More Than Kindacritical, and Rightly So
Joseph Horn John Siracusa wasn't available for this week's episode of 5by5's Hypercritical podcast, so Dan recorded a special episode with Build & Analyze's Marco Arment and Back to Work's Merlin Mann. If you enjoy, care about or in any way depend on Apple products, you should check it out.
The discussion centered on something that's been on my mind recently. While all indications point to this being the golden age of Apple products, we are (in my opinion) seeing a disturbing trend:
- Lion is the first major release of Mac OS X (again, in my opinion) to be worse than the version that preceded it.
- iOS seems increasingly to be "busting at the seams," trying to do too many things for too many people instead of ruthlessly adhering to its original strategy of doing things well or not at all.
- Siri was released half-baked, and as such, is being relegated to toy status.
- iCloud was released half-baked, and as such, currently seems like nothing more than a reboot of MobileMe. What ever happened to documents in the cloud, anyway?
- Final Cut Pro X. I'll save the meat of this one for a future post, but for now lets just say it fits the pattern a little too nicely.
I can already hear your fingers tapping away, angrily proving me wrong on each and every point. Let me save you the trouble:
- "Then just keep using Snow Leopard." I have a 2011 MacBook Air. It came pre-installed with Lion, and as such, can't run anything prior to 10.7. When I buy a new desktop later this year, the same will be true of it.
- "What, you want to go back to an iPhone that doesn't even have cut and paste?" No, but I do want every new feature of iOS to work as well as cut and paste eventually did.
- "You don't even have an iPhone 4S, how would you know?" I don't want an iPhone 4S, that's how I know.
- "What about iTunes Match?" I'm not going to pay a subscription fee, however small, to access music I already own.
- "But they just put all the pro features back in!" Really. Did they? More on that next week.
Just to be clear, I'm not framing this as a Steve Jobs issue. We're way too early in the game to see what the post-Jobs Apple will look like. My issues have more to do with the company's size and focus than with who's at the helm.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not deploying lifeboats just yet. But that brings me to the scariest part of all: where would I turn if I decided that Apple sucked? I need Apple not to drop the ball, because there's nowhere else to go. I've already gotten a taste of that medicine by switching to Avid. And while I reamin upset with Apple for killing off what we're now forced to refer to as "classic" Final Cut, I'm far more furious with them for forcing me use this.
Anyway, give the podcast a listen.