View from the Mountain

Time to look back over the years of posts

I found the Typepad platform nearly eight years ago in late November 2004.  My first post was entitled, My Welcome to Windows, and was done on November 23, 2004.  After leaving Apple in July of 2004, I wanted to get outside the reality distortion zone and taste the world of Windows.  Being the adventurous type, I decided to get Linux up and running at the same time.

Eight years later I'm still writing about technology and giving Apple advice like my recent post, Apple Finally Loses Its Mantra. The post seemed to be the natural result of a weekend where I figured out that things no longer just work on my Mac.

During my nearly twenty years at Apple, I loved techical challenges even after I became a manager in 1993.  System engineers loved to work for me because I usually understood what they were saying, and I tried my best to give them all the tools they needed to do their jobs.  My team was the only one that I ever heard of in Apple that had its own internal web site.  I built the website and used it to keep all of us accountable and informed.

Learning another operating system and using Windows XP was not that difficult, but I did have some adventures. The challenges of Windows gave me some very good perspective to launch into a battle with a local technology writer in December 2004 when he provided some inaccurate information about the Mac.  My article, The Computer Battle, was reasonable advice for computer shoppers at the time.

Over the years I have written over 1,400 posts on View from the Mountain and  more than another 1,000 on other sites that I maintain.  Several of the posts have offered advice on buying computers like that early post. Some have poked fun at computers and politics. I have often written about why I continue to use the Mac and about some of the challenges that I have conquered.

A few have even been a glimpse of my own thinking as I tried to decide which computer to buy. This post, The Apple Value Proposition, was written in February of 2006 when I was vice president of sales and marketing for Webmail.us before Rackspace bought them up. 

I finally got most things working for my Mac in that career, but when I headed off to the coast of North Carolina and decided to sell real estate for a while, using a Mac became much more difficult though I remained very optimistic for much of the first year.  The MacBook that I bought in the summer of 2006 was a constant companion that first year in real estate.

By the fall of 2007, I made the decision to buy another Windows laptop since I had given my Dell laptop to my daughter as she finished her business degree.  By the spring of 2008, I was calling Vista a quagmire.  Still I hung with it for over two years, and surprisingly saw a great deal of improvement.

As January 2010 rolled around, my wife needed a new computer.  I was ready to replace her ancient 12" Aluminum Powerbook with a new Mac laptop.  However, I was determined that she not get a processor that was already out of date when it shipped.  Finally I got really frustrated with Apple delaying the introduction of systems with the new Intel processors.  I took advantage of a really good deal at Staples.  I got my wife an I5 HP laptop and myself an I7 HP laptop.  The total cost of the two Windows 7 machines was under $1,500.  They turned out to be great machines from the start and even a year later I was still pleased with them.

In the fall of 2010, I had a project that required a Mac so I ended up buying an I5 iMac.  I was a little irritated with Apple from the start because I had to get the 27" screen to get the I5.  The I5 iMac has turned out to be one of my least favorite Macs.  It suffered from "Slow Snow Leopard" and has never been a quick booting machine. The iMac has lost the ability to boot from its internal drive and is now running from an external Firewire 800 drive.  I haven't built up the energy to pull the LCD to replace the drive.  Every time I think of it, I want to strangle the Apple engineer who agreed to no drive access door on the back of the iMac.

As my MacBook got older and older, I kept waiting for Apple to come out with a price competitive laptop.  It didn't happen so as the white MacBook was dying a slow death in the spring of 2012, I bought a new Lenovo I7 laptop.  My HP laptop is now a backup machine, but it is not nearly as nice as the Lenovo.  The 15" Lenovo even with 8 gigs of RAM, the I7 processor, and a copy of Microsoft Office was less money than the least expensive Mac laptop.

As I write this, my 2004 Dual G5 which I bought in the winter of 2004 is still functional though the browser versions are mostly out of date and unsupported.  The Dell that I bought in the fall of 2004 is still happily running Linux.  I have moved over to Ubuntu and find it a delight compared to the early Linux versions.  We no longer have a functioning Mac laptop in the family for the first time in many years.

Unfortunately every time I look at Mac laptops the math just doesn't work for me.  I have watched as I have been priced out of both laptops and towers in the Apple world.   I'll likely spend around $1,200 in total for a new laptop and a new tower this fall.  I want something lighter than my Lenovo to carry on a trip when I need something more than my Kindle Fire.  I also need to replace my aging Dual G5.

I wouldn't mind stretching a little and spending a few hundred dollars more if I could get a Mac besides the mini and a laptop besides the MacBook Air.  The $999 version of the MacBook Air doesn't even have a SD slot.  Unfortunately it would cost me at least $1,800 or 50% over my budget to get the lowest end Macs that fit my relatively modest needs. And one of the them would have to be a Mac Mini.  Based on my recent experience, paying more when I am not necessarily getting more reliable hardware doesn't make a lot of sense even though I still love Macs.  Unfortunately I also am not overly enthralled with Mac OS X Mountain Lion and iCloud is worth exactly what I pay for it.

Sadly, I have to admit the Mac has gone from being the computer for the rest of us to the computer for the well-heeled among us.

My most recent advice on buying computers and technology can be found at this post, Technology Still Needs Humans.  It won't be long and it will be time to update that article.  I wonder what will be my next technology adventure- Windows 8? I am hoping that it is not a disaster as some are suggesting.

I am hoping that my Mac experience will improve, but it is hard to get excited about Apple stuff when you keep battling problems.  I have now reinstalled iPhoto three times on my iMac.

Sometimes words get twisted

Twisted words are especially a hazard when you talk about Apple.

I have been doing some writing and interviews to promote our book, The Pomme Company.  The publicity has greatly helped the rankings and the sales of the book.  As is often said, publicity is all good as long as they spell your name correctly.  Most of us in the web world like to add that we are very happy when we get a link to whatever we are selling.

However, anyone who has done more than one or two interviews will tell you that it is a little like Russian Roulette.  Sometimes it doesn't work out very well.  I remember doing one for Der Spiegel a few years ago and apparently one of the more interesting parts to them was my bald head.  Fortunately the interview was in German and I could just ignore it.  It did get me to stop doing interviews where the only agenda was the one of the person interviewing me.

I am back doing interviews now with the goal of selling books, and it is working.  There are some challenges as you will see from my recent experience.  Talking about Apple always raises the level of passion.  There are still people who believe Apple can do no evil.

The first interview that I did was with Dan Lyons. Dan is the former Fake Steve and author of The Secret Life of Fake Steve Jobs.  I've known Dan for a while, and I have enjoyed his stories.  I actually got to know him when I tried to help him get his Apple laptop repaired.  Apple never did fix his laptop, but like most people who love Macs, he just went out and bought a new one.

Dan was very careful to make certain that what he wrote corresponded to what I was telling him. I was impressed with his thoroughness and attention to detail.  His article, What's It Like To Work For Tim Cook? A Former Apple Sales Exec Dishes, was published on November 9.

Very quickly Yahoo News jumps on the bandwagon and publishes this article, Ex-Apple Employee Attacks Tim Cook: 'He Is Not A Natural Leader,' He Is A 'Lightweight'.  It was done by Jay Yarrow who at the time had not talked to me. His article was based on Dan Lyons article.

Things started moving pretty fast at that point, and I got an email from Greg Sandoval at CNET.  He wanted me to call him on his cell phone.  I called and got him as he was leaving a restaurant.  He said he would call me back in fifteen minutes.  I waited about forty minutes for his call before calling him back to tell him that I had another call at 3:30 PM which I expected to last until 4:00 PM. He said he would call me at 4:05 PM.  I said that was fine.  I finished my other call and waited until 4:30 PM for his return call.  I then sent him an email that I was going for a walk while the evening light was still nice.  I told him I was available in about forty-five minutes.  I'm also a photographer so I hate to miss the afternoon light since I get a lot of inspiration from it.

At 4:35 PM while I was out chasing sunsets, Greg sent me a nice note saying, "I don't want to hold you up. Forgive me, the nature of the job. I'm going to be satisfied with the story I have up. Thanks for calling me back. All the best with the book."  I guess he had gotten tied up with a Pandora story.  However, the result was that I never talked to him about my comments to Dan.

That afternoon Greg did publish an article, Former Apple sales exec says Tim Cook is tech 'lightweight'.  I did get my book link, but there are things that I would have corrected in the article.

While this was happening I got a contact from Jay Yarrow who had done the earlier Business Insider article and wanted to talk to me on Friday for a follow-up article.  Friday morning Jay and I talked for over an hour, and he published this article, Tim Cook Is One Of The Three People That Saved Apple. I got my name spelled right, but I am still working on the book link and understanding the last sentence. 

However, that's okay because not long after that I noticed that Forbes had picked up the buzz and included a link to the book in their Apple Loop article. 

The really interesting thing is that all these articles are at the end of the line based on one source or me more correctly.  Most of the information could be gleaned from my book or probably from some of the articles that I had on-line at my Applepeels blog for much of the last eight years. Many of the posts were pulled down in the summer of 2011 in preparation for our book, but there are still 47 of the original 405 posts on-line. A few of the most recent posts have a link to my Apple history.

Some of the folks who criticized my comments insisted that I probably never met Tim Cook. They certainly hadn't taken the time to read my book or even visit my website where you can still figure out that I knew Tim Cook.   They made wild assumptions without trying to get things right with easily accessible information. 

I know Dan Lyons has read most of my book, but I pretty sure none of the rest of the reporters has taken the time to do that.  I guess it is a little bit of the nature of Internet reporting, that speed is more important than research or getting things right.  My old friend RJ who was an editor at the Mount Airy News would be horrified.  He had great respect for the facts and strived to get everything right.

I hope to be writing more articles with Dan Lyons at readwrite and I expect some follow-up from Jay Yarrow. Still the truth is that it is sometimes hard to get across what you want someone to understand in a phone interview.

An example is the quote from me in Yarrow's second article, "Jobs came up with all the brilliant products, Anderson, who was the CFO, figured out how to pay for parts before people even bought the products, and Cook reorganized the company's logistics."

What I said was slightly different.  I said Fred Anderson figured out how for Apple to get paid for its products before Apple paid for the parts.  It is a small but significant difference.  It was the secret to making Apple a money machine because customers were giving Apple money for computers and Apple hadn't even paid for the parts of the computers that they had sold.

I will be talking more about why I think Tim Cook has a ways to go before he tames the Apple beast.  Of most concern to me is that I don't see a passion for technology, but that is a long post.

I also have a list of things which I just don't think make sense if Apple is going to continue to be known as the company where the tiny details matter.  I'm only going to mention one, and it is the location the SD (photo memory card) slot on the new iMac.  It is behind that lovely 27" screen if you buy the top end system.  Think about reaching around that screen to put your SD card in the computer, and let me know if you can come up with a real reason why you would want to do that. 

Jay Yarrow suggested Apple only wants people to use iPhones to take pictures.  Still I think it is a stupid location for an SD slot which is something that I use a lot, but more on that later.