This is a rant. But stay with me.
The butterfly keyboard on my very expensive MBP is a serious problem. I bought a Chromebook so I could type comfortably and reliably on a lappable device. But that's not all of it.
I reported a serious iOS accessibility problem to them 18 months ago, after living with the problem for a year prior to that — and it's still not fixed. But that's not all.
iCloud documents will frequently just refuse to download to a device, for no apparent reason.
There is also no way to remove an individual iCloud document from a device which is a really sinister way to ensure you need to buy more storage capacity than necessary. Generally, their cloud services are abysmal compared to the competition.
iTunes and sync are a hot mess, and lack of user-friendliness is legendary, but you all knew that already.
There's probably more, like the touchbar that we don't need waste time ridiculing any further.
But here's the thing:
What sent me over the edge today was noticing how Apple is promoting paywalled news stories in Apple News, to promote their new subscription service. They took a lovely benefit of owning an iPad and turned it into an expensive torture device in order to convince me to give them $10 a month. (And the irony is I already pay for NYTimes and WaPo subscriptions, which are the two biggies that don't participate in their pay scheme.)
I used to think Apple cared about the user. I used to think they cared about my experience as a user. The vaunted "user experience" was their mantra. Now it's profits. I'm not saying Google is any better, but damn Apple. Can't you create shareholder value and still provide fair value to your users? Or at least services and hardware that work?
The butterfly keyboard on my very expensive MBP is a serious problem. I bought a Chromebook so I could type comfortably and reliably on a lappable device. But that's not all of it.
I reported a serious iOS accessibility problem to them 18 months ago, after living with the problem for a year prior to that — and it's still not fixed. But that's not all.
iCloud documents will frequently just refuse to download to a device, for no apparent reason.
There is also no way to remove an individual iCloud document from a device which is a really sinister way to ensure you need to buy more storage capacity than necessary. Generally, their cloud services are abysmal compared to the competition.
iTunes and sync are a hot mess, and lack of user-friendliness is legendary, but you all knew that already.
There's probably more, like the touchbar that we don't need waste time ridiculing any further.
But here's the thing:
What sent me over the edge today was noticing how Apple is promoting paywalled news stories in Apple News, to promote their new subscription service. They took a lovely benefit of owning an iPad and turned it into an expensive torture device in order to convince me to give them $10 a month. (And the irony is I already pay for NYTimes and WaPo subscriptions, which are the two biggies that don't participate in their pay scheme.)
I used to think Apple cared about the user. I used to think they cared about my experience as a user. The vaunted "user experience" was their mantra. Now it's profits. I'm not saying Google is any better, but damn Apple. Can't you create shareholder value and still provide fair value to your users? Or at least services and hardware that work?
The whole idea of New+ was to avoid the paywall, which is the reason you get hesitation between NYT and Washington post not wanting to move....
