Oh god no... Apple is far too keen on removing advanced settings in the name of accessibility. I don't want them anywhere near Photoshop or Illustrator.
Not necessarily true. Filemaker (a professional database application) is owned by Apple. It has the same range of power and functionality as Photoshop. Of course, it is run as a subsidiary and not by Cupertino directly. If Apple bought Adobe, I would be content if they simply made it a requirement that new releases were rolled out for OS X at the same time (or prior) to other platforms.
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Lets focus on the OS itself now. For power users, Spaces was fantastic. As was Exposé. Then 10.7 came around and it was all gone. There was no show-all-windows exposé and spaces was removed. Now, you're expected to only have a single screen, because, well, Apple said so.
That's weird... I've got Spaces and Expose on both my 10.7 and 10.8 systems. Are you sure you've turned them on?
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These are things that most consumers won't know (or even care about), but here's the issue: The people who do care, hate Apple for it. Not only did they manage to turn a computer into an appliance, but they managed to remove anything useful about it at the same time.
Steve Jobs (and Apple) have been saying for years that computers
should be appliances. This is not news. Most people
want their computers to be appliances. It is geeks, nerds, and tech-heads that want to fiddle and play and muck about under the hood of their computers. But these people are not 'most' people. The majority of users want their computer to just do stuff. They don't care how it works... they just want it to fetch their emails, send cat photos, etc etc
And for the most part, I think Apple has been hugely successful. People can create amazing things on their Macs without ever understanding a single thing about how it is done. Whether this is a good thing - the not knowing bit - or a bad thing is open to debate, I'll admit. Personally I prefer knowing. But I do appreciate that I can create wonderful stuff first, and do the figuring out later.
But - this is not news... Apple has been trying to make consumer Macs into appliances for as long as they've existed. Sometimes they go too far, of course.
Of course, when the consumer goes to buy a mac they'll love it, and probably won't even realize what they're missing.
What they are missing are the headaches of having to learn a whole new field instead of just working in their chosen field.
Besides... that's what makes us tech-heads useful and full of cookies. People calling us up to figure out something.