I believe that the personal computer industry as a whole has failed miserably and it is time for someone to hit the reboot button. No company is more responsible for this than Apple. Everyone always knew Microsoft Windows was garbage and over the years it has only gained in bloated complexity and has never had reliability in basic functionality, but no one with an ounce of gray matter ever thought it would be different. Apple was different though. Apple was in a position to make a computer + OS ecosystem that just worked and worked well - something people could trust. But it seems that in the last decade they have only proven that their reach exceeds their grasp.
Why are we still in an age where rebooting devices remains the number one way to solve problems? Have the software developers gained any maturity in design over the last 40 years? It appears not. It is a growing frustration for me that something that could be such an aid has been implemented in ways that cause basic functionality to fail at the worst times possible and therefore people remain afraid of computer technology. And rightfully so. Why do I even need to know how to reboot my iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Apple router, etc.? Because they suck of course.
Sure I can use my iPhone and Apple Pay to pay for goods. Theoretically removing the need to carry a wallet with credit cards and cash. But that is not possible because you don't know when it will fail to work, and so still have to carry a credit card and cash as backup. Because they suck of course.
I can use my iPhone as a remote for my Apple TV, this removing the need for keeping a battery in the Apple TV remote or find it when needed. In fact, Apple went so far as to include the remote in iOS and it is accessible with just a simple swipe up. Great. Except completely useless when the iOS built-in remote cannot communicate with the Apple TV despite being on the same Wifi network. Perhaps forgivable, except that not only does the real remote work, but also the remote app on the iPhone also works - just not the built in iOS remote function. Because they suck of course.
How about this wonderful "purgeable storage" concept in Mac OS which reserves vast amount for disk space and interferes with downloading application updates from the App store. Apple Apps store. Apple's application (Xcode in this case). Completely Apple's ecosystem. They want you to apply updates but break the means to do so and provide no way to reclaim the space. Why would you do that? Because they suck of course.
They encourage the use of iCloud, which I do for Notes, but there can be unexplainable delays of 5-10 minutes between a note being created on one Apple device such as my iPhone and it showing up on my iPad. They encourage multiple devices and the use of Cloud services but make them untrustworthy. Because they suck of course.
For years there have been intermittent problems streaming from Apple when other network services like Netflix work fine. Drag and drop has always been buggy, whether in selection of text or dragging images. There is just no reliability of service any longer in any aspect of their business. Do they not understand how untrustworthy their services have become? How long must the beachball spin like this before hitting opt-cmd-escape? I had to stop recommending Apple to people years ago and now I look forward to the day when I no longer rely upon them. But sadly on this Christmas day there remain no better alternative.
Maybe next Christmas, Santa.
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