Wednesday, 21 September 2011

Bored Of Apple?

The first computer I ever used was an Apple, my current laptop and desktop are both Apple computers and my iPad, iPhone and iPod are seldom away from me. That has made my feelings over the last few months a surprise and a gut wrenching disappointment, I think I've become bored of Apple.

That's a big statement. The company is on fire, the products are flying off the shelves, everyone seems to be carrying an Apple logo around and yet another new iPhone is on the way. So why the boredom? Well the medias handling of one item on that previous list is the first cause. It's nothing but iPhone 5/iPhone 4S in the news. The conversation in the technology world over the last few weeks can be summed up as:
Blog: Is it going to be an iPhone 5?
Blog: Yes
Blog: Is is going to be an iPhone 4S?
Blog: Yes
Blog: Maybe...No....Yes.....My unnamed sources say yes/no/maybe/who are Apple again?

It's been weeks of this. Leaked images of nothing in particular. Unnamed sources seem to be coming out of every window in Cupertino to tell journalists about the next device. Pity nothing adds up. It's been too long reading this in RSS feeds. I wanted my iPhone in June and July and August but I just don't care anymore. Apple should've announced something by now or at least let the Wall Street Journal do it for them but this silence is just frustrating to the point of aggravation. I've reached saturation point with Apple rumours.

The second cause of my boredom is OSX Lion. I've been writing a lot recently and as such I've been running Microsoft Office, Safari and Google Chrome side-by-side on a Macbook with 4Gb of RAM. Performance, which was fine under Snow Leopard, has been shocking. I've had more app crashes in one day of Lion use than in one full year of Windows 7 and three years of Windows XP. You can suggest I downgrade back to Snow Leopard but why should I? I want the OS the app developers are going to be building for and that's Lion. I hate to say it but Lion feels to me like an over complicated, over engineered mess. It's Apple's Vista. I want my OS to just work and Lion just doesn't.

Finally, and possibly most damning, Apple don't feel like something special anymore. They're a big patent fighting corporate machine. The never ending court battles that Apple start, I've no problem with them defending themselves but it seems to be with the intention of destroying competition rather then licensing and giving some assistance to industry innovation. Also, everyone seems to have either a Mac, iPhone or iPad. It's not an exclusive club anymore. This, of course, is just the side-affect of success and Apple themselves probably don't care but it all just feels a little tainted now. The aluminium has somewhat lost its shine.

Now I'm not saying everything is wrong and we should all flock away from them obviously. Customer services is second to none, the laptops look nice if expensive and I'm sure everyone will be scrambling to get iPhone whatever when it comes out but for me it's just not the same anymore. Maybe the time has come to look for an alternative? Microsoft?


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