is it time someone starts killedbyapple.com lol
If the fiercest complaint you can muster is that Apple is shutting down a service that was, by today's standards, poorly designed and risky to use (photos only existed for 30 days if you didn't save them) and that has been superseded by a much better product (iCloud) for more than 9 years, well, I guess you must have more time on your hands to be outraged about product decisions than I do.
They killed the audio jack. That's pretty heinous.
And they removed the sim slot.
And the finger print reader.
And they actively try to kill 3rd party repair.
Yeah, this still sucks. It'll probably never stop being worse than having the jack.
> And they removed the sim slot.
... this has been really nice? The new virtual-sim thing has been strictly an improvement, for me. But there may be some use-cases I don't need that it's been worse for, IDK.
> And the finger print reader.
Poor success rate for me in the best of times, and I had to re-train it every few months or shifting temp & humidity would drop the unlock success rate to like 10%. Face unlock has been a huge improvement for me, and keeps getting better, a couple years of Covid mask-related trouble aside (but, YMMV).
Annoying, but easily fixed with an adapter or bluetooth headphones.
> And they removed the sim slot.
They're just ahead of the curve on this one. The entire industry is moving to eSims for a number of reasons. This wasn't just Apple. In fact, Samsung was the first major company to release a product that used it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESIM
> And the finger print reader.
Finger print readers are available on iPhone SEs, iPads (except Pro models), MacBooks, and even the latest version of their desktop keyboards. Every other device either uses Face ID or is something that just doesn't make sense to have biometric unlocking as a feature in the first place.
> And they actively try to kill 3rd party repair.
Apple devices are not easy to repair, but they do have this:
https://support.apple.com/self-service-repair
Which is better than what many manufacturers have.
On Macbook touchpads, all it did was make my drag-n-drop operations fail ~70% of the time. I never did figure out a legitimate use for it on that platform, but then, I had to disable it as soon as I figured out that was what was messing me up. I don't need drag-n-drop to become a dexterity game.
And I don't have any fine motor control deficiencies or anything. It was all just too damn fiddly to be worth using.
Similar with the touchbar. Turns out my fingers just barely brush the F keys when I hit a couple of the number keys. No problem with physical F-keys, as there's almost no pressure applied, but the touchbar? Had to all but completely disable the damn thing to stop triggering it by accident. Not gonna change my typing muscle-memory for the sake of a fad interface that's not even available on most of the keyboards I touch in a day.
Apple's not above making mis-steps. They do it pretty often, in fact.
Is that one fair? Running Windows, fully emulated, with the limited memory that M1 had, probably wouldn't be the best experience.
Bootcamp, it's not clear that they really had a choice. AFAIK you can't buy Windows for ARM separately at all (it's OEM only) and in any case it has super-limited hardware support.
I am disappointed that they never replaced the Airport Extreme; it was one of their most "Just Works" products in its day, particularly in an era when consumer wifi routers very much didn't, and I'd have liked to see an Eero-type product from them (Eero is, itself, a fairly "just works" sort of product, mind you).