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Much as I'm always the first to moan at the prospect of using anything Apple it's at least partly in jest and merely because they tend to do things differently. It actually harks back to my data recovery days when HFS was a pain in the bum to deal with for the MSDOS/Windows based utilities I was writing and working with. For those who don't know HFS supported the concept of 'forks' which meant that an individual file contained two or three separate streams within it. This is something that the prevalent file system at the time (FATx) just couldn't cope with. Worse still the additional streams mattered so couldn't just be ignored.

In the early days all we could do is perform data recoveries on a solitary Mac in a dark corner of the office. Unsurprisingly with no designated operator the machine was inevitably full of old crap and/or in need of maintenance when you sat down in front of it. All you wanted to do was recover some data and you had to waste an hour or two cleaning the damn' thing up. Hindered by lack of familiarity.

Thankfully NTFS came along which allowed Windows applications to create as many forks (called alternate data streams) as you want. Even better the Windows networking stack provided a way to create specially named streams such that a Macintosh client could recognise them as forks. So I extended our Windows tools to output HFS/HFS+ sourced files in this format and now we only needed the Mac to burn CDs. Even better a year later we bought a utility that could mount Mac volumes under Windows so we never needed to use that ageing Mac again.

But to be fair Apple documentation for HFS and HFS+ was excellent. Not only thorough documentation of the structures but even worked examples of how you'd access them. And their hardware is good quality. I have two old iPods and both still work.

But..the iPods mean I have to use iTunes. Plus recently I've started doing mobile development and I occasionally have to sort my Mac mini out which means remembering how to operate the damn thing. Oh and it doesn't support desktop scaling so I have to run it at a lower resolution in order to expand things so that my old eyes can read them. On the plus side debugging an iOS app is more reliable and more feature rich than debugging an Android app.

So..yeah, it's good quality kit. The problem for me is simply that Apple's ecosystem follows different rules to what I'm used to and that means my occasional need to foray into their walled garden is irritating :)