The awfulness of Apple

The appeal of Apple is lost on Jerry Pournelle:

I wish I could return all my Apple devices for refunds. Actually, that isn’t true; I like my Apple iPhone 6, and I’ll keep it; but the iPad is far more trouble than it’s worth, and the MacBook Pro, while useful, suffers from the same security mania that makes the iPad useless. I can’t even install free apps on the iPad. I tell it to install; it asks for my Apple account password; I go find that and mistype it, but eventually I get it right; whereupon it tells ,me it has sent a security number to a trusted device. I go looking for trusted devices. Naturally they have to be Apple. Eventually I remember that the iPhone is an Apple device and I trust it, and lo! I find there is a message with a code number. I type that into the iPad. It is rejected. I try again. Still rejected.

I give up. I have an iPad with almost no apps because it takes all afternoon and another Apple device to get an app for it, and that doesn’t work because – I don’t know why. It took me a while to figure out that the trusted device was the iPhone; could the delay be it.? I suppose I will have to go to the Apple Store and see if anyone can fix this, but at this season that’s not a practical thing to do, and I’m not really all that mobile at my age anyway.

I thought the Surface Pro was a fussbudget and it is, but it’s got to be better than having to own two Apple devices before you can use one of them, and then having them send you a security number that doesn’t work, with no instruction as to what to do next. Congratulations. My iPad is now so secure I can’t use it, and I don’t know what to do next.

I like the MacBook Pro. I like the keyboard. But the security paranoia with the need for two devices to do the most trivial tasks like installing a free app is too much for me. And the message with the code seems to have vanished from the iPhone now; it’s neither in mail nor in messages. I suppose I must have dreamed it?

It is rather ironic that the company whose fortune was made by its superior user interface is now heading downhill due to the worst UI experience in technology. But that’s the way of the world; it turns out that Steve Jobs was irreplaceable after all.

Apple’s main concern is now keeping people imprisoned in its walled garden, not luring them in any longer. The “technology giants” are no longer even technology companies, but marketing-distribution systems. So, it’s no surprise that their technology and user experience is suffering as a result.

I have an iPad Mini that was required for a game on which I’m working. It’s got some nice hardware, but the UI is so horrifically awful that I simply don’t use it for anything except testing the game. Sadly, Google is going the same way, to the point that I no longer update my Android tablet, phone, or apps.

This tells me we’re heading for some serious disruption in the not-too-distant future.