I Don't Need My Phone to be any Thinner I Just Need It to Work!

Snce I had to wait for my iphone to restore from backup I started to wonder the same thing, is apple loosing it? I found your article and it's the same issue.

I'm no novice either. I learned to program on an Apple II basic then using 6502 assembly, and wrote my first commercial application with HyperCard using Mac Pluses as Point of sale stations for a fast food delivery franchise. Then I went to work for the financial industry and had to move to SQL .NET and PC's I came back to apple when I bought a new blackberry and was so pissed off at the interface I went looking for something better.

I'm considering buying the iphone5 but I'm afraid. If someone like me can spend 10 hours trying to sync an audiobook then what hope is there for Apple? It's gotten to the point that every time soneone in a Keynote says thinner I kringe. I don't need my phone to be any thinner, I just need it to work. I've hated Microsoft and loved seing Apple become the new masters but I worry that some day if I look from Microsoft to Apple and from Apple to Microsoft and back that it will be impossible to say which is which.

Perhaps with Steve Jobs gone, there's nothing left in the Apple Corporate Immune System to keep the simple moto It Just works. It breaks my heart to admit at Apple there's a lump there do you feel it? I want to hug Apple and tell them it will be ok, but I'm afraid the diagnosys won't be benign. Apple doesn't need diet exercise and herbs it needs chemo.

I moved to a Nexus 4 and so far, though there are hiccups, it's fine...

Wow, an Apple person dissing Apple! John, I agree and not just because I am a PC guy. I am frustrated by the "genius" system. Their most common fix when I take an iPad or other device in for troubleshooting is to say that I should erase everything and start over. I don't need a genius to help me with that. I have two iTunes accounts. I didn't mean to, it just happened with multiple devices. Their inability to help me to merge these two and only have one is baffling. I could go on, but you said it best.

I'm old-school-and-disgruntled Mac, too. So glad to read about others sharing Apple frustrations similar to mine. Apple is clearly too busy counting its money to listen. iWeb was the final straw for me. "Make all your web pages with us and we'll publish them to the net for you! Great! Thank you! And now we won't!" I was so frustrated I made a brief (2 min) video about it on Youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watc... or type in "Apple Poisoning its Faithful".)
There has got to be a better way for personal computing.

My Mum was enticed into the Apple ecosystem about 3-4 years ago. Around the time she converted, my nickname for her was "Techno Gran" since, at that time she was not too bad at using her Sony All-In-One PC. She now has an iPhone, a MacBook, an iMac and an iPad. Her ability to get things done on the PC has been seriously reduced by the Apple products. As an example, recently, she could not work out how to do a seemingly simple task such as downloading some photos from SkyDrive and transferring them over to her iPad. In the end I had to do a remote desktop session to help her. In another instance she had bought the latest version of iWork and asked me to install it for her onto her iMac which was not that old. When she tried to install the upgrade herself she could not work out what to do. It turned out that before we could install the latest version we had to upgrade the entire OSX, this required ordering a DVD from Apple. She lives out in the country so this took a few days to arrive by post, I had to go back home and by the time the DVD arrived I was not there to help install the upgrade, I forget how it worked out in the end. I feel sorry for her since she makes a real effort to use technology and she really does not need to deal with the extra technological frustration the Apple products are causing her. She thought she was buying into simplicity and it has turned out to be a nightmare for her.

She recently told me that she wishes she had never bought an Apple product.

I have been developing my own theory that Apple products are the technological equivalent to junk food, psychologically fattening an already physically obese populace. Like the Sun newspaper their products are encouraging us to be lazy and dumb down our intellectual capacities.

I think the bottom line is that, in spite of the latest glossy advertising campaign or shiny new phone, there are no silver bullets, technology like fitness requires constant effort to maintain and advance. If computers are going to help us resolve some serious problems that we as humanity collectively face we will have to up our game and our expectations considerably. We need to make a consistent and determined effort towards that end.

"technology like fitness requires constant effort to maintain and advance. " very well put.

Thanks John! This article by Kevin Kelly helps me maintain some motivation http://www.kk.org/thetechni...

Love me some KK.

I am a relatively new convert to a mac after many years working on and using windows and i really don't see what all the fuss is about. I love my computer and my iphone and all that but I don't see any massive leaps in user experience which i expected. I need to use Logic pro for stuff so I use a mac. Itunes works much more fluidly I have to say, but other than that I don't feel much of a difference.

WTF? To move photos to your iPad, you simply download them to iPhoto on your mac and then sync them to your iPad through iTunes snc process. What is so hard about that??? A 6 year old could have figured this out, or just google it for easy quick answers. Further, it is comical that your mother couldn't figure out that she had to insert the new OS DVD into her computer, click on it and it would load the software with clear simple steps, certainly exponentially easier than even figuring out what version of Windows you should be then load. And you couldn't explain this over the phone! Total nonsense!

You don't use iTunes for pictures. You use iPhoto.

Click on the start menu? Really? It doesn't say "Start" anymore. It's a damn circle. Of course going to the start menu to shut down always made me smile.

WTF is a charms bar? (I have sindows 7)

Mac -- go to the apple menu and choose "About this Mac" It's been in the same place for 30 years.

I use both Mac and Windows. Now that Windows has yet again copied the user experience (as much as they could) from OS X, it's mostly easy to understand. I'll never get over the finger gymnastics that one has to use on a Windows machine to press the control key. They should have just moved the freaking alt key. Or changed its functionality since it hasn't been much use since 3.1.

I've already ranted about my Mac problems. Lately my PC is a godsend. I just don't want to spend thousands of dollars buying all new versions of my professional software for it. I've mostly used it for running crappy little apps that aren't available on the Mac.

I switched from Windows to a Maca about two years ago. My motive was that I needed a 'UNIX-y' OS to run my development environment plus run Photoshop natively. After some heartburn fairly similar to yours, I've come upon the only solution I like--Snow Leopard, without using any Apple applications. I use Chrome, VLC, Lightroom+Photoshop, Gmail, Google's business mail and I'm fine. I paid for Lion, upgraded and then wiped it out and returned to Snow Leopard. I don't intend to upgrade the OS.

Oh and by the way, I had to quit using Finder and buy Pathfinder in order to do GUI file management remotely as good as Windows Explorer.

Snow Leopard was the last great version of OSX. I'm simply baffled at their recent decisions.

The sad part is that developers march along with Apple's release schedule. There are already several apps that won't run on Snow Leopard and require Lion and up.

I'm begrudgingly running Mountain Lion currently and it drives me nuts on a daily basis. I haven't dealt with an OS release this buggy since Windows ME (kernel panics, apps lock up and won't close, my wallpaper randomly disappears, Finder crashes, etc - the longer the computer is on the worse it gets). I have to reboot several times a week just to make the computer responsive again. I haven't had to do that since the early XP days.

The moronic and baffling changes to things like "save as" and the ability to merge folders cause me grief daily. Also they somehow found ways to make Finder worse, the dock worse, expose and spaces worse. Multi-monitor support is worse.... I just don't understand the rationale behind the systematic dismantling of the best 'UNIX-y' OS available.

It's at this point that I'm actually considering moving to Ubuntu and dealing with trying to get Photoshop to run with WINE.

I moved to Windows after OS X was introduced. The Finder is, still, an insult compared to the (admittedly crashy) Finder of OS 9. Another total POS is iTunes (on Windows at least), Apple really isn't good at software engineering.

I did exactly the same! Pathfinder looks cool too although maybe a little too mousey for my taste.

I wish I'd never upgraded to Lion. Caused me a lot of grief!

For a "UNIX-y OS" I would have suggested BSD, but if you're happy with Snow Leopard, more power to you! (FreeBSD for a more truly Unix-like experience, and PC-BSD for a more automated, slick desktop experience.) And they're both free (both ways), so always an available alternative (which you can try painlessly with Live DVDs).

I tried free bsd about a year ago. If you're looking for something simpler than osx, I really wouldn't recommend it. Btw the bsd oses are pretty much the only unix oses left that can be freely used my everyone, so they get some credit there.

People who dislike Apple's 'ecosystem' are usually those who dislike being force-fed bad, counterintuitive, buggy operating systems whose faults become more pronounced with each iteration.

Microsoft is just much more mature when it comes to software engineering. Apple makes beautiful hardware, no doubt, but they've got nothing on Redmond when it comes to software. Actually, let me rephrase that : they've got nothing on Microsoft with regards to function; when it comes to bling however, Apple shines.

Microsoft publishes bloated crapware. There office software was once a beautiful thing, but that was at least a decade ago. Once they started putting graphics editors in Word, the honeymoon was over.

It's true. Up until now, they were publishing "bloated crapware". This is no longer the truth : take a look at the new Outlook, or office365 for that matter. Microsoft has realized it was lagging behind the competition and has now reacted accordingly. I'm a developer and thus used to hate IE, but even I have to admit that ie10 is a great browser.

no thanks. that's how it works. they lost me. I don't have to 'try again.' are you stupid or just ignorant?

john -- congratulations for coming out of the closet as an old-skool Mac user who's disenchanted with the new Apple world. i'm with you. iOS just plain bugs me; my Android phone is very unfun but if i'm going to be annoyed with my portable brain, it may as well be a cheap portable brain that costs $40 a month for unlimited everything.

to me it feels like many Adobe products have gotten more and more professional/expert-oriented, while Apple's have gotten more and more limited... yet i find them awkward just like you do. iPhoto is a mess; they've pretty much abandoned iMovie in order to hawk FinalCut; and Address Book has always been so inadequate that i repeatedly try it then resort to -- ok this is absurd -- a database i built in FileMaker Pro 5 many, many years ago. at least i can make all the fields i want and track tons o' information within the database! i use Adobe Lightroom, switch back and forth between different versions of iMovie depending what i need to get done (committing to whatever the new FinalCut is like means not just money but a bunch of time learning the software). Mail is so-so compared to ancient but intuitive versions of Eudora. (Now i use gmail, but like you said -- it's not Mac, i'm not *expecting* it to be all that great.)

i've actually heard that Windows 8, across platforms, may fill the gap. a weird idea, but heck, at this point i suppose i'll try anything.

it may be that aging, old-skool Mac users are an endangered species and we should just move along quietly. Kids Today are accustomed to the new normal and have no reason to think these products should work any better or differently than they do...

You are kidding about Adobe becoming more professional, right? I just canceled my Creative Cloud membership because all of the CS6 suite (mainly Photoshop) has so many bugs that it has been slowing down my workflow. I have never done this before, but I am actually in the process of writing a blog post about how pissed I am at Adobe for CS6. I should have it done during the weekend.

Is it CS6 or the Cloud that's the problem. I haven't upgraded. Not even considering a cloud based solution. I couldn't work without my creative suite (5).

hi jaystrab, freediverx - i think by "professional" i did mean "overcomplicated" and "complex, multistep" etc. i don't have CS6 and can't comment on its bugs. what i'm trying to say is: i'd like something that falls on the spectrum between iPhoto and LightRoom , plus the equivalent of MacPaint-meets-Photoshop and Pages-meets-InDesign shipping with iLife. i don't need 98% of what Adobe products can do and i need more/easier/"intuitive" adaptations of what iEverything now does...

I am, I believe, indeed an "aging, old-skool Mac user." Sigh.

yep, we're aging right along. i haven't written for Wired in at least ten years. being able to say something like that makes one feel... old...

You are an idiot!

Oh don't mention filemaker. The most beautiful little database that could. And where has that gone in the past years? Nowhere. So many great touches but it has not kept up. If only they had sold it to another company that really cared, it would have been a world beater. So sad.

sholto - i'm so with you! even though i didn't do anything terribly complex with it or upgrade, it was so easy to make stuff in it. you could feel its HyperCard lineage. that sort of thing is what some of us old-skoolers miss: the feeling that you can adapt anything to your needs without going into Terminal or AppleScript.

There are a lot of folks on here who need to take a long, hard look at Windows 7 and Windows 8, I think...

Windows 7 is pretty good. I'm not sure about Windows 8 though, as it has not even been released yet.

Hahahhhahahahahhaha! Good one, man!

Ohwait - you weren't joking??? Wow...

I was a Mac user too until forced into Windows 7. Very very content thank you. Still use a Macbook but Windows 7 is a solid OS that is for the most part intuitive to use.

LOL!

Exactly, I don't who brainwashed you, but do use windows 7 or 8

I switched to a Mac when I was sold on the idea that their products "just work" and are easier to use. I ran screaming back to a PC within a couple months. I think that the idea that Apple products are easier to use is one of the greatest marketing successes of our time. I am now on Windows 8 and am completely happy. In my opinion, the Windows ecosystem is just better than Apple's. And, it is not even close anymore.

When you are trying to hit the search magnifying glass in contacts start lower down and then slide your finger up and it will appear if it doesn't. Hit right at the top of the screen where it says the time and it will take you to the search bar.

I appreciate the tip and will use it. But man, did I have to write a 2000 word post to learn this?!

Hi, you can just drag the contacts down to reveal the search box. This also works in the music app and other lists. Hope this helps.

Chris.

I've never been able to press it myself either, so it's not like you and your wife are the only ones. I've had every one of the problems you mention in the article and I'm a pretty capable engineer. I find a lot of the iPhone UI to be infuriating. Cell phones in general as well though, it's not just the iPhone.

try winphone7 (or the soon to be released winphone8) and you will be shocked (pleasantly)

In addition to the other suggestions about sliding your finger up, or scrolling to the top of the list to reveal the search bar, you can also use spotlight search to find contacts and bypass browsing your contact list altogether. It seems that a lot of people aren't aware that this is an example of what spotlight exists for, which is probably a usabilty or UX issue in and of itself. In any case, start using spotlight (swipe left from home screen) to find anything on your phone ... you'll feel dumb that weren't using it all along.

Spotlight search on a Mac computer is INSANELY slow and annoying. and the 3rd party apps that attempt to replace it are largely based on ... guess what ... it.

Meanwhile, on my Windows 7 machine, which rarely offends me, I can run all manner of fantastic Spotlight-like search apps (locate32, everything search, etc etc). Results come back instantly. I don't lose my place in the finder when I run a search. Etc.

I frequently utter these words while attempting to do something on my Mac mini which is currently running some OS named after a big cat from like 2 years ago [and I will not keep updating to their newer, "better" editions]: "I'm sorry. Am I interrupting something?"

If you have large backup volumes (including time machine backups) or large media files like photoshop scratch volumes, this can slow down spotlight tremendously. The fix for this, and optimizing spotlight in general, is to go into the spotlight preferences and exclude particular folders or volumes from spotlight. This is, stupidly, under the "privacy" tab in the spotlight preferences.

There is usually no reason to need to seach the backup volumes, and it spotlight tries to start indexing during a backup, it can slow things down to a crawl.

To John Battelle's point, why isn't the OS smart enough to know not do do this on it's own?

What a crock! Spotlight is super fast. Where do you people come from? Another planet?