6 ms·

I wish Apple never had their success with iTunes and iPhone. It was like winning lottery for them. And you know what happens when someone wins lottery. They f

by dba7dba 10y ago

I wish Apple never had their success with iTunes and iPhone. It was like winning lottery for them. And you know what happens when someone wins lottery. They forget about their roots and in the end, only ruin remains.

jasoncchild 10y ago
Fantastically dramatic assessment! I'm curious just what aspects of the pre-iPhone Apple were preferable?
- mulmen 10y ago
  Off the top of my head I can think of a couple: 1) OSX was a viable operating system that was first class in the Apple ecosystem. 2) Laptops and desktops that were actually better than the competition including models geared toward power users.
  - jasoncchild 10y ago
    Thanks! I've not much personal experience of pre-iPhone Apple. I'm curious about why OSX is no longer viable.
    - mulmen 10y ago
      OSX/MacOS is still viable but it doesn't receive the attention it once did. It feels second-rate compared to the mobile OS. I get the feeling one day Apple is going to release the new MacBook and it will just be an iPad with a keyboard.
      - gurneyHaleck 10y ago
        An iPad with a keyboard. God help us all. And looking back on ye olden MacOS 9, prior to OSX, there were things that just felt nice about the interface that no longer hold sway. Clicking on an icon gave an immediate response. The mouse cursor felt more precise. Compare to these nightmarish touchpad/button slabs (and worse still, touchscreens), mouse movement and pointer precision were lightyears beyond the way things seem to work lately. I have to retry things a solid 1/3 of the time, because some kind of gesture or taptic garbage tripped me up, and pushed me into an unintended outcome. I have to focus, and concentrate on finessing my hand motions and pressure or I am punished by mistakes that need an undo. When I'm in a rush, life is hell. This makes me hate life. No zealously decorative animations meant (on an unstressed system with low CPU/RAM load) the menus flashed before you like lightning. Text was crisp, unshaded pixels, with no font smoothing. There were no transparency overlays, and so everything was high contrast. Nothing was EVER lagged by network traffic except browser images and FTP/SMB shares. (and doom deathmatches) Most of this was also true of Windows 2000 at the time. Had operating systems stood frozen (particularly GUIs), while terabytes of disk space, gigabytes of RAM and dozens of CPU cores had inflated our hardware resources, I've often held the belief that we'd like our computers more, and fewer people would be as obnoxiously incompetant with computers as we see. I'm probably wrong, but the idea feels right.
    - FireBeyond 10y ago
      I'm not so sure it's no longer viable as it is stagnant. Looking at some of the major "features" - more emoticons and reactions in Messages... Siri. Some were certainly nice - Apple Pay... but I don't really see PIP being used, or Continuity (which usually actually pisses me off, because I'll switch from my Mac to my phone with an image or similar on the Clipboard, and have to wait several seconds while Continuity syncs - shame, such potential).
    - wl 10y ago
      Mac OS X or whatever they're calling it at the moment is buggier than it used to be. 10.11 is where I really started noticing it. The OS no longer deals with memory pressure well, causing the computer to freeze up when Safari's memory usage spikes. The new USB stack in 10.11 often has me restarting the computer to get my devices working again. In addition to big things like that being broken, I'm finding more and more little things not working like they used to. I recently came across a bug that would sometimes not allow me to select a file in an open dialog with my cursor, but I could select it with the keyboard and arrow keys. Apple really needs a Snow Sierra release to just concentrate on squashing bugs.
    - rleigh 10y ago
      It's poorly maintained. Large parts haven't been updated in a decade. Take a basic command, `readlink -f`. Works everywhere except MacOS X. This comes from FreeBSD, which added `-f` years ago, but MacOS X hasn't resynched its code with FreeBSD for an age, so it's running the version from 2007 or similar. I can show you plenty of examples of this sort. It would take very little effort to do this on a regular basis, and it could probably be automated. This creeping incompatibility due to being outdated and unmaintained is becoming increasingly problematic. Not something a regular user cares about, but for development and technical users, it's lacking.
  - callalex 10y ago
    I agree but on the viable operating system part, I think it's important not to discount the impressive research that has gone into the power saving and security aspects of the Darwin kernel, as well as innovations in saving of application state and state sharing between devices
  - aeontech 10y ago
    1) OSX is not viable any longer? Really? As evidenced by what? I mean, looking at WWDC talks, there's a ton of improvement year over year. Of course there's always more things that could be done, but remember, the core OS team is very small (especially compared to Microsoft, for example). Not to say that there isn't stagnation in some UI aspects (Finder, I'm looking at you...) but saying that the entire OS is no longer viable is a bit dramatic. 2) I don't see much competition that can even match Apple's build quality. The ones I do see, I am excited about, because that means they are striving to improve, and can challenge Apple and force them to improve more. Much better that, than having Apple rest on their laurels because nobody is even trying to get close.
- CamperBob2 10y ago
  The company's name was "Apple Computer," for one thing, and not just "Apple."
mtrpcic 10y ago
I don't think "only ruin remains" is a fair statement to say about Apple, when the causes you're lamenting are the saving grace that got them to be a $300B+ company from effectively the brink of death.
- dpcx 10y ago
  "In the end." They're still riding high from iTunes and iPhone. I'm personally a fan of Apple, but who knows where this ship ends up.
  - joesb 10y ago
    A: This fortuneteller I knew is so amazing, he predicted that my dad would die and my dad is dead now! B: When did he predict that? A: May be like 30 years ago, but the point is "in the end" my dad died. Who would have thought that the end will come to him someday? Your "in the end" prediction will always be true, unless Apple exists until the end of the universe.
- aroman 10y ago
  But they weren't on the brink of death before the iPhone. They were doing very well, selling lots of Macs, and had already rebounded.
  - EduardoBautista 10y ago
    Yup, the iPod is what helped make them relevant again.
    - ascorbic 10y ago
      The iMac and OS X made them relevant. The iPod made them massive.
mikesickler 10y ago
Which roots? The System 8 and 9 days, when my Mac would freeze on me every day? Throughout its history, Apple has had its ups and downs when it comes to quality on the desktop. There have been high points (System 7, OS 10.4 or so?) and low points, just as Microsoft have had their Windows 2000 and (shudder) Windows Me. There are no "roots", there are only local minima and maxima.
- toyg 10y ago
  Wtf, Win 2000 was boss. It took the desktop in the XXI century with the NT kernel. Sure, it had some security issues, but it was the best desktop ever at the time, and a real revolution.
  - tomhoward 10y ago
    Indeed, and it was the foundation for WinXP, which must surely still be the best Windows version ever in terms of user satisfaction and durability.
  - hawski 10y ago
    I'm quite sure mikesickler had in mind the contrast between W2k and Me. The former being the good and the latter being the bad.
  - helb 10y ago
    I'm pretty sure that mikesickler mentioned Win2000 as an example of Microsoft's "high point"…
linguae 10y ago
Honestly I've been feeling the same way lately, not so much about iTunes but about the post-iPhone, post-Steve Jobs Apple. I've been a Mac user for over 10 years. In 2006 it felt that Apple was fully devoted to the Mac and its Mac customers. It made computers that fit the needs of a wide variety of people, from casual users to power users. Its hardware was upgradeable, even if it sometimes meant needing to unscrew a lot of screws (but this was not true in highly accessible models such as the Power Macs and the MacBook). OS X was absolutely fantastic. It was heads and shoulders better than Windows XP and Windows Vista, and desktop Linux was a major hassle back then, especially for laptop users. Quite frankly, the Macintosh of the mid-2000s was the closest thing to personal computing perfection I've ever experienced. But once the iPhone came out and became a major success, it started to appear that Apple was neglecting the Mac. Hardware refreshes, which used to occur roughly twice a year for most models back in the mid-2000s, started to reduce in frequency. Thinness and lightness started to become the design goals at the expense of upgradeability and performance, first with the soldered-on memory of the original MacBook Air in 2008 and with the non-user serviceable battery in the 2008 uni-body MacBook Pro. Then once Steve Jobs passed away in 2011, these trends started to intensify. The soldered-on nature of the MacBook Air spread to the MacBook Pro. The easily serviceable white MacBook was discontinued. The Mac Mini, which at one point had user-upgradeable RAM and had an option for a quad-core Intel Core i7 processor, was nerfed, with no quad-core option and with soldered RAM. Even the iMac got the soldered RAM treatment, except for the high-end 27" model. The only truly upgradeable and expandable Mac, the Mac Pro, was transformed from a mini-tower to a modern day version of the G4 Cube, but with no expansion slots (the G4 Cube had one slot, if I recall correctly). And while Apple's hardware offerings increasingly became non-upgradeable and compromised, Apple's refresh frequencies started dragging out dramatically; the worst being the Mac Pro, which hasn't been refreshed in three years, an eternity in the computing world. And I haven't even gotten into the port situation, especially with the new MacBook Pro. The sad thing is that for me and other fans of Mac OS X, there are no longer any "no compromise" personal computer solutions these days like what Apple used to provide back when the company was fully devoted to the Mac. I assessed the situation in 2013 and ended up holding my nose and buying a MacBook Air despite my dislike for non-upgradeable hardware since I didn't want to have to deal with Windows 8 and the controversy surrounding GNOME 3/KDE 4 at the time. Now it's 2016 and the situation regarding the Mac has worsened. Today's Macs are not much of an upgrade from my 2013 MacBook Air, although I hope my out-of-warranty MacBook Air will last me a few more years. The PC world has a wonderful selection of hardware at every price and performance point imaginable, which appeals to me. Unfortunately, buying a PC means having to deal with Windows or desktop Linux. While they've come a long way since the days of Windows XP and 2005-era distributions, they are still, in my opinion, far behind Mac OS X when it comes to consistency, polish, and productivity. Two weeks or so after Apple announced its 2016 MacBook Pro, I bought a refurbished ThinkPad T430 to familiarize myself with Windows 10. Windows 10 isn't that bad, but I ran into an annoying problem regarding drivers. When I tried to insert a USB 3.0 thumb drive into the USB 3.0 port, Windows complained that it couldn't recognize it. My MacBook Air had no problems recognizing it. I tried updating the drivers on my ThinkPad; still no good. Finally I installed FreeBSD on my ThinkPad. It recognized the thumb drive perfectly fine. If drivers for a common laptop are more of a hassle on Windows 10 than on FreeBSD, something must be wrong. It saddens me that after decades of Apple providing an alternative commercial platform for those who won't do Windows, Apple has given up, not because Microsoft has crushed it, but because Apple now has a reliable revenue stream coming from its consumer electronics devices and from casual Mac users and no longer needs to cater to more-demanding users. Unfortunately what this means for us power users is that we have been handed over to the world of Windows and desktop Linux, and there is no modern-day polished third party OS like BeOS, OS/2, or OPENSTEP out there for us in 2016. It's really sad, and I don't think there's a viable solution. We power users are a niche market, and nobody is going to invest the millions of dollars and the major engineering effort needed to build an OS (or even a Linux desktop environment + an app ecosystem) that is as polished as OS X just to placate a bunch of disaffected Mac power users. Sadly it looks like I'm either going to need to hold on to Mac hardware like how many people in Cuba hold on to their 1950's American cars, or I'm going to need to suck it up and learn to love Windows and/or the Linux desktop. I apologize if I sound too melodramatic, but I feel like I've been abandoned with nowhere pleasant to go to.

by dba7dba 10y ago

jasoncchild 10y ago

Fantastically dramatic assessment! I'm curious just what aspects of the pre-iPhone Apple were preferable?

mulmen 10y ago
Off the top of my head I can think of a couple: 1) OSX was a viable operating system that was first class in the Apple ecosystem. 2) Laptops and desktops that were actually better than the competition including models geared toward power users.
- jasoncchild 10y ago
  Thanks! I've not much personal experience of pre-iPhone Apple. I'm curious about why OSX is no longer viable.
  - mulmen 10y ago
    OSX/MacOS is still viable but it doesn't receive the attention it once did. It feels second-rate compared to the mobile OS. I get the feeling one day Apple is going to release the new MacBook and it will just be an iPad with a keyboard.
    - gurneyHaleck 10y ago
      An iPad with a keyboard. God help us all. And looking back on ye olden MacOS 9, prior to OSX, there were things that just felt nice about the interface that no longer hold sway. Clicking on an icon gave an immediate response. The mouse cursor felt more precise. Compare to these nightmarish touchpad/button slabs (and worse still, touchscreens), mouse movement and pointer precision were lightyears beyond the way things seem to work lately. I have to retry things a solid 1/3 of the time, because some kind of gesture or taptic garbage tripped me up, and pushed me into an unintended outcome. I have to focus, and concentrate on finessing my hand motions and pressure or I am punished by mistakes that need an undo. When I'm in a rush, life is hell. This makes me hate life. No zealously decorative animations meant (on an unstressed system with low CPU/RAM load) the menus flashed before you like lightning. Text was crisp, unshaded pixels, with no font smoothing. There were no transparency overlays, and so everything was high contrast. Nothing was EVER lagged by network traffic except browser images and FTP/SMB shares. (and doom deathmatches) Most of this was also true of Windows 2000 at the time. Had operating systems stood frozen (particularly GUIs), while terabytes of disk space, gigabytes of RAM and dozens of CPU cores had inflated our hardware resources, I've often held the belief that we'd like our computers more, and fewer people would be as obnoxiously incompetant with computers as we see. I'm probably wrong, but the idea feels right.
  - FireBeyond 10y ago
    I'm not so sure it's no longer viable as it is stagnant. Looking at some of the major "features" - more emoticons and reactions in Messages... Siri. Some were certainly nice - Apple Pay... but I don't really see PIP being used, or Continuity (which usually actually pisses me off, because I'll switch from my Mac to my phone with an image or similar on the Clipboard, and have to wait several seconds while Continuity syncs - shame, such potential).
  - wl 10y ago
    Mac OS X or whatever they're calling it at the moment is buggier than it used to be. 10.11 is where I really started noticing it. The OS no longer deals with memory pressure well, causing the computer to freeze up when Safari's memory usage spikes. The new USB stack in 10.11 often has me restarting the computer to get my devices working again. In addition to big things like that being broken, I'm finding more and more little things not working like they used to. I recently came across a bug that would sometimes not allow me to select a file in an open dialog with my cursor, but I could select it with the keyboard and arrow keys. Apple really needs a Snow Sierra release to just concentrate on squashing bugs.
  - rleigh 10y ago
    It's poorly maintained. Large parts haven't been updated in a decade. Take a basic command, `readlink -f`. Works everywhere except MacOS X. This comes from FreeBSD, which added `-f` years ago, but MacOS X hasn't resynched its code with FreeBSD for an age, so it's running the version from 2007 or similar. I can show you plenty of examples of this sort. It would take very little effort to do this on a regular basis, and it could probably be automated. This creeping incompatibility due to being outdated and unmaintained is becoming increasingly problematic. Not something a regular user cares about, but for development and technical users, it's lacking.
- callalex 10y ago
  I agree but on the viable operating system part, I think it's important not to discount the impressive research that has gone into the power saving and security aspects of the Darwin kernel, as well as innovations in saving of application state and state sharing between devices
- aeontech 10y ago
  1) OSX is not viable any longer? Really? As evidenced by what? I mean, looking at WWDC talks, there's a ton of improvement year over year. Of course there's always more things that could be done, but remember, the core OS team is very small (especially compared to Microsoft, for example). Not to say that there isn't stagnation in some UI aspects (Finder, I'm looking at you...) but saying that the entire OS is no longer viable is a bit dramatic. 2) I don't see much competition that can even match Apple's build quality. The ones I do see, I am excited about, because that means they are striving to improve, and can challenge Apple and force them to improve more. Much better that, than having Apple rest on their laurels because nobody is even trying to get close.
CamperBob2 10y ago
The company's name was "Apple Computer," for one thing, and not just "Apple."

mtrpcic 10y ago

I don't think "only ruin remains" is a fair statement to say about Apple, when the causes you're lamenting are the saving grace that got them to be a $300B+ company from effectively the brink of death.

dpcx 10y ago
"In the end." They're still riding high from iTunes and iPhone. I'm personally a fan of Apple, but who knows where this ship ends up.
- joesb 10y ago
  A: This fortuneteller I knew is so amazing, he predicted that my dad would die and my dad is dead now! B: When did he predict that? A: May be like 30 years ago, but the point is "in the end" my dad died. Who would have thought that the end will come to him someday? Your "in the end" prediction will always be true, unless Apple exists until the end of the universe.
aroman 10y ago
But they weren't on the brink of death before the iPhone. They were doing very well, selling lots of Macs, and had already rebounded.
- EduardoBautista 10y ago
  Yup, the iPod is what helped make them relevant again.
  - ascorbic 10y ago
    The iMac and OS X made them relevant. The iPod made them massive.

mikesickler 10y ago

Which roots? The System 8 and 9 days, when my Mac would freeze on me every day? Throughout its history, Apple has had its ups and downs when it comes to quality on the desktop. There have been high points (System 7, OS 10.4 or so?) and low points, just as Microsoft have had their Windows 2000 and (shudder) Windows Me. There are no "roots", there are only local minima and maxima.

toyg 10y ago
Wtf, Win 2000 was boss. It took the desktop in the XXI century with the NT kernel. Sure, it had some security issues, but it was the best desktop ever at the time, and a real revolution.
- tomhoward 10y ago
  Indeed, and it was the foundation for WinXP, which must surely still be the best Windows version ever in terms of user satisfaction and durability.
- hawski 10y ago
  I'm quite sure mikesickler had in mind the contrast between W2k and Me. The former being the good and the latter being the bad.
- helb 10y ago
  I'm pretty sure that mikesickler mentioned Win2000 as an example of Microsoft's "high point"…

linguae 10y ago

Honestly I've been feeling the same way lately, not so much about iTunes but about the post-iPhone, post-Steve Jobs Apple. I've been a Mac user for over 10 years. In 2006 it felt that Apple was fully devoted to the Mac and its Mac customers. It made computers that fit the needs of a wide variety of people, from casual users to power users. Its hardware was upgradeable, even if it sometimes meant needing to unscrew a lot of screws (but this was not true in highly accessible models such as the Power Macs and the MacBook). OS X was absolutely fantastic. It was heads and shoulders better than Windows XP and Windows Vista, and desktop Linux was a major hassle back then, especially for laptop users. Quite frankly, the Macintosh of the mid-2000s was the closest thing to personal computing perfection I've ever experienced. But once the iPhone came out and became a major success, it started to appear that Apple was neglecting the Mac. Hardware refreshes, which used to occur roughly twice a year for most models back in the mid-2000s, started to reduce in frequency. Thinness and lightness started to become the design goals at the expense of upgradeability and performance, first with the soldered-on memory of the original MacBook Air in 2008 and with the non-user serviceable battery in the 2008 uni-body MacBook Pro. Then once Steve Jobs passed away in 2011, these trends started to intensify. The soldered-on nature of the MacBook Air spread to the MacBook Pro. The easily serviceable white MacBook was discontinued. The Mac Mini, which at one point had user-upgradeable RAM and had an option for a quad-core Intel Core i7 processor, was nerfed, with no quad-core option and with soldered RAM. Even the iMac got the soldered RAM treatment, except for the high-end 27" model. The only truly upgradeable and expandable Mac, the Mac Pro, was transformed from a mini-tower to a modern day version of the G4 Cube, but with no expansion slots (the G4 Cube had one slot, if I recall correctly). And while Apple's hardware offerings increasingly became non-upgradeable and compromised, Apple's refresh frequencies started dragging out dramatically; the worst being the Mac Pro, which hasn't been refreshed in three years, an eternity in the computing world. And I haven't even gotten into the port situation, especially with the new MacBook Pro. The sad thing is that for me and other fans of Mac OS X, there are no longer any "no compromise" personal computer solutions these days like what Apple used to provide back when the company was fully devoted to the Mac. I assessed the situation in 2013 and ended up holding my nose and buying a MacBook Air despite my dislike for non-upgradeable hardware since I didn't want to have to deal with Windows 8 and the controversy surrounding GNOME 3/KDE 4 at the time. Now it's 2016 and the situation regarding the Mac has worsened. Today's Macs are not much of an upgrade from my 2013 MacBook Air, although I hope my out-of-warranty MacBook Air will last me a few more years. The PC world has a wonderful selection of hardware at every price and performance point imaginable, which appeals to me. Unfortunately, buying a PC means having to deal with Windows or desktop Linux. While they've come a long way since the days of Windows XP and 2005-era distributions, they are still, in my opinion, far behind Mac OS X when it comes to consistency, polish, and productivity. Two weeks or so after Apple announced its 2016 MacBook Pro, I bought a refurbished ThinkPad T430 to familiarize myself with Windows 10. Windows 10 isn't that bad, but I ran into an annoying problem regarding drivers. When I tried to insert a USB 3.0 thumb drive into the USB 3.0 port, Windows complained that it couldn't recognize it. My MacBook Air had no problems recognizing it. I tried updating the drivers on my ThinkPad; still no good. Finally I installed FreeBSD on my ThinkPad. It recognized the thumb drive perfectly fine. If drivers for a common laptop are more of a hassle on Windows 10 than on FreeBSD, something must be wrong. It saddens me that after decades of Apple providing an alternative commercial platform for those who won't do Windows, Apple has given up, not because Microsoft has crushed it, but because Apple now has a reliable revenue stream coming from its consumer electronics devices and from casual Mac users and no longer needs to cater to more-demanding users. Unfortunately what this means for us power users is that we have been handed over to the world of Windows and desktop Linux, and there is no modern-day polished third party OS like BeOS, OS/2, or OPENSTEP out there for us in 2016. It's really sad, and I don't think there's a viable solution. We power users are a niche market, and nobody is going to invest the millions of dollars and the major engineering effort needed to build an OS (or even a Linux desktop environment + an app ecosystem) that is as polished as OS X just to placate a bunch of disaffected Mac power users. Sadly it looks like I'm either going to need to hold on to Mac hardware like how many people in Cuba hold on to their 1950's American cars, or I'm going to need to suck it up and learn to love Windows and/or the Linux desktop. I apologize if I sound too melodramatic, but I feel like I've been abandoned with nowhere pleasant to go to.