Is Apple the new Microsoft?
When I moved from Windows to Apple, it was a liberation. All of those annoying issues I was constantly deal with were gone. But over the past 18 months I've become increasingly annoyed at the stability of OSX and iOS. I'm close to where I was in 2011, when I cast off Microsoft altogether. My MacBook freezes and needs a hard reboot at least once a week. My Bluetooth audio has a delay since I upgraded to the last OSX. Load time from the home screen used to happen almost instantaneously, now there are long load times. On iOS AirDrop never seems to work, I've started to get phantom strange touch screen behavior, and every new version seems to be flakier. Apple need to get their house in order because they're on the precipice of not living up the their brand expectations.
8 comments
I actually wonder if Apple is actually getting worse, or
1) so many people are now using their software that the 'few' who have had problems with the software are becoming loud enough to actually make a dent in the companies marketing and PR story
2) so many people are now using their software on different hardware that they are unable to keep up with managing the the overall experience.
My initial experiences with OSX were horrible, I had to restart my Mac Mini a bunch of times, and it wouldn't connect to the internet, lots of general issues that it turned me away from Mac pretty quickly. Everybody told me I was crazy, but now, we're seeing lots of people at work switch to linux, give up on Mac and even ogle my windows set-up.
1) so many people are now using their software that the 'few' who have had problems with the software are becoming loud enough to actually make a dent in the companies marketing and PR story
2) so many people are now using their software on different hardware that they are unable to keep up with managing the the overall experience.
My initial experiences with OSX were horrible, I had to restart my Mac Mini a bunch of times, and it wouldn't connect to the internet, lots of general issues that it turned me away from Mac pretty quickly. Everybody told me I was crazy, but now, we're seeing lots of people at work switch to linux, give up on Mac and even ogle my windows set-up.
My personal experience mirrors that of OP's, recently things seem to be getting worse. I am also thinking of switching back to Windows. When I first switched a few years ago it was an amazing experience, so I am apprehensive of the theory of it gaining mass.
An $720 billion company, printing $50+ billion per year in profit, that gets ~85% of its profit from one product line.
Should anyone be surprised if the Mac products rot? Apple is a corporation, prone to the same flaws as any other giant: losing focus, ignoring problems outside their core profit stream, allowing problems to snowball, weakening quality control, and so on.
In 2006, the year before the iPhone came out, Apple had around 17,000 employees. By the end of this year it'll be 100,000+. What company could add over 80,000 employees in nine years and not have some bad problems come out of it? I've never seen employee expansion of that scale before at a tech company, and can't think of a tech company that has ever grown like that in world history.
Should anyone be surprised if the Mac products rot? Apple is a corporation, prone to the same flaws as any other giant: losing focus, ignoring problems outside their core profit stream, allowing problems to snowball, weakening quality control, and so on.
In 2006, the year before the iPhone came out, Apple had around 17,000 employees. By the end of this year it'll be 100,000+. What company could add over 80,000 employees in nine years and not have some bad problems come out of it? I've never seen employee expansion of that scale before at a tech company, and can't think of a tech company that has ever grown like that in world history.
Yah I've been using Mac notebooks for the past 10 years. In the last few years, so many weird issues crop up esp when upgrading the OS... currently my MBP just dies when battery gets to about 15-20% without any warning....
That said, I've ordered a Lenovo X1 Carbon and I'll be selling my MBP and switching back to Windows/Linux VM...I've also realized how many apps are superior on Windows which I am missing (mainly MS Office, BI tools, and CAD tools) ...
That said, I've ordered a Lenovo X1 Carbon and I'll be selling my MBP and switching back to Windows/Linux VM...I've also realized how many apps are superior on Windows which I am missing (mainly MS Office, BI tools, and CAD tools) ...
Heh, I have to reboot my MBP after each presentation since detaching the HDMI cable tends to mess up the screen.
I use Windows every day at work. I work in IT and we're a Windows's shop. Last June I was looking for a laptop and a real nice display was important to me. I went with a MacBook pro with retina. I can say that in my experience Windows seems much more stable than my MacBook. I do like how my MacBook wakes up much like an iPad and is ready to go. Also love the screen and how long the battery lasts. That said, once the Windows laptops have more options for better screens at an affordable price I'll be moving back.
My problem with Apple is that it appears that their open source contributions are negligible as compared to their competitors. Although they admittedly piggy back on the great work of FreeBSD, as well as who knows how many other open source projects. Even Microsoft (from what I can tell) seems to have learned from its past mistakes and is trying harder and faster to fix them than Apple.
Apple did just open source Research Kit https://www.apple.com/researchkit/ and maintain a heap of OS code here: https://www.apple.com/opensource/
It surprises me when people claim Apple is not a good Open Source candidate.
As an example, think of Android. Google used Apple's Open Source LLVM to port Linux to an ARM architecture, then used Apple's Open Source CUPS as the print system (as do most Linux distros) and used Apple's Open Source WebKit to run the browser. Google also used WebKit in Chrome until they forked it.
Can you name any Open Source programmes created by any other large tech company that have gained such widespread adoption?
As an example, think of Android. Google used Apple's Open Source LLVM to port Linux to an ARM architecture, then used Apple's Open Source CUPS as the print system (as do most Linux distros) and used Apple's Open Source WebKit to run the browser. Google also used WebKit in Chrome until they forked it.
Can you name any Open Source programmes created by any other large tech company that have gained such widespread adoption?
Sure, I can't sit here and say LLVM or CUPS are not great.
My point is that when you're the richest company, you should be at the forefront of the open source community. Instead my impression is that Apple, as compared to any other major tech company in the US with comparable market cap, is very much in the background.
I would point us to github, but oh yeah Apple doesn't seem to have an official profile on that website while google, microsoft, facebook, et al....
"unofficial mirror" https://github.com/opensource-apple
"genuine" https://github.com/Microsoft/ https://github.com/google https://github.com/facebook
Also I guess it would be hard to argue that Apple originated LLVM given its history:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LLVM
And it looks like CUPS is not 100% open source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUPS
Here's an interesting article with some talking points.
http://readwrite.com/2014/05/05/apple-github-ios-android-dev...
My point is that when you're the richest company, you should be at the forefront of the open source community. Instead my impression is that Apple, as compared to any other major tech company in the US with comparable market cap, is very much in the background.
I would point us to github, but oh yeah Apple doesn't seem to have an official profile on that website while google, microsoft, facebook, et al....
"unofficial mirror" https://github.com/opensource-apple
"genuine" https://github.com/Microsoft/ https://github.com/google https://github.com/facebook
Also I guess it would be hard to argue that Apple originated LLVM given its history:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LLVM
And it looks like CUPS is not 100% open source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUPS
Here's an interesting article with some talking points.
http://readwrite.com/2014/05/05/apple-github-ios-android-dev...
Can you name any Open Source programmes created by any other large tech company that have gained such widespread adoption?
Apple the new Microsoft ? Well, Apple is apple, there's no way you can compare it to Microsoft ! Of course, Microsoft did amazing things too, but Apple thought us to evolve and adopt, perfection and mainly "HOW TO MARKET" when you have an amazing product !
I never could bring myself to leave the consistent logical uniformity of Windows for OS X. I prefer function over form and Apple simply does not cater to people like me.
Whenever people talk about OS X keyboard shortcuts, it never fails that, at least one allegedly long time user of OS X exclaims "I didn't know about THAT shortcut, that's so amazing!" Meanwhile, in the world of Windows - if you understand 2 or 3 basic principles, you can easily operate the entire OS with the keyboard.
(EDIT: However, I still recommend Apple computers and other products to friends and family for many reasons.)
Whenever people talk about OS X keyboard shortcuts, it never fails that, at least one allegedly long time user of OS X exclaims "I didn't know about THAT shortcut, that's so amazing!" Meanwhile, in the world of Windows - if you understand 2 or 3 basic principles, you can easily operate the entire OS with the keyboard.
(EDIT: However, I still recommend Apple computers and other products to friends and family for many reasons.)
People praise OS X's keyboard shortcuts for being consistent across apps, as opposed to e.g. having a different "find text" shortcut per app. They are also very strict about using CMD as the primary modifier key, as opposed to mixing up Ctrl vs Alt. This too is function, and it's something that immediately grates when you go to Windows from Mac.
What you are doing is praising Windows for letting you operate things by keyboard that are normally designed to be operated by a mouse, such as that "context menu" key they added to keyboards and which practically no-one uses on purpose. This is something that Apple minimizes by default, but which you can enable through accessibility settings and such. The fact that many Windows users expect this to be turned on by default has lead them to conclude that Macs can only be operated by a mouse.
Furthermore, "form over function" is what a lot of Windows UI looks like to me. On a Mac, a file icon in a window's titlebar is still a full reference to the file, and you can drag it out and do things with it. A file downloaded in Safari has a progressbar on its icon, and you can copy it to a different machine and open it to resume. The Windows equivalents of these things are just dead icons and broken file type associations.
The two OS'es have a radically different philosophy. But personally, I can't use Windows anymore once I realized how dumb "Ok" "Cancel" "Apply" is, as opposed to just being able to tick off a checkbox on/off and seeing the entire UI update immediately.
What you are doing is praising Windows for letting you operate things by keyboard that are normally designed to be operated by a mouse, such as that "context menu" key they added to keyboards and which practically no-one uses on purpose. This is something that Apple minimizes by default, but which you can enable through accessibility settings and such. The fact that many Windows users expect this to be turned on by default has lead them to conclude that Macs can only be operated by a mouse.
Furthermore, "form over function" is what a lot of Windows UI looks like to me. On a Mac, a file icon in a window's titlebar is still a full reference to the file, and you can drag it out and do things with it. A file downloaded in Safari has a progressbar on its icon, and you can copy it to a different machine and open it to resume. The Windows equivalents of these things are just dead icons and broken file type associations.
The two OS'es have a radically different philosophy. But personally, I can't use Windows anymore once I realized how dumb "Ok" "Cancel" "Apply" is, as opposed to just being able to tick off a checkbox on/off and seeing the entire UI update immediately.
Is the file icon in a window's titlebar functional in a way that's actually useful to (or actually used by) anyone though? It seems to me that much of OS X's hidden and non-obvious functionality is just there to satisfy someone's incorrect definition of what would be functional for the end user.
> The Windows equivalents of these things are just dead icons.
That's incorrect. Based on your own example - Chrome and IE both have progress bars in download icons. The value of being able to transfer an in-progress download to another machine seems highly questionable to me and I seriously doubt that anyone would need such functionality on a regular basis. But, I rest assured knowing that whatever I need Windows to do, I can make it do whereas Apple typically locks down the APIs that one might need to do something different than the "Apple way".
And I think that having the entire UI update immediately after checking a box is really stupid because I cannot cancel all of my changes at once. But that's the Apple way - remove all functionality and claim that it's somehow a superior product. It's also a useless workflow for changes that might not be undoable, so it cannot be employed everywhere and now the end user has to deal with multiple workflows. Meanwhile - OK, Cancel and Apply present the full spectrum of functionality in a consistent and logical way that is not hidden from the user.
> The Windows equivalents of these things are just dead icons.
That's incorrect. Based on your own example - Chrome and IE both have progress bars in download icons. The value of being able to transfer an in-progress download to another machine seems highly questionable to me and I seriously doubt that anyone would need such functionality on a regular basis. But, I rest assured knowing that whatever I need Windows to do, I can make it do whereas Apple typically locks down the APIs that one might need to do something different than the "Apple way".
And I think that having the entire UI update immediately after checking a box is really stupid because I cannot cancel all of my changes at once. But that's the Apple way - remove all functionality and claim that it's somehow a superior product. It's also a useless workflow for changes that might not be undoable, so it cannot be employed everywhere and now the end user has to deal with multiple workflows. Meanwhile - OK, Cancel and Apply present the full spectrum of functionality in a consistent and logical way that is not hidden from the user.
My experience has been the opposite. It is much better for me to have a separate modifier key (Command) for separate things. Want to make a new terminal window? It's Command+N, not Alt+F2. Paste? Command+V, not Shift+Ins. Copy? Command+C. New tab? Command+T. None of those things are possible with Windows shortcuts. If I didn't need a shell all the time it would probably be more uniform, of course. The only really good thing about the keyboard shortcuts in Windows is the Alt+<underlined character> which I have always hoped would be part of OS X someday. (Is that what you're referring to when you say "2 or 3 basic principles?)
I definitely agree with you that Apple prefers form over function, but I don't think keyboard shortcuts are the best example of that. I could personally never get away from a Unix-like operating system, which is why Linux is really best for my needs.
I definitely agree with you that Apple prefers form over function, but I don't think keyboard shortcuts are the best example of that. I could personally never get away from a Unix-like operating system, which is why Linux is really best for my needs.