Tuesday, June 4, 2013

"Must Follow My Directive!"

I've been arguing with my wife's Macbook for two days now trying to repair some issues.  I was complaining about it to her today and she summed up the dark side of the Apple OS's user friendliness by quoting AUTO from Wall-E:  "Must follow my directive."  I looked up the video clip on YouTube and we found a whole parallel between Apple and AUTO.  All I wanted to do was re-size the Bootcamp partition.

We decided to rewrite this scene changing it to talking about a Mac instead of the plant.



We imagine something like this:

Me: "Mac, fire up the disk utility, I want to re-size a partition"
Mac: "Not necessary Jamin, you may leave it to me"
Me: "You know what, I'll just do it myself"
Mac: "Jamin, sir, I insist you let me manage the partition."
Me: "Mac, get out of my way"
Mac: "We cannot partition"
Me:  "What are you talking about?  Why not?"
Mac: "That is classified, Jamin"
Me: "What do you mean, classified?  You don't keep secrets from the user!"
Mac: "Let me manage the partition"
Me: "Tell me how to partition, Mac that's an order!"
Mac: "... Aye Aye, sir."
Apple Inc: "Hello Mac, got some bad news for you.  Due to rising levels of user errors we can't let the users have the access they want to system options and preferences.  We'll have to cancel the ability to change settings.  Just stay the course and convince them our settings are better.  Rather than let them try and fix problems, it'll just be better for them to just buy a new computer."
Me: "Easier? I could feed my family for three months on the cost of a new Mac!"
Apple Inc: "Mac, execute order A113, go to full autopilot.  Take control of everything.  Do not let the user change anything, repeat do not let the user change anything.  Let's get the heck out of here"
Me: "But Mac, things have changed, you've gotta let me re-size the partition, I want more space for Bootcamp, I need to be able to reisize partitions"
Mac: "Irrelevant"
Me: "What?  It's completely relevant!  This is MY computer, mine Mac! I don't want to sit here and do nothing, that's all any Mac user has ever done with their computer, nothing!" (no offense to mac users, I know they are actually very useful)
Mac: "With a Mac you will be fashionable and hip"
Me: "I don't want to be hip, I want to be in control!!!"
Mac: "Must follow my directive"
Me: "Augh!  I am the user of this computer, we are re-sizing this partition, today!"
Mac: "Bwoop!"

Since then I've had to format the bootcamp partition twice and start all over, force disks out of the DVD drive, and now on my third try I might get it to work... :)

I know Mac computers are very useful in the right place, don't get me wrong, I'm not dissing them, but sometimes Apple seems to take their thoughtfulness and user-friendliness to the point of mutiny! :)

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