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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

#521

Post by kasuu »

> 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 all the same mistakes as Windows did. And a text terminal? Like DOS?? Who the hell is ever going to want to use that on a Mac?

Going even farther back, it was long-time dedicated Apple users who booed when Jobs announced the deal with Microsoft.

Being a long-time dedicated Apple user is a shitty job. You don’t get paid, have no input, and are constantly disappointed. And Apple does not care about you.

I strongly suggest people should throw this notion away. It does not matter how long you’ve bought from a big company, they owe you nothing. If the latest product seems good, buy it. If not, don’t. Any more emotional investment than that is going to cause pointless unhappiness.

Save your customer loyalty energy for businesses where you can actually establish a connection, like a restaurant you like, or a local handyman.

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

#522

Post by roryirvine »

pxc wrote: post #469
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…

> The Dock was useless > The Finder made all the same mistakes as Windows did Aren't these basically true, even now? If I could easily, completely remove the Dock and Finder, I would. Launching apps via search (e.g., Spotlight) is quicker and easier than hunting for icons visually (especially given the amount of clutter on the Dock by default), and so is switching apps via search (e.g., Contexts, Witch, etc.). Finder…

Even more true now than it was then, I think.

I mean, the dock was actually quite nice in the NeXTSTEP days but OSX munged it together with the Shelf and aspects of the Win95 taskbar (actually, I think this might have started with the final OpenStep release, but I never got to use that).

These days when using a Mac, I tend to make it as small as possible and set it to auto-hide. I never actually use it for anything, but I don't think there's any way to turn it off altogether - so now it's just an annoyance, popping up with a distracting animation every time the pointer touches the bottom few pixels of the screen.

I never got along with the Miller columns in FileViewer / OSX Finder, but my impression is that it has also continued to get worse over time with features coming (and, just as often, going!) every few years without much in the way to help you discover them. TBH, I use the cli for file management by preference.

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

#523

Post by tcmart14 »

poszlem wrote: post #385
amelius wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a theory in the comments that they want to align with "people who want the best camera array and have money to burn". I agree with you and this theory sounds like moving goalposts. First people claimed that the free market will always give the consumer what they want. Then this turned out to be not true (we even have a term, enshittification), and now people come up with a more "refined" theory. Why would i…

Could it be that "people" that say that are different groups of people?

This is the other side of it. "Online everyone complains about X," but everyone is 200 randos online, hardly conclusive. If anything its more like the yelp effect. The people who are most likely to complain and celebrate online are the small vocal slice. Not even online really. The vast majority of people just dont give a damn so long as youtube, calls, and texting works (if its a phone), or whatever are probably the most common 3-4 activities most users do.

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

#524

Post by makingstuffs »

jrm4 wrote: post #462
makingstuffs wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Save your loyalty for people that matter in your actual life. There isn’t a single business in existence that cares about you. Even companies in the business of keeping you alive will only do so while doing so makes them a profit. I say this as the example of the local handyman is one where you will matter more. It’s a human relationship with a real person not a fake relationship with one person and a spreadsheet

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 mistaking motivation with priorities.

The motivation for starting a project/business is very rarely going to be the priority for said business’s survival if it reaches a large enough audience.

That’s just an inevitability of scale — the larger the audience, the harder to focus on one member of said audience and the less any one single member of said audience matters.

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

#525

Post by Kon5ole »

I honestly think Apple was interesting because of Steve Jobs.

Whatever you think of him he was clearly an strong leader who was able to make a bunch of otherwise unruly geniuses cooperate towards a common goal. He also overruled any other ego in the hierarchy so the goals that were worked on actually shipped.

This is rare, and made Apple different from other corporations, for a while.

Without a person like that at the top, corporations are money-making machines that will gravitate towards bland and predictable. Egos will battle for resources for no purpose other than being the boss of the most resources, geniuses will be increasingly bored and disillusioned and whatever special sauce there was will go stale.

Corporations can exist in that state for a long time and sometimes still make nice products of course.

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

#526

Post by makingstuffs »

dingnuts wrote: post #439
makingstuffs wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Save your loyalty for people that matter in your actual life. There isn’t a single business in existence that cares about you. Even companies in the business of keeping you alive will only do so while doing so makes them a profit. I say this as the example of the local handyman is one where you will matter more. It’s a human relationship with a real person not a fake relationship with one person and a spreadsheet

spoken like someone who has never been a regular at a small business. there are all kinds of benefits when you get to know the guy who owns you favorite pizza shop for instance

That’s a very strange and long reaching assumption to make from a post which literally said a local trader is more likely to care for you.

Reading aye…

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

#527

Post by chrisandchris »

skeletal88 wrote: post #516
8fingerlouie wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tbf, the Finder is still crap (if only it would be nearly as good as Windows Explorer was in its heyday I would probably use it more) I have the exact opposite opinion. I loathe Windows Explorer, and relatively simply stuff like presenting a tree view is apparently some weird magic trick that only Apple has figured out how to do. Browsing SMB shares (or any other networked storage) is one shortcut away (cmd+k), and…

Finder isnt crap? Why can't i paste a path and just go to it like I can in Windows or KDE, why can't I cut and paste files? Why do i have to open 2 separate windows and drag the files between them? Who decided that it is somehow useful to leave an applocation running when you close its window? There are so many silly and stupid small things wrong with os x

You can:

Copy current path: Option + Command + C [1] Cut & paste: Alt + Command + Move (actually moves the file)

It's just bad that these simple things are very much hidden.

[1] https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/47216/copying-the-...

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

#528

Post by Terretta »

As of 17 hours after post, 510 comments, there are no top level comments about the "root cause" he blames, Apple's "integration" decreasing:

“This widening gap between their hardware and software … is going to be really damaging if the course isn’t corrected. The tight integration between hardware and software has always been what made Apple platforms stand out.”

This alignment with the user, offering a well integrated experience as "the product", is the very thing Apple's competitors are funding lobbyists to get regulator help to tear down, and Apple is indeed having to make compromises to accommodate.

Living in Spain, the author should write to EU governance if the author cares about this.

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

#530

Post by abirch »

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…

Investors want infinite growth which leads to enshitification.
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