This has been the winter of our discontent. 2016 was the year the tone changed. There’s always been a lot of criticism and griping about anything Apple does (and doesn’t do – it can’t win) but in 2016 I feel like the tone of the chatter about Apple changed and got a lot more negative.
This is worrisome on a number of levels and I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I’m used to watching people kvetch about the company, but this seems – different. One reason: a lot of the criticisms are correct.
Apple, for the first time in over a decade, simply isn’t firing on all cylinders. Please don’t interpret that as “Apple is doomed” because it’s not, but there are things it’s doing a lot less well than it could – and has. Apple’s out of sync with itself.
Here are a few of the things I think indicate Apple has gotten itself out of kilter and is in need of some course correction.
This post by Chuq Von Rospach has been widely shared and debated all over the web, and it has some great insights into Apple’s 2016. Note that Chuq Von Rospach is a former Apple (and Palm) employee, and certainly has the credentials to talk about these matters.
My dad got an iPod Nano for Christmas. Setting it up for him, I plugged it into the PC and iTunes asked if I wanted to manual sync, so I said sure, since he didn’t want all of my mom’s music anyway. Trying to drag songs from the iTunes library, it said none of the songs were on the computer. They were all on the hard drive, had been imported into iTunes, but iTunes for some reason was pointing to the cloud. When I downloaded a song, it made an exact duplicate of the file that was already on the hard drive. On a hunch, I fixed it by re-importing the entire library again, which made iTunes realize that yes, all the files were actually there.
I know Apple has traditionally had a reputation of their stuff ‘just working’, but I can’t help but think the only reason this happens is because us techies are stuck handling the tech support side of things when their shit breaks. I’ve spent many hours fighting with, and cussing at iTunes on friends and relatives’ computers. I hate it with a burning passion. And the iCloud integration just makes it worse.
Edited 2017-01-05 03:00 UTC
Their stuff definitely does just work.
Meh, it doesn’t seem like they’re saying anything most of us didn’t already know for a long time now. They’re just slow to realize that it could happen to apple too. The risk of being too sheltered is that you don’t see that the change in sentiment has been going on for years.
“Chuq Von Rospach” must be the awesomest name anyone has ever had.
The whole MPB release this past fall was a tipping point.
Not releasing a solid performance / spec bump is excusable if there’s a huge leap in battery tech / capacity.
Not releasing a solid improvement to battery tech is excusable if there’s a huge leap in performance.
But to have neither, and instead to get some interaction toy and a reduction in connectivity on-board? That’s some epic B.S. right there.
I have managed to abide changes in ports / configurations / form-factors / performance over the years from Apple products because there was always something stand-out different, that you couldn’t necessarily get elsewhere that was _utilitarian_.
Touchpads, backlit keyboards, MAGSAFE, battery life & physical size compared to other brands (without being completely spec-crippled). These things were utilitarian reasons to buy an Apple laptop. Every single one of these is no longer a stand-out function, or not even available.
The series of huge mistakes has been striking.
And a price bump to go with it!
The janitor who keeps the campus clean is just as qualified to say anything they want about Apple.
Trying to guess the motivation of others is a path fraught with peril, but: if I had to guess Apple’s prime motivation behind its hardware updates, it has been to eliminate any path toward circumvention of DRM and/or encryption (which are hand-in-hand). I’d guess Apple has a strong, probably contractual, business case to keep content secure from its users. I’d guess that’s why the last Mac Pro had only Thunderbolt for “expansion,” allowing no high-bandwidth hardware-level access to the system bus, and of course it was a prime motivation behind both the elimination of the analog headphone jack and the necessity to license access to any iOS connector.
If my guesses are true, and this remains the primary motivation behind all Apple hardware updates, all hopes of Apple ever addressing the needs of the power user defined in the article (of which I am one) will remain unmet. Nothing will be added to any future Apple product that makes the platform more open, hardware-wise, or even probably software-wise. There will not be another IIci, unless we build it as a franken-hackintosh.
Edited 2017-01-08 20:06 UTC