I love Apple products, but ……

Recently Apple have made changes that are backwards steps in my mind. Most of them minor, but in sum they are reaching annoying levels. Some are made for what are probably good reasons such as harmonising OS X and IOS functionality, but they are just not working.  What is most frustrating is that these are all in areas of basic functionality – items I use all day, every day and so the adverse effects are magnified.

1. Address book in OS X Lion is appallingly bad. The old version wasn’t good but the update is worse. Different views to see contacts and to look at groups just does not work. I have more screen real estate on a Mac, so don’t cripple my Mac with an iPhone view
2. Similarly with iCal – main complaint is what has happened to my mini calendar so I can speedily look at months ahead, instead of week by week swiping, or change to month view, select date and then back to week view.
3. I moved to a Mac because when I was travelling the world, the PCs constant hogging of my processor cycles for its use and the same for precious Internet bandwidth in the back of beyond drove me insane. I would spend more time sitting waiting to use my computer than actually using it. The Mac was free of such issues – processor cycles were mine and so was Internet bandwidth. But since the Lion update this is no longer the case. My iMac sits and waits whilst something is going on I can’t find and the Internet is slower even though I have lots of memory and a good Internet connection. My Mac feels like my PC did in the Mongolian desert.  (Oh and.you know how frequent crashes were a PC thing and not applicable to Macs? – tell that to my Apple Mail program which crashes at least once a day.)
4. I have recently moved from MobileMe to iCloud. Now MobileMe’s introduction was not good and it’s service had glitches, but it generally worked in the end.  iCloud is like the old MobileMe, but worse. My main complaint is about, email which used to sync and refresh in the background. When travelling my iPhone would pick up emails and I could look and see I had 10 new messages – now I only see new messages if I open the email app and it refreshes. I have push enabled and have looked around for options – maybe there is something that will solve this, but it isn’t obvious and I am far from a technophobe.  Another huge backward step. (Just discovered there are 24 pages of comments on this issue at apple.com stretching back to Oct – and apart from arcane fixes, no resolution!)

I could go on, but hopefully my point is made.  All small things, but when you make your reputation by design excellence then forwards is your only direction, not backwards. A lesson for all businesses making rapid changes – be careful when you affect your core proposition.