2015 marks me being a Mac and Apple user, in one form or another, for a decade. While I’m an infant compared to many longtime Apple users, I feel like I am finally getting some perspective on the company and its products after using them for an extended period of time. Now that I do the math, I’ve been an Apple user longer than I was a Microsoft user before (10 vs. 7 years).
I’ll start with this controversial statement: Apple is not perfect.
Not even close, really,
However, Apple has never been perfect and you have always been able to find problems with every software release. The “it just works” moniker has always been marketing. This is nothing new.
What is new is the scale of Apple.
Today there are just so many more people using Apple’s products that you are going to be hearing from more people. It is much easier for opinions to find their way to the “surface” of the Internet today than in the past and the media is paying closer attention to what people are saying online in a bid to try to stay afloat.
That means we are going to hear of more problems.
Two articles featured prominently over the weekend. First came Apple has lost the functional high ground from Marco Arment (and more recently his following up titled What it’s like to be way too popular for a day). I can’t really disagree with much of what he wrote because there are issues with the software that Apple has been recently releasing.
My problem is that it has always been this way … and it will always be this way.
The Functional High Ground by Daniel Jalkut states it very well, and from a person who worked for Apple starting in the 90s.
And now it’s 2015, and in the immortal words of Kurt Cobain: “Hey! Wait! I’ve got a new complaint.” Don’t we all.
That sums it up for me. I’ve been reading about how Apple’s software has been horrible since I started using a Mac. I read about how Windows was/is/will be horrible since before my parents owned a computer running Windows 95 (thank you PC magazines). Software stinks. I deal with more issues at work from Google Chrome than any other piece of software right now (beating out even Adobe’s products at the moment).
Software stinks and there is no other way to state it.
Apple needs to get things figured out because they are burning up good will from some people, but they are not unique in that situation. Google is there for others (the Google Apps Admin interface is a mess). Microsoft has been there for many for a long time (and Windows 8 didn’t help in some respects).
Apple is always doomed, and to a great extent will always be doomed because they set the bar high for themselves. That’s a good thing, but lets cut the hyperbolic headlines and stories and get back to trying to make things better.