Applepeels

Why I Did Not Buy A MacBook Air

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what do I find so great about the Pixelbook?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

 

Hard to put a rosy shine on the Apple

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

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

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

There are some serious problems with Apple.

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

What's is still right with Apple

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

What does Tim Cook need to do?

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

Why am I still rooting for Apple.

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

A Sign That Apple Cares About The Desktop?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What would it be like to work at Apple?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

While I did not end up buying a Microsoft Surface, I did end up with a Lenovo Yoga, a Lenovo Desktop and a token Mac, a Mac mini.  I think Lenovo works harder at meeting its customers needs than Apple does.

With MobileMe Gone, Solutions for Photos?

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

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

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

I had my own interesting experiences in migrating to iCloud.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Will Apple Ever Figure Out the Cloud?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fortunately, I am living my dream far away from Cupterino and there are lots of tools out there better iCloud.

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

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Update- The Pomme Company, the book on my nearly twenty years at Apple, has been available since the fall of 2012.  Read more recent stories about my challenges with Apple at my ReadWrite article archive.

 

 

What Price Does Apple Put On Customer Satisfaction?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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