In many ways, we’re living in a golden age for Apple. The entire product line is rock-solid, and the only complaint any of us can muster is that Apple hasn’t released whatever top-secret products it has in the wings yet. Market share is way up in Macs, dominant in iPods, and rapidly growing for iPhones. The current crop of software for the Mac is better than at any time in the history of Apple (sorry, Framemaker-lovers), and the iPhone development community shows tremendous promise (a few apps are already the best to ever appear on a phone).
So why are so many long-time Apple fanatics, myself included, feel a bit bummed out by the current state of affairs? Is it because we hate the thought of outsiders getting in on our little secret or that we really miss CyberDog and QuickDraw GX? It’s worse — we’ve all become de facto Apple spokespeople. I don’t draw a salary from Apple, but I am a full-time Mac genius in my social circle. If you share my pain, click through.
Did you know that it’s your fault that the hard drive died in my PowerBook G4 about a year ago? I’m aware you didn’t mean it, but you’re a big fan of that Apple company, and you give them money, and they shipped a computer with a hard drive that only had four years of life. If I hadn’t backed up, I would have lost my life’s work. What do you have to say for yourself? Or did you know that it’s your fault that my wife’s iPod keeps failing? Sorry, that’s the responsibility you take when you appreciate an Apple product. The face sensor on my co-worker’s iPhone is faulty, so she keeps hanging up on people unintentionally. And it’s all my fault.
This is the legacy of Apple in the 1990s. The state of the Mac future was so dire in, say, 1996, that all of us became evangelists, following the example of Guy Kawasaki. We had talking points for mocking Windows. We went to school board meetings to argue in favor of keeping Macs in education, even as Dell started dramatically under-cutting Apple’s prices. We argued for Mac superiority, even as the rest of the world ran away. No one listened to us, so our rhetoric was as sharp as we needed it to be. On the rare occasions we could convince someone to give a Mac a shot for the first time (I can only think of one example, and it was a couple that my parents are friends with who traded in their Apple //e for an iMac. Yeah. I know.), we understood that we would be their tech support buddies and occasionally defrag their hard drives and increase the memory allocation for ClarisWorks. But it was easy, and it was a movement.
Fast forward ten years. All those people we told to give Macs (or, at least, Apple) a shot? They’ve taken that shot. And while they’re mostly happy with their investments, they still feel the need to tell us every. Single. TIME. that something goes wrong. Seriously, the day after the iPhone 2.0 update was released, no less than three co-workers wanted to show me what it had done to their original iPhones. Did they want to show me cool new apps? Of course not. They wanted to make it crash in front of me, as though I could call Apple up and get it fixed.
The same thing happens at home. My wife’s MacBook Pro that was supplied to her through work is a touch wonky (something going on with a sound card, occasional spinning rainbow wheel), but nothing that out of the ordinary. But it does have the rather bizarre characteristic of fully hibernating whenever the power gets low. And then it won’t start back up until it’s been plugged in for 15 seconds or so. “Why did they design it that way?” she asks. And I have no answer. It does suck. If I were Apple, I would have made it work the way it already did on older Macs. Somewhere over the last five years, we’ve been forced to change from Apple evangelists into Apple apologists.
This, then, is the challenge of a new era of Mac fandom: Enough people are using Apple products for their flaws to become more prominent. Apple’s current line-up of software and hardware is better than it has ever been. But today, it’s so easy to see how much better it could and should be. Back when Apple was a scrappy player fighting for survival against a predatory Microsoft, the company could be forgiven for small missteps. Survival mattered. Today, Apple should be more capable than ever before, and instead, it’s struggling with growing pains like Mobile Me, iPhone 2.0 instability, and needing to delay Leopard to accommodate the original iPhone.
Apple is amazing today. But every request I get to explain an unpleasant Apple quirk reminds me of how much better the company is capable of being.
42 responses to “The Albatross Around the Apple Lover’s Neck”
excellent entry; it put exactly into words the way i’ve felt lately. good to know i’m not alone.
Great post and, for me, very acurate. I think as Apple grows it might be loosing the edge-to-edge control it had in the past. I also suggest that these days the software is more reliable than the hardware. In the past it seemed the other way around. In Engineering we often speek in parts per million defects and 1000 is often used as a bench mark. I wonder what Apple’s performance is.
Wow. That rings true in my house. The main problem for me is that every time I visit my mother has a long list of complaints, gripes, and problems she trots out and wants me to fix. Most of the time the problem translates to her trying to do something as though it were a PC.
I must live a good life because I have no problems: iPhone works, mobileme works, apps work, macs work, imacs work, EVERYTHING WORKS.
\
there is always windows for you whiners.
The Legend is unravelling… Apple really need a larger QA team.. a few days back a colleague who had just picked up a MBP after a year of evangelizing,.. asked me why it took so long the MBP to wake up from sleep while my PB is still super… I was flummoxed !!!
Apple, please do not make us apologize for your unfinished bits… you have everything going for you.. the cash, the market, the fans,… dont screw up!.. Let the Snow Leopard be a maintenance release, we really dont need bigger, better and shinier features.. enough with the whistles.. we deserve the best combination of OS and Macs..
It’s a very common complaint, and certainly not specific to Apple.
When you work tirelessly on behalf of any organisation to promote its message or products amongst your friends (or audience), it feels great because you know you’re doing the ‘right thing’. But if no reward or even recognition comes to you from that organisation after a while, you will begin to resent it.
You’re biologically programmed for this – it taps directly into the cognitive functions that all primates have to keep track of those other individuals and what the ‘balance of payment’ is in terms of status and favours. Organisations resemble individuals in a way, or are personified by someone – Steve Jobs in this instance.
I’ve had this happen a few times, and there’s always a critical moment where you realise that your voice isn’t being heard, and that your view of the organisation changes, and you stop wanting to promote it because you don’t feel that they share your emotions any more. You’ve just fallen out of love, and yet are still surrounded by their smell (or products, in this case).
Voluntary work always has an emotional shelf-life.
You may email me to call me a romantic fool…
Melancholia? Ennui? There’s no place to go but down.
Two significant factors: the excitement is gone; so is the caché. The first iMacs were really cute, but the really didn’t compete with PCs. They just filled the pent up demand from older Apple owners. The G4 is where the real excitement began. It completely blew away every PC on the planet, it ran the ridiculously solid OS X, and we were a small but (self-)important niche. PC users envied us and constantly asked for a tour of our computers. We weren’t just cool, we were damn cool.
About 1 in 5 people now buy a Mac (though nearly zero Enterprise sales). Even including Enterprise, Apple is the 3rd biggest seller in the US. So much for exclusivity.
One market niche that has grown for Apple is the boneheads. These are the same ones who bought the biggest, baddest Dell they could (or couldn’t) afford, larded it with software they didn’t need or know how to use, then griped because it didn’t make them an instant expert. Now the Apple – like the old Dell’s et al, get nicked for more problems, when it’s really a PEBCAK (that shows my PC roots). Much like the boneheads, the low demand users seem to believe paying the (false) premium for a Mac will make them more productive and more creative.
The average G4 Mac user was a lot more advanced than the average PC user. There was a community that offered tips and support, and the user understood how to use it. In part this was due to, let’s face it, crappy Apple support. Until the advent of the Genius Bar, the only way to get real support was pay through the nose, or walk up to a stranger using a Mac and ask if they knew how to solve your problem. The lack of phone support is still a big problem for Newbies.
I also believe that an increase in problems is due to using Intel processors. Let’s be honest; Intel has never made a processor with the quality of a G4. Heck, early ‘386 coprocessors had problems with rounding errors. Thank God engineers were still using VAX computers to design bridges back then. OS X covers up a lot more of Intel’s sins than Windows (the firewall between machine code and desktop is brilliant), but not all of them. I suspect than many of the new reported OS X vulnerabilities are due to Intel programming necessities. Not all, but a lot.
And what does the latest Apple product – from iPods to Macs to AppleTV, give you that you don’t already have, except raw speed or storage capacity? The MacBook Air was more like the MacBook Yawn. iPods actually took away Firewire to add video; not a great tradeoff considering the size of video files. The only product creating real excitement is the iPhone, because it’s so different from everything else.
The lack of excitement breeds a bit of contempt. The new user expects the same thrill we got when we bought our PowerBook Titanium or ultra cool iBook. Users are happy with the performance of the Mac computer, but they wanted that extra je ne sais quoi. Boiled down to a single sentence, new owners are satisfied, they’re not satisficed. Yes, I know that’s backward, but I said it right. It’s even true for many experienced owners. The computer gives them what they need, but the total consumer experience doesn’t.
– Damn, that’s a great observation -maybe I SHOULD go back to get my PhD; I’ve got a great thesis here.
you sometimes have MacPhobia being a big Apple fan .
imajoebob hit on one point that I completely concur on- the lack of excitement and thrill for new Apple products. Years ago, when SJ took the company over, and prior to the iPod, Apple had to survive by wit and pluck. Every new Ive/Jobs design was a masterpiece, and every software product Apple released was exciting and a step forward for the Mac platform. I think in recent years, as Apple diversified its product offerings, the Mac itself has been somewhat neglected. The designs, with the exception of the alum/glass iMacs, are years old now. Mac OS X continues to evolve, but the product as a whole hasn’t changed much in the past few years. I suppose due to the success of the iPod and the Mac, and the attention to the other products in Apple’s portfolio, the design really need not change at this point. But there was a time when every product announcement brought about a design improvement, no matter how small. I think that’s what I miss the most.
But then again, I still use G3s and G4s…
Interesting post. I’m considering switching back to Mac after a few years of PC only work. Three people I know with Macs (75% of the people who I know with Macs for work, not fun) have broken machines right now. One is my architect, designing my business a new workshop… His iPhone isn’t too great for that kind of work…
Is there a genuine hardware quality issue, and fanboys are in denial, or is it pure coincidence that there seem to be so many hardware QA issues right now?
Thank you, it’s so good to know we’re not alone…
I love iamajoebob’s comment above. I think you hit the nail on the head. I personally also feel a bit of shame about the advertising attached to the new Apple products. “Think different” was an interesting, vaguely intellectual campaign with an inspiring message. It didn’t work. We now have these snotty “smear campaign” TV ads, and they do work. I’m really upset that Apple has stooped to that level, and even more upset that it worked. Frankly, I think the ads are part of the reason people get so irritated when the product doesn’t walk on water. They were told by those guys on TV that it would.
I know I sound like a twentysomething lamenting her favorite teen band, but I liked it better when we were just creative freaks who spent too much on our machines instead of being the Ambassadors to Good Computing for Everyone, Everywhere.
People seek out those who have helped in them in the past. Does this surprise you?
Mac owners generally feel they paid a premium for products that just work, when these products don’t just wok they feel betrayed.
You were part of the process of convincing them that this premium was worth it. So you are perceived as participating in the betrayal.
I believe that what is really going on is growing pains inside Apple. They have been pushing pell-mell in several directions at once and they, Apple, have now broken one of their core corporate values: “It just works”. Repairing this must become paramount at Apple or there will be a backlash. Snow Leopard is at least an indication that someone at a high level has some perception of this.
You should take the frustration you have written about and turn it towards encouraging Apple at every opportunity to get back to this core value on every front: Hardware quality, MobileMe, Security, wireless Time Machine,…
i bought my first mac about 2.5 years ago (but I’m not a “switcher” b/c I still use and like/don’t mind windows). the commenter above who said that some of the apple “cache” has decreased and more “boneheads” are giving apple a try are telling remarks. if a prodcut is energetically touted as superior to its rivals then, of course, that prodcut is calling out to the wider world; so, when the wider world shows up you can’t compalin that the wider world is ruining the neighborhood. second, i think that there has always been an exclusivity that some apple users have enjoyed; and, yes, those users are feeling less good about apple’s greater, if you will, democracy. third, i do think that the apple community’s willingness to minimize or overlook problems is contributing to some of the author’s feelings. here’s an example: dragon naturally speaking software does not have a mac version; but there is a company that’s made a mac product (the company licensed the dragon technology). suffice it to say that, despite a 4.5 mouse or 4 mouse review from macworld, the mac product has some very, very basic feature omissions (e.g., the ability to “learn” and/or auto-correct; if you use speech software for 10 minutes you see the need for this feature). on some discussion boards, i was struck by the willingness of numerous long-time apple users who acknowledged that old apple heads (i say this affectionately) were more willing to give software developers a break b/c they want to encourage more people to write software for macs. that’s a nice sentiment, but, today, for someone who has seen all the commercials and check the apple fan/prodcut sites, is not coming the company with a let-me-help the little guy attitude; these people, myself included, are simply saying put up or shut up. finally, with regard to how apple has handled mobile.me, its silence re: security updates, its tardiness re: security updates, a lot of the mac evangelists are acknowledging what has been true all along: apple is a company that’s in it for the profit. this does not mean they don’t care about giving value for dollars, but it means that they, like all other human beings that acquire wealth and power, are susceptible to getting “the big head.” and when people or companies get the big head they will be dismissive, rush products out the door, and conduct themselves in other ways that remind you what they really think. one more point (really): why such a rushed operating system release? it seemed like tiger was just settling in and, boom, here’s leopard … and all this stuff about 200 new secret features, i mean, really, would you actually consider these, even 50 of them, to be the kind that most people think of when they hear “new features”? anyway, apple makes good stuff, apple makes some stuff that’s not so good. increasingly, this is how the company will be seen.
Criticisms aside, be thankful you aren’t the sad PC supporter who has been transformed from one time computer hobbyist into family support specialist, and then into the object of inevitable blame who won’t go near a PC unless they get paid to do it. We call them IT professionals.
Apple has a vocal user community that is always pushing for more, and suffers the resultant disappointment when Apple doesn’t deliver. And yes, there is still a lot of room for improvement. But, looking at the big picture, for the vast unwashed majority of frustrated PC users, Apple’s products are very much like “giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell”.
Unbe-f***ing-lievable.
You cry about Apple vetting iPhone apps for quality control in one post then turn around and whine that they’re not doing enough quality control.
What’s it gunna be?
“the lack of excitement and thrill for new Apple products. “
You must be joking. The iPhone was only a year and a half ago. I don’t know a single Apple fan who didn’t say ‘holy shit!” when that was announced. And the MacBook Air?
damn, tough crowd.
Wow…. That was perfectly put. Keep up the great work.
Leopard has been the most Windows-like upgrade experience in Mac memory. iPhone 2.0, for all of the liberation of 3G hardware and vetted applications, needs its own Snow Leopard. Despite the limitations and exasperations of MacOS 10.5 and iPhoneOS 2.0, it’s still a smoother experience in aggregate than the ones offered by their competition, but it remains that APPL needs to spend more of their horde on quality improvement. Extending the franchise with improved quality *and* innovative products will prove more difficult to achieve, institutionally, than the renaissance of the last seven years.
I blame Apple’s loss of focus squarely on the iPhone.
Apple had very few problems juggling iPods, computers and software (think about how well the Intel transition went) but ever since the iPhone stole resources away from Leopard (and who knows what other exciting gear that may have been shelved) there’s been an increase in disappointing moments.
Apple have spent the last 3 years running flat out. It might be good for the shareholders but if quality suffers then it’s not good for the long term health of the company… or it’s CEO. They need to slow down a little, take steady decisive strides or risk getting a reputation similar to the company everyone loves to hate, Microsoft.
There’s such a resurgence in Macs and Apple products with more folks than ever buying their stuff that I hardly ever hear of anyone buying a PC anymore. And those that do regret it almost instantly. :)