I don’t think Mac users should switch, but I can’t recommend any newbies join MacShip.
Aperture users abandoned. Sierra’s scary data shifting behaviors. No updates to Mac Mini or Pro. Airport routers dropped — leaving no AirPlay or network backup options. Mac App store rotting away.
And, above all, the price of the “mainstream” MacBook Pro laptop: $2000.00. Dell has a good enough laptop for $1350 with twice the SSD capacity.
Apple makes a nice pocket computer, but otherwise they’re kinda nuts.
If you’ve ever wondered why healthcare institutions can’t easily share data between computer systems, just take a look at Calendaring in iOS, OS X, Outlook 2010 and Google Android/Chrome.
Google went down the road of calendar overlays. You can have as many calendars as you like and you can share them across a Google Apps domain or between Google users. Public calendars are available for subscription. My current Google Calendar calendar list holds twenty distinct calendars of which 8 belong to my family. (One for each family member, one for entire family, a couple of parent-only calendars that the kids don’t see.) In Google’s world, which is consistent across Chrome and Android, shared calendars can be read-only or read-write. Google supports invitations by messaging.
I love how Google does this, but I’m a geek.
I’ve not used any modern versions of Outlook, but Outlook 2010 also supported Calendar subscription. They didn’t do overlays though, every Calendar stood alone. I never found this very useful.
Apple did things differently. Not only differently from everyone else, but also differently between iOS, OS X, and iCloud. OS X supports calendar overlays and subscriptions, but the support of Google Calendar subscriptions is weird (there are two ways to view them and both are poorly documented). iOS has a very obscure calendar subscription feature that I suspect nobody has ever used, but it does support “family sharing” for up to 6 people/calendars (also barely documented). There’s an even more obscure way to see multiple overlay Google calendars on iOS, but really you should just buy Calendars 5.app.
iCloud’s web calendar view doesn’t have any UI support for Calendar sharing, I’ve not tested what it actually does. Apple is proof that a dysfunctional corporation can be insanely profitable.
All three corporations (four if you treat Apple as a split personality) more-or-less implement the (inevitably) quirky CalDAV standard and can share invitations. Of course Microsoft’s definition of “all-day” doesn’t match Apple or Google’s definition, and each implements unique calendar “fields” (attributes) that can’t be shared.
Google comes out of this looking pretty good — until you try to find documentation for your Android phone and its apps. Some kind of reference, like Google’s Android and Nexus user guides. As of Dec 2015 that link eventually leads to a lonely PDF published almost five years ago. That’s about it.
I don’t think modern IT’s productivity failure is a great mystery.
This is a weird time in software. Lots of things are going away, but few new things are appearing.
As best I can tell Windows software died around 2005. Based on what I’ve seen over the past year, particularly in the Mac App Store, OS X software died around 2011. The Chrome and Safari extensions I’ve looked for, like Pinboard extensions today, were often last updated in 2011 — around the time Google Reader died.
The iOS app store is such a well known mess that my fellow app.net (adn) geeks can’t find anything new to say, except that iTunes 12 is probably worse. Aperture died 6 months ago and yet is still being sold. Yosemite is still months away from release ready. My Google Custom Search Engines return fewer good results. Google Plus is moribund. Windows 8 might be fine but no-one I know uses it.
I can’t speak to Android, except for second hand reports of increasing malware problems. If I strain to find a bright spot I’d say Google Maps is improving in some ways, but regressing in others. Ok, there’s the malware industry. It’s flourishing.
I seem to remember something like this in the 90s, both before and after Mosaic. Long time ago though, I may be confounding eras.
My best guess is that our software development is a lagging casualty of the Great Recession. Good software takes years to create, so the crash of 2009 probably played out in software around 2011. The effects were somewhat offset by involuntary entrepreneurs creating small but excellent products. The Great Recession’s effects started to fade in 2014, but that meant many Creatives were sucked back into profitable employment. The projects they’re working on now won’t bear fruit until 2015 and 2016.
The Great Recession is probably the main driver, but there are synergistic contributors. Apple was probably coming apart at the seams when Jobs fell ill, and it now behaves like a corporation riven by civil war. The stress of the mobile transition, and the related transformation of the software market from geek to mass user, hit everyone. I’ve little insight into how well ad-funded software development is working, but Google’s disastrous Plus effort suggests it’s not all that healthy.
The good news is that there’s hope. Google may turn away from Plus. Facebook is going to have to find new revenue streams. There’s a storm building among Apple’s customers that Cook can’t possibly ignore. Most of all, the Great Recession is fading.
Here’s to 2015. Hang in there.
In an alternate universe….
Today in a terse but clear posting on the Aperture web site Tim Cook apologized for the difficult decision to end Apple’s competition in the professional and prosumer photography market. He promised to fully cooperate with Adobe on a migration path to Lightroom that would convert Aperture non-destructive edit metadata to Lightroom format. All image metadata would be preserved. Group, Album and Smart Album functionality would suffer, but Adobe promised to improve their tools to ease the transition. Aperture sales were immediately discontinued. Support through Yosemite and ongoing RAW image updates for new cameras was promised through 2016. Users were saddened but appreciated Apple’s professional approach….
That would be a pleasant universe.
Meanwhile, in the real world, the announcement that Aperture was dead, and that Apple was effectively abandoning professional photography, appeared via Jim Dalrymple’s blog. Aperture remained on sale in the App Store while muddled Apple clarifications showed up in various blogs. Some said saying there would be support through Yosemite, others hinted at helping Adobe with migration to Lightroom. As end-of-life announcements go it was a complete screw-up.
Oh - but users of Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro “should not worry about their apps—they will continue as normal”.
Right.
The impact on heavy users of Aperture is heard to overstate. That’s why Gruber’s “that’s the way the cookie crumbles” earned his feed a Gordon-death-click. Maybe I’ll return someday, but The Loop covers the same ground and is a bit less irritating - albeit equally uncritical of Apple. I’m sure Gruber is devastated.
I won’t dwell on the migration path ahead, though it makes my excruciating transition from iPhoto look like a walk in the park. As of today none of my 20,000 or so non-destructive image edits will convert to Lightroom, much less album/image relationships, image/project, folder/image/project, folder/project comments, geo-tags and more. I won’t even mention Videos (which were never well supported in Aperture or iPhoto).
I’m not doing anything for a while, but one immediate impact is that I won’t be buying any camera that Aperture doesn’t currently support. If Aperture will indeed work on Yosemite then I’ve got years to convert — and I won’t be upgrading to Yosemite if there’s any doubt about Aperture support. (Which means no major Apple hardware purchases next year.)
Beyond Apple’s announcement fiasco, I was struck by the generally dismissive commentary — as though it were a trivial move to go to Lightroom. Happily, now that I’ve killed Daring Fireball, I can say the blogs I follow are relatively realistic about the impact of Aperture’s demise.
It’s not just Aperture users who have grounds to worry. Given Apple’s software record over the past 5 years (iBooks, iMovie, Podcast, Aperture 1, etc) what’s the chance Photos will be safe for serious iPhoto users before 2018? iPhoto users are back in Apple photo management limbo.
On a larger front I’ve written before of Data Lock, and of how the “Cloud” is making data lock even stronger. I knew the risk I took with iPhoto 2 11 years ago [1]; a path that has led to the dead end of Photos.app.
The way Apple executed Aperture’s termination is a rich lesson in the consequences of data lock (a risk I understood when I signed up with iPhoto long years ago). Does anyone think it will be possible to move from Apple’s next generation Photo app to Lightroom? That’s a far harder problem than moving from Aperture to Lightroom — and that’s nearly inconceivable at the moment.
I can’t do much about the way Apple handled this transition — other than spare myself the temptation of a camera purchase. I can, however, reduce my purchases of Apple products — especially Apple software. I have no faith in Apple at all.
[1] From my ancient web page on digital photography:
Problems: iPhoto 2 through 5
iPhoto has longstanding problems. I knew of them when I started with iPhoto 2, but I took the gamble that the large user community, and the prominence of Apple's multimedia iLife suite, would pressure Apple to improve the product. That hasn't worked. If you're a PC user you should not switch to a Mac for digital photo management, instead I'd recommend Picasa (free from Google). If you're a Mac user, take a close look at iView MediaPro -- though that's a risky choice too (small market, hard for vendor to compete against iLife).
If you proceed with iPhoto, know the risks …
Data Lock - You can check in, but you can't check out.
You can export images -- though it's tricky to export both originals and modifications. You can't, however, migrate your albums, smart albums, comments, keywords, captions, etc. etc. I thought iView MediaPro would take advantage of this and sell and import utility, but they haven't. So when you use iPhoto, you marry iPhoto…
Update 6/28/2014: Clark Goble responds with more eloquence …
as Apple pushes more and more the lock-in of iCloud, of iBooks, and of iTunes video, why should we trust Apple if they don’t have a way to get the data out? This is the thing that some activists have preached for years and most of us have discounted.5 But now I think it’s a real question Apple has unintentionally made very significant. Why should I trust Apple not to lose interest in iBooks if sales drop? (Which apparently they have) iTunes Music isn’t a big deal because there’s no DRM. But the rest? Why should I store files in iWork?
Can we trust Apple? The cavalier way Apple is responding is telling us, no we can’t. And that’s a shame because they could easily have made this announcement in a way that said we could
I particularly appreciated his footnotes…
… I remember Apple fans ridiculing people trusting Microsoft with Plays For Sure DRM when that product collapsed and people lost their data. Many of those same people are pretty flippant about locked data today. ↩
I doubt rumors of Apple adding a Lightroom export will include being able to port both your raw data files and the adjustments you made to the files. You’ll either have to export as TIFFs or lose your adjustments simply because the math won’t be exactly the same. Heck, I’m skeptical they’ll export anything beyond metadata and files…
I was in an Apple Store yesterday with a burned-through seven year old power adapter cable.
Our much abused power adapter came with a MacBook purchased in November 2006 [1]. That MacBook runs Lion today; very slowly at first but with various tweaks and fixes it's become acceptable for undemanding tasks. [2] The MacBook is in turn newer than the July 2005 G5 iMac [3] my son used this morning for his MacKiev Mavis Beacon typing tutorial. That eight year old machine runs pretty well, we barely notice the slowly progressing 5 year old display discoloration.
Trust me, this is all relevant. I'm going somewhere.
At the app store I was told that Apple's policy is not to service anything more than six years old, regardless of recalls. The tech then gave me a brand new L-shaped power adapter which works well [4]. He may have been influenced by my very long purchase record [5].
I walked out of the store another happy customer, and I didn't look at anything. There was nothing there I was interested in.
Let me repeat that. There was nothing in the Apple Store I was interested in.
That has never happened before. I've also never had a seven year old laptop that's used every day.
It's not that I have everything Apple makes [7]. My new Kobo Glo is a definite compromise; I'd love a less costly iPad Mini, or perhaps an affordable iPad Mini retina, or even a thinner, lighter iPad retina at today's price. Alas, the things Apple makes that we don't already own aren't the things I want from them - or they're too expensive [8]. Gordon's Laws of Acquisition leave me nothing to look at [10].
This tech lethargy problem isn't unique to Apple. There's no tech hardware anyone makes that we really want or need [9]. And it's not just hardware, there's very little software on the market that interests me.
We are in a curiously quiet time for tech lust.
See also
- fn -
[1] It's interesting to scroll through posts around then, like my Feb 2007 tech.kateva.org posts. My blog posts then were more like my app.net shares today.
[2] Mostly tweaks or fixes to Spotlight and Time Capsule backup, some Lion features disabled, some states not saved. I switched as part of the very (very) painful MobileMe to iCloud transition.
[3] Wow, that was a problematic machine. The heat / fan issues in the G5 iMac line were appalling, not to mention the epidemic of bad capacitors.
[4] Has a thicker cord with more reinforcement. See also Apple's article - Mac notebooks: Reducing cable strain on your MagSafe power adapter
[5] Now somewhat inexplicably associated with a single AppleID (discuss), though he couldn't see it there. He had to use my home phone to lookup records.
[6] There are a lot of things I'd like to see, not least vastly better Calendaring and a faster, more useable Aperture, or better replacements for Google's tainted offerings. Problem is, they don't exist. I could probably make good use of an industrial video editing tool, but I don't have time to use one.
[7] I also have two modern Macs that will probably run OS X Mavericks fairly well. Eventually we'll replace the G5 iMac, but it's not like we're in a rush. I'm not even in a rush to get Mavericks, and I rather like the sound of it.
[8] Between the war with Samsung and China's rapid wage growth I don't expect prices to fall.
[9] Things seem even worse for Windows families. The only purchases I hear of are 15yos building gaming machines the way my generation assembled stereos.
[10] Ok, an Apple TV would be useful, but then I'd have to replace my 25 yo SONY CRT with the rabbit ears and the A/D converter. That's a historic artifact.
An App.net thread reminded me of some analysis I did in the 90s on what device sizes we should build our Cloud ASP service against. That analysis focused on pockets and purses; it came in an era when men still had shirt pockets and Jeff Hawkins carried around wooden models of the Pilot until he settled on one that fit his.
Since that time our devices have evolved a bit -- thought not as much as many think. We had slates in the 90s too -- they were just heavy and ran Windows variants or Windows thin client OS. Our clothing may have changed more [3]. Shirt pockets are gone, suit jackets are less common, and pants pockets are larger. Pocket location may also have shifted as men have gotten fatter around the world. (I don't know what's popular in China).
This produces some interesting size options based on clothing. Here's my own personal list of exemplar devices for each transport option with a gender assignment based on typical American practice.
| Gender | Clothing | Device |
|---|---|---|
| b | None [1] | watch |
| m | Traditional pants front pocket | iPhone 5S |
| m | Expansive pant front pocket | Samsung Galaxy [2] |
| f | Purse | Samsung Galaxy |
| f | Purse | iPad Mini |
| b | Backpack / shoulder bag | iPad Mini |
| b | Backpack / shoulder bag | MacBook Air 11" |
| b | Briefcase | iPad (full) + Logitech Kb/Case |
| b | Briefcase | MacBook Air 13" |
Running through the list, and disregarding whether one wants a phone or not, device options are probably best determined by one's clothing habits. The list also suggests the women should disproportionately prefer the Samsung Galaxy to the iPhone but that men should split 50/50 -- so the Samsung Galaxy should outsell the iPhone 5 about 1.5:1.
If the iPad Mini provided voice services the list predicts the combination of iPhone 5 and iPad Mini(v) would equal or exceed Samsung Galaxy sales.
This analysis suggests a narrow niche for the 11" Air. I have one and I like it, but if I were buying an Air today I'd get the 13". If I'm carrying a briefcase I might as well get the 13" Air or an iPad with Logitech Kb/Case. The 13" Air vs. iPad tradeoff is an interesting one -- for many travel cases I think the iPad wins on power and bandwidth consumption -- but see the comments -- Charlie Sross and Martin Steiger disagree. I can imagine a future version of OS X and OS X hardware with iPad like power and bandwidth use -- in which case I'd go Air.
[1] Swimsuit, running gear, nudist colony.
[2] I haven't seen mention of this, but my understanding is that Android handles variant screen geometry more easily than iOS.
[3] Our devices must be influencing our clothing styles by now.
I have just returned from a conference where I ran R and Python code on my 11" MacBook Air. It did the job well; Mountain Lion's Full Screen and Mission Control features add real value to this small screen lightweight laptop.
So for this trip the Air was a great device. For most trips though, a full sized iPad with a Logitech keyboard case would be a better work option.
Curiously, this has nothing to do with the touchscreen; it's about other hardware and iOS design decisions. The iPad's advantages include:
Travel is characterized by limited power and limited bandwidth. The AIr is a lovely laptop, but compared to the iPad it's built for a world of ample power and bandwidth. Today, even excluding the touch interface, the Max iPad is a better traveling device for most use cases.
Apple could make the choice harder though. They could make a future version of OS X a much better bandwidth consumer, and they could provide an option to throttle multitasking. The iPad would still have a large power advantage, but this make for a great OS X upgrade.
See also:
In an otherwise uncontroversial rant about Apple's net service reliability failures I came across a glaring bit of conventional stupidity ...
When is iCloud going to be more reliable? — Erica Ogg
... To be fair, iCloud has been a massive improvement over MobileMe...
No, iCloud hasn't been an improvement. I suspect Erica never used MobileMe, so she's only repeating what she's read elsewhere.
I used MobileMe, and I've used iCloud. MobileMe was very unreliable when it launched, but by the time it ended it was fairly reliable at what it did across both Windows and Mac clients. In part this was because a lot of bugs had been wrung out of the clients and because Apple stopped adding features.
iCloud was a major regression for MobileMe users, not least because Lion was a wreck. Even under Mountain Lion it's probably not as reliable as MobileMe was towards the end -- when Apple stopped trying to sell it.
So will things get better? I'm optimistic, because Apple's share price has been falling as the company is pummeled by bored journalists and geeks alike. This is a good thing; suffering helps humility, and humility may lead to new thinking on customer service and reliability. We don't need radical changes to OS X -- Mountain Lion is a good enough platform for at least another decade. We do need reliability, and thoughtful improvements.
When something goes wrong on a computer, we all turn to Google.
Almost all. I suppose Apple employees have to use Bing.
I can usually find OS X fixes fairly easily, even though when I need an OS X fix it's often a pretty obscure issue.
Windows 7 is another story. I rarely find solutions. Searches run into unanswered questions, paywalls, and wrong answers; it doesn't matter if I use Bing or Google.
Why is OS X search so much better than Windows 7 search? Windows 7 is still much widely used than OS X.
Has anyone else noticed this? Maybe it's just me.
Apple's margins disappointed today, and the stock dropped.
I grew up in a bipolar world.
Yes, the USSR vs. USA, but also the bipolar world of Microsoft and Apple. One was ruthless and ruled by corporate power, the other was a stylish tyranny.
Times changed. The USSR fell apart leaving a Russian mafia state ruled by a mobster, and the USA fell into a spiral of fear, wealth concentration, political corruption, and institutional failure. China grew wealthy, but turned into a fascist state run by oligarchs and mobsters. The EU has Greece and Italy and the second Great Depression. India, Brazil, everyone has problems, nobody is a secure Power. Now we live in a multipolar world.
Weirdly, the same thing has happened to the world of computing (now including phones). Microsoft's slow collapse is this week's Vanity Fair special. Google joined the Sith and all it got was dorkware, a human-free social network, and a profit-free phone. Post-IPO Facebook is rich and frail looking. Dell, HP, Motorola, RIM and Nokia are history.
Ahh, but what about Apple? Isn't Apple going from power to power -- even in the old Mac/Windows wars?
That's how it looks - to the press. Today. But I'm just coming off an epic 1 week fiasco involving OS X Lion and iCloud. It ended with me deciding to keep my primary machine on Snow Leopard and reverting my iPhone to iTunes sync after years of MobileMe sync. I'll try again when Mountain Lion is out.
Yes, few people will run into the problems I have had (arising at least in part from an obscure geeky bug with OS X/Unix vs Windows "line termination"). Many people, however, will run into some problems. My experience shows that many months after Apple's grandiose iCloud launch and insane MobileMe/iCloud migration, they still don't have troubleshooting tools and procedures or, amazingly, any way to delete your iCloud.com data. It's as though they thought they'd get everything right the first time -- perhaps because everyone associated with MobileMe was purged.
That's a hell of a miss for a corporation with billions in the bank and a fifteen year history of bungling online services.
Then there's the Apple ID/FairPlay/iCloud problems. My friends are struggling with these. Other friends can't figure out how to manage Ringtones on iTunes.
Perhaps most worrisome of all, Apple is providing mega-compensation packages to its corporate executives because, apparently, they must be retained. An unavoidable step with inevitable consequences. Bad consequences.
Apple doesn't look strong to me. It looks vulnerable.
Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook. None of them are serving me well. None of them are looking all that strong.
All the Empires are falling. My personal balancing act is becoming more complex all the time.
Three Things That Should Trouble Apple – Marco.org:
... Apple’s software quality is declining.
I’m not just talking about the most recent releases of everything, or the last couple of months — I’ve noticed this trend for about 2–3 years. As Apple’s software has grown to address larger feature sets, hard-to-solve problems such as sync and online services, shorter release cycles, increasingly strong competition, and Apple’s own immense scale, quality has slipped...I've noticed it for at least that long, but OS X Lion is a particular disappointment.
SF, big ideas, ideology: what is to be done? - Charlie's Diary
... We're living in the frickin' 21st century. Killer robot drones are assassinating people in the hills of Afghanistan. Our civilisation has been invaded and conquered by the hive intelligences of multinational corporations, directed by the new aristocracy of the 0.1%. There are space probes in orbit around Saturn and en route to Pluto. Surgeons are carrying out face transplants. I have more computing power and data storage in my office than probably the entire world had in 1980...
... to the extent that mainstream literary fiction is about the perfect microscopic anatomization of everyday mundane life, a true and accurate mainstream literary novel today ought to read like a masterpiece of cyberpunk dystopian SF...Even dystopian science fiction didn't predict we'd spend all our time keeping our whizzy tools working.
I've editing a summary post on my challenging iPhoto to Aperture migration. That's made me wonder, again, where Aperture 1.0 came from.
Aperture still doesn't use the native OS X tools for file browsing. It is the most un-Mac like product I've ever used.
The image framework was originally based on OS X Core Image, which was, I assume, a descendant of the NeXT imaging engine. So did Aperture start out as a NeXT photo management tool?
Unfortunately I can't find anything on the net about NeXT photo management software -- perhaps because NeXT died when the web was young, and also because "NeXT" is a useless search term (modern search engines are not case-sensitive).
Perhaps Aperture 1.0 was an acquisition, but I don't see any likely suspects on Wikipedia's Apple mergers and acquisitions list. Perhaps it was designed to be sold on Windows as well as Mac OS; but then why not emulate iTunes?
It's a puzzle. If I had to bet, I suspect it has roots in NeXT. I don't think it's de novo OS X development.
iPhoto is dying.
That much is clear. iPhoto 11's launch bug problems followed the pattern of the past decade. Unlike past releases though, iPhoto 11 lost important capabilities -- just like iMovie and Final Cut Pro X regressed from prior versions.
That's bad, but what's worse is that, after seven years of sort-of trying, Aperture is still not an adequate iPhoto replacement.
Bad on bad news, but the real sign of a dying platform is the echoing silence. When users stop complaining, a software platform is dead.
Fortunately I had planned from this the very beginning. I knew, nine years ago, I was taking a big risk putting my photos and data into an Apple product. Even then Apple had a reputation -- it didn't worry much about customer data. I figured Apple might abandon iPhoto, but I also figured the Mac community would come up with a migration solution.
I was wrong. There's no migration to Lightroom, there is no exit from iPhoto that preserves data.
Where did I go wrong? I missed this ...
Of funerals, digital photos and impermanence — Tech News and Analysis
... Apps like Instagram and Path, both of which I love, actually make this problem worse instead of better in some ways. They are great for sharing quick snapshots of a place you are visiting or someone you are with or what you are eating — and you can share those easily to Flickr and Facebook and Tumblr and lots of other platforms (more than 26 photos are uploaded to Instagram every second). But do you want to save all of these for a lifetime, along with the ones you took of your new baby or your sister’s wedding? Probably not. So again, there is a filtering problem....
I didn't imagine that geeks would basically give up; overwhelmed by rapidly changing technologies. I didn't anticipate that the 'prosumer' computer platforms would die instead of reforming. I didn't imagine that OS X would go into maintenance mode. I didn't imagine a technology regression of this magnitude.
I expected rough waters, I didn't expect whitewater.
See also:
I thought of John Halamka was a fairly careful writer, so this comment caught my eye (emphases mine):
Life as a Healthcare CIO: The Joy of Success
... One CIO received a negative audit report because new generations of viruses are no longer stopped by state of the art anti-virus software.... No one in the industry has solved the problem...
He refers to a previous post ...
Life as a Healthcare CIO: The Growing Malware Problem
... A new virus is released on the internet every 30 seconds. Modern viruses contain self modifying code. The "signature" approaches used in anti-virus software to rapidly identify known viruses, does not work with this new generation of malware.
Android attacks have increased 400% in the past year. Even the Apple App Store is not safe.
Apple OS X is not immune. Experts estimate that some recent viruses infections are 15% Mac...
Ok, so those sentences are a huge hit on his credibility. App Store issues are in no way comparable to Android attacks, and that 15% number could only be true for Microsoft Office malware (Duqu attacks a TrueType font parsing engine), or for something none of the Mac guys I read have run into. Nobody I know in the Mac community uses antivirals - even now. The cure is, for the moment, worse than the disease.
So Halamka is a bit lost, but it is true that the Stuxnet and Duqu platforms are formidable [1]. That's presumably what Halamka is talking about, and what some CIOs are thinking.
I haven't seen this elsewhere, but I don't track the Windows world all that closely. This will be something to watch over the next few months ...
[1] Even OS X Lion is no more secure than Windows 7 (for now). The only reason those viruses aren't attacking OS X machines is because there's no money in the Mac world. If Macs were used in banks they'd be at least as vulnerable to Duqu as Windows. The future (next?) version of OS X is expected to, like iOS, run signed code only.
Jobs was the best salesman of the past 50 years.
I wonder, though, if deep down he knew what was real and what was not.
His Heirs don't seem to know ...
AppleInsider | Apple VP shares four keys to company's success:
... Drawing from 20 years of experience at Apple, Greg Joswiak, the company's vice president of worldwide iOS product marketing, has explained four keys to the company's success: focus, simplicity, courage and a commitment to being the best....
... The fourth and final guiding principle that Joswiak shared was Apple's commitment to only enter markets that it believes it can be the best in...
Right. The best.
iWork. iPhoto. Aperture. Calendar.app. iCloud. MobileMe. Must be the very best eh?
Some of what Apple produces is excellent. Some of it is 3rd rate. A lot of it is second rate. If Apple's leadership really believes they are always "the best" they are delusional and Apple will become an average publicly traded company. Another Microsoft, another Google.
Apple's flagship product is the iPhone -- and there are lots of issues with the cost/value it delivers compared to Android. Apple needs to work very hard, and with clear eyes, to increase the value they bring to their customers.
Is there anyone in Apple whose job it is to question Apple's own myths?
Every review I read uses OS X iCal and Address Book as examples of the worst aspects of Lion. This one is from Macintouch... (emphases mine)
Macintouch: Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Review (Part IV)
... Others, including iCal and Address Book, are downright horrid to use, no matter how pretty they may look. It's as though everyone at Apple was given the directive "make it like iPad", but nobody coordinated the ensuing work...
iCal was awful in Snow Leopard. I didn't think it could get worse, but it is. Address Book was never a great app, but now it's moved into the "horrid" range.
In my use of Lion I get the same feeling of uncoordinated work. Some features seemed aimed at power users, others at people who'd never used a computer before. There's good work, but there's also the kind of incoherence I expect from a Google or even a Microsoft product.
This is, most assume, the first version of OS X where Steve Jobs wasn't available to enforce a narrative. It's a sign of what Apple is likely to be post-Jobs -- less like the Apple we know, more like Google.
Even I have to admit some things have gotten better over the pasts decade. Digital cameras are one. Aperture 3 is another (but iPhoto 11 is a regression).
Video editing though -- it really sucks. Honest - it's awful.
Try searching on "archival video formats". I'll wait ...
Right. There is no agreement. (This discussion is the best I found via Google, I wrote this one in 2008.) Photographers justly consider JPEG and TIFF as suboptimal archival formats -- but we're light years head of videographers.
Next, using iMovie 2008, try to create a decent looking .mp4 movie using Export with Quicktime. Take your time, I'll wait.
This has not gone well. I suspect the root cause are the video and patent wars that infest video technology. I am certain this is not the only domain where America's insane software patents are damaging growth and progress.
See also
