I don't get apple

19 May, 2025

I'm not an apple fan. I don't like their business model, and the world would be better off if they went bankrupt tomorrow. Still, whenever I heard people talking how apples UX is just better than the competition (be it pc or android), i used to believe them. I mean, they have complete control over their ecosystem, why wouldn't it be?

...Then I had to use apple products for my job.

A mac, specifically. And, honestly? I think it might just be the worst computing experience I've ever had.

It's not unusable per se, but all the little rough edges and points of friction add up to an operating system that just feels like a chore to use - Even more so than windows, honestly.

Here's a list of all the things i had to deal with.

1: It doesn't shut down properly

I have the misfortune of needing to use one of Jetbrains Products for work. Specifically, phpstorm. Now, while it's a fine IDE, it loves to randomly hang up every once in a while, especially when you try and close it. This is a problem because Macs will not shut down if there is still a program running. So, i have to manually kill the IDE via terminal. Every. Time. This happens often enough to get rather tedious pretty quickly.

Contrast this with windows, which just gives you a prompt asking if you want to shutdown anyways, or linux - Which doesn't care at all.¹

2: installing programs is a mess

On linux, you usually only use one way of installing an application - Via the package manager.

On windows, you download an executable from the internet.

On mac, you either:

1. Use the appstore
2. Use homebrew
3. Download an executable from the internet
4. Download an app file from the internet and drag it into your application folder

If you want anything beyond the most basic programs you will probably have to use all four of these installation methods.

I got slack from the appstore, downloaded php via homebrew, installed filezilla via a .app file and used an executable to install elasticsearch.

I don't think i need to elaborate on why this sucks.

3: The UI design sucks pretty hard

Apple software looks pretty. The problem is that this often comes at the expense of useability. Best example of this: The menubars. Programs often hide a lot of pretty important settings in the menubar, which is all the way at the top of the screen and extremely unintuitive. For the first week or so of using the OS i didn't even know that it did things specific to the program, seeing as it was am entirely detached part of the system UI - there was zero indication it was anything other than a way to quickly access some os settings, which is what i assumed it did. It's also at the very top of the screen and quite small, making it inconvenient to use. And having most of your settings in a grey, unstyled dropdown list isn't exactly very pretty either.

4: The file manager is extremely unintuitive

I don't like finder. First off: The icon. It's.... Some sort of abstract drawing of a face? It's better now, but for the first two weeks I'd spend like three minutes looking at my open programs, trying to figute out which one was the file manager, only to realize that it was the one that had an icon that looked like a bad minimalist painting. I thought at this point it was pretty much universal design language that icon of file = file manager, but i guess not? Maybe there's some profound historical reason behind it, but that doesn't make it any less confusing. Additionally, as far as i know, you can't actually use the file manager to, y'know... Make files? You can move them around, copy them, but you can't just left click in a folder and select 'create text file' or whatever, which is a quite frankly baffling design decision. Maybe it's hidden in the UI somewhere, but that doesn't make things much better - This is basic functionality, i should not be having to search for it. You also can't access your home folder without using a shortcut (at least as far as i can tell), which is kind of insane.

5: The peripherals are user-hostile

I know this isn't really a point about the os itself. I'm sure that if i had the money to buy a decent bluetooth keyboard and mouse they would work just fine. Thing is, the ones supplied by apple are so bad that i felt obligated to talk about them here. First up: The keyboard. It's a shitty membrane keyboard. Which is fine, i guess, except for the fact that it's both very flat and slightly slanted making it physically uncomfortable to type on. The worst offender is the mouse, though. It's also basically completely flat, meaning i have to use some kind of weird, fucked up claw grip to be able to operate it even somewhat comfortably.

What makes it even better is that the damn charging port is at the bottom of the mouse. Yes, that does indeed mean that you cannot charge the mouse while using it. If the goal here was to design peripherals that piss the user off as much as physically possible, they've achieved that.