Who are you and where is Steve Jobs?

(This post can also be seen on my “never seen before because no one goes there!” blog, The Whirling Vortex of Suck!)

It’s been a difficult couple of months for the typical hard-core Apple fan. The company you hate to love (or love to hate) has been making some pretty bone-headed moves lately and with the economy currently in the toilet can’t be making stock holders very happy either. On Monday, September 29th, 2008, Apple Incorporated shares dropped to nearly a one year low of around $105 US. The stock has dropped almost 1/4 of its value since last week (though it did bounce back on Tuesday the 30th to about $115 US). To be fair, the tech market in general has been hit pretty hard with money supplies tightening up and consumers in a panic over whether their 401Ks will be worth squat by the time a new President takes office in January of 2009. But this isn’t about Apple stocks or if the major shareholders of Apple will have enough money to pay Steve Job’s $1 salary for the year, this is about Apple and why they are just not hitting on all cylinders lately.

You’ve got the whole “Let’s release a bunch of major hardware and software at the same time and hope everything works!” debacle when the 3G iPhone was released along with new versions of iTunes, MobileMe (the eventual replacement for dotmac), the AppStore for iPhones and the iPod Touch, and the 2.0 software for the same. Was there ANY part of these announcements that went off as expected? Planned? Hoped for? Promised?

Nope, it all went to spectacular crap within a relatively short amount of time. The 3G iPhone had problems with dropped calls and an odd preference for 2G networks even when the 3G network was clearly available. The 2.0 software was the clear favorite at Cupertino to be blamed unless there was some remote possibility that it could be blamed on ATT instead. MobileMe was so bad that Apple actually had to GIVE away free months to keep people from dropping it like a bad habit on top of lowering expectations on what the service would do as compared to what was claimed it would do in its roll-out. The AppStore has been sorta a bright spot in that there are plenty of apps, many free, that are now available! Well… as long as whatever app you made was cleared as not being a possible threat to some past, current, or future product that Apple may or may not release at some point this millennia. Keep in mind that this is only the tip of the iceberg. If the problems Apple has had lately were limited to just this one day, you could chalk it up to bad karma, foolish product managers, and Steve maybe being distracted by a particularly tasty looking piece of celery but there’s more.

Many of the products that Apple has released aren’t exactly taking the industry by storm either. The AppleTV has been downgraded by Steve to a “hobby” for the company. That being the case, little to no advertising has been done for the product and very few people that I know of have purchased one. It isn’t necessarily a BAD product, it just isn’t very good and that’s a shame because it isn’t that far away from possibly being great. What does it need and how much more would it cost? Well, it could use a bigger case for one thing. A case that would hold a full-sized hard drive instead of the laptop drive they have squirreledaway in there. 40 or 160GBs? Really? If all it did was audio (it wouldn’t be called the AppleTV then), I wouldn’t care, but it’s supposed to be for video. You know, those really big files especially so when you download (or rip from your own DVDs) near-HD quality (whatever the hell that means) files from iTunes you can fit more than 10 to 20 full length movies. I bet you could buy 500GB 3.5-inch hard drives for not much more than those 2.5-inch drives currently in use. Also, why the heck do I have to have iTunes running on my computer in order to have the AppleTV see the library? Why noy just point it to the right volume where my content is stored and be done with it? Sure the content copyright holders probably have something to do with it, but can’t you make them shut up by limiting the device to just one library along with whatever content you download directly into it?

Lastly and then I’ll leave the poor thing alone, Apple sells this as essentially a media player for your living room (or wherever). Take it the next step and make it the media center. All your sources would plug into it and you would control which input was current with Front Row and a better frigging remote than the chewing gum sized POS Apple gives you now. Put three or four HDMI inputs on the back with one output. Apple has lots of money in the bank, buy Belkin or license and adapt the Harmony remote to work with it.

The iPod HiFi…nuff said. Did anyone buy this product? If they did will they admit it now?

OS X 10.5 Leopard. Late because apparently everyone at Apple was really busy trying to make a cell phone. When it did finally come out, what did we see? Problems galore. Back to my Mac was not working (and even now is shaky), dotmac issues, a menubar and dock that was so translucent that you could have trouble seeing what apps were there and which were running. Almost out of the gate people were making dock replacements and posting them online. Dock replacements! Something so basic to OS X that it was there even when the crappy beta was released so many years ago and Apple made it so bad that many wanted to replace it! Problems with Stacks, poor support for G5 iMacs with WiFi (I ran into that one myself with my kid’s computer, I finally put it on once 10.5.5 was released) amongst other problems and this was AFTER being six months late. Look, I don’t expect an initial release of something as complicated as an operating system to be perfect out of gate from Apple, Microsoft, or anyone, but it’s obvious that Leopard was not ready and Apple probably released it when they did to avoid Vista-like embarrassment.

How about award-winning design? This used to be one of the things that Apple really did well to make them stand out from the pack. What happened Apple? The last real design change for the iMacs was when they went from a G4 PPC processor (the lampshade) to the G5. We’re over two years into moving to Intel processors and it’s essentially the same design. While I’m on the subject of iMacs, any chance we’ll be able to replace the hard drive with a bigger one any time soon WITHOUT voiding our warranty? Heeeeeeyyy, we can access the Airport card and put a little more RAM in…WHOOPEE! We’re cooking with gas now! There are only two computers that Apple makes where you can relatively easily get access to the hard drive; The MacBook (but not the MacBook Pro that we spend a good 1/3 or more for) and the Mac Pro which will run you well over $2000 US.

Speaking Apple laptops and design, when are we going to see something different there? The MacBook Pros are pretty much unchanged since the introduction of the G4 PowerBook and how much different is the MacBook from the G4 iBook it replaced?

Apple used to be about taking chances…pushing the envelope and being different. It’s part of the reason why we choose them instead of the safe and certainly more accepted throughout the world Microsoft Windows platfrom. Even Apple’s failures were exciting in a “Wow! That might actually be useful if it wasn’t what anyone really wanted” kind of way. Now they seem to be trying to play it safe, don’t rock the boat. That isn’t what Steve Jobs did in the past and it makes me wonder if he’s really paying attention anymore.