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.

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.

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.

 

Apple's Not So Open World

I keep hoping that with all the success Apple is seeing that the company might ease up on the many little things that it does to force Mac users to walk the straight and narrow line of Apple issued software. It does not appear to happening.

I spent a couple of decades selling Apple hardware.  At Apple we often criticized Microsoft for selling software that locked users into Microsoft hardware and software.  Once Microsoft got mail servers supporting Outlook in an organization, it was very hard for Macs to be good clients on a network. 

Plenty of forward looking enterprise CIOs wanted Macs to work well on their Microsoft networks. I attended some meetings with impressive rosters of enterprise customers and I watched them push Microsoft hard to provide better support for Macs.

Another piece of the strong sales message that we crafted when getting Macs into serious computing environments was that with a Mac you could easily craft your own productivity suite and everything would still work seamlessly because you were on a Mac.

I think the Mac has entered a very dark period in its history.  Apple is so focused on selling iOS devices and making sure you use Apple's own software that it is tying things together in ways that would likely land Microsoft in court.

Some of you might have read my post, The Chancy Software of Apple.  One of the reasons I wrote the post was my extreme frustration with Apple's Mail app.  I moved to Postbox and I am very happy with its reliability and much superior search.  I was already using it on my Windows desktop so the transition was relatively easy.  However, it did not take long to figure out that I had strayed from the Apple way.

The first time I went to share a PDF with preview, I figured out that there was no longer an option to email it directly from Preview since my default email program is now Postbox.  I had to save the PDF and manually attach the file. 

I rarely use iPhoto but I decided to see what would happen if tried to email a photo.  I went to general settings to see if Postbox would show up as a possibility in sending photos from iPhoto.  There were three choices, "iPhoto, Mail, and Microsoft Outlook," but no option to use my default email client.  Of course this means if I decide to email a photo from iPhoto, it launches Mail.app instead of creating an email in Postbox.

I can also no longer click the share button in Pages to send an email either.  All I have to do be able to share by email is change my default email client back to Mail.app and restart Pages and magically I can once again share by email directly from Pages.

If we compare this to the Microsoft world, things are very different.  If I want to share a file or a PDF from Word on Windows, Word launches my default Windows email client, Postbox, without any problems.  I do not even have Outlook installed on my Windows computer.  Unfortunately with Word on the Mac, Microsoft seems to be hewing the Apple line.  I can no longer email a file directly from Word on the Mac.

I use Windows Photo Gallery even less that I do iPhoto but it also works fine sending a picture with Postbox.  I do use both Picasa and Lightroom on Windows.  Picasa gives me the option of sending with my default email or directly with Gmail.  Lightroom uses my default email client.

The most telling example is Picasa running on the Mac, it offers me the option of using my default email client on the Mac, Postbox, or directly with Gmail.  That would seem to indicate to me that it is technically possible.  Unfortunately it must not be that easy because another cross platform program, SnagIt, tells me that Postbox is an unsupported mail client.  That is true on the Mac but somehow Techsmith, the makers of Snagit, have figured out how to support Postbox from their Windows version.

As much as Apple disliked Microsoft, it now seems to be favoring Microsoft products.  Word is as close as you can get to RTF from Apple's pages. Then there is the whole iCloud fiasco.  I recently read that you could actually start putting other documents besides Apple ones up in Apple's iCloud so I tried to have a look from my Windows desktop since apparently it is already implemented on Windows 8 but not on the Mac until Yosemite ships.  Turns out that iCloud requires an iOS 8 device in addition to your Windows computer.

I do not have to own a Windows phone to access One Drive nor to do I have to own an Android phone to use Google drive.  Apple has made a wrong turn.  If you build great software you do not have to force people to use your software, they will use it by choice.  People once chose to use iPhoto.

I know Apple likes us to do things their way, but if the price is using sub-standard software like Mail and iPhoto, I think I will pass. I will spend more time on Windows and head out to enjoy one of our great fall evenings on the beach instead of trying to force things to work on my Macs.

 

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.

 

Hard to put a rosy shine on the Apple

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

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

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

There are some serious problems with Apple.

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

What's is still right with Apple

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

What does Tim Cook need to do?

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

Why am I still rooting for Apple.

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Apple Between the Lines

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part 2: A Mac Instead Of Windows 8 -Software

This is the second part of a two part series about how Windows users contemplating the shift to Windows 8 might find the world of Apple if they choose to buy a Macintosh instead of upgrade to Windows 8.  The first part was on hardware.  This piece covers software, the “Cloud,” and a few other considerations.

While there are more cross platform applications out there than there were a few years ago, the ones you need, might not work the way you expect on a Mac.  I am a big fan of SnagIt from Techsmith. It works well on both Macs and Windows. Yet there is one issue.  While Snagit on Windows works with my favorite cross-platform mail application, PostBox, it will only work with Apple’s Mail app on Mac OS X.  I am not a fan of Apple's Mail program. This kind of thing is one of those gotchas that can make moving to a new platform irritating so you need to check apps that are important to you.

If you come over to Apple and end up using Apple’s iPhoto to manage your photos, you might find some options gone for political reasons.  Sharing is built in iPhoto for Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter but not for Picasa web albums. Apple does not like Google so you have to buy a third party plug-in or use a browser to get you photos uploaded.  iPhoto also creates a proprietary library of your photos instead of just pointers to JPEGs.  You could just switch to Picasa on the Mac, but then there is no way to get your photos into Apple's iCloud without doing some scripting or owning an iOS device. 

One of the things you need to accept when moving to Apple is that Apple wants you to do things a certain way and deviating from the chosen path usually causes some sort of pain. That is even the case in software.

If Microsoft Office is your standard office suite, you likely know there is a new version out for Windows Computers. I just subscribed to Office 365 for $99 per year.  The last version for the Macintosh was released in 2011. While the files are supposed to move back and forth without problems, my experience is that there are always a few little things that do not work or there is an extra space here or there. 

However, there is some good news on the Office front for the Mac.  The latest update from Microsoft resulted in a dramatic speed increase in loading the Office apps on my new Mac Mini.  That is good since no one is really sure when there will be a new Office for the Mac.  The rumor that Microsoft might bring Office to Linux seems more promising than the statement that no new Office is planned for the Mac.

The one other thing that I have noticed is that after using Office 365 a lot and moving back to Office on the Mac, I am having trouble finding things. I am a casual Office user so it might just reflect that, but it is enough of a problem that I now use Teamviewer to control my PC from the Mac so I can use Office 365 instead of Office 2011 on the Mac.

Beyond Office, even some Mac users are questioning how much attention Apple is paying to their own software. Pages, Numbers, and Keynote (Apple's iWork suite of productivity apps)  have not seen a major update in their desktop versions since 2009. Jason Grady writing for ZDNet had the following comment.

“Instead Apple proceeds with its release and abandon strategy. Release iWork into the market with great fanfare and starve it until it eventually dies. What makes matters worse is that Apple will not comment on its iWork roadmap. Not even a 'we're working on it.' Nothing.”

Apple has even dropped iDVD which makes sense inside the Apple world since Apple is moving away from DVDs. However, many of us still use DVDs.  Tidbits which has been publishing information about the Mac on the web and using Macs in their workflow for 22 years recently said of Apple, “Apple software — from iOS 6 to Pages 4.3 — has been falling down. Great hardware, increasingly sloppy software.”

If the “Cloud" is important to you, you should be aware that Apple has struggled with its vision for the Cloud. Apple has changed its Cloud strategy multiple times with the result that many no longer trust Apple's with their data.  Also Apple’s current iCloud implementation is very different than other vendors' Clouds. It takes some getting used to and it is hard to escape since it is built into the OS.

I still find there are some very good apps on the Mac. I use RapidWeaver for web development and Pixelmator for graphics. Sometimes I will write with Nisus Writer Express. It depends on my mood.  As for utilities, Fetch is still my favorite FTP client.

Apple’s apps and a few other applications like PIxelmator have the ability to save to iCloud if the software vendor has chosen to market their software through Apple's app store.  However, even those other non-Apple apps which can save to Apple's iCloud save to someplace invisible in Apple's iCloud.  You can find a hidden folder on your Mac which shows you what is there but it takes some digging. You cannot see those files when you log into iCloud with a browser like you can the iWork files.  It is a weird concept. Of course the apps know that the files are there but if you want to open the file with another app, you are out of luck.  Apple just figures that there are things you don't need to know or do. It is one of the things you need to accept if you plan to go to a Mac.

The good news for Cloud lovers is that you can easily use DropBox, Google Drive, or even Microsoft's SkyDrive on a Mac without any problems. There are also other choices which work well.

Beyond software, you need to consider setup. In spite of the Mac's reputation for ease of use. Setup on a new Mac can sometimes be not so easy as I found out. I have brought up a lot of Macs over the years and my most recent one was not any fun.
 
There is no doubt that Apple has an App store with far more software than Microsoft, but there is a downside to the app store.  Apple's OS strategy also revolves around that same App Store and my experience is that it is a work in progress.  In setting up two new Windows 8 machines and my new Mac Mini, I found the Windows 8 machines required much less of my attention.  If you opt for a Mac and have even a decent Internet connection prepare for some long downloads. I have TimeWarner cable and a 4.8 GB OS backup download took eight hours.  Most updates you can have automatically applied but I still have to manually apply all the ones from Microsoft for Office on the Mac. 
 
You will find support and repair are not as accessible to Mac owners.
 
Using a Macintosh is great until something goes wrong and you will quickly find that people who really know Macs are harder to find than knowledgeable Windows people.  If you live outside a major metro area, be prepared to drive to the nearest Apple store for repair or face to face support. There are far fewer Apple repair centers around than Windows ones.  It used to be the answer to most Mac problems was reinstall the operating system. That is not as easy to do now that install DVDs are gone.  You can make one of your USB thumb drives a backup OS X installer, but my experience has shown that can have some challenges. I had to buy third party software to create one for my Mac Mini.
 
Little things like navigating your computer will be different on the Mac.
 
When you are using a computer, the file system becomes very important. Do not let someone convince you the Mac OS X Mountain Lion is more like Windows 7 than Windows 8.  I have used Macs for 28 years and I find the latest version of OS X Mountain Lion the most confusing yet. It is powerful and has a lot to like, but there is also a lot to learn. It has taken me just as long to get up to speed on it as it did for me to figure out Windows 8.

Apple decided with their previous Lion release that the command "Save As" is not a good thing. Some apps no longer have that command but now in Mountain Lion you can get it back if you hold down the “option” key when you go to the file menu.  Still the new “Duplicate” and “Move” commands can be confusing.  Macs also do not remember the last place you saved something like Windows. You can buy third party software like Default Folder X to fix that, but it is still not quite as easy to find something on a Mac. Navigating around a Mac can be confusing especially when Apple decides to hides important things like the user library.

There are some  very neat things on the Mac like AirDrop and AirPlay which require other Macs or more Apple hardware like AppleTV before you enjoy them.  Windows Media Center works pretty well with existing Windows 7 machines so that is not too different since both platforms want you to stick with one platform.

The last worry is security. I've used both platforms for over 8 years. Since MS introduced their security program, that is the only security program I have used. I have had no virus or worm problems on either platform, you just have to practice safe computing.  At one time this was a huge advantage for the Mac. Now it is not so much.

All this boils down to a move to the Mac will mean lots of changes especially in the way you view your computer vendor.  If you are coming to the Mac, you need to believe Apple knows best or you will never be comfortable. Just like you cannot fight city hall, you likely will not be able to fight Apple.  Is it any different in the Windows world.  I would argue that Apple would not put up with an app like Start8 which brings back the old Windows Start Menu, but maybe I am wrong.  They did relent a little on "Save As."

The Mac platform has some great capabilities, but you will have to work to master them.  The way you do things on a Mac is a little different.  My conclusion is that moving to Windows 8 is the best course for most Windows users. The learning curve on the Mac is substantial for a Windows user. However, I encourage you to weigh what I have presented, talk to Mac users and make your own decision. Everyone's needs are different.  What works for me, might not even fit your desk. :-)

However, for many Windows users it might just be easier to stay the course with Windows and buy a new Windows 8 machine.

The simple addition of the $4.99 Start8 utility can make the Windows 8 experience a lot like the old Windows.  Once you have done that, you can choose to ignore the parts of Windows 8 that don’t fit the way you work. 

I would not let anyone scare me away from Windows 8. I am not having any trouble using it. I have it on two machines.  One has a touch screen and the other has only a mouse.  I am betting Microsoft will listen to customers and make it better like they did with Vista.

Windows 8 is powerful and very fast.  When I boot both my Mac Mini and Lenovo tower, even I if start the Mac Mini first, I usually have several Windows applications launched before the Mac Mini even makes it to the desktop.

On my most recent startup, I turned my Mac Mini on first. By the time the Mac Mini had gotten to the desktop and launched Chrome, I had turned on the Windows 8 machine and launched the following programs on Windows 8.

Chrome

Firefox

SnagIt

Postbox (all my mail was also retrieved)

Picasa

Excel

Word

Lightroom

Trillian

Opera

The Lenovo tower has 8 GBs of RAM. The Mac Mini has 16 GBs of RAM.  Both systems have standard SATA hard drives and I5 processors.

See the first article in the series which talks about hardware for more details and price information.

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.