[justin0469]

IMO, Apple has lost it's touch just as they almost won me over along with thousands of Android fan boys with the iPhone 5. I bought the latest 13" MacBook Air the day it came out. I was impressed by the form factor but that's about it. The stability and smoothness everyone used to rave about just isn't there. I refuse to upgrade to their latest OS.

That's not to say Apple is disappearing anytime soon, but I think they have lost their touch. I believe it will be a slow but steady decline in value, down to a more Google-like share price.

[Tyrannosaurs]

Hold on, they've lost their touch since they launched the iPhone 5?

That's been a tough six weeks for them.

Re. OS X Mountain Lion - you should upgrade. Lion was as close to a dog as Apple have release, Mountain Lion is absolutely an improvement. I can understand someone on Snow Leopard not wanting to move to Lion but your Air presumably shipped with Lion. Frankly that's the version you get away from, not hunker down on.

[justin0469]

I meant with my experience with the MacBook Air. It's fair enough to say that every major product (software or hardware) has issues that need fixed but I had hoped with Lion it already would have been.

[Tyrannosaurs]

If I'm understanding you right, you like the hardware but don't like OS X?

Yet you're refusing to upgrade to the version that may fix some of the issues you have?

[justin0469]

I just don't want to trade one set of problems for another. Some of the Mountain Lion annoyances are small and fixable (Gatekeeper) but they add up to be just plain annoying. I haven't messed with it much but their limitation on subfolders is just annoying. I'm sure it's aimed at simplifying things for average users but power or heavy users need something that can conform to their style of work.

[nicholassmith]

I was a bit concerned about Gatekeeper but it's turned into a non-issue. Not sure what you mean about subfolders, unless you're talking about the issue with iCloud documents where you can only create one folder, no subs? I think I've saved one doc into iCloud as I only have one machine, I use Dropbox for everything basically.

I skipped Lion because I'd heard so much bad, I like ML though, it's pretty solid.

[Osmium]

Gatekeeper is a Good Thing. It has a reputation for being about restricting apps you can run on your Mac, which is unfair. I leave Gatekeeper enabled: if I try and run an app that isn't code-signed, all I need to do is right click and click "open" and accept the warning.

As others have said, ML is solid. All consumer features can be safely ignored: don't like iCloud documents? Turn it off and use your Mac as you always have. Under the hood, ML is as good as the Mac has ever been.

[kalid]

I don't know about losing its touch, but wanted to offer some corrections re: "I believe it will be a slow but steady decline in value, down to a more Google-like share price."

1) Comparing share prices between companies doesn't make sense (the share price is total value / total number of shares, the latter can change). That said, GOOG's current share price (~670) is higher than AAPL's current price, and near its all time high (~700).

2) If you meant to compare total values, that Apple should be worth as much as Google... Apple is over twice Google's total value (550B to 220B) so that'd be an enormous decline in value.

3) If you meant to compare relative value (price/performance), Apple is actually a better "deal" for investors in that its P/E is around 14, the market average, while Google's is 21. 14 dollars in Apple will create $1 in earnings, but 21 dollars in Google is required to do the same.

[justin0469]

Fair enough :) Bad example with the Google share price and point taken with value / # of shares. You are correct with #3. I know Apple is worth is significantly higher than Google, I just think that gap will close (Google will raise, Apple will lower) over a long period of time - as in years. Could be totally wrong, it's just something I could see happening.

[kalid]

No worries :). I've been playing with stocks lately so am aware of a lot of potential misconceptions [esp. around the raw share price, vs. market cap and P/E being indicators of value].

Apple very well could depreciate in value if their earnings slip. That would put its P/E in the bottom half of the S&P 500 (historically Apple's P/E has been around 15, it's around ~14 now).

[Jabbles]

"an enormous decline"

On the same scale as the growth that Apple has seen over the last 2 years.

[kalid]

Apple's valuation growth is due to selling enormous quantities of products -- their P/E has roughly hovered around ~15 the entire time. If it were 20 or 30 then there'd be a lot of room to fall. But their P/E is about industry average... they just have a megaton of sales.

If iPhone/iPad sales decline precipitously (to ~2010 levels) then their share price should fall to roughly that amount [probably more, since it indicates something is terribly wrong and likely to decline further].

[Samuel_Michon]

"The stability and smoothness everyone used to rave about just isn't there."

If so, that experience might have something to do with:

"I refuse to upgrade to their latest OS."

[justin0469]

Lion to Mountain Lion. I'm not that far behind and I think it's fair to expect a product which has been available for quite some time and shipped with my brand new laptop should be more stable and lived up to hype. That being said, perhaps the problem was believing all the Apple hype that is spread - I had my expectations set too high.

[Samuel_Michon]

In my experience, Mountain Lion is a lot more stable and smoother than Lion. Best $20 I've spent all year.

Mountain Lion also adds some cool features like iCloud and iMessage integration, and my personal favorite, Power Nap:

"When your Mac goes to sleep, it still gets things done with Power Nap. It periodically updates Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Reminders, Notes, Photo Stream, Find My Mac, and Documents in the Cloud. When your Mac is connected to a power source, it downloads software updates and makes backups with Time Machine. While all that updating is going on, the system sounds are silent and no lights or fans come on, so nothing disturbs you. And when your Mac wakes up, it’s good to go."

http://www.apple.com/osx/whats-new/

[justin0469]

That does seem cool in concept but when I put my laptop to sleep, I do so to conserve battery not for it to suck up battery by doing all that.

[evan_]

It throttles the CPU way down, keeps the screen off, doesn't spin up hard drives- in practice it takes almost no battery. Even so, you can turn it off, trivially.

I don't know if you think that everyone urging you to upgrade is lying to you or if you're just being obstinate. It's OK if you don't want to upgrade to Mountain Lion but stop complaining about problems that have been solved.

[Samuel_Michon]

I haven't noticed any meaningful drop in battery from this feature. Also, if you have Power Nap turned on while on battery power, and the battery level reaches 30 percent of capacity, Power Nap will be suspended.

However, Power Nap only works on recent Apple notebooks with flash storage and cool microprocessors (like your MacBook Air).

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/07/os-x-10-8/18/#power-man...

http://www.macworld.com/article/1167970/up_close_with_mounta...

[Osmium]

If you're really worried you can disable it in System Preferences, but the latest Intel processors have new "active idle" states specifically for this kind of thing.

[leephillips]

I'm guessing that by "connected to a power source" they don't mean the battery.

[brandall10]

I don't know if it's Apple losing its touch so much as the competition having gone through that period of playing catch-up, and finally they have (or are getting closer and have begun to innovate in different directions). They've been the industry heavyweight for too long and it's beginning to show.

I actually moved to Android with the introduction of the iPhone 5/iOS 6. The maps thing had somewhat of an impact, but it was more looking at how much Android has progressed with Jelly Bean (also considered WP8 which looks very impressive) vs how much iOS appears to have stagnated.

As for the hardware, I love my 2k12 11" MBA but I can't say for certain I'll remain in the Apple ecosystem on my next purchase. As a Rails dev I just need a *nix of some sort.

[justin0469]

That's probably true too. I think that Apple's smartphone and computer market share will slowly decline in favor of other comparable options.