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It Just Works

danielandrews.com

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Re: It Just Works

#11

Post by drb311 »

"It just works" is a tricky promise to make good on. Microsoft never made this promise and nor does Google.

As a Google fan I accept a certain amount of flakiness as part of the brand identity. It's always celebrated a quirky, rough feel. In some ways, Google is starting to get TOO slick.

People expect Apple to be innovative and reliable; too push the boundaries without ever falling over them. It's hard to do either consistently, successfully, at scale. It might be impossible to do both.

Re: It Just Works

#12

Post by davidw »

I got a Mac for my new job, and I gave it a few weeks, but ended up putting Parallels on it so I can use Ubuntu. I just don't like how Macs work, and don't like that I can't customize it (focus follows the mouse, dammit!) like I can Linux.

There are a lot of things that 'just work' on Ubuntu (for me, at least), like git bash completion, that seem to require more fiddling on the Mac.

Re: It Just Works

#13

Post by benologist »

stdbrouw wrote: post #2

I dunno. I've never experienced any of the problems described in the post. Always kind of dangerous to extrapolate from n=1. It also feels somewhat myopic to claim that people don't like apps like Notes or Calendar because there's more featureful alternatives. The point of stock apps isn't to please the power user.

Dismissing bug reports because "it works on my machine" is also a kind of dangerous extrapolation, especially with the near-certainty that any large piece of software has bugs.

Re: It Just Works

#14

Post by geophile »

Major Apple applications have become inscrutable and frustrating.

- iTunes, Music and the iTunes store are a mess. I understood the old iTunes organization. Navigation within my music collection has become highly non-intuitive. It seems that there are multiple paradigms (long list of tracks, and another sectioned off by album), and it isn't always clear why one or the other is used. I keep forgetting how to get to the store. Once there, the integration with the stuff I've bought is unclear (especially for video content). I once got extremely confused watching a series, not realizing that one particular view of the episodes were ordered by POPULARITY, not in chronological order. And ratings! I get the 0-5 star rating system. Then they added the heart icon for -- uhh -- something. Why not just use the existing rating system? Why do I have to rate things again for a different purpose?

- Podcasts have become very confusing. I want to be able to control what is physically present on my devices, to control data usage on my phone, and space usage on all devices. They've intentionally made that difficult.

- Photos is a disaster. There are many different organization paradigms, and it is unclear why some of my recent photos appear in some of them but not others. What are the differences among events and photo stream? Why do some pictures show up in the by-date organization but not photo stream? What's in the cloud? When does it sync with my phone? Why is it easy to sync with my phone by cable but not IP?

If current trends continue, my beautiful Mac hardware will be nothing but a boot loader for VMWare and Linux.

Re: It Just Works

#15

Post by leonroy »

Excellent article.

I too find myself looking at ways I can reduce my reliance on Apple these days. For me it's getting burnt with Aperture, discoveryd causing all my Airplay speakers to constantly act up, $1000 Thunderbolt displays flickering on my $6000 Mac Pro as well as parts of my iTunes library getting spoilt by the new Apple Music stuff. List goes on, but Daniel is right, I just don't really have much (if any) faith in Apple when it comes to my data.

I think that this erosion of trust will take years to rebuild. The sad thing is that Apple in the mid 90s had a similar rep for flaky products and Tim Cook was widely credited for tightening ops to improve product manufacture, quality and reliability.

Re: It Just Works

#16

Post by why-el »

geophile wrote: post #14

Major Apple applications have become inscrutable and frustrating. - iTunes, Music and the iTunes store are a mess. I understood the old iTunes organization. Navigation within my music collection has become highly non-intuitive. It seems that there are multiple paradigms (long list of tracks, and another sectioned off by album), and it isn't always clear why one or the other is used. I keep forgetting how to get to th…

iTunes is absolutely terrible. I did several updates for my girlfriend and friends, and none of them figured out iTunes. Most of them downgraded.

Re: It Just Works

#17

Post by msluyter »

Yes, I've also noticed an increasing number of software bugs on my Macs. FWIW, I wanted to try out the Dell XPS "Developer Edition," which appears to be about as close as you can get to a Macbook level build quality in a linux box (without having to jump though the hoops of installing linux on a macbook itself), and you simply can't order it from Dell's website. A chat with a rep suggested that it's out of stock.

So, I think Apple is creating market opportunity -- a high quality linux based laptop aimed at developers that, like the Mac, doesn't require constant fiddling or kernel rebuilds to get working.

Re: It Just Works

#18

Post by geophile »

why-el wrote: post #16
geophile wrote: post #14

Major Apple applications have become inscrutable and frustrating. - iTunes, Music and the iTunes store are a mess. I understood the old iTunes organization. Navigation within my music collection has become highly non-intuitive. It seems that there are multiple paradigms (long list of tracks, and another sectioned off by album), and it isn't always clear why one or the other is used. I keep forgetting how to get to th…

iTunes is absolutely terrible. I did several updates for my girlfriend and friends, and none of them figured out iTunes. Most of them downgraded.

Spotify is a possible replacement (even without their streaming and music finding services), but I find that application quite buggy.

Re: It Just Works

#19

Post by serve_yay »

Apple makes things that "do more" than their products of old, and we expect them to do more than devices past. The combination of features plus our expectation that all our devices be aware of what is happening on the others at all times is a recipe for a combinatorial explosion of unpredicted states, race conditions, you name it. I too miss the simplicity and "it just works" factor of past days. But it's a lot easier to pull that off with an iPod and a Mac, than iPhone + Mac + iPad + watch, etc.

They're the biggest company in the world and nobody needs to make excuses for them - I'm not saying "well, it's to be expected and it's not their fault." But I always think, who would be able to do this better than Apple? And I think the answer to that question reveals the depth of the situation we're in. As much as Apple screws up, could you imagine using a watch + phone + PC + tablet from some other vendor, and it being better? That's what really sucks about now - Apple screws up and they're the best we can hope for.

Re: It Just Works

#20

Post by swang »

1. I'm still on 10.9. Still have not moved over to Yosemite. Mavericks runs smooth for me.

2. It is 2015 and iTunes/iPhone syncing is still the absolute worst. I just want to add a couple of albums to my iPhone, why do I need to connect over a cable (wifi syncing almost never works for me) and why do I need to wait more than 5 minutes? I don't want to sync my entire phone again! (If you know how to not have iTunes do this, please tell me. It is the worst).

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