nightwatch

I used to work at Apple Austin in the mid-late ‘90s right before Jobs came back. Back then there was a main campus, (located off 183 in north east Austin), that focused on sales and customer service. Then there was an annex a couple miles west on 183 that housed Apple’s complete tech support department, (before it got outsourced). That’s where I worked. Luckily I got a gig in the High End group (didn’t have to support printers, QuickTake cameras, or any of that junk). Best tech gig I ever had, (I’ve got a few funny ‘90s Apple stories).  

Does anyone else ever think that if the DOD or the US Military decided to pull out of South Korea, Samsung would be screwed? In a weird way Apple has to compete against (and work with), a company that’s subsidized by the US tax payers. Maybe I’m taking things way too far. 

Ok. Apple nailed the iPad Pro. They really are listening to us musicians and other creative pros. Everything they added is exactly what we needed. Lightening was too slow as an I/O. It limited how much audio I could stream. USB-C can pass 100s of audio streams, especially with that A12x! 

A12x, USB-C, and what they did what the Apple Pencil! Yeah baby. Now, how much? I’m worried. $1,500 loaded? 

Apple ALMOST nailed the Mac Mini. They should have offered one with dual flash SSDs like the iMac Pro and a maybe a SATA bus for 2nd large SATA SSD. An i9 would have been nice. 

Mike Wuerthele said:

ecarlseen said:

Terrible analogies here. 

Apple's software quality has been noticeably on the decline for many years now. They're well still ahead of their main competition (Google and Microsoft), but this may or may not last. It seems to have gotten worse around the time that they started doing public betas - I'm wondering if in-house testing was scaled down in conjunction with that.

There have been show-stopping bugs in every version of System, MacOS, OS, MacOS X, and macOS, I've iterated most of them in another forum post.

Having seen them all in one form or another, I don't think that it's gotten worse -- but I think the cacophony about it is louder as there are more users.

I worked at Apple when System 7.5 was released. This was about a year before Jobs came back. A new Control Panel called the  TCP/IP Control Panel made its debut with 7.5. It was a necessary component for Mac users because it allowed them to connect to the internet. And it didn’t work. It was a total piece of crap. The few engineers left at Apple that weren’t busy making a mess of Copland (which I saw, btw), couldn’t fix it. 

So for several long weeks, customers were intensely irate after buying Apple’s new PowerMac 7200 (itself riddled with problems), only to find out that the Control Panel they needed to connect to the internet just wouldn’t  work. For weeks Apple had no answers, placing a tremendous strain on Apple’s support staff (at that time Apple still had a tremendously talented in house support staff in Austin Texas). I was a member of the High End Group, which supported the Mac OS and the high end Power PCs. 

The problem got so bad that the engineers wouldn’t talk to us. We basically had to BS customers with unnecessary Clean Installs, “zapping the PRAM” (three times, not once!), and creativially imagining what Extension was conflicting with the TCP/IP control panel because it was Apple’s official stance that the OS and TCP/IP worked “out of the box.” I still remember my manger giving us instructions to say that. I felt really bad for the customers. But it really wasn’t a PR nightmare because Windows 95 was out and most of the industry wasn’t talking about Apple anymore. That’s when you know you’re in trouble. 

My point is this. In 2012, after social media finished mourning Steve Jobs’ death, a giant target was painted on Apple’s back and we witnessed the first major social media bullying campaign in history directed at a company. There are YouTube channels that bash Apple on a daily basis, and yet they owe their entire YouTube fame and income to Apple. I wonder if some of these YouTube channels are really Samsung or Google propaganda channels. 

Yet despite Tim Cook’s mistakes, (I’ve been a vocal critic of his handling of the Mac lineup, especially the Mac Pro), and Larry Ellison’s early predictions of doom for Apple, Mr. Cook has done a damn good job at out-lasting the haters. Tim Cook is way too smart to lose the Apple brand to those who want it to go away. Way too smart. After all, he had the best teacher in Jobs. Besides, the Apple haters have never actually figured out what it is that keep us Apple sheep loyal to Apple. It’s obvious to me. It’s the reason I went to work for Apple in the first place. Maybe it’s part reality distortion field. Seriously though,  it’s the macOS, the Finder and the OS that runs it’s mobile device offshoots. Yeah, some of the hardware is cool. Apple is a hardware company after all. But even Tim Cook knows it’s the OS. Ever noticed that even now, the Finder isn’t much different than System 7s Finder? You know what the best thing Steve Jobs ever did? It was NeXT. You know what NeXT really was? It was Jobs’ 10-year sabbatical from the soul sucking tech industry of the ‘80s and ‘90s, that gave them the space to perfect the OS and the infrastructure that has powered our last 20 years. Even if Jobs didn’t see the future exactly as it would eventually turn out, he had the time and the taste to take a beautiful and stylish vector-based interface and build it on top of a UNIX like kernel, plus include the remainder of what he saw at Xerox - Interpersonal Computing. macOS and iOS are beautiful and powerful environments that are supported by a ton of developers. One cannot say the same for Windows or Linux. Android has no real shared  desktop environment. 

It’s now July 2018, and in a year or two when Apple finally gets its Mac offerings strong, and iOS and the A Series chips have discouraged  many Android phone manufacturers out of business, (when Apple, Google and possibly Microsoft are left standing - Samsung looses interest in smartphones partially because Google will push them out), the Apple hate trend will have run its course and these little software issues will long have been forgotten. IMO, of course.