I’m an Apple Fan in 2025
Stay Foolish debuted ten years ago, almost to the day, but I’ve been writing regularly for Macworld for nearly twenty years. When I first started out, we were all excited about what the latest in technology—Intel-powered Macs—would mean for Apple’s long-term prospects for survival. Two decades later, nobody ever even whispers that Apple is doomed anymore, because to suggest it would mark you as somebody divorced from reality.
It’s difficult to overstate just how different the Apple of today is from the Apple of 2015 or 2006. In taking a retrospective look at Apple, we most often find ourselves comparing the enormously successful behemoth that Apple now is to the company’s nadir in the mid-90s, when it was just steps from going out of business. But the truth is that even in just the last decade or two the company has reached heights that seemed previously unattainable.
And somewhere along the way, I think the relationship of the company to its customers—and vice versa—changed as well.
Dan distinguishes between a fan of the company and a fan of the products, but I’m not a fan anymore of the products, which are now poorly crafted compared to 20 years ago. Apple products have become, at best, the lesser of two evils, and the company itself is no longer special.
I think this is a bit too harsh. There’s a lot of stuff that’s not objectively bad, and much that is good, too. Apple is still special relative to most other companies. But clearly the tenor has changed. For me, the two big things are, first, that Apple used to be the company that tried to do things the right way, even in minor areas that were overkill; but, now, much of the time they just don’t care, even about things that users and developers find to be quite important. And, second, my default assumption is now that new things will be broken. The magic is gone.
If anything, Apple’s lack of interest in what I have to bring to their platform is what is pushing me to the web, forcing me to work with shittier languages on a rendering engine far more performant than SwiftUI.
[…]
Do I mind paying the 15-30%? No, not really. Does Apple do anything that benefits me (and by proxy, them) with that money? No, not really. Maybe my app is a bust, but so far, I’ve gotten way more interest and support from non Apple users organically than anything the App Store has offered me.
Apple has done everything they could possibly do to erode their platforms. They stopped investing in what makes their platforms great to use. They stopped supporting their biggest fans that make software for those platforms. They stopped caring about what makes their platforms so easy to develop for. Once they were successful, they acted like no one else took part in helping them reach that success.
Previously:
- Court Orders Apple to Comply With Anti-Steering Injunction
- Is Electron Really That Bad?
- Our Changing Relationship With Apple
- Setting the Bozo Bit on Apple
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Having fun playing around with vintage Apple computers from the 80s and 90s really put into sharp focus how much the magic of Apple's products are truly gone. However much less capable those old computers are, and however much they tended to crash, they were a joy to use in a way that's just gone now. Before it was full of the creativity that all its users and developers brought to it, including a hearty dose from Apple themselves. Now it's just the same soulless corporate drivel we get everywhere else, but maybe it works a little bit better than the competition.
I used to be a 'fan of the company' in the sense that I held in high esteem a lot of the people responsible for its identity and success. In the 1980s, it was people like Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld, Susan Kare, et al. (the good old original Macintosh team), but also like Larry Tesler for his monumental contributions to the user interface/interaction/experience. And later, it was the people Jobs brought from NeXT when he returned at Apple in 1997, and all the people responsible for the hardware and software Apple produced until Jobs's passing.
Now, I'm sure there are still very competent figures among the various department VPs at Apple today, especially in engineering. But the results are remarkably different. While the hardware quality of the products is still good, what surrounds it is a mess. Hardware + Hardware design + Software + Software design (the OS's user interface) aren't a cohesive unit anymore, they're a patchwork that not only is made from different pieces of clothing, it's also sewn together by different seamstresses. They're a mix of advanced technology, old design ideas, repurposed design ideas, terrible new design ideas (notches in laptop displays! iOS-ifying Mac OS, utter disregard for the HIG, etc.), and… I don't know, random ideas thrown at the wall to see which sticks. That renowned 'integration' — I don't see it anymore.
Apple's 'dream team' is long gone. The originality in product design is gone. Today's Macs and mobile devices continue to maintain the general shape they had under Steve Jobs's tenure, just refreshed a bit. And most of the new design ideas they've attempted — the Touch Bar, the notch in MacBooks — are questionable at best.
Johnson says, "Apple products have become, at best, the lesser of two evils", and I generally agree, but I'm also starting to ask myself, "Are they really?" and "For how long are they going to remain the lesser of two evils?"
