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> And where does Apple store these pictures? As a massive proprietary lump of data that is illegible to any other software or life form. Go to ~/Pictures, righ

> And where does Apple store these pictures? As a massive proprietary lump of data that is illegible to any other software or life form. Go to ~/Pictures, right click the iPhoto Library, click "Show Package Contents". Suddenly, photos! I agree with the poster, though. From a purely technical POV, Apple's software is pretty bad. I have been using OS X since 2008, and it's much worse than Linux and Windows when it comes to stability and performance. It regularly uses much more memory than either OS, behaves badly under load, occasionally freezes up when connecting to external devices, takes more time to respond to certain events, is extremely hard to customize etc. iTunes is so bad that I prefer using almost anything else to play my music. Safari is an okay browser at best; it certainly can't compete with either Firefox or Chrome. I'm able to overlook all these technical issues because OS X is marginally better designed than Windows and Linux, does most of what I need to do without me having to jump through hoops, gives me great battery life, allows be to do an astounding number of basic computing tasks right out of the box[1], and runs all the software I need it to run. The fact that the OS X UI has remained functionally the same for over a decade is also a plus. I use OS X, but very little of Apple's other software. I browse the web using Firefox, listen to music using Clementine, use iTerm as my terminal, Google Docs for documents, Gmail for email, etc. I would switch to Linux in a heartbeat, but I feel the userland changes far too much far too often. At 23, I'm far too old for that. --- [1] These include cropping pictures, annotating PDFs, slicing video, recording my screen, recording video or voice, syncinc contacts and calendars, looking up words in a dictionary, reading mail, importing pictures from a digital camera, backing up my files, viewing (but not editing) ODF, XLSX, DOCX, etc. It even includes an on-line partitioning tool (Disk Utility), and a graphing calculator (Grapher).

xenophanes 13y ago
The OS is supposed to use memory. That's what it's for: to be used. Using memory is a feature, not a bug. Let the OS manage memory instead of demanding a lot should be left in an used state. You also didn't make much effort to argue your points. Consider Safari vs Chrome. Safari has better UI IMO, and Chrome is a fork of Safari's internals. So what's better about Chrome on Mac? I use both regularly. Chrome's adblock works better but it's not obvious what else is better and you didn't tell me.
- JohnTHaller 13y ago
  Saying Chrome is a fork of Safari as if it's a bad thing and the only word on the subject is a bit disingenuous. Safari is built on WebKit which is built on KHTML (which predates Apple having their own browser). Chrome was also built on WebKit but Google has now forked it themselves into Blink which will be used by Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Iron, etc so they don't have to deal with Apple while improving the code. As for Safari itself, I don't know about Mac OS X, but I know it was a disaster on Windows. But then, Apple has always only barely been able to develop Windows software. That's one of the reasons Apple abandoned it. iTunes it seems Apple only develops on Windows because they have to and they do as little as possible with it, hence the slow, custom UI that violates all Windows UI guidelines.
  - xenophanes 13y ago
    I didn't say it's a bad thing to fork, I said it requires further explanation how a fork -- with worse UI imo -- is better. Worse UI and similar internals -- where is the way better part? I don't wish to defend windows safari, only mac.
    - JohnTHaller 13y ago
      It's also worth pointing out that Safari's UI is not open source and not part of WebKit. Additionally, I find Chrome's UI (which is open source) superior to Safari, but it's subjective, of course.
- GeneralMaximus 13y ago
  > The OS is supposed to use memory. That's what it's for: to be used. Using memory is a feature, not a bug. Let the OS manage memory instead of demanding a lot should be left in an used state. When I purchased my MBP, it came with 4GB of memory. This was apparently enough for Linux, but not for OS X. I was able to open 40-50 browser tabs, play music, run several terminal sessions, run my text editor, and a host of other software on Linux. OS X, though, it started swapping like crazy if I opened 20-30 browser tabs and my media player. It would completely freeze up for minutes at a time if I tried to run too many applications at once. It was so bad that I problems getting work done. I eventually invested in more RAM, which immediately fixed all my performance issues. This is not a one-off thing. OS X Lion is known to have issues with memory management, and several hacks exist to make things better. The easiest method, though, is to throw money at the problem and upgrade your RAM. > You also didn't make much effort to argue your points. Consider Safari vs Chrome. Safari has better UI IMO, and Chrome is a fork of Safari's internals. So what's better about Chrome on Mac? I use both regularly. Chrome's adblock works better but it's not obvious what else is better and you didn't tell me. I, too, love the Safari UI. But Safari lacks the customizability of Chrome and Firefox. Also, despite having switched to a multi-process architecture, Safari still sometimes freezes randomly if one tab is doing too much work. This doesn't happen too often, though. > Chrome is a fork of Safari's internals. It is not. Both Chrome and Safari use WebKit as their layout engine, but that's where the similarity ends. They have separate JavaScript engines and network code. In any case, WebKit has not been an Apple-only project for a very long time now. Google contributes as much to WebKit as Apple does. And there are tons of other companies that work on WebKit, including Nokia, RIM, Samsung, Adobe, and Intel. See http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/02/11/apple-google-nearly-tied-as-top-contributors-to-webkit-as-adoption-expands http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/02/11/apple-google-nearl.... So WebKit != Apple. As for iTunes: I don't think I can add much to what people all over the Internet have already said. It's does far too many things, and does all of them poorly. It has several UI issues. E.g, it's hard to see your media library and currently playing playlist at the same time – something I want to do very often. The search is quite bad, since the only way to use advanced search operators is by creating a smart playlist. If you make changes to your media library using something other than iTunes, those changes will not be reflected in iTunes unless you rescan your library. So, if I buy an album off Bandcamp and drop it into ~/Music/, iTunes won't pick it up. I'll have to drop it into iTunes to add it to my library. Oh, and when iTunes is scanning my media library, it completely blocks the UI. I could go on all day. I use Clementine for my music, which is clunky and ugly but manages my media library much better than iTunes.

xenophanes 13y ago

The OS is supposed to use memory. That's what it's for: to be used. Using memory is a feature, not a bug. Let the OS manage memory instead of demanding a lot should be left in an used state. You also didn't make much effort to argue your points. Consider Safari vs Chrome. Safari has better UI IMO, and Chrome is a fork of Safari's internals. So what's better about Chrome on Mac? I use both regularly. Chrome's adblock works better but it's not obvious what else is better and you didn't tell me.

JohnTHaller 13y ago
Saying Chrome is a fork of Safari as if it's a bad thing and the only word on the subject is a bit disingenuous. Safari is built on WebKit which is built on KHTML (which predates Apple having their own browser). Chrome was also built on WebKit but Google has now forked it themselves into Blink which will be used by Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Iron, etc so they don't have to deal with Apple while improving the code. As for Safari itself, I don't know about Mac OS X, but I know it was a disaster on Windows. But then, Apple has always only barely been able to develop Windows software. That's one of the reasons Apple abandoned it. iTunes it seems Apple only develops on Windows because they have to and they do as little as possible with it, hence the slow, custom UI that violates all Windows UI guidelines.
- xenophanes 13y ago
  I didn't say it's a bad thing to fork, I said it requires further explanation how a fork -- with worse UI imo -- is better. Worse UI and similar internals -- where is the way better part? I don't wish to defend windows safari, only mac.
  - JohnTHaller 13y ago
    It's also worth pointing out that Safari's UI is not open source and not part of WebKit. Additionally, I find Chrome's UI (which is open source) superior to Safari, but it's subjective, of course.
GeneralMaximus 13y ago
> The OS is supposed to use memory. That's what it's for: to be used. Using memory is a feature, not a bug. Let the OS manage memory instead of demanding a lot should be left in an used state. When I purchased my MBP, it came with 4GB of memory. This was apparently enough for Linux, but not for OS X. I was able to open 40-50 browser tabs, play music, run several terminal sessions, run my text editor, and a host of other software on Linux. OS X, though, it started swapping like crazy if I opened 20-30 browser tabs and my media player. It would completely freeze up for minutes at a time if I tried to run too many applications at once. It was so bad that I problems getting work done. I eventually invested in more RAM, which immediately fixed all my performance issues. This is not a one-off thing. OS X Lion is known to have issues with memory management, and several hacks exist to make things better. The easiest method, though, is to throw money at the problem and upgrade your RAM. > You also didn't make much effort to argue your points. Consider Safari vs Chrome. Safari has better UI IMO, and Chrome is a fork of Safari's internals. So what's better about Chrome on Mac? I use both regularly. Chrome's adblock works better but it's not obvious what else is better and you didn't tell me. I, too, love the Safari UI. But Safari lacks the customizability of Chrome and Firefox. Also, despite having switched to a multi-process architecture, Safari still sometimes freezes randomly if one tab is doing too much work. This doesn't happen too often, though. > Chrome is a fork of Safari's internals. It is not. Both Chrome and Safari use WebKit as their layout engine, but that's where the similarity ends. They have separate JavaScript engines and network code. In any case, WebKit has not been an Apple-only project for a very long time now. Google contributes as much to WebKit as Apple does. And there are tons of other companies that work on WebKit, including Nokia, RIM, Samsung, Adobe, and Intel. See http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/02/11/apple-google-nearly-tied-as-top-contributors-to-webkit-as-adoption-expands http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/02/11/apple-google-nearl.... So WebKit != Apple. As for iTunes: I don't think I can add much to what people all over the Internet have already said. It's does far too many things, and does all of them poorly. It has several UI issues. E.g, it's hard to see your media library and currently playing playlist at the same time – something I want to do very often. The search is quite bad, since the only way to use advanced search operators is by creating a smart playlist. If you make changes to your media library using something other than iTunes, those changes will not be reflected in iTunes unless you rescan your library. So, if I buy an album off Bandcamp and drop it into ~/Music/, iTunes won't pick it up. I'll have to drop it into iTunes to add it to my library. Oh, and when iTunes is scanning my media library, it completely blocks the UI. I could go on all day. I use Clementine for my music, which is clunky and ugly but manages my media library much better than iTunes.