hoakley October 30, 2016 General, Macs, Technology

Last Week on my Mac: should Apple give up and go Windows?

Some weeks during this year have left me reeling; with the US Presidential Election still to complete, I’m sure that last week will not be the last in which I feel punch-drunk most of the time.

It started with great expectations: an Apple event featuring Macs, at last. Here was Apple’s opportunity to show a succession of new hardware products, replacing or updating every model in its current line-up.

This was marred by Microsoft’s continuing campaign to defy human anatomy with touchscreens, which is in danger of succeeding because too few of the press consider human factors or ergonomics to be of any importance. So instead of reacting with insight and pointing out the flaws in the Microsoft Surface Studio, most reactions were near-orgasmic. We’ll see how many pro users are still as enthusiastic about those very expensive new toys in a year or two.

More worrying then was the possibility that Apple might have lost all its human factors experts and its good sense, and was about to release its own touchscreen computers. I have been concerned enough about the larger iPad Pro, which must have caused some fraught arguments within Apple, but the possibility that a MacBook Pro or iMac might come with a touchscreen caused a nagging anxiety.

Then came the Apple event itself, and Apple’s continuing failure to deliver modern chipsets in most of its Macs. When it was clear that all we were going to be offered was the much-needed replacement for the ageing MacBook Pro, I felt personally let down. Knowing so many Mac users who really needed a modern desktop system, to see Apple glibly continuing to offer its 2-year-old mini, 1-year-old iMac, and 3-year-old Mac Pro was deeply worrying. Could anyone seriously advise a prospective purchaser that they remain a wise buy?

At first, it looked like a signal that Apple is pulling out of the desktop computer market altogether. Would we see Apple’s software engineering tools – still essential for iOS and other development – ported to Windows? That made me appreciate that my perception could be nothing compared to that of Apple’s own engineers. Imagine trying to develop macOS and iOS software on any of the current range of desktop Macs. Surely such internal pressure must be driving Apple to offering something more suitable.

I’m still not sure what Apple intends to do about this, and I wish that, just for once, Tim Cook would be a little explicit about where Mac hardware is going. However positive the Touch Bar might be, however confident I am that it is heading in a much better if not revolutionary direction, this is the one time that Apple needs to be a little open.

For a friend, with a four-year-old iMac, who desperately needs something better very soon: should they hang on, or give up and go Windows? For businesses, who have seen entry-priced models of the MacBook Air snatched away from them, should they give up and go Windows? For a serious home user who simply cannot afford to buy the only 2016 model of Mac (the new MacBook Pro), should they give up and go Windows?

Apple has won over an awful lot of PC users over the last few years. Many of them may now be regretting making that change.

So Apple has left all of us in a lot of uncertainty. The sort of uncertainty that its event should surely have dispelled. Instead of coming away thinking how exciting the Mac’s future is, most people that I know are reliving the experience of the morning of 24 June 2016, when what they thought was going to be a steady, stable future was swept from under them, and the UK voted to leave the EU.

And that, in the UK, was the twist of the knife: Apple finally bowed to the inevitable and adjusted its prices to reflect the collapsed pound sterling. Not only was Apple only going to offer us one of the several new Macs that we needed, but after the price adjustments hardly anyone in the UK can afford to buy Apple any more.

It was like being propelled suddenly back to 1990, when my special developer-discount Mac IIfx cost me around £6000. With a top-spec new MacBook Pro now running at £4049 – and still with only 16 GB of memory – I wonder how many will be sold in the UK this side of Christmas.

As I was slowly absorbing all of this, and trying to work out what Apple is up to, my still-top-of-the-range year-old iMac had a hissy fit, and the Console app is still so impotent that I had to use my own home-grown AppleScript hack to try to discover what went wrong. So much for Sierra as a working platform.

6Comments

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1

Fischi on October 31, 2016 at 8:06 pm

Overall some of your Mac articles of you sounds more like an old frustrating man without any clue what are the reasons for his bad mood. It’s absolutely OK to talk about critism points but some of your articles sound more or less like a bashing. If you like to go to Windows you should go and to keeping the frustration will be yours. But you should not pour out all your personally frustration as revenge … It could be a good idea to discuss some of your issues with other peple to find solutions instead – or read some more professional sources

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  hoakley on October 31, 2016 at 8:23 pm
  
  I hope that I make it very clear why I – and a large number of other Mac users – are unhappy at the moment with Apple. I identify a substantial sector of very loyal Mac users who are currently struggling to work with their old Macs, but who cannot replace them with Macs which might deliver the level of performance which their work requires. Talk to professional designers, motion graphics creatives, photographers – as I do – and you will find a lot of them saying exactly what I have written here.
  As a developer on Macs since 1989, I have been used to using high-end Macs for much of that time. I still have my old Mac IIfx, right up to an 8-core Mac Pro. When I came to replace that, Apple was not offering any high-end system which was suitable. It has since introduced the ‘new’ Mac Pro, which was quite unsuitable for most professional work. It has consequently sold very poorly, and few creatives have wasted their money on one. Now, even that ‘new’ Mac Pro is 3 years old, surpassed in performance and capability by many much cheaper desktop PCs.
  Apple has not given any indication as to whether it will ever produce another pro-level Mac. The new MacBook Pro – which I do praise in some respects – is unsuitable for most pro users, and staggeringly cannot have more than 16 GB of memory. That alone makes it useless for many.
  These are serious issues which Apple needs to address. This is not a matter of ‘revenge’, but if Apple does not offer the hardware, what solutions would you suggest?
  Having developed for and used Macs since 1989, I am hardly rushing to Windows; the question in the title is, of course, rhetorical. But for many pro users, they feel now that they have no choice. Would you prefer me to pretend otherwise?
  Howard.
  PS I write some of those professional sources, and have done so for more than 25 years. Perhaps you never read MacUser or, now, MacFormat. And if you think my views here are scathing, you should read what some of my colleagues are writing.
  
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3

Kevin on November 3, 2016 at 3:40 pm

Fischi, you can’t begrudge him his laments, he’s been generating workarounds for Apple’s garbage code for years. He’s absolutely right with his comments. The code quality is spiralling down. What was once a rock solid platform to do anything has been eaten away, with one shoddy update after another. It’s incredible that Apple keeps promising a stinking self driving car, when they clearly struggle mightily to simply reproduce Dropbox, which is a far better service than iCloud. Constant changing of the interface, which actually makes sense, bece, ause they can’t seem to deliver useful new features, constant removing of functionality in violation of their own HIG directives, which is a slap in the face to those of us who remember how _good_ it used to be using these machines, even when they were underpowered and expensive. Worse, the documentation that used to be available from Apple has become uselessly basic, and slickly deceptive. We are forced to wander the web exactly like the damned, serd. Finally, Apple keeps on trying to get between me and my tasks. Every change, every update, they slither into the middleman position a little more, which I hate, but could live with, except that they slow everything down with their lack of ambition and vision! They’ve removed the tools to be creative for the power users. They update things so haphazardly that time needs to be spent making sure data loss, USUALLY SILENT, can be mitigated. Hundreds of daemons send gigabytes of data to Apple, undocumented, unmentioned, but not unseen, because the log files are full of errors. Finally, in the last little while, Apple is doing the “silent security update.” Sneaking code onto my devices in the dead of the night! They in no way have earned the trust necessary to put their manky code unheralded onto my systems! If only they would just double the hard drive capacity, add a half inch to the damn machine and go design their boutique self driving deathtrap that will be twice the price of everyone elses, and will only take you where Jony Ive thinks you should go! Oh, and it’ll erase your books, give you crappy photos, while it keeps the good ones in iCloud, and return your music to you edited.

This guy has stood against the tide for years. He has investigated and recorded solutions. He’s not wrong in his observations. It’s been almost ten years since Snow Leopard, You could do anything with that OS. They ship features which are useless fluff. I had hoped that they would pivot to become a business device, you know, solid, dependable, secure… it would have hidden theiir paucity of invention. Nope! Apple won’t leave you alone with the devices anymore. They want to be our “digital hub” except of course every other option is more feature-rich, or cheaper, or more convenient.

Oh, then there is the App Store. Sandboxing. Rootless. I’m paying top dollar for hardware, but all I get is a home directory. That’s ridiculous. I had that back in the 80’s, thin client on the school network. Again, I have to point out, everybody else does this better…. Well, Android is not really better, but
I loved Apple’s products. I worked all day every day just because they were so good to use. I understand that selling devices is going to be more lucrative. I still like the phones, I guess. HP has some very nice linux laptops they are offering.

Anyway, the dude is right. If Apple wants to have a silo, then it can’t steadily half ass the building of it over a decade. That’s what they are doing. It’s not only sad, frankly, it’s insulting.

Good work by the way. It’s much appreciated. keep it up.

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  hoakley on November 3, 2016 at 4:33 pm
  
  Thank you for your very kind words – and spirited defence. We’ll see what happens in the coming weeks: I think that Tim Cook understands the problem. Whether he and Apple choose to do anything about it is their business, literally.
  Howard.
  
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5

Simon on November 4, 2016 at 4:03 pm

I agree with your sentiments. I too am concerned with Apple. The iPhone 7 fiasco (in my opinion) removing the audio jack (no connectivity into sound systems or external speakers apart from Bluetooth), essentially identical phone to the iPhone 6.

OSX becomes less reliable with each new release (I’ll wait for x.6 release before I even look at Sierra). worst still are the constant price hikes. I can purchase 3 good Windows machines for one Apple.

All this does not bode well. I’ve read too many articles where Apple fan-boys tell people they can buy Windows if they don’t like Apple’s direction. The thing you’ve got to take into account is that the more people that leave Apple products the less revenue there is for developers. Once developers start leaving Apple’s future becomes ill fated. Apple’s own products such as iWorks continue to rate poorly on the Appstore and many people have left it behind for MS Office.

I love Apple products, but feel that since Steve Jobs’ demise that the innovation has disappeared. The touch bar is nice on the new macbook pro, but really, a starting price of £2400 for the 15 inch? The general populous isn’t likely to go out and buy one of those.

My iPhone 6 is due for an upgrade this year and it’s the first year I’ve held off as I’m not enamoured with the iPhone 7. You would have thought with Samsung’s fiasco with the battery on the Note 7 that everyone would be streaming to buy the iphone 7, yet Apple has had the first annual loss in 15 years with iphone sales declining. (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/25/apple-profits-sales-decline-2016-iphone-7)

This doesn’t install confidence in Apple’s future.

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6

James Norrington on January 17, 2017 at 10:27 pm

A short answer from me. You’re completely right. Am considering moving the whole company from Mac. Been using Macs for 30 years.

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