With no address bar and no merge-whilst-copying I just cannot bring myself to switch to the Mac. And yes, I am smart enough to figure out Applescript to make up for some of these inadequacies, and am not afraid of the Terminal, but I simply cannot accept this bizarre lack two such basic features. Apple could fix these two problems in an instant but it seems to me that they’ve decided to do nothing so that Steve Jobs doesn’t have to lose face and admit that the Finder is pretty pathetic.

If Apple improved the Finder and made it usable tomorrow then I’d be buying a Mac the day after. It only takes 20 seconds to boot and 5 seconds to load the desktop on my 20″ Intel iMac at work whereas my home PC (Intel Core 2 Duo E6400, 1GB of Corsair DDR2 memory, Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 motherboard, 300 GB Seagate SATA-II drive 16MB cache NCQ) takes about a full minute before I can enter my password and a good two minutes before the hard drive has settled down so that I can start doing things.

With a Windows/PC experience this bad (and with Vista being absolutely deplorable; it’s no wonder they’re now calling it “Windows ME II”), Apple could be winning over Windows users in their droves if only they’d swallow a very tiny amount of humble pie and just fix the god-damned Finder! But no… Steve Jobs’ reputation is sacrosanct…

Here’s some further reading on the Finder and the Dock and just why they are so sucky:

About the Finder from Ars Technica
Top Ten Nine Reasons the Apple Dock Still Sucks from AskTog

You know you want to – Dock beats Start Menu any-day (can you send an email directly from the Outlook icon in the start menu?).
you are smart enough to figure out Applescript to make it do what you want to; like merge folders and if you are looking for where you are in a finder window – simply change the few from folders to directory tree (its the three column icon up there in the corner on the left). Oh Command (the apple key) and arrow keys move you around your text (cmd-left is like the home key) its just conditioning (home and end are used for extended scrolling). I do prefer FireFox over Safari but I wish the Mac version had spelling built in as Safari does – and I wish it were faster but I don’t find it unbearable. It works for me – better then IE ever did – damn those .net or whatever that stuff that only works in IE – programmers. And I know it locks up to the pin-wheel of death (not as bad as a blue screen but it is annoying) but it usually isolates the program you are in.
Seriously – I’ve still have to live with Win XP (our company IT dept. won’t make the switch to Vista for a while) and I’m usually the guy who fixes others Windows XP boxes when there is no IT around but would you expect anything less from a Mac guy? Its only one-size-fits all for those who want it to be (I say why not – its damn near painless) and those who just want to get work done with little pain and more time to play. If you want to play – open up Terminal and get into the Unix code… Sorry to Rant here, go ahead If I got you started you can reprimand me now.