A Bad Apple After Steve Jobs

A Bad Apple After Steve JobsIt was a sad day for me, as it was for millions I suppose when Steve Jobs passed away.

However, that was some years ago now, and I think I am well over my grieving.

It may be connected, but I think I am also over wantonly donating my credit card limit to Apple too.

After years of being an Apple freak, Apple aficionado and Apple devotee, I have recently completed my first whole 365 day year, totally free of an Apple purchase for the first time in quite a number of years. Not even a set of ear buds.

So why have I changed from being a mega-paying disciple to a parsimonious dissident? Because, perhaps due to Steve Job’s passing, Apple has, in only a few short years, lost its fearless daring, inventiveness and devil may care attitude, and in its place, has fallen into the grip of the Wall Street rules of doing business.

Instead of delivering wondrous products that we didn’t know we even needed, Apple now tinkers with what has been a success and exploits those past successes for as long as possible. This may make billions (Ireland domiciled, almost tax-free profit you bastards?) now, but Apple can toy around with trinkets and buttons until it gets to the iPhone 175s, but it won’t deliver anything new.

What’s new at Apple. Not much.

New? Ok, I’ve seen the Apple watch thingie, but really?Pppfft! I had a watch when I was four years old. New? What does it do? Tell the bloody time? Great! New and something I didn’t know I needed? I don’t think so.

I wonder if Steve Jobs is rolling in his grave, thinking that Dick Tracey did all that stuff such a very long time ago.

Taking a four-year-old iPad or iPhone and calling it SE, is not innovation. It’s exploitation. Why would I want to buy a four-year-old product, just because it’s available in a new colour? Innovation? Be damned.

Jobs may also be rolling in his grave about iCloud. This is the cloud service that replaced Apple’s last disastrous attempt at cloud services, MobileMe. When that was released and didn’t work, Steve Jobs asked this of his staff:

“Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?” Having received a satisfactory answer, he continues, “So why the fuck doesn’t it do that?”

Well, Steve, you can rise from the dead and ask the exact same question all over again about iCloud, because while it’s an improvement on MobileMe, Dropbox still leaves iCloud for dead.

It seems that my old iPhone 6, iPad Air and Macbook Air are all very safe from redundancy now, apart from the fact that they can’t sync with each other reliably via Apple’s shitty iCloud that is, so I have no idea where my precious photos are. Oh, and they aren’t a fancy colour. Rose gold anyone?

As there is nothing at all new and compelling coming out from Apple, my credit card will be totally secure from being raided by Apple for another few years at least.

Well, I do admit that I bought a new Macbook Pro, but couldn’t bring myself to buy the model with the Touch Bar. Why? Well, I just couldn’t think of a use for it, to be honest, so I don’t need it.

When Steve Jobs was alive, he somehow found ways to make stuff that I didn’t know I needed, but did. That was his genius.

It’s a sad thing to say after being an Apple disciple for more than thirty years, but Apple has lost its gloss, shine, crunch, imagination and daring. It has also lost its ability to make and sell products that ‘just work‘.

Many facets of Apple’s product range now, ‘just don’t bloody work‘. Such as my expensive new Macbook Pro that refuses to reconnect to the Internet when I wake it from sleep. My eight-year-old MacBook Air manages this simple task with ease.

Apple has become sadly, yet another mainstream home appliance manufacturer. It might as well make vacuum cleaners to extract a few more billions in Irish tax-free profits.

Apple seems destined to become a replica of Microsoft in the 80’s and 90’s, which preyed on its past success and monopoly for future profits. And we know the Vista of where that led.

Maybe I’ll buy something with a Samsung label on it in future if I want something new and different that ‘just works‘, but I doubt it will have any ‘wow‘ factor.

Or perhaps, as I’m getting on a bit now, it’s time to get over my boyish gadget fetish and start hoarding my hard earned money for a stylish walking stick.

But anyway, thanks for the memories, Steve.

24 thoughts on “A Bad Apple After Steve Jobs”

  1. You speak the truth, Derek. except for the part that says your products are safe from redundancy, well at least I don’t think mine (iPhone 3GS, iPad2 and iMac with OSX Mountain Lion) are, because there are some things that won’t work seamlessly between them (like my version of pages on the iPad and iMac, won’t sync with Pages on the 3GS; my wife’s iMac running OSX Snow Leopard cannot use iCloud and therefore sync even address book and contacts with her iPhone 4. And so on.

    But I do agree with you that they look like they are milking the cash cow. Shame really.

    Anyway, it is a long time since we exchanged anything really. How are you and yours?

    1. Doin’ fine here! I agree about Apple’s seemingly intentional software redundancy. Same problems. But at least the lights still come on on all my old Apple toys! lol

    2. Your Snow Leopard iMac can download OSX Yosemite for FREE via the App Store. Why are you still on snow leopard?

      1. I didn’t say I was using Snow Leopard. I’ve got Yosemite! And the iCloud/iPhoto mess that goes with it. And who cares about FREE when it doesn’t work. I’d rather pay for something that does.

        1. But it still runs! I gave my original iPad to a friend recently, just to store his music. It works fine. Apple are now making redundancy by stealth by making their software incompatible with their older (what? a few years?) products. Some would call it extortion.

          1. I have an unibody 2008 MacBook which runs Yosemite fine.

            There has always been software that depends on new hardware, but I love updating the OS as each update delivers a better Macbook. Yosemite gave me a new MacBook.

            I guess I’ll be forced to get new hardware any year now.

          2. the software outdating the hardware trick has been around for a long time, Derek. Microsoft were up to that in the last millennium!

    1. If not syncing my mail, contacts and iCal correctly, and losing photos is iCloud what you call working, I would hate to see iCloud when it’s not working! I’ve gone back to Dropbox and Google Drive.

  2. This article sums up my thoughts perfectly.

    As an Apple user of 15 years I’m in the same boat. The only thing, for now, holding me back from switching to another brand are apps I bought.

    My retina MBP is having issues with hinge, USB port, thunderbolt port, and a galaxy of dead pixels. iCloud does not work at all. I work is a step back from previous versions. OSX has a lot of issues. iOS 8 is not even a beta. The iPhone 6 plus I big usable without a case, too slippery and ugly, but I need the big screen.

    The iPad I now sold. Apple TV I sold. Mac Pro I sold and didn’t replace either.

    The Apple watch is a toy. I never replace my kinetic scuba Seiko with a piece of junk with a battery that last a day or less to tell me that I got a message on my phone.

    The list goes on…

    1. Can you sell my Apple TV too? What a waste of money that was. It only managed to kill my whole Apple wi-fi. set up Great! And thanks for mentioning pixel loss. I have two mini iPads I use for work, and both had pixel holes within a few weeks of buying them. Should I also mention that although I love my Macbook Air, I do get peeved that its Time Machine back ups, onto an Apple Time Capsule I have to add, only last a month before becoming corrupted, and I have to start a whole new back up. Yep. it just works huh?

    2. you summed up my thoughts on the Apple Watch thing. What is he point in having a watch wi a batter life that lasts a day just to tell me I got a message on iPhone? Lol

  3. I’ve read thousands of posts from dozens of different posters about Apple losing its innovation, but yours is easily the best. I particularly enjoyed your choice of fonts and your punctuation. Samsung has always driven innovation in the electronics industry and that’s why they continue to dominate market share and profits. Apple needs to look no further than the miserable sales performance of the 6/6plus phones to see the impact of their failure to innovate over the last two decades. Bankruptcy is imminent for Apple.

    I look forward to reading the scores of your future posts on Apple’s failure to innovate in the coming years.

    1. After an £18 billion profit last quarter, I think Apple are little way yet from bankruptcy. However, most of that profit was from their new entry into the Chinese market. But they are starting to disappoint their faithful, which is a portent of the sharp point of the wedge.

  4. LoL, too funny. While I do hate all the bugs these days, I actually find iCloud to be okay (just okay). You do realize, you don’t need to use iCloud for anything. You can continue to use the cable sync methods you’ve always used and love, and it works just as well as before. The iTunes storage methode is alive and well, or use box, or Evernote, or whatever. Wait until they’ve worked the software to your liking, and then use it in production. Weh-weh – you want real tears? Try using iOS 8.3, in its current state, as your primary device. Now that’s real self hatred.

  5. Interesting article, thank you for sharing your thought. Unfortunately I have bought into the apple ecosystem and it’s difficult to break free. I have one little thing to say though, in my opinion Apple was innovative back in the 80’s when they introduced Apple 1 and the graphic UI, which they sort of ‘borrowed’ from Xerox. After that what I tjink they did was redesigned existing product and making them ‘stylish’, add Steve jobs ability to sell fridges to Eskimos and the recipe for success was done. I am referring to the iPod, just a Kate entrant in the MP3 game. the iPhone, was a reinvention of the earlier pocket pc-phones. The IPad was a reinvention of what Microsoft tried earlier with tablet computer. So Apple arrives later, uses old cheap technology-making run faster and without bugs because others have already sort them out- selling for high price and making us believe they are new innovative product.

  6. In my opinion, before todays car, we all born in the world of cars(we all born in 1900 I presume) but yet everybody still buying the new ones(for the design, tech, etc) the same goes with apple watch, watches(smartwatch), phones(smartphones), they all’ve been here, some just a decades, and some from centuries ago. And for iCloud, for me it works, seamlessly. I’m an apple user, but a fan of technology, i’ve used windows, blackberry, android,. Yes iOS 8, OSX, have their bugs, but i think, and I experienced it still the smoothest os, the easiest os. So i think, tech its not always about creating something new, but also making peoples live easy with it. And thats where Apple is better than any other tech company.

  7. I have an iPad Air, MacBook 2013 and iPhone 6 plus and an Apple TV. They all work and work great with my apple router. I have everything on the cloud. The calendar, 5 email accounts, a lot of old work data, thousands photos going back and forth between all devices and I have no problems. The only time I had a problem was when the service was down. I don’t think you points are valid in any way. I think they could be more innovative but honestly what else is there to create. A smart body?

    1. While my Apple devices themselves work very well individually, my major gripe is with iCloud and iCloud Drive. Since these are needed to sync my devices, it is awfully annoying when mail flags don’t sync, appointments don’s sync in iCal and website passwords don’t sync in Safari. Then with iCloud Drive, which I have to say works ok on my Mac, except for the silly .tef files, it is next t0 useless on my iPad and iPhone as there is no Finder. Why should I have to remember which app I used, and then fight to find a file?
      Then there are photos. Since iOS8, the Photo app not only fails to sync all photos across my devices reliably, there is still no app for MACOS! It’s a mess. If I take 5 photos on my iPhone, I’m lucky if two make it to my iPad. The work around I have found is to share my photos and then import them onto my iPad and Mac.
      Hardly much progress made since Mobileme. In fact, when it comes to cloud services, I think Apple are in fact going backwards.

  8. The ghost of steve jobs

    OMG a label with “Samsung” with it and calling it innovative?! My God it made me cringe. Since when a copycat be called innovative and has a good taste?

  9. Excellent observations and I concur 100%. Apple has devolved into a somewhat plebian personal appliance peddler. No amount of “rose gold” can obfuscate that fact. Fingers crossed… they will find their way back to innovations that sparks wonderlust among former devotees.

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