With Nat and Jeremy commenting on why their OS X based Macs aren't perfect, I thought I'd throw someone's proverbial .02 into the ring. I took a friend looking to get a new notebook to MicroCenter in Cambridge yesterday night and their comments were interesting. Here was a long time PC person who actually used to even work in the Macintosh software market (anyone remember White Pine software?). Anyway, their comments were two fold:
- Keyboard is less than optimal (aka "stinks"), specifically:
- Lack of key travel -- there is a real difference on PC keyboards and Mac keyboards with the amount of "depression". Mac laptop keyboards just don't feel the same.
- Key Layout. Similar to my issues here -- the whole Control / Apple thingie key.
- Hands Sliding Off the Keys. This was a new one to me. Their comment was that it felt like their hands would "slide off the keys". This may bee from the extreme flatness of the keyboard, the "slickness" of the keys or the lack of depression.
- Font Size Viewing in Apple Works. This one was interesting to me since I'm used to small text but their comment was that a) they don't want to repurchase MS Word b) they don't have anyone to pirate Word from c) they needed the equivalent of Word's Zoom feature which makes the text within documents larger without changing the print font size. I indicated that the machine might have it but that I wasn't sure.
Given that the keyboard was the real show stopper here, the font size thing, even if addressed would have prevented the purchase. It's very, very interesting to me that all of the issues being listed by Jeremy, Nat and myself are what would generally be considered "little issues". No one seems to be saying "Can't do it because software package X isn't available". It's more on the order of "I like it but it's annoying". My issues (not my friends) are things like keyboard, changes to the standard unix directory structure (Bastich! Why oh why did they capitalize directory names? Why????), ALT+TAB application switching and other little oddities.
