In computers, bugs are a fact of life. No matter how much someone might claim that an application or operating system is “perfect”, the truth is always quite different.
Take the Macintosh, for example. I’ve been using my MacBook Pro for a while, and am pretty impressed with its behavior. But “bug free? Heck no. Here are a few recent examples of “unexplained” behavior:
- I left the MacBook open and the battery drained. Before it failed completely, the machine entered standby mode. So far, so good. I carried the machine to the power outlet and charged it for a while, later powering it back on in the vacinity of my Mac wireless keyboard and mouse- note that all of these pieces come directly from Apple. I immediately unplugged the machine and carried it away. When I tried to use it, the trackpad took a very long time to respond…and the keyboard failed to work at all until I rebooted the machine
- the MacBook regularly seems to have problems connecting with its wireless peripherals, most notably the mouse. Note that these peripherals use Bluetooth. I can turn the mouse off, turn it back on, and it still won’t connect. Completely rebooting the computer usually corrects this problem, and it also seems that clicking the mouse after turning it back on (instead of moving it around) can get it back in communication with the MacBook
- Leopard has some nice features. One of them displays the amount of free space on a storage device right on the desktop. But it never seems to make much sense…look at this picture, for example
What does the icon in the upper right mean? It looks to me like it is saying I have 0.96 GB free on my hard drive. I know that’s not true: as the properties panel in the above image shows, I have 54.96 GB free. I *think* that’s because it has truncated the leading digits of the value
That’s it for now: there are a number of “behavioral” problems with Leopard that can’t rightly be described as “bugs”: they are more like features, I guess. But I’m sure I’ll find more honest to goodness bugs as time progresses.