[marbletiles]

I'm a little bit nervous to say this, but this is another of Jeff's articles where I think "man, so many of this guy's problems would go away if he didn't hate Macs so much".

In my experience, Mac devs don't hate software, and Mac users don't have the instinctive "oh [App X I haven't heard of]? That's going to suck".

Gruber talked more about this in his Broken Windows essay -- http://daringfireball.net/2004/06/broken_windows -- and what he said about security is generally true for quality and polish as well. If I get a new app for the Mac, I know that it's going to have basic standards of fit and finish and will make a reasonable attempt at being a good Mac citizen, because otherwise the community will kill it.

When a new Mac app comes out, I'm usually fairly optimistic about what it will do. When a new Windows one appears, I'm sceptical.

This doesn't extend all the way to the quality of coding admittedly, but certainly at least until the iPhone came out Cocoa devs were a fairly select set of committed people, and the higher barrier to entry helped keep at least some of the crappiest C&P coders out of the platform.

[philwelch]

Not even having a Mac saves you from the crapware hardware makers bundle with their crap. You have no idea how annoying it was for me to have to remove shitty Kodak photo management software from my parents' Mac (which had a perfectly good version of iPhoto) or the horrific, kernel-panic-causing HP All-In-One software. Or even the shitty Verison DSL setup CD I was supposed to use to set up my DSL modem.

[zmimon]

Apple is it's own worse enemy here - while there is beautiful software on the Mac and the standard is in general above what I think you find on windows, the software that Apple itself makes for windows is generally awful and this drives the perceptions of a lot of windows users.

For example, iTunes is still the one piece of software that gets me into a flying rage - usually when I want to do something stupidly simple and it refuses to let me due to some preconceived user workflow that I would be violating. It freezes and hangs at weird moments, the UI lacks all kinds of normal Windows niceties like tooltips and hover highlighting, things that are vitally important to click on are rendered as if they are not clickable at all, and in general it looks completely out of place.

The message that Windows users get from this kind of thing is that Macs are foreign and hostile and incomprehensible and the idea of spending your whole life in that environment is repellent. Strangely when I use the same software on the Mac it all makes sense - I can't even really explain why.