Applepeels

Is Apple A Prisoner of Its Design Decisions?

My history with the Macintosh goes back to the introduction of the Macintosh.  The Macintosh held such an important place in my life that I have managed to keep some first edition magazines announcing the Mac.

Yet here I am in November 2012 sitting at my October 2010 I5 iMac contemplating buying a new Windows 8 computer to completely shake up my computing paradigm.

I am thinking of jumping ship frankly because I think Apple worships far too much at the altar of design instead of functionality.  I also believe there is no one with any sense left at the rudder when it comes to user interface decisions at Apple.   And for icing on the cake, I don't believe the price Apple charges is justified based on my recent experience with Apple products.

For years I have operated on the theory that the safest computing involves doing my work on mulitple computers.  While I worked at Apple, I often used my company supplied laptop with a desktop that I purchased.  After leaving Apple in 2004, I bought my own Mac laptop and late that year a dual G5 desktop.

During the eight years since leaving Apple, for one reason or the other I have added Windows and Linux to my operating system world.  Early this summer the MacBook I purchased in the summer of 2006 died in spite of a hard drive transplant.  I moved to relying on my Lenovo I7 Windows 7 laptop and my iMac as my main two systems.

Unfortunately I quickly started having troubles with my iMac this summer.  I ran it off an external hard drive for a while and eventually reformatted the internal hard drive and installed Mountain Lion.  While I am not a big Mountain Lion fan, I thought that I was going to be okay until I started having hard drive problems once again the last week of October 2012.

It was only then that I started contemplating changing the internal hard drive in my iMac.  I have replaced lots of drives in Macs over the years including a number in PowerBooks and some in other versions of iMacs. When I bought my Intel iMac, I paid no attention to serviceability since it had a drive with a terrabyte of storage.  Other than the drive on my recent MacBook, I have only replaced drives for additional storage.

With all the cloud storage that I'm using I figured the terrabyte of storage on the iMac would be plenty so I didn't worry about replacing it.  On top of that the iMac was not my first choice machine. I didn't really have another Mac choice.  I would have preferred a tower, but there were no Apple towers in the same price range of the dual G5 that I bought in 2004 so I bought an iMac and hoped for the best.

As I started having problems with my iMac, an Apple system engineer that I know told me that replacing the drive in one of the new iMacs is very difficult.  When I started investigating and found this video of pulling the front bezel and LCD to change the hard drive, I was amazed.  It is a little like learning that you've bought a car and finding out that you have to pull the windshield in order to change the battery.

While Apple pioneered the All-One-Computer, most manufacturers make one now.  However when I investigated recent systems by HP and Sony, I found that you access their hard drives from the back.  The HP system seems to have a particularly easy way of replacing the hard drive.  I have not been able to determine if the new SpectreONE AIO by HP suffers from the same design problem on hard drive servicing as the iMac which it appears to have cloned.

I'm sure that Steve Jobs did not want any panels opening on the back of the iMac, but to be honest, it is pretty stupid to build a computer which requires you to pull the most fragile component in order to service something like a hard drive.  Just because other manufacturers might follow Apple doesn't mean it is the right thing for consumers.

Since I got my iMac, I have been very concerned that it produces a lot of heat. Given that, I was not surprised to find out that there is a sensor on the iMac drive which will shut it down if it gets too hot.  I've never seen that on anything but 1U servers.  It makes me wonder if the design of the iMac is a poor one and that hard drives in the machine will be prone to failure.

I didn't buy my iMac because it was stylish.  I bought it because it was the least expensive way that I could continue to use a Mac with a DVD and a SD slot.  In retrospect, I was too trusting of Apple's engineers and too willing to accept what Apple wanted me to buy.  In fact I ended up buying the huge 27" screen because that was the only way at the time that I could get an I5 processor.

I would have preferred to have purchased an inexpensive Apple tower with a couple of drive bays.  Apple has ignored the market for a product like that and forced us to choose between the MacMini, the iMac, and the very expensive Mac towers.

While the inaccessibility of the hard drive is a major flaw on the iMac, the proximity of the SD slot to the DVD drive is also a major design flaw.  Of course Apple just fixed that by eliminating the DVD drive and moving the SD slot to the back of the computer.  Does anyone seriously believe that having a SD slot behind a 27" monitor is convenient?

Beyond these hardware design issues, I am convinced that Apple has forgotten what made the Mac great.  I have used Macs because they made my computing life easier.  Increasingly I find that not to be the case.  I think Apple's decision to mess with the "Save As" command might go down as one of the dummer decisions in the history of computing.  As a writer, I cannot imagine what they were thinking.  I am still smarting from the more recent versions of iPhoto abandoning the elegant return to the library command of the "Escape" key.  Now I have to hit a button with my mouse.

Perhaps the final proof for me in Apple's quest to make their user interface less useful is the change that they have made to their Preview app when opening a PDF.  If you remember from Mac OS X Lion, you could easily mail a PDF from the menu.  If you have migrated to Mac OS X Mountain Lion, you will find that the option to mail a PDF from the menu has disappeared.  Unfortunately mailing a PDF directly was one of my favorite Apple shortcuts.

Adding to the insult is that one of my favorite apps, Pixelmator, has obviously "downgraded" their app by replacing the "Save As" command. If has gotten to the point that I am afraid to upgrade apps because "Save As" will disappear.

While some including my Canadian friends at McLean's are worried about "skeuomorphism" and Apple, I'm more worried about having the best user interface to get my work done.

I'm not sure if Windows 8 or Linux will be the answer, but I am increasingly convinced that Apple will not be part of the solution.  Certainly my very positive experience with Windows 7 has given me the confidence to give Microsoft a shot at my desktop.

For more on my perspective on Apple, check out my book, The Pomme Company.

If you are looking for perspective on my recent comments on Tim Cook, try my post, Sometimes words get twisted or the post that I did on April 27, 2012, Tim Cook, the right person for Apple's evolution?. The last six months don't give me a lot of confidence in Apple's direction.

 

What would it be like to work at Apple?

If you have ever wondered what it would be like to work at Apple in sales, my book, the Pomme Company, is a good place to start. Actually some current and former Apple employees think my book should be required reading for people hoping to work at Apple. My long history with Apple gives me a rather unique perspective.

There is no question that Apple is now a computer electronics powerhouse. Questions have been asked about the labor practices of Chinese companies used by Apple and other electronics companies. However, few people have thought to look stateside at the business culture within Apple.  It is actually not a very pretty picture.

That Apple has risen to the top is unquestionable.  Whether Apple will stay in its current position is more of an open question especially to those of us who have lived inside the world of Cupertino.

Creating great products is one thing.  Building a sustainable business culture that can continue to turn out great products is another thing.  Just ask Sony how difficult that is.

I would argue there are plenty of signs that the Apple of today is not the Apple of a few years ago.  I continue to be frustrated by Apple's user interface changes.  I thoroughly dislike the "Save as" changes implemented in Mountain Lion.  The dumbing down of iPhoto is a depressing subject for me.  While I am not an iPhone user, I can understand the frustration of paying a premium price for something, and then finding out that you don't have a wonderful experience with an app like maps on the iPhone.

In October of 2012, I purchased an I5 iMac.  I watched as it suffered through "Slow Snow Leopard" problem and then as I finally had to move all the data from the drive and format it.  It was the first time in 28 years of using Macs that I have had to move my data and reformat a drive.  I've had to reinstall system software plenty of times, but I have never had an Apple operating system destroy my drive.

There is no question in my mind that Windows 7 is more consistent and reliable than Apple's current operating system.  I use Mountain Lion on my iMac and Windows 7 on my Lenovo laptop on a daily basis.  Windows 7 just runs better.  If I could get Fetch, Coda, and RapidWeaver on Windows, I would likely abandon the Mac platform in spite of my long history with Apple products dating backing thirty years to 1982.

As I state in my book, Apple likely no longer has sophisticated users on their radar.  They are now more interested in casual consumer users.  Demanding users who expect a consistent user interface which enhances their productivity are on the back burner at Apple.  I challenge anyone to use an old version of iPhoto and tell me that the current version works as well.

Just the fact that you can no longer hit the escape key to move back to the full library is a huge disadvantage. As ugly as the Picasa user interface is, it works far better than iPhoto.

Then there is Apple's multiple attempts to figure out the cloud.  Certainly if you want to selectively share photos from your computer, Apple's cloud solution is not even on the radar when it comes to the best ways to do it.  Picasa web albums, Dropbox, and even Microsoft's Skydrive with Portfolio work far better than iCloud.

That Apple's popularity is at its peak when the quality of some of its products is suspect is a function of our society.  People want to be cool and Apple's products have the image of cool.  Certainly the Apple iPhone redefined the world of the smart-phone.

Clearly though if maps are important to you as they are to me, an Apple iPhone is no longer the best choice.

However, the question that remains unanswered is whether or not the unsustainable Apple business culture is at the root of these Apple products which have lost their luster.

At the end of my book I mention that my next computer product might be Microsoft's new Surface product.  An interesting side note to this is that one of the Surface engineers used to work as a student rep for us at Va. Tech.  I think my team paid for his airfare to California while he was an intern at Apple.

He got offered a job at Apple and another one at Microsoft.  He took the job at Microsoft because he was unimpressed with the culture inside of Apple.  I know from talking to him that he still believes that he made the right decision.

I'm going to watch with interest to see if the Surface product might be the one that brings Microsoft back into the game. 

At the same time, I have pretty well given up hope for a new MacMini from Apple.

Do Apple Employees Need A Witness Protection Program?

I am rarely surprised about what comes out of Apple, but this caught even me a little off guard.   Some of you know that I have a long history with Apple .  I have seen things that I still have a hard time believing.  However, my recent experience with Apple's unreal world is a reminder of just how weird things can get for you if your paycheck comes from the folks in Cupertino.

In October of 2001, I was named manager of the year for my team's outstanding performance in the federal market.  A friend took a picture of my team at the awards banquet.  I have always treasured the picture and been very proud of our accomplishment since we were covering the worlds largest IT market with a handful of people. 

I wanted to include the picture in my book and took the time to ask each person in the picture for their permission to be in the book.  It wasn't a controversial photo.  No one was nude or holding a Windows PC.  Much to my surprise three of the five current Apple employees declined to be in the photo.  I edited the image so they are unrecognizable.

One person admitted to being afraid of the consequences of being in the photo, and I respect that.  Two came up with excuses that were plain laughable.  

You can try to appreciate the situation by working through this.  For a moment imagine worrying about being in a photo taken eleven years ago when your team was the tops at Apple.  Then think about worrying about the photo being in a book that you didn't write and which you haven't even seen but which is basically a historical account of someone else's career in the fictional Pomme Company.  Then remember that none of these employees are even named in the book.

If you have that scenario in your mind, you now know just how much control Apple exercises over its people.  The whole episode reminds me a little of the "Minority Report."

When a former manager of mine who is in the picture heard about the incident he asked, "What is the story with these people? Are they in a witness protection program?"

He has been gone from Apple for almost ten years, and I exited a little over eight years ago.  We have both returned to a normal world where you aren't afraid to open a box of literature before a keynote speech.  I don't miss folks worrying about someone from the press tricking them into answering a question.

The culture of fear runs deep in Apple sale's division.  If you want to know about life at Apple in sales, you can now read my newly published book, "The Pomme Company."

Some friends have said my book should be required reading for people wanting to join Apple's sales force.

The book has taken a little over a year and was interrupted by a note from Apple's legal folks warning me to adhere to my non-disclosures.    That is actually easy to do since most of us at Apple heard no secrets.  The joke used to be that when we wanted to find out what Apple was about to announce we would check out MacSurfer.

My book is about my somewhat amazing journey.   I went from running a cattle operation in eastern Canada to being the director of federal sales for Apple.  The journey actually started just after we dispersed our cattle and I started selling Apple II+s for a small company in Fredericton, New Brunswick.  It ended with me as director of federal sales sitting on Capitol Hill with Avie Tevanian in a cyber security hearing.

My career at Apple transformed my life and that of my family.  I'll be interested to hear what people think of the book which is priced at $5.99.  It has lots of pictures of historical interest to people interested in Apple.

Most of all if you want a peak at the Apple culture that I saw, my book will be a cure for your curiousity.

Has Apple lost its soul?

My up and down relationship with Apple still hasn't reached a turning point. I remain hopeful that Cupertino will announce a product that will catch my fancy. I have a long history with the company.

I have enjoyed watching the launch of the new iPhone 5, but I am still happy with my Android powered LG Spectrum and the Kindle Fire my children gave me last fall.  I am waiting for some Apple products to excite all of us who built our digital lives around Apple solutions.

With all the media coverage around the iPhone 5 announcement, I especially enjoyed the Jimmy Kimmel segment where some supposed iPhone users couldn't tell the difference between the iPhone 4S they were being shown and the new iPhone 5.  However, perhaps that is a cheap shot.  I'm not sure I could tell you the difference between my latest LG Smartphone and whatever new product LG has announced.

Beyond being the butt of  a few jokes on late night comedy shows, there are some serious problems with Apple.

It is easy to ignore the issues if you just measure the company by their unbelievable stock price.  Before I go further let me say that I still believe that Apple makes great hardware products, and perhaps the latest iPhone and iPad are among the best they have ever made.

The question for me comes down to this, can the Apple of today follow through with its direction without paying better attention to its computer and software roots?

If you are new to Applepeels and want some perspective on me before reading more, try this link to my Apple history.

Perhaps the most worrisome issue for me, is the health of Mac OSX.  Having only recently taken the step to go to Lion, I still haven't upgraded to Mountain Lion.  I normally don't jump on an Apple first release, and I was actually hoping that Apple would announce a new Mac Mini by this time.  If that had happened I could take the step to Mountain Lion with new hardware.

Lion has been a mixed experience for me.  Perhaps you need an iOS device to really see its benefits, but I get the distinct feeling that there are now far too many ways to do the same thing on OS X.  I believe that some of the simplistic beauty of OSX has been lost as a layer of complexity has been added. 

While I am worried about OSX, I am downright depressed about iPhoto. I was at Apple when Steve was focused on the release of iPhoto. It was a revolutionary program at the time, and it had the full attention of Steve.

I'm pretty sure that Steve would not be happy with the current user interface on iPhoto.  One of the great things about the original version of iPhoto was the ease with which you could create a web album for your friends to see.  In the latest version of iPhoto on the Mac we are stuck with photostream which seems to be an all or nothing solution unless you want to use Flickr or Facebook.

As a photographer who sometimes takes a thousand pictures in a day.  I want to be able to quickly sort through the pictures, select the good ones, make some adjustments, put copies of the ones I like in cloud storage, and then create web albums of ones that I plan to show to more than a few people.  That process used to be very simple with a Mac.  That is no longer the case.

I now do my initial photo sorting and tune-ups on a Windows 7 laptop because it is easier with Picasa than it is with iPhoto. In a number of areas where iPhoto was ahead of Picasa, Apple has managed to dumb down recent versions of iPhoto.  While this was happening Google actually made Picasa better and more efficient.  While I have Picasa on the Mac, I have hung with iPhoto hoping it would get better.

While Picasa might not look as glitzy as iPhoto, you will get more work done with Picasa.  On top of that Picasa easily puts one or dozens of photos on the web with easily controllable access.  I haven't tried to find the extra cost plug-in that I purchased for my previous versions of iPhoto so I could directly load photos into Picasa web albums from iPhoto.  Likely the reason is that I resent paying for something that should be there.

It really is a final straw for me that in iPhoto Apple has built-in Flickr and Facebook support but has ignored Picasa web albums. I know they are doing this to spite Google, but users are the ones who suffer and Apple offers no solution of its own comparable to Picasa web albums.

If you want to delve into this deeper, read a post or two of mine which compares iPhoto and Picasa.

An even bigger problem is that Apple seems to have fallen into the old trap of if it wasn't invented at Apple, it can't be good.  The recent ditching of Google maps is just not something that will work out well for Apple over the long term.

I have no question that Apple has the money to create a great map solution, but I seriously doubt Apple has the management culture and the persistence to stick with their own mapping solution until it is a great product.  It is not in Apple's DNA to incrementally upgrade software or a backend solution until it is a really solid product.

If you don't believe me, just think back to the original .Mac product and all its many iterations including iCloud which was going to change everything.

Actually it has changed everything, just not for the better.

Compare Apple's cloud solution with GoogleDrive, SkyDrive, or DropBox, and it looks like making a home grown solution isn't necessarily the best path for Apple.

Apple has a history of alienating partners and having to go it on their own. Maps is just a symptom of that problem. As an Apple employee once told me, you can't say the word "partner" and Apple in the same sentence.  Let's hope that Apple makes nice with Microsoft so they don't pull the plug on Office for the Mac.

Even if Maps is a good idea, many good Apple ideas have withered on the vine for lack of attention.  Does anyone remember eWorld, Apple's online world that was going to be better than AOL?

And if that comparison doesn't ring true, just look at the history of Apple branded or backed word processors for the Mac and compare that to Microsoft which does have a history of banging its head against the wall and showering money on a project until they either succeed (Word & XBox) or fail (Zune).

Remember back to the introduction of the original Mac. It came with MacWrite.  It wasn't long after the introduction of the Mac that Microsoft came out with Word.  MacWrite after the Claris spinoff eventually became MacWrite Pro.

Then came ClarisWorks which eventually became AppleWorks before disappearing completely.  Now we have Pages which will eventually languish like the rest of Apple's word processors. Word is still around.

The lack of a culture built around incrementally improving products as opposed to ditching them is a huge challenge in the technology world.  While Apple might have mastered it with the iPhone, they have a number of other products begging for updates.

Beyond  this I believe the biggest problem that Apple has is the wall that the company throws up between the company and its customers.

While Microsoft and other companies are working hard to listen to customers, Apple is busy listening to itself.  If you are going to incrementally improve something like a map solution, you need a close working relationship with your users.  I have sent Google a few notes over the years about problems that I have found on their maps.  While I have never heard back from them, every problem that I found has been resolved.

I'm not sure Apple knows how to act similarly. Perhaps if Apple could develop a strategy to start reaching out to customers in a company supported blog, it might be a first step, but unfortunately the company's DNA would have to change before they started blogging.

As long as Apple can keep iPhones and iPads flying out the door, perhaps all these issues are irrelevant. But I do believe that Apple's OSX software is a strategic product and deserves serious attention that it is not getting.

If Apple does hit a blip, and it likely will, I suspect many of the customers who came to Apple's rescue in the past will be gone.  It remains to be seen whether current iPhone and iPad customers will be as loyal or just jump ship for the next shiny trinket.

Just a few updates and I'm off to bed.

We spent a good part of the summer doing our final move from our house in Roanoke, Virginia.  We have bid Roanoke adieu, and we will no longer be making our once a month trip from the coast to the mountain. 

We are very happy to be living here by our inlet.  The peace that I find in the wildness along the Southern Outer Banks has pretty well mended the nerve ends that were seared by Apple's winner take all culture.

If the fishing doesn't require my full attention this fall and if I don't fall under the spell of the area's blue skies, I hope to finally get the book about my Apple career published.  It has been a bigger challenge than I thought it would be.

 

 

 

With MobileMe Gone, Solutions for Photos?

Whatever you thought of MobileMe, it did offer one solution for sharing photos on the web.  With iCloud Apple has effectively gotten out of the photo sharing business.

The one good thing about iCloud is that you won't have to worry about losing your albums because there are none. I guess it is also a little harder to think of Apple as "the hub of your digital life."

Fortunately there are many other solutions besides Apple. I don't pretend to know them all.  However, I do come at this from the perspective of someone who started using the original .Mac service from the beginning so I feel the pain of those who have lost MobileMe albums or web sites.

I had my own interesting experiences in migrating to iCloud.

That said, years ago after the first change of architecture in Apple's online storage which resulted in many of my albums being forcibly retired, I became worried.  I started actively investigating alternatives.  Early on my good friend Stephen @batess turned me on to Picasa Web Albums while I was experimenting with Flickr.

Picasa Web Albums has over time become my default option for storing my photos on the web. I have never regretted the trust that I put in the platform.

There are plenty of "Cloud" storage options out there, and I use several of them.  Many are free and most have storage upgrades that are much cheaper than Apple was after the heyday of free .Mac accounts ended.

I hope to discuss a few of these alternatives and make it clear that even if Apple decides to have a way to store photos in their "Cloud,"  I would likely not bite on the offer a third time.

Just to be completely clear, Photostream is only a solution for sharing a small number of photos between compatible devices.  A compatible devices rules out an older Mac but does include a Windows 7 device.

For several years, in addition to hanging onto to my MobileMe Galleries, I have extensively used slide shows on my various websites.  Flickr, and Picasa Web Albums have also been in the mix. There is no perfect solution, and the simple thing is to try a few things and see what works best for you.  Of course that depends somewhat on your computing environment.

My computing world includes an I5 iMac, an I7 Lenovo laptop running Windows 7, an old Dell Pentium 3 running Ubuntu, and a couple of older Macs including my trusted Dual G5 system which I purchased almost eight years ago.  I am running the I5 Mac in a dual boot situation.  I have Lion running on an external hard drive and Snow Leopard running on the internal drive.  For my reasons behind that, you can see my post, The Mysteries of Apple, MobileMe, & iCloud.

I have both iPhoto and Picasa running on my I5 iMac.  For more information on my reasons for that check my post, The saga of Apple's iPhoto and Google's Picasa with some tests. 

However, in my workflow, usually the first place that a photo meets a computer is my Windows laptop since I no longer have a functioning Mac laptop.  The windows laptop stays on our kitchen table, and when I come in from my early morning walk and finish my coffee, I often upload my photos to Picasa on the Lenovo.  By the same token when I come in after a five mile beach walk, the photos usually go first into Picasa.

Picasa, while it is not as pretty as iPhoto, does a lot of things and does them quickly.  While the iPhoto user interface has become slower to use, Picasa's has become faster and more versatile.

It is not unusual for me to run through three or four hundred photos and pick out the best ones in Picasa and do some basic adjustments for light and post them in an album on the web like this Hammock's Beach Album on Picasa Web Albums.

I sometimes will export individual photos or several photos to either DropBox or GoogleDrive.  It is easy then for me to find the best photos when I go up to my office and sit down at my Mac.  I also usually upload all my photos to iPhoto and run Picasa on the I5 iMac often enough to let it include all the photos that I have uploaded to iPhoto.

The other day when I was talking to another photographer who had lost his MobileMe albums, I created similar examples of the same Hammocks Beach photos on Microsoft's SkyDrive and on flickr.  Clicking on the links will take you to the albums.

When I export individual photos, I usually want to use them somewhere besides an album.  An example would be the photo in the post, Life without Walls, on my Crystal Coast Life website.  The photo came from that same set taken at Hammocks Beach.  I currently use Pixelmator for anything that I can't do in Picasa or iPhoto.  Of course I also post photos to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest.

Sometimes, I want to make a self contained photo album and post it on my own website.  I have traditionally used ShutterBug, a Mac based piece of software to do that.  An example of a Shutterbug site would be this one that I created to sell stuff from our Roanoke, VA house which has just gone under contract. 

I attempted to create a Shutterbug site for the Hammocks Beach photos, but I ran into an incompatibility between my old dual G5, iPhoto, and Shutterbug.  Shutterbug could not see the iPhoto albums so it had nothing to work with in creating a slide show.  Shutterbug is a good product and certainly should not be judged on how it works on an eight year old Mac. I'm certain that I would have had no troubles on my iMac with more recent software.

With my inability to create the Shutterbug beach site, I decided to look for a free solution that would work on Windows and Macs.  I found VisualLightBox.  I downloaded the Windows version, and in two or three minutes created and uploaded this online album of the Hammocks Beach photos.  It was extremely straight forward, but to use VisualLightBox you have to manage your own website and understand a little about folders on websites.

As I get ready to make recommendations, two other factors are important in my digital life.  I have an Android phone, the LG Spectrum, and I have one of the original Kindle Fires.  I am no expert in iPhones or iPads, so make sure you run some tests of your own if those products are important to you.

First off the best and most complete solution is the one from Google. Picasa Web Albums has been a reliable photo partner for years.  It has never let me down like .Mac and MobileMe.  The photos that I put there years ago are still there.  It is easy to share individual photos or whole albums.  Picasa web albums are well integrated into Picasa and with a third party plug-in it is also easy to upload from iPhoto.

Google has over the last year made some changes in their effort to promote Google+.  If you have a Google+ profile attached to your Picasa Web Albums identity, Google pushes you to create the Google+ album first, and then an automatic duplicate one is created in Picasa web albums.

I actually find that a little inconvenient so I have two Google identities, one with a Google+ profile and the other without one.  When I upload photos using my identity without the Google+ profile, they go directly to my Picasa web albums account tied to that identity.  I like it better that way though I am warming to the way things are shared in Google+.

With an Android phone, both of my Picasa web albums accounts sync to my phone.  Of course I can log into either of the accounts using the browser on my Kindle Fire.

However that seems a little inelegant to me so I have recently discovered a new piece of software called Portfolio for Windows Skydrive.  The company, Snapwood Apps, makes a number of photo apps for different sharing services.

What Portfolio for Skydrive does is turn a folder of photos in a slide show when I run the app on my Android device.  It works great and I love it.  I wish they would do one for Google Drive.  The limitation is that the slide show is driven by the app on your device so you can't share it.

However, having said that I think Windows Sky Drive has some of the best sharing controls that I have seen.

So if you don't have a home for your photos on the web, there are plenty of options and several more that I haven't discussed.  The one option not there is a solution from Apple. 

In this world of everything being online, Apple's absence is a major mistake in my opinion, but I suspect it all goes back to Apple not understanding what a "Cloud" really does.

I actually think Apple would have a far better understanding of what is needed if the company got a little more involved in social media, but that is a post for another day.

If you get a chance, stop by my View from the Mountain blog, and check on my latest post, The Three Kinds of People in the World.  There is not much doubt where Steve would have fit in my categories.

Will Apple Ever Figure Out the Cloud?

Five years ago I wrote an article in which I said the following.

"Certainly if I considered the .Mac experience to be the best measure of Apple's web understanding, I would have to give Apple a failing grade.  There is no way around it, .Mac is not worth what many of us pay for it."

It is hard to believe that five years later Apple could decide to make its new iCloud service free, and iCloud might even be less useful than .Mac or MobileMe.

When I read the Register's article, "Sacrifice Another Goat, iCloud is Apple's biggest failure...," I could only nod my head in aggreement.

"Apple's cloud services continue to be more than a blemish on the company's reputation. They are a serious black hole."

I am not really surprised that Apple hasn't figured out the cloud because Apple has never understood that to really be a web player you have to free the data from the device.

All you have to is look at the way iWeb was built.  It tried its best to tie the website to a particular Mac.  Using iWeb to build a website on multiple Macs required jumping through hoops and moving huge files around by thumbdrives.

The shame of Apple's failures in the cloud is that when it came to many things about the web, Apple was a leader.  There was no easier way to put photos on the web than the original iPhoto.

Unfortunately that is no longer the case.  Adding photos to your Picasa web albums, Google drive, Dropbox or your Microsoft Skydrive is much easier than fooling around with your photostream.    If you take a hundred photos and want to put some of the best of them on the web, it is easy to do with any of the products besides Apple's iCloud.

Interestingly ever since I bought my original Droid in 2010, all the photos that I have chosen to be on the web have been automatically been synced to my phone, the web, and any computer that I choose.  In fact even with a couple of Gmail accounts to my name, things have worked perfectly with my contacts and mail.  I haven't had a glitch in over two years.  I can use Gmail as a web client or with Apple mail, Postbox, or Thunderbird.  It doesn't matter.

With Google's services I have access to my contacts, email, and photos from Windows, Linux, Lion, and all my older Macs.

With iCloud, my older Macs are completely shut out from iCloud unless I use Safari.  Interestingly my former MobileMe accounts work fine in Postbox and Thunderbird on Windows 7.  More importantly all the photos that I put on Picasa web albums and Flickr are still there instead of mysteriously appearing unannounced in my most recent iPhoto library and disappearing from the web.

I believe that unless Apple can figure out the cloud, the great products may not matter.  With the frustrations that I have had with Apple's software, I am less inclined to try the company's new hardware.

Recent tests that show the Nexus 7 tablet besting the iPad just confirm my recent unfortunate experience with Apple hardware which has a long tradition of being the best.  Since 2004, I have purchased five Windows laptops and two Mac laptops.  All of my Windows laptops except one which someone sat on are still running.  Neither of my Mac laptops are functional.  It is a small sample, but it has to influence my personal decision on hardware purchases especially since the two Mac laptops cost almost as much as the five Windows laptops.

The iMac that I purchased in October 2010 has also been problematic.  I am now running it off an external drive with Lion after having serious problems with slow Snow Leopard.  We have three Windows 7 laptops that have been models of software stability and reliability.  I don't say that to slam Apple but to convey my personal experience which has shaken my faith in Apple hardware and software.

When you add Apple lack's of understanding of the web, poor implementation of iCloud, and software problems, it makes you wonder if Apple is on the right track.

I remain hopeful, but seriously how many years is it going to take Apple to figure out the web?

Fortunately Apple's issues tend to fade in importance when I get out on the water in my kayak or have a blue water morning in our skiff, but those are advantages of life by the river in the summer.  It works better for me than living in a metropolitan area where an Apple Store is always tempting you.

One of my regular walks on the Point beyond the yellow houses on Emerald Isle is a whole lot better than trying to make iCloud do what I want it to.

By the way this is the 400th post that I have written for Applepeels.  Only a handful of them are still online, but the book is coming this summer.  If you have ever wondered what it was like to spend nearly twenty years at Apple, you will be able to read my story soon.

 

 

What Price Does Apple Put On Customer Satisfaction?

It is a dilemma talking about Apple and customer satisfaction.  The most recent numbers that I can find show that Apple has topped the survey of user satisfaction for the eighth time in a row and set a record in the process.  That should be the end of the story, but it isn't.

Even if you look at automobiles, Apple's customer satisfaction numbers are stunning in comparison.

So why bother writing about Apple and customer satisfaction.  It's simple.  As a former Apple manager, I know that Apple could do a lot better.

There is a trend in the technology industry for companies to be unreachable.  Whatever you think about Apple's Genius Bar, it is an effort to put an Apple face on help.  It is a great idea, and for the most part I think it has worked very well.

Unfortunately Genius bars aren't available everywhere.  Don't bother quoting me the statistics on the percentage of the US population that lives within fifty miles of an Apple Store, it is irrelevant if you're in an area without one like I am.

I certainly don't expect Apple to put a Genius Bar in the middle of North Carolina's Southern Outer Banks.  Even with our population swelling in the summer time, it is not economically feasible.  However, we are not the only place around the world which doesn't have an Apple badged person nearby.

If Apple wants to get to the next level of service, Apple needs to start investing in online help well beyond what is available in their support forums.  I was recently faced with the problem of "slow Snow Leopard."  I could find nothing in the support forums about the problem.

The problem was bad enough that I tried doing a clean system reinstall but my Snow Leopard DVD would not boot.  I finally found a website with some suggestions and managed to get my boot time under 12 minutes.  Of course that didn't happen before I ended up installing Lion on a new external drive.

While I was trying to resolve this issue I had a long time Mac user get in touch with me about her problems trying to keep her .Mac email.  There was really almost nothing I could do for her because her MacBook Pro was too old for iCloud.  She ended up going to Gmail.

I finally managed to migrate most of our family MobileMe email addresses, but I had to do it by trial and error.  There was no decent document on the migration, and I came across some interesting surprises when I did migrate.  This isn't the way a company that wants to remain at the top of customer satisfaction should behave.

I continue to be surprised and pleased by the ingenuity of Apple users in figuring out things that Apple has chosen to hide.  The library folder in Lion is just one item on the list. 

The missing library folder brings me straight to Lion which has been a real disappointment. One of the things that I used to love about Mac OS X was its simplicity.  Lion certainly isn't simple.  I've been a Mac user from the beginning, and this is the first time that I have ever felt the user interface was a little bit out of control.

There are just too many options. It is really scary when I find the user interface on my latest version of Ubuntu Linux more user friendly than Lion.  It is not that Lion is a bad product like Vista was, it just needs some simplification.

Then there is iPhoto which is a dead horse that I don't enjoy beating.  However, I cannot believe that the current iPhoto user interface is more productive than the earlier ones done when Steve was paying attention. Picasa certainly does not have a pretty user interface, but hands down it is better organized and more productive than iPhoto.

Picasa also doesn't crash. I created a new iPhoto album when I installed Lion on an external hard drive. The library only has a couple of memory cards of photos plus the ones Apple decided to move from MobileMe to my new iPhoto library.  I have had iPhoto on Lion crash at least three times in the last two weeks. Recently I shared a photo to Facebook using iPhoto.  As I was sharing it, I got a  message that iPhoto had removed a Foursquare album from Facebook.  Facebook is squirrely enough without iPhoto adding to the confusion.

One of the things that really stings me is when I  try go to the blog which I published with iWeb, I get this message.  It is just a reminder that Apple did not want to spend any resources keeping legacy sites and photos viable.

I'm sure that most Apple users would be stunned by my assertion that Windows 7 is a better operating system than Mac OSX.  It might not be prettier, but it always works in my experience.

The one key thing that those of us who have been inside Apple worry about with Steve's death is the high probability that Apple's culture cannot generate strong leaders because few Apple employees ever had real decision making power when Steve was around.

Lion, the iCloud migration, and the dumbing down of iPhoto lead me to believe that Apple doesn't have the product leadership that it needs to deliver real customer satisfaction.

There are only a few ways to get really good products. One is to have a genius like Steve Jobs.  The other is have brilliant, motivated engineers listen to some really smart customers and make some tough decisions as to what you are going to deliver. I'm not sure Apple's culture allows the amount of cutomer contact needed to bring customers back into the product development loop.

I cannot believe that anyone who takes more than a handful of photos would be satisfied with Apple's iCloud photostream.  I can only surmise that they let some engineers who are hardly ever out of Starship Apple make the decisions on photostream.  They must have no life outside of Apple and you certainly aren't going to be taking many pictures at Apple.

In spite of its money and market clout, Apple cannot be everything to everyone. One thing Steve Jobs preached was the necessity of saying "No."  Apple currently has enthusiastic customers with unquestioning love for Apple products.  It is a window of opportunity to make the changes that need to be made.

My recent experiences lead me to believe that the changes are not happening at Apple.  Apple has to re-invent its leadership culture to find its way to continued success in the next ten years. Risk taking and saying no at the appropriate time must find their back into Apple.

Some folks might think Apple's MacBook Pro Retina display is a wonderful boondoogle, but I just see it as something 99% of computer users don't need. I know the life blood of Apple is new products but I wonder about the true usefulness of the Retina display.

I would rather see a rock solid operating system, apps that never crash and a 15" laptop that doesn't cost an arm and a leg.

However, we know when Apple shows users something new and better, a certain percentage will buy it, and Apple will bank even more money. I could be completely wrong about the Retina display.  Maybe everyone will want one, but I'm guessing that might be in three or four years.

Perhaps I will feel different after Mountain Lion ships.  An Apple user is a lot like a fisherman.  We never know exactly what we are going to catch or when we will catch it, but we remain ever hopeful.

I'm digging into the iBook Author program in the next few days.  I will soon have some comments on the difference in writing for an iPad and a Kindle.  I have just published my first Kindle book, "A Week at the Beach, An Emerald Isle Travel Guide."  I've just started work on the iPad version.

The book on my nearly 20 year career at Apple is going through one last round of edits.  I hope to have it published on the Kindle by mid-August.

That is it from the Crystal Coast where I am eagerly awaiting the arrival of Mountain Lion and a few schools of fish.  The summer weather is as it should be, and there isn't much traffic of any kind out beyond the yellow houses on the Point.

 

The Mysteries of Apple, MobileMe, & iCloud

Sometimes the journey with Apple is full of unexpected twists and turns.  I can say that both as a former Apple employee and as an Apple user who purchased his first system in August of 1982.

How this story twists back around to MobileMe & iCloud won't be apparent at first, but sometimes living in the world of Apple isn't very simple if you are trying to live with systems that aren't brand new.

I have been resisting moving to Mac OSX Lion. I wanted to stay with an older (faster) version of iPhoto that appeared to be tied to Snow Leopard.

That worked well until recently when I figured out that I was suffering from "slow Snow Leopard." 

I restart my iMac only after we have been away traveling so this problem crept up on me.  After a recent trip back to the coast, I was appalled that it took my 2010 I5 iMac over twelve minutes to boot and open Mail, Firefox, Chrome, iPhoto, and Snagit.

Over the years, I have seen my share of strange Apple problems, but this one was one of the more challenging ones.

When I worked for Apple from 1984 until July 2004, hardware and software problems never were much of a challenge. There was always a brilliant system engineer hiding somewhere.  The closest Apple Store to our home on the Crystal Coast is over three hours away so a visit with a genius was not a real option.

My first response to the problem was to try to reinstall Snow Leopard.  Unfortunately when I started the installation, my iMac would hang while the system was trying to boot from the original Snow Leopard DVD.

As this was all happening, the death knell was ringing for MobileMe.  Earlier in June, I managed to get a friend who was running Lion to bring their laptop to lunch so I could at least start the migration so my email would keep working.  Neither of us was very confident that the process had worked.

Also while this was happening I finished my ebook, "A Week at the Beach, An Emerald Isle Travel Guide."  I wrote the book with Nisus Writer Express, but I did the final publishing edits and formatting with MS Word for Windows.  When I published my book for the Kindle, I knew that people could read it on the iPad, Macs, and Windows machines using free Kindle reader software.  I planned to do an iPad version, but I was thrown for a loop when I found that I had to have Lion in order to use iBooks Author.

With that in mind I decided to take advantage of one of the Mac's great strengths, I took a Firewire 800 external hard drive and used Disktools so that it could be a boot disk for my Intel iMac.  I took advantage of some instructions that I found on the web so in the process of downloading Lion from the App Store, I created a flash drive OSX Lion installer.

Lion installed easily and I decided to start clean and manually install all my apps. That sort of worked.  I purchased an upgrade to iPhoto just after I got my iMac so I installed it.  The Mac running Lion wouldn't launch it but when I went to the App Store, it would not sell me an upgrade.  I ended up throwing away iPhoto and spending another $14.99 on iPhoto.  All of my other apps, Pixelmator, Rapidweaver, Snagit, Coda, MS Office, Fetch, Pages, Numbers, and Keynote installed fine.  Interestingly iMovie and iDVD did not have the same problem as iPhoto. 

I personally find Lion a little confusing since there are so many different ways to do things, but I will probably get over that. Since my Lion install was finished on June 29, one of the first things I wanted to do was check to see if my earlier migration to iCloud had worked.

For some reason iCloud didn't like my Apple ID so I ended up having to create another one. I also ended up creating one of the most complex passwords that I have ever used just to keep iCloud happy.  Fortunately my mail had moved with no problem. I had already logged into MobileMe with my old MobileMe id and downloaded all my photos, websites, and files just to be certain.

My first surprise was that my MobileMe photos showed up in iPhoto on Lion sometime the next day.  With that somewhat interesting victory, I decided to work on a more challenging issue, the family email addresses that have been in MobileMe and .Mac for many years. I could find no discussion about this anywhere so I decided to experiment with a spare email account that I had in MobileMe.

By this time MobileMe had died, and we were in July. When I checked the MobileMe family accounts including my spare one using my trusty Dual G5, I saw that they were no longer working.  I found one of the last emails suggesting that I migrate my email and clicked on it.  When Firefox launched the link, I got a message that the version of Firefox on my old Mac wasn't supported.

Next I changed the default browser to Safari and tried the link again.  I got to the iCloud screen and it wanted me to log in.  I tried my old MobileMe password and it worked.  I got in and migrated my mail.

With that success under my belt, I headed downstairs to my wife's I5 HP laptop which runs Windows 7.  She uses Thunderbird for mail because she likes their icon with the bird on it.  I found one of the warning emails and clicked on it.  Her Firefox took me to iCloud and the log in screen.  I tried her email password, and it was rejected.  Having nothing to lose, I tried my master MobileMe password and voilà it worked.  I easily migrated her email.

With the smell of success blanketing me, I decided to try to fix one of her major complaints in migrating to Windows.  The one thing she really misses about the Mac is her address book.  Nothing that I have been able to find on Windows has made her happy.  I had placed a vcard export file from her old Mac on her Windows computer when I was experimenting. I tried importing it into the iCloud Address Book app, and it worked flawlessly.  Of course it is a couple of years out of date, but that isn't too hard to fix with her small number of contacts.

Just to check things, I went back and looked at her Thunderbird client and confirmed that her MobileMe email address was not working. However, she had no trouble accessing it using Chrome.  When I checked my iMac running Lion, both my MobileMe email accounts were working. I called it quits for the night.

The next morning when I sat down at my Windows 7 laptop running Postbox for email, I was surprised to see my MobileMe email address functioning once again.  I checked my wife's Thunderbird email client and her MobileMe and my spare MobileMe address were both working again.

After that I checked my Dual G5 Mac running OS X version 10.5.8.  Neither MobileMe account was working in Mail.  However, I could get to the MobileMe mail using Safari on the Dual G5.

So the net is that it you have an older Mac, you will be stuck with Safari browser access to your MobileMe email.  If you have a Windows box running Windows 7, MobileMe mail will work in Thunderbird and Postbox.  Based on playing around with the iCloud Control panel for Windows I suspect it will also work in Outlook.

So what do I think about Lion and iCloud? I'm not sure why iCloud was designed the way that it is.  It certainly does not fit my needs.  However, with some tweaks, I could be pretty happy with it.  My biggest complaint is the lack of control over Photostream.  Sometimes I take a thousand pictures in a day.  The last thing I want is for all of them streamed to all of my devices.

What I want is to pick the photos that I want streamed. When you take a lot of photos, the plan is always to pick the ones that you want saved or shared.

It is pretty easy to do a work around.  I will likely continue to import and do some of the first round of editing of my photos using my I7 Windows laptop and Picasa.  I will then export the ones that I like to either my Google Drive or Dropbox.  Picasa does a nice export with dated folders.  When I come upstairs to the iMac in my office, I will just import the daily export folder from Picasa. 

Turning on Photostream would just give me a lot of duplicates.  Often I export back tuned photos from the Mac to my Google drive.  Those are often uploaded to an album on Picasa Web Albums.  Picasa Web Albums are automatically synced to my Android phone.

There is too much mystery and lack of control in iCloud for my taste.  I can't see anyone wanting every picture they take in every place unless they only take a handful of pictures.  Fortunately Google Drive, DropBox, and Microsoft's Sky Drive all work well with the Mac.

In another strange quirk, iCloud wanted me to create another MobileMe address.  I tried to use one of my current ones but it told me they were unavailable.  It is probably somehow related to my new AppleID.  However, my new AppleID has my old MobileMe address associated with it.  One more email address isn't going to upset me.  I already have way over ten email addresses.

However as slick as this appears to work, Google's tools are much more powerful and easier to control.  I have two Gmail ids, and it works really well for me.  One little trick that I learned with Google is that if you have a Gmail address and haven't signed up for G+, you can still directly publish to Picasa Web Albums which is what I would rather do than go through G+ sharing.

After resolving all the MobileMe migration issues,  I got some time to work on trying to fix my slow Snow Leopard.  I found an article suggesting that I disable Spotlight.  I also removed the Sophus anti-virus app that I was using since I am no longer using that as my primary boot drive.

I ran some tests before I made the changes.  The test was to boot up from being turned off, launch Mail, iPhoto, Firefox, Chrome, and Snagit.  Without the changes, my I5 iMac running 10.6.8 took twelve minutes and thirty-five seconds to boot.  The iMac is a 2.8 GHz I5 with 8GBs of RAM.

With Spotlight disabled and the anti-virus program gone, it booted and loaded the programs in six minutes and twenty-five seconds.

I then tried booting into Lion using the external Firewire 800 drive. The apps were the same but I cannot guarantee the iPhoto library was exactly the same, but it was close.  The time for Lion to boot and load the applications was four minutes and eight seconds.

Just to prove that I had correctly perceived that Windows 7 was faster, I ran a similar test on my I7 Lenovo laptop with 8GBs of RAM.  The mail application was Postbox and the photo app was Picasa.  Of course Firefox, Chrome, and Snagit were all the same.

The time for the Windows computer to boot and load the apps was three minutes and ten seconds.  Actually the time is even more impressive when you consider my Windows laptop automatically loads Ginger, Spotify and Skype.

We are less than thirty days from Mountain Lion so I can hope that the new operating system will be a pleasant surprise. It needs to be simpler in my opinion, but I doubt Apple wants my opinion.  I miss some things in iPhoto also, but I have given up on those.

I'm just happy to have my iMac booting at a reasonable speed even if I couldn't find anything in Apple's support forums to help me.  I am also pleased that my wife has her cherished address book back and that all those old email addresses haven't been put out to pasture yet.

I am going to look forward to comparing Mountain Lion to Windows 8.

I am pleased that Apple has extended the deadline for migrating mail.  It would be nice to see some documentation instead of having to figure it out on the fly, but you don't become an Apple user and expect to know all the secrets of the mother ship.  That's just not the way it works.

If you have been reading Applepeels for a few years and appreciate the efforts I have made in shining some light inside of the Cupertino spaceship, there is finally a way to say thanks besides donating.  Just buy my new ebook, "A Week at the Beach, An Emerald Isle Travel Guide."  The cost is only $4.99 and it includes some great pictures and recipes. Eighty-seven pages of information for $4.99 is a deal especially since it includes our family hush puppy recipe.

If you are a Mac lover, you can buy the Kindle version now, and as soon as I am finished with the iPad version, you can buy it and feel great that the iPad version looks better and has more pictures (and all the captions are in the right place).  I will be doing a post comparing writing for the Kindle with writing for the iPad.

If you are a Windows lover, you can take some satisfaction from the fact that even though I wrote the book with Nisus Writer Express on the Mac, I had to switch to Word for Windows for the final formatting.  Kindle publishing is not exactly user friendly but it does like Word especially Word for Windows.  I also ended up doing my promo pieces for color print on Word for Windows though the images were done with Pixelmator on a Mac.

Speaking of books, the book about my career at Apple is back on track.  I hope have it published sometime in August in Kindle format first.

With that I can say that I have survived one more set of storms in my computer life. Making it through this just fits with the lessons that I learned from my mom.  The first six months of life by the river in 2012 have been much better than last year.  I say that in spite of us being brushed by a tornado.

We are fully into our season of beach weather and ripe homegrown tomatoes.  If the fish would start biting, life would be pretty good.

I am almost as thankful that traffic on the beach is still light as I am that my iMac seems to be healed.

Tim Cook, the right person for Apple's evolution?

New products have been the heart and soul of Apple for most of its history.  The recent comments by Forrester Research chief executive George Colony have received a lot of discussion. 

It is easy to jump on the bandwagon that Apple will decline without that next great thing and the vision of Steve Jobs.

I would disagree with Colony's analysis for a number of reasons.  My first thought is that it is impossible for any company, even an Apple, to turn out hit after hit. Setting the expectation that this is the only way Apple can be a great company is to consign Apple to a future which won't be very bright.

The Apple of today is really the result of three straight home-runs by Steve Jobs, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad.  The Apple of tomorrow does not have to be defined by products that break the mold every time.

There is no guarantee that even if Steve left Apple with that next great thing that it will be another product hit.  Despite what has come to be popular wisdom, even Steve had some less than successful products.  You might want to remember back to Steve's wonderfully designed PowerMac G4 Cube for just one example.

Tim Cook might be the person who finally turns Apple into an adult company.  It doesn't have to be a company that declines like Sony has.

I have already heard some thoughts from Tim which indicate that he might be right for this moment in Apple's history.  His comments on the convergence of tablets and laptops are on the money.  I just hope he is strong enough to keep Apple from making its OS X operating system look too much like iOS for the wrong reasons.

Apple has a tremendous amount of momentum, and there is plenty that can be done to grow Apple's business.  Despite what the technology press and analysts would have us believe, computers besides tablets are not dead.  There are plenty of people who will be using laptops and desktops for years to come.

Just as Microsoft is envious of Apple's share of the smart phone and tablet markets, Apple should be eyeing the huge numbers of computers that still ship with Windows around the world.  As the world of technology matures, finding new markets with that next great product might be beyond any company's ability.

However, getting beyond a 10% market share in the world of computers could be within the grasp of a Tim Cook led Apple.  One of the weaknesses that I saw in the leadership of Steve when I was at Apple was the ease with which a market or a product could be sentenced to a slow death as resources were drawn to that next great thing.

My experience with Tim Cook showed me someone who is willing to tinker with things until he gets them right.  It happens to be one of the things that I have admired about Microsoft.  That patient ability to keep working on product until it meets customer needs is what has kept Microsoft alive and still making money.

So what would I like to see Apple do to begin its journey to sustainable growth?

Obviously Apple has to keep churning out new iPhones and iPads, but Apple needs to resist the temptation to load them up with features that distract from their core functionality.  You can make something better without feature creep.  That is part of Steve that Apple needs to keep in the minds of its product designers.

At the same time, Apple needs to focus substantial resources towards making OS X the absolute best operating system for computers on the planet.  At one time it was.  It no longer is the best.  There are things that Windows 7 does better, and I find Windows 7 is more reliable.  Apple should not make OS X look like iOS just for the sake of doing it.  If there are good reasons fine, but don't mess more things up like we have already seen in recent updates to iPhoto.

Apple should not depend on Microsoft screwing up with Windows 8.

Next Apple absolutely must focus on style with reliability.  I should not be sitting here saying that my last three Mac laptops are dead while my last three Windows laptops are still running.  There is no reason why Apple cannot deliver its absolute drop dead gorgeous products and have them be ones that have spectacular reliability.  You can build a company on reliability and customer satisfaction.  You can lose a company if your products don't stand the test of time.

I really don't care if there is another laptop a little thinner than mine if my laptop lasts five years instead of two.

Next, the world of desktop computers is a wasteland.  The iMac and the Mac Mini have not revolutionized it.  They also haven't taken Apple very far into the world of two digit market share. 

There is a product somewhere between the iMac and the Mac Mini with a feature or two from the Mac Pro that could own the desktop world.  While it might not break completely new ground, it could be a home run for Apple.

Things will have to gradually change at Apple under Tim Cook's leadership for all this to happen, but I think it is very possible that Apple has not yet seen its peak.  Maybe the stock won't be as high, but the company could find a spot in the list of companies who have survived the loss of their visionary leader.

It would be good for all of us consumers of technology if Apple could not only survive but thrive.  I really couldn't care less if Apple comes out with a television, but I would be really ecstatic if Apple re-invented the desktop computer and delivered it with the world's greatest operating system.

There are lot of challengs out there for Apple. Android and Amazon will be fierce competitors, but Apple already has a lot going for it and should not face the decline that so many expect.

With that I am back to enjoying spring as it continues to unfold here along the stunning waters of North Carolina's coast.  With warming weather I plan to be back out in my kayak and anchored on the oyster rocks once again.

 

 

 

Take-out Tomato Soup and Apple's view of the future

I actually don't see very many television commercials because I watch very little television.  While I know that television commercials are not a locked-in-stone view of the future, they do give us some insight into the companies who put them on the air.  Commercials especially help us identify the products that business like Apple love the most.

While it might not go into the annals of silliest commercials, Apple's last "Siri" commercial which features someone ordering take-out tomato soup deserves some consideration.

Long ago, Apple had a marketing campaign based on a flying car. It didn't last long. Perhaps it was just before its time since flying cars seem to be coming back for real.  

However, some of Apple's campaign's have really resonated with computer users.

Perhaps my favorite was the one with the dog and the young boy who unpacked his iMac and got on the Internet faster than an adult male who had purchased a Windows computer.

I think the commercial was a homerun because at the time, getting a computer other than a Mac functioning was a really time-consuming and frustrating experience.  Getting an iMac going was pretty easy.  Of course life even with an iMac was a whole lot better when it got a Firewire port and could write CD-ROMs.

We have come a long way since the iMac was first introduced. Other manufacturers have learned a lot from Apple.  I would argue that setting up a new Windows PC is not very different from a new Mac today.  I have done both in the last couple of years.

I don't think it is difficult to argue that Apple isn't nearly as interested in desktop and laptop computers today as they are in iPads and iPhones.  Long ago I predicted that Apple desktop and laptop market share would peak at around ten percent.  I think that is pretty close to their current US market share.  I don't see it growing.

However, I never guessed that peaking at ten percent would be because Apple has lost interest in computers. I know that iPhones and iPads are selling like hot cakes but isn't a Mac still at the heart of it? You certainly can't run iCloud without a Mac to create your identity.

Maybe Apple's focus on small gadgets is finally reaching Mac lovers as it appears that users might not be jumping on Apple's iCloud bandwagon.  Apple is now giving away Snow Leopard to make it easier for users to buy Lion.

Maybe Apple's marketing has become silly enough that it is no longer a company strength. Or perhaps potential computer purcahsers aren't interested in searching for take-out tomato soup with their phone assistant?

If you ask me to define Apple's current marketing message, I would say it is all about very fancy screens for tablets and a future where we are reduced to ordering take-out tomato soup.

Maybe I grew up in a different world, but the thought of being lazy enough to order take-out tomato soup is beyond what I can imagine.  And in this world where people are struggling to find jobs, does Apple really believe that there are people out there who can afford to order take-out tomato soup or who even would want to?

If the computer future that Apple envisions for us is asking my phone silly questions and following the responses, it might be time to say out loud that Steve's absence is being felt.

Those of you who still know how to cook might want to try my grilled salmon recipe which is at the end of this post.