What is worse than finding a worm int your Apple? Finding half a worm.
Don’t get me wrong, I would never trade my Mac for a Windoze machine ever. I can’t stand Windoze and I really just tolerate the idiosyncrasies of Office because I have yet to really find a suitable replacement that is actually compatible with the rest of the world. That being said, I really want to know:
WT-Fuck is going on at Apple these days? I can’t remember a product that was released or updated in the last six months that didn’t have some kind of major issues. The followers of Apple are kind of like Trekkies, always loyal, so why does Apple feel like they just need to push out products that are not quite ready? We will wait. I am not one of those people who HAS to have the newest technology on the day it is released. I am not going to stand in line at the Apple Store or at AT$T for the next new iPhone on “iPhone Day.” That is ridiculous. However, even the people who do that would be happy to wait a little bit so that they actually get a product that works correctly!
Consider that the roll out of iPhone4 was fraught with bugs. First we had “Antennagate” where the placement of the antenna caused it to essentially short out and lose signal when held in a person’s hands. This lead to Apple giving away free cases for the phone. Then there were the screen discoloration problems in a few batches of the phone, not terrible as it sounded like that mostly cleared up for people. Most recently we have seen issues with the glass on the phone due to scratching, scoring, and breaking. In fact, there have been more claims for broken glass on iPhone4 than any of the previous models. Go figure, seeing as form was put well over function on this device with front and rear glass. Seems a little stupid and superfluous. Most people use a case anyway, why bother with rear glass?!
Around the same time there was also the release of iOS4, which, for the most part crippled the iPhone 3G, which I am a user of. There were two software updates before iOS4.1 that didn’t solve the problem. This was a point that turned many 3G owners to the jailbreak community so that they could revert back to the 3.1.3 firmware. At least over the summer I wasn’t using my phone as much as I do the rest of the year. iOS4.1 seems to be better, and they say that iOS4.2, which is due sometime this week, should have even more performance improvements for 3G owners.
While still talking iPhone, lets step forward to this week, specifically this morning for most Americans, though last week for people in Europe and Australia. So, daylight savings time ended Sunday morning, huzzah for an extra hour of sleep. The problem was that this morning, anyone who uses repeating alarms on their iPhone probably didn’t have their alarm go off. Why? A bug in Apple’s clock software allowed the clock to reset to standard time, but the alarms did not. Thus alarms went off an hour late. I am not a programmer, but this seems like way to simple a thing to have been overlooked. To tell the truth, I have no idea how it is even possible, I mean, doesn’t the alarm just look at the clock and say: “Oh, it’s 8:00AM time to go off!” Not only that, but Apple knew it was a problem in Europe and did nothing to fix it in the US, and they had a whole week to try. So, until iOS4.2 is released, it seems that we might be stuck with messed up alarms. Bad move.
Lets look at other products. We just saw the launch of the new Macbook Airs, a cool product that I don’t think would really fit in my lifestyle at the moment. However, many purchasers of the first run of the new Airs were haunted by graphics issues. Flashing screens, screens with blinkies, it just was not good. Apple supposedly released a software update that fixed this, or they were exchanging machines, but this is something that should never have happened in the first place. If it was one or two machines, that is to be expected, but the mass problems indicates to me that they really just needed a little more time to work out the bugs.
Then there was the release of iLife ’11. Here is software that almost ever Mac user uses almost every day. What happens? Install iLife ’11, open iphoto, update library, and bam, lost data, missing photos. Um, hello! Apple released two updates to iPhoto within a week of release to address this issue and issues with other missing or non-functional components. I am glad that I waited and read about the bugs before just diving in with the upgrade, I have a lot of photos and I would hate to lose any.
So, what the heck is going on over in Cupertino? Apple, Steve, you guys need to wake up and smell the coffee. Just because things have been going well, doesn’t mean you can slack off. We endusers do notice when you guys fuck it up, and there has been a lot of that recently. Figure it out and make it better, things used to be really good, you didn’t used to hear about so many issues!
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