Disconnect is a weekly column in which Tech in Asia’s Charlie Custer pokes at holes, plays devil’s advocate, or otherwise attempts to rain on the tech industry’s parade.
Photo by cogdogblog
I remember when Apple was a company focused on making products that were all about user experience.
Don’t get me wrong, the company has always had an eye for visual design, too. Remember these beauties? Gorgeous. But sexy design sells a product once. What has kept Apple fans coming back year after year is the intuitive software, it-just-works hardware, and the promise that using an Apple machine would just be straight-up better than any of the alternatives.
I bought my first Apple product in 2004. That laptop survived four years of American college debauchery (including a few precipitous drops and drunken spills) like a champ, with no hardware or software issues whatsoever. And I loved it because it was dead simple. When I opened iTunes, it gave me all of my music right there. Anyone could understand the interface and use it almost instantly. Other apps, from iPhoto to iMovie, offered the same thing.
How far Apple has fallen since those days…
What the hell is this, Apple? I don’t give a shit what the Vince Guaraldi Trio did on this day in 1973.
Software nightmare
I genuinely don’t understand what’s happened to Apple’s software design. OS X and iOS are still, at their core, well-made products, but many of Apple’s proprietary apps have become design disasters both on the computer and on the smartphone.
Take iTunes, for example. This once simple program has been crammed full of useless tabs that want to sell me things. There’s the iTunes Store tab, which has always been there. But then there’s the “New” tab, which wants me to buy random shit I’ve never heard of. There’s the “Connect” tab which, as far as I can tell, exists to give me updates about three of the thousands and thousands of bands in my music library. Then there’s the “For You” tab, where Apple tries to sell me on a subscription to Apple Music. I remember when iTunes was a music player. Now more than half of its tabs are trying to sell me things.
And I don’t even want to talk about what Apple has done with iPhoto (now Photos), or the brutal gutting it has perpetrated on iMovie over the years, stripping out useful functions for no apparent reason and forcing me onto competing video editing software.
Examples are even easier to find on iOS, of course. If you have an iPhone, chances are you’ve got a folder full of impossible-to-delete Apple apps you never use. And even the once good ones have gotten worse over the years. Apple’s podcast app, for example, was once the clear top of the heap when it came to iOS podcast listening. Then an unnecessary update gave it a disastrous makeover that made it clunky and difficult to use. I switched to a third-party podcast app and never looked back.
I’m not alone on this, by the way. Michael Hiltzik at the LA Times chronicled some of Apple’s software misdeeds earlier this week, and he cites a number of prominent industry figures who feel the same way.
Hardware
The future looks terrible
Where is the bottom?
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