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What Bugs Apple Fans About Apple
An anonymous reader writes "Forbes.com went to MacWorld to ask Apple fans what bugs them about the computer and gadget maker. Turns out the lack of replaceable batteries, need to buy Vista separately, and most of all the stock price bugs people."
We Apple fans like to see Apple do well, but probably more in terms of selling more products (higher marketshare, becoming more popular in society, etc.) than just higher profits (most of us aren't in it for the money, after all). So for me, one annoying thing Apple does is charge for products or services that could/should be free.
.Mac and Apple began charging $100/year for it. I realize that this increases profits (at least short-term), but I often find myself wishing that companies would accept short-term losses if it would mean an overall increase in marketshare and customer satisfaction. If .Mac were free, it could be marketed as yet another advantage of the Mac (in addition to iLife, etc.). Instead, it's an expensive subscription service that many people know nothing about, nor have they any reason to.
For example, the new software for the iPod touch is a $20 download. This is the same software that's a free update for the iPhone. Even the new software for the Apple TV is a free upgrade. If I were an iPod touch owner, I'd be pretty offended that I have to pay $20 (well, disregarding free jailbreaking options and whatnot) for an update that iPhone users get for free.
Remember iTools? The free service that gave you mail, web storage, etc. if you were a Mac user? In July 2002 it was rebranded as
enough.
I use macs at home and at work, and they are great machines....most of the time. Maybe I'm a perfectionist, maybe I'm just expecting too much, but so many of Apple's tools are great most of the time. However they have flaws that make them annoying to unusable in certain situations, and at least the Apple of late seems unwilling to fix them.
Example: Airport extreme with airdisk. When the thing is working it is perfect, however, in my experience the disconnects are really annoying, and it disconnects much more than my airport express ever did. Also, when, out of the box, I tried to bridge it with said express it went into infinite reboot mode till I did a factory reset. Again, in theory a great product but when I pay a premium for Apple products I expect it work right 99% of the time, not 90%.
Their server products are another great example of how Apple's products, on the surface anyway, are great, but in practice it tends to fall apart. We are rolling out an LDAP system and it has been nothing but problems. Apple has done a seemingly good job of making a really slick open directory server tool, but there are just too many bugs to make it worth while. A particularly nasty one, that has been reported to Apple but Apple refuses to fix, is that for some international users certain actions will change the time zone to Cupertino, which can wreak havoc with systems. Come on Apple, we paid a lot of money for this system, the least you can do is get the time zones correct. The server also has almost no meaningful error messages(took me forever to figure out the effects I was observing was related to the time zone bug, the Workgroup manager went on its happy way, authenticated me, then didn't do anything afterwards, not a single error message). Similar problems with getting Remote Desktop to work with Directory authentication. All I get is a "Authentication failed" message with no additional information either on the target machine or the server! Come on Apple, you went through a lot of effort to develop this system, but all that is wasted if you don't give me proper error messages!
Ditto with iPhone content management, the system works great 90% of the time, but the inability to give the user more flexibility with content management can lead to frustration and hacks that require playlists of playlists......
I don't know why Apple refuses to address these issues. None of them seem like they would be incredibly hard/expensive to fix, but Apple just seems to have the attitude that if it works in the general cases, there is no need to investigate the extremes and fix whatever problems may arise.
Monstar L
The thing that really bug me about Apple now is that they seem to have completely forgotten how QA is supposed to work. I have filed more bug reports for Leopard since its release than for any other OS (including on that is reproduceable and causes the user's home directory to be rendered inaccessible by any Leopard machine). I have raised my standards a lot for what kind of bug I should file with Leopard. With Jagwyre and Tiger I filed bugs that were UI regressions or caused irritation. With Leopard I'm only filing ones that are major UI regressions or cause serious data loss and I'm still filing a lot more than I was.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Agreed. In my case, I build web sites, so having two monitors is critical, something that the iMac and Mini won't support. However, I don't need a particularly powerful box to do the coding and some light graphics work. Because I want two monitors, I'm faced with the choice between a $600 Windows box or a $2500 Mac Pro. While I would gladly shell out extra money to have a Mac desktop--I'd pay $1000 or even $1500 for one, probably--I just cannot justify paying four times the price for the Pro. Unfortunately for Apple, this situation is pushing me towards Windows in general. I've got an old iBook for travel, but there's something to be said for consistency, and when the iBook goes out I'm not sure if I'll go Mac or Windows with the next laptop.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
I find that very interesting. For me, the two-finger scroll and two-finger alt click have been godsends. Now I can left click, right click, and scroll without changing my finger position on the trackpad whatsoever. I can't stand using the separate right click on my IBM linux laptop now.