Apple started decaying before Steve Jobs’ death | Hacker News Reader

Apple started decaying before Steve Jobs’ death

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53 pointsc3d53 comments

Title != Content IMHO. This is mostly just a rant about Lion. But while I think some of the author's problems are self-imposed (close your windows when you're done with them!), I agree with the sentiment. I've been an Apple user since 1986 and I've never seen them get closer to Microsoftian behavior than in the last year.

For another great example of this, look at Airport Utility 5 vs 6.

You gain:

  * A big shiny globe and background  
  * iOS-style badges for firmware upgrades

You lose:

  * Client lists  
  * Logging and statistics  
  * IPv6 settings  
  * Wireless multicast rate, txpower, 40MHz channels, interference robustness  
  * Printer support  
  * I'm sure some other stuff

I learned this the hard way the other day. I went to look up a DHCP client and found the table no longer exists! The recommended solution is to install Airport utility 5 ALONGSIDE Airport utility 6. What?! I completely understand the Apple mantra of simple usability, but the power user functions have always been hidden behind that veneer. Now they're just GONE.

> I've been an Apple user since 1986 and I've never seen them get closer to Microsoftian behavior

This is an odd comment -- how is this "Microsoftian" behavior? If anything, this is typical Apple behavior going back to the dawn of time. The most frustrating thing with Apple products (for technically minded users) has always been the lack of user control.

The original title was something like "Autosave? Give me my computer back!"

I've noticed a disturbing trend of people using a benign title to get to the frontpage then editing it to be troll-bait after the fact. I don't know how long you can edit a title, or who is able to edit it, but it's pretty irritating not just because of the confusion the initial comments bring under the new title, but because then I can't find the submission again later. If I tried searching for "give me back my computer", this post wouldn't show up, even though that was the title I initially commented under.

HN culture generally seems to prefer to "not change the title from the one given by the original article" (calling it "editorializing"), and so in this case the title of this post was "fixed" (which may not have even been done by the original poster: the submission guidelines state that if there is a "gratuitous editorial spin" on the title it may be changed by "the editors").

(edit: I agree, however, that changing it a while after it is posted is really awkward... I'm glad you stated the original title, as otherwise I'd have a very difficult time understanding why many of the comments are directly responding only to the auto-save feature. Also, I am not intending to state that /I/ believe the title was "gratuitous": I haven't thought about it yet.)

I also feel that Apple is stepping away from power users more and more. Most of the new features in Lion make it more consumer friendly, easy to use, like all the other iProducts.

As a poweruser i dont like this. I dont like how Lion breaks Dual Monitor usage with apps in fullscreen, i dont like how a quad core MBP is nearly unusable due to insane noise and heat when utilized with more than just webbrowsing and listening to itunes and a couple of other small anoyances like the whole merging of iOS back into OSX and the more and more closed eco system. However, if you want to be able to develop software for this interesting market and those consumers, you have to use their products. Overall Apple still has the best experience but its heading in a very consumer/casual user oriented direction.

"MBP is nearly unusable due to insane noise and heat when utilized with more than just web browsing"

I think you may have a defective unit. I have a quad core mbpro 15" and it's the quietest, coolest running laptop I've ever used. I generally run dozens of apps with several servers going and have no issues with the device on my lap.

to be fair i am working quite a bit with game engines and need to test clients and servers at the same time. Load is still pretty moderate in such a scenario though and the i7 MBP i owned was screaming all the time and annoying my co-workers alot. You can find alot of people complaining about the same issues even with not GPU intensive stuff, so i dont think its defective as it runs perfectly otherwise!

MBPs are a bit notorious for having too much thermal paste applied during manufacturing. It's a bit hit or miss, and it's getting better, but here's a good example...

* 2011 15" MBP (thunderbolt), i7-2.0GHz (quad-core, 8 logical CPUs), AMD 6490.

* Laptop 1: 32C at idle (silent, fan at 1900rpm), 57C (fan at 3400rpm) at peak load for 2 hours. Never tops 36C under "normal" usage.

* Laptop 2: 54C at idle (fan at 3000rpm), 75C or more (fan at full tilt) at peak load for 30 minutes Hits 58C under "normal" usage.

We eventually cracked open laptop 2, to find the thermal paste was a bit of a disaster. After cleaning it up and reapplying the appropriate amount, temperatures were consistently with 5-10% of Laptop 1.

What's most unfortunate is it's hard to get a MacBook Pro returned or repaired for this. The solution, sadly, is to DIY.

While I empathize with all of his pain points here, I disagree with the idea that taking control away from the user is a new phenomenon in Apple products. That's kind of the whole point of them.

What? Someone's rant about their frustrations with Apple software pushes them to declare Apple dying a slow death? Uninteresting link bait like this shouldn't make it on the frontpage.

As I was reading through this, I couldn't help feel that I would want all of these things on my home laptop/desktop. These are nice features for a computer that gets used for an hour or two, once a day, for personal reasons.

I'm not bashing on Apple (believe me, that's not my intention). Apple is in the consumer market. Due to their success and the "cool" factor, they're being thrown into the enterprise or productivity market without really understanding it. Apple's culture doesn't care if changing something makes it harder to edit a 150 page Keynote presentation, because the customers Apple wants aren't going to be making more than a 10 page Keynote, maybe for a class.

Just because OSX is Unix doesn't mean they want the Unix crowd. Just because it all works well and is relatively secure doesn't mean they want the business crowd. I don't think they're intentionally shutting out the productivity market but rather that it never crosses their minds when they're deep in something cool and new.

Apple wants to be in your home, playing your iTunes to every device you own. Apple wants to be in your startup <2years old. Enterprise is hard, and is sure as hell isn't cool. Yet power users and productivity-minded folks seem to blame Apple for not doing well in a market Apple doesn't want.

But OSX has been popular with power users (i.e developers , art/music type people).

They of course have consumer products too, but I don't know if I could justify a $1000 laptop just for casual use.

I wouldn't say art/music people are power users of the OS, rather power users of their software. What OS ProTools or Adobe runs on doesn't matter to them.

Developers need the OS features, and developers tend to write code where they're going to run it. People aren't writing enterprise applications on OSX. If you're developing for OSX or iOS, you've chosen your market and you should know exactly what you've signed up for. If you're writing Windows or Linux code on OSX, you might want to reevaluate your productivity system of choice and find something a bit more stable.

Spending $1000 on the only computer in your house isn't a huge stretch, especially when it works better with your phone, your TV, your router, and your stereo.

I think Lion is awesome. The best OS X release yet. Some little things are annoying but the big picture is amazing. I’m very happy with it. (Also: Apple is starting to correct many of those little things with Mountain Lion.)

I couldn't agree more. It had a few more bugs than I would like when it shipped, but the feature set is fantastic.

It's a weird feeling using someone else's machine that is still on an earlier version of the OS.

tl;dr Apple is decaying because there are some things I don't like in Lion.

Well, most of these issues become nonexistent when you run Mac OS X on a solid state drive. And it seems that that has been the direction Apple has been heading in (to make OS X more like iOS) and non-coincidentally all the iOS devices use solid state drives. I have installed Lion on a Mac Mini that has similar specs as my Macbook Air (except for the solid state drive) and I can see what the author is talking about -- It takes 10 minutes to boot up the Mac Mini and 10 seconds to boot up the Macbook Air. Even very large documents auto-save very fast on the MBA, so not a big issue there either. Considering that all computers will use solid-state drives eventually, all these issues disappear. Not to mention that when we get used to Mac OS X, Apple is trying to push forward and there is going to be change that people don't like so much. You either move forward or you get left behind in this industry.

Seems pretty clear that this is just a rant written after a frustrating experience.

The thing is that Apple isn't "decaying" so much as it's changing focus. It has been very clear for a long while that they are now shifting toward more casual users and away from the things we on HN might prefer. Opening windows on reboot, as this guy complains about, is a pretty compelling feature for a novice user who just wants to get back to what they were doing.

And anyway, on modern macs with an ssd this isn't much of an issue.

I believe the solution here is to get an SSD for your os. There is no reason in this day and age not to have one.

I do agree with you. Hard drives are slow and ancient technology.

However, I do agree with the other people commenting. SSDs shouldn't be a requirement for a desktop. An OS can have all the fancy features in the world, but there shouldn't be any reason for a computer to use all your resources for an OS-level operation. I've been waiting for the day when a OS can boot itself then trickle in the rest of the startup features in a way to minimize the impact on performance. Windows does a lot of maintenance in the background when you're not using it, causing a lot of people to complain that "Windows is using 4GB of RAM just for itself!" But when another program requests that memory or that CPU time, Windows gives it up and delays whatever it was doing. Why can't this be universal, and why can't it apply to booting the OS as well?

OK, let's change the drives of our iMacs. That'll be fun.

That's not a solution. That's a disgrace.

Why do you think so?

Was requiring a mouse/a hard disk/a MMU/16 megabytes of RAM/2 gigabytes of RAM/etc also a disgrace?

If not, what is different about this change? The only thing I can think of is that Apple is selling machines with hard disks and Lion.

Actually, I got an SSD while I was running Snow Leopard. My MacBook was incredibly fast, I couldn't believe it.

I upgraded to Lion though, and I must agree with the OP. It is slower to start, boot, run, etc. even with an SSD.

This seems to be the case with lots of software now. e.g., I can't run Thunderbird 3 on a machine without SSD.

Some of us use laptops and need as much storage in them as possible.

An SSD for your OS and a larger HD for storage aren't mutually exclusive.

On a laptop they are. USB harddrives should not be required for normal operation (they are wonderful for storing things you don't use often, but they suck to drag around).

No, they aren't. You can have multiple drives in a laptop. It depends on the model, but you can. Suggesting otherwise is ignorant.

Seriously?

As I sit here, I have over 4TB of external storage hooked up to my MacBook Pro already, another 2TB standing by, and a few TB more available over my gigabit LAN, but when I'm not at my desk, where exactly do you think all that storage is? Floating weightlessly beside my head ready to jump into action at a moment's notice?

You want me to have to pull out and hook up an external drive in Starbucks or a conference room or wherever?

What do you want me to do when I don't have that option, and instead have to wait around for that critical video, or virtual machine, or whatever, to copy off my external HDD onto my tiny, overpriced internal SSD on which it may not even fit? Even just managing the placement of files and keeping track of which versions are current or not is a pain in the ass, but what do you want me to do when I have 30 seconds to copy 40GB?

Think real world, not some bizarre happyland where those ports on the side of your laptop mean you can do anything with it anywhere.

> Seriously?

Yes.

> As I sit here, I have over 4TB of external storage hooked up...

I'm not talking about external drives. Why are you?

You do realize that computers can have more than one drive, right? I mean, even laptops?

> You want me to have to pull out and hook up an external drive in Starbucks or a conference room or wherever?

I don't know. What do you do now when you already have 4TB of external storage. I mean, please, share with me what you do now when you have that 4TB file that you need with you at all times, how do you handle that now?

> What do you want me to do when I don't have that option,

When you don't have the option to connect 4TB of external storage?

Really, you should spend a few minutes reading your post. Your coming across like a self-entitled ignorant ass with noting to contribute. Check yourself.

You can have the best of both worlds: http://gigaom.com/apple/how-to-replace-your-macbooks-optical...

FYI, you'll be in for a lot of heartache should you ever need that optical drive. On machines that ship with an optical drive, Apple provides a firmware that refuses to boot off USB or firewire optical drives. It'll start, but then it'll fail pretty quickly. The only solution is to crack open your machine and slip your SuperDrive back in. Oh, they also block booting from USB flash or disk drives. So, don't try that as a workaround either.

No, I can't. For the moment, I need that optical drive rather badly. In the future, I won't even have the option, as Apple is highly likely to eliminate it entirely in the next few iterations.

K then since you can't give up a hard drive or optical drive, just get ready to lug around a desktop for the rest of your life because apparently whatever profession you're in is years behind everyone else.

For 99% of users, an SSD and some sort of data drive is a perfectly workable solution. You're the outlier here.

Development and operation of internet-based services is "years behind everyone else"? What is it you think "everyone else" is doing? And how will anyone manage to have an SSD and data drive in their laptop when there's no physical room for it?

> What is it you think "everyone else" is doing?

Not needing 9TB and an optical drive to do it? Really, you have specific needs. That's fine. But it's fairly egotistical to think that a consumer company like Apple will make something to meet your simple needs.

What I said stands. What you apparently lack is the ability to put it together.

There certainly is room for it. SSDs are just rather small circuit boards with a bunch of memory chips on them. So any laptop big enough to hold a 2.5" hard drive can also hold that hard drive plus an SSD, rather easily.

Has Apple not mastered the oh so tricky technology of "two harddrives inside of one computer" then?

The Mac Pro has 4 3.5" drive bays and 2 5.25" bays, so yes.

I'd be interested to hear about any "tricky technology" that would let you put two regular hard drives in a Macbook Air.

"SOME people can't DO that" is one of the most common, least convincing internet retorts.

So 'some' of use have constraints which make this not a good solution ... so what?

Instead of ranting about Lion, he should get his hardware checked and preferrably get an SSD.

MBA+Lion: fastest boot/reboot times I ever had.

I have a 6 Gbps Vertex III driver and reboots are markedly slower than they were in Snow Leopard. But, I think his point was related to the application startup, which has caused reboots to take > 5 min. even with an SSD for me. And when you have to force shutdown the system or it crashes, which happens a lot in Lion, you can't opt out of the application restore on startup.

Apple's change of Save/Save-As to 'Save a version'/'Duplicate'/'Export'(?) has been the major frustration for me.

Especially when a document is opened in a way where you don't yet know if/where it's permanently saved (as from the web), it's now much harder to find out where it is and make sure you have a copy where you want it.

Just command click on the name in the titlebar, it will show you where it is. In 10.8, you can even rename and move from the titlebar.

I think this behaviour change is very good, it just doesn't fit our expected and established workflow. People just can't get around not having a 'Save as', when duplicate is probably closer to what they actually want to do.

If I have a Keynote file open, and I want to split off a new file so I maintain my old file, File->Duplicate and I'm done. I don't have to tell the system where to save it yet or anything. Once I've made my change, File->Save and it gets saved to a specific location. All the while, my original is there to reference and is intact. If I'm not ready to save it, I don't have it. It automatically is saved as long as it's open — even if I close Keynote.

A 'Save as' workflow would mean I'd have to File->Save as, name the new file on disk, make my changes then save again. If I wanted to reference the original file, I'd have to go back to the filesystem to open it again, or use a recent menu. This way has more context changes and app switching.

I'm not saying the old way is bad, just that the new way is probably better given the iCloud enhancements coming in 10.8. People have been forever using 'Save as' workflow to keep a template of a file, then save off their edited copy. Maybe this just isn't a great way to do it in the first place.

How does a slow start-up time on the author's laptop make him think that the company is decaying?

It's nice that the author is sharing his experience with one of Apple's products, but I was hoping to read an article about how "Apple started decaying before Steve Jobs' death."

Moreover, a 10-minute startup time seems incredibly anomalous, especially for a Core i7 laptop, regardless how much stuff I've had open.

I've had an early 2011 (Thunderbolt) quad-core 15" MBP. Granted, I put a hybrid drive in it (Momentus XT), but I think the worst case from a resume-reboot was under a minute. I have seen some bad cases, but they were usually things like re-standing up VMs in VMWare (on a dual-core MBP 13), with many, many dozens of Safari tabs open (to where the system was paging considerably). Even then, I think the time to resume was around 3 minutes (closer to 30-35 seconds sans resuming VMs) with a bog-standard 5400rpm hard disk.

I have a mid-2011 iMac as well. I've never had a reboot take longer than 30 seconds.

10 minutes is at least an order of magnitude worse. This could be a case of HFS+'s tendency to corrupt (sigh), and as a result, causing issues, or it's some other issue that's triggering an edge-case in resume.

It takes < 10s to reboot osx lion on my end (mba, iMac). My iMac was frequently crashing but it turned out to be from the RAM, Apple changed it and I never saw a crash again.

Alas, the title is misleading.

imho reboots are such a rare occasion, that the timing isn't all that important. And it seems that the reason author reboots his computer is because he is triggering some obscure kernel bug. I'd have Apple engineers focus on fixing the bug rather than trying to shave some percentage points off boot times.

Auto-save seems like it needs just more polish. Applications should do it in a low priority background thread, and thus it shouldn't be noticeable at all. His rant about Keynote doesn't substantiate his claim that "auto-save doesn't scale". That's like saying that sorting doesn't scale because bogosort is slow.

imho closing window accidentally shouldn't be a big thing. Reopening the document should be a trivial task, and no state should be lost. So instead of making dialog boxes that slow down the average case, I think there should be a framework (or something) that would provide serialization of undo history (and other state-related stuff) to disk. Actually I'm disappointed that tools like Photoshop do not provide that already. But auto-save is still a step to right direction imho.

Articles like this always miss the point. You're not Apple's audience. You sound like you need to get a Linux box. Apple is all about a unified entertainment experienced (check), beautiful design (check), and making things simple for the user (check check double check). Programmers aren't users. They're programmers. While we sit here and bitch over the choices in Lion which I myself also hate to a degree we forget that almost every other computer user on earth is lucky if they can even find the power button. Hang out with techies long enough and you start to believe every user is just like you. You're a minority, pal. Apple isn't going downhill but you may have outgrown them. I don't like Lion either but I can't say it's Apple's big mistake, I know better.

But that's by far the most important minority apple might want to care about. As Paul Graham said: to find out what you'll be using in five years, check out what IT guys use today.

Five years ago they all started to use Macs. What if they would quit today?

Problem is, in this case it's the other way around. "To find out what you'll be using in IT, look at what people were using 5 years ago".

Even us in IT are not immune from cool consumer technology, and we can be pretty self-convincing that we can make it work the way we want it to. People are just starting to realize that this isn't always the case.

Start with tech that does what you need and make it do what you want, not the other way around.

That is not an excuse for a bad user experience. No one (techie or not) wants to wait 10 minutes for their computer to restart or minute long autosaves.

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