iPhone – Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 3

The Gadget Price Conundrum That Isn’t Really A Conundrum

A future of haves and have less

It’s always fun watching folks trying to shoehorn yesterday’s conventional wisdom into tomorrow’s reality. It might feel like dealing with a today thing, but it’s actually making the point by missing it.

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Recently I’ve seen lots of blogging and social media mouthing off that such and such a device is boring, or isn’t innovative enough, or just iterates on last year’s model. Pick a device category and you’ll find a chorus singing that song. In the wake of Apple releasing the $599 MacBook Neo this week, which as a device seems anything but boring, I’ve seen plenty of folks complaining about the tech Apple left out to hit that low price point.

But that low price point is the point. And it’s not just a way to expand the market to more cost conscious consumers. That will happen of course. But Apple is opening up a future of higher price points for newer tech by now selling these lower priced Macs and iPhones that are anything but the low priced junk it once dismissed.

In case you’ve missed it there’s been a lot of preparation to condition the market for more advanced and more innovative tech that’s going to cost considerably more than what the median has been for quite some time.

No one knows for sure, but folding iPhones are predictably going to rival folding smartphone price points of other makers, and be much more expensive than what most consumers (I’m not talking tech writers and gadget bloggers) are used to seeing.

Whether costs go up because of new tech and new innovations, DRAM shortages, tariffs, wars, or what have you, the point is Apple, Samsung, and others are seeding the low end of the pricing fields to create more room for more expensive tech in the higher, richer pastures. Tech is poised to make some bolder moves, or so they tell us, but not everyone is going to be able to afford to play on the high end. But there is an essential, increasingly more marginalized market, perhaps not as lucrative on the margins, but still worth harvesting.

It’s no different than seeing the mix of higher end vehicles in the same traffic jam alongside rusting out beaters on the highway.

It’s actually and accurately a pretty sober assessment of how the frame of income inequality is gaining a more intense focus lately, even though it’s been that way for quite some time. Unless we’re EMP’d back to the Stone Age, tactile tech in our hands is going to be a part of all of our lives for quite some time. (Call me when you can do a video doctor’s appointment on an AI pin.) We’re just going to see a broader gap between what’s essential to have and what’s nice to have if you can afford it.

(Image from Julia Taubitz on Unsplash

You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.

Apple’s MacBook Neo Will Probably Hit Many Sweet Spots

The sweet spot that matters most is the price

I support a number of folks, both older and younger, who only use computers in the same basic way they use their smartphones. I’m thinking Apple’s new MacBook Neo, with a starting price of $599 will hit many of their sweet spots.

Of course, we’ll all have to wait for the reviews after the first wave of reviews, the ones that real users take the time to share before we really know what’s what. But if nothing else the pricing is going to be one of, if not the, winning feature. If the build quality lives up to what Apple usually provides I’m guessing it will be a hit, and sell millions, adding new opportunities for Apple Services revenue growth.

I saw someone somewhere yesterday say that you can buy an also newly introduced iPhone 17e alongside a MacBook Neo for the same price of the base MacBook Air. They are not far off. The number of iPhone users I know who have shied away from Mac computers, simply because of price, will I’m sure will be checking this out, especially since you’ll be seeing them on sale at Walmart, Best Buy and other outlets. Certainly given that possible customers will be able to see these computers in locations no where near Apple Stores.

Online chatter is about as you’d expect with both positive and negatives responses to the announcement. The negatives focus on what Apple did not include and lesser specs than existing MacBook lines. But in the end, the spec that matters is that $599 starting price. My guess is the online chatter and the reviews are going to be largely irrelevant regarding the success of this product.

You can watch Apple’s clever product intro video below.

Apple’s Color Wheelies

Color me a gadget utilitarian

I’ve never been one to be that obsessed with the color of tech gadgets or any of the other tools I use. Sure, colors attract, and I’m all in for more color rather than less in many things, but I’ve never been one who has made a gadget purchase based on color.

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In fact, I usually shy away from bolder color choices. I’ve typically chosen whatever version Apple is marketing as black when it comes to iPhones and whatever case I bury them in. I do the same for laptops, not straying too far from silver or occasionally the variant of Space Black that seems to change more frequently than I imagine happens in the dark depths of space. I do own a Blue iMac 24, but the last time I really saw the “blue” on the rear of the enclosure was when I set up the device.

I feel the much the same when it comes to other non-computing tools. Walking through a hardware store I always view the bright green, bright orange, red, aqua, and other multi-color designs of drills, other hand held tools, lawn care equipment, etc… as somehow cheaper than those with a more muted approach. They look more utilitarian, and frankly, suggest longer lifespans. As my grandkids age and I shop for their gifts, the more brightly colored tools look like toys to me.

I know I’m probably the oddball when it comes to color coveting. There certainly seems to be a lot of excitement about Apple presumably releasing new products with a slew of new color options soon. But I think of my computing devices the same way I do other tools. I acquire and use them to complete a task. Many others see them as personal statements and that’s cool. More power to those who need that or appreciate that sort of whimsy.

Another way I think of this is that if a tool maker needs to market new colors to keep customers excited about their products, it means the product has probably reached maturity enough to more than prove its value. But that doesn’t always keep the marketers employed.

(Images from 9to5Mac and MacRumors)

More Thoughts On iOS 26’s iPhone App Changes

Still very much a work in progress

Back last fall I wrote about the changes Apple made to the iPhone’s Phone app in iOS 26. I thought they were both helpful and confusing. I followed that up a month or so later suggesting that smartphone makers needed to make delete and report spam buttons more of a priority.

New Shareshot.

I still maintain the points I made in both of those posts, but here are some more thoughts after having used the Phone app since.

Regarding the Hold Assist Detection feature what I said earlier very much still applies.

It makes me think that the designers of this feature have never used the Phone app to call a pharmacy or a doctor’s office where the person answering the phone is so busy that when they answer they speak so fast that you can’t understand what they’re saying. In my experiences attempting to use this feature in cases like those, the person on the other end just hangs up and I have to make the call again.

Recently I spoke with a receptionist at one of my medical providers about this feature and her response I sums that up well from the other end of the line. Simply put she said, “I have no time for such nonsense.”

She said essentially the same thing about the Screen Unknown Callers feature that allows the call recipient to see who is calling or leaving a voicemail. As I previously mentioned I have the Ask Reason for Calling option selected. Early on there were a few callers that actually left a voicemail, but that seems to have diminished over time. My speculation is that those doing the calling have caught on and just continue down their call lists. With this same medical provider I missed several calls because she was using a different number assigned by their phone system than I had placed in my contacts and the call logged as Unknown.

As to making spam reporting a more prominent UI feature not buried under a series of menus and taps, if Apple (and others) were really serious about making life easier for their users they’d add a Delete and/or a Delete and Report Spam option to the notification of a call. I mentioned in that earlier post that this Call Filtering feature would probably lead to a whack-a-mole game with spam callers. Based on the increasing frequency of spam calls I’m receiving I think the spammers are currently on a trajectory to win that game.

I still don’t know why all phone calls I receive, welcome or unwelcome, are listed as a Priority Notification. Since last autumn I’ve changed my lazy habits with contacts and been diligent about providing good contact metadata for doctors and others I do business or social interactions with. At that point that appeared to be the best way to try and take advantage of the newer features. But honestly I don’t think it matters much at this point based on what I’m seeing.

I support several elderly relatives who use their iPhones for basic needs, communication being the primary one. Having had a chance over the holidays to physically examine their devices, I noticed little usage of the delete function in the Unknown Call Callers section of the Missed Calls list. There were long lists of unknown callers. I imagine at some point we’ll see articles on how to clean up those lists.

In summary, I’d say the new Phone app features are still helpful and still confusing. Like everything else with Apple these days they should be categorized as a work in progress. Here’s hoping we won’t be on hold too long before we see progress happen.

Matt Gemmell on “The Fallen Apple”

Dissatisfaction with the familiar breeds contempt

Matt Gemmell begins with an understatement. “It’s a troubling time to be a long-term Apple customer.” It doesn’t get any easier to read after that. Nor should it.

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Like many Apple users these days, including myself, Matt is expressing his dissatisfaction with Tim Cook’s Apple. Misery loves company. So does commiseration. The Fallen Apple is a powerful read, and I suggest you do so.

Yes, he points to Cook’s knee-bending and kowtowing that betrays much of the carefully cultivated culture Apple spent untold sums creating over the years, now tossed aside like a decaying FineWoven iPhone case. Perhaps with a sparing nod to rationality Gemmell calls it an act of “corporate sacrifice.”

But this paragraph is particularly damning:

I sometimes think about the full-page, black-background Steve Jobs memorial on the Apple site, with the list of tributes you could send submissions for. Then I try to imagine the same thing for Cook, and I find that it only cheapens the original. The Tim Cook of the Trump era is the erasure of a man who previously could do little wrong, but I think that ultimately it has also laid bare a person whose goals and even motives are as far from Apple’s erstwhile values as it’s possible to be. While Jobs gets to be remembered with artful aphorisms and elaborate hagiographies, surely Cook’s epitaph must be something along the lines of “another record quarter”.

Corporate rationality, like it or leave it, is often as distasteful as it is easy to comprehend. But in my view it requires the wrong kind of different thinking when you’ve built a company on creating an emotional connection with your users.

One thing leads to another. Gemmell points not just to the cultural upheaval and downward spiral, but also to a future that appears uncertain. As he puts it, “More perniciously, Apple is also hemorrhaging people and knowledge.” It makes one wonder if Apple University is still in existence. If so, what exactly are they teaching these days?

But, and to the larger point, he correctly states Apple isn’t hemorrhaging profit.

I hope very much to be wrong, but I fear that Apple’s skyrocketing revenue masks a steep institutional decline that is already well underway, propelled by the fact that success itself, improperly managed, is a poison.

It must be something for folks like Cook, Trump, Musk, etc… to sit atop such vast piles of money, knowing how much dislike and distaste they engender and how it undermines the thrones they cling to. Apples ripen and fall. Unless they are harvested. Either way, there’s an end.

Read the rest here.

(image from Johann Lensless on Shutterstock

Nikita Prokopov Takedown of macOS Tahoe Icons Is Iconic

Apple should be embarrassed. It won’t be.

Nikita Prokopov takes Apple’s macOS Tahoe designers to task over their use of icons in menus in a a terrific, yet saddening post called It’s Hard To Justify Tahoe’s iCons. It’s an iconic takedown over what I also find an unnecessary and distracting visual change in Tahoe. Set aside that I think it’s unnecessary and unattractive, it’s just implemented so poorly it makes me wonder how many resources Apple devoted to something this poorly done, and how many more resources it will have to devote to hopefully cleaning it up.

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Prokopov’s post is filled with examples that points up inconsistencies and confusing metaphors. It is illustrated extremely well with enough examples that anyone at Apple should find the cataloging of it embarrassing.

In his conclusion he states:

In my opinion, Apple took on an impossible task: to add an icon to every menu item. There are just not enough good metaphors to do something like that.

But even if there were, the premise itself is questionable: if everything has an icon, it doesn’t mean users will find what they are looking for faster.

And even if the premise was solid, I still wish I could say: they did the best they could, given the goal. But that’s not true either: they did a poor job consistently applying the metaphors and designing the icons themselves.

It’s well worth a read, but I tell you this, as bad and as distracting as I thought this macOS Tahoe design feature was, Prokopov’s post is full of so many examples that it actually makes Apple’s choices even more distasteful.

(Image from Propokov’s post)

My Year In The Apple Fruit Basket 2025

Not a good fruit crop yield for Apple

2025 was an odd year toiling in Apple’s orchard.

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Getting this out of the way upfront, it was a year that Apple’s corporate behavior, personalized by Tim Cook, made me think seriously about looking to fill my computing needs and habits elsewhere. That’s an ongoing discussion I’m having with myself. As it rattles around my brain, I don’t see an alternative that is any better or any worse from a corporate posture point of view. Apple has plenty of company.

From a technology point of view I also don’t see any better alternative beyond reliving my past hobbyist days with Linux that I’m far too old to contemplate. I used to be that geek. I’m not anymore. Aside from communal political knee bending, every tech company’s plunge into the Artificial Intelligence swamp has mucked up everything, everywhere all at once, in one way or another.

I have to touch Windows now and again and every time I do I feel like I need to take a purgative and wash my hands. I feel much the same about Google’s products. Life as a geek was already becoming increasingly more distasteful in the days when it was just the algorithms that enshittified everything, but adding Artificial Intelligence into the mix has created a slop that even hogs are beginning to turn away from. I know that’s all here to stay and I’m honestly sad that it is.

Hardware

This was the first year that I didn’t upgrade much Apple hardware. I don’t think it was a conscious choice correlating with Apple’s corporate behavior, but I won’t rule out my subconscious working against my small contribution to Apple’s bottom line. Let’s put it this way, I didn’t feel the usual gadget lust tugs and twinges over anything Apple announced this year.

I did upgrade to an iPhone 17 Pro and didn’t even think twice about taking a serious look at the iPhone Air. Apparently I wasn’t the only one. There’s nothing really remarkable to say about the 17 Pro. It’s as good and solid as it’s predecessor and if that’s incremental, than incremental is more than enough for me. I think that’s also true for most users.

I did pick up a pair of AirPods Pro 3 and wrote a quick review that you can read here. The battery life on the AirPods Pro 2 was approaching end of life, so it was time, and I use AirPods a lot.

I also upgraded to the Apple Watch Series 11 from the Series 10. It’s not that the Series 11 does anything more remarkable from a technology perspective. It doesn’t. But I’m in sort of a trap of upgrading every year due to the technology I use to monitor my diabetes.

I use the Dexcom G7 sensor that pairs with both my iPhone and Apple Watch to show me and my doctor how I’m doing with my blood sugar readings. I’ve come to rely on the constant monitoring on the Apple Watch app more than I do on the iPhone. But the two devices and their apps are married. On the Apple Watch that constant monitoring takes a heavy toll on Battery Life and Battery Health. Since I’ve been using that technology Battery Health can degrade at or below 70% in a year. That’s enough for me to upgrade every year.

That is an excellent example of one of the pitfalls of Apple’s development pace that drops new operating systems annually, but trickles out fixes over the course of a year. Dexcom developers take quite a bit of time to catch up with new hardware and software. They have to. They are a medical device company. That lag is certainly more acute with a device that monitors medical conditions, but this year’s round of operating system changes have been challenging for developers in all software categories leading us all into a perpetual year of beta software.

Summing up what I feel about Apple’s 2025 hardware releases I’ll leave it this way. Apple continues to make good improvements with each hardware iteration. Quite frankly, I’d be content to see Apple continue iterating the way it has since the dawn of the M-series chip change, but the many voices continually calling for something newer and bolder seem like they’ll have their day in the next few hardware cycles.

The current crop of Apple hardware has matured into the best I’ve seen on the market. Here’s hoping all that’s rumored continues that trend. That said, I don’t really see the appeal of a vastly more expensive folding iPhone beyond it being a regressive retro move and small enough to make it easier to stuff in a pocket. I guess the next big retro innovation will be to bring back mechanical keyboards. But, hey the Commodore 64 also made a come back this year. I’m guessing a folding iPhone will be enough to excite the faithful. For a few months.

Software

Software provided the real color on Apple’s fruit plate this year with what they shipped and what they still haven’t. The Apple Intelligence slices are browning around the edges, leaving an unappetizing anticipation for what may or may not be unveiled. I say “may not” because in Apple’s announcement last spring delaying the rollout of how Apple Intelligence integrates with the “new Siri” there was an important word that most seem to have overlooked. Here’s the statement:

“Siri helps our users find what they need and get things done quickly, and in just the past six months, we’ve made Siri more conversational, introduced new features like type to Siri and product knowledge, and added an integration with ChatGPT. We’ve also been working on a more personalized Siri, giving it more awareness of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps. It’s going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year.”

The key word in that statement is “anticipate.” Most conventional assumption makers believe whatever Apple is working on will roll out sometime in the first half of 2026. But that word “anticipate” is a great hedge that only a PR professional or lawyer could love. I don’t doubt the pressure is on to release something. I wouldn’t bet a dime on it happening before WWDC 2026.

As for what Apple Intelligence is currently, it’s still nothing to write home about. Notification summaries remain a comedy gold mine. I think I’ve touched the Writing Tools a few times, but fall back on other proofreading habits and tools. Whatever Siri is or is not doing, it’s gotten worse and even less predictable than it was before. Every time an accidental touch of the camera button light’s up the border of the screen it’s more a reminder of what’s not there than what it was promised to do. Whatever Apple is planning, the current iteration feels like it’s been largely abandoned like a rotting piece of fruit.

Liquid Glass was the feature that did ship. Countless words have proliferated around the Internet about the design change. I’ve written a few myself. My take at year end is that Liquid Glass is neither here nor there.

Legibility issues and design disasters need lots of work and attention, most of which won’t come while the number 26 is still affixed to the operating systems. Devices still work, even though I’m seeing more and more haphazard weirdness as app developers try to play catch up while Apple itself is still trying to chase down its own problems.

Given the leadership turmoil within Apple who knows what Liquid Glass may or may not become in the future. But then who knows what it was actually intended to be in the first place, beyond a distraction from the Apple Intelligence miss. It certainly wasn’t designed to fulfill anything Apple’s marketers thought it might. If there’s harmony in trying to unify things across platforms, someone needs a basic course in music theory.

While I don’t hate Liquid Glass my continuing impression is that it still feels childish in a bubbly sort of way that doesn’t jive with the sophistication that the advanced hardware platforms seem to beg for. That was my first impression when Liquid Glass rolled out, and it was solidified after spending a large junk of time with my grandkids and other relatives’ kids watching them play children’s games on their non-Apple tablets over the holidays.

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It may look cool to some, but it feels like undercarriage lighting on a car to me.

There Were Some Good Things

The most important operating system change that Apple made was iPadOS 26, finally instituting, and then continuing to iterate on, a much better windowing system for iPads.

And, the best new feature on any of the Apple devices I use the most is the Wrist Flick to dismiss a notification on my Apple Watch. It’s simple, it’s effective, it makes sense on all levels. It should have existed earlier. And it should be what Apple aspires to with everything it creates.

Spotlight was given an overhaul offering new features like a clipboard manager. I’m still experimenting with it, but can see how it might replace Raycast in the future if Apple continues iterating on it. It’s a good addition that still needs work.

I think Apple is on to something with the changes it made for the Phone app to try and help alleviate spam calls. I hope they continue to improve this, because as good an effort as it is, I and others still find it confusing.

Perhaps the best thing about the OS 26 releases beyond that is that all of my devices are working as I anticipate if I look past (not through) Liquid Glass and avoid Apple Intelligence.

Summing Up

In the end, I think 2025 will be considered a lost year for Apple. I maintain that Apple’s ability to take the long view strategically hindered more than it helped. And I think that some of the executive level changes reflect that. But the fact that it takes a long time to see any new substantial change in an already crowded and confused orchard didn’t argue well for the year to be a success. The political posturing alongside the product missteps has led to my personal disgruntlement and I know it has for many others as well.

One of the many Apple mantras that we’ve become accustomed to is that Apple designs its products for 90% of its users. That may indeed still be true. As much as I feel comfortable with steady iteration in hardware and software, it feels to me increasingly that Apple is reaching more and more for innovations that excite the remaining 10%. I get that. And to a degree it’s commendable. But in my experience with the users I support, the majority of those in that 90% probably never even attempt to use many of these new innovations. It’s not a case of reach exceeding grasp in my opinion. Rather, it’s reaching in the wrong direction.

Apple has already made some noise that the next OS versions will be more fixing and futzing rather than feature rich. How could it not be? By the same token, how could it be if, I as feel is increasingly likely, it will be the first time we see what the new Siri and Apple Intelligence will really offer.

I also think Apple and the other tech companies need to pay attention to the warning signs that are starting to bubble up about Artificial Intelligence. I think most of the growing distaste of AI comes not from what these tech companies are offering on computing platforms, but from the day to day encounters people are experiencing in their daily lives as more and more non-tech companies roll out versions of AI support. The way I’m hearing and feeling it, jokes and complaints about AI at holiday gatherings this year are starting to compete in numbers with ones about government and politics.

I don’t think that’s an accomplishment that augurs well.

(First image from Johann Lensless on Shutterstock)

Apple’s Customer Support Weaknesses

Closing holes in customer support

The story from Paris Buttfield-Addison about losing 20 years of his digital life due to a hacked gift card broke last week when I was watching my grandkids. I was able to follow along but didn’t have time to comment, but it certainly flashed me back to some issues I have had with Apple in the past. The good news is that it appears that someone from Apple’s Executive Relations solved the issue.

If you aren’t up on the story the quick summary is that Paris Buttfield-Addison attempted to redeem a $500 Apple Gift Card he had recently purchased from a third party retailer. The card had been tampered with. Apple’s system saw it as problematic and disabled his 25-year old account. After frustrating attempts to resolve the situation Buttfield-Addison blogged about his situation, which was picked up by much of the Apple press. That in turn prompted action which escalated the situation to the Executive Relations Team. You can read all about it here.

As I said, the good news is that the account was eventually restored.

The bad news is that it took the pressure from exposure online to solve the issue. What’s good is that the story was picked up enough to generate that pressure. Often that’s not the case.

I can testify to that from two events in my Apple experiences. Both of which required escalation to the executive level. The second one requiring intervention from Craig Federighi after I had all but given up hope. You can read about that adventure here. It took quite a while to get that issue resolved, one that lasted through several operating system revisions.

The worse news is that increasingly if you have an issue with Apple (or any other large company for that matter) that falls outside their prescribed systems of support you really have to be either lucky or damned persistent to get a resolution. There’s an old saying that if you have one employee you have an employee problem. That applies to customers also. If you have one, you have a customer relations problem. To be fair in a company as large as Apple it has to be tough to mitigate these kind of issues given the very large number of users.

But if you smash those old sayings about employees and customers together the resolution dynamic can easily become untenable. It shouldn’t. The fact that large companies have to have an Executive Relations Team speaks to failures in management. Anyone remember Comcast Cares on Twitter? Great that it existed. An admitted failure that it had to.

When a company anticipates potential breakdowns and devotes resources to solving problems its existing customer support systems can’t handle, the dog is chasing its tail. One has to assume the resources devoted to Executive Relations Teams solving issues that regular customer support systems can’t must be less expensive than addressing the flaws in existing customer support mechanisms. At least I hope that’s the case. The alternative is that a company just doesn’t care.

To be fair, there will obviously be issues that can’t be anticipated that require some method of higher level oversight to be corrected. Customers can only hope that leads to better support further down the line once an out of the ordinary problem arises. Unique problems crop up all the time and rules and regulations get changed to deal with them. But setting up barriers to problem solving creates its own set of problems.

With more and more companies adopting AI solutions to help with customer service and support, it makes one wonder if we’ll end up with AI Executive Relations Teams made up of AI engines solving problems AI support created in the first place. But I imagine it will fall back to humans.

Assuming you can reach one without needing allies in the media to help make your case.

Thieves Get Picky And Only Want iPhones

Picky pickpockets

I find this story funny. I shouldn’t. But I do.

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Apparently thieves are picky when it comes to the smartphones they steal. According to this report in London Centric:

The thieves took Sam’s phone, his camera and even the beanie hat off his head. After checking Sam had nothing else on him, they started to run off.

What happened next was a surprise. With most of the gang already heading down the Old Kent Road, one turned around and handed Sam back his Android phone.

The thief bluntly told him why: “Don’t want no Samsung.”

As I said, I shouldn’t find anyone who finds themselves in this sort of misfortune funny. The victims. Not the thieves, obviously.

Discerning criminals are all about the resale value apparently. Which, if all of the analysts and fanboys get smart about it, might be a new metric to score the ridiculous game of which smartphones are better than another.

(Image from Donenko Okeksli on Shutterstock)

Apple Peelings

Like it or not, Apple locks us all into perpetual betas

A concerned reader asked me a question the other day. She wondered why I always seem so down on Apple even though I use lots of Apple gear.

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I have many reasons to be down on Apple. I’m not fond of how Tim Cook has sucked up to the Trump regime. I think Apple’s monopolistic policies harm developers and users alike. I think Apple can’t live up to the pace it has put themselves and us on. Apple’s “It just works” mantra long ago faded into the dustbin of history the same way Google’s “Do no evil” did.

That last one is the one that gets me riled up the most.

Things don’t “just work” anymore. They work sometimes. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes after working for a while they just stop. Sometimes they return to working. Sometimes not. I chalk this up to the fact that every Apple user is essentially running beta software whether or not they have opted into betas. (I don’t run betas.) As I’ve stated here often, when beta software arrives for beta users on their devices, beta software is also being introduced behind the scenes on Apple’s servers. Beta users expect there to be issues. That’s the price of admission. Non-beta users do not. And in my view, they shouldn’t be exposed to those same “take your chances” experiences.

Most users aren’t aware of this and some of the signals that are easily missed are so common place that they are easily ignored. For example, if you use an Apple Watch to log in to a Mac, every now and then you’ll see a message on your Mac that you have to sign in with your password to make that Apple Watch feature work again. Typically, that happens around the time Apple releases a new beta version. Or you may see that a notification that a device you’ve owned for quite some time has suddenly signed on as a new device to your iCloud account as a new device.

Things get muddier still as most Apple coverage is about what’s happening with each new beta and ignores the problems that backend issues may cause for non-beta users. At least I rarely see it and I try to stay current. Apple coverage is also spending as much time looking to the future as it does the current moment. That begs the question, are we just bored with the present and if so, why?

Apple is on what seems to me like a far too haphazard and perhaps reckless pace of advancing software development that is leaving users and developers playing catch up, while it does the same. It’s one thing to play catch up, it’s another to play catch up when you’re adding new features into the mix at the same time. I get it. The pace of tech, fed by the AI bubble/boom/bombast is forcing everyone into a high stakes race. But it sure isn’t taking care of the potholes on the racetrack.

The last few years there’s been a period in the spring each year where things have settled down somewhat before they start ramping up again for the next year’s betas to be released at Apple’s WWDC. That typically comes after a .3 or .4 release of that year’s current operating system. That’s typically in the Spring and often feels like a breath of fresh air. I like the Spring. I also like the Fall, but while I eagerly look forward to the leaves changing color, I approach Apple’s annual Fall operating system releases more and more with trepidation knowing that some of the Summer’s beta issues will continue as we head into Winter.

A big part of this in my opinion is Apple’s fortunate position of taking a long view in its hardware and software development. Apple may be working several generations ahead of whatever they are selling at the moment, but I don’t believe they are paying enough attention to what’s happening in the moment the majority of its users are living.

But, back to that original question. After some of the bigger issues I mentioned earlier became prominent enough to make me question my use of Apple products I did some looking around and some self examination. Given that I support a number of folks who use Apple products as well as products from other makers it was easy enough to do. The simple sum that all added up to is that Apple’s hardware is, in my opinion, the best of what’s on the market, and no one else has come up with software solutions any more reliable than Apple at the moment. I chalk that up to the AI rat race that feels more and more likely to keep companies and users frustrated for sometime to come while everyone chases promises that more than likely won’t pan out they way they were sold.

Sure, I could try to work my older geek muscles back into shape and chuck it all and buy cheaper equipment to run Linux, etc…and that has had some romantic appeal. But in the end, I am no longer that romantic and will admit to the compromise that I need something that works reliably most of the time, if not all of the time.

The fact that I felt very uncomfortable typing the phrase “most of the time” in that previous sentence is I guess the best answer to the user question I opened this post with.

In a different context, but to the same point, since I pay for the hardware and the services I use, I feel I have every right to complain when something doesn’t work reliably or as advertised. It’s no different than complaining to my grocer or my auto mechanic when they don’t live up to service I initially signed on for. Sad to say, my realization is that it’s easier to change grocers or auto shops if things don’t change for the better. And that’s the compromise I’ve let Apple (and the rest of the tech sector) force me into.

I write about my experiences mostly. I don’t regurgitate Apple’s PR for clicks and then comment how problematic something might be on a podcast down the road when something new is rolling out. If I’m having a bad experience I’m betting others are too. So, I share what’s at my fingertips, on my screen, and occasionally running rampant in a memory leak.

(Image from zebronit on Shutterstock)