He’s just so smug
Last week, Brad Feld shared an email he received from a friend. The email was titled Hit In The Head With An Apple.
It touched on some very real issues dealing with Apple and working with Apple products. It also reminded me of a similar piece written by Jeffrey Zeldman called Curse of the Zeldman Curse. It’s a hilarious acocunt written by one of the web’s best storytellers.
I’ve become increasingly frustrated with Apple for some time. I love the products. I even love the level of support. I’ve been responsible for the purchase of close to $300,000 worth of Apple hardware, software, and support. And I’m sure I’ll continue to purchase some products, but dealing with Apple has not always been fun and games.
I remember expressing my frustration to Apple about a year ago. The crux of the issue is that I always get the impression from Apple that they are blaming me for the technical problems I have. Nothing is ever because of a flaw at Apple. Yes, they admit that bad products – lemons – exist, but they never admit that their methods, policies, or whatever cause the problem.
But …
Apple removes features or products with no warning. – arrows, final cut, Quicktime etc.
Apple will make arbitrary decisions and arrogantly assume that if you want those features you are the idiot – copy and paste, mms, flash (okay, I agree with that decision).
And perhaps most frustrating to me, they dismiss legitimate questions as non-issues based solely on their own product line. I’ll give you an example. A few years ago I was consulting a k-12 school about an iPad 1:1 program. The iPad did not support printing at that itme, so I asked the obvious question – “What about printing?” Their response was “Why do they need to print?” I might agree with the substance of that answer, and I’m even willing to assume these education reps knew me well enough to know that, but even so, the response was off-putting at best. What’s worse, if you ask me, is that their answer to that question now is “The iPad supports printing.” but they don’t want to discuss it any further than that.
Like I’ve already noted, I’ve been happy with their products and even with their support. We’re talking about a company that gave me two iPhones for free to make up for AT&T’s incompetence. They have also gone out of their way to warn me about using their products in cases where they knew there was a better option ( on the educatoin sales side ).
I just wish they wouldn’t be so smug.
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