Wow, two years! Craziness. And speaking of craziness, my letter to Apple:
August 31st, 2011 by Kasmir
Hi there,
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I feel it’s prudent at this point to give you the first feedback I’ve ever sent in to you guys. I’ve been an apple product & software fan for years, and have been an active proponent of almost all of your products and software, and what an amazing experience everything has been, spreading the word throughout my friends & family, many of whom are now also Apple fans. For the last year or two however, that love has taken a rather abrupt downturn, and with the release of Lion, I’ve been extremely frustrated, and am now planning the first downgrade I’ve ever even considered in my long history of using OSX. The operating system is easily the worst release I’ve ever seen of OSX. It’s buggy, is slower than Snow Leopard, and the new “features” that have been added are extremely irritating. The remembering documents or open windows functionality seems like it was only half finished, most of the applications don’t seem to care about the global override (which is irritating enough to have to do on its own), and the checkbox you get on restart to re-open things doesn’t remember the last choice you picked, forcing you to turn it off every time you reboot. The decision to switch the scroll direction of the trackpad, while I consider unintuitive and stupid, should at minimum have only been applied for those people installing a fresh copy of the OS. Anyone upgrading an existing system should have been left alone. External monitor support has been extremely frustrating. I actually had to put a call into the support center just to be able to log in with an external keyboard, which worked flawlessly in Snow Leopard, and even now that we got the initial frustration resolved, it -still- requires me to leave my mouse perfectly still until the screensaver kicks in, otherwise the monitors stay black and I have to do irritating steps to get a login prompt back. These are just a few of the more irritating things about Lion that I’ve encountered. There are others, but they’re too numerous to list. At this point, it’s far too much like running a windows system, one of the things I find really irritating with Windows is that every time I do a fresh install, I have to spend a couple of hours going in and turning off all of the extremely irritating bells and whistles, security settings and bloatware that are all on by default for no good reason. With OSX, I never had this experience, the most I ever had to do before was go in, change my color defaults to silver, and disable mouse acceleration (albeit this is a command line script, which is irritating in its own right, but easy to fix). This is a sad, sad turn for the operating system, and unless things change drastically, will likely mean that my next system is not a Mac.
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This has just been about the operating system thus far, but I also have large issues with the app store. It’s bad enough that even with products that I know and love, if they’ve moved their releases to only being available on the app store, I have stopped using them. There’s only one left that I use, and as soon as I find a good replacement for it, I will be ceasing to use that as well. I’ve let all of these companies know this as well. I’ve owned a fair number of IOS systems, a few iPods, an iPad and now an iPad 2, and with all of them, by far my least favorite part of the system has always been the store. It’s clunky, slow, hard to find anything, and the inability to queue downloads with it without having to re-launch the application is frustrating beyond belief. This kind of thing on its own has already made me decide to by an Android device for my cell phone instead of an iPhone 4, it was a tough decision, but I just couldn’t bring myself to spend that much money on a device that is that massively locked down and irritating to use.
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I’ll stop here, I think my point is clear, and hopefully my voice isn’t a lone one, and will help you guys get back onto your good path. I personally know a good many other Mac lovers that are in the same boat, all considering switching back to Snow Leopard, and when it comes time to upgrade hardware, going elsewhere, but I’m sure if you start putting your focus back on quality and customer ease of use, you can win us back like you did oh so many years ago.
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Thank you,
I’m going to try and do something at least weekly to keep things rolling, so if you notice i’m overdue, whack me upside the head or something 