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.

 

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.

Apple's Core Has Changed

What runs the engine at Apple has changed dramatically over the last few years.  Someone who just moved on from Apple sent me this article about Chromebooks making up half of US classroom devices sold.

The article did not surprise me. I predicted it long ago, but even I am surprised with how quick it happened.

Apple's early brand was built on a couple of things, productivity and the education market.

Over thirty-three years ago, I bought my first Apple product. It was an Apple II+ and it revolutionized the way that I wrote and mailed a newsletter.  I was a field representative for the Canadian Angus Association. My Apple with Apple Writer II, an Epson MX-80 printer, and DB Master changed the way that I worked.  It turned a week's worth of frustration into something that could be done in a day.

Just six weeks after figuring that out in September 1982, I went to work for a TI mini-computer VAR that was dabbling in microcomputers. The one I bought was one of the first few that they sold.  I became the microcomputer sales coordinator. Within a year we were selling over three million dollars of Apple product.  I was hiring and training sales people as fast as I could.  We opened four more stores across three provinces in the next two years. Eventually we had over twenty people dedicated to selling Apple's products.

The vast majority of those first sales were to education. In November 1984, a little over two years after I dispersed our cattle herd of over 200 Angus, I went to work for Apple.  We moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia. In the next year I closed an order for 1,300 Apple IIes.  The order at the time was the largest single purchase order ever received by Apple Canada. It put an Apple IIe in every fifth grade classroom in Nova Scotia.  I ended up finishing as the number two sales person in Apple's international division that year.

If you fast forward a few years to 1992, I had moved and was working with Apple in education in Virginia.  My efforts had turned the colleges and universities in Virginia into an unbelievable success.  I was named higher education account executive of the year for Apple USA.  I was also promoted to higher education manager and joined Apple's extremely successful but short-lived higher education division with Jim Buckley at the head.  I still wear the sweatshirt that I got at the first higher education managers' meeting in Colorado Springs.

Success in education was at the heart of my success at Apple. The education business along with the support of the creative community was also keeping Apple alive.

Apple's Higher Education division disappeared sometime around 1996 and I believe that the decline in Apple's education business began shortly after that. Part of the problem Apple was having at that time was trying to be a consumer company.

There was a lot of window dressing on the education market in subsequent years, but what Apple and Steve really wanted to do was become a consumer company. The iPod, iPad, and iPhone made that a reality.

Apple has probably become the most successful consumer products company the world has ever seen. However, I have to wonder if Apple sold its soul for that success?

Products that come out of Apple are still very nice and I am sure many educators still love them.  Certainly there are some creative people still enthralled with their Macs, iPads, and iPhones.

From my perspective Apple products have become more suited for content consumers than content creators.  I know the commercials say otherwise, but the people writing the commercials probably do not use Pages, Numbers, or Apple's Photo program.  Even Apple rarely uses Pages or Numbers. Just ask someone who works there.

In the last year I have written about how Apple is no longer at the center of my world and that there would be no Apple under our tree in 2014. In the computer world, I cannot see how the equation has improved for an Apple.  I still very pleased with the Lenovo desktop that was under the tree. Nothing Apple has introduced has sent me rushing to an Apple Store.

I am using El Capitan on my repaired iLemon.  It is not a bad operating system, but I prefer Windows 10.  I work for a Mac-based company and we struggle daily with Apple's software.  Not long ago I had to export a document from Pages to Word to fix a problem and then import it back into Pages.  Today I ended up doing a mail merge in Word on Windows.  After I sent the file to our CEO, he commented about how much work it saved the home office because I got that and the labels all done so quickly.

It used to be that you used a Mac because things just worked on Macs. That not necessarily the case anymore. A lot depends on how hard you push the applications.  Mail does not do a good job with all my email accounts so I use PostBox across all platforms.  I am not an Outlook fan either. Photo does not accomplish anything I want.  I average about 40,000 photos a year and they get processed in Lightroom on Windows. The long documents which were created with multiple style sheets in Pages O9 by our company are not much fun in the new Pages.  I am happy to have almost no contact with Numbers.

As someone who spent many years selling Apple's computers to the education world at the CIO level, I feel some sadness in seeing Apple let that market slip through its fingers.  As someone who depended on Macs for years to get my work done, I am disappointed at the state of Apple software.  I also hate to say that there is no Apple hardware product with the features and pricing to earn a spot on my desktop or under the Christmas tree.  I will stick with my current iMac, Mac mini, and my three Lenovos.

Time will tell if focusing everything on the iPhone world will be the right long term strategy for Apple.  Certainly it has been a great money making strategy, but a legacy of money might not be what I would have hoped for the company that brought us so many amazing innovations.

To find out what life was really like in Apple sales, check out my book the Pomme Company. The stories are true. I am pleased to have over eleven wonderful years between me and my last day at Apple. That my life here on North Carolina's Crystal Coast only intersects a little with Apple is just fine with me.

I miss the future OS X never had

Recently I have written about how Apple once was the center of our world and the decision I made to not purchase a new Mac.

With my new Leonvo desktop and the reduced workload on my Mac Mini I am pretty happy with my technology plan for 2015.  Everything thing seems to be working well.

If you have read many of my posts here, you might know that one of my favorite computers of all time is a 2004, dual G5 running OS 10.5.8.  It has 1.5GBs of ram and still runs after over ten years of heavy use.

I have mentioned a number of things about today's Apple that indicate a company much more interested in piling up cash than in delivering the computers that many of us once expected from Apple.

I dislike the incompatible versions of the iWork apps and the continual notices that my Mavericks powered MacMini is incompatible with iCloud. I have written about why I do not like Apple Mail and iPhoto programs.  All of that has to do with the product that OSX has recently become.

OSX for several years after it was introduced was one of the easiest to sell operating systems that I have ever sold.  It was a product that improved with every release and impressed almost everyone who took the time to try it.

One of my favorite sayings is that those who are ignorant of history often have no idea whether they are going forwards or backwards. Sometime new technology is better and sometimes it is not the answer.

In the spirit of that, I used to take the new college graduates who wanted to sell Macs at our Apple dealership in 1984 and make them spend a few days learning the Apple IIe before they got their hands on a Mac.  A few memos written using AppleWriter made MacWrite seem even more special.

I share some examples about Apple's refusal to even consider its own history in my book about my Apple sales career, The Pomme Company. The Apple I know so well  is a company whose stubborn refusal to pay attention to its own history has doomed it to repeat many mistakes.  Perhaps taking its operating system for granted might be high on the list as I well remember the days of System 7.

I recently booted up my dual G5 to look for a handful of old pictures that I needed to write this family history for the folks who bought our family home and now run it as a bed & breakfast.

Finding the pictures was not much of a trouble (maybe "find" even works better on the old Macs), but the real treat was going back to the earlier version of OSX.  OSX felt snappy and I once again got the feeling that I was in an environment where my experience as a computer user trying to get work done was important.

This trip back in computer time prompted me to run a few timed tests.  I have heard people complain about how slow OSX Mavericks can be but I had not made the effort to time it. I was not very surprised about the results.

I did each one of the tests at least a couple of times and some had to be done more because I forgot to hit the start button on the timer.

I timed each computer to the point when it got to the log in window and then from the point I hit enter after typing my password to the point that I could launch a browser and it was ready for me to type in the URL.

Here are the results.

Dual 1.8Ghz G5 with two 1TB drives and 1.5GB of RAM took 46.5 seconds to the log in window and 15 seconds to Safari being ready for the URL.

MacMini running Mavericks with I5 processor 16GBs of RAM and two USB drives took 1 minute 25 seconds to log in and another 1 minute and 45 seconds before Safari was ready for the URL.

I5 iMac running Yosemite with 120 GB SSD and 8GBs of RAM and one firewire 800 drive took  31.7 seconds to log in window and 10 seconds for Safari to be ready for the URL

I7 Lenovo laptop 750GB drive and 8GBs of RAM running Windows 7 took 41 seconds to log in window and 24 seconds for Chrome to be ready for the URL.

I7 Lenovo Desktop with hybrid 2TB drive and 16GBs of RAM running Windows 8.1 took 18 seconds to  log in window and 14 seconds for Chrome to be ready for the URL.

I5 Lenovo Yoga Laptop with 64GB SSD and 4GBs of RAM with two 1TB USB drives running Windows 8.1 took 8.5 seconds to log in window and 13.9 seconds for Chrome to be ready for the URL.

I used Safari for the Macs because it is the only browser that works reasonably well on the dual G5.  I did not think it was fair to saddle the Windows machines with Safari.

What is a little ironic about all of this is that the iMac, my iLemon, was also once the victim of slow Snow Leopard.

It is a little sad that the iMac with a SSD is only a few seconds faster that a ten year old computer running regular hard drives.

All of this confirms what I can say with confidence as someone who uses Mac OS , Linux and Windows on a daily basis.  You can get more done on one of today's Window's machines than you can with one of today's Macs.

It was nice to go back to the G5 where the operating system easily remembered the last file folder that I accessed. I also appreciated the reappearance of the escape key as a way to navigate back from a picture to the library in iPhoto.

I might still be a gungho Mac user if Apple had seriously worked to improve OSX instead of turning it into a poor nephew of iOS.  If Apple were cash strapped, I might understand the need to focus its efforts on only where the money is but Apple has all the money it needs to do whatever it wants.  Unfortunately a truly better OSX is not it.

I did not get to run a Linux test since I have yet to have time to bring up my next dedicated Linux box, but I will find time eventually. I think Linux still might be my future OS, but I doubt it will be via the VMware product I am using now when I run Xubuntu. Also I have not written off Windows 10 either. Microsoft probably has more to lose if they do not perform on the desktop than Apple does.

Working to bring fiber to those towns missed by Google is going well and keeping me too busy to play as much as I would like with my Linux project.  Also I could have easily run a test with my wife's Chromebook but it would have smoked all the competition and I did not want her to know that she has the fastest computer to the races in the house.

That it is today from the Crystal Coast of North Carolina where I have proclaimed that winter is done for 2015 as March rolls into town.

 

 

 

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.

 

Apple Closer To A Real Cloud With iCloud

With the latest operating system release, Yosemite, Apple is the closest it has been in a long time to figuring out the cloud.  With the previous version of iCloud you could not actually see what files were in Apple’s cloud.  You could also only save files from Apple apps and a few other App Store blessed apps.  It was a strange way to run a cloud even for Apple.

 

Days before Yosemite’s release I heard rumors that you could see your files on iCloud using a Windows 7 or 8 device.  That turned out to be only partially true, it would work but only if you also had an iOS 8 device.  Since I am married to the map-happy world of Android that did me little good.

 

When Yosemite was released, I downloaded it and installed it on my backup Mac, my infamous iMac.  I have been around long enough to not install a first round Apple operating system release on my production machine, but other than a couple of fonts that refuse to work and the things that I share from iPhoto disappearing into a black hole, the upgrade went almost as uneventfully my last triple upgrade a year ago.

 

What I really wanted to see with Yosemite was if Apple was truly making some progress in the cloud.  It turned out that they are.  It still has an Apple gotcha or two, but iCloud looks a lot more like a real cloud solution than it did a year ago.

 

I have uploaded and downloaded a variety of files from my Windows 7 & 8 machines and my Mac Mini running Mavericks.  iCloud appears to work flawlessly on all of them assuming you don’t try to use Opera as your browser or try to save directly from Mavericks. When I do that, I still cannot see iCloud folders or find the file once I have saved it.  It appears Apple does not want me to use anything on my Macs except Yosemite.

 

When I login from a browser, there are folders and I can see what is in the folders.  The interface is slick.  Uploading and downloading works well and seems speedy. 

 

I was even surprised that I could get iCloud to work on Xubuntu Linux using Firefox.  You can also easily email a file with your iCloud email account.  If you are using Pages, Numbers, or Keynote, you can share a document.  The iCloud options are only slightly less flexible than the ones you get from your Google Drive.

 Options for Google Docs

One Drive, Box, and DropBox all have slightly different options.  On DropBox and Box, you can set when a link to document expires. Box has some additional options as you can see.

 

 

For uploading and downloading documents, all of them, now including iCloud work very well.  If you want to edit documents on the web, either iCloud or One Drive are pretty good options depending on your platform preference.

 

However, if you have an Android tablet or phone, you will be out of luck with iCloud.  I could not get it to work on my original Kindle Fire or my Nexus tablet.  I am actually a big fan of One Drive on my Android devices.  I am able to access and see Word and Excel files without any problems.

 

iCloud is a workable solution for storing files and offers iPhone and iPad users some benefits that my ecosystem does not let me test.  

 

There is only one complaint that I still have with iCloud.  I can download files from iCloud to my ten year old dual G5 but I cannot upload them.

 

 

Somehow it seems like enabling uploading of files from an old computer would be more important than downloading files to it, but I am not going to lose any sleep over it since Dropbox works fine.  I am just happy to have a ten year old computer that still boots and allows me to rummage around in the files once in a while.

 

So compliments to Apple on making some substantial progress with iCloud.  Now if Apple would just figure out that supporting Android would not be the end of the world, a few of my friends who have Android and iPhone smartphones might be able to use iCloud instead of Dropbox.

 

That is it from North Carolina's Crystal Coast where Macs are scarcier than people who don't like water.

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.