Applepeels

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.

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.

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.

 

Is The Enterprise In Apple's DNA?

Reading a sampling of this week's articles about Apple heading into the enterprise brings to mind Yogi Berra's famous comment "It's like déjà vu all over again."  As one Apple employee told me, we never stopped going after the enterprise.

There is a grain of truth in that as I will explain later, but if you read a few of this week's Apple enterprise articles, you will find that the newest Apple push is based on partnerships with other vendors and developers.  When I see articles touting partnerships like the one with IBM, I have a hard time thinking beyond what a longtime Apple employee told me a few weeks ago.  "You cannot say Apple and partnership in the same sentence."

Considering my long history at Apple in enterprise sales and that I still have some whiplash from Apple's enterprise efforts, I think a few comments are in order.

The gospel according to Steve Jobs says that Apple is a consumer company which makes great products, some of which work very well in the enterprise.

My last few years at Apple I led what might have been Apple's most successful enterprise team.  It was something of a skunk works project, but we did exceptionally well in one of the toughest enterprise markets in the world, the United States federal government.  We had some high level support including Tim Cook, Bud Tribble, and Fred Anderson. 

We were able to get operating system level implementations that made Apple products attractive to a number of agencies and especially to scientists who were tired of dealing with what at the time was a never-ending assault of viruses and malware.  We got as far as getting OS X approved as part of the federal government's enterprise architecture. Apple did an OS level implementation of smart cards.  Smart cards are requirement if you are going to do business with the federal government.  A couple years after I left, they even published a manual about how to implement smart card services on your Mac.

Apple in 2000-2004 period championed CDSA, or Common Data Security Architecture, as the middle-ware building block for smart cards.  The theory being it would be easier for everyone if security devices and providers across difference architectures wrote to the same middle-ware.  I have not followed this closely but I know that you can still use smart cards with a Mac.  However, Apple has switched how they do it all as of Yosemite and there are some questions as to Apple's direction with their security implementation.

With that as a background, here are my thoughts on Apple and the "new" enterprise push.

First Apple has done many enterprise pushes and perhaps all have shown some degree of success but the ill-fated attempt just after 2000 to get into the enterprise with iMac kiosks.  The only thing thing that push accomplished was to get a lot of enterprise sales people fired.

Since the early nineties, all of Apple's enterprise sales pushes have had a few common characteristics.

1. Lots of strategy.
2. Few actual Apple feet on the street.
3. Apple has continued to go its own way.

I still remember the Apple-DEC alliance announced in 1988.  Most of us selling to the enterprise hopped on a train and went to DEC Word in New York City.  DEC was to provide the integration support and people to get Macs into the enterprise.  I cannot remember any sales bump from the DEC alliance.  Perhaps the third time alliance with IBM will be the charm.

In talking to Apple folks, the theory is that Apple is just building the hooks into OS software mostly iOS and that the enterprise folks are going to run with this on their own with help from IBM and a sales bump to Apple.

It is obvious that iPhones are doing well in American corporations.  A new iPhone, much like a fancy Mac was in my days of selling at Apple, is a pretty nice corporate perk.  iPhones are tied down more than the Android world so there is some appeal to the corporate IT folks.

However, there are some substantial cultural barriers at Apple.

1. As my example with smart cards illustrates, Apple often changes course for what seems to Apple like very good reasons.  However, those changes are sometimes not communicated well and often the benefit is more in Apple's mind than to the customer who sometimes just wants things to work without having to jump through some new hoops.
2. Apple really does not know how to listen to customer needs. It used to be a big part of the company's culture before Steve came back. It disappeared then.  If you saw the procedure Apple uses to determine what features make it into an OS release, you would have a hard time not laughing.  I hope but doubt it has changed much.
3. Though the Yosemite Beta program  is certainly a step in the right direction, I doubt we will see pre-release versions of iPhones being sent out to enterprises to make sure that new software and/or hardware does not break their software.  Apple is built on surprise and secrets which are not favorites in the enterprise world.
4. Enterprises really like companies that keep working on something until they get it fixed.  Apple would rather invent something new than fix something old.  That is truly part of the company's DNA.
5. Enterprise sales are often built on long time relationships between executives and Apple does not do this well.  One of our biggest challenges in selling to the federal government was that no Apple executive would say in public that the enterprise was important to Apple and that Apple would stick with its enterprise products.  Beyond that Apple executives do not like to travel far beyond the safety of their offices in Cupertino. You have to make the pilgrimage to Cupertino. Enterprises want you to come to them.  Unfortunately not enough comes out of Apple executive briefings to compensate for this Cupertino-centric approach.

The history of Apple is littered with failed enterprise products from Apple's AIX based Network Server to the more recent Xserve and Xserve RAID products that were abandoned in 2010.

The whole Xserve with the RAID product was supposed to a major push into the enterprise.  They were great products but Apple had done little preparation for the selling and support of the products.  They shipped the products, the field sort of figured out how to sell them and the diehard Apple customers helped us through the many product challenges.  Apple actually did a training for the sales people after the Xserves had been selling and the people doing much of the training were the people in the field who had figured out the product's limitations.  Apple was never willing to commit enough system engineer resourses to adequately support the products.  Apple also made a major server architecture change to Intel.  Changing processors pulled the rug out from under one of the largest Xserve customers who was using the Xserve product mostly because of the small heat footprint of its PowerPC processors.  One might want to ask the VAR who got stuck with lots of outdated PowerPC Xserves about the reliability of Apple as a partner.

As to Apple listening to customers, I can still remember giving Tim Cook's Quicktime movies of enterprise customers talking about the difficulties they were having getting Macs to be good citizens on their Active Directory networks. After those made their way through the organization, I can remember Avie Tevanian flat out telling us that the customers did not know what they were talking about when they said Macs were not good Active Directory clients.  In his mind there was no problem.

The solution to that problem was that I took one of my field system engineers and had him spend months writing an Active Directory plugin that got rolled into OS X.  The employee is still writing OS software for Apple.

I was recently complaining to an Apple employee about all the incompatibilities between different versions of Pages.  He assured me there were no problems. Yet I told him we live with problems almost on a daily basis because so much of our work over the years is in Pages 09 and there are always litle problems if we open the sixty page documents in newer versions.  He said that Apple certainly did not expect enterprise employees to move to Pages but it was fine for small businesses.  As someone in a small business, I might question that assessment.

Unfortunately the problem is not really Pages.  It is Apple's attitude that it is okay to release a product that is not backwards compatible and then not even work at fixing it.  If iPhoto can die for a "better" product, what changes might Apple spring on the enterprise just because it is going to make something better for Apple.

I am not holding up Microsoft as the perfect enterprise company, but the kind of we-are-going-to-fix-it attitude that took VISTA and made it into Windows 7 helps enterprise customers stay the course.

It is entirely possible that Apple's DNA has completely changed and this enterprise push will be the charm, but pardon me if I remain a skeptic for a couple of years.

For more on the world of Apple enterprise sales, check out my book, The Pomme Company.  Of course this is not my first post on Apple and the enterprise.  Feel free to visit, Once more into the trenches on Apple and the Enterprise or Lingering regrets from Apple days.  I also stumbled across this post, Why the Apple-IBM tie-up is doomed to fail, and how it could succeed, by Jean-Louis Gassée.

As with most things Apple, time will tell better than any of us making guesses, but at least I have history on my side. That is my take on Apple and the enterprise from our spot which is almost as far as way from Cupertino as one  can get and still be in the United States.  

Our November Transformation at the coast is a much better prospect than hopping on an airplane and heading to one of the Apple Sales Conferences that are happening this time of year.

However, I will look forward to hearing how this new enterprise push is positioned internally.  It should be entertaining.

 

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.

 

Could Apple have been even more successful?

I was hired to go to work at Apple in October of 1984, only a few months after the Macintosh was introduced.  My first official day was November 26, 1984.  In one of the few moves in those days targeted at saving money, my partner and I did not get to start until after the sales conference that year.  We were sure they just did not want to spend the money for another two tickets to Hawaii from Halifax, Nova Scotia.

 

My days at Apple lasted until July of 2004.  This summer it will be ten years since I left Apple and a lot has changed at the company and in my life. In 1984, fresh out of two years in sales management at an Apple reseller, Macs were the only computers in my life.

 

Today I am down to two Macs and my life has more Windows and Android devices than Apple products.  At the peak of our addiction, and I include my family since they were all Mac users, we had well over a dozen Macintoshes not counting my collection of old Macs. Today the total number of Macs across the five adults in the family numbers three.  The two that I have and one iMac that my older daughter has.  No one in the family has an iPad or an iPhone. Even my wife who loved her 12” Powerbook well beyond its useful life is now using a HP laptop.  I think we might be able to find two or three old iPods in drawers.

 

With the drop in Apple products in our family, I started wondering if the technology in our lives might have been different if Apple had been even more successful particularly outside the consumer world.

 

Sometimes it is hard to imagine that arguably the world’s most successful technology company might have been more successful, but I expect if you could find other ex-Apple sales folks besides me willing to talk, you might find a number who would agree with me that Apple could have gone farther in the enterprise if they had wanted to do so.

 

Back in December on my Applepeels blog, I posted an entry, The Decision That Lost The Desktop For Apple.  In it I make the argument that the pricing decisions that Apple made at the height of the popularity for the Macintosh II had a huge impact on Apple’s desktop market share.

 

You could take my reasoning a little further and say that we were all hurt by Apple’s punting on the enterprise market.  Certainly the federal information technology world which needs all the help it can get. I have argued at ReadWrite that federal IT is a mess.

 

Then there is the rest of the enterprise and publishing market which actually kept Apple afloat until Steve Jobs discovered the iPod, iPhone, and iPad.  My career at Apple ended roughly about the time that Apple figured out that selling to consumers was a whole lot easier than meeting the demands of fussy CIOs.  As an Apple product manager famously once told me, “Customers do not tell us what to make, we tell them what to buy.”

 

But what if Apple had been successful in the enterprise market?  Many of us believed that Apple had all the elements needed to be successful there except the support of Steve.  We had a great operating system that was far more secure from viruses at a time when Windows was being swallowed alive by all sorts of threats.  In those early days of OS X even Apple laptops and professional desktops were very competitively priced.

 

We were able to get token support from Steve on some federal requirements like SmartCard support, but there was never a serious push into the enterprise after Steve came back to Apple.  There was only ever a handful of enterprise sales people at Apple and in spite of some recent rumblings reported by Business Insider I don't think that is going to really change.  My guess is that the 100 enterprise people Apple is looking for probably just cover the ones that got too expensive on the payroll and were let go. 

 

When my team took over the federal market for Apple, we started with one sales person on each coast, one system engineer, my area associate, and me.  We joked that we could hold team meetings in my Previa van.

 

Still Apple and my federal team in particular was very successful in the federal market.  Many CIOs were tired of being held over a barrel by Microsoft.  The cost for Microsoft Client Access Licenses (CALs) was a thorn in the side of many federal CIOs.  However, no CIO federal or otherwise was stupid enough to bet their whole enterprise on Apple which refused to say in public that the enterprise was important to the success of company.

 

One of my last meetings at Apple was taking Avie Tevanian in June 2004 to see Karen Evans, who at the time was the CIO for the whole federal government.  Avie got wound up trying to convince Karen to start developing applications with WebObjects.  Karen handed him his head and told him the federal government had moved to COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) software.  She also asked him a question that sent him into a serious enough tailspin that I had to rescue him.  She wanted to know why she should trust her important business to company that only ever talked about the consumer market and iPods?

 

The fact that Apple practically gave up on the federal market and has never taken a lot of the business world seriously left room for Microsoft to keep pounding away on their OS until they came up with Windows 7.   The lack of a viable alternative to Microsoft meant they were to maintain their stranglehold on the feds.  It also left a lot of the small business world firmly in the grip of Windows XP and its descendants.

 

My two older children are in IT and the youngest worked in a finance office.  My wife worked in an insurance office and after Apple I sampled a number of different workplaces whose only common denominator like those of the rest of the family was that usually I was the only Mac user in groups as large as seventy to one hundred.  I struggled through the pains of VISTA but was pleasantly surprised with Windows 7.  I held off in getting a smartphone for a long time.  A year after my son bought a Droid, I relented and followed his platform choice. I did not even consider an iPhone because the AT&T network was so bad here on the edges of civilization.

 

At WideOpen Networks job, I am happy to be back at a Mac centric company, but I am not going to give up my Windows gear.  I like living in a multi-platform world and I know how fickle the winds of Apple are.

 

Had Apple been more successful in the enterprise market, my family might never have wandered away from the platform.  Obviously Apple is very successful, but just imagine a world where you went to work and everyone was using Macs.  I think Apple not pursuing the enterprise world left room for Microsoft to keep plugging away.  There was a time when the argument that the Mac was a more secure platform was undeniable.

 

I stuck with Macs not because of any great love for Apple but because I like using the product. It is not inexpensive to use a Mac in spite of what some loyalists will tell you, but I find myself more productive doing certain things on a Mac so I have not given up on the platform.

 

Perhaps we have Apple to thank for the fact that we all can buy some pretty nice Windows hardware like my Lenovo Yoga at very reasonable prices and some great tablets like the inexpensive Nexus 7 that I have.  If Apple had taken the enterprise market seriously and made some aggressive moves on pricing, this world might be even more Apple centric than it already is.  Then again, all that success in the enterprise world might have distracted Apple and we would have never gotten the iPhone and iPad.  Then it might have taken a long time for Android to develop and we would have all been stuck with Blackberries.

 

We will never know for sure.

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.