Apple doesn’t care about the power users
They’re amazingly easy to use, and you can spend more time creating, and less trouble shooting, I absolutely agree.
But since I’d say the iPhone, they’ve been ignoring the power users, and adding more and more features that appeal to John and Jane Everyday.
What about us, the boys and girls that move around their environment so fast, it’s hard to keep up, using short keys for just about anything, and aren’t afraid of some Terminal awesomeness?
A power user, to me, is someone that uses his computer every single day for most of the day, performing mid to higher-end tasks (no content management, but coding, design, video editing, animation, etc.) and requires stability and speed to increase productivity.
1. Most power users use an external display, keyboard and mouse
If you’re on your computer to make a living, I sincerely hope you’re not using your laptop in laptop mode, destroying your neck and back in the process. The laptop is a great form factor, and allows to work anywhere, but it’s not ergonomic, to say the least.
A full keyboard is faster, and so is an external mouse in comparison to the (amazingly good) track pad. I’ll race you any day.
All the slow swipey things, gestures, and the external track pad are great for on the move, but way too slow for power users’ daily usage.
Have you seen the touch bar and Photoshop demo? That’s not how power users Photoshop! They work incredibly fast and precise, this is how my intern Photoshops.
I have yet to try out the new Touch Bar, could be great, but I doubt it’ll add much speed to my daily work. Changing the brush size in Photoshop? I will do it faster keeping my hands on my keyboard and mouse, hitting alt+rightmouse, but I need to try it, first.
The Touch ID is great. Biometric logging in and paying, love it.
2. Most power users have a myriad of peripheral devices… on USB.
Limiting the Macbook to 2 USB ports was already a (very) bad idea to me, switching completely to Thunderbolt 3 / USB type-C seems like a serious dick move towards power users. At least have a transition period where you have both, despite of the thinness, I don’t care about that. We know you use lots of storage, external devices and phones, but fuck you, here’s a port nobody uses yet, not even our own devices.
USB-C is an awesome interface, it’s the future, but I won’t switch overnight, so it’s a very bad thing for my workflow now, and millions of professionals.
External drives (of which I have plenty), 4 keyboards on my different workstations, three displays that use USB as a USB hub (because we only get the damn two on the laptop), two audio interfaces, my Serato Scratch Live for when I deejay, SATA-connector for drive repairs, GoPro cables, even my damn iPhone 6S, they all need some kind of converter or hub now.
Great. Thanks. Dicks.
3. I use HDMI and the SD-slot a lot.
HDMI, mostly for presentations, and even to hook up the laptop to my TV, because I don’t want to bother with Apple TV or Chromecast. By the time those are booted or started, I’ll be past the 20th Century Fox trumpets, singing along in Ralph voice.
SD, because I shoot pictures and video frequently, and the transfer speeds are much higher than fiddling with USB cables (doesn’t matter, there are no more standard USB ports anyway).
Shoot, insert SD, import + empty, done. Nice.
Now, tell me how you will improve this process by removing the slot and USB ports.
Here’s how: you won’t.
Dicks.
3. Stop with the animations and noob eye-candy already
Here we have some of the most powerful computers ever built, with the combined speed of every computer that existed in the eighties, yet they slow the interface down with animations, emails doing swoosh, you can’t even full-screen anymore in a normal way. Because fuck you.
All nice and dandy for the bloggers or the family looking up recipes, or making crappy iMovie edits, but at least have the option to disable all of this. That, and spend more time optimizing your UX, it has excellent aspects but is terrible in many ways.
We don’t give two shits about adding stickers and it raining hearts on iMessage. iMessage is great, very fast and convenient, leave it alone. There’s Facebook for all the noob stuff.
4. So you remove the iPhone jack, you need a special connection on the headphones, but it won’t work on the Macbook?
GTFO with this nonsense.
And give me my damn headphone jack.
Dicks.
Taking the piss
From a deejay for over 15 years, vinyl and everything: come on, man.
Now you’re just taking the piss.
I’ve been a fan, even fan boy, for a long time (basically since they went BSD-based), but if they keep this up, and it saddens me to say this, I will consider moving back to the W-word of the M-word.
Faster interface, the entire side loaded with USB ports and card readers, for less money, on a shittier operating system and plastic hardware. What a shit trade-off that would be.
