Apple Nag

I’ve used your products primarily since March 1, 1984 when I bought my first original Macintosh and ImageWriter printer. I was proud to be a Mac owner because it was so superior to the alternatives.

In the subsequent years leading up to the present time I became a Mac bigot. Everything else was not only not good, it was trash and I wondered how anyone could use that crapola.

Then Macs started going downhill with quality problems in the hardware and software. Macs just sucked less. I stopped doing unpaid sales and evangelizing for you and kept pretty quiet. When people asked me what kind of computer to get, I would no longer say, “Get a Mac”, I’d say, “What do you want to use a computer for?” I often told them to buy a PC.

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I see you’re offering a “free” iPod Touch if we buy a Mac for university. There are two things wrong with this ad, and no, one of them is not the ubiquitous asterisk and “Terms apply” gotcha.

There’s no such thing as a free iPod

Again, you’re proving you’re no different than most other retailers in deceptively saying that the iPod is free. It’s not free, it’s included in the price. Well, actually, it’s worse than that. We have to buy it at the retail price and you will rebate up to $259. Since the cheapest Touch retails at $259 that doesn’t cover the taxes now does it? So it ain’t free, is it?

It’s also just a rebate, which means you’re bribing us with our own money. We pay you. You hold on to millions of dollars of our cumulative money earning interest for weeks. We waste our time filling out your stupid rebate form and sending it in (don’t get a single character wrong or it’s grounds for rejection). You give us our money back sometime while we worry about if you’re using a shady rebate company that will conveniently “forget” to send the cheque. We’ve still paid the taxes and you’ve stolen our time.

Clearance

And, for those who don’t follow your product release cycles, you neglect to mention that this is the older generation model that will be replaced with the next generation in — oh — October. Once all the kids are back at school and have had to purchase the Mac and iPod.

Fine, fine, it’s a nice way for you to clear inventory before the new model comes out. Why not be up front about it or just discount the Mac price by $259? Then we save on taxes and don’t waste time on sucky rebates. Right, because your cost is a heck of a lot cheaper than the cash price, so it’s really costing you nowhere near $259 to make this offer.

You demean yourself with every one of these deceptive tactics.

With your one billionth download, I started to think about the apps I have installed on my iPod Touch. I was somewhat startled to realize that I had 50 apps, yet I only paid for one $1 app — and I don’t use it anymore because a better free one became available. That works out to an average of two cents per app.

I’m known to be notoriously cheap — er, frugal, yeah that’s what I mean. But even so, you would think that the legions of app developers would be able to convince me to part with more money.

Games are not my thing, so even though I have several free games installed, I hardly play any of them. I certainly won’t pay for something I don’t use. Games are hot on the app store.

After some introspection I believe I have the answer. I don’t like your policies.

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Was it all the way back in 2002 that you guys first starting talking about the Digital Hub. That’s seven, count ‘em, years ago. When do you think we’ll see it come to fruition?

You have made steps, for sure, because we’ve got Macs, iPods, iPhones, Apple TV, and a monitor or two. That covers desktop and mobile computing.

There’s iLife and MobileMe to tie the hardware together giving us personal web site creation, photos, home movies, the ability to burn DVDs (those old fossils), and to share content with our family, friends, and the world on the Internet.

iTunes is a big part of the integration for music, movies, TV shows, podcasts and syncing to the other devices like iPods and Apple TV. In many ways, the features are targeted at making you more money than what’s best for your customers (don’t get me started on the 2G Shuffle and iTunes 8.1 fiasco).

It sure looks like you’ve got a hub strategy. Yet, you don’t promote the hub concept anymore. Is that because it would handcuff you into implementing features that would be detrimental to maximizing your profit margin?

Let’s talk about the rough edges and one huge group of people you’ve left out — family.

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It’s been a few days since I was last motivated to nag you about the latest flaw in your various products. Oh, I’m still experiencing things I’ve previously blogged about, including some new minor things like my iPod Touch failing to connect and sync this morning. That’s the first time it did that so it wasn’t worthy of a separate post.

I’m just wondering if I’ve reached the state of saturation that I don’t even see the problems anymore, or I’m getting senile.

But, I was wondering about something. Remember that whole digital hub thing Steve was talking about — how many MacWorld keynotes ago? When do you think you’ll get around to implementing it? Now that’s worthy of a special post.

I had some HD video podcasts that I wanted to take with me on the iPod Touch. Unfortunately, you guys never considered that we might like to watch the podcast on the Mac, the Apple TV, or the Touch, whichever was best suited at the time. Your own children don’t know how to play nice with each other.

Elgato’s EyeTV allows us to create a schedule and specify that we want to transcode automatically to an Apple TV or iPod video format. We can’t select both, unfortunately, but that’s for another nag.

iTunes forces us to manually do the conversion. That’s bad enough, but your user interface experts don’t seem to understand the concept of a “use case“. They haven’t thought through how real people want to use the features.

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My niece celebrated her second birthday party yesterday and my venerable Canon PowerShot G2 4.0 megapixel camera was kept busy.

I publish these photos on my iWeb-created site running on my Power Mac G5 server at home. It’s trivial to get the photos from the camera to the family in short order. Or so I thought until I really kept track of the sordid process.
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If you don’t know what Stockholm Syndrome is, you’ll need to read up on it to fully understand this post. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Back now? Fascinating read, wasn’t it? Perhaps I should have titled this post the Cupertino Syndrome. That’s not an original idea when applied to you, though. You’ve heard it before.

At least one well-known tech personality has called anyone who was underwhelmed by your March 17th iPhone 3.0 lovefest “haters.” Wow. How bad does that guy have the Syndrome? Just because we’re not in awe of your announcement he blindly calls us haters, never having met us; never having heard or read about our other comments.

Not a problem. I’ll still call it as I see it, and if you read a lot of reviews by high-profile tech sites, they’ll be more in agreement with me.

Your iPhone 3.0 announcement is underwhelming due to your success. Bizarre, right? The more successful you are in the market, the more flack you get for missing features. Uh, you’re not surprised by that, are you? So please excuse me if I don’t drool over stuff I’ve had in other products for years. Sometimes, many years.

A press event for this feature set? Only you guys can get away with that stunt. That’s not an insult, that’s respect for your marketing folks. Now those guys are awesome.

Let’s have a look at some of the features in the order I think are important.
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You can read all kinds of product reviews of your new announcements on other sites, but I’ll let you know why I won’t be buying your Mac Mini and why I might buy your Mac Pro.

I was multitasking last night by watching a movie and working through my RSS feeds using Google Reader on my iPod Touch. That was the first time that I heard about your new hardware releases. Even without a keynote, you generated enough interest for me to pause the movie at strategic points so that I could concentrate on the specs. And you know how much I love my movies.
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