Month: November 2016

Well….not everyone’s angry.  Those people are the lovers of Apple…and we all loved Apple at some point.  We loved all that innovation coming out of it like a well-oiled Future Machine.  Pushing the boundaries of what’s possible, enhancing our daily lives, eradicating the complicated, old way of life to make way for the new…those were the days, eh?

 

And now look at this.  Apple is freaking broken.  Pushing out crap that no one thought they wanted, stuffing their shit with gimmicky, awful features that no one in their right mind uses or cares about, pushing feature after feature at us like they forgot what they were doing.  They are changing, turning into Fat Pig Number Whatever.

 

They’re extorting money out of us, removing ports that we all need, changing the game, pushing new features as…as our needs change…pushing aside the past…like the headphone jack…to make way for new and more feature-rich ports…like the lightning port…or…doing the exact same thing they’ve been doing for years.

 

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Feature Overload

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First thing I need to get out of the way:  Our lives require more complex features.  We cannot live as simply as we have before.  As things grow more complicated, we need more features to deal with them.  Apple is attempting to encompass ALL of our lives, while leaving us CONTROL over our lives.  That needs more than just two buttons for five things.

And in keeping with this control…Apple added a news app to iOS, right?  Don’t want it?  You can remove it.  Like any other third-party app.  Apple isn’t trying to force you into every single thing they shove out.

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“Gimmicky” features

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If you’re a person that believes all the new features are gimmicky, you’ve probably run into an Apple fan who believes that the new features are “innovative” and have “never been done before”.

Well, the definition of gimmicky is “a cute tweak to a product, the purpose of which is to attract attention and nothing else”.

I have heard the Touch Bar described as “gimmicky”.  I’m sorry, WHAT?!  A bar that helps you use the program, i.e. Final Cut’s zooming feature, because Apple removed the zoom bar from the interface and without the Touch Bar you have to use the semi-useless Trackpad, is a GIMMICK?  You can use features while in fullscreen for some programs!  Is that a useless trick for attention, or a productivity enhancer??

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Software Instability

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I admit, Apple haters:  Apple has indeed gone downhill with its quality in terms of software.  But it’s for a completely natural reason.  Remember how I said that Apple is trying to encompass all of your life while leaving you control?  The more features they have to make to achieve that, the more testing they have to do.  And they can’t just sit on their butts testing everything while the world sinks into a pit of “where the hell did they go they suck”, so they end up releasing things without the polish they used to have.

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The Smart Battery Case Design

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Uueh…this shouldn’t be limited to just the battery case, it should encompass all future products that people deem ugly.  Why?  Because they’re NEW, and Apple’s goal is to push aside the OLD, as in nothing will be familiar.  Products will challenge our perceptions because they don’t look like what we would describe as “slick”, and our definition of “slick” was built on the looks of OLD products.  As in, the 1986 versions of futuristic heavens where cars fly and everything is made of smooth steel.  As long as the battery case feels great in your hand and in your pocket…what does it matter how the hump looks?

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USB-C

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Well, Apple did it.  They’ve been doing it with the headphone jack…they removed a port we all need.  I mean EVERYTHING runs off USB!  It’s a freaking standard!  And now we have to buy these stupid little adapters that cost money and fill up our drawers and backpacks with tiny little boxes that are so small that tiny little chihuahua dogs can swallow them and we lose them and thy just make our workplaces look uglier and more ridiculous the more adapters we have and…

SHUT UP.

Think a little…think of what Apple’s been doing.  They were the first to remove the floppy drive, right?  Everyone probably went as nuts as you guys are now.  Floppy drives were as much a standard as USB is today.  Floppy disks were how you transferred information.  Businesses and families relied on it, it was the only thing they really trusted, just like USB today.  And Apple removed it.  They removed the only trusted method of information transfer…and I’m betting the exact same explosion of “WHAT THE HELL APPLE” happened then.

And look where it got us.  By abandoning floppy disks and drives, Apple forced the world to adopt new strategies for storing and transferring data.  And now, everything is much faster and better.

They’re doing the exact same thing again with USB-C.  USB without the C is not an all-in-one-port, but USB-C is.

Soon, we’ll abandon all the adapters…but we have to have them now in order to be compatible with the old USB-complient products.  Those old products will fade into obscurity, now that Apple has the ball.

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Functional vs. Control

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The last thing I will debunk is the notion that Apple continues to fill its products with non-functional junk.

……well, they DO fill their products with non-functional things…but it’s not necessarily junk.

I’m mostly talking about Live Photos.  Now THAT is the closest thing I can think of that really can feel like a gimmick a LOT of the time.  You press hard on a photo, and it shows you a few seconds before and after the photo was taken.  That only works on the iPhone, and only works right on iPhones that support 3D Touch, and it serves no real purpose productivity-wise, and it can grab people’s attention.  Gimmick heaven.

Yet…it doesn’t feel like a cheap trick.  Try this if you don’t believe me:  Get a dog to do something cute in front of the camera, and snap a Live Photo.  Now wait a day or two, then open the photo.  Yeah…there’s a dog there, it’s cute…but it’s just a photo.  Now play the Live part of it.  Now you can see the dog as it is, not a frozen image, but a jumping panting ball of cuteness.

Same with a party you went to and want to remember.  You may have forgotten to take a video, but you have lots of photos…and they’re Live ones, so you can still relive snippets of the party.  That’s not a cheap money-grabbing feature…that’s a completely non-functional, but well thought-out, life-enhancing feature.  You have more control over the moments of your life.

 

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So…there.  I’ve spelled out for you why this entire anger issue you all have is ridiculous.  Apple is doing the exact same thing they have been doing for ages, and they only reason they’re slipping a little bit is simply because they’re trying to encompass our life, just as they’ve been doing already.  I find it funny that we apparently hate change…and yet we push for innovation.  Which IS change.  The definition of innovation is “something RADICALLY DIFFERENT than what has been done before”.

That said….maybe there is a little smidgen of brain farts going on…after all, they did release the iPhone 7 without a USB-C charger…and then right after that released the Mac…that has nothing but USB-C ports…