Apple? where and why did it all go wrong??

GrahamS – You do know that you can postpone the reboot for 4 hours at a time right?

Indeed. Not really very helpful if it pops that up while you are not actually at the PC though eh? Say in a meeting or, as in my example, at lunch.

Blimmin Windows – at its most annoying when it tries to be helpful.

As for Acrobat Reader, sorry whatnow? Foxit every time, much sleeker and easier to live with.

Adobe is mandated by work. As I understand it FoxIt doesn’t support some of the digital signatures and form features we use.

Then..Jobs died and without him it’s just another nerd company doing things for nerds.

How do you square that with them being more successful (marketshare , market cap, share price, profit, revenue..take your pick) since then?

I must stop feeding trolls… 😉

Oh I do love my MBP oh yes I do. iTunes is the worst thing I’ve ever had the mispleasure of using. My ipad is getting on and I’m severely tempted to ditch the iPod, ipad and iPhone and start the change to android.

iTunes is the worst thing I’ve ever had the mispleasure of using.

I wish they’d just leave the UI alone. It seems to change every time I’m forced to upgrade when I buy a newer iPhone model.

Just tried to quote you, but couldn’t **** paste on my iPad/safari. Shite.

Posted from my iPhone. Simple enough.

I wish they’d just leave the UI alone. It seems to change every time I’m force to upgrade when I buy a newer iPhone model.

I’d just settle for it not losing my shit all the effing time! It’s in the same place! I haven’t moved it and I don’t want to put it in the pitifully small HDD on the mac. Dumb useless crap. Posted from ipad lol.

I hated my MBP but Yosemite seems to have made more stable/usable.

Well, well, some folk ARE able to paste, impressive stuff. It’s almost as if bugs affect some people, but not others… 🙄

Well, well, some folk ARE able to paste, impressive stuff. It’s almost as if bugs affect some people, but not others…

C+P bug does exist. As discussed on iOS thread. So anyone for those it doesn’t affect, congrats, but it does exist.

Also, Soylent Green is people.

C+P bug does exist. As discussed on iOS thread. So anyone for those it doesn’t affect, congrats, but it does exist

YAY! What do I win?

“Just works” comes from those of us who used Microsoft products for years which frankly didn’t work, frequent hangs, crashes and the dreaded BSD, blue screen of death.

As for Apple’s market cap, two things hugely profitable now (able to sell premium products in huge size), massive potential (money they can make from Apple Pay could dwarf their other revenues). Apple has something like a 40% market share in developed markets like the US and UK, if they mirror that in other markets their growth potential is exponential.

IMO they make the best products in terms of design, functionality and longevity and I am prepared to pay a premium for that, their desirability means I have good resale value if I want

FWIW I have a Windows Phone (Nokia 520), a Surface RT tablet, an HTPC with Windows 7 and a 6 year old desktop I use for audio recording and photo editing that has Windows 8 on it.

They all work fine, don’t crash and weren’t too expensive to buy. I also find them very usable – especially the unified search in Windows 8.1 – just start typing what you want to open (program, file, webpage) hit enter and then it’s there. So fast!

I’ve used apple stuff before and it’s very good too. Not worth the price increase for me though.

A lot of the difference is that Apple makes software and high end hardware – there aren’t any low-end Apple devices.

You can now get PC hardware of the same quality from Microsoft (see their Surface line) as well as other manufacturers (ultrabooks etc). But Tesco will also sell you a Windows tablet for £99.

The difference between the sell on value and the original price is probably about the cost of the android you could have bought instead?

As a non-user of Apple products it’s all gone worse for me – last night I sat down at the family Mac and tried to freshen up the music on my iPod with some CDs and a couple of downloads. iTunes is definitely less inituitive and harder to use than a few years ago and to add to my misery the damned stupid mouse and the fancy screen keep doing stuff I don’t ask them to do – suddenly the tool bar will disappear off the top, the whole screen shoots off to one side or the picture shrinks down to nothing. Maddeningly too clever for its own good.

These sort if things are going to ebb and flow. Pick your poison.

I’ve been windows for a long time and I’ve seen it go good, bad, indifferent, good again and then a bit loopy. But I’ve always produced good work on the systems, at a small fraction of price to the Mac. We edit 4/5k video and I’m not losing out to any of my Apple piers. But we do save money and have learned a lot about hardware over the years.

Apple who still have good results are bound to eventually go a bit off the blower. How can you not when your so successful?

I think the point is getting lost both in this thread and in the market. Apple captivated people first with a superior graphically led operating system which led many designers like myself in my prior career, to fall in love with the user interface based on its capability. It’s second coming was to launch high end desirable devices with fresh idealology that everyone wanted and was prepared to pay a price for.

Bugs in iOS wouldn’t be an issue if the competition hadn’t caught up. No one cared how slow the original iPod was, or if it had any bugs (although let’s face it the functionality was limited) because there was nothing to compare it with. But because the competition has caught up Apple has lost is uniqueness, or its USP in the trade, and therefore it’s devices are now compared competivelly to other similar devices on e based of commonality – ie look, feel performance and price. .

Apple is not Nerd, it was designed to be outwardly non-nerd superior technology that just serves its intended purpose. To go back to the Ethos that Jobs created, Apple needs something very, very new that perhaps us and maybe even they dont know about yet to recapture our imagination.

Finally, does anyone know how to save a PDF in Safari on the iPad? Because every single “expert” on the apple support forums still suggests saving it to a program that, as far as I can see, was removed several OS’s ago leaving no option. I mean, it’s not like I would want to save a PDF doc to my tablet to then go work offline is it?!? Seriously, that’s all I want and it’s doing my head in. Intuitive my hairy arse.

All sorts of options for you. iBooks being the simplest. Me? I use Dropbox, as then the PDF is available on all my machines straight away, and can control where it’s saved, ie file it away in a client/project folder in Dropbox. It is very simple. A child could do it.

@alanf – I don’t want a Android device, the Apple stuff IMO is better. I wouldn’t care if the Android device was free.

@globalti, all of those things are configurable, from what you say you are resting your hand on the trackpad hence sending the machine commands.

@rone, you are right Apple had a dip but have recovered strongly. If you look at Apple stock vs Microsoft the outperformance has been massive over past few years.

I worked on the UK launch of the original Mac and have used them for work ever since. That has been pretty effortless. A couple of worms in the 90s and that’s that. This year has seen us change from our 10 year old towers to Minis and again has been pretty easy. Macs every time for me in a creative environment.
I have an ipod Touch and an iPad but compared with the flexibility of my MotoG phone and Nexus7 they suck big time. So that’ll be horses for courses then.

So here’s a real question my wife is struggling with;

We have a redundant XP PC with all the peripherals. I say get a mac mini and plug it in (cheaper). She says she wants the 27″ sexy monitor…

Same result, different cost?

he he. I think our office had the second LaserWriter in the UK.. £5k IIRC in 1985?
Douglas Adams might have had the first 🙂

We worked with Macs from very early on, certainly 1984 onwards. The level of documentation in Inside Macintosh for example was fantastic.

@Kryton – I have a Mini (since 2009 still used every day). Yes you can re-use your screen/keyboard/mouse/etc but if you get a Mini it will work best with Apple magic mouse and wireless keyboard – I use mine with either the TV or a 24in monitor (£125-ish). If the Mrs wants a big screen you can get non-Apple but if she wants an Apple one then you might consider an iMac as you’ll be spending close to that overall.

Have a look at MacRumors – you probably don’t want to buy the base Mini (mine was but I upgraded ram which you cannot do now), 8GM ram and bigger/faster drive would be best, you can add disks externally easily for more storage.

I had a 4S for 1.5 years, and a Samsung Galaxy S4 for 1 year.

The S4 has been a terrible phone with nothing but issues, some stemming from the hardware, some stemming from base Android, and some stemming from Samsung’s Touchwiz shit they load over the top of Android.

I wanted to like Android, I really wanted to. I am a nerd. I build my own high end gaming PC’s and tinker with those to my hearts content so Android should be a match made in heaven?

It was a crap experience for me. The phone destroyed SD cards with no word from Samsung as to an official reason why. The OS freezes and crashes on a weekly basis, and apps freeze and crash on a daily basis.

The OS looks crap – which I believe is Samsung’s doing rather than base Android OS – but still. All the extra gimmicks have been turned off after week 1. The phone is made of plastic and feel cheap. App uninstall themselves and/or unlink from their shortcut regularly.

The camera is the only redeeming feature of this phone for me, and whilst it is a good camera, a camera does a smart phone not make.

Android people at this point will say that the S4 isn’t the “true” Android experience, now thats probably true, but it is not of my concern. Google should have a tighter control on who can use their OS if 3rd parties are going to screw it up so badly that their own supporters denounce it as a “true” experience.

I could go on, but this is why I have just bought a iPhone 6. Sorry Android, I really tri [—- Unfortunately, Google Chrome has stopped working.]
[OK]

jambalaya – thanks. Looks like the best thing for me to do is keep saving…

plyphon, your mistake was not getting a nexus!

To be fair you can’t judge Android based on Samsung.

Same result, different cost?

Just get the 27″ iMac, it’s a work of art!

To be fair you can’t judge Android based on Samsung.

Android people at this point will say that the S4 isn’t the “true” Android experience, now thats probably true, but it is not of my concern. Google should have a tighter control on who can use their OS if 3rd parties are going to screw it up so badly that their own supporters denounce it as a “true” experience.

Unfortunately for Google, people can and will judge their OS by what their 3rd parties are doing with it. I think Google are waking up to this and are setting tighter design style guides and development standards.

Android is free for anyone to bastardise. Anyone can take Android and do what they like to it eg Amazon use it for their phones and take off loads of Google stuff and then add their own gubbins.

Android is free for anyone to bastardise.

I think that’s a pretty classic double-edged sword. It offers freedom but a lot of vendors seem to use that freedom to make a complete arse of it.

My MiL got herself some cheapo Android-based tablet to match the FiL’s iPad.
Whoever made it thought it would be a great wheeze to remove the Play Store and lock it to their own proprietary store which had about a dozen apps in it. 👿

Cue me spending ages having to root it, put on a dodgy custom rom from some random website, install Play Store and all the apps she actually wanted – only for my FiL to tell me that a couple of months later that “it had been crashing a bit so I reset it, but she seems to have lost Facebook”

His “reset” had actually somehow wiped everything back to the factory install and I had to start again!

All sorts of options for you. iBooks being the simplest. Me? I use Dropbox, as then the PDF is available on all my machines straight away, and can control where it’s saved, ie file it away in a client/project folder in Dropbox. It is very simple. A child could do it.

Except dropbox doesn’t work offline or I would do that.

Doesn’t matter anyway, will be getting rid soon and getting a laptop. Let the l mug buying it worry about that ( father in law so sister in law is tech support).

But yeah, it’s the difference for differences sake that really annoys, my folks have a mini and the scroll working the wrong way round and keyboard being set for Apples own QWERTY interpretation was just annoying . Why? Everyone else can stick to a standard, why mess that up?

err dropbox works offline. only the file sync needs connectivity.

file is local on all machines, and if for some reason it’s updated, it resyncs across all your devices the next time there’s a connection.

unless the tablet/phone app version does something different to proper computer version?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-30116319
😉

whereas I had to go…
swipe… tap… tap… (wait a bit) tap… (wait a bit more) swipe… ooh it looks pretty.

CountZero – Member
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-30116319

POSTED 18 MINUTES AGO

Do Apple devices not allow you to see page four of this thread?

Yeah, it does, can you tell I never use the damn thing?

Anyway, problem is solved, damage mitigated and table steadier will be gone soon enough.

Except dropbox doesn’t work offline or I would do that.

Well, it needs a network connection to copy the PDF to your other machines obviously, but your local copy will be sitting there for you to read on your local machine,

Doesn’t matter anyway, will be getting rid soon and getting a laptop. Let the l mug buying it worry about that ( father in law so sister in law is tech support).

Saving and viewing PDFs from the browser is much the same on laptops really. You can view in the browser, or save and open the PDF in another app. You know you can get Adobe Reader for iPad if you want to ape desktop OS behaviour so closely, don’t you?

But yeah, it’s the difference for differences sake that really annoys, my folks have a mini and the scroll working the wrong way round and keyboard being set for Apples own QWERTY interpretation was just annoying . Why? Everyone else can stick to a standard, why mess that up?

The scroll direction can be swapped you know. A child can do that as well.

The different keyboard mappings are annoying, as are extra proprietary keys, but all OS manufacturers have played that game… why add a “Windows” key for any other reason than differentiation for example? Standards… if only. Keyboard mappings aren’t even the same between countries using the same alphabet… all very annoying, but the blame lands in lots of places, not just Apple’s lap.

1) Again, I didn’t know that. I don’t use Dropbox so wouldn’t naturally assume I would need it to perform the function of a download manager, something probably 99% of all other browsers do by default.

2) As said, most other browsers are more than capable of downloading a file on their own. I just made the ridiculous assumption that because I can view it I could obviously save it without downloading largely irrelevant software for the task I was attempting to accomplish.

3) I swapped the scroll direction quite easily thanks, no need to be a patronising twunt (are you an Apple tech support by any chance?). My parents, on the other hand, aren’t quite such a Genius as yourself so were getting quite annoyed by it. As for the windows key, yes it’s there but so was the Apple key before it, not sure what your point is really. The difference is that whilst most OS distros follow a convention for keyboard shortcuts eg. CTRL-T, OSX is just annoyingly different.

squirrelking: I’m not sure I understand your complaint.

Dropbox doesn’t “perform the function of a download manager” and Safari like most other browsers IS (unsurprisingly) perfectly capable of downloading a PDF file on its own.

For a PDF it opens an in-browser preview and from there you can choose to open it in another app like iBooks, Dropbox, Google Drive, Stanza etc.

Use the “Open In…” or “Open in iBooks” buttons:

I have a Mac Mini that I’ve upgraded the RAM in to 16gb and run with apple keyboard and touch pad but a Samsung monitor. Did look at getting the Thunderbolt display but you can get so much more for your money if you go non-apple. I think they’re bringing out a new model fairly soon so if you must have one, maybe wait for that?

I’ve had numerous iPhones up to and including a 5s. Got sick of the utterly dismal battery life so moved to an HTC One, which as it turns out also has a rubbish battery. The M8 that I now have is awesomes though

If you’re thinking about changing from Apple to Android, I found it a massive pain in the rear. However, having now got used to it, I don’t think I’d go back.

The ipad mini I have however is rubbish – a complete backward step to the 1st gen that I had. Battery life is rubbish, its slow, keeps crashing…