I used to be an Apple fan

Dear Apple team,

I used to be a huge Apple fan.

I saved up whatever I could during my school years so that I could finally afford my first iPod in 2003, and my first Mac – a Powerbook G4 15" – during university in 2005.

That first Powerbook had tons of issues, and was finally replaced with one of the then-newly released MacBook Pros, which itself broke down a lot, yet still, I loved Apple. I loved how nice and fluid everything worked, I liked how it seemed to magically recover from every error, how it guided you to the solutions, and just how simple and intuitive it all seemed.

In 2008, I finally got my first iPhone. I could hardy wait for any new Apple event that was announced or even just rumoured. In early 2013, I finally switched to a new Retina MBP and soon after got and iPhone 4s.

I was working as a dev ops engineer for havok at that time, and in our office, I was the go to guy for anything Mac or iOS.

Yet, over the last year or two, I have begun losing interest, and got more and more frustrated with the Apple products I have.
My Mac failed to update to El Capitan, and multiple retries to recover it had failed, forcing me to go back to Yosemite. I get frequent crashes in built in Apps. Mail stopped to reliably fetch my mail, oftentimes I have to restart it to wake it up again. Since the iOS 9 update on my iPhone, apps that ran fluidly before have gotten almost unusable. Both my Mac and my iPhone bug me with notices to update every day, without a way to switch that off. The iPhone displays annoying fullscreen ads for newer iPhones, right inside built in apps. The list goes on and on.

Honestly, nowadays I’m a lot more satisfied with my Galaxy Note 8 tablet that still runs fast and ad-free 3 years after its release, and my Desktop PC running Windows 10 that I recently built. They seem to run smoothly, problem free, and do exactly what I’d expect - something that used to be the thing I loved about Macs.

My next notebook might be Windows machine again, the first time in over 10 years, and my next phone will probably not be an iPhone.

Apple seems to stand still in regard to innovations, and its software quality seems to degrade more and more – slow, irritating apps that are a pain to use because they try to hide all functionality behind an ever barer interface, forcing you to dig through menus and dialogs to find what you could easily do in the past. And the ever present feeling the products don’t strive to be a good tool to use for a long time anymore, but just a way to drag you along until the next update comes out.

I used to be an Apple fan. Sadly, I don’t think I am anymore.

With regards,

Johann