the one thing I have never had a problem with in a Mac.

A reasonable approach to using different character sets and being able to easily write in several scripts in any application.

It's easy to keep it virus-free and secure (although my last machine "helped" me discover how having any problem with an encrypted partition means that you have lost that partition and should reformat it now to save time).

There are also a couple of things I like about it but could live without:

The finder is still nice. And backing up, or moving stuff around the file system, is easy.

I also like having a decent terminal without having to install magic software.

And the batteries are still pretty good, which is critical for a laptop.

But there are downsides...

The hardware is clean and shiny, and has the things I need. But then, so does other hardware. I am finding it is decreasingly better than the alternatives, and Apple is starting to sufer from their own success as great designers. This machine is beautiful - but at the expense of being suitable for working. And unfortunately for me I didn't buy it to look at it on a nice desk, in an office in the upper stories of some New York or London consultancy company, I bought it to do real work travelling around the world. The "beautiful screen" is horribly reflective in the real world.

Apple's approach to making software is like their hardware. You get a few options, it looks beautiful, and they don't understand anyone who wants something else. iTunes is reasonably nice (although having used the iStore twice, I have long decided I never want anything to do with it again). The mail client is reasonably good, but since I have Opera I don't need or want it, and Safari is not bad but the same applies. Unfortunately, the system is designed aroun the idea that people will use those applicaitons, and important things like determining the default browser are actually built into Safari. When Microsoft tried to make IE an integral part of the OS, the US government took them to court. Apple's approach (incidentally also on the iPhone) is at least as anti-competitive, but for some reason people seem to think they are still saints trying to make the world a better place, rather than another company aggressively competing in a marketplace.

On my dock I have almost none of the default items (I do like how easy the dock is to change) - although they stopped shipping Graphic Converter years ago I still keep it - and it is one of the handful of pieces of software I pay for. I have NeoOffice, and get frustrated when Apple updates turn everything into iWork applications or the like. I have Opera, of course, and Amaya. I use and like TextEdit - it does enough for me without being a monster, and I have the terminal on the dock. Primarily, I use it for CVS which I actually like doing through a command line. After a bunch of reading (including ages wasted on Apple's own "documentation" which is often easy to use but lacking in anything I actually need to know ) I eventually made an educated guess and installed the "Developer Tools CLI" package from their Xcode developer tools, to get the things I really needed in a few MB instead of a couple of GB of things I don't want.

And this brings me to the thing that I am increasingly frustrated by in software, and systems software in particular. People are assuming ever-increasing growth in the hardware that people use. Moore's law doesn't say that everybody will upgrade the way I do, with a corporate-paid machine whenever I need one, with the specs that I ask for. And they don't. But software designers, and web application designers, seem to live in a world where Silicon Valley bandwidth and Steve Jobs design requirements are assumed to apply to all.

I want to move between computers, like I move between countries. And I have USB sticks that can carry enough data and software to allow me to work on any reasonable operating system (redundant software so I can plug in to a linux machine or a windows machine and do the work I do every day with the same or equivalent software). But the more diversity I see in the market place (the sub-notebooks or netbooks or whatever they are called now often have lower specs than the machine I used a decade ago) the more it seems I see people restricting their software to working on only a handful of the systems people actually use.

And this applies equally to Linux as to MacOS and Windows. An old machine I have at home that is perfectly capable of running Opera 10 turns out not to be big enough for any of the standard releases of Linux, so I am going to leave it with Windows98, until I have time to poke around more and find or customise a Linux into a small footprint. Then I have to try and make it usable for people who have spent 80 years without a computer.

I would give them my old Mac. Except that unlike the Windows machine that is much older and at least as dirty, the Mac actually doesn't work at all.

So I am starting to spend a bit of research time looking into Linux, 8 years after dropping it for the Mac as an exercise in understanding what other people did. (That was when nobody at W3C used a Macintosh - and they advised me against getting one. It turned out in retrospect to be the best and most reliable machine I have had in the last decade).

Or am I just getting old and crotchetty?