In general, I’m quite happy with my Mac. It “just works” most of the time, and I don’t have the screw around with it to do what I would expect it to do. However, there are a small number of things that it doesn’t do right; they all small enough to be annoying but not show-stoppers:
- I think the filters/speakers on the left/right of my keyboard is dirty/clogged. Just moving my hands over them causes the screen to dim. Brian tells me that lots of other people have been complaining about this since the 10.3.8 update — perhaps this one will get fixed soon.
- I cannot play to Airport Extremes through my iTunes. I can see them listed in itunes in the bottom right, but when I try to play to them, nothing happens — music keeps coming out of my machine, not the airport extreme. This has happened to me in at least 2 different places.
- My Codetek virtual desktop sometimes misbehaves. It sometimes flips off to another screen and then flips back. This usually happens when I’m flipping to another screen — e.g., I’ll flip flip flip (i.e., 3 three desktops away), but Codetek will go to the 4th desktop, and then flip back to the 3rd.
- If I have a message half-composed in Mail, if I switch off to another application, I’ll frequently get a popdown window saying “The message cannot be saved.” However, if I switch back to the compose window and hit Apple-S, the message saves properly in the Drafts folder.
- I have the full Acrobat reader installed, but if I pull up any PDF document in it, it will not print more than 1 page. More specifically, if I print the document from within Acrobat, Acrobat goes through the motions of printing all N pages (i.e., I see the dialogue of it and it lists that it’s printing N pages), but only one page comes out of my printer. I actually think that this is a problem with my print setup at home — my Mac automatically finds the CUPS print server on my Linux workstation (to which there is an HP laser jet attached). I’m guessing that there’s some kind of wonkyness there in the data that the Mac sends and CUPS is able to understand. As further proof of this, I have never been able to get documents to print in landscape mode from my Mac (I select landscape in the print setup dialogue, but they come out on the printer in Portrait).
Has anyone else seen these kinds of things? Any hints would be appreciated…
Updates
Here’s some more things (added after the original post) that my Mac does:
- Emacs periodically freezes and I have to “Force quit” (this is the Carbon emacs that I download from Brian)
- That same emacs, when used with “-nw” goes into a spinning loop of death and needs to be kill -9’ed from a different window
- It never remembers wireless networks that don’t have WEP passwords (even though it asks me if it should remember them for the future)
- MS Office will typically (but not always) launch behind all other windows, even if I’ve double clicked on (for example) Excel and sat there waiting for it (i.e., not changing the focus to anything else)