Filed under: Analysis / Opinion
That irksome Mac moment
Now, we all love Apple and our Macs. However, we've all had that one irksome Mac moment during which we wanted to tilt our heads back and shout, "Nooooo!" Vader-style. Mine happened earlier this week, when I realized exactly why the majority of people don't use Macs.I was at my day job (tech support drone) when I got a call from a coworker making a presentation at a remote location. He was having trouble with the "Powerpoint box" (according to my IT Decoder Ring, this means "projector") because it was "...for PCs, not Macs. In fact, they're all PC here, so I can't use my iBook for my presentation!" I assured him that the Powerpoint box would in fact work with his iBook, once I drove over there and delivered a Mini-DVI to VGA adapter.
So I did, and everything was fine by the time I left. However, I saw a room full of maybe 35 people have their suspicions confirmed by the whole ordeal: "Macs don't work with anything." There was the presenter, going on and on about how he had to nix his slideshow because his Mac couldn't work with their system. Never mind that I showed up and proved him wrong, for I was the "computer guy," and I know how to beat those useless Macs into submission. No mere mortal could possibly have set that up.
So, TUAWers, what was your irksome Mac moment? We all have one. Do share.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 5)
Liam Dunaway said 9:07PM on 9-07-2006
I spent thirty minutes in a CompUSA trying to convince an older couple that Macs could, in fact, surf the internet. After browsing many of their favorite sites in front of them on an iMac, they were still convinced that they had to buy "something extra" to be able to do that.
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Neil Christie said 9:08PM on 9-07-2006
That's strange, simply because a mini-DVI to VGA adapter would make no difference in this case - Apple never ever shipped an iBook with a Mini DVI output port.
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Sean said 9:12PM on 9-07-2006
I so want that angry Finder icon. Mind uploading it somewhere please? Thanks.
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jedd said 9:16PM on 9-07-2006
I assume he meant one of those mini-vga to vga things, but i totally get the gist of the article, i find that kind of attitude often
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Timothy Hannon said 9:13PM on 9-07-2006
NTFS formatting/writing. Any fixes there?
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Mike said 9:20PM on 9-07-2006
Right now, some Flash applications cause any browser, for any user, to beachball o death. I can't figure out why, and the support sites from adobe and apple aren't helping.
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Daniel Brauer said 9:25PM on 9-07-2006
"Sorry, I can't video chat with you on MSN because I have a Mac."
It's so embarrassing every time I have to say it.
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Brian said 10:23PM on 9-07-2006
I am an AV tech at a college and I work everyday to break the myth that macs wont work for presentations. It is totally false that they think that but it is so engraved in peoples mind that its hard to convince. In fact I have less problems with macs than PCs. The only problem is using wide screen formats with projectors but That is fixed by simply changing that output resolution of the computer. But that same problem could also be said about a wide screen PC. And to tell you truth it is a problem with the projector itself, not the Mac.
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Mark Fleser said 9:32PM on 9-07-2006
I have had the opposite with using projectors on macs. Last semester I too a public speaking class and whenever I would do a presentation all I would have to do is connect my adapter to the projector's VGA cable and plug that into my iBook and boom instant silver screen with only an apple logo which was my desktop on that side (I used the little extended desktop hack to do this http://www.rutemoeller.com/mp/ibook/ibook_e.html) I then open up my keynote presentation privately on my iBook's display (no sneak peeks for the audience) press play and it's ready to go. No "why isn't this working" or "how do I do this". When the peecee users go to start up their presentations nothing but frustration. No one seems to know that on their peecee laptops there is a little button to switch to an external display. Mine was just plug and go, theirs was plug and what the f^ck. Oh and here's the beauty of it, I had notes the current slide and a preview of the next slide on my screen they had to have notecards and were only able to see what the audience sees.
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Ryan said 9:39PM on 9-07-2006
The syslab computer science geeks that spend most of their time either being hax0r l33t or bashing Macs make me want to scream.
It's only when my friends sit down at my Mac to chat or surf the web that they say Wow, if I had this computer I would have so much fun, just playing around."
Hear that, geeks?!?! FUN!
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Ryan said 9:42PM on 9-07-2006
I was in the middle of pitching the idea of a 'mac-lab' at my old middle school with a teacher when my iBook crashed (very unfortunately I had just made the point of the extreme rarity of such an event). I looked around a room full of very humorous faces (many of the people in the room were devoted PC users) and a few disappointed ones (the three teacher mac-using contingency at the school). Later I found that my logicboard was fried. Incidentally the school instead canned the idea completely after the failed presentation.
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Tourian said 9:42PM on 9-07-2006
"Sorry, I can't video chat with you on MSN because I have a Mac."
Totally agreed ;_;
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tsecam013 said 10:01PM on 9-07-2006
gotta agree with the video chat on MSN Messenger..it sucks :(
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Bryan Arnold said 9:53PM on 9-07-2006
First time reply in a year of reading this blog.
I too, had my MacBook Pro at a meeting, before I had installed Parallels. One of the people at the meeting had a disc that they could not get to work. I asked him if I could try it, only to find out that it was an exe file. I had to say "Sorry, my Mac cannot open this file." The looks from around the room confirmed to them that Mac's are inferior.
I could not agree more. As a former Windows user for my whole computing life, I switched to Mac a year ago.
Mac's need to somehow grow above the stigma that the majority of the computing public has put them in. Mac's are for "graphic design people" is a very common thought, even still, where the playing field in that area, and many others, is basically the same.
Besides some very annoying issues (some of them are mentioned above by other readers) Macs can do everything a Windows box can do.
From what I have seen, the majority of Mac users I have dealt with are really computer challenged. So all the Windows users see how the challenged Mac user struggles, they think that Mac's are all about eye candy/video/graphic design/music and nothing else.
I have found Mac's to be a breath of fresh air to work on in the past year. I also have shown other Windows users, that are skeptical about Macs, that a Mac can in fact do this or that, and most of the time easier than Windows.
I think as more and more people that know what they are doing use Macs, other people will take notice, and Macs can work their way into becoming accepted.
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Yuri Walkiw said 10:13PM on 9-07-2006
Whenever someone asks me to video chat, I used to say I have a mac, but now I just sign out and fire up mercury meesenger. I hate mercury messenger's layout, but it has a basic video chat in it. When I'm done, I sign back into Adium or the default Microsoft Messenger.
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t-diddy said 10:08PM on 9-07-2006
I've learned to carry in my laptop bag every possible cable for those types of situations. Also, I'm not prone to those as well, as most classes I take are Mac friendly. Although, at my school the IT department somehow downgraded all of the brand new G5 towers to Panther earlier this year because the head guy read somewhere Tiger wasn't good at networking. The head of Media Arts finally convinced them this semester to reinstall Tiger on all of the machines. That's the thing about IT departments who are only PC friendly. They think because they can't hack the thing, it's not going to work for them.
It's been pretty different getting my wife to convert to a mac. Most notably, the first time she tried to burn a CD through the finder, which is so simple yet you wouldn't think to click and drag it to the trash the first time around. She's still skeptical, but every day she deals with her PCs at work, she realizes what a pain in the ass they really are.
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Eric Coleman said 10:09PM on 9-07-2006
Since when can't you video chat with MSN users... doesn't aMSN allow for this?
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martin said 10:09PM on 9-07-2006
I remember when I was having problems getting a client's new MBP to work on their Windows Server 2003 network. He didn't need to get on the domain but he just needed to see the server's shares and he couldn't. That was when I learned the incredibly useful tip about the default encryption in Win Server 2003. But while I was struggling with it my coworker said "I thought these things were supposed to 'Just work'" which got me peeved, it wasn't the damn Mac's fault, it was Windows Server trying to force encryption on every client connecting to it, something stupid and most likely put in to discourage the use of Macs at the workplace.
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Fritz Laurel said 10:20PM on 9-07-2006
This PC dude just doesn't get it....
http://forums.smartertools.com/forums/thread/19564.aspx
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Dr. Dave said 11:22PM on 9-08-2006
I'll share an experience that will exactly offset yours...
Last month I was presenting at a science education conference. The previous speaker spent 10 minutes with 2 tech people trying to get his Dell to talk to the projector properly (while the audience of 70+ fidgeted) and got nothing but a blank screen until he finally gave up and switched to a backup set of overhead transparencies.
When his talk was over I walked up and plugged in my PowerBook and got an image on the screen immediately. I started my talk with the line... "Everybody's seen those I'm-a-Mac-I'm-a-PC commercials, right?" Got a big laugh.
So... it all comes out even in the end.
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