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Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

latimes.com

71–80 of 613 posts

Re: Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

#71

And so the pendulum swings, as it always does. Apple will begin sitting on it's laurels while core services and products degrade, while Microsoft enters a quiet, user-first renaissance under new leadership. If you switch Apple and Microsoft in the above paragraph, it sounds a lot like the past...

Apple will begin sitting on it's laurels while core services and products degrade, while Microsoft enters a quiet, user-first renaissance under new leadership.

(buzzer sound)

Re: Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Obviously there's a very large target market of folks that just want their tech to work and will happily drop a few hundred bucks each time they need to upgrade or repair. But it's hard to go back once you've opened up your computer and seen how cheap/easy it is to replace some of these extremely modular components. I imagine my mindset will change as I get older and have less time/more disposable income. There is.…

> (comes out to be ~$60/month) Even phased like that that is a lot of money.

Not for a tool contributing towards six figures of income for me annually. That's an insane ROI.

EDIT: I know people who spend more than that on Starbucks each month.

Re: Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

#73
post #2

I think there is a decline in the quality of Apple's software. However I think there is a correlation between the amount of users and complaints / bugs found. Now that Apple has a large and growing user base the seeming quality is also degrading. However I could be wrong, just my opinion. Personally I haven't had as many issues as described in the article e.g. Preview has always worked fine for me. However the bigges…

Try it with modernist cuisine's official pdf-s. That is the test i use when I really want to make a pdf reader suffer.

Re: Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

#74
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does suck the repairability is next to none but they have the best looking hardware out there. I have yet to see any other manufacture come close to what Apple can do hardware wise. A metal laptop enclosure is basically unheard of outside of Apple sadly. I would like to see someone step up.

Do you buy hardware based on what it looks?

People are entitled to do that.

Just like people buy cars/homes/clothes/cellphones just because of how they look.

I'd argue they should look at the overall "package" when purchasing, but if looks are important to someone that's absolutely fine, and there is nothing wrong with valuing looks.

Re: Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

#75
post #20

Wow, that's a lot of media hoopla. Let's be real, Apple's never been a software company -- they've always made excellent hardware and good enough software that people will deal with because they want their amazing hardware. No one has ever said anything about any Apple software compared to what people say about their hardware. Software's not in their DNA and I think all this media attention will just fade after a whi…

It would be nice if there was better Linux support from Apple. I haven't tried it, but from reading guides it seems like installing Linux on a Macbook comes with a whole set of gotchas and workarounds.

Re: Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

#76
post #38

I don't much care about the software - I haven't used iTunes in years, don't use Mail, etc. etc. - it's the operating system I care about. Wi-fi has been buggy on OS X for literally years now. And each new major release seems to bring some new pain point where it refuses to turn on, refuses to connect, doesn't transmit data... and on and on. There's no way Apple can't know about this - it must drive their own employe…

I've found that wifi is buggy generally with lower end APs. It may be Apple employees generally have a better class of router/wifi

Recent Macs have a wifi chip that requires WME/WMM extensions (Wireless Multimedia) in most cases. For most APs it will have issues if these are switched off. Rumor is it's a chipset thing not a software thing.

Re: Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

#77
Apple has always had problems with software quality. In the past, Jobs was around to not only provide a reality distortion field to distract people from that fact but also to drag the company forward on specific projects and products (such as OS X) which kept the balance of quality to crap high enough. He also kept the company away from making big design or UX mistakes. Since Jobs has been gone Apples has been making missteps at an increasing rate, consider, for example, this set of gems: https://twitter.com/jonyiveparody/status/674749292494491648

Apple's edge has always been that it was well plugged into the aesthetic sensibilities of its market, which is an unusual combination of skills to be tied to reasonably high quality engineering (the same dynamic that existed between Jobs and Woz since the first, really). It's somewhat inevitable that it would go away eventually, it's more sad that nobody cracked the formula so that more companies could have the same level of success. Clunky design is still the norm almost everywhere, and that's only slowly changing.

Re: Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

#78
post #20

Wow, that's a lot of media hoopla. Let's be real, Apple's never been a software company -- they've always made excellent hardware and good enough software that people will deal with because they want their amazing hardware. No one has ever said anything about any Apple software compared to what people say about their hardware. Software's not in their DNA and I think all this media attention will just fade after a whi…

I remember Steve Jobs saying that Apple is a software company, and then quoting Alan Kay: "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.". Apple certainly has the talent in-house to be a software company (llvm, webkit, cups, swift, metal, etc., even if they didn't start the first three) but somehow it doesn't seem to reach the higher level apps (iTunes, Podcast, etc.).

I suspect poor product management: I strongly doubt llvm or swift are driven like iTunes.

Re: Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

#79
post #3

It's not just software. While I'm still a fan of Macbooks, I'm getting close to abandoning ship thanks to the increasingly un-repairability of these things. I have a Macbook from ~2008 that's still functional as a media PC thanks to memory/SSD upgrades and battery replacements over the years. My current Macbook Pro has memory soldered on to the motherboard and a battery glued to the case. The SSD is technically repla…

As much as I liked Mac OS X, I recently jumped ship from my early 2015 retina macbook pro to a dell xps 13 and i am super happy. Windows 10 is definitely not the same but it is much much better than how windows 8 used to be. The biggest factor that got me to switch was how locked down the hardware was and i couldnt even replace the battery if i wanted to. And i got the 128gig version thinking there would be aftermarket storage upgrade option down the line but it doesnt seem like that is happening.

Re: Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

#80
post #68
post #3

It's not just software. While I'm still a fan of Macbooks, I'm getting close to abandoning ship thanks to the increasingly un-repairability of these things. I have a Macbook from ~2008 that's still functional as a media PC thanks to memory/SSD upgrades and battery replacements over the years. My current Macbook Pro has memory soldered on to the motherboard and a battery glued to the case. The SSD is technically repla…

The extra annoying part is that Apple's total lack of reputability is starting to spread to competing products - a lot of Android phones have dropped user-replaceable batteries, for instance, and a sizable amount of good Windows ultrabooks are about as repairable as MacBooks.

> extra annoying part is that Apple's total lack of reputability is starting to spread to competing products

Oh, please. Apple has nothing to do with that problem. The problem is we're a throw away society hell bent on buying the latest greatest thing. If it's anyone's fault, it's our own.

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