I’ve had an iMac G5 for just about a year now. I’ve been patient, and I gave it time. I considered extenuating circumstances as well. But after a year of experiencing the same problems, over and over again, something needed to be done. Having also experienced some of these problems on other Macs I’ve used, I can fairly safely say they’re not limited to my iMac, and furthermore, they’re the sort of problems that could be easily fixed by Apple engineers. I sat down to write this list in the hope that they’ll read it and act on it for the sake of future Apple users.

First, let me specify this: my computer is up to date with the latest patches and downloads from Apple. It has no viruses, it hasn’t been hacked into by spammers, no hard drive sectors are corrupted, it’s fairly new and fairly fast. It also has plenty of memory. Specs: iMac G5 2.0GHz/1GB RAM. In short, it’s a good computer that should work just fine.

• iPhoto is slow, and crashes just about every time I download photos from my digital camera. No, it’s not my camera, I connected three different models, from different manufactures, and it crashes regardless. The photos get downloaded, but somehow when it’s got to close the connection between it and the camera, it freezes. I have to Force Quit it. Also, when I use it to browse my photos, it’ll crash unexpectedly and close. This it does every once in a while. Shouldn’t it be more stable than this?
• Burning DVDs and CDs is a real hassle. It’s fairly easy to get the burn process going, but finishing it is another matter. That’s because the software is unreliable – and I’m using the built-in software (Disk Utility, Finder). About 5 out of every 10 CDs or DVDs I stick in there, my Mac spits out because of “communication errors” with the drive. This is a ridiculously large number of errors. Having burned CDs and DVDs on my PC, from the same brand, and even the same batch, and never having gotten disc errors, I can say that this is clearly a Mac problem. Furthermore, these are good CDs and DVDs (Memorex, TDK). They weren’t made by some cheap, fly-by-nite operation, so they’re not to blame. You may think, big deal, DVDs and CDs are cheap, they’re only 15-25 cents a piece. Maybe so, but the error rate is still unacceptable. And have you thought about DL discs? I recently bought some, and they came out to about $5 per disc. I tried burning a big file onto a disc (about 6 GB), only to have my Mac spit it out, again because of a communication error. I’m not happy when my Mac wastes my money like this. How about when Blu-Ray or HD DVDs come out? They’ll be $35-50 per disc. Would you be happy when your Mac spits one out during burning because of a communication error? That disc will be unusable, and you’ll be left with a hole in your wallet.
• Reading and writing to CD-RW discs is problematic as well. Simply put, my Mac spits out certain CD-RW discs without even bothering to read them. Why? I don’t know. When I stick them in my PC, they work fine. They’re not scratched, they have files on them, they’re usable. Or, it’ll sometimes read them, but it won’t let me erase them. I can erase them on my PC.
• iDVD is a joke. It’s not a real application. It’s got to be the most un-intuitive piece of software ever created. I tried using it several times, I tried reading the help files, but no use. I just can’t figure out how to use it. And I’ve been using other DVD burning software on both the PC and the Mac. iDVD I just can’t figure out. Plus, it has this ridiculous restriction on the size of the video files. If, by its own estimation, a video file’s size exceeds its own burn limit on a DVD, no matter if its actual duration is less than what would normally fit on a DVD, it won’t burn it. It’ll say I need a DL DVD. That’s silly! It should compress it to fit it onto a single layer DVD. I for one am not going to waste a DL DVD to burn half an hour of video. It just doesn’t make sense to me. Here’s a concrete example: I have a video file that I filmed, the video file size is smaller than 4 GB (actually, it’s under 1 GB), the video duration is under 30 minutes, yet I can’t burn it onto a standard DVD with iDVD because it’s too big. Does it make sense to you?
• I like iMovie, but the movie exports (to movie files) are slow. Plus, it could stand to be easier to use. My benchmark is the video editing portion of EyeTV. It’s incredibly easy to edit videos there. Wow, is it ever easy! That’s how easy iMovie should be, especially considering that Apple is positioning itself as the leader in multimedia hardware and software.
• Mac OS X crashes. Yes, as unbelievable as that sounds, it does happen. And when it crashes, unexpected things occur. Like, files on external drives get corrupted. Why, I don’t know, but I wish it would stop. I lost plenty of precious files this way, and I don’t like it. When Windows crashed, it may have warned me that files may be lost, but somehow the files were always fine.
• Quicktime Pro is one slow piece of software. I tried using it to export movie files to different formats, but when it takes 24-36 hours to convert a 2 hour video file from DivX or AVI to H.264 or MPEG-4, it’s a little too much time for my taste, and I daresay, for most people’s tastes. Yes, I tried this numerous times, with different movie files, and conversion to different formats. Slow, slow, slow. Oh, and another thing. I buy Quicktime Pro for $30, and when I want to open .mpg files, I find out I need to purchase another $30 codec. I don’t remember having to do this on my PC. As a matter of fact, the same .mpg files were playable (and still are) right within the standard Windows Media Player.
• Have you tried to use Mail to import your emails from Thunderbird? Have you noticed it just doesn’t work, that it crashes every time? Yes, it’s Apple’s fault. Why? Because a single person was able to take care of this problem with a handy app, somewhat misnamed, but wonderfully effective. It’s called Eudora Mailbox Cleaner, and it’ll automatically import Thunderbird and Eudora emails into Mail.
• This is not entirely a Mac problem, Microsoft has plenty to do with it too, but PowerPoint freezes a lot, on many .ppt files.
• Video play in iTunes is jumpy at best. I mean, yuck, why enable video play directly in iTunes if it’s going to be horrible? Doesn’t matter which videos I play, whether they’re from the iTunes store, or MPEG-4 files from video podcasts, videos take precious seconds to load, video play stutters, pauses in mid-play, skips over frames – in short, it’s just not good enough. My iMac is no slouch. It should do just fine. And no, the solution isn’t to buy a newer Mac, a “dual core”. I’m not going to buy a new computer every year, although I’m sure Apple would like it if I did that. Remember what Steve Jobs said not too long ago? That people need to buy a new iPod every year in order to keep up with the changes? (!)
• I have an external iSight, and it’s unreliable. It stops working unpredictably, and I have to unplug/re-plug it into my iMac when it does that. I tried recording a video of myself on the iSight through Quicktime, and 20 seconds into it, the iSight froze. Tried it three more times, with the same result, then gave up. Seems to function okay with iChat AV, Skype and Yahoo Messenger though, but its microphone isn’t any better than the internal iMac one. I still have voice echos when I use it. I should probably mention that this is a replacement iSight. The original one that I bought with my computer wasn’t centered – in other words, I stood dead-center in front of the computer, the camera was pointed at me, yet on screen, I appeared on the left. I had a really “nice” time getting Apple Support to replace it.
• My Bluetooth mouse was/is a battery hog. You know how batteries in these Bluetooth mice last about a month. Apple estimates it at about that, anyway. Well, the Bluetooth mouse that shipped with my iMac ate through its batteries in a week, and sometimes in just a few days. I tried using both alkaline and rechargeable NiMh batteries, with similar results. It took over 6 months to get Apple Support to believe me and ship me out a new one. The new one seems to take about 2-3 weeks to go through its batteries, but I’m not going to waste my time calling Apple again. Yes, I have the 3-Year Apple Care Plan, but I guess Apple just wants me to pay for it and not use it, because they balk at replacing defective parts every time I call.
• The Shared folder – you know, the one where you’re supposed to be able to “share” files among the users on a computer – just doesn’t work as it’s supposed to. You see, it keeps the user permissions on the file when you move stuff into it, so when my wife wants to re-name or move or delete a file I’ve shared with her, even though she should be perfectly able to do this, she can’t, because that file belongs to me. She has to authenticate herself, as an Admin (if she weren’t an Admin, she couldn’t do anything at all), and only then can she do something with that file. And she has to authenticate for each file she wants to work with. This is an absolute hassle, and it’s not the way a Shared folder should work. Apple, this is one time when you need to copy Microsoft. The Shared Documents folder on PCs works great, and just as expected. When you move a file into it, it inherits the permissions on the Shared folder, which means all users can work with that file and do whatever they need to do with it. This is logical. Apple’s way isn’t, and needs to change.
• Hey, did you notice that there’s no easy way to have common iPhoto and iTunes libraries for the accounts on one computer? You just can’t do it with a few clicks of the mouse. You have to hack things. Seems to me that a husband and wife who have two accounts on the same computer ought to be able to share their photos and music libraries, and have single copies of each, not duplicates. There’s no “official solution” for this on the Mac. You have to find your own, which is what we did. We went into the prefs for iTunes for each account, and pointed it to a common location in the Shared folder. Of course, we had to call Apple Support to get the privileges reset, because there was no way to figure out what in the world the user groups were, but that’s another story. With iPhoto, it was harder. There’s no way to change the library location, iPhoto won’t let you. But you can hack it by using shortcuts in the expected location in each user account that point to a common location. We chose the Shared folder again, and again we had to reset privileges. But this should be easier, much easier! With a few clicks of the mouse, we should be able to say what libraries we want to share among user accounts, get them re-located on the fly, and also specify which user accounts have permissions to what.
• What sorts of user groups are there in Mac OS X? You have to be a UNIX geek to figure them out. When we needed to adjust privileges on folders and files (see bullet point above) we were at a loss. What in the world is “wheel”, and so on and so forth? Why not something intuitive, like “Administrators” and “Users”? Windows has Apple beat on this one.
• Why is FTP mode set to Passive by default? And why can’t it be changed from within FTP program settings (you know, apps like Fetch or Cyberduck)? Because it can’t. You have to go into Terminal to change it, and you have to know what to type in there. You may think this is trivial until you realize that some web hosting providers enforce Active FTP mode. I sat there, dumbfounded, for a couple of days, trying to figure out why I couldn’t connect. I had Active mode enabled in the FTP program prefs, but still couldn’t connect. I called Apple Support, only to have them blame me for some faulty setting, or pass the ball to my web hosting provider. I had to insist, and finaly was transferred to Advanced Support, who were able to tell me how to change the FTP mode in Terminal.

For those of you that are going to misunderstand this post, let me clarify things. I’m not trying to explain my way into using a PC instead of a Mac, because PCs are that much better… They’re not. A Mac has certain advantages over a PC, and every Mac user knows them, including me. That’s why most Mac users can’t see how they could go back to Windows. But, I’m sure most Mac users have also experienced plenty of frustration with their Mac, and think Apple could do a better job with things. This post was written for that purpose. It’s a list of suggested improvements gathered over the span of a year by a fairly typical Apple user, and I really do hope that Apple puts my list to good use.

Updated 11/07/07: I’ve taken my iMac in for repairs since I wrote this, and it turned out to be the logic board and Bluetooth module. My thanks to those who pointed them out as potential problems in the comments! The repair experience was, shall we say, sub-par. Read my post on that to get the details if you’re interested.