| I'd been exclusively with Apple since 1989 when I bought my first Mac (an SE with dual HD floppy drives and a whopping 400 MB external hard drive). I stuck with Apple through the difficult years and then even became the editor of a multi-title Mac publishing operation. Apple loved me so much they gave me a loaded iPod for my birthday one year. I don't know how many people they've done that for, but not many, I'm guessing. But things started to change with the success of the iPhone and then the iPad. We Mac fanatics used to say that any success for Apple was a win for the Mac platform. But in reality, it hasn't played out that way. The Mac is languishing, and it's languishing in ways that I can only attribute to intent. It's becoming more frustrating to use. Files that you see right in front of you don't come up in a search. Software updates bring rapid obsolescence. Simple things like "Save As" have been changed in Apple's apps so that now Shift-Command-S, for example, is the command to "Duplicate" a file, which you then have to Command-S save. Then when you close out, you have the additional step of dismissing a save dialog on the original document. The hardware, obviously, is not being built to last. (Apple's laptops were always frail things, dating back to my PowerBook Duo and PowerBook 520c, but their desktops and workstations were always bullet-proof; they are not anymore.) It's a bunch of little things and big things combined to make a very frustrating experience. This December, I decided to jump ship. I bought a Surface Pro 4. The hardware is awesome (Core i7 with 16 GB RAM). The software needed some manual intervention, but it's coming along. (Microsoft didn't include the WinTab driver, for example, so there was no pressure sensitivity for some apps. And there was no documentation available for it. And frankly Apple's keyboard shortcuts for special characters are better than Microsoft's, but I've been able to emulate those.) I don't even think about what platform I'm on when I'm working now (except when I use Dreamweaver CS6 because Adobe is freaking horrible and can't deal with Microsoft's trackpad and wants to force me to rent CC, which I will never do). I never considered an iPad or iPad Pro for a second. They are useless to me. When I get a unit in, it just gathers dust. There's nothing "pro" about it unless your profession is typing e-mails and visiting Web pages. Plus, I actually like computers. I'm old enough that they are still like science fiction to me. I still have dreams about them. And I like to be able to get into the software guts of my computers and mess around in there. I also refuse to consider the iPhone. Not as long as there are Android phones that have expandable storage and a removable battery. Plus every time I have to deal with one of my kids' iPhones, especially when I have to deal with iTunes on top of that, I want to punch Apple so badly. And most importantly, I don't want to be at the bottom of the food chain in Apple's iTunes ecosystem. And that's all Apple's customers have become. |