It’s been a while since I’ve seen such a pithy and accurate representation of what it’s like being an Apple Mac & iPhone user these days (well done Nick Hodulik!).
The externalities cost estimates might be a little tongue-in-cheek, but honestly, are they all that wrong? One small irritation at the wrong moment can ricochet my happy mood off into the doldrums, and Apple’s products produce a hundred “small” irritations every day – which compound in their irritation when you see them software update after software update, year after year, product after product. It’s hard not to take it personally. Like Apple is deliberately being cruel.
Daniel Kennett wrote, in his memorial to Aperture, about how the Mac-using experience wasn’t actually rainbows and perfection even back in whatever you personally feel was the golden age (I’m with him that circa System 7.1 was glorious, though the early days of Mac OS X were also very special to me). Which is true – fire up your favourite old Mac on Infinite Mac and see the strength of your rose-tinted nostalgia glasses.
But, the big difference is that Apple back then was a relatively tiny company struggling just to survive in a brutal industry dominated by soulless, greedy monsters.
There is a point at which mere indifference or incompetence transitions into negligence, and it’s long before you become one of the wealthiest companies on the planet with a veritable army of engineers.
Having worked at Apple – among other big tech companies – I can say with confidence that there’s no valid reason why they cannot fix long-standing, infamous bugs. It’s. Not. That. Hard. One half-decent engineer could fix everything listed on Bugs Apple Loves in six months, single-handed.
It’s not apparent why that doesn’t happen, but it’s not that Apple are technically incapable of it, and it cannot be that they’re unaware, so it must be that they’re choosing not to.
I hope Nick finds some solace from that – I know how he feels. The situation is simple, designers rule the roost at Apple and dictate engineering priorities. To them it’s more important to constantly reskin the OS and UI’s in order to make it “look fresh” rather than focus on productivity and ease of use. (including fixing bugs)
Designers aren’t serious engineering or power users, they care only about the cosmetics of the product, not the substance behind it.