Why everyone hated Apple and why they were wrong
Apple’s latest technical solutions have made a lot of noise. In the iPhone 7, the jack slot disappeared, in the new MacBook the usual connectors are replaced with USB Type-C and there is no memory card slot. Poster Daily recalls all the joys that engineers from Cupertino deprived us of, and why it is difficult to argue with them.
Apple for 30 years with an enviable persistence has been producing computers of closed architecture under the control of its own operating system. Neither the popularity of the PC as a gaming platform, nor the recognition in 2006 that Intel chips were better than their own could convince them of this. It turns out that the company, which we used to consider the most important developer of innovations, is in fact very conservative and rational in the market. By tradition, Apple itself decides what is needed and what the user does not need, and the vector of competitors does not seem to bother them at all.
Fear and Loathing for iTunes
With its appearance on the shelves, the iPod not only turned the MP3 player market upside down, but also spawned an army of haters. The then users could not do without a graphic equalizer, miniUSB and the ability to drop music folders. But iTunes had the highest wave of hatred – the user had to edit tags, synchronize the player with the computer, and in case of tag errors, do this several times. Not everyone then understood that iTunes was not so much an attempt to impose another software, as the first truly convenient opportunity to download music from the Internet, without violating copyright.
At a time when the music industry was drained by Internet piracy, and musicians and listeners were incredibly hostile to record companies, iTunes paved the way for a new way to monetize. In a 2003 interview with Rolling Stone magazine, Steve Jobs talked about iTunes: “If copyright dies and intellectual property protection disappears, people will stop investing. It will hurt everyone. People need an incentive in the fact that if they make a reasonable investment, they will receive a good income. Anyway, stealing is bad. It spoils the character. We want to offer a legitimate alternative. Of course, today college students, downloading music from the Internet, do not understand that they are doing the same thing as you did when you did the bootlegs of Bob Dylan’s notes. The fact is that it is difficult to wean people from piracy without proposing a legal alternative. ”
Memory Complaints
By 2009, the iPhone accounted for 47% of the global market, ahead of Symbian, Blackberry and Android smartphones. Instant success is easy to explain: by that time, the slow and complex Symbian had already exhausted itself, and Android was still far from perfect. But most smartphone owners are accustomed to using flash cards and were not going to give them up. Users transferred photos to SD cards using smartphones as a card reader, downloaded applications and music from a computer, dispensing with the slow and expensive mobile Internet. And, importantly, they were protected from data loss in the event of a phone breakdown. But Apple decided that memory cards are an extra option.
In 2011, Michael H., a Phonearena observer, wrote about external memory as a big problem with Android devices. Applications transferred to the card worked slower, widgets disappeared, download and operating system speeds decreased significantly, and application files were scattered throughout the file system.
Using memory cards also increased power consumption – perhaps the main scourge of smartphones of the time. Large companies such as HTC, Samsung and Motorola are still trying to abandon memory cards, especially in flagship models. However, faced with the indignation of users, they return to the original. To date, only two manufacturers have completely abandoned the use of external memory cards: Apple (since the iPhone was released in 2007) and Google (since 2010, the Nexus S).
Matthias Duarte (Google’s chief designer, and previously director of user interaction technologies) said in an interview: “In Nexus devices, we limited ourselves to internal memory so that users did not have to think about drives and files, about where it is better to save music, video and applications and how to configure it. So that applications just work well. ”
The new MacBook is like an apple of discord
Having abandoned memory cards on smartphones and tablets, in 2016 engineers from Cupertino switched to laptops. The rejection of memory cards in the MacBook Pro, which is used by professional photographers, musicians and directors, seemed absurd to many. But Phil Schiller, senior vice president of marketing for the company, called the memory card slot cumbersome in an interview with Independent and noted that many cameras are equipped with wireless data transmission devices, which is the most convenient solution for connecting the camera to a computer.
