Nonstop whining about how Apple sucks

TidBITS Talk
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It’s your site, Adam, but it’s more or less the equivalent of putting your fingers in your ears and declaiming “nah-nah-nah I can’t hear you”.

Honestly you have more fortitude and intellectual honestly. It stinks that Apple has betrayed us at a deep level and lives now simply to create revenue streams and milk them. Almost all of us here jumped on the Apple train, using and evangelising Apple products and software for Apple’s promise to make computing better and to improve our lives.

As each product line becomes more and more locked down and less and less open, as more and more critical bugs slip into core software, it is our and your role as those who knew the original brighter Apple to hold these bean counters to account.

We have the right to computers which can be repaired and upgraded. We have the right to an OS which does not lock us out of core functionality. We have the right to be able to install third party applications. All of those rights have either already been taken from us since the death of SJ in 2012 or Apple is in the process of taking them away from us now.

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This topic has certainly brought out more participation and comments from users than most of the other topics on the board. Isn’t that a good thing?

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I’ve used Apple since 1986, and it’s about the same level of awesome vs. crap as it always has been. Lots of awesome, a fair bit of crap. Happened under Jobs; happens under Cook.

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Read the first post again:

There is a difference between criticism and whining. Criticism is pointing out—without being insulting or demeaning—that a specific product, service, app, or feature has some sort of a problem. Criticism is backed by reproducible statements of fact and in an ideal world, includes realistic suggestions for improvement.

Criticism becomes whining as soon as it claims that a single individual at Apple is responsible for the problem, as soon as it starts using inflammatory words like “incompetent” or “stupid,” or as soon as it lapses into the hypothetical with “If Steve Jobs were still alive…” He’s dead, Jim. Move on.

Not if it’s done without blame, invective, insult, or other derogatory inflammatory language.

No, it’s me saying that it’s my site and I’m sick of reading this crap and I don’t want it inflicted on others as well.

Hell no. The only utility of this thread has been a few people trying to point out where a particular complaint is based on a misconception or one-off situation, and but as so often seems to be the case with whiners, there’s no desire to actually fix things or gratitude for assistance.

My hope was that by establishing this penalty box thread, behavior would improve. It was not an invitation to keep polluting the stream. And it has wasted hours of my time that I could have spent productively on something that would actually helped people. I can’t express how much I hate this sort of behavior.

As such, I’m going to start cracking down harder. Whiners—in this thread or anywhere else—will get a warning, and after that, all their posts will be moderated with a heavy hand. If I get any grief for that, they’ll be banned for good.

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I disagree with that.

I would definitely say the level of “crap” has increased during roughly the last decade. If by “crap” we consider issues like putting usability, reliability, or customer benefit behind concerns related to brand value, market share or shareholder return. The current Apple is very concerned with their public image, with marketing, and they have (successfully of course) done a tremendous amount for their bottom line. Market value has increased dramatically. But it appears to have come at the expense of a focus on what is good for the user. That is behavior (and a quality thereof) I haven’t seen from Apple in a very long time (if at all, at this level).

I believe to understand where it’s coming from though. Apple used to be the underdog. They had to be better constantly. They had to put user benefit ahead of everything else if they wanted to stay alive. Market value was at best a consequence of being successful at “being better” than the rest. Had Apple sat back, or decided to only do some things full steam while doing others a bit ‘meh’, well that would have immediately threatened their existence. This is not to say they didn’t fail at things every now and then (clones, Newton, the IIsi, ;) hockey puck mouse, etc.—there are plenty of examples of that), but they had to recover from those failures quickly, charge head in other areas, and demonstrate they could do better just to remain barely relevant. Nowadays, however, Apple dominates many of the markets it’s in. It can afford to neglect certain aspects. It can afford to show lack of interest in some customers or certain product lines. It doesn’t have to constantly prove for each and every aspect of their software/hardware that they can do better than the rest. In a world where customers are “locked in” to an ecosystem, they don’t have to be convinced to stay with you each and every time they go out to make a purchase. That has no doubt had consequences.

Now you might say that the good that came from all these developments outweighs the negatives in your opinion, and that’s perfectly fine. But saying these negatives do not exist or that thay have not become more pronounced is IMHO simply not factual. To put it in very simple terms: if you’re an AAPL stockholder this is probably one of the greatest times. If you’re a professional Mac user, you are reminded almost daily your best times seem to have ended quite a few years back.

I might also add one more example for what I consider part of that increasing “crap”. Essentially, a lack of, not just focus, but vision. What is Tim’s vision? I know that Apple wants to use green power, recycle products with robots, and be inclusive and that they like making shiny thin devices, but in terms of products what is the vision? What do they burn for product-wise, and where do they want to take us with their products? I think an earlier Apple would have offered rather simple answers to those questions (Steve sure would have). But the present Apple? Who knows? For a while they wanted to dominate the smartphone market. That apears to have fallen apart when they (unlike for iPods) refused to widen their product range or stay super aggressive in terms of hardware engineering. So then they decided they wanted to become a hiphop music station and offer everything around that experience. But somehow that didn’t really take off either. So now they appear to want to become some kind of Netflix and make TV, that is however entirely devoid of violence, foul language, and nudity. Something tells me that will be a tough sell. Or is it they really want to be a services company based around their own payment system and credit card? I’m not sure. The goal posts seem to move frequently these days.

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I agree with you.

But you are never going to convince Adam that your thesis is anything more than whining.

He has made clear he wants a troubleshooting, news and advice site with a big fat period at the end. And it is his site.

What Apple does or doesn’t do or how they do what they do or their culture, vision, support, attitude, management, or much anything else not concrete and provable is simply in Adam’s mind not worth discussing.

I take your thesis one step further and say what you have observed is not an accident or even market-driven. It is the result of a series of conscious decisions made at all levels of the company.

No one at Apple came out with a memo that says “Sloppiness in coding is normal and part of the development process.” Or “Too much information on screen on what the program is doing confuses our users”.

What’s the old saying “That which gets measured and rewarded or punished determines the culture of the company”? Tim Cook will not be fired for a lack of vision or mediocre software. He will get fired for missing his quarterly targets. So you can make a good guess about what gets his attention.

If quarterly unit sales are measured heavily and mouse clicks to accomplish a given task are not measured at all, then no one gets punished for adding a few more mouse clicks.

Adam is right about one thing. There is nothing we as users can do about it in the current environment except pray for positive change, submit feedback, and maybe at some point consider the value proposition of paying more to supposedly get better and deciding that the Apple brand of better isn’t worth it anymore.

For me, I have already chosen in maps, music, news, e-mail, office productivity, books, cloud storage, web site browsing and streaming entertainment. I do not buy or use Apple products to serve these needs and they’d have a hard time getting me to switch unless their offering was free.

Meanwhile, Apple is still better than the alternatives in hardware, operating systems, backup, security and privacy, mobile devices, longevity, service and support, interface design and consistency, photos, and a few other areas. So here I stick with Apple. But I am so disappointed, my loyalty is slipping. I could be convinced to join the Dark Side.

I think we must stop grieving over a lost love. Steve is dead, sadly. Even if Apple wanted to replace Cook with someone like Steve, it simply might be impossible to find anyone. If that person exists, they are likely a rebel and aren’t going to impress the staid corporate Apple Board.

The history of Apple’s choices of CEO’s hasn’t exactly been great. They took Steve back because it was do that or bankruptcy, and Steve was the less disruptive and least expensive choice. The guy worked for $1 a year. And the Mach OS came with Steve.

We users must be accepting that the changes we long for may never come or come too late.

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In 1985 Chiat/Day was bought by, and merged into, TBWA, the agency who created another, almost equally groundbreaking campaign suggested and initially developed by Andy Warhol. The Absolut Vodka ads created by artists that elevated the a blah bottle filled with clear liquid into pop culture icon. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he moved the account to the LA office, which had some of the people from the SF office, some people from NY and some people from LA. They were people who came up with the long running “Think Different” and “Mac Vs. PC” “iPod” and iPhone ads. TBWA Chiat/Day is still churning out great work for Apple hardware and services. I particularly like “Shot On iPhone” that’s been running for the last few years; maybe it will last almost 10 years, like Mac Vs. PC.

I worked with BBDO NY on a number of accounts over the years that they did very good work for, including Panasonic and Sony. They were the wrong place at the wrong time for Apple.

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And I disagree. I think there were lots of issues of usability, reliability, and other crap all through the 1980s & 1990s and that no, it hasn’t particularly increased in the past decade.

You’re certainly welcome to that opinion. In my opinion, you’ve forgotten the previous issues and so the current ones stand out more in your memory. You’ve mistaken that for an actual difference.

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Yeah, this. I recall going through repeated restart cycles as I ran Conflict Catcher to figure out what extension combination might have been crashing my computer. What fun!

I am sitting at a ten-year-old iMac that is perfectly functional, albeit with an upgrade to SSD. It is more satisfactory today than my first two Macs – a IIcx and a 7200 – were when they were fresh out of the box.

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In the early days, most computer users were pretty hardcore people, with more than an rudimentary understanding of the machines in question.

Now just about everyone has, or at least uses a computer. Add in watches, phones, tablets…

Personally, I don’t think computers are built for the old hardcore group anymore, instead they are built for the masses. No longer the underdog, right! Be careful what you wish for lol

Despite any complaints I have (Siri has been BRUTAL lately), I still prefer Mac to PC :slight_smile:

Diane

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Oh, lord, yes. Conflict extensions. Eesh.

I’m also thinking about how catastrophically buggy System 7 was until it had been updated about five times, the floppy disk swap routine that predated hard drives, and the Font/DA Mover – there was a usability nightmare of the highest order.

How did we survive the 80s?

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Of course System 7 was a PITA at times. LOL @ Conflict Catcher. Back then I would have sounded like some of you. I would have told you that all of that was still was awesome compared to the issues I faced a decade earlier with my 1983 IIe.

But what the today’s-the-greatest-situation-ever crowd forgets is what the competition looked like at the time. Although System 7 was a pain, DOS and the PC issues you faced those days were simply unbearable to anybody but complete masochists. So comparing today to then is nonsense.

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fogcitynative
fogcitynative@gmail.com

    September 3

The history of Apple’s choices of CEO’s hasn’t exactly been great. They took Steve back because it was do that or bankruptcy, and Steve was the less disruptive and least expensive choice. The guy worked for $1 a year. And the Mach OS came with Steve.

This is totally, 100% not true. Steve initially returned as a consultant to Apple. He was given $127 million + $37 million worth of Apple stock that he pledged to hold for at least 6 months + $429 million for the purchase of NeXT. About a year later, Steve surreptitiously sold all the Apple stock for less than what it was worth when he acquired it, causing it to drop a lot further. He then ran screaming to the Board that the enormous drop in shares was 100% Amelio’s fault, so they should fire him, which they did, and of course, make Steve CEO + give him a seat on the Board Of Directors. They agreed on interim CEO to see if and Apple could be returned from the dead, + a seat on the board. The rest is history.

Just about everyone believes Jobs was truly a unique genius, a naturally brilliant creative thinker, product developer, designer, marketer, and a technology visionary without peer. But a benevolent, kind, considerate or self sacrificing person he was not.

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I dunno. But I cannot forget all the times throughout any given day in the pre-OSX era I had to crawl under my desk to hit the switch on the power strip to restart my Mac whenever I was using Quark or Pagemaker, Illustrator, Photoshop, or even Excel or Word. The horror, the horror…

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Oh, come on now, David, who doesn’t miss the flawless beauty of co-operative multi-tasking, the intellectual challenge of manually allocating application memory, and — man! — didn’t we all just love losing hours of work when Mac OS bombed on us? Ah, the good old days!! :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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You are measuring against the wrong benchmarks David. Yes, Classic OS 7,8,9 didn’t have protected memory and could not multitask effectively. Adding a lot of add-ons to one of those Macs would eventually result in a conflict (Conflict Catcher was very helpful software at the time). Those were known limitations of the OS which would not be resolved until OS X was finally released.

The first really non-beta iteration (I used them all) was OS X Panther, which had most of the rough edges of Unix sanded off and rounded. The most reliable and troublefree and without limitations or senseless features was Snow Leopard. The benchmark for the last seven years (post-Jobs) is the Apple eco-system of Snow Leopard. I have computers which I actively use (in the last month, most daily) on Mavericks, El Capitan, High Sierra and Mojave now.

The way to get along with OS X these days is to use as few extra features as possible. OS X is a bare bones operating system. Add functionality with third party utilities and programs. Examples include Keyboard Maestro, Typinator, Launchbar, Little Snitch, Spectacle, USB Overdrive, Choosy, Witch, Hazel). That way one doesn’t have to relearn and reprogram one’s Apple’s scripts with every OS update. At one major update per year that’s highly inefficient (one major update every two years was more than enough but it didn’t allow Apple to slant the table far enough in its own direction: it gave the third party developers and hardware makers too much stability to keep on a short leash).

Treated this way – with Apple as an unreliable and mendacious partner – the underlying Unix and the legacy Mac interface conventions (regularly violated by Apple), OS X remains very usable and mostly pleasant to use (if one ignores the constant phoning home, i.e. even when setting up email accounts whose passwords should be private Apple sends your email login information to the mothership, every time your clocks are updated, Apple logs your location).

Again, all that is good about Apple now was already in full maturity by 2012 and Snow Leopard’s third update in early 2010. Any significant improvements have been in improved third party applications. On Apple’s side, the only notable new software worth using is FCP X. It’s a lot better in 2019 than it was in 2012. There are issues with the interface still but they’ve been patched over with crutches, the effects and transitions are very well-built and very fast on what is an incredible 4K video engine. No other video editor can do so much so quickly on so little hardware.

Adam is excited by new things – it’s what makes him enjoy his work and be so good at what he does. Over a 29 year journey (on which I’ve accompanied him in my own right as a Mac user, a regular subscriber both free and paid and a buyer of Take Control books), Adam has conditioned himself to see improvement and benefits in upgrades. His livelihood depends on it. If people don’t adopt new Apple technology, Take Control books sales will plummet. Since I’ve put Apple on a strict diet (stay on a single OS for three to six years: first Snow Leopard, then El Capitan, new long term candidate in testing, High Sierra) and stopped adopting the trendy and ever changing (changing is deliberate choice of word instead of evolving), my personal purchases of Take Control books have plummeted.

Adam is at risk of becoming no longer an honest broker of Apple technology, but just a booster. TidBITSwould be much more interesting if instead of continuing to publish Apple boosterism and almost uncritically embracing any new Apple technology, TidBITS (through its publisher Adam) would focus on defensive computing and helping Apple users maximise their technology budgets, find the most reliable OS combinations and third party software and protect their privacy.

TidBITS sort of does that now. But somewhat reluctantly, always assuming goodwill from the part of Apple. That’s a mistake. Apple is a financialised company right now, run for the benefit of shareholders. Not for the benefit of users, not for the advancement of technology, not to create a better environment. It’s hard to concede the Wall Street-ification of our favourite technology company and what has been the long term companion for many of us through decades.

I’m very sad that Adam’s final response to the criticism of Apple from fellow long term Apple users and enthusiasts is to plan to ban most of us. As we get older, people become less able to accept information outside of their comfort zone. Surprisingly Adam is two years younger than me. Based on his cranky tone about information with which he disagrees, I expected him to be five to seven years older than me. Perhaps it’s harder to face it in volume (even I’ve had some trouble on this thread with fogcitynative’s very long and prolific posts about how Apple spoils his coffee every morning) as a moderator than we know.

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Nope, I’m measuring against the right benchmarks, Alec. ‘Known limitations’ is just a different way of saying that ‘yes, things are unreliable, a pain to use, and full of crap’ which is what I was saying.

On the rest of your post: yes, that’s the opinion that my original post was disagreeing with.

Let’s be careful about what I said: there are lots of issues of usability, reliability, and general crap now, and there were lots of issues of usability, reliability, and general crap then. Hardly ‘the greatest situation ever.’

I disagree with this, as well.

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As do I (and I suspect most on this board).

What I bemoan though is that while Win PCs have made great progress the last decade, it appears the last time the Mac really improved a whole lot was a decade ago. Now some might claim that’s just because the Mac is so perfect, there’s nothing left to improve. I would strongly disagree with that stance. And I think the fact many pro users to this day hold Snow Leopard and ~2013 MBPs in such endearing memory is testament to this development.

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Mac OS features introduced in the last decade that I find highly useful and/or improvements (and this is just off the top of my head):

App resumption, auto-save, Messages, iWork in iCloud, Notification Center, iBooks, Continuity, Handoff, Siri, and Apple Pay.

Safari specific: Reader View, full-text search in browser history, address field autocomplete, extensions, iCloud Tabs, Share sheet, unified search/address bar, muting tabs, automatic passwords, and lots of privacy stuff.

Also: making OS upgrades free.

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Thanks for sharing your list David. I’m happily living without any of those features (well auto-save runs but any of the applications where I cared about auto-save already had their own, I’m still irritated by the hide-and-seek Save as… functionality which can currently be enabled with the option-key. The notification center I do use but don’t find it inherently superior to any of what existed before (Growl, menu bar applets with numbers on them). For chat I prefer the small number on the menu bar icon as it’s both discreet and immediate and doesn’t involve having my private messages sitting around on the top right of my screen or disappearing so I don’t know they are there at all.

Almost all of the above includes sharing a great deal of one’s activity and reading with Apple. That’s not something I’m comfortable with as long as the Patriot Act or a version of it remains in effect in the United States.

I diligently use folder and file structure rather than the auto-storage in random spots on your hard drive which “modern” development has made trendy.

I’ve long ago made the move over to Chromium (without sign-on or Google features, turning off all the phoning home) and/or Firefox as a primary browser. Most of the functionality which you outlined above is easily replicated with extensions which are not dependent on Apple’s good will. Current move-the-cheese annoyance with Safari: the RSS reader has been removed. Passwords I’d definitely use a cross-browser, cross-platform system, i.e. Bitwarden in my case. Since we do quite a bit of online application and web development at Foliovision, my password needs are more robust than an iCloud/only Apple user.

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