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I feel Apple has lost its alignment with me and other long-time customers

morrick.me

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Re: I feel Apple has lost its alignment with me and other long-time customers

#501

Post by looseyesterday »

snowwrestler wrote: post #89

> it’s a company that I feel has lost its alignment with me and other long-time Apple users and customers. When OS X debuted there was a daytime radio talk show in my area called “The Computer Guys.” They capably covered all sorts of computing topics, but were clearly long-time Apple dudes. And they spent weeks complaining about what a disaster OS X was. The Dock was useless and violated Apple’s HIG. The Finder made…

I think I agree only partially, ofc people tend to over-react to change, however I do think as apple has grown they have become more careful in the ways that matter. I like that they are still pushing things with liquid glass and trying and failing, thats not the issue. But where is my trifold? Where is the folding iPhone? Or some sort of Dex mode? I Think they've stopped pushing the edge of whats possible and I think thats only natural, since they are worth so much money a single product managers messup could cost them millions if not billions, when thats the case its only natural to stop experimenting and play it safe, every incentive will push you towards that from D&O insurance, to activit shareholders even the increased media scrutiney.

Re: I feel Apple has lost its alignment with me and other long-time customers

#502

Post by wvenable »

von_lohengramm wrote: post #202
grues-dinner wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest I sometimes feel that my aversion to getting looked into an ecosystem is actually a detriment in some ways. I have a horrible mishmash of apps and programs and nothing integrates really well long term (story of life on a Linux desktop, really). Maybe life would really be better if I just hand over control and become a true believer!

I used to go through phases where I would try this. I gave Windows + WSL a shot. I gave embracing the Apple ecosystem a shot. I gave GNOME a shot. I gave KDE a shot. I was even crazy enough to give ChromeOS as my daily driver a shot. And so on and so forth. I found every single time that it just wasn't worth it. There was always some critical failure that was either completely underlooked or a 20 year old bug/shortco…

I love how contradictory this comment is. "There was always some critical failure... this setup isn't perfect... things really only break when..."

Everybody has different needs and something you don't care about on Windows or Mac or Gnome might be critically important for someone else.

Re: I feel Apple has lost its alignment with me and other long-time customers

#504

Post by [deleted] »

cameldrv wrote: post #461
sippeangelo wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time I need to browse to a specific path I have to google it, because there is no path input anywhere. (It's Shift+Cmd+G of course)

They also screwed up cmd-shift-g a few versions ago where if you type, say, /Users/me/Documents, it puts you in /Users/me. Now you have to put in /Users/me/Documents/ if you actually want that folder. Then of course the autocomplete wasn’t changed as well, so if you start typing and then cursor down to the completion and hit enter, it doesn’t fill in the slash, so it goes to the parent folder. You have to cursor down…

[deleted]

Re: I feel Apple has lost its alignment with me and other long-time customers

#505

Post by J_Shelby_J »

op00to wrote: post #426
rectang wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to hate Airpods in videochats since they made the person wearing them sound bad because of dropouts, had heinous latency, and frequently disconnected causing meeting interruptions. But people think they're "better" than [wired] Earpods, which have none of those problems. /me shakes fist at cloud

I've literally never seen any of those problems with Airpods in my meetings, and I'm in meetings A LOT. I can't remember the last time someone joined with audio issues in general! I personally use a Plantronics DECT headset which is ~12 years old and on its third battery, but otherwise an excellent workhorse. If I couldn't get another one of these headsets, I'd probably move to Airpods.

Please don’t. All of Apple products and especially the AirPods have horrid microphones that cause me physical discomfort to listen to.

Re: I feel Apple has lost its alignment with me and other long-time customers

#506

Post by keithxm23 »

epistasis wrote: post #19
avidiax wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is a hostage of its own marketing. A modular iphone that has an easy to replace battery, easy to replace screen and is maybe 2mm thicker to account for it? That would be a sellout. A convertible Macbook Air with a touch screen? It would be sold out. Neckband-style airpods with all-day battery life? Might not sell out, but would be popular. A best-in-class TV powered by Apple TV? Would probably sell well. But al…

> A modular iphone that has an easy to replace battery, easy to replace screen and is maybe 2mm thicker to account for it? That would be a sellout. The number of people who might actually like this is very tiny. Most of them do product reviews. But their audience is not going to care. Think about your older uncle. Your niece in her 20s who loves to paint and read but doesn't want to replace hardware. That's what most…

I've owned several Nokia phones in the early 2000s. It was dead simple to replace a battery. My 70 year old aunt who is a tailor by trade knew how to pop out the back, and insert a new battery. There's absolutely no reason a screen replacement can be made as simple. The Fairphone series has already achieved this for screen-replacements (albeit with a bit more difficulty than a simple battery replacement.)

Even if the majority of people are unable to do these part-replacements themselves, it is still a massive improvement to make them easy to perform. The reduction in expertise required to perform these replacements would significantly reduce the cost of these operations while simultaneously reducing e-waste.

Re: I feel Apple has lost its alignment with me and other long-time customers

#507

Post by integralid »

Retinal7467 wrote: post #492
jrm4 wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this is dead wrong. I'll go in the other direction. With a few exceptions, it is unfortunately true that "a business" isn't just "a way to make money," it's VERY OFTEN "the only reasonable way to accomplish a big-ish goal involving multiple people." I say this as someone who started a business incidentally, my father had a big project that he and I loved the idea of, and I knew I could put together a good team…

You’re conflating small business and large business. The moment you have investors return on investment becomes the sole motivating factor and whatever humanity the organization had will be slowly squeezed out from the top down. This isn’t ideological, it is a legal principle. A corporation taking actions that harm returns opens them up to lawsuits. Edit: worker owned coops don’t have this issue because they are defi…

GGP started with "There isn’t a single business in existence" though.

Re: I feel Apple has lost its alignment with me and other long-time customers

#508

Post by ben7799 »

The writer seems to be one of the older crowd that made being a Mac user a huge part of their identity in the 80s and 90s. In the 80s that was tied in with the Mac being a pretty superior computer only accessible to the wealthy. In the 90s the Mac became a bit of a disaster as the decade went on and these guy stayed in utter and complete denial about it.

Then when OSX (-> Mac OS) started becoming really great in the 2000s I think they complained about stuff changing but then felt recognized when developers started flocking over to the Mac. But then you've got all these average people jumping on buying iPhones and iPads and Watches and AirPods and now they don't feel special.

It is pretty hard for me to get worked up about it. Some of the glory days were nowhere near as great as they remember, it's just they were a special club back in the day and now they're not really. The rest of us will just keep getting our jobs done using Macs.

One other aspect is a lot of these people were not particularly technical and as such were pretty inflexible in their thinking. They often seem to have built up extremely rigid and complicated ways of wanting to organize everything on their system because they are the kind of people who are used to following an exact set of steps to do everything on the computer, and they perhaps learned that at great pain. So they become extremely sensitive to UI changes as they perceive any change they have to get used to as wrecking their perfectly tuned productivity.

As an example they get super upset about the finder. They seem to have frequently built up some really complicated way of using the finder and then will get really upset, whereas an even more technical user will just go update their script/macros/whatever in 5 minutes if something changes and not get up particularly bent out of shape. The guy (and I've only ever met guys in this camp) who gets upset is probably not building a script that would have saved 100x more time over the years.

Re: I feel Apple has lost its alignment with me and other long-time customers

#509

Post by ben7799 »

jfengel wrote: post #37
loughnane wrote: post #32

I feel like these posts started popping up with increasing frequency over the last 10 years. At this point its almost a rite of passage to realize that Apple---though good in many ways---is far less than it's cracked up to be. At least in tech circles.

Tech circles have never particularly liked Apple. Sometimes they're right; sometimes they're just grumpy that non-techies like things that they don't. I've been hearing that since before Slashdot dubbed the iPod lame. So I just kinda tune it out and wait to see whether people buy it or not.

This says it. Actual "tech" circles were historically not super into the Mac. Of course there were some people who loved it, but the bulk of the classic Mac fanbase was design type people and people who were mostly recreational PC users but had way more money to spend than typical PC users. More hardcore tech folks were turned off by inflexibility and OS instability by the mid-90s.

This has of course changed over the past 20 years as all the OS limitations with the Mac were lifted and all PCs have kind of matured and you don't have massive increases in speed every year. So Apple's better quality, closer price parity, and better software support started to look better and better to actual tech people.

Re: I feel Apple has lost its alignment with me and other long-time customers

#510

Post by freedomben »

Retinal7467 wrote: post #492
jrm4 wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this is dead wrong. I'll go in the other direction. With a few exceptions, it is unfortunately true that "a business" isn't just "a way to make money," it's VERY OFTEN "the only reasonable way to accomplish a big-ish goal involving multiple people." I say this as someone who started a business incidentally, my father had a big project that he and I loved the idea of, and I knew I could put together a good team…

You’re conflating small business and large business. The moment you have investors return on investment becomes the sole motivating factor and whatever humanity the organization had will be slowly squeezed out from the top down. This isn’t ideological, it is a legal principle. A corporation taking actions that harm returns opens them up to lawsuits. Edit: worker owned coops don’t have this issue because they are defi…

I think you misread. The GGP post did not differentiate by small or large, nor did GP
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