It’s been seven years since I bought my first new Mac. Over that time, I’m been a pretty intense Apple fanboy. For the first few years I was repeatedly amazed at the things Apple hardware and software enabled me to do that I didn’t even realize I wanted to do.

My oh my how times change. Just a couple weeks ago I wrote a missive about how pleased I was with the new iPhone. Now I must temper that enthusiasm with a sobering look at how Apple has changed, for the worse, since I started using the OS X suite of affiliated products seven years ago.

Let’s begin with my statement several sentences back: one thing Apple proved itself very adept at early on was opening new markets in useability. Not only did Apple make already-known application types easier to use, it offered up new applications and devices which created their own market. Its innovation was not necessarily in creating the Music-Computer linkup (it didn’t), but in making it usable and fun and creating an integrated and intuitive shopping cart on to of that application (iTunes). Apple’s innovation was not creating a digital music player, but scaling-down the feature set and user interface to make people actually want to use it all the time, and constantly adapting the hardware to complement their own music software, not to mention obtaining a market share which quickly dragged disparate industry interests together and forced them to come up with a new digital music market paradigm.

Something went wrong when Apple started focusing on iPhone, I think. They’ve put so much focus on this goldmine (which, again, has come out pretty damn amazing), but neglected their core software.

Let’s start with OS X, the operating system that supposedly made the “New Apple” possible: Every subsequent release of OS X since 10.1 seems to fix a few bugs, which is nice, but then layer gobs of useless features on top (spaces, stacks, widgets, etc) that neither makes much money for the company nor improves the productivity of end-users. The latest version has been so buggy that they’ve accelerated the planned release of the next iteration. Alas, every version is a paid version, and thus costs users extra money just to “keep up” with an OS they don’t really need to upgrade or change (do you sense the beginning of the Vista syndrome?). On top of this, every time I bring the computer out of sleep I have to turn off and turn back on my AirPort in order for it to reacquire my wireless network signal (and all the “Geniuses” can say is “it’s not bad for the computer” or “it’s a new OS, it will have bugs”). So much for the mobility evangelists at Apple.

Next comes that suite of software that Apple pushes as the “cool” and “hip” quotient of its very existence: iLife. One application in this suite is a no-brainer in terms of actually being useful and productive fairly continuously: iTunes. Apple has thankfully been very dependent upon this application for a sizable portion of its post-iPod revenue (and for the massive popularity of the iPod and iPhone hardware lines), and thus has focused a huge amount of energy into this application’s ease of use and efficiency. I’m happy with it.

Every other application in iLife has issues. Major issues:

1. Garage Band: What the hell is this even for? So that stupid talentless teenagers can create early-Kraftwerk sounding drum loops and sampling feedback noise and start flooding the market with crap? Who uses this and why? I really need to know.

2. iPhoto: Anyone with a sizeable digital image library knows how important it is to maintain an organized and accessible database of your content. iPhoto was very good at this from the beginning. Augmented with the third-party iPhoto Library Manager, it actually had a professional level of database-type dimensionality. Every new version, alas, has layered new “features” which don’t seem all that useful. If you intensively use keywords, you don’t need ‘event’ labels. If you actively re-date your photos, you don’t need events to tell you when your photos took place. If you are working on scanning in old photos, renaming them and dating them accurately, you don’t want a system designed for the lay user who practices benign neglect of their collection. All these new features do is clutter up the database and make the maintenance process for the active archivist immensely more time-consuming and create new opportunities for bugginess and crashiness. After a couple months of trying to manage my library on my new MacBook (which I Bought around last Christmas), I gave up and went back to letting David manage all our photos on his old version of the software. Alas, this prevents us from having synchronized libraries and who knows what’s failing to get merged in when I fail to send him all my photos on a regular basis. Basically, the new iPhoto has upgraded itself beyond usability for me.

3. iMovie: David and I use(d) iMovie a lot. But since I got my new MacBook, I stopped using it. The interface is so completely different and so many old features missing (copy and paste? drag and drop? Trash/empty trash?), and so much new crap is in the way (playing the sound as you mouse-over content, the inability to have more than one project on your computer at once), that after a couple tries at importing old VHS tapes I gave up the project and left it to David to pick up on his own on his old version of the software. Another example of “improvement” basically meaning “eliminating usability”.

4. iWeb: I was pretty hardcore excited about moving into the world of database-based websites. David launched our Twin City Sentinel joint venture on Joomla around the same time I was converting this site to iWeb 06. It was OK. It was quite buggy back then too. Stuff would disappear, synch-ups and uploads would fail or mix themselves up. But it was a new application and the ease of updating my journal, plus all the ready-made templates (especially useful as I no longer had photoshop) were quite nice. Less than a year later, of course, I got this new MacBook, with iWeb 08, which happily converted my entire site to a new format, changed all the style sheets, modified the database structure, broke links. Most of the two years of journal entries I still had left to populate I’ve just left in the netherworld of my local archives, scared of going to all that effort only to get thrashed by the next “update”. Now MobileMe has come along and trashed the site pretty much to hell. I used to be able to read my site on my old Windows Mobile smartphone. Now I can’t even read it on my iPhone (it crashes the browser every time). Most uploads/synchs fail. Photo albums mysteriously disappear and reappear. Strange comment artifacts appear on one upload and disappear on the next upload. Browsers crash, readers lose interest.

…So yeah, Apple software has issues. Of course, the most exasperating problem I’ve had lately is the prissy, snarky attitude of just about every other Apple user I encounter. They all know they are having issues with the new software too, but when I say stuff like “I wish they would have just left it like it was before, they almost universally snipe at me as a luddite or someone who doesn’t like change - I’m a lay user, someone who wants things to stay simple. Sorry, I thought this attitude is what Apple’s whole “user friendly” image was trying to capture as target market for those who thought Windows was too complicated and inefficient. Excuse my desire for simplicity.

Next there is the band of users (most of them moderating forums or just stuck with a chair up their very wide asses at home since they have no job and spend their whole day in user forums posting 30 million posts every day) that reply to every enquiry about a given issue a user is having with “well, all you need to do is rebuild your website; backup and reinstall your iPhoto library; reimport your content; delete and re-synch your MobileMe; etc, etc, etc.” Excuse me - these are not small feats. I admit that maintaining current backups is a no-brainer for anyone who likes their content, but the need to constantly utilize these backups due to the bugginess of an application (a bugginess that wasn’t there when you made the decision to start using said application) is a ridiculous requirement for routine lay-users.

Finally, something my friend Dan brought up: the whole concept of the Genius Bar at the Apple store. You know, that place that you make an appointment at and might get to talk to someone an hour or so after your appointed time. The place where you are looked at down the nose of scruffy tattooed and pierced children who are probably still recovering from their previous night’s bender, and yet seem to delight in convincing you that you just aren’t up for the challenges of using this hardware/software. Only cool skinny hipsters on a white background are up for it. It’s no wonder that said hipster in the continuing line of Apple ads is becoming gross and annoying even to other hipsters, whilst his chunky bespectacled Windows counterpart is becoming quite popular and loved on the comedy circuits.

Thus ends this installment of MurderingRant. To clarify and build some sort of unifying thesis into this long litany of bourgeois complaints, I will say once again that, generally, I’m still happier with the latest Apple products I use than the Vista suite I’m using regularly at work. iPhone is still better than my old Blackjack. I don’t want to touch a Zune with a 10-foot pole. Apple still has a tenuous hold on my loyalty, but it’s losing it fast. What’s going wrong with this company? Is it a succession crisis as The Evil Steve Jobs tries to decide when the hell to retire and who the hell to manage his company (aka, his pension)? Does it have something to do with the fact that Apple recently surpassed Microsoft in the size of its cash horde or Google in the size of its market capitalization? Does Apple perhaps have an existential issue looming in which market leadership no longer allows it to play the hand of “small shopkeeper with the freshest local veggies”?

The coming year or so will be a make-or-break one in determining just how loyal this fanboy can be.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 13th, 2008 at 10:00 am and is filed under Mac, Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.