Quite a number of people have also written to me privately in direct messages in Discourse or directly in email, expressing their dislike for the level of whining and commenting about how it has prevented them from participating as much as they might otherwise.
So yeah, it’s ironic that this thread has generated so much traffic, but we can also hope that less whining will result in more people engaged in the pursuit of asking for or receiving help.
Thank you so much for the clarification from someone who has first hand knowledge.
Very interesting post, I was in TV advertising production but never worked on National spots. We did some nice regional stuff and once in a while had a decent budget for a pyrotechnician, helicopter, dolly track, or a food stylist. Sometimes we just made throw away junk for used car dealers.
I was also a fan of Justin Long’s series of “I’m a Mac . . .” and the schlub over there is a PC.
And the totally musical ad set the the Rolling Stones song “She Comes in Colors”. (Probably not the actual title)
Such brilliant work that I can remember these ads 30 years later. How many other ads can anyone remember from 30 years ago? A few for me. OJ for Hertz. The Marlboro Man. Mrs. Olsen for Folgers with the great Rockapella jingle at the end. Alka Seltzer’s “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing” series. “Mama Mia, dats one spicy meat-a ball”
Great creative cannot sell a bad product or service but mix great creative with superior products and it is like watching 4th of July fireworks.
I long for the days that Apple was cool; and demonstrably better than the competition.
But as another poster said, Apple is now for the masses and needs to be simple.
Do you know the story about how Chiat Day lost the account?
It would be interesting to compare the anti-whiners level of participation in other threads against that of the whiners.
Are their complaints about whining their only contributions?
I like the fact all the whining is in one thread. That way the anti-whining complainers can skip it or mute it. And everyone will be happy again.
Maybe the whiners really now what they’re talking about? And aren’t being heard by Apple?
fogcitynative
fogcitynative@gmail.comAugust 29
I was also a fan of Justin Long’s series of “I’m a Mac . . .” and the schlub over there is a PC.
And the totally musical ad set the the Rolling Stones song “She Comes in Colors”. (Probably not the actual title)
An interesting story I heard many times and I don’t know if it’s true is that Bill Gates approached Mick Jagger to license “Start Me Up” for the Windows 95 launch commercial. He asked Jagger how much it would cost, and Jagger, who dropped out of the London School of Economics to go full time with The Rolling Stones and was adamant that the Stones never let any of their songs be used in any commercial, threw out a number in the ridiculously high millions figuring it would get him off the hook and help Gates save face for using a song everyone knew featured “you make a grown man cry” in the refrain. But Gates took the bait, and “Start Me Up” set a record for licensing a song for commercials.
I forget who the ad agency was, but they tried to talk Gates out of it. Windows '95 and Microsoft were well known and established, and the vast majority of computers out there were PCs, so it inevitably did well. And the commercial, which did not include the problematic refrain, was actually good.
Bill Gates also loved the “Butterfly” creative, probably one of the worst ad campaigns ever. An operating system and software featuring a gigantic bug???
Such brilliant work that I can remember these ads 30 years later. How many other ads can anyone remember from 30 years ago? A few for me. OJ for Hertz. The Marlboro Man. Mrs. Olsen for Folgers with the great Rockapella jingle at the end. Alka Seltzer’s “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing” series. “Mama Mia, dats one spicy meat-a ball”
Great creative cannot sell a bad product or service but mix great creative with superior products and it is like watching 4th of July fireworks.
I long for the days that Apple was cool; and demonstrably better than the competition.
But as another poster said, Apple is now for the masses and needs to be simple.
Do you know the story about how Chiat Day lost the account?
John Scully. He wanted everything Steve Jobs related obliterated from the face of the earth, and supposedly Scully had a good friend at BBDO. When Jobs returned, he fired BBDO and rehired Chiat Day. “Think Different,” another groundbreaking and effective ad campaign, was the first of many more.
I stopped visiting Macintouch because it became a huge whine fest. The noise-to-information ration rose too much.
No, they’re just opting out entirely because it’s a toxic environment. Only whiners want to hang out with other whiners.
I worked with BBDO creative. They were the most pedestrian corporate agency ever.
At the other end of the Spectrum were agencies that won Clios for ads the were beautiful yet ineffective.
And then there was Chiat Day. Still in business in LA.
Well, c’mon Adam, it’s like anything else. If a whiner and an antiwhiner meet, it’s total annihilation.
One person said, “If a whiner and an antiwhiner meet, it’s total annihilation.”
And the side effect is an awesome spray of very energetic particles, not always charming.
Alas, that is simply not true. Literal quote from someone I know who has worked at Apple as a designer: “Man, I sure missed user testing while I worked at Apple.” A lot of designs went (and possibly still go) out the doors in Cupertino after thorough design discussions, lots of iterations — but with little to no usability testing.
I very much doubt that that is true for every product and every iteration, but there definitely is a trend that their interaction design suffered while Jonathan Ive was in charge of UI/UX design, and quite a few of those details make me wonder why they didn’t catch that in usability testing. The answer probably is that it simply wasn’t tested.
Apple does offer a Lightning-to-USB-C cable, but the vast majority of (3rd-party) chargers and in-car adapters (3rd-party, but also built-in) only have “classical” USB connectors. And then there are the owners of older Macs plus countless Windows users, who purchase iOS devices, too.
So, shipping an iPhone with anything but the old-school USB cable would be quite a foolish thing for Apple to do.
It’s true that the extra cable for connecting the device directly to a new FW3-equipped Mac isn’t cheap. Then again, that cable works just fine with the standard USB-C chargers, so there’s one less charger to drag along when traveling, too.
Sigh… I wish it was whining.
Mojave was bad. But it works more or less. Catalina is just terrible. From what does the Mojave security protect me? Not a thing. What does the security in Catalina do? Nothing.
I double click on a document Documents folder and an app opens it. The app now asks if it can have access to the Documenta folder. Fine. What now? The app can now do anything to the files in the Documents folder. What is different than before: nothing. The user can’t control the app because he doesn’t know - he can’t know - what the app is doing.
It’s the same with all other security “features”.
I can make the Finder crash in Catalina by selecting a file. Bug is still open. Since High Sierra I can make the whole computer dead by executing some AppleScripts. Bug is still open.
Apple was about quality but nowadays they can’t even make a keyboard anymore.
If you’d have said, “I didn’t like Mojave. But it more or less works for me. Catalina I just hate,” I would likely ask to better understand just what you find problematic. (That kind of curiosity is just built into us interaction designers, because it helps us better understand our users and, in turn, design better products.)
When people claim, however, that Apple’s operating system is deeply flawed overall, and that the company has become incapable of making any useful and usable products anymore, as if that were an undisputed fact — that’s when I just can’t take the discussion seriously anymore, because it is no longer grounded in rational fact and realistic perspective.
And yet…
In case a user sees that kind of warning, maybe they weren’t aware that the application wanted access to data on your machine that was not immediately obvious. For example, if you’d see a request for a plain-text editor requesting access to your calendar or contacts data, wouldn’t you wonder if that’s a legitimate need just to write text?
Honest questions: Would you prefer that, instead, all applications could access literally anything on your machine without you being made aware of it? And would you think that’s the right behavior for all possible users?
Catalina — an entire operating system with all its humungous complexity — is still in beta. I’m “rather” convinced that they have quite a few issues to fix overall, so there just might be a good reason for not dropping everything to address your bug report before working on any others…
Sounds intriguing. Care to share those AppleScripts here?
Honest questions: Would you prefer that, instead, all applications could access literally anything on your machine without you being made aware of it? And would you think that’s the right behavior for all possible users?
The Calendar warning makes some sense. Double-clicking a file is something unexpected? After I have given permission the app can do what it wants: read everything or delete files.
My app needs full hard disk access and uses AppleScript. It also contacts my website for updates. I can now do anything I want. I’m not stupid so everything is legitimate. The point I wanted to make is that the security with the permissions is an illusion.
Catalina — an entire operating system with all its humungous complexity — is still in beta. I’m “rather” convinced that they have quite a few issues to fix overall, so there just might be a good reason for not dropping everything to address your bug report before working on any others…
I have seen a lot of betas. The Catalina beta was bad beyond anything I have ever seen before. The Finder crash bug was just the last straw. Beta 7 is working better now. And yes, Apple has to something more important to do like making emojis.
Here is an example script:
tell application “Mail”
get source of message 1 of mailbox “@read” of account “Macsend” as Unicode text
end tell
I get this also when moving mails to the trash for Mail or in Filemaker. In extreme cases you have to restart the computer.
One customer got a crash with:
Application Specific Information:
*** The system has no mach ports available. You may be able to diagnose which application(s) are using ports by using ‘top’ or Activity Monitor. (3) ***
Another gets:
Application Specific Information:
BUG IN CLIENT OF LIBPTHREAD: Unable to allocate thread port, possible port leak
Wahnsinn, the bug seems to be fixed in Catalina. Need to do some more testing.
As much as I dislike emojis, we should stop using them as an example of something Apple is focusing on rather than fixing Catalina bugs or releasing the Mac Pro or pretty much anything else. The company employs over 130,000 people, so it’s a really safe bet that the team working on emoji art has nothing to do with anything functional.
Sigh… that was click-bait. I need to try this more often.
I have used Apple since 1989. I have purchased more than 25 Apple computers during the last 30 years. I believe Apple has the following problems which have made me think seriously about whether or not to buy a new Apple Computer when my current one is obsolete or dead. I can attribute my dissatisfaction to the following:
Lack of vision. Steve Jobs was a visionary. He had an inordinate belief that business/financial people were better equipped to run the company than he was. Hence the first bad choice Scully. Followed by a second bad choice Cook. Now Cook is hard working. He is a brilliant financial guy but like all accountants he is not a visionary nor does he color outside the line in kindergarten or think outside the box as CEO of Apple. He is also not a systems person. These complaints are fair because to do what he does best he doesn’t do the things I would like to see done.
Apple has middle management problems. Comand-C is a computer command. I call command-c a key-chord and I use them all the time. Two of my favorites are in Apple mail. One empties the mail trash folder. The other moves selected mail to a folder. After an update one of them was missing. After the next update the missing one was back but the other one was gone. After another update they were both there but the hint in the menu reminding you what the key-chord was was missing even though the key chord worked. To what do I attribute this sequence of events. Poor management. I believe the folks in the Apple mail group broke something while fixing something else. The didn’t catch the new problem they created because they only test the part they had fixed. In the process they broke something else that would have been caught if they had tested the entire program. They did this several times breaking something while fixing something and only testing the part they had fixed even though in the process they broke something else that would have been caught if they had tested the entire program. This leads me to believe that discipline and morale is down in that group and I expect the problems are to limited to that group.
Finally there always has been to much secrecy. However, the most irritating aspect shows up in the Apple.com/feedback. There is no confirmation that someone read your feedback nor is there any feedback to tell you they are (a) not going to fix it or (b) Mr or Ms X is working on solution.
I have been led to believe that a robot sorts the feedback and then sends it to the appropriate department where I am told actual humans scan the robot summaries. This human for all I know is an admin.
Here’s my submission. This is not whining, in fact, none of my complaints are whining. In every case, they are specific examples of Apple’s what? Behavior? Culture? Leadership? Sloppiness? You describe it how you like, I know it is REAL and not my imagination.
Hell yes, my anger about the downhill slide of a company I used to admire and my desire to see Tim Cook fired. Yeah, that’s whining.
Here’s my feedback about a very specific problem with no solution:
*I was wondering if being able to think logically is a requirement to get hired by Apple?
Take the current public beta for Catalina. One of the things in the menu a user can report upon is Feedback Assistant.
But what if the bug is actually in Feedback Assistant?
Meaning using a buggy non-functioning Feedback Assistant to report the bug in Feedback Assistant is LOGICALLY IMPOSSIBLE.
Unlike developers who get to actually contact someone at Apple, the general public who catch all the bugs the developers missed have no such avenue, other than this one.
Apple under Tim Cook has gotten stupid, lazy, and sloppy.
I have some bugs on Beta 7 to send & cannot send them. I guess you’ll just release it with the bugs like you did with the High Sierra Update. I got a free MacBook out of that mess.
I and others I know have filed problem or enhancement reports concerning Feedback Assistant and using Feedback Assistant more times than I can count over the years. Some have been fixed or adopted, but not in a particularly timely manner.
Obviously if it won’t let you submit the report at all, then that has to be dealt with in some other manner, but other than that I don’t see what’s logically impossible about using it in such a manner, especially considering modest success we’ve had in doing so.
-Al-
When you allow an accountant to be CEO, the decision to include in the box the $5 at cost adapter or not is made on how much extra revenue Apple will make on every MacBook Pro sold by forcing the additional sale of a $35 adapter with a proprietary chip in the connector that prevents third parties from making a less expensive version.
Today, it is all about the REVENUE, not about technology, not about happy customers, not about striving for constant improvement. How much does it cost to make and how much revenue can we get out of it.
Tim Cook is an accountant and he makes financial decisions. Right now, his mission is to see how much more revenue he can squeeze out of the Apple user base. That’s it!
