The Awesome Apple We Once Knew. 

I used to think of Apple Computer and get the Apple glow, that wonderful feeling of knowing that someone was looking out for you. Ah, yes, the minimal virus, the bug-free, simplified operating system and user interface. I was so satisfied with this Company that I wrote a newspaper column that went around the world in major newspapers for ten years, a testament to my deep admiration for Apple and Mr. Jobs. 

Now, Apple had a few flaws that we all knew about, like changing critical parts every few years causing all its users to go out and buy new peripherals or changing operating system software every few years, making an Apple user expensively change applications as they had to be rewritten for this advance. But we put up with that because we had a friend in Apple, even though these changes significantly disrupted our lives. 

Those in the business also knew that Apple would hobble apps before major updates, making them much more remarkable when the new version was released. It was usually 2-4 weeks of dumb apps and then all was good. Again, we had a friend.

But a few events changed all that. 

Apple got greedy. This is a long story that culminated in me noting 7 or 8 billings from Apple on my bank statement in one day. I didn’t use most of those items, so I eliminated them. But because of the innovation, security, AI, and familiarity, I cut them some slack. However, that was when I reassessed their virtues and was rudely surprised.

A. Innovation—Apple recently freely admitted to stealing intellectual property to advance its innovation reputation and paid heavily. Appie hasn’t introduced a new breakthrough product since the iPhone. Tim Cook believes that managing inventory and margins is the path to success. There is no shortage of breakthrough technologies but Apple doesn’t have any of them. And Apple just abandoned its advanced car project as well. (now that said, Apple did introduce a new processor system (the M1-3) but it is a long needed variant of their old reduced instruction (RISC) chip and it does work well enough but more an improvement than true innovation. 

Interesting enough the evening that I wrote the above paragraph a Mac rumor site announced that Apple was going to introduce their new Large dataset AI in the form of a droid that followed one around the house and another , a monitor that followed one around their desktop. Something akin to the device shown below on the Big Bang Theory called the Remote Sheldon Episode. 

B. Familiarity—I used to go to Apple trade shows and nag developers to make their products more usable to a broader range of customers. I summed it up with, “If my grandmother can use it, your market will expand by a factor of 1,000″. Some listened, and others are no longer with us. Apple used to know this. Since I stopped nagging, all that simplification has gone away, including the great simplifier AI. Even the internet and banking has gotten far to complicated for grandmothers. Hell I have five fifteen digit passwords committed to memory and they have four or five additional security impediments as well.  Grandmothers can’t play here. And if you read 3 below you will see that apple isn’t helping here at all.

C. AI — Developers mostly did simplification with artificial intelligence. It was simple and useful. Press button “Improve Photo” and presto boingo the photo would be spectacularly improved. Apple maps and most other Apple programs were intuitive and could “read your mind” about what you most likely needed. “take me to the grocery store, and it would know where you were and what your preferred brand of grocery store was. In anticipation of Apple’s big AI introduction, apps with no AI or AI stripped from them, Apple life utilities are mostly useless. Apple Maps is dangerous. Ask for directions and Maps would give you two or three stops to your original destination (a bug still in after two updates). Or it might give you directions to a place with the same name 6 or 700 miles from where you wanted to go – Home.

D. Security—I don’t know if this is an AI issue, but I had a couple of incidents that put Apple’s security in the Very Dangerous category. Apple introduced a new feature that stacked all documents by category on one’s desktop: all photos in one pile, all presentations in another, and documents and PDFs in others. It keeps one from having 3-400 documents all over one’s desktop. Great feature. However, I had to attach a photo to an email. The photo was on the top of the images pile, so I selected the pile, causing the images to spew out on the desktop, and I dragged the desired image to the email and sent it. When that person responded, I noticed that amongst the attachments I sent were a bunch of Confidential and restricted distribution drawings along with the original photo. Whoops. I take my IP and trade secrets pretty seriously. I was flabbergasted. The other incident rehappening for the last month is that I use Private search function to avoid my browser from thinking my research is a buying search. This means that competitors don’t know I visited their site, and I am not bombarded with advertising for props and fans and pharmaceuticals and stuff I am currently developing. The issue is that sites that should be in the private category are popping up in the regular Tabs section. Security should be secure and thus it should not be attached to advertising profits. This is a breach of trust and probably goes back to greed. Leaking data to Google or another search engine. Our trust in Apple was our trust in the future. Now, where will we find it? 

Additional note; why do we need to trust our robot suppliers? Well, Robots will rat you out. They know things about you. Things that you would prefer to not be made public or attract the attention of government agencies or banks or organized  crime groups.. Thats simple enough. Our last freedoms live in the hands of our AI Droid masters. This is so scary. 

Now don’t get me wrong I believe humanoid androids are our future but only if they can be trusted. In order for them to be trusted the people making them must be our trustworthy friends. Like Apple used to be. So I leave the future in Apple’s hands and I will rat them out when they cease to be our friends.

Am I nieve? Perhaps. But not as nieve as a massive corporation that believes margins are more important than customers and friends.