The popular myth that we are all told repeatedly is that Apple designs their products from a human-centric behavior, whereas dumb old Microsoft designs from a cold, machine-centric standpoint. Apple's operating system is, therefore, much easier and friendlier to use, whereas Microsoft's OS is user-hostile.

It's a nice myth, and certainly in 1984 when Apple was marketing the Macintosh against character-mode DOS, it made a lot of sense. Many design decisions were made in the original MacOS from a human-centric standpoint, and for many years it was fairly evident that Windows was lagging behind in trying to copy it, and not always succeeding.

Times have changed. These days, the original MacOS is long dead, Macintosh hardware is just PC hardware, and both Windows and OS X are so similar that one is forced into nitpicking over ever-shrinking differences between the two.

Occasionally, however, these differences come out of the blue and smack you in the face. One such event happened to me yesterday.

On Windows, when you copy a directory over top of a directory with the same name, a helpful message pops up:

It's a little wordy, and some of the choices may seem confusing (what's the difference between "No" and "Cancel"?) but it does exactly what you think it will do: it copies all files from the source folder into the destination folder, prompting you before it overwrites any files that have the same name.

When I tried this on my Mac, however, I got a very different message:

This is a little confusing. I have some files in "important" from my thumb drive, which I had already copied to the Mac's hard drive before, but now I had some new files on the thumb drive's directory that weren't there before. I had also created a document in this folder on my hard drive.

Stupidly, I thought that OS X would do what Windows does: add any new files to the destination folder, and replace ones that were there already.

It doesn't do that.

Instead, it permanently deletes the destination folder and then replaces the entire folder with the source. Any additional files you added in there before are gone. It doesn't warn you about this. You could accidentally drag an empty folder with the same name over an existing folder and it would delete every item in the existing folder. I tried it a couple of times to make sure.

There is no way back from this operation. OS X's Finder has an "Undo" command, which I figured would save me from this dumb mistake. Does it undo what it did? Not at all. It just deletes the folder completely. The files you had in the folder originally are not in the Trash. They are just gone.

I have been scratching my head to try and figure out how this is "Human-centric" at all. Why would any human want their operating system to delete files without telling them, and with no way of recovering them? No matter what technical justification you might come up with to explain this bizarre behavior, it completely fails the human-centric test.

Windows, on the other hand, gets it entirely right: no files are ever deleted, and the user is prompted if a file is about to be overwritten.

Preemptive snarky comments (blatantly stolen from Raymond Chen)

"That's the way MacOS always did it, and therefore it's the right way!" No, it isn't.

"OS X may do this one thing wrong, but Windows does EVERYTHING ELSE WRONG, HURR DURR" Perhaps, but maybe OS X does other things wrong too! It's too late: the myth is already shattered.

"You're using an old version, upgrade!!" It's great if this bug is fixed in newer versions, but that hardly justifies it being so broken in previous ones. (EDIT: It turns out this bug is still there, and may never go away)

"DURR GET LEOPARD WITH TIME MACHINE HURR DURR" Again, that's great, if one has Leopard, and is carrying around an external USB drive, and has it plugged in all the time, and, and, and, and...

"YOU SHOULD HAVE USED GOOGLE DOCS HAHAHAHA" Go away.

Fortunately, I didn't lose that much, but it was still quite annoying. I'm not saying that I suddenly hate Apple, or am going to stop using my Mac, or anything drastic or silly like that.

But I will no longer blindly assume that Apple has always has "human-centric" design in everything they do.