Man. If you know Macs, and want to see how stupid a person can be, check out this article. I had to check the site’s main page to find out that it was not, in fact, a parody magazine–the guy’s take on the Mac was so ridiculously wrong on so many counts, it seriously looked like a spoof. I’ve fallen for those before. But this time, it’s for real–this guy is just plain dumb.

Let’s go over the article’s high points. First, a preview of his gripes from the second paragraph:

I was suckered in by the hype about freedom from viruses, simplicity of computing and versatility. Instead, I bought a boat anchor that can’t view Web sites properly, is not compatible with Microsoft Word and can run only dumbed-down versions of regular software.

How do you respond to that? The Mac is not easy to use? He addresses that later on, but we’ll see that his main complaint is that the Mac is not identical to Windows XP. Security he dismisses out of hand, as if it were not worth anything. “Not compatible with MS Word”? And “dumbed down versions” of software? But as I said, that’s just a preview. Let’s get down to his real gems:

I’ll be lucky to get half of the $4,552.71 I paid for the Mac on May 21, 2006.

Here’s a real sign of his cluelessness: he bought a pre-Intel professional-level Mac G5 just a few months before the Intel-based machines were released. That’s like buying a brand-new, top-of-the-line VHS player today–you’re buying into the old technology just a short time before it becomes outdated.

What’s more, why did he buy a top-of-the-line desktop system? His previous computer was an IBM ThinkPad, for crying out loud. It sounds like he loaded it up with massive amounts of RAM as well–and the costs would not be less for a similarly-equipped Windows PC (a common fallacy in this article–complain about the Mac for having the same downsides as every other computer out there). Why not get the Intel iMac 20-incher, already out by that time? It would have cost less than half as much, and almost certainly would have met his needs–probably more so, as it could run Windows as well. And all he talks about is running Word, PowerPoint, and the browser–no 3-D gaming or video editing. Clearly he bought the wrong computer. The iMac is plenty fast for his stated needs. This guy clearly did not do his market research, at all. And this guy works as a marketing consultant?

I liked the sexy FireWire with its zippy transfer speeds, although I used it only to transfer data to my external hard drive.

Another sign of cluelessness. Firewire is 400 Mbps. USB 2, which has been out for a few years now and is standard on all computers including Macs, is 480 Mbps. Maybe he’s talking about the Firewire-b port, which goes up to 800 Mbps–but that speed is only of use if you have super-fast peripherals, like a heavy-duty RAID array. Video editing pros need it, for example. A law firm marketing consultant, though? What for? The hard drive he mentioned was likely an out-of-the-box consumer drive, which uses only a fraction of the Firewire speeds.

The signs of doom were there on day one, but I ignored them. I pretended that I liked the one button mouse. I quickly started using click + command keys (and other keyboard shortcuts). I really missed the little scrolling wheel in the center of the mouse.

What the hell is he talking about? First, the Power Macs selling in May 2006 came with the Mighty Mouse, a 4-button mouse with a scroll ball (more versatile than a scroll wheel). How idiotic do you have to be to not realize there are three extra buttons on your mouse? Did this guy read no manual and speak to no Mac user?

Second, even if he was given a one-button mouse, he could easily just buy any USB mouse out there and it would work fine. What is wrong with PC users that they can’t buy any mouse that was not shipped with the computer? I got a Windows machine and didn’t like the old-style ball mouse they gave me, so I went out and bought a laser mouse. It’s not brain surgery.

I put up with the fact that the HP printer, which I had purchased on the recommendation of an Apple Store, would work about 50 percent of the time with the Mac. I was constantly deleting print jobs and starting them over.

I have an HP printer, and it works beautifully. In fact, I don’t even have to install the driver software, even if the specific driver for my printer is not installed in OS X; the Mac simply sees the printer, and makes up its own driver. I have only had trouble with network printers, and only in some cases even then. My PowerBook G4 easily connected to and used a Fuji-Xerox color copy machine on my office network, after just 30 seconds of setup. You have to be pretty inept not to be able to print correctly from a Mac.

I noticed it was slow; I saw that stupid spinning colored wheel a lot. The Mac would hang up; the TV ads said Macs didn’t do that.

Here’s another sign something was unusually wrong, or else he’s massively exaggerating. Even though it was pre-Intel, the top-of-the-line Power Mac G5 was lightning fast. What was he trying to do that got him the spinning cursor “a lot”? He never reveals this. I suspect the exaggeration explanation. As for hangs and crashes, that depends on what software he uses, in what combinations. Maybe the guy was loading up with beta software; crashes with finished software are rare, at least in my experience. Again, he’s probably exaggerating; frustrated people with a grudge do that a lot.

I did like the Finder because it was quick in locating files, but it would turn up a lot of false hits. It was comparable to the Google Desktop searcher on my PC.

It’s called “refining your search terms.” False hits are a problem endemic to all search engines, PC or Mac. So how does this show the Mac is worse? And does this guy not appreciate all the advantages in Spotlight over Windows alternatives, even despite the software’s version-1 shortcomings?

What drove me nuts was that I would open Word for Mac and couldn’t delete files while I was in Word. There is no File | Delete option.

This is something that I suspect a lot of people would not recognize, and this guy does not even correctly identify it. He’s talking about the ability in Windows to manipulate files and folders from within the navigation dialog box–say, when you do an “Open” or “Save” command, and you want to look for where to open or save something. It’s not a Word feature, it’s part of the operating system.

It gets better:

So the documents took up space on my hard drive, until someone told me I had to find the document in Finder and then move it into the trash from there. This seemed stupid to me; I just wanted to highlight a file and tap “delete.”

How dumb is that? This guy never caught on to the fact that in both Windows and the Mac that the standard way of manipulating files was in folder windows?

More amazing, without the ability to delete files in a dialog box, he would never delete any of his files? And by the way, how is his hard drive filling up with Word files? My superpowers of observation tell me he’s exaggerating an inconvenience again. Create more folders and organize, Pointdexter.

Look, I’ll admit right here and now that I like that ability in Windows, and would like to see the Mac pick it up–but to be chained to it so absolutely that he could think of no other way to function is so computer-illiterate to be laughable–at least for a guy who puts on the airs of writing an article about it in the media. Or are complete N00bs commonly writing tech articles now?

The really vapid thing here is that even after he’s told how to do it the standard way, he sees it as a chore that is somehow more difficult, when it is practically the same thing, just in a different location. Instead of opening a dialog box in Word, just open a window in the Finder. Navigation is virtually the same–easier on a Mac, in fact. To get rid of the file, instead of tapping “Delete,” tap “Command-delete.” I know it’s rocket science, but get with the program.

Word files transferred from the Mac were missing pictures. PowerPoint files transferred from the Mac would lose their formatting. PCs and Macs are not compatible, regardless of what they say.

Interesting–I transfer Word and PowerPoint files with my students, who use PCs, all the time, and I never have these problems. My guess though: the pictures that disappeared were in a file format that his version of Office for the Mac could read, but the Windows version of Office could not. I would guess that he saved the file using Office for Mac 2004, and tried to open it in Office for Windows 2000. I know that causes this kind of problem a lot. In short, he’s probably whining about the Mac because he’s too thick to figure out that the software version is different. This is true on Windows-to-Windows compatibility as well; it’s a universal software version incompatibility, not an OS shortcoming. As for the loss of formatting, I’d be willing to bet he used a font on the Mac that didn’t exist on the PC–which would be his error, not the computer’s.

The multiple clicking to accomplish simple tasks was a constant annoyance. Things I could do with a PC in two keystrokes took four or five clicks with the Mac. To do a “fast print” required clicking File, Print, find Copies & Pages, click Paper Type/Quality, click Normal and finally clicking Fast Draft. And there was no way to leave the setting as the default. I had to do it manually every time.

He’s basing the ease-of-use of the OS on a single printing task? How about doing a find-file between the two OS’s? A far more common task where the Mac does in one stroke what takes five or more for the PC. How about mounting and ejecting USB flash memory sticks? How about creating a new folder within a file & folder window? How about changing screen resolutions? How about setting up printers? I could go on and on; the list of things a Mac does faster is a lot longer than the list of things you can do faster on a PC.

Doing a simple screen capture was an immense chore. On a PC you just press Alt and tap PrtScr. With the Mac I had to download and launch special programs to accomplish this simple task.

So, doing a Command-shift-3 is an “immense chore”? (By the way, a screen capture on Windows in not what he says it is–he’s describing a window capture, not a screen capture!) This guy is wailing on the Mac because he’s too damned lazy to even look up the keyboard shortcuts? (Three clicks: System Preferences, Keyboard & Mouse, Keyboard Shortcuts. Boom.) The same shortcuts he could easily customize on a Mac but not in Windows? You don’t have to open the “Grab” application (which, by the way, comes pre-installed on your Mac) to do a screen grab on the Mac; that app is mostly good for “timed” screen grabs, so you can get a picture of the cursor in action, pulling down menus and such.

In fact, the Mac is easier and more versatile here than Windows. In Windows, you only have the keyboard shortcuts “Print screen” (to capture the whole screen) and “Alt-Print screen” (to capture the image of a window or dialog box). On the Mac, there are six keyboard shortcuts (most of them customizable), for capturing the whole screen, a window/dialog box/any-object-selected, or a custom-sized area you define, and to save it to the clipboard or as a file on the Desktop. With a free utility, you can specify where the file is saved and what image format it is saved as.

Here’s a perfect example of the Mac being way better than Windows, but this guy is just too dumb to realize it.

I didn’t even bother with the Mac’s iCal or Mail, which required me to buy an @mac.com address.

Wrong. Mail can work freely with any email account, just like any other software. iCal works fine without .Mac as well; the mac.com address only serves as a convenient way to publicly publish your calendars and sync them between multiple computers–things you can achieve anyway if you have a bit of technical knowledge.

Instead, I went straight to Outlook for Mac. A lot of the software for Mac — such as AOL for Mac OS X — was dumbed down and missing may features of the current PC versions.

AOL for Mac was his prime example of dumbed-down software? And the outdated and feature-poor Outlook was an example of better software than what comes with a Mac? What a buffoon.

For me the killer was the Web browser. Safari simply cannot read Flash. It is, quite simply, a second-rate browser.

That’s funny, my version of Safari reads Flash fine. In fact, I had to get special software to selectively disable Flash animations on Safari, they annoy me so much! Did he try downloading the plug-in? As for my Mac, I didn’t need to–the Flash plug-in was included when I installed OS X.

Now, it is true that some web designers lazily create their sites so they only work cleanly for Internet Explorer, but that’s the web designers’ fault, not the Mac’s. You’ll find the same difficulties with Firefox. It’s not anyone else’s fault that some web designers are exclusive because they don’t want to work hard enough to check their pages on different browsers and do the necessary touch-up work. Besides, finding a web site that doesn’t work in Safari is not an everyday experience; aside from a Google app or two, in fact, I can’t recall encountering a non-functional page in Safari for some time now.

I even called Apple headquarters and asked when a better version would be available and was told that Apple is in no hurry to improve it.

Yeah. Right. I’m sure that’s exactly what they told him. I’d bet a lot that he’s either lying about even calling them, was unable to explain his problem clearly because of his ineptitude, or that he’s massively exaggerating again–or the last two combined.

On the suggestions of friends, I downloaded Netscape and Firefox, which were no better.

I rest my case.

I scraped along with Internet Explorer 5.0 for Mac, and then discovered in 2006 that Microsoft would no longer support the Mac version.

This explains why his browsing experience on the Mac sucked–he used the crappiest possible browser, in a version several years out of date, just because he couldn’t figure out how to play Flash animations on a web page he visited in Safari. What a loser. A coworker of mine emailed me a few weeks ago to complain of web sites not working and that his browsing experience on the Mac sucked big-time. He was amazed when I accurately guessed that he was using Internet Explorer, and after I got him started on Safari, he had no complaints.

I run several Web sites, all optimized for IE 5.5 or higher.

Here’s another clue. He’s one of the lazy designers who “optimizes” for Internet Explorer. He apparently does not know that “optimizing for Explorer” means that instead of using universal coding so that every browser can read the page, he instead codes specifically for the Explorer browser in an exclusive way that simply shuts out visitors not using Microsoft’s software. Then he whines about Safari “not working.”

I couldn’t operate my own Web sites with the Mac. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Say what? How, exactly, could he not operate a web site using a Mac? I do it just fine. Oh, I bet I know–he probably still uses Microsoft FrontPage and can’t find a Mac version. Outside of that, there’s no reason he can’t use a Mac for this, not that I can figure–and I run several web sites myself just fine, thank you.

Then the hard drive croaked on me after only three months of owning the machine. I couldn’t tell what was going wrong and had to hire someone for $125 an hour to come over and tell me what the heck was happening. Apple replaced it for free, but I became leery of what other hardware would fail unexpectedly.

Here’s a clue: hardware can fail on any machine. You expect the Mac to never have hardware problems? How does the fact that a hard drive failed make the Mac any different than a Windows PC?

Furthermore, you had to hire a guy at $125 an hour to tell you that your hard drive wouldn’t work? And you claim the expertise of running several web sites? The author claimed he went to an Apple Store before buying his printer, which means he had access to a Genius Bar. Sure, it’s a pain to haul the big Power Mac chassis into the store, but it has those big handles on it, and surely it would be worth saving $125 an hour?

This is the definitive Ugly-Windows-User bashing of the Mac. A moron who doesn’t bother to read up or learn how a Mac is different or what it can do, then complains when his Mac doesn’t act like Windows. If I posted a blog entry on Windows that was as stupid as this article is, I would be too embarrassed to write again at all for a month, and would never expect anyone to trust anything I wrote about computers ever again.

There is one fringe benefit to this, however: if I ever need market consulting, I know exactly who not to call for assistance. If this guy is so clueless about operating a simple computer, I wouldn’t trust him to do anything more complicated than driving a stick-shift, following a recipe for cookies, or programming a VCR–and probably not even that much.