Comment by yef | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yef | Hacker News Reader

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Apple is a great company with many great products, but fanboyism irks me to no end. The article isn't about market failures, it's about bad products from a user standpoint. For the ones that I've used, I agree wholeheartedly:

Hockey Puck Mouse: I could never feel how it was oriented. I know I'm not the only person who had this problem.

Earbuds: They fall out of my ears if I'm not completely still. I know I'm not the only person who has this problem.

iTunes: Great in 2001. Now it's bloated, slow, doesn't handle large libraries well, has terrible error messages (or none at all), movie rentals don't work, sync'ing works weird, the list goes on and on and on. I know I'm not the only person, again.

I would add OS X to the list in terms of usability as well. Take, for example, the 7-year long thread on Jeremy Zawodny's blog about focus-follows-mouse. Why couldn't they put an option in the mouse settings to allow focus-follows-mouse?

You only get to add OS X if you can make a case for Linux or Windows being more usable.

Sure, here goes: the mouse moves the way I expect it to in Linux and Windows. On Mac, it feels like I'm dragging it through sand. I can't find combination of settings to fix it. The OS also has so many cute animations that if feels sluggish. For example, when I log in, I type the first letter of my name, and a password box animates into place over the course of about a second. I can't find a way to turn the frills off. I get the feeling that Apple products are designed to make users feel good, while Linux is focused on letting people work. I think Apple is doing the right thing, I just wish they paid more attention to the power user rather than forcing arbitrary UI decisions on them.

^ iTunes: Great in 2001. Now it's bloated, slow, doesn't handle large libraries well,

What is considered a large library? I have about 3500 songs, and I am not having problems.

I have about 16k and it's almost unusable. From what I hear the PC version performance is much worse than the Mac version though.

Ok, that is much larger than mine. :-) I'm just curious of the point that iTunes becomes unusable.

So far, no problems in either XP or OS X for me

14k. OSX. MacBook. No problems.

I have 52k, usage is fine on iMac late 2007, but at times a little bit slow when scrolling through the cover art.

60k or so, enough to actually need a music manager :)

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