Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software
latimes.com
latimes.com
From my perspective, their application software has always sucked. It was there because you need apps to bootstrap a platform and attract enough users to attract developers. But you can't really expect a consumer electronics company to have the best application for a given niche once the niche has been identified and attracted companies that really want to make it their bread-and-butter.
XCode and occasionally FaceTime & iMovie are the only bundled applications that I ever use on my Mac. When I get a new computer, the first things I do are usually download Chrome, MacVim, Google Photos, and VLC. I use Hangouts over iMessage, Google Calendar over the built-in calendar, and Google Docs over the office suite. On my iPhone, getting Google Maps and Yelp is a top priority, lest I end up navigating off a mountain. This is not a new habit; I've operated like this since getting a Mac in 2009 after a 10-year hiatus from Apple products.
Perhaps I was just less brainwashed than most Apple fans, and the end of the brainwashing may itself be news with big consequences for product adoption. But IMHO anyone who used the whole integrated Apple software suite and never looked elsewhere has been missing out on some seriously nice features this whole time.
Ditto for anyone not using the Apple ecosystem. Better tested drivers installed by default, no OS license hassles, no issues created by malfunctioning (or maliciously functioning) antivirus, top download sites weren't infested with malware (no hunt for the real DL link), journaled FS in the consumer tier for instant fsck since 2002 (vs 2012), no-additional-cost professional-grade IDE since 2003 (vs 2015), one-click backup since 2007, decent integrated movie editing, some truly awesome platform-specific-at-first apps (subethaedit, quicksilver, textmate, coda), solid one-button-away desktop search years before it landed and stabilized in Windows, window navigation with expose (they've arguably been leapfrogged since then with window snapping), unix command line with a decent terminal emulator, emacs movement supported in every text field by default, built-in menu bar search, the list goes on.
I now have both feet in the Windows ecosystem but the transition was rough. If you have used Windows all your life, you have taught yourself to live with a lot of BS. Since you have made the investment it's now a sunk cost and no longer factors into your OS decision. Fair enough, but realize that wasn't the case for everyone. Also realize that you necessarily didn't miss what you never knew you could have.
I use the past tense because MS has caught up on most of these fronts, except for perhaps stable drivers and license hassles, where they are hobbled by their business model rather than technical shortcoming.
I still have a soft spot for KDE circa 2003. It was as pretty or prettier than OS X, and also featured "No malware", but even moreso. Amarok is still probably my favorite music player ever, much better than iTunes. People in this thread say that Safari was one of the best browsers available when it came out in 2003 - well, it got that way by forking KHTML. Stability kinda sucked, but it was very usable.
I never managed to get a non-VM linux install fully functioning. Once I graduated the end-of-semester ritual faded into the past and I stopped trying. I've recently had good experiences with bootable USB images, maybe I should give it another chance one of these days.
> KDE circa 2003. It was as pretty or prettier than OS X
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Desktop_Environment_3#/media...
http://www.guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/desktop/full/macosx...
I can't say I agree, but I'd still have used it if I could have gotten it working.
I've had the same thought in my head for a long time now but haven't been able to put it the way you did; completely agree. There was also a time when OSX supported things like .psd previews, built-in *.iso mounting, and unzipping capabilities right out of the box when Win XP didn't.
This is part of what initially got me to become a big Mac fan, but as time goes on it seems that there are fewer of these unique advantages as modern Windows becomes more competitive. This also makes me all the more disappointed to see Apple's apparent lack of OSX advancement and shortfalls in reliability/usability.
The interesting thing for me is that I never would have thought that Windows would ever be competitive with Mac again for my attention, but the feel of sloppiness in Apple software is slowly moving me back in the other direction. Once Windows has things you mentioned like better platform-first apps, emacs bindings, and a better shell, I think I might fully commit to that switch.
With this positive experience in hand, I decided to build my own rig and many of the annoying memories of why I switched to Macs in the first place came back. Windows 7 on the Skylake box was a pain due to driver support. Windows 10 installed without much hassle, but there was a minor engineering effort tweaking the bios fan settings to be silent, installing low-noise fan adapters, collecting and installing drivers for the new chipset. Obviously, this comes with the territory of building a computer, but it was a small reminder of things dealt with.
Gotta say though, Ninite does make the initial installation of software a breeze.
For instance, when I tried Xubuntu, my GPU was running at a constant 90 degrees Celsius for no real reason. Found out it was because it was also rendering another 5 screens in the background. Deleted them, after 3-4 days they would come back. My screen was 1920x1080, but it liked to change my resolution to 1024x768 every 5 or so boots.
Tonnes of small problems, like the "settings" program emptied itself. Then the Windows key would stop bringing up the menu thing. And icons liked to disappear from my desktop.
Then when I tried Debian, I could install it fine, but couldn't boot. Pretty sure this was also to do with the GPU.
Then when I tried Linux Mint, it worked okay for a day, then apparently I didn't have permission to change wireless networks, and I had to plug in a PS2 keyboard to decrypt the volume on boot (though this was easy enough to fix, just had to find the right Logitech USB Keyboard module to put into the initramfs). Again, many small issues that escape me right now.
The only distro that has worked well, with no bugs (that I didn't introduce), was Arch, but Arch is a real mission. Only thing is my wifi speed is slower than it is on Windows/OS X (~600kB/s down from ~1000kB/s, not a huge deal). Arch is great as a project IMO, but if I have to write an email or do banking or something, I really don't want to have to mess around with config files.
I love Linux so much, but that's why I'm currently an OS X user.
You paid for that by spending $XXX more than a PC on your Mac. (posted from a mac but I make no delusion that I didn't pay for XCode)
If you're buying hardware devices that linux can't support well then you're doing it wrong. Support open standards and eschew manfacturers that don't support open source.
Since Windows 3.x.
Macs were too expensive for Portuguese purses vs what Amiga, Atari and PC systems were asking for.
Also as a gamer I could never convince myself to pay more for less technical specs.
As for better drivers, Apple's OpenGL and OpenCL support leaves a lot to be desired when one is into graphics programming.
I have a hard time with this. Apple products tend to lock you into apple software. If you want to develop software, then you are pretty much stuck with XCode. If you want to send email on iOS, then you are stuck with the built in mail app (at least if you click an address from Safari, or Contacts). If I ask Siri to play some music, it launches the built in Music player. So if what you say is true, then why can't I set a default app made by a third party company?
There are like nine different versions of Emacs for OS X...
And you're not really stuck with Xcode anymore than you're stuck with Visual Studio on Windows. You can use the command line tools to do everything yourself, it's just more difficult. You can also obviously write apps in Java or even Electron, which is very popular these days.
As for Siri not using your custom music player, that's unfortunate. But integration often comes at the cost of extensibility, and while Apple has the former nailed, they are still clearly working on the latter.
GNU/Linux and *BSD are probably the only OSes where there is no such thing as an OS vendor SDK.
Surely there has to be a middle ground. :)
I think the main problem is not the application software (aside from iTunes and Apple Maps) - the main problem is the OS level software.
During the "golden age" of apple, apps would just work. Didn't matter if it you were using Apple-provided software or "better" 3rd party stuff - crashing, lagging, stuttering was minimal.
Now, many users are seeing much more lag, beach balling, and kernel panicking than before, across all of their applications. [1] Combine this with some poor decision making in the UX/UI department of certain Apple apps and you get a lot of people who are unhappy with their entire software stack.
But the app is the closest piece of software to them, so instinctively it makes more sense to blame declining app quality, when it's actually more a function of OS stability.
I've been a Mac user for about 10 years and it was never better than now, probably the opposite. Every edition had bunch of bugs I hated. Before then I regularly tested Mac for local computer magazine and it didn't look better either. I even managed to freeze Mac OSX 10.1 with first mouse click when it arrived in our lab.
Before then we had lots of fun looking at ways you could hang by that time absurdly obsolete old Mac OS....
So the golden age for me has been 2009-2015 from Snow Leopard -> Mountain Lion (trailing off steeply w/ El Capitan) and from iOS 1 - 7, w/ iOS 8, 9 introducing issues.
I have a three year old MacBook, and I believe, a four year old Ipad2. I want to believe it was just the iPad and too much JavaScript, but my laptop is not what I expect from a three year laptop. That wheel is spinning way too much. Chrome brings it to unusuable, but figured it was my fault. I only have 4 gigs. Actually, I though 4 gigs would be enough?
I do not believe in buying a new computer every two years.
I always though if an evil dictator ran Apple, they could force us to by new product, but they would have to do it sly. Just enough wheel spinning, to make us buy. If Apple does that; I'm gone forever.
Actually, I've been done with new Apple products for awhile. I will just repair my older products. I still believe in the company though. I hope they don't get cute?
nope. Ive been using apple software for 20 years.
apple software has ALWAYS been crap. its just also been less crap than the opposition.
hell, before OS X, a crashed app would force you to restart the entire computer....
I still remember long afternoons debugging a CodeWarrior application, and having to restart after every successful replication of the problem...
I had actually never heard of MobileMe before reading that thread...somehow I was busy/oblivious enough not to have ever used it.
It's only since the "App-store" that apple seemed to screw things up. It's quite amazing that so did microsoft and so did linux desktops. I feel like the golden age of desktop computing ended with the dawn of the iphone.
XCode is a necessary evil for a lot of developers, FaceTime depending on your situation is also a necessary evil for users. iMovie is the best of a bad bunch for the average user.
However the OSX interface is still very slick in comparison to *nix, requires hardly any maintenance and still supports "all the things" because developers love the hardware and the UX and have built the applications needed for it.
I've always turned away from Apple because "you are paying for a brand" - however since being given a Macbook to play with I've really enjoyed using it for dev and personal use. I've uninstalled and removed pretty much all the "bloat" that people like us have a preferred alternative for, but the average user simply doesn't give a damn.
I still run away from iOS however. The requirement to find an exploit in the firmware to do what I want is a PITA.
More recently, there are online alternatives like https://appear.in/ that I've been happy with, and which don't require you to install a browser plugin like Hangouts.
I think that on a technical level, WhatsApp is the best messaging software on the market. It at least features reliable message delivery, something that both Hangouts and iMessage have yet to get down. But its usage is largely limited to my Indian friends here in the U.S, which makes it of limited use to me.
When iOS got invented Apple got into mobile devices. Microsoft has been making Windows Phones (way back to Windows CE) longer than Apple has been making iPhones, but the iPhone sells better.
Apple has sort of gotten into a trap they got into before bringing Jobs back, problems with software quality. Jobs solved it by merging MacOS and NextOS together to make OSX. Then OSX spawned iOS.
Apple got focused on bringing out new hardware, to have users upgrade every once in a while to keep the profits going. They focused on the hardware more than the software. That is the mistake that Apple once made during the PowerMac Era before Jobs came back to fix it. They were working on project Copland to fix it, but never finished that project.
It is not that Apple Fans are brainwashed, they like Apple because it is not Microsoft. They've been burned by Microsoft too many times and went to Apple as an alternative. But now Apple is starting to make mistakes like Microsoft did in their software. Apple Fans are starting to take notice of that.
Apple just needs to focus on software quality for a while, fix the bugs and CVS exploits. Instead of releasing new features, just fix the bugs and make the OS and apps stable. They've done it before and they can do it again.
> Perhaps I was just less brainwashed than most Apple fans
I'm not quite sure who of you is the brainwashed one ... ;)
I've looked elsewhere but I stick with Apple's software because I like the simplicity and privacy it offers. I don't want more than a handful of basic functions in my calendar app. I don't want a half a dozen new features to help me avoid reading e-mails. I don't need to install Google Maps to avoid driving off a mountain because Apple Maps works fine for me. I don't want to type the wrong thing into a Google app and see ads about it for the next 3 months.
Also, I don't really like Google's desktop offerings - or the lack of them - everything is a webapp, and they just don't work as well as proper desktop software would have. I am so annoyed by the random reloads Chrome apps do, and the utter disrespect they have for multiple desktops.
I've been using hyperswitch as my cmd+tab replacement for a while, and it is much closer to the windows implementation. I find it better..
The one choice you can't make is iTunes. Being forced to use that dreadful piece of software is why I gave my first iPhone away after little less than one week. It's abysmally incompetent as a music player. You could probably count the number of codecs it supports on one hand - a core feature of a music player is, well, playing your music. Last time I used it, it still didn't have a media library and dumped tens of thousands of songs into a flat list. You have to have that garbage installed on your machine if you own an iPhone. Not interested.
In the "Advanced" tab, which I'd expect any self-respecting HN denizen to go to first, there's a checkbox for "Keep iTunes Media folder organized" which explains that it will "[place] files into album and artist folders, and [name] the files based on the disc number, track number and song title". Mine is a very hierarchical structure - and I've had it for a decade. No flat list here.
"You have to have that garbage installed on your machine if you own an iPhone. Not interested."
Not true, either - hasn't been true since the advent of iCloud in 2011.
As to the codecs - it does do MP3 and AAC, which probably covers 95% of available content, though it doesn't do Ogg Vorbis, Quo Vadis, or various others. For that sort of thing there's VLC.
You haven't needed iTunes to use an iPhone for several years now. I still plug mine in once in a while for a local backup but I can't tell you the last time I've needed it. Apple's cloud backup is pretty good in my experience.
Don't get me wrong... iTunes is definitely getting worse. The media browser is too hard to find in the new version and the new default views don't handle large libraries very well.
And yet you use Google everything, despite privacy concerns...
The only thing that prevents this from being a massive pain in the butt is that they have also stolen the personal data of 300 million other Americans, and by the time they work their way down the list (my last name starts with 'T', after all), all that information - credit card numbers, operating system installs, addresses on file, net habits - will have changed anyway.
However, I guess that as Apple grows and attracts more customers outside of tech (especially as they have done with the iPhone), they will have also picked up a much larger share of customers who will use the built-in apps. If it's true that the quality is gong down as they say, well those people will form the opinion that you would expect them too which happens to be the one written about here.
Let's also not forget that the operating system itself has a huge impact on the experience. The difference between the OS and the apps is that problems in the OS don't just affect end users, they often affect app developers too. So regardless of how their apps are, they could easily get themselves into trouble here.
I loved the fact that they used Pascal as system programming language, but the mixture of Pascal, followed by C and eventually C++ with Powerplant wasn't that nice if I recall correctly from Mac programming manuals.
Also the fact that up NeXT's acquisition Apple's engineering failed to deliver a new OS.
A lot of 'improvements' made after that, comes with little or none consideration to make things more useful. Rather it seems to focus more on atheistic, which, as a developer, I couldn't care less.
With the occasional exception, Apple has never been very good at application software.
Is it a priori obvious that which conglomerate would be better at some app than another?
Plus using third party services is just smart in that it avoids vendor lock-in and makes it easier to switch out of the platform(s) should you choose to do so.
Since you weren't even using Apple Software at the time, your judgment of whether Apple software used to be good or not is kind of meaningless.
My first computer was a Mac LC in 1991, and I was a die-hard Macintosh fan all throughout adolescence. I learned to program with Think Pascal on a Centris 660AV. My whole family continued to use Macs after I gave them up in 1998, so I certainly used them during that decade, I just didn't like using them.
To be honest, I can only think of 1 feature that was added post-Snow Leopard that I use regularly. Being able to receive/send messages from my mac and that isn't available to non-iPhone users. And better trackpad gestures, but that's closer to hardware (although it requires OS support) than software.
That being said, I remember Panther and Snow Leopard after the .0.3 updates to be the best versions.
Besides that, the software problems affect their entire software base, including parts that can't (easily) be turned off or removed, like iCloud, Music, the iOs task switcher, etc.
My current Macbook Pro has memory soldered on to the motherboard and a battery glued to the case. The SSD is technically replaceable, but the specs that this laptop shipped with are going to be the specs that it dies with.
When the battery goes, I'll have to either risk destroying the machine or pay way too much to Apple to do the job for me. At that point I'll probably just switch to a brand with a more reasonable user-servicing model, assuming those still exist.
I almost jumped ship recently because the Surface Book hits a great mix of screen quality/power/battery life, but judging by the forums, it's buggy as hell. So what to do? I'd love a swap-able battery in my rMBP like I have in my T450s, but at the end of the day, I never reach for my ThinkPad when I've got my Mac handy. I'll just go ahead and pay the $200 bucks Apple charges to replace the sealed battery.
[1] My non-technical wife, who has a Mac, recently needed to use my work laptop. Her first reaction on seeing the screen was "wow, your firm cheaped out, huh?" I've got a totally maxed out ThinkPad T450s with i7, 20GB of RAM, and FHD IPS display.
They're also locking down the platform more and more. I don't think this is some conspiracy to take away user freedom. I think it's because anything that makes a platform 'hackable' also makes it 'pwnable' by malware. Again they are optimizing for the mainstream of the market, which is mostly users with absolutely zero clue about malware or security. They want to field an OS that apps can't easily trojan/backdoor and conscript into a botnet or crytolocker your files, etc. Unfortunately hacker types are casualties here.
It's very, very hard to remain appealing to the hacker crowd while also targeting the mainstream. You're targeting two very different local maxima and a lot of what these two camps want is in absolute conflict -- e.g. UX vs. "power" and packability. I actually think Apple is doing a decent job all things considered. Macs are still great for development and are hackable enough, and if I want more hackability I can spring for a $30 Raspberry Pi or run anything I want inside Parallels with the bonus of not borking my main host machine if I mess it up. I am worried about the future though. If they overly "iOS-ify" the Mac they will lose me.
Chose the mid 2012 non-retina display. Took out the disk drive and put in my own SSD and RAM. Does everything I want it to do without the slightest complaint. All told I probably paid ~$700 less for a comparably powerful machine with 10x the internal storage of a late model MBP retina, albeit heavier and with a slightly inferior display.
Next time I need to upgrade I'm with you - it's just too painful to knowingly buy into an ecosystem where upgrades and repairs feel like unabashed extortion.
Obviously there's a very large target market of folks that just want their tech to work and will happily drop a few hundred bucks each time they need to upgrade or repair. But it's hard to go back once you've opened up your computer and seen how cheap/easy it is to replace some of these extremely modular components. I imagine my mindset will change as I get older and have less time/more disposable income.
I like having a 9 cell battery, I like having >1TB of storage, the ThinkPad keyboard and TrackPoint, and I like being able to take the thing apart.
At the same time, I also like OS X. I get UNIX underlyings, yet can continue to use software like Photoshop. And there's just a big bunch of subjective things that IMO OS X just does better, like scrolling and font rendering.
Still, the device is growing older, and I honestly have no idea what to replace it with once the time finally comes. The strange combo I have doesn't really have a modern equivalent. Do I sacrifice modularity to stay with OS X? Do I go to Windows or Linux to keep modularity with a modern ThinkPad (which are getting too close to the way modern MacBooks are, sadly).
By the time (two years?) they decided to roll one out I had already bought an Asus laptop, which was comparable in most ways and costs about half of what I paid for the MBPro.
I don't think I'll be buying Apple hardware for a while. Their increasing push towards planned obsolescence troubles me deeply.
I put a 128GB USB3.0 SanDisk Ultra Fit[1] in my MacBook (these things are tiny), to supplement the SSD. Currently on sale for AU$74. Plenty fast enough for storing media, and I'm wearing my SSD less now too.
Not to sure what to do when the SSD wears out, probably boot of the USB stick, but that's a while away and I'll sell the laptop before then anyway.
The 3rd gen removed: Ethernet, Firewire 800, Superdrive, Kensington lock, and nothing is user replaceable eventually... All for what? To save 0.93 pounds in weight and 0.2 cm in thickness (13" model).
I don't care if the "Macbook" and the MBA want to go this route of maximum thinness/lightness; but what irks me is that they ruined their supposed power user machine for these cuts. Give me the functionality back. It wasn't like the MBP was heavy or large even before 2012.
EDIT: and most importantly, more battery chemistry per weight. Safety requires that serviceable batteries are enclosed in rather substantial cases whose internals are non-user-serviceable. Apple "cheats" by making this case the entire laptop, rather than a specific battery module.
Edit: There are even some people in this thread, who I assume are "power users," that are willing to sacrifice previously sacrosanct things like ethernet ports for mobility. Personally I'm not willing to do so but I also don't have a pressing need for a laptop.
The display isn't the best, but close... the touchpad is bar none the best in any laptop, but I might be willing to sacrifice that when I need another laptop... I haven't been doing iOS native, and my work issued laptop is an rMBP as well, but may just create a build server for cordova out of a used mac mini if/when the need arises.
I never bought into iOS devices, mainly because of early ties to Apple, and I'm somewhat entrenched in Android's ecosystem. The poor software updates, broken SMB/CIFS support and a host of other issues has me more than concerned.
I love the thing and had the fried graphics card issue fixed some time ago instead of opting to replace the MBP with a newer model.
This old thing is struggling to keep up with El Capitan these days though and I'm now mulling a Thinkpad with OpenBSD as a replacement. I kind of wish I could get this same body with updated hardware and OSX 10.6 but that's not in the cards.
The worst part of this is that Apple's success has dragged the rest of the market toward things like non-replaceable batteries.
I bought a T550 minimal configuration, for $600 upgraded the RAM to 16G & 500G SSD for $200, after using MBP for 7 years.
Though the MBP is still kicking ass with an upgraded 8G RAM & 500G SSD.
... it may be too late: https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&sa=1&q=macbook+air+ba...
To add insult to injury it's almost impossible to make a file-for-file backup before decimating a device with iTunes sync. In fact, the iTunes sync process is the main reason I stick to Android despite it having a whole other ecosystem of flaws. I'll take a USB Mass storage device and robocopy / rsync, thanks. They actually work.
Then I spend the next half hour looking at the connected device to ensure my collection is still there.
It's part of the reason why I switched over to the (defunct) Rdio. Managing the individual iTunes music files was just too stressful.
You could 'chflag -R schg' the entire music dir, thus making it immutable - even for root - without chflagging it back.
Then there's no more syncing risk. Just saying.
Sync is one-way - what could you lose?
It's far safer to plug your phone into a Windows machine and using the file system GUI to copy the photos to the folder you want. Using Preview to import the photos as if the iPhone is a scanner is another safe method.
The multiple user/multiple computer problem that you're referencing can probably be solved by logging in to the corresponding icloud account on the computer.
And if you don't want to trust iCloud with photo sync, there are other options (Dropbox does that, and Plex has a photo sync function if you want to host those files yourself).
As somebody that's used a Mac for 90%+ of all computing-related tasks since OS X was released, all of the above-mentioned apps/services have been dead to me for years. I honestly can't remember the last time I purposely used any of the above.
What's driving me away is a combination of flaky behavior on the desktop (bizarre wifi glitches; bizarre NFS/SMB/AFP mount behaviors; increasing system instability), and a lack of differentiation across both the desktop and mobile platform. There was a time when I needed a Mac or i-Device to do things I cared about/needed, but those days are long over. Almost all of my compute activity happens on a server in my homelab or 'the cloud', and Linux and Android meets or exceeds my needs for completing other tasks. I just swapped my iPhone 6+ for a Nexus 6P, and my current MacBook (12" model) will probably be my last when I retire it in 3-4 years.
I want and need a deluxe Linux OS for which I would pay $200/year, which would do things well. This includes:
- Porting bugfixes forward (I dropped Ubuntu because they didn't port a bugfix from 12.x to 13.04 - After 2 days trying to recover my network auth, I asked a Mac to my boss).
- Designed for me, not for monkeys with big fingers who bring up Amazon results for every search (That's not why I dropped Ubuntu, but desktop developers aren't within the targets of Canonical),
- Who would hire and pay UX designers. I want the Mac OS X experience. I don't want to recompile my kernel. I want few features in the OS, but well-designed. I want people working days over days to fine-tune the mouse controls in the OS (the first warning that made me upset about Ubuntu). I want to hear the rumble of developers integrating Webkit with nice developer tools into an open-source chromium.
- I, developer, using IntelliJ IDEA, using apt-get/brew, I want to be the paying customer of that OS. I don't want my data be sold. I might want some cloud sync, but I don't want share buttons, especially when I watch porn (I'm absolutely serious). And I want the cloud parts of my OS to be under APL-Affero.
- Obviously those bugfixes must be sent back upstream to the OSS community. Ideally there would be half the money left to pay back, but let's start pessimistic.
- As a bonus, in that OS, all apps would be webkit/js-based. But I'm dreaming.
It is totally possible to charge for open-source, even the GPL says it. You can't prevent people from re-sharing the OS online, but you can offer upgrades to subscribed users only.
I wanted the Apple experience, but that's not coming back. Look what Nest did: They're selling a working thermostat for 3x the price. Tesla is selling electric cars for deluxe customers. I want to pay $200 per year, recurring, for a stable env with little novelty and many bugfixes, and I want to "deluxe". I want to purchase the feeling of being superior with my OS.
And I say that as a peson who earns €32.000 gross per year (France).
Oh good heavens no, that's the absolute last thing I want from a OS.
(Btw. I never compiled a Linux kernel for my desktop/laptop)
It's not the best player ever, but it's free, it's better than iTunes, and it does all I want.
This is so spot on. It feels like they rearrange iTunes every month, especially the mobile version.
Recently I noticed that I'd be searching for a song (that I have on my phone) and it would default to their streaming service.... Why would I want to use my data to stream a song that I already have on my phone?
It gets worse: this is now also the default behavior on the ipod touch.
Well, if he was alive, a lot of weird design choices would not have been made. Like the pencil sticking out of the iPad, that weird battery pack, the magic mouse with the charging port on the bottom, etc.
Then, after a few years of iOS use, I switched to Android. Suddenly, I was an outcast among friends: any group SMS conversations I had been a part of, I would no longer get. I get it: Apple uses iMessage, and it is not present in Android. But at least Apple could warn the sender that it is unable to deliver the message to me, instead of silently dropping it! Friends started calling me: are you OK? And I had to patiently explain to them the iMessage fiasco. I tried everything to disavow iMessage on my phone number; but nothing works. I still don't get messages in group conversations, months later.
This totally soured me on Apple. Instead of being a greedy little fuck, why can't they just play nice? They are the biggest company in the world; they don't have to be giant pricks too!
http://www.macrumors.com/2015/08/05/imessage-android-lawsuit...
It's harsh, but this only happens if you don't follow the instructions.
Deregister and turn off iMessage: https://selfsolve.apple.com/deregister-imessage
If you follow this, you'll never miss a message.
Wi-fi has been buggy on OS X for literally years now. And each new major release seems to bring some new pain point where it refuses to turn on, refuses to connect, doesn't transmit data... and on and on. There's no way Apple can't know about this - it must drive their own employees crazy. Yet, nothing gets done.
If I were in the market for a new laptop right now I'd be taking a serious look at a Surface Book - it's the first thing I've seen that looks like it could rival a Macbook in the hardware department. Sadly, I'd have to do a lot more research into getting a decent POSIX environment set up on it before I could take the plunge.
It's SO CLOSE and it was $1,000 cheaper I may have just dealt with it. Just not quite there.
The last year I have gone through three routers:
* Asus RT-N66U ("the Dark Knight"), worked fine on 2.5GHz, but the 5GHz signal gradually became worse until one day it just disppeared. Apparently a lot of users have had this issue.
* Asus RT-AC66U, the smaller version of the same router. Just stopped working occasionally, requiring a reboot.
* Netgear AC1750 R6400-100NAS (little brother to the "Nighthawk"). Current router, was stable enough for a while, but now needs rebooting a couple of times every week. SSL/TLS connections stop working randomly. Devices such as iPhone and AppleTV fail to get packets through on the first try after being dormant for a while.
At work we have the Netgear AC1900/R7000 "Nighthawk", which has been extremely stable. But it's also quite expensive, and large (as is the AC1750).
I've lost all faith in Asus, and the only other brand I can see that has a good reputation is Ubiquity. They make "pro" access points for hotels and such. Then again, hotel wifi is the worst.
We don't hate Apple software!
We have seen a steady decline over the last few years, and so we are expressing our concerns. This does not translate to us hating the software. We know what Apple can do when it really focuses on the quality of it's software (see OSX Snow Leopard).
I still think OSX is more stable and useable then any other OS out there. Yes there are annoyances, but they are trying to move the ball forward. The only piece I would agree has gone completely off the rails is iTunes.
OSX is still strong, and I believe Apple will right the ship. After all, Apple employees use Mac's themselves to build iOS.
They have a bunch of gripes, but at the same time there's still a lot that makes them happy and they're not about to start using Windows or Linux instead. This is exactly how I feel: yeah, there's stuff they need to do better and some of their stuff has either gotten totally crufty (iTunes) or was a bit too early (Apple Music, Apple Watch), but overall I still prefer Apple's products to their competitors at this point in time.
Hangouts / Google Calendar are also really clunky and seem poorly tested. Things often go out of sync or you're randomly asked to re-login several times a month, and only during video chats.
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Hangouts is bad. Very slow and bloated everywhere. On mobile it only syncs notifications at random. Audio and video quality is total crap, and even with this new web beta thing where it's supposed to be better, it's still much worse than skype.
The most incredible thing, and I am ashamed of typing this but whatever, is that I've actually felt an improvement in my life after turning off hangouts in gmail. WTF.
My Fall 2015 Mac Book Pro has already crashed more often than my Fall 2013 did in two years. Apple support claims the logs show it is software, not hardware, so I'll take their word for it.
Our UX guy summed up the other serious issue with Apple software, they are focusing more on design now rather than UX. There is a great article on FastCompany about it http://www.fastcodesign.com/3053406/how-apple-is-giving-desi.... Stuff may look fine but it no longer functions in a natural, intuitive fashion; it no longer "just works". The font selection in iOS is a great example, it's almost like it's picked specifically to be hard to read. Killing misbehaving iOS apps has become a pain, the current app is never in focus, swiping is clumsy and swipe up to kill will often swipe left or right instead. iTunes as a whole is another example of this. It was never great but it's become increasingly difficult to find what I'm looking for and make it do what I want.
I find myself cursing my computer and my phone on a regular basis now instead of the once in a blue moon I used to.
I shouldn't have to turn on half of the Accessibility settings to return to what I'd consider a normal interface, either. (And the real problem with any non-default setting is that many apps clearly don't test with that; e.g. with the "bold" or "larger" font settings, a lot of things start to truncate or just not lay out as nicely.)
This is really the kick in the nuts while your down. You find those useless forums where the suggestion for every problem is "Reset your PRAM" and there 100 pages in the thread going back for years and you realize "Yep, I'm never going to fix this terrible problem".
Leave me alone. I get periodic full screen ads when I try to listen to music. Is that too much to ask?
I just bought my first iPhone (switching from an Android, the droid maxx - great battery life) largely because I missed being able to easily sync music with my phone. What do I get? Broken music player. Two of the four tabs at the bottom of the Music app are Apple Music-related (radio, "connect"). The UI for switching between displays of my library - artist, album, song - has degraded terribly. And I had to painstakingly delete all of the "cloud" versions of things I'd bought long ago from iTunes. Figured out how to only show music local to my device and now there's an annoying bar across the top of the app at all times.
I mean, fuck, how do you screw up the best mobile music player interface that hard? Just to encourage adoption of a shitty streaming service, with no way to opt out?
Do people not care about syncing music to their phone and listening to it offline anymore?
Had this happen twice today on my long commute. After 15 minutes, gave up trying to make my very expensive phone play music. This on top of the usual iTunes complaints is pushing me to abandon Apple until things improve.
They need to rethink this app/service.
I constantly have problems with OS X WiFi connecting/dropping out, this has only been a recent thing since 10.11 (before OS X wifi support was incredible).
I also have problems with Spotlight screwing up. I use spotlight for launching apps, and it often just loses all the apps which I use all day every day. Instead of finding 'Skype' for example, it'll return a list of all the times I've mentioned Skype in emails instead. Again, this broke in 10.11.
I never really use the new features in OS X, which is fine, but 10.11 especially has so many regressions in it for me it is pretty annoying. It also absolutely blasted my unix config in a really hard to fix way, which hasn't ever happened on a previous OS X update.
So you get that impression of everything being a bit creaky but never really getting motivated to spend some time fixing it.
It doesn't have any of the slowdowns that Spotlight does, and it still has a small interface by default that can move anywhere on the screen.
Something weird has happened though. When I left OSX, it was already a bit buggy. A lot of stuff didn't work properly and wasn't well thought out. Windows, aside from the unfortunate Metro experiment, has just gotten better.
Over the life of Windows 7, the only time I had BSOD's was when the SSD with the OS got too close to full. If I kept some free space on my OS partition, BSOD's simply did not happen. Windows 8 was even more stable. It just works. Yes, I added Classic Shell so I could just completely avoid Metro, and the result is an OS that just works and doesn't get in the way. I have privacy concerns about W10 which have prevented me from upgrading, and that really is the one major fly in MS's ointment. Free upgrades are nice, but I'd prefer to pay for an OS where my data isn't treated as a product.
Will I continue to use Windows? Well, there's no other choice for gaming and blurays, so yes. Privacy concerns aside, this is more palatable than ever. Linux continues to be a workhorse for me, and I don't miss OSX one bit.
Edit: I should mention that I tend to customize certain aspects of my OS rather extensively. I like things to be a certain way. Linux is fantastic for this. Windows is good too. OSX is really hit or miss. Some things aren't too bad, but other things are an absolute chore. It's amazing that an OS can restrict hardware and customization choices to the extent OSX does and still be buggy.
The software is another matter.
And I've still gone back to routine crashes if I have a VM open. It hasn't been this bad for me in years.
There is a big difference between shipping an MVP (a HN favourite!) and a buggy piece of shit product.
Will it harm Apple (or Microsoft, or ...) in the long run? Probably not. Sadly users seem to be used to this kind of thing now from all the main players so what alternative do they have?
On a positive I have found Android L to be a solid release which is probably the only solid major point release I have used from any major software company in many years.
Apple will begin sitting on it's laurels while core services and products degrade, while Microsoft enters a quiet, user-first renaissance under new leadership.
If you switch Apple and Microsoft in the above paragraph, it sounds a lot like the past...
I'm not holding my breath. A lot of decisions around Windows 10 have been, in my opinion, user hostile. If Apple drops the ball, the most likely outcome is that we return to the bad old days where there's Windows - it's ugly and it sucks but everyone know how to use it - and nothing a whole lot better.
(buzzer sound)
The secondary aspect is the surface area of what they are dealing with. This is a far cry from the old Mac OS days where they were really a PC company. Now they have to make OS X, iOS (for both phones/tablets), and tvOS all work together seamlessly. If quality was exactly the same, they would have far more bugs just based on the cartesian complexity of possible interactions.
I hope they can sort it out because I'm feeling the pain just like everyone else, but I don't see any better alternatives at the moment.
Which isn't saying much, since they're still terrible. Their cloud-synced Notes.app is almost unusable; every time I add a note on the phone there's maybe a one-in-three chance it'll sync to the desktop immediately, a one-in-three chance it'll sync the next day, and a one-in-three chance it'll appear three days later or more. If Apple has in fact gotten better at cloud services, it's only because they were so abysmal before that there was nowhere to go but up.
How much of this is due to the loss of Steve Jobs? A great amount, I think. He had all day to look at the outputs of different teams and tell them why it was stupid or ugly.
Apple products have always been buggy. If you do anything slightly unusual, you quickly find that everything breaks. It's as if they don't actually systematically test anything and instead only fix the bugs that the developers themselves happen to notice in day-to-day use.
Here's me ranting about it in 2011: https://jx4slc83qru3hgkkkt1v.oasis.sandstorm.io/
Here's me ranting about it in 2014: https://plus.google.com/+KentonVarda/posts/FEUGQ7mxkUL
And here's me ranting about it in 2016: My wife's Macbook has a fun feature. It scans the network looking for audio receivers. When it finds one, it hijacks the receiver, switching it away from its current input and over to the Macbook's audio. This happens for example while watching movies, while the Macbook is in the other room with no one touching it, even though it has never been intentionally asked to use the TV room receiver for any purpose (though there is another receiver in another room that she uses regularly). As Denon receivers have no apparent access control, there is no way to stop this except to set up some sort of firewall between the Macbook and the receiver. (I do in fact use the receiver's network protocol, so disconnecting it is not a good option.)
Let's be real, Apple's never been a software company -- they've always made excellent hardware and good enough software that people will deal with because they want their amazing hardware. No one has ever said anything about any Apple software compared to what people say about their hardware.
Software's not in their DNA and I think all this media attention will just fade after a while and people will keep using and loving Apple hardware and putting up with their miserable software.
For the record, I use Notes/Mail/Photos on my iPhone, and Preview has never crashed for me.
If you swapped all occurrences of "hardware" and "software" in the above statement with each other, you'd have what people said about Apple in the 1990s.
I suspect poor product management: I strongly doubt llvm or swift are driven like iTunes.
Wrong.
This may be less true recently, but for a good decade Apple had the superior OS and were the only ones who got device and media integration right - that's all software.
I dunno. I may not be on Apple any more, but I thought some iterations of their software were really damned good, like Snow Leopard, older versions of Mail, Keynote, iPhoto, iMovie (the one that no longer supported plug-ins - was that 08?), Safari, and so on.
For me, iLife (iPhoto and iMovie in particular) has always been a very compelling reason for non-techies to switch from Windows to Mac. It's probably the only thing that I miss from Mac since switching to Windows.
If you want to see a hardware company that doesn't get software, look no further than Sony. Apple's main problem is that they don't get cloud services. This is where Apple can't compete with Google in the same way that Sony couldn't compete with Apple.
I am also not nearly disgruntled enough to even consider switching platforms to something else (like Linux for example).
No matter the platform people will always have gripes and issues with the software. It's amazing how much choice we all have these days, and it's simply not possible to cater to everyone's whims.
I feel like over the last couple of years the landscape has changed tremendously, and what once may have been a simple blog post that mostly got ignored the news can spread further and wider than ever before. Things that are simple complaints of "I wish this worked better" now get twisted and restated as "X hates Y".
I have two MacBook Pros right now. One is a 2008 champ that's still going despite having been dropped several times. It's got an SSD and maxed out RAM, running Snow Leopard. It actually does really well.
One is the last 2012 pre-retina that just dropped out of Apple Care last August. It's running Mavericks. It has sleep/wake issues. Firefox can actually trigger a restart of the entire machine. It actually seems notably less stable than Snow Leopard.
I'm afraid to upgrade. I actually don't know anyone who didn't have problems with Yosemite. I've been trying to figure out if El Capitan is actually better.
Or, if not, how I can escape the platform after pretty much 15 straight years of making it my personal choice.
I won't lie, there's bullshit over here. I can name a dozen things I hate. But at least on the Win10 SB I feel productive. On the OSX I feel like I'm constantly dealing with an abandoned system that only sort of runs now.
I'm sick of constant random iOS reboots, out of date OpenGL, poor/reduced quality apps (Photos I'm looking at you), the growing monolithic nature of iTunes and the fact I feel like I'm running Windows ME all over again.
I wish they'd stop spending so much time on marketing new features -- who cares, really -- and spend a few years making stuff great.
Is that common? I have and use a 5s for years now and I have a spontanious reboot every 6 months maybe. And I am a very active user. Same for my wife (same phone). I have a new Samsung as well; it gets stuck every 2 days enough to have to reboot it.
* I've had to switch to a wired ethernet -> TB adapter and turned Wi-Fi off altogether because of Wi-Fi instability, despite having enterprise-grade WiFi APs in my house (Ruckus and Ubiquiti).
* Peaking out the CPU usage and GPU usage at the same time almost guarantees a kernel panic despite Apple's hardware diagnostics reporting no problem and my Fluke temperature probe not showing temperatures going above 90C (although to be fair, that's very hot... that's standard Macbook Pro temps).
* Crazy audio issues for SPDIF, despite it being a basic standardized protocol that's had kernel support since OSX was released, every time they come out with a new version they manage to make SPDIF output break in strange ways.
* Sleep/Resume/Hibernate no longer works reliably, many times instead of waking up the system will simply reboot.
* Bluetooth devices (specifically Magic Trackpad 2) will disconnect and then reconnect randomly for no apparent reason.
I don't even use any of the Apple provided software other than OS X itself, but I still have seen the product go rapidly downhill. I went from being an Apple hater to being a hardcore Mac user, to now back to being an Apple hater that's just waiting until I can find a decently reliable Linux ultrabook (Lenovo X1 Carbon maybe?). The repairability of a laptop isn't even a concern to me at this point, I consider buying a laptop a sunk cost of being in a technical job. I just need it to work reliably because I depend on it for my livelihood and it's currently unacceptable.
The other day I was working remotely and in a conference call with the CTO and had a kernel panic twice in a row because I was doing `vagrant up` in the background which kicked me out of the call. How does that look for my professional reputation when I have technical difficulties during a call and I'm supposed to be a senior level technical staffer? Totally unacceptable.
The desktop was a singularly terrible experience of bugginess.
The bugs I experience in OSX are nothing compared to that experience. The only bug I notice right now is sometimes my wife's computer isn't accessible through Finder, and vice versa. Annoying but we have a work around.
At work I use windows 7, and it makes me want to punch the wall several times an hour. Some of that is (I think) the corporate crap that my company installs. Every day is a super horrible experience, and I have not been able to pin down where the problem is stemming from.
Working on my mac at the end of the day is an absolute pleasure by comparison.
I'll concede though that I really don't like the design of itunes and haven't ever thought it was good. It's definitely worse now than in the past though.
RE iphone/android... I switched to android for a year. It's not been horrible, but also not great. Really the main problem I have is the awfulness of the google app store. 25,000 five star reviews for the AT&T app, yeah right. In fact it's rare to find anything less than 4 stars. It's all rigged reviews out the wazoo, probably fed by the mechanical turk.
The recent slippage in quality and focus mirrors what happened in the late 80s and early 90s after Steve was forced out. There was considerable leftover momentum in the short term which allowed the company to coast for while and keep up some semblance of health, but eventually the lack of focus caught up with them. They became "beleaguered" in the mid-90s and only recovered when Steve came back (and axed products that weren't working, focused resources on new problems, simplified the product line, etc). It took many years, but he eventually turned them into a powerhouse.
Now that he's been gone for a while, we are seeing a similar phenomenon. In the short term after he left, the company had considerable momentum (due mostly to the iPhone) which carried them along for a number of years, but without someone at the top who had his ability to maintain focus, the company is starting to slip again.
This time, there may be no coming back.
Personally I haven't had as many issues as described in the article e.g. Preview has always worked fine for me.
However the biggest issue I do have is anything network related. Getting new messages in Mail is terribly slow, iTunes constantly gives me an error then loads the album or whatever just fine afterwards.
I am using a old mac mini, and I can't afford a new one... every time I update xcode, it get slower and more unstable, specially because the memory consumption jumps up, it is now in a point where it uses more memory than the mac mini has in first place (meaning it is constantly trashing with swap... crashes are common too, project corruption is also getting increasingly common).
I lucked out that my current client had a old non-updated iPod to allow me to use (you can't use new version iOS with old Xcode).
That's the first thing that went through my mind when I read the complaint about Preview crashing. Then I got to thinking about how Preview can eat up a lot of memory in certain situations (maybe large complex documents rendered to retina framebuffers), so maybe it's a memory issue. Journalists may not be as likely as people like me to insist on ridiculous amounts of RAM.
But bashing Preview and touting the alternative Adobe Acrobat Reader!? Are you serious? Firstly, they are different products. Preview handles multiple file formats and Adobe Reader is meant for PDFs. Secondly, Preview allows you to edit, combine and covert pdfs all of which you would have to pay Adobe to unlock these features.
Preview is such an amazing tool and I would go as far and say it's one of OS X's killer applications.
Many of the issues that I'm hearing about Apples software quality appear to be caused by a company who is trying to do too much with too few engineering resources. They are getting stretched thin and having to make more quality sacrifices than their customers are willing to tolerate.
I bet that if they opened an additional engineering office in a less contentious area of the united states they would be able to staff teams more easily, with longer average tenures, and tap into the talent pool and skills that they are currently unable to hire at the volumes they require.
I would suggest Portland, Oregon as I'm a native Oregonian, and because we have some of the best software engineers in the world!
Music, messaging, news. All these things are entire billion dollar industries, we can't expect them to hit a home run on everything.
They likely see the problem but can't execute.
The uptime on this thing is usually around 60 days, at least. I have at all times around 40 tabs open in Chrome and do heavy Java development in IntelliJ IDEA.
I don't think this laptop has ever crashed in these 2 years. Just never happened. I reboot once in a while when something like audio goes crazy or just in case after running out of memory with IntelliJ and a handful of other JVMs a few times in a row.
I have no illusions on usability of Apple software. I think they are teeming with idiots (iTunes, already mentioned package management, photo import app, text editor), but the OS is kind of rock solid. Why wouldn't be, it's a POSIX OS and consequently is relatively simple and logical, at least from API standpoint.
There are two things that drastically help with stability:
1. My account does not have admin privileges and I never give admin password to any prompts, unless I know for certain why.
2. I never install any software as administrator. If something does not want to install into ~/Applications (you know, drag and drop), I take it apart and "convince" to install.
3. I guess there's #3, no updates. Only clean OS installs once in a few years. It's a little scarier than the same tactic on Linux, where I am sure that this is not a real problem, but in most cases it's not an issue on Mac OS X either.
I may occasionally fire up the core Calculator app but with Numi in my menu bar and Alfred a quick Option-Space away, I rarely even use that.
Having been burnt by Apple disregarding other software I've been a big user of in the past, I'm not going to let them do it again.
iTunes give we some weird null error if I switch accounts. Since a few weeks I think (do not use it often, only for updates).
My iphone 6 often refuses to show the 'copy'-popup the first time I select something. So I regularly have to selected something again, just to get the popup. This used to work the first time.
Just some examples that come to mind.
Apple's edge has always been that it was well plugged into the aesthetic sensibilities of its market, which is an unusual combination of skills to be tied to reasonably high quality engineering (the same dynamic that existed between Jobs and Woz since the first, really). It's somewhat inevitable that it would go away eventually, it's more sad that nobody cracked the formula so that more companies could have the same level of success. Clunky design is still the norm almost everywhere, and that's only slowly changing.
Apparently, engineering and producing a high-quality laptop is a really hard problem. Only Apple and Lenovo seem to be able to do it. And if you go Lenovo, then you are stuck installing Linux who's device drivers are only as good as the time volunteers have given them. And even then the hardware isn't as good, so it's not even worth considering Windows instead of Linux.
I believe that the solution is to introduce some sort of modular laptop standard such that people can build them to taste, and manufacturers can focus on building user installable components at various cost/performance points - like the desktop gaming PC market. Modularity would have additional security and openness benefits.
Overall I am happy with my Mac though. I think techies and press people find a lot more faults with Mac software than most users do. But it could be that after years of using Linux desktops my standards for good GUI software are extremely low.
Essentially Apple is the first company in history with such as large distributed platform of devices utilized by an unprecedented number of people, and unlike every other company, it wants to keep a tight grip on every aspect of that. By the time is addresses an issue, it loses sight of another. This is how I imagine Apple is functioning right now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5C8rnpAbIs
I think part of the reason why app's core apps such as Apple news or Mail client appears to be so horrible is not because they are worse but because everyone else (app makers) is getting better. Whether it is Flipboard's News app or Microsoft's Outlook they are specialist at building that and Apple is not.
I think it is time for Apple to focus on the platform and development tools rather than continuing to build other kind of software.
With that said. Their consumer apps have always been overly simplistic candy glossed shit, Made worse by the fact that they can't be removed without lower level hacks.
I may not fall with their target demographic but I'd never buy into the platforms/services of a company who won't let me have a choice over something as simple as what Apps I have loaded on my machine.
But yeah, I never thought I'd say I was happier using the Microsoft variant but here I am.
And that's with 2 OS revs full of crashes, poor power management, and a replaced device because rev0 literally tore its hinge apart. I still enjoy the thing more than opening up my "work" laptop and struggling with OSX's halfhearted core apps and awkward expression of UNIX and just... the least amount of system stability surrounding virtualization I've had with any of the OSs I've tried.
Safari used to be fast two versions ago but something changed in a recent upgrade and now it is useless.
Would be really interested to hear from an Apple employee what the inside talk is like.
Strange times are these in which we live.
Hmm, that was my reaction to iTunes in 2003.
Both the iPhone apps and the modern version of iTunes are an utter, over-designed mess. It felt like the core programming functionality was there, until some UX designer got a hold of the front end of those apps and decided to fubar it beyond recognition.
There is _Literally_ no way to just look at all music on your iPhone. You have to have it in playlists or add the songs you want to a playlist, or just shuffle all songs.
*Edit: No way to look at all iPhone songs while not using iTunes with your iPhone plugged into your PC.
Now, it's just as you say - hard to find specific albums or artists or songs, and once I do, I can't quite tell what it'll do when a song finishes playing. Since I found it through the search box, and not in a list... will it play the next song in the album? In a playlist? Will it just stop?
What I don't know is whether my feelings about the new interface is logical, or if it could be summed up as "you damn kids." Is it a paradigm that I'm just not used to yet, or is the UX objectively bad?
Android isn't exciting either nowadays.
Similarly I'd peg iOS 5 or 6 as the last good iOS versions.
Both of these systems has been in steady decline. The iOS-ization of OSX killed it. Desktop user don't need stupid shit like an App Store, terrible default security options that mimic an iPhone, full screen mode default when you maximize, notifications (aka. productivity interruptions), etc. my list could go on...
There was once a time Next and maybe Apple had programmers and educational users (educated users) in mind in building some of their software. That seems to be gone.
What are we left with now Ubuntu - that's another ghetto just a different kind?