One of the great things about OS X is that it doesn’t tell you all the errors or problems that it has. If you need to know, you can find out. But otherwise it will leave you alone and only tell you things you need to know.
I realised how much I had taken this for granted when I recently needed to use Windows. The first 5 minutes there were 10 errors I got told about, none of which I needed to know about. It’s one of those things that is just plain annoying more than anything else.
This is where Apple’s Lion operating system tries a bit harder than last time, but is also not such a good thing. For example, rather than it necessarily telling me it’s searching through my e-mails for something I’m looking for, it seems as if it’s doing nothing. I think the idea is that the results will just instantly appear. But as my computer isn’t the latest and greatest (but by no means aged), it seems like it’s doing a whole lot of nothing when it’s actually doing something.
So how do you know if it’s doing anything? You don’t. If it’s thinking for a minute, and comes up with no results, how do you know whether it’s actually doing anything? You probably can’t easily tell.
So, I like the idea, but when these computers aren’t fast enough to figure out the answer in what one would think is a reasonable amount of time, most people will assume there isn’t an answer. And they’ll never know.
I’d prefer a computer that tells me what it’s doing, so I know if it’s doing something and just thinking slowly, or not doing anything at all.