Pretty sure it's not a troll. He's pretty well known for his writings on search engines. It's a sign of the times when longtime Mac users are complaining. That's how bad things have gotten.
I've watched people struggle like he's describing. Too many upgrades. Too many authorizations. Too many restrictions. They are jumping through hoop after hoop just to do basic stuff. If they are young they probably don't know any better. But for anyone who has been around, this has gotten to be a joke.
If you have stuck with Apple over the long haul, then you remember what it was like before OSX. When OSX was first introduced you had to upgrade your Mac hardware just to run it or it would be dog slow. Then it got better over time as we all upgraded but it has gradually become more and more annoying. How many people are staring at a spinning beachball at this very moment? Trying to appeal to PC users, all the Mac vs PC nonsense. Then trying to lock down people's music and other files and make them "subscribers", like they are some sort of media licensing company. Apple is no longer an alternative to the typical computer hassles. They have become a primary source of them!
But only if you have been using Macs for many years can you see this. Noobs and fanboys are not going to notice. They will wait minutes for their Mac to boot and stare endlessly at the beachball and accept that this is "fast, start-of-the-art computing".
While noobs suffer through iPhoto staring at beachballs, I will boot in seconds and process my photos, running in a background process, in half the time, using a more traditional UNIX without the Cocoa cruft. No hassles.
I supported the Macintosh Labs at SFU from 1991-1993. Those systems booted off of floppies (which I handed out at the front desk) - and one of my jobs at Harbor Center was, on a weekly basis, running anti-virus off the boot floppies to clean them off.
I also supported the Macintosh Platform at Netscape (HUGE Macintosh house) from 1996-1998. A good portion of the time we ran into a tough problem on the Macs there (by then we had hard drives), our Mac Lead (which I was not) - had us do a "Fresh Install" of the operating system. That pretty much always resolved the problem, but seems kind of invasive nowadays.
I sometimes think we view Mac History through rose colored glasses.
I will agree with you - that damn beachball is annoying. Though, I am happy to say, that as of 10.7.4, it probably only spins for about 5-10 minutes of my day now in aggregate, as compared to the 20-30 minutes a day back in the 10.7.1 era.
Tolerance. I guess I just have less of it. Machines are faster now than they were back then and I am not going to tolerate slow response time just for the sake of the latest version of an OS. Windows is the same game. Upgrade, again and agina and again. All the while, no speed gain. I once worked for a guy who said, "Software is like a gas. It expands to fill space." Nowadays I use UNIX exclusively, as much as I can. Whenever I have to use Windows or Mac it slows me down. With UNIX, I can keep the software expansion contained and enjoy the speed gains as hardware improves.
Everything with computers is a trade-off. I'm happy to make some trade-offs and forgo whatever Cupertino is hawking in order to have flexibility and speed like the "good ole days".
Technically. If you consider The Open Group as some sort of authority. But Apple's OSX shows how meaningless it is to recieve the expensive POSIX "certification" from The Open Group. Alas, there is nothing in the spec about having to actually perform. Nothing that requires clean design or reliability, let alone transparency. I mean, if you want to use UNIX for a commercial product, by all means go ahead, but the least you could do is not ruin it.
"Certified UNIX". Pure marketing. Apple has the budget. There are vastly better UNIX implementations (from which Apple has borrowed copiously) that will never be certified. Go figure.
From where I sit, the most talented coders always seem to hold the POSIX specifications in spite. They do not like them. OSX is proof that they are not being unreasonable by taking that view.
To be clear, I'm not endorsing GNU/Linux. That is a whole 'nother story of UNIX gone bad.
On my old Atari ST, which I still use, the busy bee comes on the screen only when the machine is doing useful work for me, that I have explicitly asked it to do. If it's not busy, the machine is always responsive. On OSX, the beach ball appears at random seemingly, when doing something as trivial as scrolling a document (or web page), or clicking on the menubar at the top of the screen! And the machine is useless until it finishes whatever it's doing.
The ST has 1 8Mhz processor and 1M RAM and a floppy drive. The Mac has 4x3Ghz cores and 8G of RAM, HD not SSD like that's an excuse. And remember we are talking about simple GUI updating tasks here. There is simply no getting around that the interactive parts of OSX are appallingly badly written. Processing a mouse click and drawing a menu, for crying out loud!
I am amazed at how these modern day machines just don't seem that powerful when you use them. I remember using my Pentium 166 with I think 4MB of RAM, and sometimes I feel it was more responsive than my current Windows box or Mac with tons of RAM. Maybe it's just nostalgia talkin'.
It's not nostalgia. It's the software industry; and Apple. If they do not keep writing needless code and mindlessly adding features and then _forcing_ you to use their software (you are not given a choice; hello Apple), they become less important. The focus then (properly) becomes Moore's Law.
And your machine gets more and more powerful. That comes from the hardware. Software does not add more power. It drains power.
But you will not likely see much of the gains from Moore's Law as a home user; you only see "new" software. The software industry will be the ones who get the benefit of hardware advances. They will promptly usurp all the gains for themselves to make their bloated software capable of running. Writing power hungry programs is perfectly acceptable (I love writing code) BUT _forcing_ people to use it is not cool. Users are not often given a choice to keep using "yesterday's" software (even if it still works). Even if it would let them see the gains from Moore's Law. That is a travesty. Keep staring at the beachball. Life is good.
We've had decades to observe software development and it's clear that software does not have an equivalent to Moore's Law.
Let us buy the Apple hardware without the Apple software. Let us install our own software if we so choose. Now, behold as people try to argue against this. But they are only arguing against options and choice. What is the harm in giving people the option to install their own OS? If anything without the Apple brand is so terrible then surely no one would opt for it. So no harm done. You never know, they might actually be able to sell lots of hardware this way. "Average consumers" are not the only ones who spend lots of money on hardware.
Apple has taken a decent system (free UNIX) and ruined it. They have made it unusuable for anyone who has any idea of how fast computers SHOULD be.
Yes, the industry would like you to upgrade every year, if they could. They've managed to force most people into perhaps a 3 year cycle. But the truth is, for tasks like documents of a few pages, small spreadsheets, sending a receiving email, etc, etc, then a machine from 1990 could do all that.
Imagine if the car industry worked like this, if 3 years after you bought a car it wouldn't work quite right with the only fuel you could buy, and spare parts were impossible to obtain, and the engine compartment was welded shut!
I definitely see this myself. When waiting for my Linux box to respond to a mouse movement or my Windows laptop to wake back up, I think back to my Apple ][ where it was never possible to enter data faster than the computer can handle it.
Right now there are 257 tasks running on my Ubuntu box. I don't recognize half of them.
I'm not sure who "we" is anymore. Smart people like yourself would not do many of the things we're seeing done. I think it's within your power to control the slippage at least starting with you. Again, the word is "tolerance". When will you say "Enough. No mas."?
If you need one, I'm happy to send you a UNIX (or simple instructions on how to build one) that does not have the complexity of Ubuntu but runs just as fast and does all the same stuff, sans the gratuitous GUI's. You can always add GUI layers later if you want them. My guess is you won't once you see how much faster things are, and how few processes you need to be running at any given time.
You've got to be kidding me. He may be the world's leading expert in search engines (I doubt it), but this post is ridiculous.
My favorite part is when he receives simple, straightforward advice from Apple on how to fix his iPhone issue, but he chooses to ignore it. Instead he scours the web for alternatives, and spots one suggestion that is applicable to jailbroken phones.
"Are you frickin’ kidding me? I have to jailbreak my phone to fix this problem?"
Uh, or you could just try any one of the four easy solutions you've been offered so far.
But that would make way too much sense, so he continues his search. He ends up at iphonefaq.org, a site that "looked pretty official." Are you freaking kidding me?
Finally, after hours of searching, he arrives at this gem:
"The only option that was relatively straightforward and seemed to work, according to many forums, was to restore the phone."
As in, the original solution provided by Apple's tech support. Apparently it's Apple's fault that he can't follow directions or readily accept simple solutions. I can't go on, I'm getting dumber just reading this.
I think you're missing the point. He didn't ignore the suggestions, he felt that particular suggestion to restore the entire phone was unacceptable. Just because Apple says to do it, doesn't mean it may be the absolute best solution so the author went about finding other possible alternatives among the community. Unfortunately, beyond jailbreaking it there was no other worthwhile solution. In the end, he did exactly what Apple told him to do... and it still failed.
If a warning light on my car's dash turns on, I might look for a fix online. But if someone in a forum suggests I drive my troubled car off a cliff, I'm not going to write an angry rant accusing Ford of making me drive my car off a cliff.
I'm also not going to navigate to some amateurish-looking website that's obviously not affiliated with Ford, and claim that I can't tell it apart from Ford's website (and imply that Ford is somehow responsible for my confusion).
And if I can't fix it myself, I'll bring the car in for servicing, rather than writing a linkbait article speculating about what the repairman might tell me. (In fact, if the phone is a year old and it has a legitimate issue, Apple might just hand him a new phone... I find that scenario more in line with my own experiences, but we'll never know, since he couldn't be bothered).
> Unfortunately, beyond jailbreaking it there was no other worthwhile solution.
Really? Because he listed a bunch that all seemed more worthwhile.
simple, straightforward advice from Apple on how to fix his iPhone issue, but he chooses to ignore it.
'Oh, your phone has 2/3 of the storage taken up by cruft because our OS doesn't work properly. Delete everything on the phone and start over. Have a nice day!' This is answer may be "simple and straightforward" but it is not "acceptable."
soon: "That model is 9mo old and Apple gave you a simple, straightforward answer: buy a new one. Why are you still complaining?"
Looks like he definitely hit the nail on the head when he assumed he'd get people blaming him for not blindly following the "Just wipe your phone!" advice.
