Is a mac book worth it

[Ham]

The issue is not the way Windows handles fonts but the way Word manages styles. Styles is the beginning, end and middle of all Word issues. When Ctl-A remove all styles doesn't work you know you are well and truly shagged.

Bring back WordPerfect.

[mrcharly-YHT]

Sure, yawn, you keep saying that. Meanwhile I'll keep working from templated documents centrally controlled across 3 continents, 1600 users. ffs

[Jaded]

As Ham says, it is Words magic work with Styles that is the problem. Formatting, as I said 

[CrazyEnglishTriathlete]

No.  Have been using Macs since 1989, but the company is now run for profit only.  My Macbook Air is starting to wear out (June 2013) and will have to think about a replacement.  But its probably not going to be an Apple product. 

[TheLurker]

I was around a friend's house the other night, she was showing me her new bike. It was a bit shit to be honest, I used to have one and I hated it. Awful to ride, she could have got one a lot better. Like mine. I told her this and she claimed she liked her new bike and enjoyed riding it anyway.
...snip...

Ian wins.  Good enough to read aloud to MrsLurker. Who laughed a lot. Ta.

[ian]

I have to agree – Word's styles are awful. They juggle non- and counter-intuitive at several levels. Overly complex with a horrid, unapproachable UI. It takes an effort and even for an experienced user they're frustrating. Frankly it's a million times easier just to dump everything into InDesign (and we've no got onto graphics placement in Word or the inexplicable ways it still fails to work with postscript formats). Alas, I'm often not the owner of the document so this isn't always or often an option, as just a contributor I have to wrestle with large proposal and other documents in Word. I swear. I swear a lot. With passion and feeling.

As for fonts, I'm not sure of the issues, you just need to ensure matching fonts are installed.

[Jaded]

across 3 continents, 1600 users. ffs

57 channels and nothin on.

[Feanor]

The thing that gives me most grief in word is auto-numbering.

If you manage to wrangle it into working once, then whatever you do don't change *anything*, or the auto-numbering will break irreversibly.

[Kim]

From my limited observation, Word clearly provides the tools necessary to format large documents sensibly (I've seen it done).  It also provides an intuitive user interface that encourages naive users to sabotage that at every step.

There are often better tools for the job.  Exactly what will depend on what the document is and who or what is producing the content.  As ever with Microsoft, Word's main advantage is compatibility with itself.


I still think WYSIWYG encourages bad habits, but that boat sailed in about 1993.

[Pickled Onion]

Yes, it could probably be done using a proper scripting language but the only proper scripting language I know was never ported to Wintel boxes.

Apples have a command line too...

I could be wrong but I'm guessing Mr Larrington is referring to DCL, which, despite requiring about 20 American Feet of shelving for the Operators' Manual, at least worked properly, unlike PowerShell.

[citoyen]

I still think WYSIWYG encourages bad habits, but that boat sailed in about 1993.

A large part of my first proper job was formatting copy for typesetting books using markup language - that started in 1996. Only real downside to working that way was that mistakes weren't always spotted until the proofs came back from the typesetter...

Seeing a document formatted using the space bar and tab key makes me feel queasy. In fact, it makes me feel queasy just thinking about it.

[red marley]

I once wrote an entire book, in camera ready form for the publishers using Word (on a PC). It is possible.

I now use Latex (on a Mac) to write large documents. It is possible.

I think the usability of MacOS and Windows, both above and under the bonnet, is gradually converging, so the choice between them is less significant than it once was.

[caerau]

Well they both seem to be converging on the smartphone interface for some reason. 

[ian]

One of my first proper jobs was carefully gluing abstracts to paper for camera ready copy. About 28,000 of them...

I remember creating some animations of DNA replication once-upon-a-time before they were ten to a dozen. It was amazing(ly rudimentary by today's standards). And 1 minute 30 seconds of screen time took an overnight render on the SG machines. Ironically, DNA sequencers took about the same amount of time back then. Longer if you'd forgot to load the samples.

Markup, I dreamed of mark-up. Well, until I sat in front of Framemaker+SGML.

[TheLurker]

The thing that gives me most grief in word is auto-numbering.

If you manage to wrangle it into working once, then whatever you do don't change *anything*, or the auto-numbering will break irreversibly.

Auto numbering worked well up until the 2007 version and was robust.  Not since.  They tried to make it clever and failed miserably.  Even looking at it funny causes it to throw a fit.

[Afasoas]

But then people get rather strangely impassioned by computer choice. Personally, it's fridges. Man, I never tire of badmouthing people who chose LG fridges. I mean seriously, P34454s! You can get a Samsung with a P34643X compressor for half the price.

There's a reason for this, and that's the way that the fondness for Apple's offerings is mind boggling. They aren't exactly a panacea for usability or ease of getting things done that people perceive them to be. If that were the case, I'd be using one to type out this message. And I wouldn't find myself offering so much support to the small number of Mac users in my work place. MacOS is like a sandbox which offers a good veneer of usability but it doesn't hold the users hand in quite the way it needs too. It doesn't stop users from filling their disks up to the extent the machine takes a long time to boot and becomes hellishly unresponsive. It doesn't give the user a clue what's going on when network connectivity is broken because the routing table is missing a default entry. It doesn't tell the user that networking isn't working because Bonjour has decided to saturate the network interface. And whilst the finish on them is very nice, the actual build quality is awful. So is the way they seem to treat their customers. Don't take my word for it, watch some of the repairs undertaken by Louis Rossmann and judge for yourself.

Yes it's nice that the interface is so consistent across a range of apps and it's nice how it just works with other Apple devices. And yes I could possibly entertain the idea of recommending Apple products if they weren't so ludicrously overpriced.

I would hazard that you're not a 'normal' user'.

No, I just get to support 'normal' users when their computers are not working, which gives me a slightly broader insight.

These days when the Windows machines go bad (7,8,Server 2008r2, Server 2012r2) it's nearly always ageing hardware - some of our desktops are 8-9 years old with plenty of poke but hard drives (SSD), RAM and graphics cards give up the ghost.

When the Macs go bad, it usually a silly bug/characteristic*. The problems I refer to that you don't understand, are issues that have effected end users and all they know is that they've not been able to work on their computer as they intended. The end users haven't understood the problem either. They'd probably just restart MacOS and continue there work until the next time the problem recurred. The things is, we like to ensure our IT is working with ease so that end users are not hampered by the technology. Same with bureaucracy and processes - our developers have a pipeline and they are turning out 50-60 software deployments per day. We don't want that pipe line blocked or slowed down by poor IT, poor processes etc. and the same ethos goes for the entire business.

*It's a bit like running Linux  on a desktop really (albeit more polished UI wise), but that's FOSS and doesn't add hundreds of pounds to the purchase price of the hardware it's running on.

[ian]

I've yet to meet an IT department in the entire world that 'like(s) to ensure our IT is working with ease so that end users are not hampered by the technology'.

That's the funniest line I've read today.

Anyway, a computer is a preference like anything else (any modern computer is over-capable). I'm no idea why people are obsessed with criticising Macs. It's a computer, it works, and I like it. That I'm East Surrey's 18th Most Influential Tidy Haired Though Leader™ (now with the Beard of Authority®) is mere coincidence.

[Jaded]

Hell yes. We deal with quite a few IT departments. Empires built to ensure an easy consistency and that what they say goes. Users? What do they know, why on earth would they want to do that?

[Afasoas]

I've yet to meet an IT department in the entire world that 'like(s) to ensure our IT is working with ease so that end users are not hampered by the technology'.

That's the funniest line I've read today.

Anyway, a computer is a preference like anything else (any modern computer is over-capable). I'm no idea why people are obsessed with criticising Macs. It's a computer, it works, and I like it. That I'm East Surrey's 18th Most Influential Tidy Haired Though Leader™ (now with the Beard of Authority®) is mere coincidence.

Hell yes. We deal with quite a few IT departments. Empires built to ensure an easy consistency and that what they say goes. Users? What do they know, why on earth would they want to do that?

I don't work in an IT department. We don't have an IT department. Or departments even. That would be frowned upon, like anything that introduces unnecessary bureaucracy.

If our end users want Macs, they get them. Hence we support them.

Apple would have people believe that for certain things, you NEED a fruity thing. (Can't fault the marketing)

Their fruity things are expensive and not necessarily better (not necessarily any worse) than the alternatives available for doing those things. Shiny displays with poor colour balance for instance, not great for creating visual media.

Fruity things are obscenely expensive given their flaws and feel to me, like a bit of a con.

[mike]

Cheaper in the long run too... http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/apple-ibm-macs/

[Morat]

If it's for home use then why a laptop?

Space, convenience, sociability.  Not everyone has room to give over to a sodding great tower, laptops are generally pretty quiet so you can sit on the sofa in the bosom of your family, rather than locked away elsewhere in the house, and still get on with your IT related trivia.  And when you're done you can stuff a laptop out of sight in a small cupboard.

All good reasons but I've recently moved back to a desktop and use a tablet or phone for sofa surfing. With some careful shopping you should be able to buy a more powerful desktop and a tablet for the cost of a laptop. If you're buying from scratch I'd recommend going a little overboard on the monitor as it will probably outlast a few iterations of CPU/motherboard/memory

[Jaded]

I've yet to meet an IT department in the entire world that 'like(s) to ensure our IT is working with ease so that end users are not hampered by the technology'.

That's the funniest line I've read today.

Anyway, a computer is a preference like anything else (any modern computer is over-capable). I'm no idea why people are obsessed with criticising Macs. It's a computer, it works, and I like it. That I'm East Surrey's 18th Most Influential Tidy Haired Though Leader™ (now with the Beard of Authority®) is mere coincidence.

Hell yes. We deal with quite a few IT departments. Empires built to ensure an easy consistency and that what they say goes. Users? What do they know, why on earth would they want to do that?

I don't work in an IT department. We don't have an IT department. Or departments even. That would be frowned upon, like anything that introduces unnecessary bureaucracy.

If our end users want Macs, they get them. Hence we support them.

Apple would have people believe that for certain things, you NEED a fruity thing. (Can't fault the marketing)

Their fruity things are expensive and not necessarily better (not necessarily any worse) than the alternatives available for doing those things. Shiny displays with poor colour balance for instance, not great for creating visual media.

Fruity things are obscenely expensive given their flaws and feel to me, like a bit of a con.

How much did your bike cost. I assume you only have one?

[mrcharly-YHT]

For general corporate use, fruity things are overpriced and too restrictive. Single-manufacturer, limited types and no flexibility on builds is simply no good for corporate machines.
Expensive for development, restrictive on what software can be used and terrible for backwards compatibility.

For some people, for some uses, they are worth it.

[Afasoas]

I've yet to meet an IT department in the entire world that 'like(s) to ensure our IT is working with ease so that end users are not hampered by the technology'.

That's the funniest line I've read today.

Anyway, a computer is a preference like anything else (any modern computer is over-capable). I'm no idea why people are obsessed with criticising Macs. It's a computer, it works, and I like it. That I'm East Surrey's 18th Most Influential Tidy Haired Though Leader™ (now with the Beard of Authority®) is mere coincidence.

Hell yes. We deal with quite a few IT departments. Empires built to ensure an easy consistency and that what they say goes. Users? What do they know, why on earth would they want to do that?

I don't work in an IT department. We don't have an IT department. Or departments even. That would be frowned upon, like anything that introduces unnecessary bureaucracy.

If our end users want Macs, they get them. Hence we support them.

Apple would have people believe that for certain things, you NEED a fruity thing. (Can't fault the marketing)

Their fruity things are expensive and not necessarily better (not necessarily any worse) than the alternatives available for doing those things. Shiny displays with poor colour balance for instance, not great for creating visual media.

Fruity things are obscenely expensive given their flaws and feel to me, like a bit of a con.

How much did your bike cost. I assume you only have one?

2.
One cost £250.
The other swapped for a Canon eos350d dSLR


I don't think bike analogy works - unless you can name a manufacturer/brand that uses components that are welded into the frame, or provides ancillaries that can only be bought with and used on bikes of their own manufacture.

[caerau]

Overall Internet Hatred of computing platform is in my experience of t'internet directly proportional to company size.
Once through a certain level of 'dominance' they become the arsehole of evil where once they were seen as a plucky independent company defending the world from The Evil Empire.


circa mid 1990s when Microsoft was the Evil Empire and Apple having just about survived the schplamming of nearly all other competing brands when the IBM PC became King  were seen as defenders of the faithful.


Then they invented the iPod and gradually acquired the reputation of being an Evil Empire themselves.


Similar feats have been achieved by Google and Yahoo in their time.


This has always amused me.  I don't really give a toss who is biggest at any one moment and the received wisdom that such and such a company's products are SHITE products, well just because, has always bored me mostly.

... and on an on it goes...