Applepeels

The Best Mac Ever

My stories usually come with a bit of history and this one is no exception. If you just want to want to know what the best Mac I have ever used is, I will save you a few minutes. It is the Mac Studio Pro. There were no grand tests performed, but the Mac Studio Pro can claim the title as the best Mac ever because it just works like a Mac should.

My history with Apple products goes back to the Apple II+ which I got as a gift from my mother in the summer of 1982. By the fall of 1982 I was selling Apples.  I became Apple sales manager at the Texas Instruments VAR where I purchased my Apple, one of the first Apple II+ computers in the province.  I helped them open stores through New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. We had five stores by early 1984, and by the fall of 1984, as the company turned their focus to IBM, I went to work for Apple in their first wave of direct employees in Canada.  I got my first own-a-Mac shortly after that. An own-a-Mac was a deeply discounted Mac. Due to some quirky internal rules when I took a new job in Columbia, Maryland with Apple, I got a new own-a-Mac, this time it was a Mac II with a 40 meg hard drive. I was estactic. Own-a-Macs were supposed to be once in a lifetime pricing.

Before the Mac II, my original own-a-Mac got an internal hard drive from the Hyperdrive people who happened to be working from Halifax where my Apple office was until 1987. I think that I traded the upgraded original Mac for a SE30 which was a dynamite little computer. Sometime after we moved to Roanoke, Virginia, the Mac IIcx became one of my favorite Macs. I upgraded it to a Mac IIci and then with one last upgrade it became the Quadra 700.  That Quadra 700 rode around in the back seat of my car for years. It was a perfect demo machine with an added video capture card. I upgraded the hard drive every time I upgraded the processor. 

Another favorite along the way Mac was the PowerMac 7100. It was a workhorse and the first non-Motorola processor that I felt good about in those early days of the PowerPC. My PowerMac 7100 eventually got turned into a headless, stealth Linux server for my Apple office in Reston, Virginia.  The PowerMac 8600 was also a great computer. After purchasing the 8600, it became my home office desktop computer for six years until 2004 when I went through the Apple window. It was solid computer but during its residence, I could not resist an amazing deal on a lovely blue Mac G3.  It is perhaps the only computer that I regret scrapping. It was the ultimate connectivity machine with the ability to read about any device. I think it was the last Mac to have a SCSI interface. I did have a dalliance with a G4 cube that I got to use in my home office up in Reston, but it rebooted every time I forgot and put something on top of it. 

The winter of 2004 after my defenestration from Apple, I bought a Dual G5 Mac. It died last spring (2023) after nineteen years of service but its hard drives live on in external cases. The Dual G5 still has a place in my office.  It has the best case ever built for a Mac or any computer. It was a very good computer but it seemed to weigh a ton.

Other than saying the Titanium G3 laptop was the best Apple laptop in memory, I going to ignore Apple laptops since I went without one for nearly a decade between 2010 and 2020. None can touch my Mac Studio Pro anyway.

My office currently has a 2010, I5 iMac, a 2012 I5 MacMini, a 2021 M1 MacMini, and my M1 Max Mac Studio Pro with 32GBs of ram and a 1TB SSD. I use a 2020 I5 MacBook Pro as my personal laptop.  Among all those Macs, the Mac Studio Pro is my work machine and the best one in the office.

The list of things that I do on my Mac Studio covers everything from web design and photography to spreadsheets.  I use Pages, Word, and Nisus Writer Pro for word processing.  I have the full suite of Adobe photo products and all of Microsoft's Office products. Then there is Pixelmator Pro, RapidWeaver, Coda2 and other great software that I have been using for years. The only thing I cannot run on the Mac Studio is ArcGIS Pro.  I run that on my I7 Lenovo laptop running Windows 11. I also have an old Lenovo I5 running Ubuntu Linux just in case I run into a wall.

The experiences that I have had with Macs has not always been positive but I have tended to live on the bleeding edge.  What I can say is that compared to a lot of Macs that I have used, the Mac Studio has been rock solid. Even my M1 Mac Mini has had its share of teething problems but nothing like the iMac that I still have.  It was once called my iLemon. A heart transplant of a SSD has kept it going. It is now the oldest functioning desktop in my office at thirteen years of service.

Take it from one who has seen a lot of Macs, you will be happy with your Mac Studio Pro.

New Macs in the House

I have struggled to justify purchasing Macs over the years since I left Apple in 2004.  Yet there were times when Apple could do almost no wrong with hardware like the white plastic Intel MacBook laptop that I bought in 2006.  It nearly erased the memory of the Aluminum Powerbook G4 that I bought in 2004 which effectively died about a month after the warranty expired.

It was almost like that I was cursed as an ex-Apple employee. While I was at Apple, I seemed to always have the latest and greatest hardware but everyone knows that Apple hardware is not inexpensive. For years I just couldn't justify the prices that Apple demanded. Then in the summer of 2020, I bought a new I5 MacBook Pro because after nine years at a company that uses Macs, my 2010 iMac and 2012 MacMini could no longer handle the tasks.

Still it would likely be a surprise to friends still at Apple that I bought a MacStudio in December and just took delivery of a MacBook Air for my wife.

Using Macs for 39 years has not been a smooth ride by any stretch of the imagination. I have probably recycled a truck load of dongles and proprietary hardware.  Even with twenty years at Apple, I could not protect myself and my photos from Apple’s Cloud missteps.  However, all my photos now reside in places besides Apple’s Cloud.  As I have often said your data needs to be divorced from the hardware not hooked to it. I have achieved that without Apple's interference.

I went with a Mac Studio because my work had become even more demanding and the 16GB of RAM in my Powerbook just was not enough. I did not switch my wife back to a Mac because Apple miraculously figured out how to do cloud photos.  They didn’t as far as I can tell and photos don't matter to her.  I brought her back to the Mac because I believe that Apple has a better security foundation and does a better job handling and protecting passwords without going to a third party password manager.

I have used a variety of password managers including Last Pass (no snarky comments needed) and most recently Keeper which I continue to use.  Apple’s system activated by their touch finger print reader or password on the Mac or by Face ID on the iPad is just simpler and it works. So far there have been no breaches.

Now I don’t just use Macs, I have a Linux machine, a couple of Windows laptops, a Chromebook, and a Google Pixel 6 Pro phone. The Macs include my I5 based MacBook Pro, an M1 based Mac Mini, a 2010 I5 iMac, an older 2012 Mini and the new Mac Studio. 

You don't have to be someone with over four decade of Apple experience (I got my Apple II+ in 1982) to read the handwriting on the wall. If you are going to continue using Macs, you need to be on Apple silicon.  I have been with Apple through all its processor migrations so I am confident that the company will do that correctly and those that don’t get on the train will be left behind. If we are lucky most of the important and needed applications will follow.

So here maybe four months after writing a post that Apple no longer just works, I decided that my problem was that I had made the mistake of buying first generation Apple hardware when I should have known better.  I accept responsibility.  I knew better and thought this time might be different. It wasn't.

My Mac Studio with 32 GB of RAM arrived December.  While it was a little shaky at first, the most recent operating system update seems to have made it rock solid.  Since January I have written over 350 pages of reports using Pages. The reports are backed by multiple spreadsheets, both Excel and Numbers. I have also done several presentations with Keynote.  I use GoToMeeting, Zoom, and Teams regularly. I have had no problems. I was impressed enough that I started thinking about updating my wife’s aging Windows machine with a MacBook Air.  It didn't take long to make that decision.

Thirteen years ago she became a reluctant Windows user.  I got my wife the Mac Book Air because I felt like that once she got over losing a touch screen, she would have a good safe computer to do all our banking and accounting needs. She has a Google Pixelbook Go for browsing and social media.  She likes to separate business and play computing so I am fine with that.  Losing the touch screen has been more painful than I imagined but she will get through it.

Part of the reason I did not buy her a new Windows machine is that Windows 11 has become very irritating or maybe pushy is the word.  I have a very capable Yoga 9i but it seems like Windows is always trying to sell me something or get me to do something that I don’t want to do. I don’t really care that Windows 11 is built for gaming because I don’t do gaming.

For many years I was an iPhoto fan, then a Picasa fan, and eventually a Lightroom user because I had run out of choices. Recently I have had a lot of trouble with Lightroom on my two screen setups with the menus not displaying properly on Windows and then there is that Lightroom licensing nightmare. I have two separate licenses but it seems I am always having to deauthorize something. 

It also appears that Apple is taking Photos a little more seriously than it has in the past. While it doesn’t have everything that I need, it is a lot closer than it was in the last few years.

In 2023, I think Apple is a better choice, maybe not for everyone but for us it is.  Likely I will spend more on Macs but they do have some trade-in value and we likely won’t need too many more computers at our age.

If you are considering a Mac and have an iPhone, we will likely be very happy with a Mac. If you are a Windows users who is tired of the pushy Windows 11, a MacBook Air is a solid computer. I don't think there is an equivalent Windows machine to the Mac Studio. The Mac Studio is the product that many of us have been requesting for years. It does not disappoint. If you are a power user and the Mac has software that works for you, I can also guarantee that you will love it. I do not miss the jumble or cables and stuff on my MacMini.

I can highly recommend a few programs but I doubt that anyone has the same needs so I will just list them. If you want to ask about a specific product, contact me.  One of my favorites is Bear because it lets me write on multiple Macs and my iPad without worrying about files. I also use Coda2, RapidWeaver, BBEdit, Fetch, Squash, Nisus Writer Pro, Numi, Yojimbo, Greenshot, Snagit, CleanMyMac, Kiwi Mail for Gmail, Spark Desktop and Marked 2 along with the full Microsoft suite including Outlook.

The one thing I do a little different is that I have a LaCie 1GB SSD drive.  It comes with a program that creates a folder on your Mac called Mirror. All my work files are in that folder. It is automatically backed up to the LaCie drive regularly.  At lunch and at the end of the day, I do a manual back up from the Mirror folder to both the NAS in my office and the appropriate folders on our cloud-based Box drive.

At this moment in my life I am a happy, somewhat contented computer user. My Windows computers won’t disappear because I can only run ExpertGPS Pro on Windows.  I do like the way that Windows will show you all the images in a folder. The Mac doesn’t do it as well.  The Mac is also terrible at searching my NAS but Windows does a good job. A Windows touch screen is also something that I miss greatly when navigating my screen real estate. Apple isn't quiet the Open Standards company that I believed it would become but OS X is still Unix. On balance, prefer to work on a Mac because it is less intrusive. It does try to make me use something like teams when I don't want to. Our company's email which is hosted with Microsoft used to work on a bunch of clients but they keep tweaking things and that is no longer the case. At least Apple understands that IMAP is IMAP.

There is only one caution when buying a Mac. If you are new to a Mac it helps to have a friend who is a Mac user if you aren't close to an Apple store where you can find experts. Google search isn't nearly as useful for solving Mac problems as it is for solving Windows problem.

I have been writing about Apple computers for a long time.  Here is one of my early article, Computer Battles.

 

Should I Buy a New MacBook with Apple Silicon on the Horizon?

I bought a 13-inch MacBook Pro in early July of 2020. It is actually the first Apple laptop that I have purchased in the fourteen years since I bought a white plastic MacBook with one of Apple's first Intel processors. It replaced my broken 15" Aluminum Powerbook G4. This time I am buying what might be the last of a line of laptops with an Intel processor. The last time I was buying what was one of the first systems with Intel processors. This decision to buy has been a couple of years in the works.

For those that need a short answer to should I buy? The 13" MacBook Pro is a very good Mac. I hope it will last me for six or eight years. It is much faster than either my 2012 Mac Mini or my 2010 iMac, both of which have I5s, SSDs, and 16GBs of RAM.

The new system has been a pleasure to use. I have only had the system a month so this will not be my last post about the 13" MacBook Pro. If you need a Mac, and you can find any type of a deal, I would recommend you buying this Mac as opposed to waiting for a laptop with Apple silicon.

Unfortunately, if you do order the MacBook Pro 13" on Amazon, it will only have 8GBs of RAM and 256GBs of SSD storage.  The only way to get 16GBs of RAM on Amazon is to order the 16" MacBook Pro which is very expensive at just under $2,100. For my work, 16GBs of RAM is essential. You can, however, get a custom system from the Apple store with 16GBs of RAM. You can no longer add RAM to most of Apple's systems after ordering.

If you are new to the Mac world, and just want a Mac, it probably makes sense to wait for the first of the new line of Apple silicon-based laptops.

For anyone that wants a longer answer read on as I do not come to this question without some biases.

I worked for Apple for nearly twenty years and Apple has not really been price competitive in the laptop world since I bought my white plastic MacBook.  The MacBook Air has been as good as it got but it was never enough horsepower for me. However, I have worked for a company that uses Macs as its primary machine for the last seven years. I spend more time than I would like writing large proposals with Pages which by times drives me up the wall for different reasons than MS Word makes me nuts.

The two machines that have kept me functioning are more than a little long in the tooth, a 2010 iMac and a 2012 Mac Mini. Both have received transplants of SSDs to keep them functional but the challenges of using machines that old in an environment with hard deadlines outweighed the advantages of not spending any money. Since I am ex-Apple, I managed to use my contacts to get a good deal. Even at that, I spent considerably more money than I would have on a similarly configured Lenovo and the Lenovo would have had a touchscreen and a larger SSD.

A computer that comes into my office comes into a sophisticated environment with multiple operating systems. I like it that way. If I need to use Windows, I just turn my chair. While I am tied to the Mac because of my job, much of my other work can be done on my Windows computer, Linux, or even my Pixelbook. I have a history of wanting to spend $1,100 or less on my laptops. I broke the rule for this MacBook. My HP Envy has 16GB RAM, 500GB SSD, 8th generation I7 with a touch screen, GeForce graphics and it came in at less than $1,100. The Pixelbook with an I5, 8GB RAM, and 128GB SSD cost $699. My previous Lenovo Yoga with one of the first 64GB SSDs came in at $999 in the fall of 2012. It is still running.

My new computer is my first experience with macOS Catalina. I have been stuck on macOS Mojave. When I went to work at Apple in 1984, I gave up MS/DOS and did not spend any serious time with Windows until I left Apple in 2004. Even after all those years away from Apple and many of them using Windows almost exclusively, my system of choice is the Mac. I even have a 2004 Dual G5 Mac and a Titanium Mac laptop that both still work.

Having explained all of that, the biggest reason to buy the current Intel-based MacBook Pro 13" is the non-Apple software that I am using on my current systems. I have been through Apple's transition from the Apple IIe's 6502 to the Mac and Motorola's 68000, from Motorola chips to the PowerPC and from the PowerPC to Intel chips. It hasn't always been pretty. You can count on Apple's core software suite, Pages, Numbers, and Keynote to work well on Apple's on silicon. No matter what Apple promises the software from third-party vendors will come when they get around to it. If you depend on a specific piece of software, you might end up waiting for it.

This is not just a silicon thing either. My Mac Mini is still on my desk. I have a nice Epson scanner and an HP Color Laser Printer that I have been unable to get to work with Catalina. Apple does not focus on making things work like they used to back when they were desperate for computer revenue. Even then Apple has had some bumpy transitions and left some users of their own software hanging out to dry. Want to open a ClarisWorks or an AppleWorks document with Pages? Good luck. Fortunately, my Titanium PowerBook will still run OS9 and Appleworks.

Mostly the MacBook Pro 13" works as advertised. The Touch Bar above the number keys is a waste as far as I am concerned. I have yet to find a use for it. The biggest delay that I had in buying the MacBook Pro 13" aside from cost was the keyboard. When I found out that the infamous butterfly keyboard had been replaced by the new Magic keyboard, I went ahead with my purchase. I like the keyboard so much that I have not replaced it with a desktop one.

I also particularly like the way the MacBook works with my attached large Dell monitor. Things wake up the way that I left them which is sometimes not the case in the Windows world. The touch ID seems infallible so far and it is a good addition to the system.

When I brought up my new MacBook, I made the decision to do clean installs of all my software and not drag over everything that had found its way onto my Mac Mini in the last eight years. Besides Apple's suite of software, I use Slack, Excel, and Word in MS Office's suite, Powermail, Pixelmator, Fetch, Adobe's suite of Lightroom, Photoshop, and Acrobat, along with RapidWeaver 8 and Nisus Writer Pro. I have a Canon Pixma TS-9100 inkjet and a Brother HL-2360D laser printer on my network. Both work fine. I haven't given up on my color HP Laser printer but it isn't a priority right now and neither is my Epson scanner. Like everyone, much of my work is done in the cloud with browsers. I have chosen to go with Firefox and Safari on the new Mac. I have encountered no problems. Box, Drop, and Google photos all work like they are supposed to work. I have not installed desktop clients for OneDrive, Box, or Drive.

The only hitch that I have had with the MacBook is network related. Sometimes it seems to drop the connection to my NAS. I just have to reconnect but it is a problem that I have not experienced on the High Sierra iMac or the Mojave Mac Mini. It is not a huge issue and might have something to do with my unfamiliarity with Catalina.

In closing, if you are already in the Mac world and have a significant investment in software and hardware that you plan to continue using, the MacBook Pro 13" with the new magic keyboard is likely a good, but somewhat expensive investment.

If you are thinking about jumping to the Mac world, I would wait for Apple's new silicon. You will likely have everything you need to be functional very quickly after the introduction. With no legacy applications or hardware, compatibility should not be an issue.

Apple at the center of our world

There was a time when Apple was my family's world.  It went far beyond technology since the company wrote our paycheck.  Before Steve came back, Apple was much like a family.  I can remember going to a memorial service with our vice president of higher education when the son of my regional manager was killed in a car crash.  I can also remember the same vice president showing up at my father in law's funeral.

Our vacations were sometimes even Apple sponsored. If you were good in sales at Apple, you could win a golden Apple sales incentive Apple trip.  We took trips like that to Paris, London, Vienna, Ireland, Australia, Munich, and Canada.  I once even loaded my family in our Previa van and drove across the country from Virginia so I could attend a higher education conference in Monterey, California.  A key customer was going, my manager said Apple could not afford to fly me out so I turned it into a family vacation.

I usally wrote with a Cross pen that had an Apple logo on it.  I had a number of Apple watches and of course as any Apple employee will tell you, I had an imposing stack of Apple t-shirts.  It would have unusual to come home from an Apple event without five to ten t-shirts.  When I wore a suit, it had a gold Apple lapel pen with diamonds in it. It was an Apple life that went well beyond the technology.

Of course the technology was also there. There were Apple modems then Apple Airports and Quicktake digital cameras and even Apple scanners. Of course there were faithful Apple LaserWriters and color Imagewriters.  Our home networking started with AppleTalk connectors.  We even had an Apple CD player and I once carried the Sony-Erircsson T68i cell phone which Steve Jobs demoed on stage in 2002.

Most impressive of all, I had an Apple Color LaserWriter. As a manager working out of my own house the Color LaserWriter shipped to me not long after it was first introduced. The 110 pound printer was shipped to my house and that same week one caught fire at Penn State which was one of my team's accounts.  It was the beginning of the end of the Color LaserWriter.  None of the reps wanted to deal with it after the fire so it never left my house until it became surplus.  For years it was very popular with neighborhood children who needed color graphs for their science projects.

The Apple technology in house spread to several neighbors.  There were programs for Apple employees to let neighbors and family buy computers at a substantial discount.  We had many neighbors take advantage of it.

Some of those computers in the days of the Performas and endless model confusion before Steve came back were not that great.  I can remember replacing a few.  A few of the ones that that had Intel processors on a card were especially flaky. Fortunately laptops were so expensive in those days that I had no close friend buy one of the infamous Apple 5300 laptops.

When Steve came back, pieces of the Apple life and products started disappearing.  The Newton which had become a favorite of mine while I was traveling got canned along with printers and everything but a few computers.  The new focus was good because some very good computers came out of it, and I bought several of them for the family. I did that even after purchases for the family from Apple became less and less of a good deal with Steve choosing to also make money off of employees.  I believe I bought seven or eight iMacs for the family over the years. There still is probably a lamp shade iMac in one of our children's storage areas.

Most people know that Steve was focused on technology but few understand how focused he was on making money.  I believe the culture of making lots of money pretty well defines everything Apple does these days.

For me Apple has itself whittled away much of their technology that I counted on at one time.  I long ago retired my Airports and went to better, less expensive wireless equipment from other manufacturers.  Even before I left Apple, I ended up switching to HP laser printers.  Where once printers worked seamlessly on Macs, now it sometimes not the case.  From the day I got it over eight years ago my HP Photosmart 6180 has been a challenge on my Macs. The last two OSX upgrades I installed it would work for a week and quit.  I recently installed it on my new I7 Lenovo desktop.  So far it is working flawlessly which it has done on a number of Windows computers over the years.

However, my LaserJet CP1025nw color printer has worked well on my Macs from the start. I have also had good luck with a number of Epson printers from their Professional 4000 servies on down and with a Canon Pixma printer.  Printing is one of those things you never know until you try it.  It once was not that way with Apple.  An Apple printer would just work because Apple made certain that it did.  I like to think printers mostly disappeared because Steve did not like the mess of paper. I think it was 2004 when we got an edict from Steve that we could no longer hand out paper brochures or information in our booths because it made the booths look messy.

Software and services have also disappeared over time but mostly because they have become more problematic or just do not do the job that I need done.  I gave up on iPhoto in 2011 and Apple's Mail in 2014.  I still have to stiffle a laugh when someone complains that Apple's mail search just does not work.  Search in Postbox has never let me down. Probably no one needs to be convinced that while iCloud has improved, it continues the legacy of Apple just not understanding the cloud.

Of course there are some programs that needed to die and iWeb was one of them.  Apple has also made changes that made my love of its products a short term affair. Other times they have made me sound almost prophetic.  I published this in 2007.

I haven't spent much time with the new iPhoto but my initial impression is that it is much easier to do web albums, but the export panel isn't as efficient or perhaps as quick to use.

I do really like the options that people viewing the albums are given.  Apple has done a really nice job there.

This is the link to my .Mac web gallery.  Not surprisingly the Picasa favorites are also available at my Picasa Web Albums ( now Google Photos) and a few of the same photos are in a set at my Ocracokewaves Flickr site.  You can decide which you like the best.

I think web albums part of iLife is much better than the iWeb way of publishing photos.  It's almost as good as the original iPhoto way of doing it. :)  Of course I now have published photos in all three versions.  I'm not sure how I manage the older ones.

I have one philosophical problem with the way Apple manages the web albums.  If you make a mistake like I did and only publish one picture, the only way to get it off the web is to delete it in the web gallery section of iPhoto on my Mac.

It would make a whole lot more sense if you could manage it from the web instead of using an application on your computer.

If you try the links, the only one that does not work  after seven and one half years is the one to the .Mac web gallery.  Given that who would you trust with your photos? Certainly not Apple. At one time we were surrounded by an Apple life and now we are not.  As much as there might be some readers out there ready to comment (and do not waste your time, it will not be published) that I have a grudge against Apple because they showed me the door (which by the way is how almost everyone in Apple sales that I know left), that really is not the case. My Apple career rests on always stellar performance reviews and a wall full of sales awards.  Read my book if you want more.

Most tellingly I have spent something over $7,000 just on Apple hardware products since I left the company in 2004.  I bought an Aluminum Powerbook G4 within days of leaving.  A few months later I bought my dual G5 and Apple monitor which I still have and cherish. I bought a MacBook which I loved in spite of some early faults (and a dead memory slot) and an iMac which has required a lot of love. I now depend on a MacMini which had a tough early life and has no more ports left to give.

That is basically $700 per year on Apple hardware over ten years for five computers. That does not include external hard drives both Firewire and USB, keyboards, mice, cables, and adapters. The G5 is still running but unsupported by Apple.  The MacBook is dead.  The Powerbook G4 is dead but could be fixed but it would require more money than it is worth. The iMac is retired because I just do not want to spend any more money on upgrading its storage and I am irritated by yet another incompatible version of Pages. Taking the iMac apart is not something I want to do again even if that did increase its storage.

I have spent close to that many dollars on Windows computers in the same ten years.  The only one of those nine computers that is dead is a Dell laptop that I bought in 2004.  I gave it away and someone sat on it in 2011.  So when I said there would be no Apple under the tree, there were plenty of reasons behind that decision.

I look at what could be classed as my Apple addiction in the same light that I do the $2,220 that I spend annually with Time-Warner.  It is an expense that I need to manage better.  With Netflix, Prime Video, and some of the other options popping up this year, I hope to halve that Time-Warner expense and get the Apple expense down to under $100 per year.

Maybe life would be different if I had not bought an original Droid five years ago.  There has never been an iPhone in my life. I recently upgraded to a Droid Turbo and love it for all the same reasons that I loved the first one, ruggedness, great mapping capability and very good phone reception.  I am also tremendously impressed with the turbo charging.  I only plug the phone in for charging while I am having breakfast in the morning.  Of course I have to chuckle at the email I exchanged with an Apple employee recently over an almost unintelligible OSX message.

"...too much focus on iOS and yet my phone still keeps crashing and has a defective battery they will not replace."

With no iPhone (because they had very poor reception initially in our coastal area ), it was easy not to fall under the spell of the iPad especially since my children gave me an original Kindle Fire at Christmas in 2011.

We have come a long way since Apple was at the center of our world.  Now on the edge of Apple's world, I am more disappointed in Apple products than anything.  I have not given up on Apple products but I am in more of a holding pattern waiting for a product to convince me that there is still genius at Apple that will produce a product worthy of my money.

I will continue to look for software to make my MacMini useful. No software that has caught my attention recently like Coda 2 seems to come from Apple. Pixelmator will stay as my choice for a couple of very specific tasks for awhile.  We will see if Pixelmator can survive my new found access to the latest and greatest Photoshop.  I also have one website that requires RapidWeaver unless or until I change it.  It is not a good sign that I have not upgraded to the most recent version Rapidweaver.

Five years ago I did a post, The handful of programs that keep me using an Apple Macintosh.  There are two very interesting things in the post. One is the five reasons that I saw for continuing to use a Mac.

1. I can count on my Mac to get the job done no matter what it is.
2. My Mac is instantly available to me. There is no waiting for it.
3. There is still enough user interface consistency that I can use almost any application.
4. Things typically just work, hard drives, cameras, mice, printers, etc.
5. Most of the software I need comes with the Mac, and the rest is reasonably priced.

The next is the list of programs that I believed five years ago to be keeping me on a Mac.

"RapidWeaver, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, and Fetch are the programs that keep me using a Mac.  I also use Pages for one tri-fold brochure that I publish monthly.  I am pretty sure that I could do it in Word, but I have never taken the time to try it.  I could live without Pages."

It is funny how things have changed in five years.  My Windows computers are the ones I count on now. They boot faster than my Mac and have done so for a long time.  The famed Apple user interface consistency is not what it used to be.  I would far rather use Techsmith's SnagIt on Windows than on a Mac. The user interface is better. The user interface is also better on Windows Mail 8.1. The iMovie user interface changes with every release and it seems that I have relearn it every time that I open it.  We will not even get into the changes on Pages.  The incompatible file formats are enough of a headache as Bregalad recently commented. When I am managing a lot of files or devices, I would far rather be using Windows 8.1 than a Mac.

I migrated my tri-fold brochure to Word long ago because the office printer I was using stopped supporting Macs after an upgrade.  A few years after that I switched to a two-sided rack card that I now get Staples to print.  I did have trouble printing the PDF proof of it last year from Pixelmator on a Mac and switched to Photoshop on Windows.  I abandoned iPhoto and now Apple has it on the same chopping block that got iDVD.  My sneaking suspicion is that things do not work as well on a Mac as they used to but other than anecdotal information, I have no real proof other than having to regularly reboot a couple of applications on my Mac.  That never used to be a problem.

The other real challenge is that Apple is choosing over and over again to make laptops unfixable and even products like the low end iMac and MacMac Mini impossible to upgrade. Unfortunately the trend is catching.  The battery in my Droid Turbo cannot be replaced and I suspect my Lenovo Yoga is not very easy to tear open either.

In the end many of those things that made me commit time and money to the Mac have disappeared.  I bought my wife a Chromebook for Christmas.  Her five year old HP laptop is still working but the battery life is not what she needs in spite of a new battery last winter. She loves her new Chromebook and I actually like it better than either of my tablets.  I am amazed by the Chromebook's battery life, good screen, speed, and light weight.  However, there is still an Apple IIe in a storage closet to keep the memories alive.

If computers are going to become disposable like Apple seems to hope, they need to be very inexpensive and I am not holding my breath for Apple to catch that wave.  That is it from the Crystal Coast where we are on snowflake patrol while others are waiting for a potentially historic blizzard.

 

On the Edge of the Apple Ecosystem

Starting in the summer of 1982, Apple came into my life.  With an Apple II+, an Epson MX-80 printer, and AppleWriter II, I was off to the races.  Apple, the company, went on to consume a big chunk of my life. I dedicated over twenty years of my life to convincing people that using an Apple computer was the best way to have a productive relationship with technology and the data generated by it.

Even after my career at Apple ended in the summer of 2004, I continued to use Macs. Sometimes I was the only person using an Apple product at a meeting or even where I worked. As I have written, I think I managed to thrive while using Macs. I always felt that using a Mac kept the computer out of my way and let me get more things done.

For the last eleven years, I have been living in a multi-platform world.  Sometimes it was because I wanted to and other times it was because I had to use something other than a Mac.  Almost every day during those eleven years, I have spent time on a Windows computer and on a Mac. In addition on a majority of those days, I have also used a Linux computer.

I lived through the birth of Windows XP, the pain of Windows Vista, the relief of Windows 7, and the somewhat discordant world of Windows 8.  I have used every version of Apple's operating systems that has been released from Apple DOS and SOS through all the versions of the orginial Mac OS and OSX.

I have come full circle and the company where I have worked for the last few years does most of its work on Macs.  Apple was truly at the center of my digital life for many years.  I used .Mac, iPhoto, iDVD, and even briefly tolerated iWeb.  While never a real fan of iWorks or Apple's attempts at the cloud, I have been using both for years.

In a certain respect working for a Mac-centric company at this point in my life is unfortunate because I am as unhappy with Apple products as I can ever remember.  The Apple platform now seems to get in my way so I am downsizing Apple's footprint in my life.

Having said that, this is in no way a rant again Apple or its products.  It is more a list of what has pushed me to my decision and my first steps. I still have two Macs, but my reading of the tea leaves tells me that I am no longer one of the users that Apple targets.  I do not have an iPhone or an iPad and my only iPod is an original one that I won from Apple for being manager of the year.

I am convinced that the best way to have a healthy relationship with technology is to keep Apple and its products on the edge of my digital life. I make heavy demands on my technology. Apple does not seem to be interested in power users on a budget.

On a more fundamental level, I am little upset that Apple shows little consistency in the treatment of my data. Perhaps the screen capture at the beginning of the post says it best. Today it is easier for me to work with a combination of Microsoft and Google products.

None of this means that Apple products will not work for you. If you love Macs, your iPhone, and iPad, and are happy with the direction of Cupertino, you probably do not need to read any further.

However, if you feeling a little pressured in the Apple world, you might take some comfort from where I am headed with this next series of posts.

That Apple no longer makes products which fit my needs is something I have suspected for a long tme. However I will now go a step further and say that Apple's software products are mostly uncompelling and while some like iCloud are slightly better, they still are not very capable.  I cannot comment on Apple's intergration with their mobile products but I am pretty ticked off with iCloud being tied to Yosemite for Macs.  Google, Microsoft, Box, Dropbox, and almost anyone you can name does a better job with the cloud than Apple.

Beyond that, Apple's lack of consistency, openness and compatibility in its applications is beyond frustrating.  I have had it with the confusion and extra steps required because much of our company's earlier work is in iWorks 09 and Apple latest versions are not completely compatible.  While iMovie is still probably the most capable free product out there, I really hate that I seem have to relearn it the few times a year that I make a movie.

The last straw is Apple's attempt to force me to Yosemite on my Mac Mini because I upgraded on my iMac. It is an extra irritant that even today's Microsoft would not try.

That iPhoto is scheduled for the chopping block only makes me feel good that I abandoned it long ago.  That Aperture is gone confirms my decision to stick with Lightroom in spite of buying a copy of Aperture a few years ago. Much of what I am seeing could have been predicted by Apple's treatment of the content that I entrusted to it years ago with its dot Mac service. I lost many websites and still have photos with screwed up names because Apple's web tools renamed them beyond recognition.

When you use products side by side every day, you notice things that others might miss.  My I5 MacMini was always slower and more problematic than my I5 Lenovo tower.  That Windows remembers the last place I have looked saves me time and I find renaming files simpler on Windows.  My Windows computer also connects more quickly to my new NAS. I have gotten used to Windows 8 and I expect the next version of Windows will be better.  I no longer have that hope for OSX where I find search does not work like it should.  I have one HP printer which I have installed multiple times on the Mac.  It usually works for a few days and stops.  It has never stopped working on the Windows computers in the house.  All those things are nits, but they figure in making a technology decision.

Evaluating the technology that you are using and how it meets your needs is probably not something most people take seriously, but it is important to me.  I take lots of photos, build websites, write books, and spend a lot of time writing or creating information about fiber networks.

As I wrote before the holidays in No Apple Under The Tree This Year, my wait for Apple to address its core computing markets is over. I took an important step during the holidays.  I ended up ordering a 16GB Lenovo with a 2TB drive, DVD recorder, keyboard, and mouse for $800.79 tax included. I had planned to a 32GB model but they were sold out so I ordered the 16GB model with a couple of expansion slots for RAM.  Even with buying the extra memory, I will still have a 32GB Lenovo system for around for $975.  Fortunately Lenovo unlike Apple still believes that products should be upgradeable.

My plan is to move much of my non-work related computing to the Lenovo.  Migrating from my I5 Lenovo was pretty easy.  I signed into my Microsoft account and it moved all my mail, contact and printer settings over without any problems.  Signing into my Chrome and Firefox browsers also moved over much that I had used on the old computer.  I did end up installing Start8 which I have on my other Windows 8 computers. I also copied over a hidden folder from Postbox and let Postbox re index my inbox overnight.  I use Postbox as a second mail client and a very powerful mail search engine.

Step two was signing up for the photographer's version of Adobe's Creative Cloud.  This means that I will slowly migrate from Pixelmator on the Mac back to Photoshop.  I was already using Lightroom so this just gives me the latest version. I never completely quit using Photoshop.  I just had a very old version.

My MacMini with its almost full 500GB drive was part of the reason I bought the new Lenovo. There was not room to do much of my photographic work and keep all of my company work going. However,  I got lucky on that and my son solved the storage problem for me.  He gave me a Synology NAS that he is no longer using and a new Gig Ethernet switch.  After getting it set up, I did a test copy of over 3,600 photos.  The copy took less than two minutes.

I quickly freed up 15GBs of space on the MacMini.  That gives me enough room to run my VMWare Fusion version of Ubuntu Linux once again.  I'll probably do that until I have time to convert my old I5 Windows box into a Linux machine ether by way of VMWare or with a direct installation.

Having almost 11TBs of raid protected storage has made some decisions a lot easier.  Today, I took down my I5 iMac running Yosemite.  With more breathing room on the MacMini, I really don't need it and it is one less version of Pages and Keynote to worry about when working with files. I did not find Yosemite compelling.

If we can eventually move all our business work to the latest versions of Pages and Keynote,  I can delete iWork 09 from my hard drive. That might not happen for a while based on the way the new versions of Pages are handling old Pages documents.

At this point, I have Office 365 on my Windows computers and Office 2011 on my MacMini.  We were using the iCloud version of Pages to do joint editing of simple documents like press releases.  That stopped yesterday when I found out that one of the sharing links led to a blank document.  Fortunately I had a downloaded version of the document as a backup.  I have never had that happen with Google drive which I used for almost all my ReadWrite articles.

Pictures will be handled on my Windows computer with Picasa and Lightroom.  Most of writing for the web is handled with the browser version of Draft so can be done on either platform.  Books will be done in Word and can also be done on either platform.

Most of my websites are WordPress based so that is also browser based.  A few are created by RapidWeaver and some hand-coded with TextWrangler but I am confident the Mac can still handle that.

In sense my computing life is a flip-flop of what I often saw when selling Macs for Apple.  In those days it was not unusual to see someone using a Mac at home for personal use and a Windows computer at work.  For most of my personal things except a couple of websites, I will be using Windows.  When I do work for our company, I will be using a Mac.

However, the Mac that I'll be using runs Postbox for mail, Chrome and Firefox for browsers.  I will still use RapidWeaver, TextWrangler, and Fetch.  Pages, Numbers, and Keynote will only figure in my day job.  I offered my wife a MacBook Air for Christmas, but she chose a Chromebook.  So far she is very happy with it.  However other than battery life she also has few complaints about her five year old HP I5 laptop running Windows 7. It has been very reliable.

I will be on the lookout for an Apple product that will thrill me and a revitalization of OSX but I am not holding my breath especially if they are headed in the direction of a MacBook Air with even fewer ports. It was over eight years ago when I bought the last Mac that I thought was a great buy.

I thought about Apple's obession with no ports and no DVD drives as I stuck my TurboTax into the external DVD drive I had to buy for my MacMini.  Good thing TurboTax comes in both Mac and Windows versions.

That's it from the Crystal Coast where winter is going as expected and I am managing to get by without Yosemite in my life.

No Apple Under The Tree This Year

It is the end of the year and time for my biennial technology refresh. My computers get heavy use since I work in the technology industry, write and take thousands of photos.  I also build websites and have a few books to my credit including one on my career at Apple.  During my last refresh in late 2012-early 2013, I bought a new Mac Mini and a new Lenovo Yoga laptop and a Lenovo I5 desktop.

My desktop is not a normal one but it has gotten to the point that I could use a new Mac. My I5 iMac is four years old and my I5 Mac Mini will be two years old in January.  The hard drives are both are nearly full and the back of my Mac Mini is a cable nightmare.  The Mac Mini chugs along much slower running Mavericks than it once did.  Yosemite has not wowed me on my somewhat cursed iMac. 

With earlier Apple products, I might have just popped the cases open and put in larger hard drives as I did many times in my still running dual G5 that I bought in December 2004, for $1795.  I think it started life as a system with a single 80GB drive.  It now has a pair of 1TB drives.

Popping the case open is not much of an option on either of my current Mac systems, but I work for a company that uses Macs which means Pages, Keynote, and Numbers are part of my daily work life.  So I need a very functional system.  Considering my job and the fact that I also spent almost two decades working at Apple, a new Mac would look like a shoe-in.

My history with Apple computers began with an Apple II+ and I got my first Mac when I joined Apple in 1984. When we sold our home in Roanoke, Virginia and made our final transition to the North Carolina coast, I cleaned out my home office equipment closet which had a wonderful collection of Macs that I had purchased over the years including my Mac IIcx/Quadra 700, Mac 8600, and Blue and White G3. I even had the motherboard and hard drive of the Mac II that I got as my company own-a-Mac  when I moved from Apple Canada to Apple USA in 1987. The closet also had a couple of the six iMacs that I had purchased for my wife and daughters.

With that much history with Macs, it would seem that I would be a perfect candidate for a new Mac. Unfortunately Apple does not have a product that fits my needs. iMacs are hard to repair and the Mac Mini is just not expandable enough without resorting to expensive Thunderbolt upgrades. Even then the memory is limited to 16GB.

The dual G5 I got ten years ago is one of my favorite Macs of all time. It still runs whenever I need it.  The $1,795 that I paid for it was a good investment and I would gladly pay something close to that for another updated version of an expandable Mac with a couple of easily swappable hard drives.

Unfortantely Apple has abandoned this segment of market. If I want a nice I7 system with 32GBs of RAM, a hybrid 2TB hard drive with a DVD drive and lots of USB ports, I have no choice but to look elsewhere. I can find something like that at Lenovo with a nice video card for $1,050 before taxes.

I would be happy to pay a 30% premium on that or close to $1,400 to Apple if I could get a product that really meets my needs.

What kind of desktops could I get from Apple for $1,000 but less than $1,500. It is a pretty unimpressive list.

I could get a 2.8Ghz I5 MacMini with 8GB of RAM and a 1TB fusion drive for $999.  If I bump the Mac Mini to an I7 and 16GB of RAM, the price goes to $1,399.  Unfortunately the Mac Mini now comes with soldered in RAM so even if it supported 32GB, there would be no way to get it there.  You don't have to take my word for the latest Mac Mini not being what people might have wanted.  Here is what Ars Technica has to say.

But as iFixit's teardown confirms, the system is no longer as versatile as it has been for the last few years. It's sad to see upgradeability thrown out the window even though the computer still has room for it on the inside.

The 21.5 inch iMac is limited to 8GB of memory and already costs $1,099. If I step up to the iMac with 2.7GHz Quad-core Intel Core i5 and !6GB of RAM, my cost goes up to $1,499.  I am still stuck with a 1TB drive for that price, 16GB, and no DVD drive.  I can get 32GB of RAM if I go to the iMac with Retina display. That would set me back $3,099 and I would still just have 1TB of storage, no DVD and an iMac that is even harder to service than the one I have.  One of my least favorite things about the new Apple is how they force you to go up the line to get basic functionality.  When I bought my I5 iMac, I had to buy the one with the largest screen at the time just to get an I5 processor.

I sold Apple products for years and understand well the mantra that specs are not everything.  However, if you seriously use your computer for work like I do, the amount of RAM matters a lot.  I already have a 16GB Mac Mini and I find it is not up to the job.  So why would I replace it something just like it which by the way now costs more than the one I bought in 2013.  The current low end Mac Mini is less expensive than what I paid for my Mac Mini but the processor is slower.  A Mac Mini with the same processor that mine has costs $100 more than what I paid for mine and comes with RAM that cannot be removed.  What a deal you have given us Apple.

So here I am wanting to buy a Mac that will go to 32B and have the potential for lots of extra storage. It appears that I have no choice but to look at the Mac Pro. The $2,999 Mac Pro comes with plenty of processing power but only 12GBs of RAM and only a 256GB SSD.  It costs twice what I want to spend, has less RAM than I want and I still have to buy some Thunderbolt drives with enclosures to get to a couple of TBs and a DVD reader. A Mac Pro system would be well over $3,700. Would it last ten years? Who cares?

It does not matter whether Apple builds better sytems or worse ones. If they do not have anything that will meet your needs, you are out of luck.  I hate to see Apple walk away from this segment, but I for one am tired of waiting for Apple to address its core computing markets.  I will make do with the Macs that I have for work, but I plan to buy a new Windows machine that matches my needs. I will transfer more and more of my work to a Windows computer.  Then I'll take my old Windows computer and make it a very nice Linux box.  It was only about one and half years ago when I gave away my 2004 Dell Pentium running  Ubuntu to a young student interested in Computer Science.

I have delayed this decision far longer than I should have.  Apple with its less than stellar software, so-so Cloud software, inattention to the education market, attempts to force me to upgrade and lack of backwards compatibility should have already convinced me to long ago run away to another platform.

Apple built its computer business on the fact that you could customize its computers to your needs.  Thunderbolt is way too expensive for most of us. I just need a serious computer with lots of RAM and the ability to have a couple of drives that I can change as technology moves forward.  Apple is MIA in this segment.  It might come back to bite them.

But I am tired of fighting it.  Apple I get your message, I will go buy a new 32GB Windows machine with a 2TB drive and use the leftover money from what I had reserved for your coffers as a start towards a new camera.

That is it from the Crystal Coast where the cold you feel on a big river in December is nothing compared to what a serious computer user looking for a reasonably powerful system feels from Apple.

 

Even Apple Stuff Does Not Work All The Time

Macs have a long tradition of "just working." Windows stuff is often considered unreliable and unworkable by dedicated Mac users. Some of that is a myth and the reality is probably a little more complex.

I recently spent a little more time on my Mac than is normal in my multi-platform world.  I had three things on my plate, doing a mini-review of Pages 5 for ReadWrite and working on a new mailing and an email newsletter for WideOpen Networks, the company where I work. 

In the world of businesses, WideOpen is a rarity, we are a Mac shop.  While we have other platforms available, we do all of our proposals in Pages 09 and most of our work is done using Macs.  I cheat a little since I handle most of my email correspondence from Thunderbird running in Xubuntu Linux which runs on VMware's Fusion 6 on my MacMini with 16GB of RAM.

One task that I tackled for WideOpen brought home the complexity of today's computing environment.  We wanted to export some contacts from Highrise, which is a great cloud-based CRM solution that we use to stay in sync from multiple locations.  Someone else had tried to get what we wanted out of Highrise and decided that there was no easy way to do it.  That is when the old Mac guy, that would be me, got called in to look at the situation.

Moving contacts from one place to another has never been a favorite task of mine.  The way Google handles contacts while not perfect has continued to keep me a fan of their platform.  Apple's address book on the other hand has always been a little challenging when trying to get things in or out of it.

Our goal at WideOpen was to have the ability to print address labels for a limited set of contacts that we tagged in Highrise.   It seems like a simple enough task but as might be expected getting the results we wanted gave us a few surprises.

I first hoped get a clean .csv file that would let me import the file into my Dymo LaserWriter 400 Turbo software's address book and print from my Windows 8.1 machine.  I moved my label printer to my Windows desktop when my iMac died an untimedly death.  I had so many early challenges with my MacMini that I never moved it back.  Somehow I had managed to carry the old address book from my Mac over.  I cannot remember how I did it and it now appears to not be very easy.

First off exporting as a .csv file from Highrise was not much fun since the platform has so many fields which are not needed in address label printing.  If there is a way to choose what fields are exported, I have been unable to discover it.

After looking at the .csv file in Excel and trying a few things, I stumbled on the Highrise suggestion that I export my tagged contacts as a multiple-person vCard.  I tried it and much to my surprise the contacts came over to my Mac address book.  It showed as a Last Import and so I saved it as Smart Group with the name of First Mailing.  I then printed it to my regular Brother HL-2270DW using a standard Avery Label format.  It worked perfectly.

However, when I sent the instructions to my boss who has his Dymo Turbo LaserWriter label printer hooked to his Mac, the printer was not happy and screwed up the printing.  It was late in the day so we gave up. 

At dinner that evening, I wondered if my label printer was hooked to one of the very accessible front USB ports on my Lenovo tower or the hard to reach ports on the back.  It did not take me long to wander up to my office that evening and discover the label printer was hooked to a front port.  I unceremoniously unhooked it and plugged it into the USB port of the Mac keyboard on my Mac Mini.  I added the new USB label printer, changed the page setting to Dymo and Address labels, and my test set of labels printed in under a minute.

The whole operation of switching the printer from my Windows computer to my Mac had taken less than five minutes.  I was pretty excited and sent a screen shot of the settings to my boss.

When we talked the next morning, I found he had been unsuccessful in using my settings. Even after fooling with it for 45 minutes, he had not been able to get it to work.  We have both been serious Mac users since 1984 so there probably little that I could have done in his situation to change the results.  Our offices are six hours apart so he finally figured out that the Dymo software can be used with the Mac address book.  However, there is a problem with tags in the Dymo software that makes it an imperfect solution.  It will be an issue that will take more time than it deserves.

There was a time when Apple made everything from printers and scanners to cameras and almost all the software.  There was also a time when the choices in the world of technology were limited.  I started with an Apple II+, an Epson MX80, and AppleWriter II. There were not many other choices in those days.   Making a few things work well is relatively easy.  Making a lot of things work well is much harder.  It has always been one of the reasons that the Windows world is more complex.

As Apple has moved to a company that does not make everything,  things have become more complex like the Windows world.  Back in October 2006, I bought an HP AIO printer and eventually got it working on my Mac and even my Linux computer using Ethernet.

Until this past summer, the HP AIO printer has worked fine on whatever Mac I used.  However, when I upgraded to Mountain Lion, the printer would show up but the computer could never connect to it.  The printer is on an Ethernet network and four Windows computers have no problem printing to it and they represent Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1.  When I upgraded to Mavericks the HP printer worked fine for two days on the network and then stopped again.  I tried removing it and adding it back with no change in the problem.  Finally I hooked it up using the USB port and everything is fine and the Windows computers still work via Ethernet.

There are mysteries in the computer world and sometimes they are just not worth solving.  When I upgraded all three of my computer operating systems recently, the built-in SD card reader stopped working on my Lenovo Windows tower when I took it to Windows 8.1.  I chose the easy way out, I just plugged in an external USB reader.  That task, just like hooking up the HP printer by USB took seconds and figuring out either problem could take days.

 

 

 

 

Hard to put a rosy shine on the Apple

I am sure there are diehard Apple fans who believe nothing is wrong at Apple and the company is hitting on all cyclinders.  I doubt that is the case.  Unfortunately like all large companies in a very competitive global market, Apple is finding the road to continuing success a road with some twists and turns.

In spite of the challenges, I am not going to join with Doug Ehrman, a contributor to Motley Fool, and suggest that Apple would be better off by getting rid of Tim Cook.  I actually thought Ehrman's arguments were particularly weak. The idea that consumers will give Apple a break if they are searching for a new CEO is a fantasy.

One of the biggest challenges for Apple in the nearly twenty years that I was there was the revolving door management.  The reality is that you will never replace Steve Jobs.  Tim Cook plus almost anyone is still no Steve Jobs, but I firmly believe that Tim needs to find some new leaders with a passion for technology.  He needs to stop listening to whomever is whispering in his ear currently and find some folks who can bring some excitement back to the company.  There has to be more to innovation than thin, light, high resolution screens, and prices that are higher than anyone else in the industry.

There are some serious problems with Apple.

1. Obviously Apple has not been nimble enough to respond to the Android challenge in tablets and smart phones.  Going to court also has not worked.
2. Apple's strategy of taking industry standard parts and demanding unbelievable margins in computers to add to their cash horde is unsustainable in the long run.
3. If Apple is going to be a premium product, it needs service where there are no hiccups like my iLemon. Even Tim Cook's Executive Relations team which had initially promised to solve all my iMas's problems gave up on it and gave me the remarkably sage diagnosis that it was broken.  Guess what? Computers that cost $1,900 and are less than two years old should not break.  I had five other people all with similar iMac problems contact me.  That included one Apple employee who was afraid to push the issue.
4. Apple needs a culture change.  If you can find someone who worked at Apple and is willing to talk, you will find that Steve Jobs created a company culture where risk taking was discouraged.  You will also find that aside from developers, Apple has isolated itself from customers who might at least provide some serious feedback which is not tainted by the famed reality distortion zone.  I am not talking about people talking to their local genius bar.
5. Apple still does not understand the cloud and their new beta of cloud based software is almost embarrassing.  iWork beta in the cloud cannot import RTF files. (note hyper links are now working)
6. Pre-announcing a new product like the new Mac Pro and not shipping it is even worse than the fiasco that Steve Jobs created in 2003 when he preannounced the G5s in June and was unable to ship any until the end of July.
7. I use both Windows 8 and Mac OS X Mountain Lion.  I find Windows 8 more stable and more usable. I cannot stand the dumbing down of OS X and apps like iPhoto which I have stopped using.
8. If you are going to have the best products, quit doing stupid things like putting the SD slot on the back of a huge iMac screen.  Make sure your products are also the best to service.  Having to pull the huge LCD panel to get to a hard drive should not be the first choice.
9. There are companies like Lenovo who believe they can deliver high quality and reasonable prices. If Apple is going to be the Lexus of the computer world, they need to fix problems when they find them instead of creating angry customers.  Otherwise consumers will figure it out.
10. Apple has always been proud that they ignore the competition and make their own way. That may no longer be possible.  They need people who can figure out what the competition is doing right and help Apple get ahead of the curve.  I see no evidence that Apple has people like that currently.

What's is still right with Apple

1. They have some very passionate customers, but even there their patience is limited.  We had an Apple user visiting with us recenlty  He was very ticked off that his photos which should have been in the iCloud and on his iPad were missing in action.  His comment to me was that it was becoming too complex to be an Apple customer. I promise that I did not coach him.  As far as I could tell he had everything set correctly and the photos were just not there.
2. Apple has a core of great products.  They need to get better not just thinner, lighter or weirder.
3. They have a strong developer community.
4. There are some very hard working and bright Apple employees.

What does Tim Cook need to do?

1. He has to decide what the new Apple is going to be. It will not be Steve Jobs' Apple.
2. Innovation has to once again become a core value at Apple.
3. Apple can no longer afford to screw up the cloud.  Go buy Dropbox or someone else who has a good cross-platform cloud model and then add some Apple value to it.
4. Get OS X back to being the best OS out there.  That I prefer Windows 8 and Xubuntu Linux to Mac OS X Mountain Lion should be an embarrassment to Apple.
5. People still use devices for the software.  If you cannot figure out how to create great software, you better start throwing some more support towards open source.  While Picasa might not be as pretty as iPhoto, try editing a few dozen photos with each and tell me which one does it easier and better.  I already know the answer.

Why am I still rooting for Apple.

1. I love nicely designed hardware and I still think Apple can be the best source of this.
2. I want competition. It is the way we get better products.
3. Twenty years at a company even if the last two were the pits still makes you root for them a little.

For those who have just found my Applepeels blog, it, like me, has been around for a long time. There is more about me at this link or it you want to explore my non-Apple writing a little more try this link but it comes with some upfront apologies if my page does not resize properly in your browser. 

At one time I had over a thousand pages of posts on Applepeels. Apple never challenged the accuracy of a single one of my posts.  However,  much of the older Applepeels content is now found in our book, The Pomme Company.

And for those who might care, the book is now available in paperback. It is expensive because of the large number of color pictures, but on the other hand, the Kindle version is very inexpensive.  Print production costs are what they are.

Just to be clear so potential readers understand the book's content, there are no Apple secrets in the book.  It is about working at Apple.   However, no other person that I am aware of who was at Apple for nearly twenty years has written an unchallenged book.  Every Apple employee who was part of the history and who has read the book and communicated back to me has commented that if anything I was too kind to Apple.

Little of what I saw has changed according to reports from people still at Apple. I did work with Tim Cook so my comments are not idle speculation.   If you want to see what it is like to be in Apple sales, the book will meet your needs. The book will most definitely show you a side of Apple that few people aside from Apple employees have ever seen.

 

Apple Between the Lines

It has been nearly two months since I scanned the headlines on Apple websites. It has been even longer since I wrote my last article on Apple at ReadWrite.  I have been busy getting two books out the door.

I am not surprised that there is little to draw me beyond the typical Apple headlines. I got the feeling that Apple and I were heading in different directions as I was finishing up my books.  I am one of those people who still work with desktop computers, build websites, manipulate photos and graphics.  I suspect in Apple's world that I am something of a dinosaur.  I judge platforms by the applications that they bring to me and the productivity that I find from using those tools.  I do not own an iPhone or an iPad.

Still I am not here to argue that Apple is going to disappear, is poorly managed, or has crummy products.  By most financial measurements Apple of 2013 is a great success. Unfortunately, all that success has not made it to my desktop. I am here to report that I see little reason to keep Apple on my immediate radar.  I am actually down to two applications that only run on a Mac.  I still cling to Pixelmator as a favorite graphics tool and I have a couple of websites where I use Rapidweaver, but that is it.  The rest of my Mac experience is gone.  I got tired of waiting for new versions of the iWork suite.  iPhoto managled one too many photo libraries and why anyone would put up with iCloud and its services is beyond me.  I use Postbox on Windows for my mail.

I did give Apple a fair chance at keeping my loyalty.  I bought a new MacMini in January and with the OX 10.8.3 update it has become a stable and reliable partner.  It is not nearly as fast as my similarly powered Lenovo desktop running Windows 8 but speed is not really the issue.  The real issue is that there is no software that draws me over to the Mac platform and I am not that happy with the Mountain Lion interface which should scare folks since Windows 8 is my main other platform.

I thought iAuthor might be something that would be important to me, but when I found out that it would only work with an iPad attached, I gave up on the Mac as my publishing platform.  Amazon has a very capable piece of software that emulates a Kindle which I can use to view my work before I publish.  There are some subtantial advantages to being on the Kindle platform so it did not take much to kill the idea of moving my books over to the iPad.   While I am not a huge fan of Word, it seems to be the best tool with the most specific instructions for creating books to be published on the Kindle platform.  I actually tried my older version of Word running on the Mac but it just made for some additional work.

Then there is the whole cloud issue. DropBox, Google Drive, and SkyDrive all work very well and do what I need.  I have still not met anyone who loves iCloud.  I know Apple keeps making some incremental changes to Photostreaming to make it palatable, but I have been burned too many times by Apple's ever changing online photo storage strategies.  I do not care about iCloud anymore.

This August will mark thirty-one years since I first came to the Apple platform.  I got excited about it because I could do things with that first Apple II+ and subsequent Macs that I could not easily do with other computers. That has changed and I did fight the change.   Over the years I campaigned for a better and more reliable iPhoto and even a small tower that would more closely meet the needs of those of us who still believe that creating quality content requires more than an iPad or iPhone.  I even sort of grew to like Pages before I decided it had become just another abandoned Apple software product.

Even if Apple does come up with a tower, I likely will not be looking at it because I do not see a new version of Microsoft Office coming to the Mac in the near future.  I have more hope that I will figure out how to use Google Docs to publish my books than I do that Microsoft is going to bring an upgraded version of Office to the Mac. It is not that I love Google more than Apple but they do update their core products regularly.  Beyond the Office issue, Apple has become an expensive platform.  If you want to argue with me on that consider first that I have purchased three I5 computers in the last six months, one Lenovo Ultra Book, one Lenovo tower, and one MacMini so I know what comes with each system. I am not really intrigued by ever thinner iMacs.  I would rather have  a more reliable one instead of the one in my equipment closet that died an early death.

As I watch Apple executing its huge bond deal in order to buy stock back to keep its stockholders happy, I have to wonder what it would have cost to get some upgraded iWork apps out the door and make OS X better not just glitzier.  Some professional Mac users would have paid for those new Apple products. That the MacMini on my desktop is more a curiosity than my workhorse is a little sad.  After all, over thirty years is a long time to live on a particular platform, but when all the signals to move on are there, it is hard to ignore them.

Years ago Apple gave me the tools to do some really neat things.  Today the deep integration of Google's mapping software and its seamless integration with Google's cloud services for maps and photos let me create a rather unique travel guide.  The mapping done on my Android phone would not have been as easy on the iPhone.  Certainly the mapping tools in Lightroom sealed the deal for me.  My decision to run Lighroom on my Lenovo tower came down to pure economics.  The $599 MacMini came with a 500 GB hard drive and the $479 Lenovo came with a 1 TB hard drive and had more room for photos. Its storage is also more easily upgradeable than the MacMini's.

I will continue to keep an eye on Apple, but it will be more to fulfill my curiosity than to plan any further purchases. I have no doubts that there are plenty of folks out there sitting on the edge of their chairs just waiting for the next Apple product.  I hope whatever it is goes well for Apple and for them.

If you are curious about my new travel guide, A Week at the Beach-The 2013 Emerald Isle Travel Guide, I have created a Kindle promotion with two free days, May 1 & 2, to download the book  Amazon has free reader software that lets you read a Kindle book on anything including the iPad, iPhone, and Mac. In fact with the Amazon sofware you can easily have the book on all your devices.  You will find the details about the free promo and software at this page.

If you are curious about me, try my about me page on my main Crystal Coast Life site.

Is Windows 8 An Opportunity for Apple?

In a series of two articles, I want to explore how someone coming from the Windows world might see the Apple world as an alternative to upgrading to Windows 8.  I use both Windows 8 and Mac OSX Mountain Lion on new hardware.  A lot of this is based on my own shopping experience and preferences on computers that I have just purchased. 

The choices that you might make would likely be different especially if you are a dedicated Mac user, but many Windows users venturing into the Apple world should be able to relate to this. With that introduction, here is how I see it.

As a Windows 7, Windows Vista, or even Windows XP user, you are likely aware of the big changes Microsoft has made to the Windows 8 interface. Perhaps you have even heard someone suggest that Windows 8 has such a huge learning curve that it would easier to just move to a Macintosh.  Apple of course would love for you to “upgrade your computer experience instead of just upgrading your computer.”

Before you leave the world of Windows for the kindly embrace of the reality distortion field of Cupertino, consider your options carefully.  These hardware thoughts will frame the argument but to cover all the bases will require a second post. There is a lot more to moving to a Macintosh than just finding the on switch on one of Apple’s elegantly designed pieces of hardware.

Shopping for Apple hardware is in a sense uncomplicated. They only make a few models and they release them on their schedule not anyone else’s. If you do not like what Apple has, you either wait or go to another platform,  

In February 2010, my wife’s ancient 12 inch Aluminum Powerbook needed replacing. I waited a couple of months for Apple to ship the new I5 processor laptops. Finally I gave up and bought her a Windows laptop. I actually ended up buying her and myself new laptops.  My 15 inch HP I7 laptop and her 14 inch HP I5 laptop together cost $200 less than one Apple I5 inch laptop with an outdated processor.  Three years later my wife is still happily using her system.  My youngest daughter has inherited mine.

Finding the exact combination of hardware and features you want is a little more challenging in the Apple world than in the wide open world of Windows hardware. Hardware from Apple is based on what they want to market not necessarily what you might want to buy. Today that means if you want a SD slot for photo memory cards, you will not find it in Apple’s lowest priced laptop.

There is no escaping you will spend more money if you chose to go to the Macintosh.  In spite of Apple recently dropping their prices on some laptops, Apple laptops often cost nearly twice the money that a Windows laptop will cost.  Before the Apple fans jump in and complain about the comparisons, let us go ahead and say that Apple is going to give you fit and finish that you will probably not be able to match in a Windows laptop. Perhaps Google's Pixel Chromebook might be engineered to compete, but Apple is hard to beat on hardware design.  They will throw in some leading edge technology that may or may not be of value to you. If you want that Apple level of fit and finish, do not bother reading any further just get out your check book and go buy a Mac.

However, if you are like many of us and just want a functional laptop that will last you three or four years, there are plenty of them out there in the Windows world.  The quality varies widely. However, I would rank my current Lenovo I7 Ideapad with the best of the Mac laptops I have ever used so my pricing example comes from Lenovo.  Remember we are trying to decide if it makes sense for a Windows user to go to the Mac instead of upgrading to Windows 8.

On Lenovo’s website it is easy to find a 14 inch Lenovo laptop with an I7 processor, 8 GBs of RAM, 1 TB hard drive and a DVD drive on special for $699. There are never significant specials in Apple’s world. On Apple’s website, the 13 inch MacBook Pro with a slower I5 processor, half the ram, and half the hard drive space will cost you $1199.  The Mac does have slightly better resolution along with Thunderbolt and Firewire ports.  Of course the Mac has OS X, but we will discuss that in part two of this series.

If you are coming from the Windows world, you probably don’t have any Firewire peripherals and likely have never heard of Thunderbolt.  Thunderbolt is a peripheral connect standard developed by Intel with Apple’s help.  It is relatively new and very fast. You can buy a beautiful 27 inch Thunderbolt display from Apple but it will cost you $999.  

You should also keep in mind that many monitors require $30 adapters to work with anything Apple. My Mac Mini came with one, but I had to buy a second for my second monitor. My closet full of adapters did not have the one that I needed.  Apple is the king of special adapters so just be prepared. They are part of the Apple world.

The numbers show the lowest priced Apple 13 inch MacBook Pro laptop that I found is 72% more expensive than the Lenovo which has a better processor, more RAM, slightly larger screen, and a bigger hard drive. While specs might not matter and it is all about user experience and elegant design for Mac lovers, numbers do not lie. Mac laptops cost a lot more.

There are some categories where Apple's prices are even less competitive. If you want a Mac tower, it will cost you close to $3,000. While my new Lenovo tower does not even come close to matching the power of the Mac Pro models, it only cost me $499. This week of February 17, the same Lenovo tower is on sale at Staples for $449.99. The closest thing in price to my Lenovo tower is the Mac Mini. 

Again you get less for you money when you buy the Mac. My I5 Lenovo came with 8 GBs of RAM, 1 TB hard drive, keyboard, mouse, and DVD burner. My Mac Mini came with 4 GBs of RAM, 500 GB hard drive, no keyboard, no mouse, and no DVD burner and retailed for $599.

If you get the Lenovo at this week's sale price, the Mac Mini is 33% more expensive, not really a tower, has less RAM, a slower I5 with less cache, a smaller hard drive, no keyboard, mouse or DVD burner. In defense of the Mac Mini, it is one of the nicest small computers that you can buy. I love mine and use it as the basis for my whole desktop virtualization experience. However, by the time you upgrade the RAM, add a DVD drive, keyboard, mouse, and external drive for storage, it is not inexpensive. If you feel like you need those items like I did, you can easily add another $170 to $200 to the cost of the Mac Mini even if you stay away from Apple branded accessories.

There was a time when you could argue that Macs came with SCSI hard drives and perhaps arguably better processors, but today most of these components are the same. Apple just makes more money on the assembled pieces than anyone. They have the cash hoard to prove it.

One final argument that you will hear on hardware, is that Macs last longer than Windows machines. There was a time I would absolutely have agreed with that argument and that Macs in general last longer. Now I am not so sure.

If Mac users keep their computers longer than PC users, it might only reflect the natural reaction to keeping more expensive products a little longer. In 2013 it may not matter how long you want to keep your Mac since Apple is aggressively bringing out yearly operating system upgrades which regularly drop support for older hardware.

If you have a Mac system older than three or four years, it is likely Apple is going to abandon your old hardware anyway. Remember Apple makes money selling hardware. They are pretty well giving away their operating system.

In the next article I will deal with software and operating system differences for migrating Windows users.