Applepeels

Why I Did Not Buy A MacBook Air

Certainly, I am getting to the point of needing a new Mac. My main system is a 2010 iMac that my son and I resurrected from the dead in 2013 a few Thanksgivings ago. My backup system is a MacMini which I purchased in January 2013 when my iMac was in the throes of its death. I have not had a Mac laptop since my white plastic MacBook died in the summer of 2012.  The Apple Store just told me my iMac with an I5 processor and 16GB of RAM will not run Mojave, the latest version of the Apple operating system.

The system that I considered replacing with a new MacBook is my faithful, original Lenovo Yoga with 4GBs of RAM and a 64GB SSD, touchscreen and an I5 processor. I paid $999 plus taxes for it on Black Friday 2012. It has stayed on the kitchen counter or traveled with me since I bought it. I have never had a problem with it, but I have to run a tight ship to stay within its limitations and it will only connect to 2G WiFi. I sometimes used it as a tablet at night when browsing the web.

It makes sense to have a traveling Mac laptop since I work for one of the few companies out there that use Macs on an everyday basis. We actually use Pages, Numbers, and Keynote.  However, I do not come to this purchasing decision without a bias. I starting selling Apple Computers in 1982 for a reseller and went to work for Apple in November 1984.  When I finished my career at Apple's choice almost twenty years later in July 2004,  my position at Apple was the director of federal sales. From 2000 to 2004 my federal team continuously preached about Apple's embrace of open standards in OSX. It was a message well received in the federal market as we tripled sales year after year with an incredibly small team given the US federal IT market is the world's largest market.  It is easy to say that for over two decades Apple was at the center of our world.

My last ten years at Apple also coincided with Apple's last efforts to be price competitive.  Many of those years Apple lived by the mantra that each year they should introduce new products at the same price point but with more features and power. Without giving away the rest of my story, I can still say that I am not alone in saying that those days of Apple attempting to be competitively priced are long gone.

Before detailing my thought process on my computer purchase, a little more current technology context will be useful.

In December 2014, my son and I bought my wife a Toshiba Chromebook. She had been using a Windows laptop since January 2010 when I forced her to give up her 12" Aluminum Powerbook G4. She wanted something with better battery life that did not weigh as much as her 2010 I5 HP.  We looked at the current MacBook Air and Chromebooks.  For what she wanted to do, email and browse the web, a Chromebook that cost $800 less than the $1,000 plus MacBook Air price tag seemed a better choice. She is still using that Toshiba Chromebook today. Her home business 2010 HP Windows laptop was retired in the summer of 2017 after seven and one-half years of service. It was still working but had gotten too slow.  She got a Lenovo 720 I5 with 8GBs of RAM, 256GB SSD and fingerprint reader. The cost was under $800. The total cost for both of her current computers is around $1,000.

Last year I replaced my two-years-old Windows desktop with an HP Envy with 16GB, 500GB SSD, 8th generation I7, GeForce MX-150, and 3840 x 2160 touchscreen display. The price was $1099 plus tax and since I bought it at Costco, it came with a two-year warranty. It stays upstairs in my office hooked up to a nice Dell monitor. I do almost all of my photo work on it now. I now use Adobe's products for most of that work. It also has my GPS software, Expert GPS, another product called GeoPhoto, WonderShare Filmora for video, and a product called XnView that I use for browsing photos.  I also have on it the Microsoft Office Suite and an Amazon product used for Kindle books. When we evacuated during Hurricane Florence, it did travel with me. While using it side by side with my old Lenovo Yoga, I got a good taste of the difference between 2G and 5G WiFi.  The HP Envy is usually on my wired Ethernet network in my office.

My work iMac does have a few programs that I use personally, Pixelmator, BBEdit, Marked 2, and Fetch. There is another factor that matters in my decision, I have been an Android smartphone user since March of 2010. I recently upgraded my four-plus-year-old Motorola Droid Turbo to a Google Pixel 2XL. We also switched to Google Project Fi from Verizon and our phone bill dropped from around $100 to about $50 per month while going from my Droid and a flip phone to two smartphones. Somehow Verizon had me using three to four Gigs of data monthly. Since switching to Fi, we have barely broken one Gig of data per month for the two of us.  I also have a repurposed Lenovo I5 with a 500 GB SSD. It runs a version of Ubuntu Linux.

Beyond it is nice to have a MacBook Air to travel with for business, the most important thing for this purchase is for it to meet my everyday needs. That is especially true since I am paying for it with my money. Those daily needs include checking my emails (several accounts), doing some light photography work, browsing the web to read the morning news, ordering a few things from Amazon, and looking at maps and weather. I should mention that my travels are limited and I usually only get away four or five times a year. Usually, only one or two of those are business trips.

I was in no rush to make this decision until I saw the Black Friday specials on Pixelbooks. The one that caught my eye was listed for $699 with a full touchscreen, 8 GB of RAM, and 128 GB SSD. It also came with four months of free YouTube TV and 100 GBs of online storage. Almost simultaneously, I saw that the old MacBook Air was being offered for $799 at Best Buy. I consulted my son who is even geekier than me and read a few articles including this one, 10 Reasons Why I Chose the Google Pixelbook Over a MacBook. It was written back in August when the Pixelbook and the old MacBook were priced essentially the same.

One of the key points that I got from the article was that Pixelbooks now run Android apps and can run Linux apps. While I doubt I will ever run Linux apps on a Pixelbook, I can easily see me running Slack, Bluemail, and a few other Android apps. My son advised sticking with Windows, but I felt comfortable trying the Pixelbook.

Wednesday before Black Friday, I texted a friend who works at Best Buy to confirm they had a Pixelbook in inventory and then headed down shortly after getting confirmation. It took just a few minutes to get the Pixelbook up and running at home. I think it is the best laptop I have used since the Titanium Power Book.

So what do I find so great about the Pixelbook?

1. It is instantly on when I open the cover
2. The battery life is great.  I usually get a couple of days between chargings.
3. My Android apps do work as advertised.
4. It took me less than a day to adapt my morning routine from Windows 10 to the Pixelbook
5. I love the touch screen.  I think it makes browsing even easier and more natural. The screen itself has outstanding resolution and type is very clear.
6. The computer is very fast and responsive.
7. The backlit keys are great
8. The touchpad works very well
9. It has a great keyboard
10. It is a perfect streaming companion with YouTube TV and Chromecast

The price is definitely right. I have not seen a computer with this build quality available at the $699 price point.  My wife loves the way our kitchen counter looks now compared to how it looked with the Lenovo Yoga and its components.

So what has not worked so far?  I have not been able to connect to my Synology NAS. It is not a huge deal since I am usually dropping screen captures from the downstairs computer to the NAS. Now I just copy them to a folder on my 100+ GB Google drive and then drop them on the NAS from one of my office computers. It is an extra step but a minor.  Most people don't have their own NAS anyway.

My biggest surprise has been how well minor photo image editing and resizing works on the Pixelbook.

Did the MacBook Air have a chance? If the new MacBook Air had been priced at $999 instead of $1,199, I would have looked at it seriously.

At one time when Apple's products were a real cut above the build quality of other computers. Maybe then there was some justification for charging more.  Today, with many of the same components, Apple charges more just because they can.  Apple has become the computer maker for those who like to pay more for their computers. Apple has also become the computer maker that loves trapping users in its increasingly proprietary world.

Not long ago I had to move my Dymo LabelWriter to my Windows desktop. Somehow Apple's address book no longer works with the LabelWriter. Regrettably, iPhoto and iMovie are no longer programs that I use. In contrast, Google Photos has become a valued partner in my photography.

I am not a fan of Google's lack of privacy but if I have the need, I have an email account where I can turn on encryption with a click.  When I have a problem in Pages or Numbers, I can almost never find the answer on the web.  Similar problems in Word or Excel can be solved in seconds.  When you add all this to the pricing, going with the Pixelbook was not a hard decision. That said, sometimes Google, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft all deserve a critical eye for how much power they wield.

Like I predicted long ago, high pricing and the Chromebook have killed Apple in the education market. Raising the price of the entry-level MacMini from $499 to $799 and changing the processor from I5 to I3 is not going to help Apple expand their market. I suspect Apple is just very happy with their 13-14% of the market that seems willing to pay whatever Apple asks. It will be interesting to see if all the Chromebook kids fall for iPhones or go towards Android/Chrome devices when they have to use their own money. Apple's recent pricing actions will push those of us who are price sensitive farther away from the platform.

As to my decision, yours might be different if you are immersed in the Apple world and happy about it. That years-ago decision to go to Android for GPS and mapping reasons might have been a fork in my computer world. People who went with iPhone are happy with it as far as I can tell. That being the case, there is no reason to rock your boat if you like where it has taken you.

The Chancy Software of Apple

Many people love Apple computer hardware.  I think people who love Apple written software are a little harder to find.  Sure there are people out there who still think OS X is Apple's gift to the world, but you will struggle to find someone singing the praises of Mail, Pages, Keynote, iPhoto or any of Apple's shrinking suite of computer software.  I can say up front that I have said some nice things about Pages 5 but it is not a piece of software that I choose to use.

Part of the problem is that Apple introduces software and kills it off. The list goes back many years and includes software from Apple's application company Claris.  Claris emailer was a good program as was Claris Works.  Aperture was well thought of by some users and I was a fan of iDVD.  All those programs are gone.

Then there is the iWork series that languished until recently when Apple brought out Pages 5 which creates all sorts of formatting problems when moving back and forth between it and Pages 09.  People would not have to move back and forth if Apple had maintained feature parity with the old version.

Word might be bloated and not much fun to use, but it does a much better job moving between platforms and versions.  Apple just does not seem to care.

I can perhaps buy the argument that Claris Emailer did not make sense for Claris when Apple decided to give away the Mail.app program.  However, if that is the case then why isn't Apple's mail program a better program?

Perhaps you think it is, but I can assure you that it is not a program that you want to bet your company on these days.

While I admit to being an email program's worst nightmare with over a dozen email accounts, I long ago gave up pushing Mail.app.  I only asked it to take care of five email accounts. One is a legacy Mobile Me account and aother is an iCloud account.  The other three accounts were IMAP based accounts that I use in business.

I have been struggling for three or four months to trouble shoot a Mail.app problem on my Mac Mini.  Before I detail the problem, it might help to understand my desktop.  I have multiple computers at my fingertips including an iMac that is not pictured.  In my office I run two Mac computers with OS 10.9.5, one desktop with Windows 8.1, and a laptop with Windows 7.  I also have another laptop with Windows 8.1 that sits on our kitchen table downstairs.  My MacMini also runs VMware Fusion and Xubuntu Linux.

In addition to all the computers (and you can read more at this article), I also once was a vice president at an email services company and spent plenty of time reviewing training materials telling people how to configure our email services on a variety of email clients. I also did some of our Linux and Mac compatibility testing.

There are not many email clients that I have not used over the years including Eudora and even Outlook on earlier versions of Windows.  Having worked for years at Apple and after spending time at an email company, I believe email should be bullet proof.  Even after I left our email company, I would sometimes call the company and ask them if they were having server problems when I noticed an email taking too long to be delivered. Each time I called, it was confirmed that they were experiencing some server problems.

So here is the email problem that has finally made me call it quits with Mail.app.  One of my business email accounts will randomly will stop receiving emails and/or refuse to send emails.  I have done everything to verify the settings are correct including deleting the account and starting over. Nothing helps except pivoting to another computer to send or receive the email. Mostly I just launch VMware Fusion and Thunderbird and send the copied and pasted text from Thunderbird running on Linux.  It has never failed me.

I have also turned to my iMac and sent the email using the Mail.app running on it.  It never has a problem sending the email.  Of course I am also able to send using Windows Mail 8.1 which I quite like. Today I finally broke down an installed Postbox on my MacMini with the troublesome Mail.app.  There was still an email from yesterday that my boss had sent and that Mail.app had refused to receive.  Within minutes of entering the same settings into Postbox, I had the email from yesterday.  It is also worth mentioning that my original Kindle Fire, my Nexus tablet, and Android smartphone all have no problem with the same email account.

I have done enough testing to conclude that Mail.app on this particular MacMini has a problem. Sometimes it works and sometimes it does not.   Perhaps I could reintall Mail.app and fix the problem but it was easier to install Postbox because I get the added benefit of a mail search that actually works.

I was reminded of how well the Apple Mail program worked at one time when I booted up my trusted Dual G5 running OS 10.3.9.  I personally like the older version of OS X, iPhoto, and Mail.  Mail search actually found what I was looking for quickly. iPhoto let me use the escape key to move back from a picture to the library and the old version of OS X felt very comfortable.  I was relieved to find the operating system actually remembered the last place I looked for files. It was also interesting that there was no Apple way to move some exported JPEG files from my old iPhoto to the cloud.  I ended up using Dropbox which worked perfectly.  Apple has proved time and again that it does not care even one tiny bit about my ten year old Mac.

Now I am not going to give up on Macs because of a flaky mail program, but Apple seems to be waging a war of attrition on serious computer users.  iPhoto certainly is not the revolutionary program which I loved when it was first introduced.  Even the iPhoned-version of it seems is falling out of favor.  I actually quit depending on iPhoto over three years ago, I pull the plug on Apple's iPhoto at v 9.1.5. I moved to Picasa and Lightroom.

While I can make it run,  I truly miss an up to date version of iDVD.  Then there is iMovie.  I just prepare to relearn the program every time that I use it. Apple's somewhat undeserved reputation of user interface consistency falls completely flat with iMovie.  It seems to never be the same program.  The formatting errors we find moving back and forth between versions of Pages are a huge hit to productivity.  It takes a lot of time to correct them and we cannot find any font based issue that would cause the problems. Adobe got a lot of our company's money to make certain that was not the problem. In the end it is easier to switch over to Word to do a mail merge than fight with different versions of Pages.

Seriously if I am a Mac user in business, I seem to be stuck with Microsoft Office and what seems to be the declining interest of Apple in providing alternative software and services. I did not become a Mac user and go to work at Apple just so that I could have nice hardware to run Microsoft applications.  I could write a whole post on how disappointed I am in iCloud. So many companies even Microsoft get the cloud close to right and Apple cannot even get into the ballpark.

I recently asked an Apple employee if Apple used any of their own software, the reply I got was that a handful of Pages documents have been sent out but never a Numbers document.  I suspect Apple still uses Keynote, but that is not enough to keep a business user on the platform even if it were truly that much better than PowerPoint.

Perhaps Apple's software would get better if company policy dictated only Pages and Numbers documents sent from Mail.app.

I work for a company that uses Macs so I will continue to hope for innovative solutions like Postbox that make staying on the Apple platform a lot easier.

That is it from the Crystal Coast where summer is still here but fall is knocking on the door.

 

Apple's New Blog Doesn't Impress Me Much

We can be pretty sure that hell has frozen over.  Apple has launched a blog and the Wall Street Journal is falling all over itself talking about the kinder, gentler Apple. 

I continue to use my MacMini daily but it is far from my only computer. If asked about Tim Cook and Apple products, I would be more likely to subscribe to this view, Tim Cook’s Apple: Middling Products Designed to Pad the Bottom Line While Gouging Loyal Customers.

Some place between the two views of Apple lies the truth, but as a heavy user of technology and one who sees problems that could use the magic Apple touch, I remain unconvinced that the changes at Apple are anything more than cosmetic or that we will see products that might help us have an easier time doing our jobs in a digital world that Apple helped create and even complicate.

Still I am glad to see Apple finally embracing a blog even if it is just for developers who have had a special relationship with Apple for many years.  In fact developers have often had a better relationship with Apple than many Apple employees who oft times are in the dark about what the Cupertino mothership has planned. Maybe having a blog will help Apple better understand the needs of web content creators.

Perhaps as a heavy technology user who creates content I am in a small minority, but I remember well the days when Apple brought us WYSIWYG technology that worked very well in the black and white print world of the mid-eighties.  Apple kept pace for many years delivering color printing capabilities that set the standard for the rest of the industry.

As content also found a home on the web, Apple got lost.  It never came up with a web tool that was worth using.  In fact Apple ignored the whole blogging world and missed one of the essences of the web, that your content has to be editable on all sorts of devices even one that you might not manufacture.  I always thought Apple was clueless about blogging because no one at Apple ever did any blogging. Certainly iWeb was never a serious competitor.

I started my first blog using TypePad not long after leaving Apple in 2004.  That was ten years ago and Apple has finally decided to do a blog but only to try to win developers over to yet another new language. I would be much more impressed if some Apple executives were blogging and trying to learn what Apple needs to do next.

While other companies have been figuring out the web and using it to better understand their customers, Apple has been busy becoming a consumer company with just as much secrecy as the old Apple. Those of us who still use products like RapidWeaver for the Mac to create content are obviously in the minority but I do not think Apple should give up on people like me. While Apple let the whole web world slide by and has been inconsistent with its tools, there is still a vast opportunity out there for an innovative company.

Unfortunately Apple's recent products have not helped.  While I like the new Pages 5 tool, you cannot even export HTML from it.  With the Beats acquisition, I see Apple moving farther from its roots as company that provides great productivity to users who have to work with digital assets.

We are in a strange world right now where often content is on the web, in ebooks, and in print. It is a very complex process to take content and have it work in a variety of environments.  There are tools out there that promise to do this, but they are either expensive or complex to use.

The real genius of Apple that kept the company alive was reducing the complex to simple. When the Mac was introduced, we could print what we saw on the screen.  Screen resolution and printer resolution did not increase in lock step but it was close enough and the tools were good enough that we could do a pretty good job producing print jobs and eventually that included color ones.

I just finished publishing the third version of my book, A Week at The Beach - The Emerald Ise Travel Guide.  I ended up doing the final Kindle version on Word for Windows and the final print version on Word for the Macintosh.  It would have been nice to pull everything together with an Apple product, but Apple obviously wants you to use iAuthor and publish only on their store. Word on the Mac does not do well what the Kindle world requires which is filtered HTML.

While I can understand Apple wanting to tie content to its devices, it would seem logical to me if Apple's devices are the best products for writing Kindle books that Apple will sell more products and probably get more books for the Apple platform.  Yet the most recent version of iBooks Author will only export as an iBook, PDF, or Text.

I am not going to pretend this is an easy area to tackle but neither were products like iMovie and iPhoto.  There is a huge opportunity for Apple to create an amazing writing tool that gives content creators more flexibility than iBooks Author and also lets them create books for Apple's store, the Kindle store, and for the print world.  Apple already has a leg up on being able to use video in iBooks Author but the company also has a serious tilt towards a closed eco-system instead of an open one.

There are also sort of directions Apple could take, but I would love to see something like John Gruber's Markdown language used so that the same content could have different formatting applied to it.  I already use a cloud-based product called Draft. Draft has introduced Kindle support so I am anxious to try it.

Right now those of us trying to publish in multiple environments would probably jump on an Apple solution.  One that would let me publish to a blog, a web page, a PDF(x3 of course), or a real paper book would be most welcome.  Third parties can build those things, but those of use who used the old Apple LaserWriters remember how well things worked when Apple worked closely with Adobe to make sure software, hardware, and printers all worked together seamlessly.  I would love to no longer worry about hidden HTML in a Word document.

Amazon with its Kindle reader product for virtually every platform has done a great job making sure a work published on the Kindle store is widely available even on Apple hardware.  They also have CreateSpace as an in house paper print publishing firm.  They have their delivery mechanism down pat.  However, other than emulators to check your work, they provide little help in the actual creation.

If Tim Cook's Apple is truly a more cooperative Apple, it would be great to see Apple become the publishing platform of choice once again even it means having to talk nicely to Amazon.

When I am not trying to coerce last generation tools to produce next generation books and content, you can often find me  here on North Carolina's Crystal Coast enjoying one of the most beautiful places on earth.

A Sign That Apple Cares About The Desktop?

We all have different expectations from the companies that have helped define our lives.  My hopes for Apple revolve around the tools that the company created or helped popularize over the years. Many of those innovations let me do things that I could hardly imagine.

With me it started with an Apple II+, AppleWriter II, and an Epson MX-80 dot matrix printer.  Then there was the Mac, Pagemaker, and Illutrator, iPhoto, iMovie, and iDVD. While not all of these came from Apple, their initial releases were tied closely to the Macintosh.  Since the announcement of the Mac, the Mac desktop has been an important part of my life. Today I still use the Mac, just not as much. Linux has won a significant piece of my desktop.

Even when I gave my desktop over completely to Apple, it was not always been a smooth ride. Products like Claris Emailer and iDVD were dropped.  Some things like iPhoto's integration with the Cloud and web pages have changed for the worse.  Perhaps iWeb was the best indication that Apple never could quite understand that to be successful on the web you need to divorce the device from the data. Google certainly understands that.  I would even argue that Microsoft is better at it than Apple. Then there is an application like Pages which took me a long time to embrace for a few things only to watch Apple decide to ignore it.  I might not agree with Microsoft's direction on Excel, but I doubt they will ever ignore it.

Apple's misunderstanding of the cloud imight someday be looked upon as a major mistake. Still there is no question that Apple remains a money machine.  What I am wondering is can Apple still innovate in a way that really matters.  It is not a new question.  I found this August 18, 2011 article by Brandt Dainow, Why the iAd was a failure, an interesting read.  I especially like this quotation which refers to an earlier article of his.

The thrust of my criticism was that if Apple creates aspirational and innovative new products, but then restricts access to them, it forces others to create competing systems. By refusing hardware manufacturers such as Samsung and Nokia access to the iOS system, Apple forced them into the arms of Google and Microsoft. I argued that, just as the Mac had gone from 30 percent market share at its peak to less than 3 percent today, so would the iPhone go in the mobile market.

While the Mac has gotten up to 10% or so of market share, there are those who are now arguing that it has peaked. 

It turns out that a lot of what Apple has done throughout its history is to create innovations and then to try to wall them off.  There was a time before Windows 7 when many computer users would have loved to have the more secure and capable OS X running on their Dell or HP.  Apple was sure that letting OS X into the wild would destroy the company.  It turned out that Apple's success was not destined to come from OS X anyway.  It was going to come from the iPod, iPhone, and iPad and related services which now make up close to 86% of Apple's revenue.  I always thought that it was funny that I had to buy a third-party add-on for iPhoto just to do something as simple as put my photos in Google's Picasa web albums without resorting to a browser.

In a sense Apple is now trying to use OS X to drag along those of us still creating content with Macs.  It likely will not work.  The web is changing everything and Apple's walled worlds are showing some huge cracks.  Android may be as unstoppable in the mobile market as Windows was in the desktop market.

Android runs on a lot of hardware from different companies.  I like to compare the sharing options that I get when viewing an image on the Mac with what I get when viewing an image in the gallery on my Android phone.  There are twenty choices on my LG Spectrum phone instead of the seven choices in Apple's Preview.  Of course Apple is not the only guilty party in limiting our choices.  When I want to share a photo from my Amazon Cloud Drive using my Kindle Fire, I only get four choices.  That lack of choice has a lot to do with my decision to make a Nexus 7 my main tablet.  I get more choice on a lot of things.

By trying to control everything, Apple limits our choice and opens the door to innovation from others. But if the limitations that Apple forces on us are severe enough, then the market is guaranteed to respond with other choices.  Some of the choices might not be goods ones, but then again some of those choices might be really good ones like the Nexus 7 that I'm using.

While some argue that the only way for a good user experience is to let Apple control everything, my experience has shown that Apple cares little about the user experience except to want to use it to prod me towards their vision of a pure world with only Apple products and services.

It will be interesting to see how well Microsoft's experiment in using their operating system to prod us toward tablets and the Surface Pro will work.  Actually the operating systems of both Microsoft and Apple are not very high on my list these days.  I am moving towards a roll your environment using virtualization. Look for my upcoming article on it at readwrite.

For now I would like just one sign that Apple cares about my user experience.  I will nominate bringing back the "Escape" key in iPhoto as a way to return to the library instead of clicking on the annoying "Photos" button.  I doubt we will see that since the march of Mac OS X towards iOS likely will accelerate instead of slow down. 

In truth, it does not matter.  I have found a new solution, Adobe's Lightroom.  Guess what?  The "Escape key" works like it should there.  A better sign for me to pay attention to is Frank, our great egret from Canada.

My iLemon

Even a company like Apple which has a reputation for very reliable computers over the years, can still ship a bad product.  I’ve been using Apple’s computers since August of 1982.  I worked for the company for nearly twenty years and I have had access to a lot of Apple’s hardware over the years.

 

In October 2010, I purchased an I5 iMac which I have come to call my iLemon.  It’s the first Apple computer that I have owned in over thirty years that I consider to be a true lemon.  I’ve had some problems with computers over the years but none of the issues have rivaled what I’ve seen on this iMac.

 

While this is only one iLemon in three decades of Apples, I think buyers going into the holiday season should listen to the challenges that I have faced and carefully weigh them as they consider purchasing a new computer.

 

To many people Apple is a premium product on par with the best computers that are out there.  Certainly with few exceptions, you end up paying more for an Apple product than you might for a product from another manufacturer.  If like many Americans you live in a metro area, your Apple purchase gives you access to an Apple store and what can be for many people a very satisfying support infrastructure.

 

A little over six years ago, my wife and I made the decision to move to North Carolina’s Crystal Coast.  It is an area of unbelievable beauty reminiscent of Atlantic Canada where we lived early in our lives.  It is not a densely populated area, and as such is not really on Apple’s radar.  The closest Apple Store is in a mall in Raleigh which you might reach in three hours if you hit the traffic right.

 

The distance to an Apple Store has not stopped me from using Macs, it has just made it more challenging.  Just as we were moving to the coast in the summer of 2006, I bought a white MacBook.  My Aluminum G4 laptop that I had purchased 21 months earlier had become unusable.  The ribbon cable to the laptop monitor was malfunctioning.  After evaluating repair costs, it made sense to buy the new Intel based MacBook.  It was shipped to me and that fall I had a problem with it.  After some pressure I was able to convince Apple to let me ship it to them for repair instead of making two round trips to Raleigh.

 

When we moved to the coast, my job required that I use Windows.  While I put it off as long as possible, I ended up buying a HP laptop running Windows Vista.  It was an inexpensive computer with a limit of only two gigs of ram. Vista was not much fun but in a couple of years when I ran out of hard drive space, I bought another HP laptop with an I7 running Windows 7.  At the same time I replaced my wife’s ancient and deadly slow Mac laptop with an I5 HP also running Windows 7.   We paid less than $1,500 in total for the two computers.  At the time Apple was not even shipping laptops with I5s or I7s.

 

During much of this time, my white MacBook was a constant companion.  When I went to work, I often carried the MacBook and my Vista laptop.  Vista was a quagmire in my opinion and working on a Mac was an order of magnitude better.  However, Microsoft learned from Vista and Windows 7 was a huge step forward.  Not long after I bought my Windows 7 laptop, I quit carrying both laptops.  Windows 7 proved to be very reliable, and I could do almost everything that I wanted to do on it except for work that I did on the web.

 

For that work I had my MacBook and a trusty dual G5 tower that I purchased in December 2004.  In the fall of 2010, I started a project that required more horsepower than my four year old MacBook.  The software I wanted to use would not work on my G5 so I made the reluctant decision to buy an I5 iMac since I had been priced out of Apple’s family of towers.   At the time, the only way to get an I5 processor was to buy the 27” screen which barely fits on my desk.  I ended up paying something over $1,800 for my iMac.  It was slightly more than I paid for my dual G5 tower six years earlier.

 

The iMac had some quirks.  It generated a lot of heat and I found the SDHC reader which was located below the DVD drive to be very inconvenient and something of a pain for someone like myself who takes a lot of pictures.  As is often the case not long after I bought my iMac, Apple shipped a newer, cheaper one.  I did take advantage of a $7.50 upgrade to the new iApps but more about that later.

 

If we fast forward about 15 months to the spring of 2012, the iMac began to exhibit some disturbing signs.  It was taking well over fourteen minutes to boot Snow Leopard.  I did some research and talked to some Apple folks and eventually decided that I was suffering from “Slow Snow Leopard.”  I followed some homegrown remedies that I found on the web since Apple seemed to have no suggestions.  I did get the boot time on the iMac cut down to reasonable time. Shortly after that my MacBook died after over five and one half years of faithful service.  The iMac became the only computer on which some of my web design software would run.

 

About three months later, the iMac gave me a dire warning that I should copy all of my data to another hard drive, reformat my drive, and reinstall the operating system.  I went one better and after coping the data to another drive, I did a complete clean install of Apple’s Lion operating system onto an external Firewire 800 drive.  I ran that until I was comfortable with Lion. Then I formatted the internal drive and did another completely clean install except I moved up to Mountain Lion,  Apple’s latest operating system.

 

When I say completely clean install, that means I went back to CDs or disk images for all my applications.  The operating systems were installed from Apple’s app store.  Starting at square one actually worked well except for a set of upgrade disks that I had purchased from Apple.  For some reason Mountain Lion would not recognize the upgraded iPhoto.  I solved the problem by spending another $14.95 at the Apple Store for a new purchase of iPhoto.

 

All this sort of worked for a couple of weeks.  Being of a cautious nature, I only installed a completely new, small iPhoto library on the internal drive.  In spite of that I started to have iPhoto library corruption problems.  It wasn’t long before I figured out that the internal drive was dying.  The computer quit booting from the drive so I upgraded my external drive to Mountain Lion and started running the computer off the external drive again.   During all of this I wasn’t too worried about my data since I am a heavy user of Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft’s SkyDrive.  I also had regular time capsule backups of my data.

 

At the same time I switched to the external drive I started have intermittent problems with the SDHC reader on the Mac.  Sometimes it would read a card from my camera and sometimes not.  I would often rotate my chair fifteen degrees, insert the same card in my Lenovo laptop, load the photos into Picasa, and export the ones that I wanted to my Google drive and then import them from Google drive to iPhoto on the Mac. 

 

Surprisingly sometimes I could come back later in the day and the iMac would read the same card it had refused to read. It might read one or two of four cards or sometimes none of them.  I also was having more trouble with iPhoto.  I ended up reinstalling iPhoto from the Apple Store twice.  For any of you who have done that, you know that it can take a few hours with a cable modem. For a while it seemed like the iMac was always downloading something from Apple.

 

Obviously by this time, I had a tremendous amount of time and energy expended in trying to fix my iMac.  At this point I figured out that Apple in its wisdom designed recent iMacs so that you have to pull the LCD panel to access to the hard drive.

 

For someone who has been swapping hard drives in both desktop and laptops for years this was a bitter pill to discover.

 

Over the years I have been a big believer in trying to give companies a chance to stand behind their products and services.  I’ve had significant luck with companies as diverse as Adobe and Toro in getting problems resolved so I decided to contact Apple to see if they would do something to make amends for what I consider an iLemon.

 

With a long career at Apple, I still have a few high level email addresses so I sent a note to someone high enough up the corporate tree to see if Apple was willing to stand behind their product.  I wasn’t too surprised when I got a call on my cell phone the next day from someone in executive relations promising to help me resolve my problem.

 

I was traveling and naturally they wanted to trouble shoot the problem so I promised to contact them when I got back home. That was especially important since they couldn’t find my name attached to the serial number of any iMac.  I was surprised since this iMac was my seventh one over the years. All the others were actually used by the ladies in the family. 

 

That weekend and the following Monday, I spent much of my time running tests and doing screen shots.  I formatted several types of SD cards with five different cameras to try to determine a pattern on my malfunctioning card reader.  I also tried to document the strange problem I was having with photostream in iPhoto.  I took all that information along with my system profile and sent it to my contact at executive relations.  I told her that I would be available at my home phone number at 10 AM the next day.

 

At about 10:15 the next day, I noticed that I had transposed two digits in the backup cell phone number that I had given them to use if our home phone number was busy.  I sent a new email with a corrected cell phone number even though I knew the executive relations lady had my correct cell number.  A couple of minutes later I got a call from the system engineer saying that he had been waiting for the right phone number.  It was a clue that he had not read the email that I sent the previous day or looked at any of the information I included.

 

I spent well over an hour on the phone with the Apple expert and let him download all sorts of stuff from my computer in the hopes that he could resolve some of my issues.   He seemed to tire of the whole thing and we never got to the photostream issue.  He promised to pass the information on to his engineering team and get back to me.

 

I waited a week to hear back from him and then sent a note to him and my executive relations contact.  The next day I got a call back from my executive relations contact.  All she said was that it had been determined that I had a loose wire on my SDHC reader, and I should take the system to my local service provider.

 

Many Mac users would not have the experience or the extra hardware to go through the effort that I did to fix my iMac. Some will say that I should have purchased Apple’s AppleCare extended warranty.  I feel the same way about extended warranties on computers that I do about extended warranties on cars.  I should not have to buy an extra warranty to get a product that is trouble free for a few years.  Had I made a policy of buying Apple’s premium-priced, extended warranties on every Apple product that I have owned, I would be out several thousand dollars.

 

I was a little disappointed with the result of my Apple intervention. My suggestion to Apple was they send me a new MacMini and I would just take the iMac to electronics recycling.  In the end I wasted a few more days of my time on what has proved to be a hopeless system.  With a dead hard drive and a card reader with intermittent problems and Bluetooth that no longer works with my phone, spending money on this iMac is probably a waste.  The shame is that all of this hardware worked fine at one time. None of this relates to the user not knowing how to get a computer to work.  All of this is in Apple’s lap for creating a combination of hardware and software that turned out to be unreliable.

 

The whole experience did prompt me to order Adobe Lightroom 4 for my Windows laptop so I will no longer be tied to a couple of adjustments that I used in iPhoto for photos taken in a certain light.

 

The whole experience confirmed several of my thoughts about the new Apple.  Number one is that what many of us said would happen to reliability when Apple switched to industry standard parts has happened.  Apple is no longer the leader in reliability.  You don’t have to take my word for it, you can read this reliability report published in February of 2012.  Apple is in fourth place and way behind Lenovo which ranks number 1.

 

My second thought is that Apple often pushes design to the point that it impacts reliability.  I was surprised to find that the hard drive on my iMac has a temperature sensor that shuts down the drive if the temperature gets too high.  It is the first time I have been aware of a Mac outside of the Xserve that has a sensor like that.  You can cook your hand on the top of my iMac at times.  I have to believe that all the heat contributed to the early death of my hard drive.

 

Third, the Apple value proposition isn’t what it used to be.  The two HP laptops which I bought for a total of less than $1,500 are still working great.  As laptops they have had a harder life than my iMac which has never left its desktop.  They’ll soon be three years old and are still functioning.  The iMac never even made it two years.  My original HP laptop that I bought over five years ago is also still working.

 

Fourth, just because you pay more for Apple, don’t expect better service especially if you live outside the major metro areas.  I was really disappointed with my “trouble shooting” experience.  The whole thing seemed to be aimed at minimizing what Apple would do to fix my problem.  I’ve solved a lot of customer issues in my career, and never did I get on a call with a customer having a problem without reviewing all the information about the case before I talked to the customer.  I also never left a customer with an unresolved problem.

 

On top of it all, after the call with the Apple expert, I got an email to me addressed “Dear Robert.”  I have to say if you cannot even get my first name right, you probably aren’t going to solve any of my problems.

 

I have to compare my Apple experience to the phone call that I received from Adobe’s director of worldwide operations on a Sunday night telling me that he was sending me by FedEx a free copy of Dreamweaver to make up for problems I was having with an upgrade.  Last summer I got a call from the executive assistant to the CEO of Toro telling me that they were sending me a free cable to replace the broken one on my lawn mower.  I’ve been using Toro mowers for nearly 50 years.  The cable might get me to continue to use them.  Just a month ago, Nikon agreed to fix my Nikkor telephoto lens even though they could not find their copy of the extended warranty card.  Unless they drop behind the technology curve, I will stick with my Nikon cameras.

 

I want Apple to be a premium brand willing to go the extra mile because I have paid premium prices for my Apple products.  Unfortunately my experience even with some high level intervention shows that it is buyer beware with Apple just as it is with many other companies that sell products not nearly as expensive but sometimes more reliable than Apple products.

 

Apple’s latest refresh of the iMac line adds some more twists to the equation.  You can no longer upgrade your own ram in an iMac and if you want a DVD drive you have to buy an external one. Apple’s RAM prices are about as expensive as the market will bear.   From the review that I recently read, Apple has substituted a lower performing hard drive in the least expensive iMac.  Based on my experience I cannot think that is good.  Then in the ultimate convenience move, the SDHC reader is now on the back of the monitor.   The only reason that I can see for an iMac being thinner and lighter is that it will be easier to carry into a mall Apple Store for repair.

 

It saddens me to say that in the nine months since spring I have invested more time in this iMac than I did keeping my Vista laptop running over a couple of years while I was calling Vista a quagmire.

 

I am going through a complete technology refresh on my desktop in the next twelve months.  Likely there will be an Apple product on my desk, but it will not be an iMac. Whatever Mac I get will be here on probation since my recent Apple experiences have not been confidence building. 

 

Actually I made the first purchase of my technology refresh on the Saturday after Thanksgiving.  I bought a Lenovo Yoga running Windows 8 for $999.  My older Lenovo laptop is now hooked to an external monitor and acting as my main desktop system while I try to figure out how to replace my iMac.  Here is a picture of my desktop.

 

I bought a new Lenovo because of the great experience with the previous one. It is the best laptop that I have used since the Powerbook G4 Titanium that I used as an Apple employee.  So far I am very pleased with the Lenovo Yoga which is a combination ultra-book tablet with a touch screen.  I’ll be sharing my Windows 8 experiences and the decisions I make on other purchases at ReadWrite Web. 

 

You can read more about my Apple experience by checking out my recently published Kindle Book,  The Pomme Company.  Rumors of my book causing iPads running Kindle reader software to overheat are unfounded.

The Real Essence of Apple in 2012

I have watched with interest the announcement of the new iPad and the subsequent grumblings about it running too hot or not having an accurate battery icon.  I have also seen the over the top descriptions of the new screen.  New products always have issues.  Technological advances like the new screen always come with some challenges.

While the truth is always somewhere between the headlines, I am sure Apple has a winner in their new iPad 3.  Coming out with a product like the iPad 3 with great advances which make you want to buy it now is really what makes Apple the most successful company in the world by any number of measures.

Yet here I am on the Internet about to suggest that perhaps Apple has become the technological equivalent of the soft drink company that Steve Jobs mocked when he got John Sculley to come to Apple.

There is no question that Apple has made lasting changes in way we use and view technology. During my career at Apple many of us were driven by the belief that an Apple product came with enabling technologies which were hard if not impossible to get with other products.

That changed over time, but I do belief that making new powerful technology available to people was part of the reason for Apple's early success.  Just look at desktop publishing and printing on laser printers.  With the help of Pagemaker and Postscript, Apple was the leader in that revolution.

That Apple has changed and become more successful for the change is unquestionable.

However, do more people buy Apple products now because they are cool and sexy or because of what they can do with them?  Are Apple products now just pricey status symbols?

I still use my I5 iMac because there are a few web design and graphic applications that I really like and which I believe add to my productivity. 

While we were working at selling our mountainside home in Roanoke, Virginia.  I used RapidWeaver 5 to design a website promoting our home.  I also wanted wanted to include a slideshow with larger images so I used Shutterbug.

Most days I use the graphics program Pixelmator to tweak  photos like I have inserted in this post.

I am pretty sure that if I could get those three programs on a Windows PC that I would give up using Macs.  However, I feel no pressure to give up Macs.  On the other hand I am still waiting for Apple to deliver a compelling reason for me to keep using Macs.  Lion certainly was not it.

I actually have not run into a lot of new Mac users, but I do know plenty of iPhone users and a good number of iPad users.  Both are solid products, and many of their users have good reasons for using them.

However there are plenty of alternative products.  I am on my second smart phone. My first was an original Droid, and I was very happy with it until it died.  The second is a LG Spectrum.  The MyTracks App probably was the reason that I stayed on the Android platform. I love maps and GPS. Right now I think the Android platform is ahead of the iPhone in GPS and maps.  Also I was familiar with MyTracks, and I wanted 4G so I didn't consider an iPhone for my second purchase.

I haven't seen enough need for a iPad type device to use my own money to buy one.  However, I have greatly enjoyed the Kindle Fire that my grown children gave me this year for Christmas.  I use it for checking emails when I am sitting in my easy chair. I also do some light web browsing and check the weather in some of my favorite spots.

The most important use that I have found for my Kindle Fire is entertaining our three year granddaughter.  After she has been running full steam for several hours, putting puzzles together or drawing on the Kindle is a great change of pace for her.  However, I am happy that she only has access to the Kindle when we do our monthly visit.  I would rather her spend time collecting earthworms or playing in the water than using any kind of computer, even an iPad 3.

I will give Apple full credit for pulling the rest of the industry into the smart phone and iPad world.

However, I guess the question I really want to pose is,  "Has Apple moved to the point of just sugar coating technology so that people want to buy it more because buying the product makes them feel cool than for what it really does?"  Of course there is some of that in all technology and technology companies.  New products create demand.  Without demand technology companies die.

I would be very interested in hearing some feedback from new Apple users.

Do you have an iPad 3?  What do you do on it that you can't do on an iPad 2?  With all the tiny finger prints on my Kindle Fire, I'm pretty sure the new screen would be wasted on my needs.  How has the new screen changed the way you use your iPad?

If you have a new iPhone, what apps are the ones that make the new iPhone essential to you?

And if you are a Mac user, are there Mac specific applications that brought you to the platform?  Or did you come for Apple's new iCloud?  If you came for iCloud, what do you think of it"

For those interested, my book has been finished for a while.  Professional advice that I have received indicates that even if my book is favorable to Apple which I think it is and even if the book doesn't reveal any proprietary information about Apple, which it doesn't, Apple will likely sue me just for the fun of it.

So I will likely self publish, but I am still thinking about the risks.  Those who have read the book believe that it offers a very interesting perspective on life at Apple.  However, I am not sure that I feel up to being bashed around by Apple at this point in my life so that is the delay.

By the way, I am still grateful to Apple for my career which gave me the opportunity to choose where I wanted to live for much of my life.

Aside from that, the tomato plants are in the ground here on the Southern Outer Banks.  Life is pretty good on this watery side of the horizon.  The weather has been so good that it is hard not to hear the beach calling.

 

 

Why I might agree with Steve on Adobe

Steve seems to think Adobe is a dinosaur for pushing Flash. He doesn't want it on the iPhone, and I believe is going to stop shipping it on Macs.  Originally I thought maybe Steve was out in left field for going after Adobe & Flash. After all I have used a lot of Flash in  in websites.

I am certainly not a Flash developer, I just happen to use Rapidweaver which is a great little web design program for the Mac.  It allows you to easily make use of Flash for slideshows. 

I even went so far as to install Flash on my Droid to see how it worked on movies that I have built as an option into my new business project.  The Flash actually worked, but it seemed to take some of the speed away from my Droid so I removed it.

While all this was raising doubt in my mind about Flash, and maybe moving me towards agreeing with Steve for the first time in a while, I finally came to the conclusion that I needed to go back to using Dreamweaver by Adobe for my web development.

I went to Adobe's website where I learned that my full copy of Dreamweaver MX2004 was not eligible for a web downloadable upgrade. 

Twenty-five years in the technology business gave me some hope that there might be a manual update or some solution short of paying full price for a product that I had bought and upgraded a number of times over the years starting long before Adobe bought Dreamweaver from Macromind.

In fact I think that I upgraded Dreamweaver MX2004 at least once after buying it but I have moved and cleaned out my computer closet so my MX2004 was the last serial number I could find, and it was scribbled on a piece of paper.  I forget which Apple OS upgrade killed that version of Dreamweaver.

With that thought in mind, I engaged an Adobe Online Store person in a chat.  You might a hard time reading these but click on them to give it a try.

 

And so begins the saga that has leads me to believe that even if Steve is wrong about Adobe's Flash, Adobe is doomed. In a fast moving world, they are a company where clearly the left hand not only doesn't know what the right hand is doing, but they don't even care.

After Adobe collected my money on November 3 for a non-working upgrade of Dreamweaver, I spent a lot of time on the line with Adobe Support.  The support person finally assured me that this would be resolved in 48 hrs and that the second tier support people would have a workaround for me.  Of course in the meantime, I had software from Adobe that would not work, and Adobe had my $214.  I was walked through filing a support issue and got a case number.

When I did not hear from Adobe 48 hours later on Friday, I called once again on Saturday, and after a considerable wait and another full explanation, I was assured once again that second tier escalation would come up with a work around for me in 24 hrs probably and at the worst I would have an answer in 48 hrs or by Monday.

Of course I did not hear anything in 48 hrs. But I was surprised to finally see a note from Adobe support on Tuesday morning just 24 hours short of when I bought my useless software.

    We believe your issue is resolved and have therefore closed your case..

I went to the Adobe Support Portal and found that they were offering me a not so generous 20% off of the full version of Dreamweaver.    Since I was busy and past experience had shown that anything involving Adobe was not going to be quick, I put off the call until Thursday afternoon.  I was pretty unimpressed with their offer since I had gotten an email that morning from Adobe promising 10% off a number of Adobe products if I bought them before the end of November.

At this point, it is probably worth mentioning that this situation had moved to the point of not being about the money.  It was the principle of the thing.  An Adobe representative told me something, and I wanted the company to stand behind it.  I am a longtime Photoshop user along with being a Dreamweaver user for years, so I felt that I deserved a little bit of respect.

Of course my principles were tempered somewhat by wanting to move forward on my project which I had built with a demo version of Dreamweaver.  So Thursday afternoon, I called Adobe expecting that I would pay them the $104 plus taxes (the difference between what I had already paid and the discounted full version), get my serial number, and be on my way with my web development.

I called the Adobe Sales folks and gave them my case number, and the rep came back and said that he was ready to bill me and ship me my product.  I asked him for the total, and instead of being $104 plus taxes it was $319 plus taxes, and he said I could not have a downloadable full version, I had to wait for the shipment of a box containing Dreamweaver.

I asked him where my credit was, and he informed me that he wasn't authorized to do that.  I asked him why I could not get an online version and serial number, and he had no explanation other than he could not do it.

His only suggestion was that I talk to Adobe Customer Support and see if they could help. Obviously this is beginning to sound like a continuous loop.   Well I spent another hour or so talking to them only to find out that the only way to get my money back was to do an electronic return of a product which of course is a product that I have never been able to use.  I told him that I wanted my money back instantly just like they had charged my credit card.

He informed me that was impossible and that it would take 7-10 business days to process my return of a product that is impossible for me to use.  I had my wife check our AmEx account this morning, there is no credit from Adobe, and of course I am not surprised.

At Apple we used to worry about integrating stores and online stores, but it seems Adobe hasn't figured out how to even make the online stuff work with its own online people.

I have never seen more people in one company that could do nothing to resolve a customer's issue.

If ever I have seen company that has dug themselves into a hole, it would be Adobe. They have very expensive software in a world headed in the other direction.  If they think their products are so good that they can get away with horrendous customer service, then the folks at the helm of Adobe have not been watching the computer industry very closely over the last few years.

I am not going to pay money for a full version of Dreamweaver and I am going to get my money back. I am also going to try some other products to see if I can replace Dreamweaver.

I am putting Adobe on my list of businesses that are so clueless that using their products is hazardous to your mental health.  And if Flash works anything like the sales process at Adobe, I might have to side with Steve on this one.

Perhaps for more than one reason Adobe is truly a dinosaur in a world that is changing far more rapidly than they are.

Update- Saturday afternoon 6:20 PM Eastern Time.  I had another online chat with Adobe this afternoon.

I don't think that I made any progress with them.  You can judge for yourself from the copy and pasted conversation that I put on the web.  I edited out my account number, order number, and my e-commerce email address.  It somewhat entertaining, but it is amazing how useless their support people are.  I think this is the four or fifth one that has tortured me.

I took the advice of several folks and turned the issue over to American Express.  They immediately told me that I was no longer responsible for the charge pending their investigation, and they would remove it from our account even though it had closed for the month. 

What a difference in dealing with the two customer support teams. 

I still have Freeway Pro on my system.  I will try it and another recommendation that I have received.  Adobe products will never darken my hard drive again. In my wanderings I found one customer support rating for Adobe of 2.8 out of 10.  My rating would of Adobe would be even lower.

I also found a customer service ranking website where Adobe is ranked 242 out of 325 companies with a ranking.  From their scores it looks like they are headed to the bottom.

On issue resolution they get a 1.6 out of 10.  Their overall score is 27 out of 200 and their rating is "terrible."

I also found this story of someone who waited four months for a refund from Adobe.

Late Saturday night update.

l have downloaded a trial Freeway Pro 5.5 and found that I can upgrade from the version that I bought in 2007 for $99.  I plan to give it a shot today.  I also downloaded trial versions of the image editing program and vector drawing program.  They are certainly reasonably priced and at first glance look like a good way to rid myself of Adobe.

In spite of the tribulations with Adobe, it was still a beautiful November afternoon on NC's Crystal Coast.