Microsoft can eat my fat cock

[The Former DMiller]

ABF, you are basing your opinion on using publically-available computers, which is where most people get their opinion of Macs from. If I had based my opinion of Macs on the computers we had at my university labs I would have hated them too, but that holds true for the PCs as well.

Familiarity is certainly part of it, but it is true that Macs have no equivilant of the Start menu. The Apple menu is all you get, and that's cluttered even worse than the Start menu is with all kinds of stuff (I know, you can configure it to make it better, maybe you could fix the Apple menu, but Windows comes with one that works right out...)...

What you said hear lends itself to the fact that you are unfamiliar with using Macs. The Apple menu hasn't been the main hub of the Mac since 1999 when OS X was released. The Dock is where most of your navigating begins. The great thing about the Dock is that it is fully-customizable. My Dock has my most-used applications (Word, Excel, Safari, Geometer's Sketchpad, and the Terminal) as well as my home directory, applications folder, and documents folder so I can get to everything I need with pretty much one click of the mouse and a second of navigating.

I just don't like Apple's interface design. The way all non-fullscreen programs share the same top menu bar, instead of each application window having its own, takes some getting used to and seems to be the worse choice (makes it a little slower to use them if things are windowed...). Having all programs share the same bar as the apple button and the clock and all that stuff just seems inelegant... and it leaves no room for running-tasks buttons, you've got to go to the Finder menu to find what's running. ... oh, and you can make it autohide, right? Never tried, but I know that I hate having the taskbar always showing on my pc.

This is your opinion so I can't really say it's wrong, but I love that the menu for programs is always in the same place. I am always trying out new programs and it is very easy to learn a new program when the menu is more or less the same in every program.

Oh yeah, and the public imacs here at school are slow and none of the applications run as well as they do in PC. There are almost always some free, so once in a while I use one, but I quickly regret it... between the nonfunctioning rightclick menus that have almost no features to how the version of Word they have is evidently incompatible with Word 2000 documents (it could not properly display the formatted file) to everything else... yeah, I don't like macs.

They could be slow because the Macs are much older than the PCs. And if you want to right-click with a one-button mouse on a Mac you can always press Command (the Apple key) and click. Anyway, the fact that they don't have a version of Word that is compatible with Word 2000 shows me that they don't keep up the Macs in those labs very well.