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If you really believe that a company can churn out nothing but perfect products over and over again without making any mistakes, then maybe you have been drinki

If you really believe that a company can churn out nothing but perfect products over and over again without making any mistakes, then maybe you have been drinking too much of Apple’s Kool-Aid. Every top company has good and bad generations of products, and Apple is no different. This type of post complaining about Apple losing its soul and dying has been coming out regularly for at least the decade since I’ve been following Apple, and probably back way farther than that. Something about Apple makes it an irresistible target for this kind of criticism for some reason. Check out the MacRumors forums for examples.. it’s a group of people who track every move Apple makes, yet overwhelmingly complain about every potential flaw. That’s not saying that there aren’t flaws to criticize about Apple’s products, which there certainly are. But the level of vitriol is extreme compared to what I see directed towards most other companies (except video game companies.. gamers are a tough crowd).

thomascgalvin 6y ago
I don't think Apple should be held to a "no mistakes" standard, but for the last few years, the trend has been toward less functionality and more user-hostility. Take the drop of 32 bit support. There are now huge swaths of software, software that I paid a lot of money for, that I can no longer use if I buy new Apple hardware or upgrade to the latest MacOS. There are bright spots, too. The new keyboards are much, much better than the butterflies, and the physical escape key is a welcome return. But in general, when Apple announces something new, I'm worried about what they're going to take away from me, not what they're going to start offering.
- 1over137 6y ago
  >when Apple announces something new, I'm worried about what they're going to take away from me, not what they're going to start offering. So much this. And it used to be the opposite.
  - linguae 6y ago
    I feel the same way about Apple these days, and the fact that Apple is secretive and doesn't provide roadmaps makes it harder for me to feel at ease with Apple. My last straw is Catalina's notarization policies, but my discontentment with Apple started back in 2012 with the introduction of soldered RAM in the MacBook Pro. After a few years of seeing the writing on the wall, I am slowly coming to grips with this and I'm planning to migrate to Linux and FreeBSD by 2022. My 2013 MacBook Air is aging, and that will be the first device to be replaced. I'm slowly reacquainting myself with the flexibility and the large array of choices that the FOSS ecosystem provides. I'm going to miss Keynote, Preview.app, and the Omni Group's software, but in exchange I get an environment where I have more control.
- scarface74 6y ago
  Apple hasn’t shipped a 32 bit Mac since 2006. How long was Apple suppose to keep support for 32 bit software? Should they also have kept support for PPC software? 68K software?
  - dmitriid 6y ago
    > Apple hasn’t shipped a 32 bit Mac since 2006. So, they could easily have given developers a roadmap/timeline of 13 years saying "in 2020 we're going to deprecate 32bit software, please upgrade". Instead, they gave everyone less than two years. In comparison, the switch from PowerPC to Intel took over four years. And this was at the time when MacOS had significantly less software available on it. Apple themselves released the last version of software that supported PowerPCs 7 years after the announcement of the transition.
    - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
      If developers weren't willing to do it in two years then another eleven won't make any difference.
    - scarface74 6y ago
      They kind of did when they announced Carbon wouldn’t have 64 bit support over five years ago. PowerPC support was dropped in 10.7 three versions after the first Intel Macs came out. It was an optional download in 10.6.
  - true_religion 6y ago
    Personally, I like the Microsoft approach of having backwards compatibility forever in Windows, until the end of time. They could have made 32 bit support slower, and gone through a virtualization layer.
    - scarface74 6y ago
      And the Microsoft approach has it own set of tradeoffs. - Security. The more code you have the larger the attack surface of vulnerabilities. One of the earliest side spread attacks on IIS was caused by IIS not checking the validity of one of the myriad of ways that you could represent a string in Windows. It didn’t take any great hacker skills to take advantage of the vulnerability. All you had to do was encode a DOS command in the url bar of a web browser to run commands on the Windows server. - code bloat. There is a reason that Microsoft wasn’t able to port Windows to low memory/relatively slow mobile devices as easily as Apple was. - battery life. Have you compared the battery life of the typical Windows laptop to Macs running on the same hardware? - it doesn’t force adoption of newer technology. If Adobe could have gotten away with it. They probably still would have 68K code running on the latest version of their products.

thomascgalvin 6y ago

I don't think Apple should be held to a "no mistakes" standard, but for the last few years, the trend has been toward less functionality and more user-hostility. Take the drop of 32 bit support. There are now huge swaths of software, software that I paid a lot of money for, that I can no longer use if I buy new Apple hardware or upgrade to the latest MacOS. There are bright spots, too. The new keyboards are much, much better than the butterflies, and the physical escape key is a welcome return. But in general, when Apple announces something new, I'm worried about what they're going to take away from me, not what they're going to start offering.

1over137 6y ago
>when Apple announces something new, I'm worried about what they're going to take away from me, not what they're going to start offering. So much this. And it used to be the opposite.
- linguae 6y ago
  I feel the same way about Apple these days, and the fact that Apple is secretive and doesn't provide roadmaps makes it harder for me to feel at ease with Apple. My last straw is Catalina's notarization policies, but my discontentment with Apple started back in 2012 with the introduction of soldered RAM in the MacBook Pro. After a few years of seeing the writing on the wall, I am slowly coming to grips with this and I'm planning to migrate to Linux and FreeBSD by 2022. My 2013 MacBook Air is aging, and that will be the first device to be replaced. I'm slowly reacquainting myself with the flexibility and the large array of choices that the FOSS ecosystem provides. I'm going to miss Keynote, Preview.app, and the Omni Group's software, but in exchange I get an environment where I have more control.
scarface74 6y ago
Apple hasn’t shipped a 32 bit Mac since 2006. How long was Apple suppose to keep support for 32 bit software? Should they also have kept support for PPC software? 68K software?
- dmitriid 6y ago
  > Apple hasn’t shipped a 32 bit Mac since 2006. So, they could easily have given developers a roadmap/timeline of 13 years saying "in 2020 we're going to deprecate 32bit software, please upgrade". Instead, they gave everyone less than two years. In comparison, the switch from PowerPC to Intel took over four years. And this was at the time when MacOS had significantly less software available on it. Apple themselves released the last version of software that supported PowerPCs 7 years after the announcement of the transition.
  - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    If developers weren't willing to do it in two years then another eleven won't make any difference.
  - scarface74 6y ago
    They kind of did when they announced Carbon wouldn’t have 64 bit support over five years ago. PowerPC support was dropped in 10.7 three versions after the first Intel Macs came out. It was an optional download in 10.6.
- true_religion 6y ago
  Personally, I like the Microsoft approach of having backwards compatibility forever in Windows, until the end of time. They could have made 32 bit support slower, and gone through a virtualization layer.
  - scarface74 6y ago
    And the Microsoft approach has it own set of tradeoffs. - Security. The more code you have the larger the attack surface of vulnerabilities. One of the earliest side spread attacks on IIS was caused by IIS not checking the validity of one of the myriad of ways that you could represent a string in Windows. It didn’t take any great hacker skills to take advantage of the vulnerability. All you had to do was encode a DOS command in the url bar of a web browser to run commands on the Windows server. - code bloat. There is a reason that Microsoft wasn’t able to port Windows to low memory/relatively slow mobile devices as easily as Apple was. - battery life. Have you compared the battery life of the typical Windows laptop to Macs running on the same hardware? - it doesn’t force adoption of newer technology. If Adobe could have gotten away with it. They probably still would have 68K code running on the latest version of their products.