Guided by Steve Jobs Apple have had an incredible decade. Even when they were in no position to lead the market they decided to lead it anyway and ended up winning. The iPhone came from nowhere and revolutionised the smartphone industry to such an extent that Nokia all but rolled over and died. It was a visionary move.
The iPhone has also become the most widely used amateur photographic tool in history. It’s also in some situations a serious camera capturing history and spreading it around social networks before anyone with a news cameraman is able to get on the scene.
It leads the camera market in terms of software design and apps whereas the photographic giants Canon and Nikon (I am reminded of Nokia) have barely even started. A compact camera now has to be pretty special to deserve ownership, and it still isn’t as omnipresent in my life as the iPhone – the best camera is the one you have on you.
For filmmakers Apple machines have also been revolutionary, Final Cut Pro – the darling of Hollywood. The Mac – a cultural icon and tool for the mind in comparison to Microsoft’s nerdy virus prone Windows.
Now I believe we are seeing at best a stumble, at worse a steady fall from grace. I write this entirely from a subjective point of view, so by no means should it be taken as fact. But I have long observed technology and I can see the signs of decline at Apple – the poor design decisions and strategies at odds with what people need.
(And the iPhone still has no dedicated shutter button!)
Lion
Such a basic thing as scrollbars – demoted. Auto-save – demented. Inverted scrolling – flawed. Lion has a lot of silly stuff.
Scrollbars have been made invisible until you use one. Logical? It is like removing the sitting room sofa and replacing it with an invisible yeti. I know we even have touch-pads on the back of our mice now but it takes more gestures than an irate mother in law to scroll to the bottom of a folder containing 400 photos.
Like that difficult moment for Microsoft with Windows Vista, Lion has all the hallmarks of a product which has peaked. Misguided evolution of fundamentals which didn’t need changing in the first place and a lack of major new ideas. I call it change in all the wrong places.
Job’s great strength at Apple, I believe, was his taste. He’d use a prototype or a beta version and instantly recognise bad taste when he saw it.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dR8SAFRBmcU[/youtube]Auto-save replaces Save As in all future Apple software – as well as basic but critical everyday apps like Preview and TextEdit.
It is incredible that as poor a concept as auto-save became a pillar of this release. Who thinks it is a good idea to have an app like Preview automatically overwrite the master JPEGs on your SD card when simply resizing versions out for the web or cropping?
The time I have spent not clicking Save As, I have lost clicking Revert To Save to get the masters back.
Preview crashes regularly. It’s slower. It refuses to edit RAW files (only after duplicating as a TIFF). One time I resized in bulk 30 JPEG images on my drive which Preview then saved over immediately. To return the masters to their original resolution I had to click each individually and do a Revert to Saved. It added 10 minutes to a 30 second workflow.
This kind of behaviour can’t be turned off. In effect I’ve changed my brain instead – commanding and reminding the poor thing to duplicate files in Finder before editing them. Yes Preview may use Lion’s Versions to keep track of document changes in history but this folly will go down in Apple’s as a particularly ignominious one.
Another one – touch-scrolling is inverse by default. Content moving in the direction of your finger only makes sense when your finger is on the same plane as the content. On a touch pad with a vertical screen or on a mouse with an upright monitor it makes no sense at all. Nobody at Apple seemingly picked up on this. There’s no point standardising the iPad and Mac. They’re different products for different purposes. It is like trying to standardise Final Cut Pro so it’s more like iMovie.
Nothing sums up a lack of vision and misguided tinkering quite like this. These aren’t earth shattering problems (although Preview is basically unusable) but that they are in an Apple product to start with says a lot. We have been so used to now with extremely solid design and functionality. Yet these mistakes are with fundamentals of the OS, and so wrong. The only great overhaul seems to be under the hood which is necessary from time to time but Lion has made very little difference to the way I use my Mac, except to annoy me.
Pricing
The price of Mac hardware especially the Macbook remains ludicrously high compared to the same spec Windows PC.
iPhone
I still love my iPhone. The prominence of Sony Ericsson and Motorola prior to 2007 is but a distant memory. It is by far the best phone I’ve ever used and the longest I have stuck with one brand for. That’s not to say the iPhone might not suddenly disappear as quickly as it began. Suicides at Foxconn and of far less importance a lack of white paint and the death grip (a major design flaw if ever I saw one) have rocked the boat. But of biggest commercial significance is that for the first time ever the iPhone has serious competition.
It has been completely outgunned in hardware terms by almost a full year by Samsung and HTC. Handsets like the Samsung Galaxy S2 are more advanced, period. Of course I’ll be getting an iPhone 5 but it’s clear the Asian hardware manufacturers are a step ahead in time and bring new handsets to the market faster. Personally a yearly refresh is enough for even me but – oh the temptation.
On the all important software side Apple still holds a critical advantage. The AppStore is superb and might stop people migrating en mass to Android in the short term but it is clear that the competition are pulling ahead at an accelerating pace on all fronts.
Final Cut Pro X
What a horror story. It was an almost unmitigated disaster. Not a single filmmaker I know uses it. There was a mass of returns from ordinary consumers too. It is clear that the focus is on the mass market rather than the creative industries. The two big motivations for me when I switched to a Mac from a PC was video editing and an OS that ‘just worked’. I had to sacrifice my entire games library for this. It was a big decision!!
Final Cut Pro was a fantastic video editing solution for creatives and pros, it is a travesty it was never replaced in the true sense. FCPX is not Final Cut Pro. I explored it extensively upon release and haven’t picked it up since because it simply doesn’t do what I want it do or with as much gusto as the competition. It has more silly fundamental design decisions than the whole of Lion put together – small but critical things that show Apple have lost the plot.
All their eggs in one basket
In my opinion Apple’s recent success is almost entirely down to the iPhone.
The halo effect of iOS has been to boost the number of people moving from Windows to OSX. iPhones are so good they lead to Mac ownership.
iOS also kickstarted the re-development of the iPad after the concept was shelved and that is also a massive sales success. These too tempt customers toward Macs and away from PCs.
Such attention has the iPhone and iPad commanded, Microsoft’s own phone based on Windows 7 has barely got off the ground, coming too late into a fierce Apple / Google storm on the back of very poor predecessors.
The strategy of turning common cell phones into mini-computers has served Apple incredibly well.
But in no way would Macs be as popular as they are now if it wasn’t for that takeover of the mobile market.
This page on the Apple website reveals the entire company’s product range. It basically consists of the iPhone, iPad, Mac, iTunes and some related accessories like Apple TV. That is a pretty small range of products considering the size of Apple’s profits so if one of them dives it will have a massive effect on the company.
Apple need to broaden their approach to the market and diversify into more areas. It’s also incredible that Apple have avoided the same kind of anti-trust lawsuits Microsoft have been bombarded with. Safari has been intimately linked to OSX in much the same way Internet Explorer was the default option for Windows, and yet the authorities have been silent – which shows just how slow on the uptake The Establishment is.
Now Apple have become The Establishment, I wish them the best of luck.
I still love Apple
Apple have some wonderful engineers, designers, a great visionary at the helm – or possibly standing back due to health reasons. That much alone could have a lot to do with the glitches in Lion. Jobs at 100% would have used Lion extensively and corrected much of it thanks to the hands on nature of his direction and the degree of influence he enjoys over products.
No need to panic yet – but Lion and FCPX have been rather worrying.
