All declines have to begin from a high, and with regards to Apple, it would appear to be all downhill from here. A few weeks ago, I ranted about the way Apple’s walled garden and forced upgrade approach was being adopted by foolish technology companies. Two of our four Kobos ended up bricked, both due to the same buggy updated firmware; I could have avoided bricking the second one were I not inadvertently forced into an unwanted update by the computer software.
Apple was able to get away with this very risky strategy due to it being run by a perfectionist, detail-oriented, technofascist. It didn’t matter if the updates were forced, because anyone working for Steve Jobs was going to be triple-damn certain that the updates would work properly… or at least not contain any fatal bugs. Now that Jobs is gone, it doesn’t surprise me in the least that Apple is running into the same kind of bugs that plague most of the other companies that stupidly tried to imitate it. I received this email from a friend of mine who was so bold as to update his iPhone to iOS 6:
I updated my iphone to IOS6 last night. New
app appeared called ‘passbook’ which apparently is ‘the simplest way to
get all your passes in one place’ … except it doesn’t connect to the
itunes store. Also I found I had lost
all my playlists from my music … this also happened to a friend but his
have since automagically reappeared … mine haven’t so far!
It’s now been two days and he is still missing his playlists. Not a big deal, hardly a fatal bug, and yet likely indicative of more serious problems to come in the future. Meanwhile, Karl Denninger notes that Apple has forced its users to give up Google Maps in favor of its own lower-quality map software. It’s far too soon to pronounce final judgment, but these recent events tend to bolster my expectation that the second post-Jobs era at Apple is not going to go any better than the first one did.