Eric Karns

Over the years I have become increasingly frustrated with Macs. I know it makes me a black sheep amongst designers, but Macs suck so bad I can’t stand staying silent anymore.

Let me give you a breakdown of a day in the life of a Mac-using designer.

I get in to work and proceed to try to turn on my G4 tower which is so ginormous I have to keep it under my desk. When I reach under my desk to turn the damn thing on, I can’t find the f*ckin power button because it’s so elegantly designed flush to the surface and can’t be felt. So I have to use the light from my cell phone to see where the power button is.

Now that I have plumber-butt from ducking under my desk, I stand up and tuck my shirt in and wait the 5 minutes it takes for my beautiful Mac to boot up. While I’m waiting I turn on the PC we use in the office for email. It boots up in half the time and I see I have several emails with file attachments.

Since Macs don’t work in a PC work environment (at most workplaces), I have to transfer the files from my PC to a server, (which happens to be off-site and slow as hell). Then I turn back to my Mac to download the files I just uploaded from the PC!

As I switch to the Mac keyboard, suddenly every word I spell is missing its first or last letter… this is because the keys are all designed at such a low profile that they are difficult to strike especially for us carpal tunnel sufferers. The keyboards themselves look beautiful when they’re brand new… all white and clear plastic… that is until day 2… when they’ve sucked every ounce of dust and dirt out of the air and look like someone wiped their butt with it.

Then.. there’s the Mac “Mighty Mouse”, the smart mouse that you can squeeze to hide all your windows. Well, my windows hide themselves all the time because apparently I clench my mouse too tightly. There is no right click button so you have to learn to deal with that too.

- I have some photos I want to work with in photoshop, but I can’t plug my camera into my Mac or it will reformat the drive to work with a Mac.

- I want to edit some sound files but none of the free sound editing software works with a Mac.

Mac’s are SLOW. Period. Don’t ever let anyone tell you they’re fast because they are not. It used to be that Mac’s processed high res design files faster, but these days PC’s are just as good.

Mac’s live about 2-3 years and then become so slow they’re useless. They cost about 5x more than a PC and don’t work with 20% of the software PC’s do.

So where is the benefit?

Oh… and P.S. I bought an iPod nano a few months ago and had to return it because its made for a 3 year olds hands. You can barely switch from one song to another without needing a microscope.