wow...too bad I'm old and nerdy
Here are my issues...they're all little things. Interfaces between programs are inconsistant. Apple is now guilty of this as well with shake and color, but they are targeting a specific audience who are accustomed to these painful interfaces.
To select a line of text on the mac...I triple click, or I click at the beginning of the selection and drag one line up or down to select in that direction...even if there's not a line following or preceding the text...simple, small hand movements rather than pain inducing treks across the vast expanses of the mouse pad (when you're used to one, the other feels extreme).
When Typing an URL, I type apple and return will auto complete the address as
www.apple.com, When I type apple/quicktime and hit return, it auto completes to
www.apple.com/quicktime (I'm aware of the ctrl-return thing...but it should be the default behavior rather than an exception).
applescript which allows you to control just about every application on your machine and tie them together (and now automator which allows you to drag functional blocks and connect them to write code)...this is the way the TV Guide is regionalized, BTW. Visual basic is close, but doesn't go as deep into the system as AS does.
shutdown is in the start menu...it's a semantic problem, not a functional one.
My problem with them is really the "death of a thousand papercuts". There's so many little things that seem like they were added as features without the thought ever occuring that regular people would ever have to actually use them. The interface is just the elements that we used to type in (in the DOS world) without having to type in the initial command. The mac was built from the ground up to hide these functions from the user. As an old school computer geek, this is the promise of the original concept of computing. It was supposed to get out of the way and let you work. To me, the PC seems like more of something you work on rather than with.
As a professional computer technician for the past decade...the troubleshooting workflow for the Macintosh is much more straight forward due to apple having complete control over both hardware and OS. No gazillions of DLL's to sort through, no monolithic registry to go corrupt and bring the computer to its knees...hardly ever an OS reinstall (which is something akin to changing out the engine of your car to replace the bad sparkplug)...which is 9 times out of 10 just to replace the registry...so back up a clean install of your registry every morning and keep the last 20 or so of them...when it starts going wonky, you can just re-import the last working one and your life will generally go back to happy...I would also back up before you install new HW/SW. See, I know windows, I just don't do them