Eat me, Tiger
All right. Enough. I’ve had it, Apple. For too long, I have been your little bitch. I have argued on your behalf against people who don’t care enough to have a strong opinion on the matter. I have apologized for and redirected attention away from your mistakes. Like a good little wife, I have supported your ideals without any consideration for my own. But that stops now.
Your Tiger is a pussy. It shutters and shakes whenever I tell it to do even the slightest thing. Its fierce eyes turn to beach-balls whenever I look at it. It coughs so much whenever I move the cursor that I think it might be afraid of my mouse. If this is a modern operating system, then it may be time to get postmodern.
That means an operating system that is based on new concepts. Your concept of the graphical user interface is predicated on an outdated response to an ill-perceived market. When your GUI was created, your market was the business-place. It only made sense to base your metaphor on the concept of the desktop. But the market for the computer has shifted. The business-place is no longer its center. The computer is so ubiquitous that anyone would be hard put to determine its central audience. Unfortunately, regardless of where a computer is used or what it is used for, your metaphor has locked the interaction into one founded on a concept of work.
I think work is the wrong way to go. My ideal GUI would be based, rather, on the concept of play. I’m not a UI designer, so I’m not about to suggest how changing this founding concept plays out across the board. Perhaps there’d be more sliders and less checkboxes. And perhaps your move toward more fluid transitions is a step in the right direction. But if you’re gonna start going in a different direction, you’re not going to get where you want to go by keeping one foot on the old path.
Perhaps the reason Tiger is so slow is because your designers don’t know if they want to keep it in a cage or let if run free. Or to not mix metaphors, perhaps I should say that the reason Tiger is so slow is because its designers want to keep it in a cubicle.
Regardless of the reason, Tiger is too damn slow. I keep hearing that your 10.4.3 update has upwards of 500 bug fixes. Hopefully, you’ll fix the speed issues I’ve been having with my Mac mini. But I fear that fixing the bugs is equivalent to plugging the leaks.
We need a drastic change. And I realize more and more everyday that it’s not going to come from you.