Hi, just joined the forum.
Sorry to make my first post a bit of a rant, but I am really frustrated with the mac. I've had it for 3 months and find doing anything other than surfing to be clunky and difficult to learn. Here's a list of my current issues, which it would be great to get some support with:
1. I can't write to and therefore manage the external drive that had all my old PC stuff on it. Turns out it has to be mac formatted. My HD has got over 300GB and may MBP HD is 256 so I've nowhere to put all of it so I can format the drive. This is the main stumbling block to getting going.
I'm loathe to spend another £100 on another hard drive just to help me format the mac one.
2. Finder. Opens tiny windows that you can't maximise to see everything that's in there. It opens a new window every time you you go into a sub folder and it doesn't look like I can change this setting. It takes ages to shut every window down as I like to use lots of sub folders to organise my stuff. Can I make it work more like Explorer, or can someone point out benefits of Finder that I might be overlooking?
3. Main reason I bought the mac was for HD video editing which apple fans and the store people said it was built for. iMovie is so hard to use. I don't understand why content has to be organised as events. It also won't drag and drop events into the space to start a project. So I have to import files, which takes 1 hour per video (clips are c.30 mins long, they are biking videos). This reformatting amazes me as they are MOV files - the OS's own system - and yet it has to re-process them and make duplicate copies of everything when it works with them. I have the original source, the copy in events, then the project file copy - it seems daft and hugely wasteful of disk space.
After working on a movie, it then takes 1 hour to process a video, then another hour to export it so I can share it. Once exported and opened up, it's lost all its quality, down to below VHS standard. This makes a mockery of the retina screen i paid megabucks for and the HD camera I bought.
4. No delete key. Can one be assigned to another key? I find it frustrating having to remember all the combos of Fn, CTRL, alt, CMD - its like a playstation game. Is there a logical taxonomy somewhere which makes it intuitive what alt does as opposed to cmd?
In short, pretty much everything I have attempted to do other than surf the web has been unsuccessful. I feel really cheated by the apple hype that this is an easy machine to use. My iphone and ipad undoubtedly are; the Mac is planet zog.
5. I think it might be best to just reset the mac to its factory settings and start again. How do I do that?
6. Anyone want to buy my MBP retina 15 inch 256GB for 1500? I'd happily take the £300 hit.
Sorry, rant over.
Sorry to make my first post a bit of a rant, but I am really frustrated with the mac. I've had it for 3 months and find doing anything other than surfing to be clunky and difficult to learn. Here's a list of my current issues, which it would be great to get some support with:
1. I can't write to and therefore manage the external drive that had all my old PC stuff on it. Turns out it has to be mac formatted. My HD has got over 300GB and may MBP HD is 256 so I've nowhere to put all of it so I can format the drive. This is the main stumbling block to getting going.
I'm loathe to spend another £100 on another hard drive just to help me format the mac one.
2. Finder. Opens tiny windows that you can't maximise to see everything that's in there. It opens a new window every time you you go into a sub folder and it doesn't look like I can change this setting. It takes ages to shut every window down as I like to use lots of sub folders to organise my stuff. Can I make it work more like Explorer, or can someone point out benefits of Finder that I might be overlooking?
3. Main reason I bought the mac was for HD video editing which apple fans and the store people said it was built for. iMovie is so hard to use. I don't understand why content has to be organised as events. It also won't drag and drop events into the space to start a project. So I have to import files, which takes 1 hour per video (clips are c.30 mins long, they are biking videos). This reformatting amazes me as they are MOV files - the OS's own system - and yet it has to re-process them and make duplicate copies of everything when it works with them. I have the original source, the copy in events, then the project file copy - it seems daft and hugely wasteful of disk space.
After working on a movie, it then takes 1 hour to process a video, then another hour to export it so I can share it. Once exported and opened up, it's lost all its quality, down to below VHS standard. This makes a mockery of the retina screen i paid megabucks for and the HD camera I bought.
4. No delete key. Can one be assigned to another key? I find it frustrating having to remember all the combos of Fn, CTRL, alt, CMD - its like a playstation game. Is there a logical taxonomy somewhere which makes it intuitive what alt does as opposed to cmd?
In short, pretty much everything I have attempted to do other than surf the web has been unsuccessful. I feel really cheated by the apple hype that this is an easy machine to use. My iphone and ipad undoubtedly are; the Mac is planet zog.
5. I think it might be best to just reset the mac to its factory settings and start again. How do I do that?
6. Anyone want to buy my MBP retina 15 inch 256GB for 1500? I'd happily take the £300 hit.
Sorry, rant over.