Yep, used 'em quite a bit. Found 'em irritating beyond all rationality and quickly turned them all into Windows or nix boxen. Now I have a bunch of overpriced, underpowered Windows and nix boxes with bad keyboards.

1) Apple's Toolbar is the universal toolbar across the top of the screen. Turn on a Mac built since 1984 and there it is. I think Apple calls it a menubar, but meh, whatever. Just because Apple chooses to call it something different than everybody else doesn't make it different.

2) There are plenty of multi-doc apps where you can close the window, but the app remains "open", toolbar dutifully filling up the top of the screen just asking you to hit command+n or whatever to start a new document. It's as old as time.

3) I conceded no such point. I was claiming that if drag and drop between apps was something I wished to accomplish, I was able to do that just fine in <insert any modern windowed operating system>. But in most windowed systems, you can also maximize/full-screen the app, particularly using an MDI metaphor, to focus your work on just that app when you want and not have your online poker game or movie, or some other similarly designed and looking app showing up in the background driving the user to distraction because it's cluttering up their visual space with irrelevant garbage.

4) Thanks for describing my point exactly. The singular menu bar, the place where all the application functions exist is completely decoupled from the object (the window) that the functions are operating on. If I place two apps side-by-side, I can only see the menubar from one app at a time.

4b) You tell me. The Apple line of operating systems has proven to be so unusable for me due to this reason that to this day I can't explain why it happens nor train myself to avoid it. Call me slow, or whatnot. But when I close a window, I mean to close the app, not have it hang around. This is one of many areas where Apple products don't "just work" as the adherents tirelessly proclaim - at least for me. Call me odd, but I haven't had this problem in any other Windowed OS I've ever used, not BeOS, Amiga OS, Risc OS, any version of Windows, Plan 9, etc. etc. etc.

5) So you walk around with the controls to operate your car decoupled from the vehicle? It must be awesome to drive facing backwards from the backseat. I also keep appropriate tools near where I'm working. If I'm doing woodwork, I go to my woodwork shop and bam there's all my woodworking tools. When I go to paint something, I go to my studio, and boom there's my paintbrushes. You do in fact keep the tools you are using in context with the work you are doing.

I've never had a case where I was needing to bang a nail into something, reached over and accidentally grabbed a paintbrush or gasp a steering wheel. Yet I do that almost every time I have to use an Apple OS product, since 1984.

6) I think we agree on this (see above), but what I'm saying is that the lack of clarity that decoupling the menubar (or toolbar or whatever we'll decide to call it "the thing with the functional buttons on it") from the document/workarea/drawing pad/whatever is maddening un-usability.

7) "It's as if you want the OS to only allow you to do one thing at a time". Pretty much. When I'm typing a comment on HN, I really really really don't need to see my sales figures spreadsheet floating around in the background, or my engineering proposal or my image editing tool, or my IDE, or whatever. I (and most people I know) only have one brain and one set of hands. It's physically impossible to operate more than one app at a time. We all also like to full-screen whatever app we're working on at that moment and not see any remnant of another app poking through the lousy interface.

I also want to be able to use more than one app at a time if I so choose. So I want to see them both side-by side, or one atop ta' other or whatever works for that moment, and I'd like to have the associated toolbars with the app in that part of the window, not along the top bringing ambiguity of app focus into play. Particularly among most document related apps, the menubar is practically identical.

8) "It's a desktop". Bzzzz, we call it that, but strict desktop metaphors have proven to be a failure since even before the days of Microsoft Bob.

"You don't push everything off your desk and only have one piece of paper allowed on it at any one time, do you?"

Yes, as a matter of fact I do. I don't need too see or deal with unrelated task assets floating around in my physical work area. When I'm reading a magazine, I put it away someplace when I'm done with it, then turn to writing a proposal or something on a different piece of paper. I take the magazine, and remove it as far as I'm conveniently able to so I don't have to deal with the visual or physic clutter of having the magazine under the proposal I'm writing on. When you work, you don't just continuously stack out of focus piles of paper under the thing you are currently doing do you? Please don't say yes, because all I can picture is some poor guy standing on his desk in front of a stack of loose papers, up up up on his tippiest toes, furiously writing something on the top sheet trying like hell not to knock over the stack.

"unless you're making an argument for having nothing but old-school Windows MDI"

I'm not saying that old-school MDI is the only way to go. There are plenty of apps where the MDI interface makes no sense (a calculator for example), and plenty where it does, but neither does the Apple way (my calculator takes up 1/8th of my screen, do I really have to have some freaking menubar reconfigure itself along the top as in an Apple world).

The MDI metaphor for window/document/app handling is sorely lacking on the Apple line of OSs, and has been copied in most other OSs, but the Apple way of doing things with a sticky decoupled menubar has found absolutely no other followers outside of the Apple world. It offers absolutely nothing as a "way of doing business" and as I'm saying, can also lead to user confusion even among a user with decades of experience using all manner of computers. The Gods of usability have spoken and the Apple menubar is the "wrong way to do it" (TM)

I can't be bothered to find the source right now, but GIMP was originally written to specifically mimic the non-MDI nature of the Apple OSs. This is great if you are targeting some fraction of the 10% of the computer using population that thinks this is a good idea, but for everyone else who doesn't think it's a good idea, and thinks it's an unnecessarily distracting way to do business.

I have, in decades of dealing with computers, found almost no reason to go the Apple way for daily business -- purchases to the contrary were at the insistence of a few people crying "but it's really good now!". Everything from servicing the machines to finding decent software to getting things at a reasonable price is a maddening experience 2nd only to trying to get Audio working properly on a Linux box.

Here are Apple's reasons to go Apple
http://www.apple.com/getamac/whymac/
- Doesn't get PC viruses (great, I don't get Apple viruses)
- Instantly Wireless (so is my $300 netbook)
- High performance (Apple hardware is consistently behind the power/price curve)
- Always up-to-date (so is my Ubuntu box, and my Windows box, except I don't have to pay a $99 recurring fee every year when Apple brings out some minor revision to the OS...)
- Born Ready, and some vague statement about driver configuration. (Dunno, I haven't had to install a driver in 5 years outside of configuring to print on a fussy network printer one time. But I've suffered grievously at getting printers and external drives and other such odds and ends working on my old MacBook. Again, not as bad as getting sound to work properly in Linux, but it's pretty bad.

Basically, Apple has conceived of one or two ways to do things, and if that's how you work, then awesome. But if you wish to deviate even slightly from that golden path you are screwed. Major deviations just require an operating system swap-out. This is why Apple's computing products will rarely get a higher market share than low double digits and will usually spend most of it's time in the single digits.

My question is, has Apple bothered to use the competitions offerings?