
My 2018 Apple Report Card - tosh
https://daringfireball.net/2019/02/my_2018_apple_report_card
======
emsy
Gruber is way too generous with Apple here. I like Apple products a lot but
there are too many problems to love them:

The throwaway design of the products should downrank environmental to a C. I'd
give them a D but they show real efforts in recycling and ethical material
sourcing.

iPhones are getting too expensive. They give memory size options they can use
to upsell, rather than what customers need, and there are no options for
people who want smaller handsets other than buy outdated devices or switch to
Android. They don't ship features like Smart HDR on their 1 year old (!)
device, to create artificial USPs.

Even the D on the Macs seem generous when you consider they still act like
they did nothing wrong with the Macbook keyboard, the Air/Mac Mini price
increase mirrors the iPhone's and we've never heard again of the new Mac Pro,
while they STILL sell the trash can.

The watch is fine, should've gotten an A imo.

Apple has gotten better with services, but a B is undeserved. Apple Music is
still worse than spotify, iCloud is OK at best and Siri still sucks.

Apple could rule gaming but for whatever reason choose not to. That should've
been graded and get them a C.

I have a lot more points and nuance, but these are the points just came to my
mind.

~~~
interpol_p
I know everyone says Siri sucks, but I use it hundreds of times a day now and
it's just... working. Though my use consists entirely sending messages, asking
to play artists or music tracks, and making reminders

I get that as a trivia and knowledge service it's pretty sucky, but as a voice
assistant it's doing a good job

~~~
emsy
Yeah I use Siri for Homekit, reminders etc. too and it works great. But that's
because I've learned what _not_ to ask and that sucks. Checking for
restaurants, shop opening times, cinema schedules works so well with Google
assistant (in Germany). With Siri it's a game of chance. Asking basic
questions about what distance two cities are turn into a game of how to pose
the question so siri understands me.

~~~
interpol_p
Absolutely. I wouldn’t rely on Siri for those things either. But I have come
to realise that I use it hundreds of times per day to do messaaging, music,
weather and reminders. So I’ve gotten some significant value out of the
service

------
tonyedgecombe
Both the MacBook and iMac lines look confused to me. Why are they still
selling iMacs with hard disks rather than SSDs? What is the point of the iMac
Pro when they have a Mac Pro? Why is the new MAC Mini so expensive, it used to
be the budget option. There doesn’t seem to be much of a strategy around their
desktops, it’s as if nobody is in charge.

Also why can’t they offer on site service for a £10,000 desktop? Lenovo can do
it.

~~~
lisper
> Why are they still selling iMacs with hard disks rather than SSDs?

The iMac has driven me crazy since the day it was introduced, way back when
the display was still a CRT. What is the point of integrating a computer and a
monitor in the same enclosure? These two products have completely different
life cycles. The iMac forces me to replace them together for, what,
aesthetics? Bah.

~~~
jinushaun
iMac users don’t upgrade their computers. It’s an appliance like a microwave.

I switched to an iMac after I realized that every time I tried to upgrade my
desktop, everything was incompatible with the new stuff, forcing me to
effectively upgrade everything at once and build a new computer. This kept
happening every 4 years.

I could have avoided this with incremental upgrades, but who has time for
that?

~~~
Yetanfou
Strange, the last incompatibility-problems I saw were those caused by
disappearing interfaces - things like parallel printer and SCSI ports - but
those are all long gone. If I'm not using my HP SJ5200 scanner (with parallel
and USB interface) - it is because the thing is slower than the somewhat newer
version I came across at a flea market, not because it is incompatible. That
thing is probably around 20 years old if not more but it works fine. The same
goes for more or less all other 'old' external hardware - internal is often
hampered by the absence of internal PCI (or VESA local bus or ISA or what have
you) slots - so I can't really identify with this idiom of 'everything needing
to be upgraded after a desktop refresh'.

It might help that I use Linux and as such am spared from forced upgrade
trajectories.

------
threatofrain
John Gruber praises iCloud as one of the best things but do people really feel
that way? I feel Dropbox or Google Photos / Drive is way better on software
experience.

~~~
saagarjha
Dropbox and Google Drive aren’t great on Apple’s platforms. Files integration
on iOS makes them somewhat passable (though, they don’t quite work right there
either), and on macOS Dropbox is horribly invasive while Google Drive is
poorly maintained and slow :(

~~~
tonyedgecombe
True although iCloud on Windows isn't great either.

------
mpweiher
> [iPad/MBP] On. Off. On. Off. Instantly.

I actually remember an early WWDC where someone from the leadership team, I
think Bertrand Serlet, demonstrated exactly this with an iBook. It was a
pretty big deal at the time, so it used to work.

For me, the biggest complaint with the new phones is that they're all way to
big. The XS is the smallest, but I don't really want to spend on the flagship
when it's a compromise for me.

If they'd add a slightly smaller XR, that'd probably be the ticket. Or a high
end SE/X... ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

------
jinushaun
I was expecting Gruber to give out A+ on all fronts based on the things he
posts about Apple, but it was a fair report card.

I’m glad he called out the shopping experience in stores. I thought roaming
checkout would be convenient, but it’s maddening having to comb through the
store just to find an available sales associate to buy a small thing.

Apple used to have dedicated checkout plus roaming checkout. Now they only
have roaming checkout.

~~~
Tomte
> I was expecting Gruber to give out A+ on all fronts based on the things he
> posts about Apple

That's a common sentiment on Hacker News.

In fact, Gruber is regularly criticizing Apple, often quite harshly.

Just not on HN's pet peeves.

------
addicted
One thing I don’t see mentioned enough is that Apple’s changes to the iPhone
means that increasingly even minor issues with the phone lead to Apple
replacing the hardware, instead of the part that is broken.

And the replacement is always a refurbished phone which is usually terrible in
its own way, and comes with a terrible warranty.

This really hurts Apple’s service, which I guess would fall under retail.

------
_-___________-_
Link should probably be changed to
[https://daringfireball.net/2019/02/my_2018_apple_report_card](https://daringfireball.net/2019/02/my_2018_apple_report_card)
rather than linking to the homepage.

