
A Declining Trajectory - j4mie
http://mattgemmell.com/a-declining-trajectory/
======
barney54
I take issue with "It was the very reliability of it — in user-friendly
design, as well as stability of functionality — that was the basis of my
choice in the first place..." With some Apple products this was true, with
others, not so much. iTunes is one example. To me, iTunes has always been a
mess. In the old days it would reliably update my iPod with new songs
purchased from iTunes, but that was about it and the usability was always
terrible.

~~~
charlesism
What do we mean by "old days" here? iTunes predates the iPod. In the old days,
I had very few qualms with iTunes. Currently, it's been 6 months since I
launched it (or rather _intentionally_ launched it).

~~~
cableshaft
Don't you just love when the Mac decides it wants to launch iTunes without you
asking it to, just because you plugged a device in?

~~~
charlesism
Yep, iTunes or Image Capture... annoying. I have a Pavlovian reaction now, and
I avoid plugging my phone into my Mac. While one can easily change the
preference to prevent it, I've been caught out too many times, from
reinstalling or using an alternate user account.

Having iTunes fire up while I'm using my Apple remote with VLC is even more
annoying. And since it tends to catch me when I have company, I generally
don't feel like pausing a film to fix it either.

------
mooreds
Trust, once lost, is hard to regain.

I agree that slowing down the upgrade cycle would be one way to regain the
trust, as long as the extra time was spent on quality assurance (in all its
forms) rather than new features.

Killing some product lines would be another (though be prepared for howls of
rage from the 20% that found the product useful).

It's tough, though, for me to give any advice to the folks running a large
company without their context.

~~~
danieldk
_I agree that slowing down the upgrade cycle would be one way to regain the
trust,_

And at the same time people are complaining that OS X rarely has any new
features. I agree that iCloud sucks. But I haven't seen a clear trend up or
down since I started using Macs in 2007, except perhaps fewer hardware issues.

~~~
randall
I have. The Mac Pro is garbage. GPU issues like I've never witnessed before.
Sample size of ~30 Mac Pros, 25% of them exhibit gpu issues.

~~~
charlesism
I'm hoping it's true that Apple will move their Pro machines to better support
external GPUs. Being able to swap out a fried graphics card without downtime
would be brilliant.

------
wibbleywobbley
I have a Surface Book and a 2013 MacBook Pro. Hardware wise, both are are what
I would consider to be best in class. Software wise there is absolutely no
comparison in terms of reliability. I generally like Windows 10, but I'd have
a really hard time depending on my Surface Book as my only computer.

~~~
lmm
FWIW my Surface Book works perfectly.

~~~
wibbleywobbley
I think the Surface Book hardware is fine -- it's just dodgy drivers and
Windows 10 updates that cause tons of issues.

With my MBP I can close it and throw it in my bag without a second thought. I
wouldn't dare try that with the SB because nine times out of then I'll end up
with a dead battery.

~~~
mercer
I'm really surprised this is still a thing. One of the first things I loved
about switching to a MacBook was that the sleep/hibernate functionality 'just
worked', while it almost never did on the Windows laptop I had before that.

This was __10 years ago __, and even _then_ I didn't understand why a crucial
feature like this wasn't given more attention.

------
mildbow
Yup.

My first macbook pro lasted ~4 years, then I sold it for ~50% retail. Second
macbook pro died after 2.5 years with a screen hardware issue. Third, and
probably last, macbook pro is dying after 1.5 years.

If I was a conspiracy nut, I would say they don't care about declining quality
because otherwise people wouldn't buy the next release as replacement.

I'm getting off the Apple bandwagon for my next laptop.

~~~
danieldk
To repeat the cliche: the plural of anecdote is not data.

I am pretty sure that there are as many people with counter-examples.

E.g. I haven't had a Mac with issues since 2010. 2008: MacBook white: plastic
starts discoloring, the rubber starts peeling. 2008: Mac Mini DVD drives gives
the ghost after a year or so. 2009: MacBook 13" aluminium has broken DRAM
SIMMs.

~~~
maccard
Yep - Still running an Early 2011 Macbook pro just fine here - had a
motherboard failure but was repaired by apple under an extended warranty for
that particular issue. Other than that, no issues.

~~~
ssharp
I'm still running a 2008 Macbook Pro with no issues other than a battery
replacement. I did upgrade the RAM and replaced the SuperDrive with a disk
drive and the disk drive with an SSD.

------
smoyer
I stopped buying Apple products when they stopped updating iOS on my iPad
after just a couple years. It's now over six years old and is still perfect
for many tasks but since it's stuck on iOS 5 and has bugs in its HTML
rendering, there are an increasing number of web-sites that crash the browser.
If I'm going to replace a tablet every year or two, I'm going to buy sub-$100
Android devices.

~~~
endemic
I think that's part of the learning curve. Early devices were just too
underpowered. But compare with iPhone 5: released in 2012, and still running
the most recent OS (albeit somewhat more slowly). And Apple usually has pretty
extensive OS support for their non-handheld hardware too (I'm still rocking a
2010 MBP).

------
zeveb
I've thought that Apple has been in a rut or declining for over a decade.
Their hardware designs are trite & a little ugly; their UI just is neither
attractive nor easy on the eyes; their cloud services don't really deliver
privacy and security (iCloud isn't end-to-end encrypted, and iMessage allows
Apple to MitM).

At a certain point, one has to ask: why pay the premium? Why not just use
Linux?

------
ebbv
Another day another "Apple isn't what it used to be and I hate their products
now" diatribe.

If you don't like their products buy someone else's. If you don't like your
Apple Watch stop using it.

I use an iMac and a MacBook Pro for work and they serve me fantastically.
Sierra has a couple weird things (like it doesn't automatically load your SSH
identities after reboot) but it seems fine. iOS 10 has been fine as well and
my new iPhone 7 Plus is great.

If there's something actually wrong with your hardware, take it in for repairs
instead of writing a blog post that will accomplish nothing.

~~~
destitude
Matt is long standing Mac citizen/Mac Developer. I rate his opinion much
higher then just some blog poster. He wants Apple to change back to what made
it great. How many other choices are out there especially on the desktop?

~~~
ebbv
> He wants Apple to change back to what made it great.

If that's what he wants this blog post is really short on actual suggestions
or details of specific problems and big on just general "Apple sucks now, it
was good before." which is useless.

I'd have a lot more patience for this type of article if he actually went into
detail like "My MacBook used to get 10 hours of battery life before updating
to Sierra now it only gets 8." or "My wife doesn't like her iPhone 7 because
she has had problems with Wifi connectivity and battery life." instead of
"She's frustrated with her iPhone 7." Which, again, is useless complaining.

~~~
jonas21
He does list quite a few issues:

> My Watch is misbehaving too, regularly losing its ability to track heart-
> rate and thus update in-progress workout calories for ten or twenty minutes
> at a time. Its battery life is vastly reduced. My iPhone’s battery widget
> shifts itself around on the widgets screen, and regularly vanishes
> altogether. There’s an unfamiliar street-address hovering in the Spotlight
> screen that I don’t recognise, beneath the app suggestions. It’s hit-or-miss
> as to whether the emoji suggestions feature works in the new on-screen
> keyboard. I quickly disabled my Apple Music trial after it deleted several
> of my rare live versions of Dire Straits tracks. And Apple Support finally
> conceded that my immaculate, obsessively-cared-for 2015 MacBook was beyond
> repair after three warranty parts-replacements

\---

Apple's not dumb. I'm sure they're already aware of these issues. It's a
question of whether they care enough about quality to fix them, even if it
means delaying a launch or cutting products.

In that respect, the author is doing the best he can to help Apple fix them --
by letting them know that long-time fans do care about the issues, and view it
as a change in their relationship with Apple.

~~~
ebbv
Yeah there's a couple examples but the article is mostly just general griping,
which, like I said, I'm bored of.

I should be clear; there are plenty of things to complain about with Apple.
They aren't a perfect company and their products aren't perfect. But we see
articles like this one make the rounds several times a year and it's always
the same "Apple's not as good as it was X years ago!"

