The Downside of Apple
I want to start this post out with a few facts. 1) I love Apple products. 2) I love OSX (for the most part) in comparison with any other operating system on the market. 3) I like iOS and the development tools Apple supplies to write software for their products.
I have been using Apple products for years now and can honestly tell you that I am more productive on their products than any other system I’ve ever owned and, as you can imagine, I’ve owned quite a few. So, I guess the question should be, why am I writing this article? The short answer is because I can, the longer answer is because I can voice my opinions here and Apple can’t delete them like they do on their own forums.
Do I think Apple will ever read this blog? Probably not and I’m even more sure that, if they did, they wouldn’t really care. However, if enough of us complain, maybe one day they will get someone in charge that understands that users do matter! So here goes.
If you’re thinking of purchasing an Apple product, here are a few things to understand about the mentality of those in charge.
1) Apple is like any typical government that you’d find in charge. They think they know what is best for everyone else. If you use an Apple product you have to give up on certain things that are common sense to everyone else and just deal with them. One example that has caused me to stop what I’m doing and write this article is their developer network and its recent changes related to security and passwords. They require you to change your password every month or two and they force you to create a password with 6 different constraints. For example, you must use numbers, you must use upper and lower case letters, you can’t repeat characters and so on.
This might all sound reasonable to those not versed in the subject, however, in reality it’s pretty dumb. First off, making me change my password every month is insane. Secondly, not allowing me to repeat or keep my password is dumber and eventually if you keep pushing me, you are forcing me to have to resort to writing my password down because I have no idea what the heck you made me change it to the last 5 times. If you are so worried about someone else getting my password then issue a one time pad and mail it to me. Or better yet, try to crack my password and if you do, then have me change it. Don’t just assume I made my password 12345 and make me change it every month.
2) iOS and the Apple store are outdated and need to be changed. Accept the idea that people want to do things you might not agree with on your hardware. Apple sells the most awesome hardware on earth, keep that up, but stop trying to control what I do with it. If I want to run Linux or Windows on your hardware then let me. If I want to load security apps on my ipad or even a different boot loader, then let me. Stop changing your software with each release to break people that are hacking your OS. You serve to do nothing more than to push me towards Android and Linux, which is exactly what has happened.
3) The App store is a great concept, however, why can’t I ship my product directly to my customers like I can on Android? If I want to take advantage of automatic updates and such, then I’ll use your store. However, making me take a month between releases while you’re engineers try to reverse engineer my app to make sure I haven’t done anything sneaky in it is just stupid. You’re totally screwing up the entire release process and quick bug fix turnarounds that our customers demand!
4) Apple should stop adding iPhone functionality to the desktop. Computers have large screens (non touch) and keyboards. They use a mouse to drive them. Give up on this dumb full screen app crap and hiding my scroll bars. It causes buggy behavior and, basically, just aggravates your users to death. As an example, in OSX the scrollbars hide themselves unless you’re scrolling or if you get close to the edge of the program depending on your settings. So if you open Finder and need to click that bottom file in the list, good luck, because when you get down there the scroll bar pops up and covers it up. Brilliant feature!!
5) Apple has the most awesome backup service called Time Machine that really is at the top of any backup process list. However, they recently decided that maybe they’d build that into all of their apps so that the programs save all versions of files and lets you easily backup and revert to old images of them. On the surface this sounds awesome, in practices it’s just dumb and dis-functional. We already had time machine and we already had CMD Z to undo. With all this new crap, I now can’t do proper “Save As” on documents and the overall usefulness of your apps are pushing me towards Open Office. In fact I honestly regret having purchased Pages and Numbers because I can’t use them properly with all the new “dumb” changes.
6) Having application menus at the top of the screen is like this huge Apple marketing BS compagne. They say they did research when, in fact, Steve Jobs just said he knew better and therefore it was so. It takes longer to get to things if you’re running multiple monitors and it’s just dumb, serving absolutely no useful purpose what so ever.
Like I said in the beginning, I really like Apple hardware and currently own a top of the line Macbook Pro Retina that I absolutely love using. However, purchasing my music that I can only play in iTunes, movies that I can only watch in iTunes, not being able to run certain apps on my iPad and iPhone just because Apple doesn’t agree with what they do, not being able to boot my computer to Linux or Windows if I want, and all of the other closed nature crap that Apple dishes out on a daily bases is really making me start to dislike them. This is exactly what almost finished them off the first time around and I predict, that unless they change their ways soon, you will begin to see them start to slip back into no man’s land.
Please wake up and stop trying to control us all! We love your products but we are really starting to dislike your control freak style.
In closing, I’ll describe who I was and who I am. I use to be a die hard Apple person that bought thousands of dollars a year in movies and songs directly from iTunes and the store. I had an iPhone, iPad, Macbook Pro, iPod and so on. I then started to have needs that Apple didn’t find proper so I hacked my iPhone in order to gain access to those features. Apple then began a game of cat and mouse and did their best to break the boot loaders on every new release. Not by accident I might add because even today they are continuing the same activity.
Because of all of this and the ability for me to easily and simply load new boot loaders and pretty much everything else onto a Droid, Apple lost my business and I moved to the enemy. I then needed a new computer and started playing around with Linux and other hardware in an effort to just stay away from Apple and their closed systems. This introduced me to the fact that all of those thousands of dollars of songs and music I had purchased over there years really were not mine at all. Apple had them all locked to iTunes which won’t run on Linux and therefore couldn’t be played. This caused me to immediately stop purchasing any further songs or movies on iTunes and now Apple has lost that income from me.
It’s easy to say this is just one person and no one else cares about these things, but in fact there are millions of people just like me. Maybe they haven’t totally jumped ship yet, but they are there and these things do bother them on a daily bases. I’m posting this blog in hopes that one day Apple wakes up and realizes that they could be even more successful than ever before, just by opening the doors and letting us all in.
Let us buy music and movies without the need of iTunes. Let us sync iTunes music with Droid phones and write a droid app that lets us buy music and play music on the droid from the iTunes store. You’ve already allowed Amazon and others to open markets and take millions of dollars of business away from you because they support iOS and Linux and Windows and we’re not locked into one program to deal with them. It’s time you open your eyes and think outside the box for once. There are lots of us out here!