Apple is vexing me
I really like Apple and in general my experience with them is consistently better than almost any other vendor I’ve dealt with. Nevertheless there’s something about Apple that is a little insane making. They’re single minded desire to control everything has bad and good points.
For example, check this out. I’ve got my old 20″ iMac. It was great - intel and everything, but I recently upgraded to the new iMacs and wanted to wipe and reinstall the OS so I could give it to my wife to use. This should be easy, right? I’ve got a few OSX install discs here and have friends who have them should those not work. You know what? It turns out, literally dozens of tries later, that the disks are specifically tied to the model of mac you have. Not just the processor, or even the line, but the specific model, as far as I can tell. I tried using installs that were for intel iMac and none of them worked. I literally can’t reinstall the OS!
Now, what the hell is the problem with this? It isn’t like there’s anything besides a mac that I can install OSX on. Why the heck should it be so hard? I already paid Apple for the privilege, I even have a bought copy of OSX but it can’t be installed because it’s only for PPC. In fact you can’t actually buy a copy of OSX for intel. You can’t buy a copy. Do I really need to take my machine in to the Genius Bar for the privilege of reinstalling the OS? Jiminy.
Or the iPhone. We’ve all heard the horror stories of folks who have gone abroad with their iPhones only to come home with a phone bill thousands of dollars strong. Fortunately Apple seems to have provided a way to turn off EDGE when you are roaming internationally to help prevent that. But what the hell? It’s an all or nothing proposition? Unfortunately, yes. The iPhone uses your data indiscriminately and in ways that you literally have no control over - there is nothing you can do on your phone to affect your data usage even one iota, except stop using the web browser. But I ran an experiment over a few days where I didn’t web browse at all (very tough to do! I’m already so used to being able to check things out at the drop of a hat) and the phone was rocking 1MB a day. Which is $20 in AT&T speak.
Part of this is just that the iPhone is chatty - your visual voicemail goes over data not voice. And all your mail obviously goes over data. The stupid thing is that because the iPhone is locked down the only mail app you can use is Apple’s which downloads, more or less, the entirety of every piece of mail you get (except ones with big attachments). That’s a lot of downloading for most people. On my old Treo, I used the wonderful (if crash prone) chattermail which would let you specify exactly how many bytes you wanted to get of each mail - enough to get all the headers and maybe a little bit of the body and it’d let you download the rest on a case by case basis. This is perfect, I just don’t read every piece of mail on my phone so it was a great way to manage data consumption.
Or even this whole turning off EDGE. Why is it just for international travel?? Is it really inconceivable that I might just not want to have EDGE running for a bit? Would it have been that hard? No, it wouldn’t have been, but because Apple decided not to allow it, it is now impossible.
And the double tap of the button? Yeah, it’s a good idea, except for the fact that again Apple has hobbled it so that it only can take you to your favourites or back home. Why wouldn’t they let it send you to any of the apps? It isn’t like Apple doesn’t know what apps are supposed to be on your phone! And beyond that it only works after you unlock it, so double tap to doesn’t do anything before it’s unlocked. So you still have to tap, slide to unlock and then double tap. Annoying.
All said, Apple’s got a lot of PR issues to deal with, but I don’t think really it’s done anything wrong. The iPhone price drop ruffled some feathers, but that’s just how it goes in technology, that I got anything back is gravy and more than I’d expected. This whole thing where it’s battling iPhone hackers and bricking phones, is problematic, but ultimately not surprising. Not surprising especially because they said that’s exactly what was going to happen. There’s a lot of outrage and calls that Apple is stupid for shooting itself in the foot by closing down avenues that are making the iPhone better. But really, is it surprising? Apple’s said that the iPhone was a closed system and it’s not like the hackers are doing something Apple itself couldn’t provide in a heartbeat and better if it wanted to - Apple wants it closed for a reason and if they were going to stand back and allow this to happen, why wouldn’t they just come out and offer an SDK instead? It was optimistic thinking that they wouldn’t do anything. Hopefully they’ll still launch the SDK soon.
It all points to the issue that Steve Jobs is a control freak and he needs to lighten up a little. Not much just a little, I mean clearly he’s got the special sauce that makes Apple products work better than everything else and I don’t want to mess around with that. But I wouldn’t mind seeing some more choice whether a free for all or else even just Apple blessed 3rd party developers making some iPhone apps. Apple is free to lock down it’s stuff, and people are free to look elsewhere for their goods.
October 8th, 2007 at 7:47 pm
Is this something new with the install disks? I’ve used Mac Mini install discs to reinstall one of the original Powerbook lines. I had an eMac, use MacMinis and PowerBooks/MBP’s at work, and I thought the only incompatibility I ever ran into was processor type. Are you sure there’s not some other issue going on with your particular situation?
As for the iPhone, the things you outline are exactly why I didn’t buy one and don’t plan to for a couple years. Even putting aside that Apple tethered the iPhone to one of the worst cell carriers EVAR (IMHO), historically whenever they enter a new product space they have growing pains like everyone else.
Unlike everyone else, they have a megalomaniac/supra-genius at the helm who (if reports are to be believed) may not take suggestions or criticism well and is notoriously infamous for being the final decision maker for, well just about everything. Not a good combination. (can you say iMovie 08?)
I’m a huge Apple fan, but enough of a realist to realize that El Jobso is both a blessing and a curse at times.
October 9th, 2007 at 10:52 am
Now if someone hadn’t tossed the install discs to begin with he wouldn’t be having this problem. ;-) I store my MBP discs in a safe place and keep a copy in my daily commute bag at all times. Not sure when it began but it seems like Apple’s been making the install discs model-specific for some time now.
October 10th, 2007 at 10:56 am
This falls into why people like me don’t use macs, even from graphics. The simple fact that you can not build your own mac has always been crazy to me. They have great products and great minds designing their stuff, but the lack of integration with other merchandise is still a mystery to me. Not only would they make more money selling parts AND machines rather than one or the other but they might actually learn something and apply it new products. I want a better graphics card, or a better cooling system? I install one. I don’t have to sacrifice something else for the money to go get a new system. Mac heads would argue, well thats because the mac system wouldn’t need a new cooling system or graphics cards, but I say BS. Maybe for 2 years, then you want to change something up. I drool at the day I can go out and buy a mac OS and some mac parts and put em on my ol pc :) Anyway, good read.
October 11th, 2007 at 10:05 am
Well, Macs aren’t really for DIY’ers like you and I. They’re for lazybones like Fe who just want to unbox and go. ;-) And since Apple’s targeting that type of consumer, keeping the Mac relatively locked down works better from a support standpoint.
October 11th, 2007 at 9:54 pm
Ahhh the support side I did not even think of. And true, Fe takes lazy to a level most can not even appreciate, aside from Garfield and maybe Jabba. I think if they had decent help pages online, like they do now, the DIY’ers would probably need far less customer service or support than the customer they are used to now. I don’t know, I just want to have all the options i can when building a machine, and it’s a shame to have to only wonder what cool hard drives or graphics packages they would create if they were designing parts.
-P
October 15th, 2007 at 7:38 am
Michael, I believe it is new - I think it is a special sauce they cooked up especially for the intel macs. As for the iPhone… well, despite everything I said, I still find it to be the best phone I’ve ever owned. Well, I did really love my old nokia sliders from the late 90’s…
As for laziness and throwing away discs… well, I wish I had been lazy enough not to throw away those freaking disks. But, I was never really a hardware DIY’er. I fear and hate hardware, so generally speaking just deal with what I’m given, and fortunately Apple generally gives me just what I want.
And, I’m increasingly moving towards keeping everything on external drives and just using internal drives for the OS and other unimportant things.