What Bugs Apple Fans About Apple

An anonymous reader writes "Forbes.com went to MacWorld to ask Apple fans what bugs them about the computer and gadget maker. Turns out the lack of replaceable batteries, need to buy Vista separately, and most of all the stock price bugs people."

Old complaint...

[SaidinUnleashed]

Don't get me wrong, I love my new macbook, but the one-button mouse really bugs me. I can live with the two-finger click thing, but I'd really prefer a two, or three button trackpad.

greed

[FredAkbar]

We Apple fans like to see Apple do well, but probably more in terms of selling more products (higher marketshare, becoming more popular in society, etc.) than just higher profits (most of us aren't in it for the money, after all). So for me, one annoying thing Apple does is charge for products or services that could/should be free.

For example, the new software for the iPod touch is a $20 download. This is the same software that's a free update for the iPhone. Even the new software for the Apple TV is a free upgrade. If I were an iPod touch owner, I'd be pretty offended that I have to pay $20 (well, disregarding free jailbreaking options and whatnot) for an update that iPhone users get for free.

Remember iTools? The free service that gave you mail, web storage, etc. if you were a Mac user? In July 2002 it was rebranded as .Mac and Apple began charging $100/year for it. I realize that this increases profits (at least short-term), but I often find myself wishing that companies would accept short-term losses if it would mean an overall increase in marketshare and customer satisfaction. If .Mac were free, it could be marketed as yet another advantage of the Mac (in addition to iLife, etc.). Instead, it's an expensive subscription service that many people know nothing about, nor have they any reason to.

The stock price?

[Orig_Club_Soda]

I LOVE the stock price. I bought my stock 7 years ago and its one of the best in my portfolio.

The attitude that "almost but not quite" is good

[antifoidulus]

enough.

I use macs at home and at work, and they are great machines....most of the time. Maybe I'm a perfectionist, maybe I'm just expecting too much, but so many of Apple's tools are great most of the time. However they have flaws that make them annoying to unusable in certain situations, and at least the Apple of late seems unwilling to fix them.
Example: Airport extreme with airdisk. When the thing is working it is perfect, however, in my experience the disconnects are really annoying, and it disconnects much more than my airport express ever did. Also, when, out of the box, I tried to bridge it with said express it went into infinite reboot mode till I did a factory reset. Again, in theory a great product but when I pay a premium for Apple products I expect it work right 99% of the time, not 90%.

Their server products are another great example of how Apple's products, on the surface anyway, are great, but in practice it tends to fall apart. We are rolling out an LDAP system and it has been nothing but problems. Apple has done a seemingly good job of making a really slick open directory server tool, but there are just too many bugs to make it worth while. A particularly nasty one, that has been reported to Apple but Apple refuses to fix, is that for some international users certain actions will change the time zone to Cupertino, which can wreak havoc with systems. Come on Apple, we paid a lot of money for this system, the least you can do is get the time zones correct. The server also has almost no meaningful error messages(took me forever to figure out the effects I was observing was related to the time zone bug, the Workgroup manager went on its happy way, authenticated me, then didn't do anything afterwards, not a single error message). Similar problems with getting Remote Desktop to work with Directory authentication. All I get is a "Authentication failed" message with no additional information either on the target machine or the server! Come on Apple, you went through a lot of effort to develop this system, but all that is wasted if you don't give me proper error messages!

Ditto with iPhone content management, the system works great 90% of the time, but the inability to give the user more flexibility with content management can lead to frustration and hacks that require playlists of playlists......

I don't know why Apple refuses to address these issues. None of them seem like they would be incredibly hard/expensive to fix, but Apple just seems to have the attitude that if it works in the general cases, there is no need to investigate the extremes and fix whatever problems may arise.

Re:Leave it Forbes...

[TheRaven64]

What about the other things? Replaceable batteries? The batteries on my MacBook Pro and PowerBook are easily replaceable. Those on the iPod aren't, but I would much rather have a small device than a bigger one with a removable battery. Vista? I switched to Mac to get away from Windows, and all of the other operating systems I use are free (and Free). The stock price? Totally bugs me. Every time I use my Mac, I think 'this would be so much more useful to me if only Apple's stock price were different.' No, wait, I don't.

The thing that really bug me about Apple now is that they seem to have completely forgotten how QA is supposed to work. I have filed more bug reports for Leopard since its release than for any other OS (including on that is reproduceable and causes the user's home directory to be rendered inaccessible by any Leopard machine). I have raised my standards a lot for what kind of bug I should file with Leopard. With Jagwyre and Tiger I filed bugs that were UI regressions or caused irritation. With Leopard I'm only filing ones that are major UI regressions or cause serious data loss and I'm still filing a lot more than I was.

Re:Lack of acknowledgment of my market segment

[Quirkz]

Agreed. In my case, I build web sites, so having two monitors is critical, something that the iMac and Mini won't support. However, I don't need a particularly powerful box to do the coding and some light graphics work. Because I want two monitors, I'm faced with the choice between a $600 Windows box or a $2500 Mac Pro. While I would gladly shell out extra money to have a Mac desktop--I'd pay $1000 or even $1500 for one, probably--I just cannot justify paying four times the price for the Pro. Unfortunately for Apple, this situation is pushing me towards Windows in general. I've got an old iBook for travel, but there's something to be said for consistency, and when the iBook goes out I'm not sure if I'll go Mac or Windows with the next laptop.

Re:Old complaint...

[phoebusQ]

I find that very interesting. For me, the two-finger scroll and two-finger alt click have been godsends. Now I can left click, right click, and scroll without changing my finger position on the trackpad whatsoever. I can't stand using the separate right click on my IBM linux laptop now.

And which people did they talk to?

[hellfire]

Batteries? This is a huge complaint by a large portion of the user base. The problem is that you didn't have to go to Macworld Expo to find this out... cheezy reporting.

Windows Vista? Ummmm this is entirely misrepresented here. Yes, some people might be upset that they have to plunk down $200 for vista, but think about it. That's not a problem with apple and no one focuses that gripe at apple. That's all the fault of Windows being way too expensive. It's that or they start bundling windows and making the mac $200 more, which I don't want. Apple has lots of great programs that are comparable to most windows programs.

Stock price? Everyone's stock price is hurting right now! We are a month from a recession, the stock market is tanking, and a stock going down after an expo is not unusual, in fact it happens a lot. It's called profit taking. Investors ride the short term wave of hype, and when the hype is done, they get off the wave as fast as they can. After the expo there's no more momentum keeping the stock moving upward quickly.

Ask a real apple fan what cheeses him. Like for example that A2DP isn't supported on the iphone, or any iPod. That's my #1 beef right now right after the battery issue.

Re:Lack of acknowledgment of my market segment

[slyn]

I agree. I'm not much of a serious gamer, but I would love to have a computer with a good GPU, a decent CPU and lots of storage to tinker around with. I would Tri-boot and use OS X for normal web browsing, WoW, and making simple movies (like this one i made [youtube.com]) in OS X, playing custom songs in GH3 in XP, and for experimenting with various FOSS OS's, as essentially the only experience I have is with Ubuntu. Part of that tinkering includes me wanting to make it myself, but that is not a neccesity. So essentially now the only thing that could fill that void is a Mac Pro, which would be more powerful than I want, or a Hackintosh, which I am putting some serious thought into getting now that the new Mac Pro's have 8800 GT's, and thus (hopefully, I haven't actually done any research on this) there will be drivers for that card in the OS x86 builds.

Just like the parent I have a monitor, portability is not an issue, and the Mac Pro is overpowered for what I want to use it for. A computer with a 8800 GT, a Core 2 Duo, 500+ gigs of HD, and commodity everything else would be perfect for what I want to use it for, but there simply isn't one that Apple makes. If they did, I would be one of the first to line up for it.

Re:Leave it Forbes...

[je ne sais quoi]

I can't tell you anything about Leopard, but here's my record for uptime on my desktop running 10.4:

18:07 up 112 days, 8:57, 5 users, load averages: 0.93 0.24 0.08

As I'm typing this, my desktop has been up 42 days. So, might I humbly suggest that it is not the OS that's your problem, could it be an application? (And yes, I also use my desktop as a file server/terminal for my cluster, that's why it stays up so much.)

Re:Leave it Forbes...

[p0tat03]

Agreed fully. Leopard, while not as big a disaster as Vista, was not a solid release - not in the same way that Tiger was largely problem-free. I'm still getting MANY network driver problems (refusing to talk to my router's DNS, but only when looking up CERTAIN entries), some BSODs were eliminated with 10.5.1, but IMHO some of them were so serious and easily encountered that it should never have been in any shipping version.

Feature-wise I'm liking Leopard, the unification of the UI is definitely a step forward, and the only problem I have with the OS is its bugginess, and given how I'm used to the rock solid reliability of Tiger, I sometimes contemplate downgrade.

Re:Lack of acknowledgment of my market segment

[alan_dershowitz]

Using the video output, your desktop was mirrored and did not span the two screens. (I don't know if the newest models still do this.) There were firmware hacks to get around this completely artificial restriction, which Apple put into place to differentiate their consumer line machines from their professional line. That's a thing about Apple that bugs me, now that you mention it.

Re:Lack of acknowledgment of my market segment

[kamochan]

The powerpc ibooks (and afaik imacs, never had a powerpc one) did have that artificial restriction. One bit changed in the boot loader prompt was sufficient to remove the restriction (the "firmware hack"), and it was so common that in practice it didn't even affect warranty (yes, I tested this). The intel macbooks and imacs do not have the mirror-only restriction.

And I completely agree, the artificial restriction was annoying. I suspect that consumer feedback to that effect (mine included) affected the decision not to have it in the intel line-up, i.e. when a sufficient excuse came to remove the restriction without looking silly. The non-pro mac versions are better than pros also for some business stuff (desktops & road warrioring), in which mirror-only is a stupid restriction.

My main annoyance of Apple is the rev.A quality suckage (and the truly sucky quality of Leopard, up to and including 10.5.1). I'm the friggin' customer, not a beta tester. My time is worth a lot, and that's a premium I'm not willing to pay. Consequently I am no longer an early adopter... but it sucks to just drool at all the new stuff :-P

Re:Smugness perpetuated by Apple

[Phroggy]

I've been a Mac faithful for about 15 years. I have owned every high-end apple laptop since the G3 Wall Street. The reason I have owned every high end laptop is that one of them always seems to have a major problem a year into using it. It could be a bad hard drive, motherboard, screen problems, or an OS upgrade that doesn't upgrade well and kills my system so many times, that I say f'it and get a new machine.

I definitely recommend the AppleCare extended warranty. Yes, if it breaks, it's a pain to be without your computer for awhile while it's being fixed, but my experience with Apple's service has been excellent. All computers have a chance of something breaking; Apple computers are only slightly more likely to break than others.

If it's not a machine going down, it's the lovely hanging mac. Some app has a problem, and you get the endless rainbow of death, or better yet, a frozen screen. Now all OS' have issues, and I have always loved my Mac(s), but the time has come for me to part ways with Apple (well, except for my iPhone).

That's very peculiar. Of course a crashed app can give you the spinning rainbow, but that happens to me on Vista all the time too (minus the spinning rainbow). A frozen screen shouldn't happen; Mac OS X is normally VERY responsive when an app has crashed. If the nature of the crash is that the app is using gobs of memory and the OS is swapping like crazy, then yeah, the whole thing's gonna grind to a halt, but that'll happen on Linux too.

I guess the reason is their PC vs Mac ads. Yup, that is the MAIN reason. When these first came out, they made me incredibly angry due to the fact that Apple gave insinuations that the Mac never crashes, or freezes (this constantly happened to me with 10.4 and my machine died when upgrading to Leopard).

I'm surprised that you would switch to Windows because of a TV ad campaign. Or comments about how the Mac is impervious to viruses (which we all know by know is not the case). No, Macs are not impervious to viruses, but right now, Macs don't get viruses. This will change, but until it does, we might as well enjoy it.

Apple just took a bunch of stereotypes about Mac and PCs (many of which are completely wrong), and threw them in a commercial, even though most of the stuff they were saying was complete BS.

Apparently your experience differs from that of most people. I'm not sure why.

So I am done now. I am moving on and sold my dead MacBook Pro and am in the process of selling my G5 tower, and will now be using Windows newest piece of crap... Vista.

Wait a second, your MBP is still covered under warranty, but you'd rather sell it and switch to a PC than let Apple fix it for free? That disturbs me.

So long Mac news, how I loved thee, but I can't take the smug anymore.

Is it really Apple and their products, or Mac news sites and their fans, that you're trying to get away from? The two are hardly synonymous.

Re:Yeah! That Stock Price!

[Lars T.]

I cry bullshit.

Dec 2006, 17" macbook pro, starting price $1999
Dec 2007, 17" macbook pro, starting price $2799

Dropping prices my ass.

Nice try, selling the 2006 low-end 15" as a 17". In the real world the price stayed the same - which still means Apple drops prices, just not for all products.