After a three year hiatus I bought a Mac – largely because design of PC laptops has seemingly regressed to the days before the Sony Vaio 505.
When I last had a Mac, both the hardware and the software were better designed than a Windows based PC. On an Apple you didn’t have DLL’s that made it impossible to manage software installations and you could link several computers together without having to hire a full-time network administrator. Microsoft software was a pile of junk compared to Apple’s until very recently.
These days, however, Apple seem to be able to produce excellent hardware design, but their software has deteriorated. Take, for example, the ‘aqua’ interface in OSX – yes there are animated events just like on an SGI (and where are they now?), but the principal interface issue, text rendering, is a joke on OSX. The latest version of the Apple OS anti-aliases text, period – you can adjust the threshold above which text is smoothed but you can’t switch it off. Even if you were to be able to switch off the text smoothing, which effectively reduces the screen resolution by a factor of 2, you would then encounter the fact that you can’t change the default OS font and the default is not designed to be ‘unsmoothed’ text, kerning letters so that they merge together or are unreadable. Back in the days of System 7, Apple had already solved this, while Microsoft were still to develop screen ready fonts such as Verdana.
Now all this may seem anally retentive, but reading text on screen is a fundamental issue and one which Apple used to be a leader in. Anyone following the evolution of UI design would notice that easily readable non-aliased fonts such as Jason Kottke’s Silkscreen are important on the web, but Apple have ignored unaliased fonts altogether.
Apple should stick to hardware and media software applications, their OS no longer competes with Microsoft’s on the desktop and ironically, letting it disappear may increase the chance of a challenge to Microsoft’s monopoly, the Apple OS is kept alive only to serve the purpose of deflecting anti-trust allegations away from Microsoft.