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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

#531

Post by MattSayar »

olalonde wrote: post #272
flohofwoe wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Finder made all the same mistakes as Windows did. 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), and the UNIX terminal is pretty much needed to make a Mac usable in the first place - which is fine though, because the UNIX-ness was exactly why I switched to Mac ;)

What's crap about Finder?

I cannot right-click and create a new file.

The "Recents" doesn't contain files I've recently interacted with, and I'm still not sure what qualifies a file to be listed in Recents.

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

#532

Post by 1970-01-01 »

Steven Jobs was an absolute beast at devouring consumers and generating (flooding) the company with cashflow via yet another handheld device. With Steve at the wheel, that flood of cashflow was able to directly fuel the next device R&D with very few market misses. Welcome to the end of that long road. Tim has nothing on the horizon that comes close to the lighting-in-a-bottle, handheld revolution that Steve started with the iPod. What you are finally witnessing is the common thread in Apple's 'alignment' over a very long time is simply APPL.

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

#533

Post by thewebguyd »

AlexandrB wrote: post #387
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…

> First people claimed that the free market will always give the consumer what they want. Enshittification does give consumers what they want: free stuff. People will deny it up and down and claim they would pay for non-enshittified Facebook, for example. But how many people actually would pay a subscription to use a Facebook style service? Enough to build sustain a company of Meta's size? Probably not. How many peop…

> Enough to build sustain a company of Meta's size?

This is the problem - I'd argue we shouldn't have companies the size of Meta (or Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft, etc.). It's that these companies are nation-state level huge, and operate in a system that continues to demand more growth still, that causes problems like enshitification.

Would enough people pay for Facebook to support a company of Meta's size? No, but that's OK - enough people would pay for it to support a much smaller, customer-focused company, and that would be a really good thing across all of tech.

What's so wrong about just sustaining a certain size/user base instead of endlessly growing bigger and bigger?

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

#534

Post by thor-rodrigues »

Terretta wrote: post #528

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 integrat…

This is not the point of the author. The author is criticising the new redesign of the latest iOS/MacOS/WatchOS 26, as being of poor choice with an over focus on form in detriment of function.

Also, to which aspects are you referencing exactly, that “Apple’s competitors are funding lobbyists to get regulator help to tear down”?

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

#535

Post by DavideNL »

barnabee wrote: post #517
freetime2 wrote: post #76

Regarding the iPhone 17 Pro: > People who have no use for all these pro video recording features shouldn’t waste their money on it. Unless they want a big chunky iPhone with the best camera array and/or have money to burn. I feel like people who “want the best camera array and have money to burn” probably describes a significant percentage of HN readers. I’m honestly pretty excited that they’ve finally put the larger…

I should be firmly in this market. Indeed, I was about to order a 17 Pro just for the camera upgrade (coming from a 15 Pro). Then I installed iOS 26. I think I hate it. It might be the last straw. I’m seriously considering taking the plunge and switching from iOS, which I’ve used since the iPhone 3G, to GrapheneOS on a Pixel 9 Pro. It’s not just iOS (which is all three of worse, buggier, and slower) but also the dire…

Will the pixel 10 be supported too, i wonder…

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

#536

Post by Someone »

cm2187 wrote: post #355
alexey-salmin wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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 ma…

Pre MacOS X was a 90s style OS and had major limitations that were a problem for every user, starting with no real multi-threading, and I think no protected memory. Where it was great was in the simplicity to the user. If you wanted to install or uninstall a driver or functionality, all you had to do is move an extension file in or out of the extension folder and reboot. That simplicity was lost in MacOS X. That made…

> Pre MacOS X was a 90s style OS and had major limitations that were a problem for every user, starting with no real multi-threading, and I think no protected memory.

Technically, the last “classic” Mac OS had memory protection and a fully preemptive scheduler.

The very serious caveat was that all “classic” Mac OS applications ran in a single process, and, within it, were scheduled cooperatively.

It was possible to create fully preemptively scheduled threads from within such applications, but they couldn’t write to the screen. I don’t remember whether they could do file I/O.

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

#537

Post by addicted »

Aurornis wrote: post #404
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…

Don’t forget the waves of rage when Apple removed the CD-ROM drive from laptops. Or when USB Type A ports disappeared in favor of USB-C ports. Or when the iPhone dropped the headphone jack. People still seethe about this decision even though Apple sells an excellent DAC for $9.99 that rates extremely well when tested by the audiophile obsessives and is easy to leave permanently attached to your headphones. There are…

If you think anyone has "forgotten" the issues you're deeply mistaken.

Apple essentially has a monopoly on iOS so just because people have adapted to their decisions doesn't make their decisions correct, or at the very least, painless.

If a headphone jack existed people would still be using it.

The USB-C example is particularly ironic given that it was Apple that was fighting switching over to USB-C on the iPhone until forced to do so by the EU. For years you could carry an Android and Macbook with a single charger, but needed 2 chargers for a Macbook and an iPhone. When Apple dropped USB-A completely it was painful for years, and people still have trouble with it. Most competitors still include at least 1 USB-A port.

Which wasn't the case for the CDRom or the floppy drive examples, showing that those decisions were correct in a way the USB-A removal one wasnt.

Further, even when Apple dropped the CD-Rom, it was a phased removal starting with teh Macbook Air, which made complete sense. People who bought the MacBook Pro still had CD Roms (except for 1 of the cheapest models). That was the correct way to approach this. Remove it from a device where it made sense to remove it, while keeping it for the Pros who needed it, but also signaling that it was going away giving people time to transition their workflows.

The USB-A port was signaled for 1 year at best (and even then it really wasn't signaled...it was simply removed from the cheapest model, which could have been seen as cost cutting more than anything else), and then a year later all the PRO laptops lost their USB-A ports completely. This was the opposite of the kind of transition they did earlier (such as keeping Firewire on the Pro laptops for years after they were removed from their no Pro versions).

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

#538

Post by desolate_muffin »

J_Shelby_J wrote: post #505
op00to wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Might want to see a doctor about that

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

#539

Post by desolate_muffin »

kesor wrote: post #333
fredsted wrote: post #326

This blog post evokes feelings of deja vu. It's the same blog post every year by some guy with a pixel-perfect blog that's used macOS since the nineties. The author, like lots of people in this thread are really triggered by the headline "awe dropping", and sure, whatever, but what did you expect? If they launched a foldable phone, the blog post would be all about how foldable phones don't make sense or that another…

AirPods being a "huge part of Apple's profits" because people keep losing them, and they keep breaking, so you always need to buy a new pair every several months. Hardly a product worth praising.

Do you actually own AirPods or just assume that's the case? Nobody I know has really had to replace their AirPods unless they lose them, forget them in a pocket and wash them, or decide to upgrade after a few years (myself included). Certainly there are some people on the edges who replace them more often for whatever reason, but you might consider the possibility that they sell well because many people (myself again included) believe they are a pretty damn good product.

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

#540

Post by Retinal7467 »

integralid wrote: post #507
Retinal7467 wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hi, thank you for your comment. I have clarified that I was responding to both of the parent posts.
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