I had to work with a Macintosh network today. If I had been mostly ambivalent towards Macs before (which I wasn’t; I had thought the system response time for just about everything was sluggish and the interface (one button mouse?) inefficient), now I can state unequivocably that I HATE Macs. Especially OS 9. They say Macs are easy to use? Of all the most unintuitive, poorly designed interfaces I’ve seen, the Mac interface is at the top of the list.

Now, I’m not stupid. I’ve figured out how to program your VCR, *without* the manual. I’ve set your car’s dashboard clock. But I couldn’t figure out how to eject the empty CD drive tray because there was no eject button on the tray and I literally spent 10 minutes trying to figure out how to do this through the Finder (and then gave up because I couldn’t figure it out). There were files that I could select and hit Copy on, but then I couldn’t Paste them into a different folder because Paste was always grayed out. When I copied a selection of files, the system sometimes ran out of memory. I couldn’t get a USB printer installed with OS 9. Another OS 9 machine would see the network, but I couldn’t get it on the Internet and there were no TCP/IP settings or troubleshooting tools available. (I suppose if it were Win9x and I didn’t know about “winipcfg”, or NT and “ipconfig”, I might have the same complaint in this one instance. But somehow for me Windows (since 9x) manages to be mostly intuitive, though we often complain, and I remember it being so even when I wasn’t too familiar with anything and set up TCP/IP for the first time through the control panel.) Oh well. I don’t see this as a matter of taste at all, anymore.