Apple Nag

All this time I’ve been nagging you for not listening to your customers. But I had an epiphany on my walk in the park with the dogs that caused me to change my mind. Yes, your quality is still poor and arguably getting worse, but it’s just what (most) of your customers want. It’s “good enough”.

Once upon a time, your customer base was composed of people who were looking for high quality hardware and software, and most of the time you delivered. That was the differentiator. If you didn’t have that you would have vanished into oblivion years ago.

But now you’re catering to the young people who don’t know what quality is because they’ve never experienced it. And on the rare occasions that they do see quality, they shrug their shoulders and mumble, “whatever.”

I’ve seen my daughter watching a DVD on her MacBook Pro listening to the audio through those tinny speakers while she’s sitting in front of our 40″ widescreen LCD TV with a Surround Sound system! When I ask why she’s not using the TV, she says, “this is fine, dad” in that “don’t bug me” tone.

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I use this blog to point out that the shine on the Apple is starting to fade. Tarnish is showing in many places. Why do I do this? Because I’m a heavy user of your products, and have been since my first Macintosh 128K I bought on March 1, 1984. I would really like to see a higher quality standard than what I’ve been seeing lately. Entropy is really setting in with your products. I know you can do better.

Countless times you guys screw up and fail to admit your mistakes. It can take weeks, months, and even years before enough irate customers force you to offer extended warranties (although you sometimes keep them hidden). Sometimes we just have to live with the pain. I’m not going to go through the litany of problems here. It would take too long. Readers can just browse your support forums to get a taste.

No company creating such complex products can be expected to be perfect. Sometimes perfection is a matter of opinion. All I expect of any company is that they admit they made a mistake, take ownership for it, correct it at their expense, and have the decency to offer an apology.

Is that too much to ask? Apparently it’s not enough for some folks.
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Aside from my conspiracy theory that you release “security” patches to destabilize the OS in preparation for a paid upgrade — “Anything has got to be better than this OS!” — perhaps there’s another reason for the abysmal stability of OS X Leopard and the mess your applications are in.

It’s all those Windows and Linux switchers who are coming over to the Mac platform. It’s all their fault. Well, mainly.

You look at your market share rising as a result of the poor, down-trodden Windows users seeking salvation with the Mac and say, “Hey, these flea-infested customers are used to having crappy software so why should we expend much effort in maintaining high quality or a consistent user interface?”

When your market share was closing in on the low single digits and was less than half the percentage of people who donate blood each year (yes, that bad), you needed to offer some differentiator to Windows. You tried quality and consistency and succeeded quite well, with the occasional brain fart.

Now that it’s cool to own Macs — geez, even Microsoft thinks that’s true — you’ve been spending time adding features and stealing resources for the iPhone. But, you seem to have forgotten the user interface designers and quality inspectors in that building you sold a few years ago. They might still be there, you should go have a look.

OS X was improving in stability until 10.5 Leopard came along. Now, every time I try to do something I hesitate not knowing what wonderful behaviour I’ll experience.

While you integrate your apps, there’s so much inconsistency between how they function now, that it looks like they were designed by totally different companies. I’ve covered this in several previous postings.

Without the Switchers, there may not be an Apple, but they’re lulling you into a false sense of godhood.

Having Switchers in the Mac camp is like being adrift on a life raft surrounded by salt water. You need water to survive but this water will poison you.

If the following is a typical Windows switcher, you know what I mean …
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I think this cartoon from Everyday People by Cathy Thorne pretty much sums up my attitude when dealing with Apple. Follow Cathy on Twitter @cathythorne or her Facebook fan page.