So long, Apple?

I love Apple’s hardware and software. I think you could call me a fanboy. In recent years I haven’t been standing in famous queues and upgrading my hardware as one of the very first people in the world, but still, I’d upgrade, a bit later, in my own tempo, but I’d upgrade.

New Macbook Pro? Sure! New iPhone? Yes!

I’ve even learned how to buy Apple’s stuff. I have learned to wait for tiny upgrades and “s” versions. Because Apple’s like Alfa Romeo, you just don’t buy the first series. Unless you want to have a beautiful car that doesn’t drive. I understand that this is a result of Apple’s way of building things. Iterations. Incremental changes. And KA-CHING all the time. I buy that.

Have I ever had a bad experience with Apple’s stuff? Sure. I can even remember using my first iBook G4 some 13+ years ago. After couple months, every time I’d change the display’s position, it would go blank. Broken cable. Not a big deal, but annoying.

So I kept buying new laptops, later iPhones and iPads and was rather happy. I started my software house and of course we bought Macs for developers. No dissonance.

Then Steve Jobs passed away. I remember watching the first keynote after his death and commenting loudly: “The magic’s gone”. Couple years forward and something else is gone. Of course you guessed it, it’s the quality that I have on my mind. It’s been satisfactory, but it’s below that level now.

Why? 8 months ago I started using a brand new Macbook Pro (OK, you got me, I didn’t wait for tiny upgrades). 3 months later space bar stopped working. Touch it anywhere except the very middle of the key and nothing happens! And I need to tell you that I am nazi when it comes to eating by the computer. Ask my wife! Somehow it started to work again after two weeks or so. Couple months later the “e” key started to behave weirdly — either not working at all or saving double “e”. I’d eend up with senetenecees like e theseee. Pretty solid for $2K+ machine with Pro in the name.

Apart from problems with keyboards we’ve had plenty of bigger and smaller issues with these new Macbooks and Mac OS X High Sierra. Or High Sierera if you prefer. Maybe the smaller ones weren’t tragic, but hey!, we are using these computers professionally and we expect something less glitchy for the money. Besides, each tiny problem just gets in the way of delivering our services.

Today one of our developers told me he’d like to migrate to Linux-based machine. He said Apple used to be great because everything worked out of the box and Linux was hell because you had to configure everything from scratch. But nowadays it seems like the opposite is true. So Macbooks seem to no longer be the developer’s machine of choice.

I got to tell you that couple years ago even Steve’s famous assholism wouldn’t convert me to Windows or Linux. But I am starting to think about doing so. So long, Apple?

Of course, people will keep buying Apple’s stuff and our switch want change a thing. But Apple should definitely do something about quality of its products. Because it’s gone.