[Update: This was written in 2007 before the release of OS X 10.5 Leopard, before the release of the MacBook Air, and soon after the release of the original iPhone and iPod Touch. Most of what I predicted basically came true in terms of quality and the focus on the average consumer. Since then, I have moved on to Linux as my primary OS, an android phone instead of the iPhone, and I am no longer recommending Apple computers to PC users. OS X got progressively more buggy with Leopard and Snow Leopard to the point I could no longer tolerate it. Then there are the technical issues in OS X such as the terrible decisions made in regard to the file system. Meanwhile, android is getting progressively better than the iPhone with every update and Windows 7 (despite the fact that viruses are still an issue) is the best version of Windows to date and I find it no more buggy than OS X. Given the growing list of security vulnerabilities in every piece of software Apple codes, it is only a matter of time before malware becomes a real issue. While my post is dated at this point, I still find it interesting for historical context.]
While many people have been complaining about some of Apple's recent decisions and hardware issues (iPhone, iPod Touch, and aluminum iMac for a chronological reference point), I have yet to see anyone label these as the obvious progression of a trend that has been evolving at Apple for the last few years. This trend is the slow and steady driving away of what I refer to as Prosumers. We Prosumers are the hobbyists, the early adopters of new hardware, the computer geeks, and the unofficial support technicians of friends and families. We are the ones who write reviews, who lead user groups, and whose opinions people seek when deciding what to buy. What Apple seems to have forgotten, though, is that we are essential to Apple's success, and they are driving us away.
I switched to the Mac back in 2001 because I saw the direction Microsoft was going with XP and activation, and I was tired of the way they abused their customers through pointless upgrades at high prices. My previous experiences with Macs were limited and had not been very good, but Linux was still very rough for desktop use, so what other choice did I have? I ended up falling in love with OS X (10.0.4 at the time). I also fell in love with Apple's hardware designs and their general reliability. Since then, I have recommended Apple to many people and have personally converted at least (I've lost count) 10 families, 5 individuals, and 2 businesses to the Mac platform. This has equated to many machines purchased from Apple... and all because people trusted my word, were convinced by my passion, and knew they'd have me to help them when there were problems.
Despite my love for Apple, though, the passion is fading fast. Their focus has been turning completely toward the average consumer and I am beginning to feel as if I'm losing my place in the Apple ecosystem. I will admit outright that I understand why Apple's attention has focused on the consumer. They are the ones who have spent all the money that has propelled Apple to newfound success over the last few years. They are also the ones most desperately in need of simple solutions such as Apple offers. It is good that Apple is fulfilling this need. Unfortunately, though, Apple has been neglecting those of us who convinced those average consumers to spend the money that got them to their current growth rates, and they are on the verge of losing many of us.
The first reason is the lack of variety in hardware. Apple has often maintained models that fulfill the needs of us Prosumers. The G4 towers, in particular, struck a good balance of practicality, elegance, and expandability. They were easy to get into for hard drive swaps and RAM upgrades. There were enough PCI slots to upgrade them at will. They were not perfect, but they satisfied us enough and were even good for doing some crazy hardware mods. In the laptop realm, the 12” PowerBook was the Prosumer's dream. Granted, there was no PCMCIA slot, which limited upgrades, but the portability of it (while still possessing enough graphics horsepower to do some real work), more than made up for the trade-offs for those of use who live and die by our portable machines. I would wager that this model sold less than any other Apple laptop in production during its time, but it gave us Prosumers something to fill our niche needs. Then there's the Mac mini. Niche? Absolutely. Low sales numbers? I'd be willing to bet on it. Beloved by Prosumers? More so than any other specialty machine in recent years. Just check the internet for all the crazy hacks that fellow geeks have built with these things. I'm sure the bean counters at Apple keep suggesting this product get the axe. It was rumored to happen just recently, but has seen at least one last revision. I hope that someone at Apple is wise enough to see the value of this machine beyond its apparent fiscal viability, though. There are other classics, like the Cube, of course.
If you look at Apple's current lineup, though, it starts to become obvious that the willingness to satisfy the niche is evaporating. We still have the mini, but, beyond that, there is really nothing for us geeky Prosumers to get excited about.
The Mac Pro? While very expandable and customizable, the thing is a monstrosity. It is way too big to be practical and way too expensive for those of us who have other gadgets and hobbies to spend money on. They call it the Pro, and that is precisely who this machine is good for: graphics, audio, and video professionals... and not too many others.
The iMac? Yes, it looks beautiful, but they have proven with this model that they are willing to throw practicality out the window for the sake of consumer glitz. Prosumers like to upgrade their own hard drives, to experiment with their hardware, and to add upgrades from time to time. It is a foregone conclusion that expansion is out with all-in-one machines, but Apple's design decision with the new Aluminum iMac is madness!!! You can't even get to the hard drive without special suction cups to remove the glass from the front, and a clean room environment to avoid getting dust inside the glass when you put it back together. This is similar to the idiocy that went into the 2nd and later revisions of the G5 iMacs. I had to take one apart recently to get a hard drive out for someone because it had the bad capacitor problem and would not boot. I almost gave up three times in this process. Just as a point of reference, I have torn down and rebuilt about a dozen iBooks, as well as my 12” PowerBook. This is no small task. Yet the G5 iMac was such a nightmare to get into that I didn't want to do it. With the new ones, this problem is only worse. I cannot recommend these machines in good conscience to anyone. Hard drives fail. They will have to ship them to Apple WHEN their drives fail. Madness, I say. This exhibits to me a deeper madness that is setting in at Apple, which troubles me greatly. Do not get me wrong, I have long extolled the beauty of Apple design. I have a very strong appreciation for the philosophy that EVERY detail is important and that having an integrated whole is a sign of beauty and order. However, this philosophy has been pushed to an extreme at Apple lately, and all practicality has been sacrificed in the process. I predict that the new hardware designs of the other models when they come out will be just as offensive in this regard. I hope to be proven wrong, but the iMac is such a magnanimous affront to the balance between practicality and beauty that the G4 towers represented, that I cannot trust their decisions until I see them. In fact, I had been looking forward to the rumored slimline notebook Apple is working on. Further rumors and the evidence of the iMac, though, have caused me to lose interest. The screen will be too big, the machine will be too fragile due to its aluminum casing, and I fully expect them to drop ethernet and other ports for the sake of making it beautiful... in the process making it useless to those of us who miss the 12” PowerBook and would like something even smaller. They could still prove me wrong, but the evidence at this point is that they will not. [Update: I was wrong about the casing since they introduced the unibody design, which helped solve the denting problem, but I was pretty close in my other predictions.]
The MacBook? A very close contender. It is, in my mind, Apple's best overall design at the moment, but there are several flaws which make it a complete non-option for us Prosumers. First is the video hardware. It is perfectly fine for most people and probably even overkill. It is not enough to run Final Cut Express, though. Keep in mind that many Prosumers use our machines to make additional income through side work or hobbies. Not being able to run an advanced video editor means we can't even consider it as an option. As far as I am concerned, the screen is still too big on this machine to make it as portable as we need it for great mobility. Then there are the hardware problems. This model has been riddled with manufacturing problems from day one of its existence. I am not sure if the design is the problem or that Apple is using cheap manufacturing, but it makes it hard for me to recommend this machine to people now that there have been several known and widespread hardware problems.
The MacBook Pro? Let me start by saying that my place of employment bought me one of these latest models (the LED screen model) to use as my work machine, and it is a huge part of the reason I am writing this letter. I literally hate this machine. There are so many bad decisions built into this machine, and such poor quality in the build, that I am disgusted with it and often consider turning it in and telling them to pass it on to someone else. The screen on this thing is not well-designed. I was looking forward to LED screens, but they did not use a true Matte finish on the glass, so the light waves do not diffuse. To put that in simpler terms, the light waves come directly out of the screen and do not spread out in multiple directions. Yes, this is bright, and it looks pretty good... if you are looking perfectly perpendicularly at the screen. However, if you get off-angle at all, you will see a strong yellow cast to everything. Why? Well, they used cheap LEDs with a blue tint, and then apply a ColorSync profile that adds yellow back into the mix to balance the colors. If you view the screen at an angle, though, the colors do not mix properly and everything looks yellow tinted. This makes it impossible to do graphics work unless you set up a perfect environment. This also means you cannot do real work while using the thing on your lap, because the screen does not tilt back far enough to get a good perpendicular view. When I have had several people huddled around me, I have to apologize and explain why the colors do not look right to them. This is rather embarrassing to someone who is known as an Apple evangelist. The keyboard on the MacBook Pro is worse than the screen. I absolutely loved the keyboard on my 12” PowerBook. I was expecting the same one on this MacBook Pro. The key caps are the same, but the important parts, the key switches, are TERRIBLE. They are entirely too stiff and I find myself constantly having to spellcheck everything I type for missing letters since I often fail to hammer the key hard enough to register the keystroke. I had also been excited about the backlighting... until I tried to use it. Why doesn't it work like the screen? I like the ability to use the brightness keys to choose a static brightness level for the screen. The keyboard, however, does not allow you to turn off the ambient light sensors. The practical effect of this is that the backlighting is constantly changing brightness and turning on and off. It is terribly annoying. I installed a hack that would keep the backlight at a set level, but it was very buggy and I ended up having to just turn off the backlighting and leave it off for good. As I mentioned, the screen does not tilt back far enough for those of us who spend hours using our machines on our laps in our favorite chairs. The trackpad is not very precise and I find it annoying when I am stuck trying to do image editing without a mouse. Then there are the build quality issues: outer screen case warping for no reason that leaves a gap in one corner when the lid is closed, cheaply put together plastic trim ring that has too much play above the optical drive, a shoddy optical drive that has problems with discs burned in a G4 iBook as well as making a terrible racket when it is burning, and the aforementioned problems with the sensors and LCD. The wireless network performance is horrendous when benchmarked against older Apple laptops and is not fast enough regardless of signal strength. Finally, there have been so many bugs that I have had to reboot this machine more times in the two months I've had it than I rebooted the 12” PowerBook in two years. Is the Intel version of OS X really this buggy, or is the motherboard in this thing just a hodge-podge of barely supported cheap bits? [Update: I still hate this thing and have been considering trading it for an equivalent PC laptop because running Linux and Windows on this Apple hardware is a bit of a nuisance, and I just can't use OS X any more as a daily operating system. Also, the graphics card went out, requiring a motherboard replacement in less than 3 years]
The Mac mini is the only saving grace in Apple's lineup right now. Granted, it does not fill all the needs of the Prosumer, but it at least gives us something to use for projects and has been the only model in recent memory that has not exhibited widespread hardware problems of one sort or another.
And this brings me to another growing problem: manufacturing. As Prosumers, we understand the value in paying more and getting what you pay for. As I said earlier, we use our tools to make money or practice our hobbies. For this, we understand the value of having good quality that we can rely on and we are willing to pay the premium... knowing that it always pays off in the end. This used to be the philosophy of the Apple we knew and loved. I have a G4 Cube running 24/7 as a backup server. It is 7 years old. It works perfectly and runs for months at a time without being rebooted. When it was introduced, it was pricey, but it has lasted. In comparison, the guy who bought the the G5 iMac I pulled the hard drive out of paid hundreds of dollars more for his machine, and it only lasted about a year and a half. There have been numerous failures among Apple's all-in-one machines over the last few years, and some of the people I advised to buy these have suffered from it. The G5 PowerMacs have started to leak their coolant, ruining the motherboards. The plastic on the MacBooks has started discoloring and cracking for no reason. MacBook Pros have had problems with RAM, Airport, and improper application of thermal paste on processors. The number of people I know who have had to do without their machines for weeks at a time while they wait for repairs that only Apple can make due to the proprietary nature of the parts supply is growing rapidly. It has started to make me feel guilty for advising these people to make the purchases they did.
Why is this happening? My theory is that Apple got tired of PC people complaining that Macs were so expensive. To combat that, they decided to cut prices. In order to cut prices, they had to move away from their former manufacturing plants, and hand it all over to the Chinese. This MacBook Pro I am typing on shipped straight from China to here. Yes, it cost less than a comparable PowerBook would have cost a few years ago, but at what cost to reliability? We Prosumers were never happy about those high prices, but at least we were comforted in the fact that we were buying a machine that should last us 5 years of solid use, followed by 5 more of other useful duties (like my backup Cube). Presently, it does not appear that any of these machines will last even 3 or 4 years. Apple wanted to compete on price, but the price they paid to do so has taken a heavy toll on the loyalty of those of us who have advised people to buy Apple hardware for its reliability. If Apple continues using the same Chinese manufacturing that its PC competitors use, how can we expect the overall quality to be any better? And how can I , in good conscience, recommend someone spend more for a machine on the perception of higher quality when the reality is that the quality is now no longer likely to be much better than the $750 PC? We Prosumers would much prefer a return to higher prices, as long as it means a concurrent return to higher quality and reliability. Very often, our livelihoods depend on these machines. We do not have time for extended downtime.
So, that sums up the hardware selection and build problems, but there are other ways Apple is driving away the Prosumers. Look at the iPod Touch. It could have been the Prosumer's dream machine. Instead, they made some really terrible decisions and left out all the features that make the iPhone so good... the speakers and volume control, by extension of that the ability to have alarms in iCal, the ability to add events to iCal, and the camera. Instead of being a tool, it is merely a glitzy plaything. It is the technological equivalent of the sugar water Steve Jobs chided Scully into leaving behind so that he could change the world... the Touch is nothing that changes the world, just something to satisfy people's need for more. To add insult to injury, the build quality of these is pathetic. The screens are terrible from all the accounts I have read and this makes them useless for the one thing they seem to be intended for: video.
The last trend I want to point out is the terrible software QA we have seen lately. Mac OS X 10.4.9 and 10.4.10 have been the buggiest releases of OS X I can remember suffering through since 10.0.4. The Finder is so crash-prone that I am starting to feel like I am using Windows. Just the other day, I was connected to my Cube here at home. I forgot to disconnect before putting the MacBook Pro to sleep. When I got to work, I noticed this and clicked the disconnect icon, expecting to watch the beach ball for one whole minute before I could do anything. Instead, I waited five minutes before giving up and doing a forced power down. The subsequent reboot, reopening of all my apps and browser tabs, and trying to remember where I left off on other stuff I had open cost me about a half hour of frustration. Why can't they fix this?! Did they outsource the coding to Microsoft? Wireless transfer rates have been pathetic on Intel Macs and I assume this is driver related. Other Finder bugs and app crashes have become more routine. To add salt to the wound, I used my old 1.33GHz 12” PowerBook to do some DVD burning recently, and realized that, despite the multiple times faster processor in this MacBook Pro, it doesn't feel much faster for most routine tasks, and even slower in some. The only place it is obviously faster is in video encoding. Unless they can get better speed out of these machines for GUI tasks and general usage, why are we enduring the bugginess of OS X on Intel? If I didn't loathe the prospect of having to use 2 laptops on a daily basis, I'd go back to my 12” PowerBook for all my personal usage. If it were not for my need to use Final Cut Express and Live Type, I'd probably turn this one in and just request them pay me a small stipend for using a personal machine as my work machine. [Update: QA at Apple has only gotten worse, not better, and 10.5 and 10.6 have been terrible in terms of stability and bugginess. Speed has improved under 10.6, except when the Finder starts locking up and requires a hard-power-down, which you have also experienced on numerous occasions if you use USB SD card readers extensively.]
Software QA for many of their other products (don't even get me started on iLife) has also been fairly abysmal over the last few years. It often feels as if they are taking the Microsoft approach to software development, where they release software when it is 90% done and rely on the crash reports of the users to make up the last 10%. I'll say it again... we Prosumers use our machines as a vital part of our livelihoods. We cannot tolerate a broken production workflow and hours of lost time because Apple decided to update QuickTime to support some fluffy feature that got added to iTunes without proper testing. If I could have back all the hours I've wasted cleaning up after Apple updates and working around bugs, I could earn enough money in those hours to buy a machine or two.
The whole thing is just starting to build a lot of frustration in me. I feel like there is no longer room for people like me in the Apple ecosystem. This ecosystem I once loved for its great tools and variety of choice is leaving me with no option for hardware that I actually like and want to use. Meanwhile, I continue to see small PC laptops and specialty machines like the Sony UX and I can only drool over them since OS X only runs on Apple hardware.
This is starting to feel like a relationship going sour. It is still in that stage of denial, where you hope you are just going through a dry spell and the other person is not really trying to push you away... but the feeling lingers.
It is sad that we Prosumers should ever feel left out here in Apple land. I can assure you that we are a large part of the reason for Apple's growing momentum. All those people who asked us what they should buy, all those favorable blog posts, all the free hours of tech support we have given to Mac newbies, and all the times we have sworn by the hardware we used and loved have all contributed to people being willing to try a Mac despite their fears. We helped them through the switch, then they told others. Without us, I do not believe Apple would be gaining steam right now. By way of illustration, I've never met anyone who said they bought a new Mac because the “Mac Guy” made the “PC Guy” look like a fool in a commercial.
If Apple loses our enthusiasm, who will assure these people they are making the right choice? Who will coach them through migrating their data off their old PCs? Who will praise the lesser known virtues of the Mac OS that make it so powerful? [Update: Recently, two different people who were planning to buy Macs changed their minds after discussing with me what they were going to primarily use their machines for. The benefits that still remain, fewer in number with every update, no longer justify the price difference to most people.]
So, how can Apple prevent driving us away? The answer is not as simple as they'd like. They will need to start by taking us seriously again when making decisions about what hardware and software to provide. True, we make up a very small percentage of all purchases, but having us around helps build peripheral sales. Remember all those people I mentioned having converted? I didn't buy those machines, but they would still be using Windows PCs if they had not known I'd be there to help them through the switch. I would wager that each Apple Prosumer wields similar influence on the purchasing decisions of others. If there is not a single piece of hardware for us to get excited about, why should we spend a premium price on something that is a compromise for us? We are the kind of users who are perfectly comfortable making the switch to Linux because it will run on that really cool Sony handheld computer. Apple needs to keep this in mind. It needs to listen to what we want in our hardware and software, and try to meet those needs. Granted, the specialty hardware will not sell much, but they can take the R&D money out of the marketing budget, because, if they keep us happy and give us products to get really excited about, we will share our enthusiasm with others, and that word of mouth will be hundreds of times more powerful than another Mac vs. PC commercial in bringing switchers over. There is a very high, yet intangible, value to Apple to have us around and enthusiastic. When we lose our enthusiasm, as I am starting to, we are less willing to recommend someone buy an Apple. Just the other day, a long time Mac user was asking me what to buy when his PowerBook G3 finally dies (it is on its last legs after 7+ years of faithful service). In the past, I would have been quick to recommend one model or another for his needs. Instead, I half-heartedly mentioned the MacBook, but followed it up with a warning that it will not last as long as his PowerBook has because the Chinese manufacturing is much shoddier than the old manufacturing. I even had to say that there was not a single model of Apple hardware I could confidently recommend for reliability except for the Mac mini, but that model would not meet his needs. It was a sad day for me to have to admit that if he buys another Apple, it won't really last longer than the HP laptop he bought his wife. [Update: Every person I know who bought the white MaBooks or the pre-unibody MacBook Pros have had one significant hardware problem or another, in most cases requiring Apple to send the machine off for repairs.]
That's when I realized that something has to change. Come on Apple, give us something to brag about again. We love beauty, but not at the complete sacrifice of practicality and ease of repair. We love lightweight, but not at the complete sacrifice of expandability. We want to see some more great designs like those of the past that struck a balance between beauty and usefulness. We want to be able to replace our own hard drives without having to send our machines in.
We need the Apple of old, which fights for us and defies the trends in the industry that prevent progress and take us for granted. I do not know if you have any official “devil's advocates” in your teams or not, but you need some. You need people who will be able to see the practical consequences of every design decision and point out the potential flaws before they happen. You need someone who can see clearly what details of a product will annoy customers, and who will point these out to the engineers and software design people without the fear of hurting feelings. You need more critical thinking. How did no one challenge the iMac and the fact that practically no one would be able to change their own hard drive? How did no one point out that removing the ability to add calendar events on the iPod Touch would cause way more ill-will than such a decision would ever be worth monetarily (assuming this decision was made to protect the iPhone)? With better critics working in these areas, you could prevent a lot of anger and frustration. Hire me, I'll do it. I have the critical thinking skills needed for the job. Hire anyone. Just please do something before we Prosumers lose all our enthusiasm and start considering the limitations of running Linux just so we can have better options in hardware (note to all Linux fans: yes, I stay up-to-date with latest releases of several distros... I am speaking from experience strictly concerning desktop use so don't bother trying to recommend distros to try). Save us from having to half-heartedly recommend the MacBook to people, not because it is the right option for them but because it is the only option available to them if they want to use OS X. And if you are not willing to do this, please license OS X to companies who will. You've been our champions all these years, please do not abandon us to the pain of having to run Photoshop 7 in Wine on Linux, using gimpy fonts, having to abandon iTunes, and having to live through the Linux version of Firefox. We really do not want to go down this path... please don't make us. [Update: Linux on laptops has improved dramatically since I wrote this, Gimp is now usable enough that I can mostly do without Photoshop, and Google released the Chrome Browser, sparing me the pain and suffering of dealing with Firefox's slide into irrelevance. I am the happiest I've been in computer land in the last few years with the two most recent releases of Ubuntu - 9.10 and 10.04]
Todd Russell
October 7, 2007
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