Today, I downloaded and installed Mac OS X 10.8. I won’t call it an upgrade because it’s not. About two hours ago, I attempted to install 10.6 on my one-month-old laptop. Sadly, it did not work. Every time I tried to boot to the old OS, the system crashed. So, I’m stuck with this piece of shit operating system. Here’s the thing. I thought 10.7 was pretty bad. It made no real changes, except things that appeared to be eye-candy, and which, for me, made the product worse. So, what do I hate about 10.8?

  1. iCal is dumb. I didn’t like it in 10.7 where you COULDN’T see all your calendars on the side all the time. You could press a button to bring them up, but the next time you started it, they were gone again. Why did I want to see the calendars, so I would know which color corresponded to which calendar. Another problem was how it kept wanting to automatically set the times. I like to track my runs in iCal. I like to take my heartrate and enter that as well. So I used to enter “43:12 126bpm”. Basically, how long I ran and what my heartrate was. But Apple, in their infinite wisdom, would take that entry and show 43:12 bpm and set the time of the event to 1:26. Couldn’t find a way to say, just leave what I type in the entry. Really annoying. In 10.8, you can see all the calendars, which is great. So I can pick, say my work calendar and then add a new event… and it fucking goes to the Home calendar. Doesn’t matter which calendar is selected, all new events automatically go to the Home calendar. Solution, bought BusyCal, which works as I expect it to. I liked iCal a lot because it sync’d nicely with my iphone. (BusyCal should sync ok, but I haven’t tried it yet.) Though, I’m pretty disgusted with my crappy iphone now and will probably switch to an android phone. So, iCal is probably going to become less important to me when that happens.

  2. Mail.app no longer gives you the option of NOT storing your password. As soon as you start the program, it asks you for the password. That’s as it should. But it no longer has the checkbox that says don’t store the password. It’s just automatically put in your keychain. This is completely unacceptable to me and the reason that I wanted to go back to 10.6. Solution, bought MailMate, which isn’t perfect, but at least doesn’t store my damn password. In 10.7, I had a heck of a time getting my mail set up as I like it, not as Apple prefers me to use it. So, no I don’t want to see my mail as conversations. I just want to see each message as it comes in. I want my mailboxes on the left side and all the mail in the top pane with the current one in the bottom. Fortunately, the upgrade kept these settings, but since it automatically stores the passwords, I ended up deleting all my accounts. And I removed it from my dock.

I also bought an upgrade for VmWare Fusion, because I’m pretty sure my old version doesn’t work with 10.8. I’m disgusted enough that I don’t even want to know what else they fucked with on this version.

It’s interesting to me that I really no longer use any of the apps that came with the operating system. That was always such a nice draw of OS X. Now, it seems like they just want it to work like an ipad. If I wanted to work on an ipad, I would. But I want to work on a laptop, where I’m (usually) much more productive.

Personally, I hope to get at least five years out of this laptop, which is how I justified the large price. There should be a number of operating system changes in that time, but I’m not planning on switching to any of them based on my experiences today. In the back of my mind, I’m already planning on switching to linux in the future.