I like the ring in vista... I even had it installed on my machine while using XP. Damn thing is cute. But yeah, either way... when you actually have to see ANY progress indicator, it's a cue to pull your hair out. Lol. I second the guy who said the beach ball is dated-- seriously, it is. It should be an apple with more and more bites being taken out of it, lolol.

andthepickles

Meh, the "BeachBall" (is that official?) pisses me off. Just the bright colors seem to suggest "Hey! You have a Mac! Don't worry that the system is frozen and the past 30 minutes of cutting you've done in FCS are essentially gone to waste when shit hits the fan -- be happy! Colors! Wee". And I HATE when people try to tell me to be happy about something I so clearly shouldn't be.

Though I'm a bit of a Vista fan, so take it for what it's worth.

rcast1986

Beach Ball of death. Cuz at least with Vista, you can ctrl+alt+delete stuff. With OS X, if you're Beach Ballin' you're done.

Joseph

I don't use Vista, so I can't comment on the ring of death.

I have 3 systems running OS 10.5.5, and I have been using OS 10 since the dreadful days of 10.0.

I can't say I have experienced any issues with the beach ball of death. Sure, I see it occasionally, but it usually doesn't last long. When it does, it's because a program isn't responding, so I force quit the app, then relaunch Finder. No problems for me.

I must be the lucky one person out of everyone who doesn't get the beach ball much.

ottermann

@jackbling:

+ Watch video

jackbling

Not in the the US, no Vista, no OSX...

So I'm in heaven then?

DeLarge

never really understood the beach ball.....seems that you woulndt want to brand something that signifies waiting...part of the reason i assumed the hourglass was dropped...

jackbling

never experienced one or the other.

mumin

Def Vista... Not because the icon is bad... Usually because some mind numbingly stupid interaction just occured or some warning dialogue is about to appear or some driver conflict needs resolution. I had the luxury of using my relatives vista machine over the holiday. The lovely vista spinning ring appeared on average every minute while some inane dialogue appeared. I'm not a fanboy, but I am thankful for OSX this holiday season

UnaLawlipop

I like vista's ring better.

socceryo3

I find them equally annoying. They appear in the same situations and tell you the same thing, so they are the same, right? Or are we talking about aesthetics here? In which case, I've gotta hand it to MS, they have certainly improved from the hourglass.

craig_16

The beech ball is not that bad, it only shows up sometimes and it's really brief when it does, Vista ring is kind of annoying cause it comes up all the time and it's not as brief

snitch29

The wedding ring of death is the worst, without a doubt.

sridhar3

Wedding ring of death...heh

Jrsy is the dude, playing the dude disguised as another dude

@dc-united: Concur.

AJ_Syrinx

I think it's more annoying on Vista. Waiting on OS X reminds me of unicorns, butterflies, and Steve Jobs' sexy turtlenecks.

bestpersonintheunivers

Well, given that the Black Friday waiting lines have been shown to cause DEATH, I think we have a winner...

dc-united

I feel the beach ball is more annoying as it looks dated on osx

Yeebles

@jackbling: lol, funny vid. There is just nothing worst than sitting there getting hypnotized by the beach ball for an endless amount of time. At least with the BSOD, you know the comp is effed up and you need to reboot it.

rer89

So, as a triple booter of Vista/OSX/Ubuntu (Soon to add in W7), here's what I think.

The beach ball is freaking obnoxious. I may see it 75% as often as I see the blue nipple ring, but it's 200% as offensive on my end. The generic Gnome one isn't very pretty, but it's not seizure inducing like the beach ball. The nipple ring may happen the most and threaten the most annoyance, but it's also very pretty.

Here's my order of preference:

Blue Nipple Ring
Hourglass
Gnome-Waiting Symbol
Beach Ball

casexy

@Joseph:

command + option + esc has gotten me out of some serious clusterfucks in OS X

discounteggroll

spinning beach ball/ring is better than frozen beach ball/ring...

discounteggroll

Well, i never had Vista really crash on me. But the Macs in school do that a lot to me, causing grief and suffering. How many times have destroyed my work already, spinning wheel of death?! I'm going to shoot that stupid ball one day. Right after I'm done with killing gravity, that son of a b*tch.

NilzXX

The beach ball kills my soul. I wish they would use something less....fruity.

Toastie

Waiting? Okay, happy story...
Bought a new Macbook exactly fourteen days ago. Checked with the staff to make sure that if any sales popped up in the immediate future, that there was price protection. Laughingly, the sales woman assured me that in the UNLIKELY event of a sale, I'd get the difference.
So today rolls around, and sure enough, Macbook goes on sale.
Let me tell you, I worked in retail for twenty years and I'd rather shave my legs with a rusty carrot peeler than be at a mall on Black Friday. ..But hey, a hundred bucks is a hundred bucks.
So I journeyed to the mall with fear in my heart, expecting the worse. ..Nope. In and out in twenty minutes. No problems. No hassles. No questions asked. It was one of the better customer service experiences I've had.
...Now if only I could change that fucking beach-ball icon.

Miranda Kali (Desperate But Not Serious)

Not a fan of Xena's Glowing Chakra of Waiting but the beach ball has been delaying Mac users for ages. Advantage - Spinning Beach Ball.

OMG! Happy Thanksgiving!

@admoseremic: Indeed ^_^

MeoX9X

@bestpersonintheunivers: .....akward.

Toastie

I'm giving my vote to black friday lines.

MeoX9X

@UnaLawlipop: Vista icon is terrible because it's usually associated with confusion and rage and wasted time.

UnaLawlipop

@AJ_Syrinx: @dc-united: yeah...

syko21

@admoseremic: Make that REFUSE to use Vista.

admoseremic

I vote for the hourglass. I've never used Vista and can't afford a Mac.

admoseremic

I hate black friday lines the worst.

I only like the vista ring, when its on XP...
as for the OSX beach ball, it reminds me of unicorns and butterflies frolicking in a turquoise grass meadow with blue glass trees

segamanxero

Ranked according to worst (>) to not as bad (<).
Black Friday Lines> Windows Vista spinning Ring > Mac OSX beachball

Why? Because on Black Friday lines, you sit/stand outside in sub 40 degree weather in front of Bestbuy, waiting for at least 2 hours, you notice that some idiot cut in front and now a riot has sparked between soccer moms, cheapo business men, gamers, and children. After bestbuy employees break up the fight and finally let people inside, chaos erupts as another line is created in front of the one item that you acually came here for. As you grow closer to the register, you realize that bestbuy employees (d-bags) got first dibs on just about everything, limiting the stock to 4 items. After not receiving what you had hoped for you go home, angry, cold, lethargic, sneezing, with a runny nose and cough that will make you remember this day for weeks.

cgsofly

@rcast1986:

Don't worry that the system is frozen and the past 30 minutes of cutting you've done in FCS are essentially gone to waste when shit hits the fan

It's called "SAVE" as in what you should do quite often while working on sensitive material.

dambo29

I think the KDE gray unresponsive window deserves to be a part of this comparison as it is also an annoying indicator that a program is not functioning as it should. A little less annoying than the ring or beachball as it has never totally frozen my computer

VanniGreene

wtf is black friday?

ichi1

@discounteggroll: Agreed. More research people.

robot-shmobot

@Joseph:

Umm, no. There are several ways to kill a non-responsive app in OS X.

1) Command + option + esc brings up a running list of applications that you can kill (applications listed in red are non-responsive).

2) Apple Menu >Force Quit... will bring up the same menu. Yet you may have to click outside of the frozen app to access the menu bar.

3) Right click on the application's icon in the dock, select "force quit"

You could also open up the activity monitor or the shell an kill an app that way.

aquaosx

@bestpersonintheunivers: lol

oceanrider

@dc-united:

+1

iwantcokeinabottle

@Yeebles:
Agreed. Not to mention I seem to be getting a lot of freezing beach balls recently...

libre4vida

I don't like the beach ball for two reasons.

a) It doesn't really fit in with the OSX theme in any particular way so it always looks kind of out of place.

b) I hardly ever see it so when something does go wrong it's extra annoying because I've gotten used to OSX almost never choking (RAM RAM RAM).

My buddy's mini with 1GB RAM was painful even on Tiger. Constant beach ball.

mmmiles

Why no entry for the RED RING OF DEATH on the xbox 360?!? It's far worse than ALL of these (except actually being killed) because it means 3-4 weeks without my xbox!

Skyyboy

@segamanxero: Finally, more who understand!

chizelord

The worst is when they show up at the same time.... You know things are going to hell then.

maztec

@bestpersonintheunivers: I'm with you on that one all the way.

chizelord

I hate that Blue Ring of Death.

AZRoboto

@Yeebles: The Mac Classic black and white stopwatch still pops up every once in a while in Photoshop for me. That looks dated.
I agree that a newer, shinier wait icon is needed to keep users entertained for longer.

mferrari

What's worse than the spinning beach ball is when OS X digs deep in its hidden OS 9 files and shows us the WOD (Wristwatch of Death).

LangleyAlcyone

well...since i hate with a passion, its an easy choice for me to make!

Framewerk

@phoomp:
Oh, SNAP!

tridtaei

I hate the beach ball of death, especially when it delays a fine, spirited round of Ford Racing 2.

Nintenboy01

@snitch29:
I only get the Vista ring when I'm using iTunes in Vista.

phoomp

@Yeebles:
Beach ball all the way ... because OSX is supposed to "just work". Vista's spinning rings and black friday lines are expected.

phoomp

Vista ring. Whenever it shows up you know you're in trouble. On my systems it means Vista's about to grind the disks for 1-2 minutes and hold up all applications that need I/O for no explainable reason. Presumably the kernel thinks it has a good reason for blocking all I/O on the system while it seeks around, apparently at random, but I haven't figured out what that reason is yet.

unit3

all suck, linux pwnz all!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

citizen024

@jackbling: still loling at the somewhat dated vid...

PobreGizmo

@phoomp: BaZOWWWW!!!

PobreGizmo

@Yeebles: Agreed that both the beachball and of course the wristwatch look dated. Vista's Blue Ring of Death((?) I thought they would have gotten away from death-rings of any color by now...) may steal from OS X, but at least it's something new.

PobreGizmo

I live in the Uk so Black Friday lines are non-existent over here. OSX's beachball I can handle as it usually rights itself, Vista's same ring for everything just pisses me off...

Narfmaster

(Brownie points to anyone that gets that reference.)

DisposableInterloper

the vista ring is more aesthetically pleasing... but it better be because whatever you're trying to do, wont happen. that ring will just keep spinning and spinning, hypnotizing with its malice

lite.blu

Vista ring.

I knows it 'cause I seen it. My two children, they tried to load a Web page. Took them over three days. They sat there waitin', and by the time the loadin' bar was only half-full they was dead. Starve on the Internet, with a belly stuck out like a bladder...

DisposableInterloper

I hate the Vista ring. It looks like radar, but nothing is coming..

magikal04

Hmmm.... I had no idea that was a spinning beach ball....

It rather looks like a delicious lollipop without the stick.

Twenty5

@mferrari: What the hell is up with the old stopwatch? That little blast from the past drives me nuts when it shows up.

I only use OSX so I can't complain about Vista's rings, and I slept in this morning, so Eff that. I'm getting everybody bags of compost this year; I can pass it off as a "green gift" and I spend less on trash pickup.

graverobber- My Yugo Nova!

I think the beach ball is worse. I don't use vista, so it freezing up doesn't bother me. Besides, when I see the beach ball, it usually means I am at work and the AVID Media Composer is not cooperating. Hold on, gotta restart.

whatachiouche

I hate the beach ball of death. I have a MacBook from 2006 with 1 GB of RAM. I'm updating it to 2 gigs this Christmas, but for now, it's pretty annoying. If I leave it on for more than a day or two, Safari especially, but most programs will start beach balling all the time. I think some of their programs must have memory leaks. I hate the unresponsiveness. It's gotten to the point where entering text lags in my browser. What's even worse, that's happened a couple of times, is that the mouse is the usual pointer icon, but nothing responds to it, I can't access the Dock, Spaces, Expose or Cmd+Tab. I've gotten so used to my computer just working that I've gotten into bad habits of not saving frequently. SO... I vote for beachball, definitely.

kzooguy

If the wheel means "wait", most people dont get the message. to most it means "CLick everything" which only lengthens ur wait. Instead OSX should have a game of space invaders pop to entertain you.

tkohrs2002

My vote: Nether, I vote for the classic Windows hourglass, been looking at it wayy too much in my lifetime...

L_A_G

beach ball only pops up for me when stressing this lil one gig system to the max... i usually forget im multi tasking and have like 10 apps running in the background... especially vuze

johnthevulcan

Lol! I just got the beach ball right before I pulled up this article. While it is very annoying, at least you can just right click on the app in your dock and say quit process. Another huge annoyance in vista, I haven't logged in once where I didn't have a new update to install.

dathiene

@mferrari: I get the stopwatch when I'm waiting for Firefox to load. Super Weerduh.

D.E.P.C.

The vista ring, it comes up all the damn time and stays that way

Digitallysick

Mac beachball. Why? Because it usually means your program is frozen for good, at least that's the way it works on the newest macs at school. Vista ring will still load something about "holding up" for a moment. November 28th lines? Not even American so it doesn't do anything to me.

cowpop

WTF is that beach ball thing?

MacAttack7388

Jesus, I always thought you called the "bitch ball"! Did your elegant spainard accent fool me?

LindsayJoy's MBP is into S+M

@craig_16: @craig_16: @UnaLawlipop:

Funny because I never get the vista ring in those situations.

I get it when something stops responding, which is pretty rare, or when a major change happens (settings, installations, etc).

I don't mind it at all.

mattattaxx

At least with the beach ball, I know its going to come back to normal...

But it is ugly as hell *blech*

kmkl

OS X is not as quick to go to the beach ball as vista is with the ring thing.

hatboysam

I miss the wrist-watch icon that I knew and sorta loved from the old OS's. I still see it on occasion, when I'm running older PPC applications, but the beach ball is a spiraling vortex of impatience.

No comment on the wedding ring of death, except for this:

+ Watch video

Kaiser-Machead

@Nintenboy01: haha.

shorty6049

@kmkl: You do? I dunno. One thing about OS X, it can be touchy about certain things, like external drives that don't want to cooperate. It sends Finder into a scramble, and ends with you staring at this swirly colorful pinwheel of torture.

Kaiser-Machead

Definitely the beach ball. It flashes all those dumb rainbow colors (is there a point?), and at least the Vista Spinning Ring isn't too distracting. Pretty nice actually. I don't see it too often.

quikboy

I hate that beach ball. So bad.

andrew_t29

@bestpersonintheunivers: HAHAAA.. sexy turtle neck.. HAHAAA
Eric Cartman!

sarwatmj

@phoomp: soo true..

sarwatmj

@phoomp: Ditto. WMP hardly ever freezes/lags...nor does Zune :P

DigitalSciGuy

I never wait in line for deals on Black Friday. I always find some sort of way to make the purchase in those unadvertised pre-Black Friday sales or by other means including having someone on the inside hold back a product for me.

The beach ball is significantly more annoying than the blue ring of death. I see the beach ball way too much even on the newest Mac computers.

BigDragon

beachball ftw

logantrox

@Toastie: Yes, I wish they would start using icons that more resembled vegetables...or something like that.

DigitalSciGuy

@OMG! Black Friday!: Please refresh my memory...what exactly does 'Xena's Glowing Chakra of Waiting' look like again?

DigitalSciGuy

@dambo29: This is what auto-save is supposed to remedy. Let's not go about throwing stones....

DigitalSciGuy

@DeLarge: You might possibly in the purgatory of Sugar OS and Negroponte....

DigitalSciGuy

The rainbow seems appropriate for OSX users. ;)

vista64guy

@vista64guy: Oh subtle jab, I salute thee.

Kaiser-Machead

@vista64guy: I've noticed that at work. ;)

BigDragon

Vista

vgart

Black Friday horde kills!
[www.nydailynews.com]

JunoonX

@aquaosx: I've found that at times none of the above works for me. OSX keeps ballin and I try all sorts of force quit and command + option + esc attempts, but it remains hung much like at times it does on Vista. It certainly has to do with a specific application, but so does the case apply to Vista. Personally, while OSX is much leaner and built as rock solid as any other Unix variant (don't go chewing on me about BSD, it all started out as Unix), I found the performance for Leopard degrade over the years.
My tiger setup is still as rock solid on the iMac, but Leo.. let's just not talk about it.

JunoonX

blue screen of death on windows and vista...!

but i tend to agree with poster #1, black friday and it's fatalities are now #1!

smokeonit

@Yeebles: annoying and gay.

Ariel_Wollinger

I hate to admit it but the beach ball is a tad annoying. I get it a lot on my old iMac G3.
I haven't used Vista enough to get annoyed by the ring. It does look slightly better than the beach ball though. Damn you Steve, how could you overlook the outdated beach ball?

MrHaroHaro

Oh the Beach Ball! It still haunts my dreams from that dreadful day.
But seriously black Friday lines aren't that bad because it's not like it's a part of everyday life.

AUAnonymous

spinning beach ball of death

jiveabillion

@Yeebles: These comments really show the basic mind of mac users to me... "New and shiny matters over everything!"

Moargazm

yea lot of beach balls later on Leopard!!

dont know about Vista, but on XP when its stuck u hit Ctrl+Alt+del, and the task manager appear in a second so u kill that process.
in Leopard, i keep pressing alt+command+escape for minutes before i can end the process. they should really do something about it.

dont know about vista, but i know my room mate is always depressed and he has Vista :D

medopal

@Lite: And, if the wedding ring goes bad, it takes half. Most of the time those other rings just need a reboot.

Lite

@Jrsy is the dude, playing the dude disguised as another dude: No no no, you have it all wrong.

Marriage is a 3 ring circus, not 1.

Engagement Ring
Wedding Ring
Suffering

Lite

@Moargazm:
Yes in a way. But didn't Jobs say that Apple was a Software company who put a beautifully designed software in a beautiful piece of hardware.

It is sorta expected a design conscious company such as apple to make interfaces as slick as possible. Now I'm not saying that interface is everything but it sure helps with the end user experience.

Microsoft are not expected to be as slick but are doing quite well (in my opinion) with the Vista interface (despite it's supposed sluggishness). Also, Apple need to produce the best product possible to justify its overly inflated prices.

Yeebles

@aquaosx: @discounteggroll: I've been in many situations where both of those don't work. I'm a Unix guy so I go for the ps -ax, then kill -9 PID. That always works if you can get to it. What would be awesome is if you could switch shells like Redhat, login to the shell that's locked up and remote kill.

Joseph

WTF is up with the spinning beach ball with iTunes 8 - every single little thing you do you get the f***ing beach ball. It never used to bother me but now I hate it with a passion because I see it so much these days (it's even worse if you have an iPod or iPhone tethered - you're telling me while one single song transfers I can't scroll down or do anything else at all...just watch a f***ing spinning beach ball for about 5 to 10 seconds!!???) What a load of crap...Apple is soooo going down hill...

davecw

@DigitalSciGuy: This:

OMG! Black Friday!

Beach ball is the worst
I like the ring
and never encounterd black friday waiting lines

TBM-Fan

I've never heard it called a "Beach Ball," we've always called it the "Mac gay rainbow spinning pinwheel." I enjoy the moving load cursors, though, because when they freeze, it doesn't give you eternal hope that the system may start moving/reponding again (enter XP's godforsaken hourglass).

alexmg2420

Remember in Mac OS 10.0 when it was the spinning CD of death?

Mr.Purple

Beach ball.

It freezes shit up, oftentimes to the point where I have ti /unplug/ my Mini.

ItsRabid

the beach ball at least looks pretty.

although for a while, i hated it, as my blackberry used to have a very apple-esque theme, so seeing the beachball meant that my blackberry was freezing.

the vista ring is fugly.

the black friday waiting lines cause brutal fights, but are over for the next 364 days or so.

he who still uses a sony clie, and once called himself rimplestultskin

@phoomp: Exactly!

*Takashi Miike*

@Yeebles: Definitely that goddamn beach ball.

*Takashi Miike*

If I remember correctly the beach ball was around when DOS was still using a growing row of x's to fake a progress bar.

pschroeter

@dc-united: Well if you add up all the you've wasted staring at one of these and compare it to the life lost times chance of dieing in black friday lines the wasted life on spinners would be higher

Zomb

@UnaLawlipop: your problem is you are using a relatives computer which always tend to suck. Their the ones who have all those "extras that came with the computer and are running Mcafe and using the AOL browser. If they are the "computer smart relative" that reads all the PC magazines and install half the useless utilities they recommend every month then their worse. Maybe its that rare actually smart computer user who has a clean comp that works, but from your expirience i doubt it.

Zomb

@snitch29:

But Brawndo has electrolytes...

Pretolo

Computers should spend the time actually working on whatever that they're doing, instead of rendering the cursor for the fun of it.

It's like a cellphone that beeps and lights up to tell you that the battery is dieing...

It's just not helping the cause.

Pretolo

@Vroomtrap:

It's the same exact thing in OSX, but nice try on starting a flame...

Pretolo

@ottermann:

It works like that in Every Single Modern Operating System.

Good job on describing your everyday task... Please don't tell us how you wash the dishes....

Pretolo

@andthepickles: I agree. The new Vista cursors are pretty nice. Much better than the hourglass in XP - which is SERIOUSLY dated

redandwhite

I would say the apple spinner of death. I find it harder to figure what is wrong. I should be able to do it on my own and fix the problem, but it seems that OS X does not let me change certain things. Not to mention this usually happens before the log in and you can;t do anything from there.

daisukeumon

@D.E.P.C.: I havent gotten the evil stopwatch yet on my 2 year old macbook and the beachball is never in its death form... weird.......

-MoN-

Definitely the beach ball of death.

KStrike155

My job involves repairing alot of XP/Vista machines, so I've got to say the spinning Vista ring is the most annoying, especially as it appears so often. I bought a new Unibody MBP a few weeks ago and I haven't even seen the spinning beach ball yet so all happy there.

lemonboy100

The apple beach ball is most frustrating, since it's non-optional.

swoyekr.

My vote is for MS Spinning Ring..

The Comedian