Why Apple is the cross-section of great hardware, envious design and shitty software.
Apple has to put its cash to work
Over the last two years, I’ve tread deep into the Apple world, the Macbook has become my best friend for more than just getting my work done and my iPhone for everything else, one that I still have plenty of qualms about but has inevitably become an extension of my habit. In the decade prior to this, I was the PC guy. A Microsoft lover if you will. Since the time I got my first Pentium PC to my Quad-core laptop a couple of years ago, I had been an incessant resident of the Windows world and I was happy, content and excited even. I could play all my games, watch any movie, drag-drop files or songs to my mp3 players (remember those?) at will, store and organize pictures as JPEGs and even happily customize away till Windows no longer looked like itself anymore. I ruled my world.
But that was before and my introduction to Apple started with the iPod Touch 2G towards the end of the last decade. It was a beautiful piece of art, really. The slimmest piece of electronic gadgetry I have ever owned. Needless to say, I was in love. The battery lasted plenty and it chilled my heart everytime someone asked, “Is that an iPhone?”. No, it wasn’t, but I’m sure even the iPhone wished it were as slim as an iPod. It was all good, except it wasn’t. There was something missing. It was the software.
For you to spend a few hundred bucks on something and feel like someone else was in control wasn’t the best situation to be in. I disliked the limitations that Apple had set on how the interface should look or even what you could do with the device. You could easily dismiss that as a consequence of the great Apple design philosophy, that elegance, simplicity and usability come at a price, but I wasn’t convinced. So I jailbroke it and it opened a whole new world. I got a customizable Notification Center (prior to Apple copying it), some level of multi-tasking among other features that actually made the device immediately more productive and immensely more usable. This brings me to the first major piece of popular Apple software that I was exposed to.
iTunes
iTunes lets people access the iTunes Store to buy entertainment content from, including Apps, Movies, Books, TV Shows and Music among others. You can also use it to manage your own local media library. For those of you who own iOS based devices, iTunes is also what you use to sync content between your laptop and device. According to this article, iTunes has over 500M users worldwide, as of May 2013.That is HUGE. To put that in perspective, in its 6 years since launch, Apple has managed to sell a little under 400M iPhones.
And it’s not like iTunes isn’t making any money. iTunes (and the store) is a 30B+ annual revenue business for Apple that can put many a company to shame all by itself. With those kind of numbers, you’d assume that Apple would shower at least a little love on this widely used piece of software.Alas, that isn’t the case. iTunes has continued to be one of the biggest sources of bloat, bugs, crashes and annoyed customers.A quick look at the user reviews here says it all. Needless to say, I have long since stopped using iTunes except when I have no easy choice i.e. sync my iPhone, which has always been the worst piece of the whole flow. I cannot, for the love of God, put songs on my iPhone without iTunes. It makes total sense for Apple, but screw you Apple, you did not pay for my iPhone (or iPod or iPad).
iPhoto
Yet another piece of bloat from Apple is iPhoto, the software that lets Mac users sync, edit and organize the pictures retrieved from their devices. And where does Apple store these pictures? As a massive proprietary lump of data that is illegible to any other software or life form. Again, great bit of wizardry from Apple to lock its users down and yet again they choose to rule my world for me. Bad Apple, bad. I used iPhoto for about a year since I got my Macbook, with open arms, trying to adapt to the Apple way. But I had enough of the bloat, buggy interface and crashes that seemed to plague it over time. I switched to Picasa and while that had its own set of limitations, it was no iPhoto. If the user reviews on the Mac App Store are any indication, things don’t seem to have progressed anywhere on this front. Enough said.
Xcode
Ah yes, Xcode. This is where the magic happens. Apps. The one thing that truly brings your iPhone (also iPad and Macs) to life is made here. All 800,000 or so of them. Think about all the hundreds of millions of hours developers spend on this piece of software to put that shiny little icon on your phone that makes you smile every morning. But this my friend is where Apple shows its software prowess (or lack of it) the most. And that is pure evil.
Don’t get me wrong, Xcode along with the iOS / OS X SDK is a powerful piece of software that helps developers produce some amazing and innovative applications. But it takes a lot of work, more so because it is a huge performance hog, buggy and crashes like there was no tomorrow. Besides, it can also be incredibly hard to use at times depending on the weird errors it decides to spew out without telling you why, where or how to rectify it. It is the sole reason for many a nightmare among Apple developers. Not to forget the whole ordeal behind getting an app that you just built, onto your phone, just so you could test it. Seamless would be the last word that comes to mind, but I’ll leave that for another day. Again user reviews always tell the story better than me rambling on about how much I hate.
You might say, I focussed merely on the bad points to blatantly make it look bad. And, I have for a reason, highlighted the bad, merely because they often outweigh the benefits to the point where you wish you had something better. And in some cases (like Xcode or even iTunes) you don’t. You are stuck in Apple world and their way is the only way. Sadly enough, none of the Apple elegance, design or usability ethos feature in these applications. I wonder whether it is Apple’s ignorance or incapability that continues to be the source of this tragedy. I, for one, sure hope it is the former and that someone at Apple will turn these applications towards a newer, better direction sooner than later.
You might also say there are other applications that Apple has built, Keynote perhaps or Final Cut Pro maybe that are not as bad and maybe even outshine some of their competitors. But in terms of pure numbers and significance, they are not relevant. Safari is to some extent somewhat of an up and coming dark horse, but not just yet. But before I close off, I can’t but talk about the most used Apple software.
The motherlord that is iOS
iOS is a great operating system with some truly outstanding features. It is simple, functional and just works. There are no two ways about opening an app, for example. You tap an icon and the app opens, you tap the home button and you’re back where you started. Besides, it has most of the latest and greatest apps you hear about everyday. This is the sh** at least for a lot of startups out there. This is where it begins. That might change very quickly if Apple fails to stall the decline in its market share, not until then.There is no way I would even remotely call it shitty. But it’s not as magical as it once was in 2007 and the couple of years that followed, not since.
But for something with that kind of popularity it fails to live up and iOS 7 isn’t going to fool everyone into believing that it is a massive reinvention with fancy, bright colors everywhere. Guess what Apple? The other operating systems already let their users do all of that and more. And enough has been said about “flat design” already, so I digress. Sure, Touch ID makes it easier to authorize your phone and might kick on and it will be interesting to see the kind of adoption iBeacon gets. But otherwise, iOS has remained pretty much the same since its inception. You still end up staring at a sea of dead icons that fill your phone, doing nothing, wasting visual space and battery.They might look good, but thats not what you bought your phone for. You drag down the Notification Center only to be lost in an endless stream of notifications from your apps. The multi-tasking has improved but ideally I’d like to switch and close apps with gestures instead of the Home button.
I’d love to brainstorm ideas to take iOS forward here, but again,that will be for another day. Sure, iOS 7 makes the devices a lot more usable than previous versions but it still has a long way to go before it can be called innovative or exciting even. Also, when was the last time you used any of the 18 or so apps that Apple puts on each iPhone like the Contacts or the Stocks app? If you are like most users, probably never. Why? Because they can’t compete. They remind me of the junk apps that used to be loaded on all OEM Windows PCs and one of the first things you did after buying was to uninstall all of them. Sadly, in Apple world that is a big no-no (you didn’t pay for my iPhone, Apple!!).
PS: if you want to hide those junk apps on your iPhone, check out this hack.
