The Trouble With Apple; or, Why I’m Excited About Surface

The Honeymoon

It has now been nearly a decade since I switched to Apple computers. Frustrated with the blue screens of death and viruses, I picked up a tiny PowerBook on the advice of some friends, and fell in love almost immediately. It was absolutely everything I had been hoping for: a stable OS and simple-but-powerful software on top of a rock solid, upgradable hardware base. Sure, it cost me a premium — like all Apple products — but it was worth it. Although I replaced the hard drive after a few years to get more space and faster read speeds, that computer is still working now. Which is a miracle, because I dropped it at least a couple times.

Fast forward four years. Although that computer was still working fine, it was feeling a little old, and I was excited about the new MacBook Pros. I was also getting into video editing — which I had been introduced to by iMovie on my first Mac — and I was looking for something with more speed, power, and a bigger screen to handle the HD camera I had just purchased. So I bought a big new MacBook Pro.

Things Fall Apart

I was disappointed to boot it up and immediately discover that Apple had removed functionality from iMovie. I hadn’t anticipated that; I just figured a company as cool as Apple would always be working to make things better, not worse. But I muddled through in spite of the features that were missing, and was reasonably happy with things, until six months later the battery died. And then a few months after that, the CPU died. And then a few months after that, the power cord broke. Sure, it was all replaceable but I hadn’t bought AppleCare precisely because I trusted the company so much after my last computer. That thing was built like a tank! Why would I need extra insurance?

Fast forward to last fall. I’m in need of a new laptop that’s more portable and less broken than the old Macbook Pro. I decide to pick up one of the new Macbook Airs, though this time I’ve learned my lesson and spring for the costly AppleCare package on top of the already-expensive base price of the computer (in the interim, I had also bought an iPod and then had its battery die). It’s a good thing, too. Within just a few months, the fans would break and need to be replaced, and to date I have already gone through two power cords. It’s all free, of course, but it’s annoying to have to keep bringing my still-very-new computer back to the Apple Store again and again.

The operating system is as smooth and lovely as ever, of course, but I’ve been discovering that Apple has continued worsening its creativity products. I hadn’t had cause to work with iMovie much until our recent Startup Asia Jakarta event, when I was asked to edit some video and had no access to the blazing-fast custom desktop PC we have at home (or its copy of Premiere Pro). So I fired up iMovie, and my god, that program is a disaster. Not only have additional functions been removed since the last time I used it, it’s now buggy to the point of literally being unusable. My colleagues can attest to this as they were in the room listening to me swear as I repeatedly attempted to import an image to use in my video, only to have iMovie display a different image from the same folder. No, I didn’t click the wrong one, and no, their filenames were not the same. I have no idea how it was happening. Finally, I got so annoyed with the whole thing that I switched to Screenflow — screen recording software that includes a rudimentary editing feature — to make the video instead.

Last week, my parents came to visit in Beijing — hence my absence from this site — and that, too, brought new frustrations. Collectively, we might have looked like an Apple commercial, with four Macs in the same room, but we were all annoyed with iPhoto, which we discovered is a bit less intuitive and functional than previous iterations. Or, as my father put it when he started yelling at his computer: “Dammit, you’re supposed to be better than PC!”

The Future is Ugly

So I wasn’t all that surprised when Apple announced that its new generation of Macs is more fused-together and less upgradable than ever before. Or that it announced an “update” to the Mac Pro line so half-assed that Tim Cook is already assuring angry customers that there will be another update next year.

In the middle of this, Apple fandom has become something like a religion. In fact, when I mentioned I had been frustrated by my Macbook Pro and was switching to Windows for the editing computer that’s being used for the film I’ve been making in my free time, one of the film’s donors told me that their family would no longer support the film if I was going to say negative things about Apple products. Here in China, product launches are so big they keep leading to actual violence. It’s all kind of extreme.

Now, I understand that what Apple has done is mostly the result of consumer demand. But why are we still demanding this stuff? When I bought my first Mac ten years ago, I got a computer that had:

• A stable, smooth-as-silk OS
• Sexy design
• Rock-solid hardware
• A highly-functional suite of creative software products
• Upgrade-ready hardware setup that was easy to customize and/or repair