> it’s a company that I feel has lost its alignment with me and other long-time Apple users and customers.

When OS X debuted there was a daytime radio talk show in my area called “The Computer Guys.” They capably covered all sorts of computing topics, but were clearly long-time Apple dudes. And they spent weeks complaining about what a disaster OS X was. The Dock was useless and violated Apple’s HIG. The Finder made all the same mistakes as Windows did. And a text terminal? Like DOS?? Who the hell is ever going to want to use that on a Mac?

Going even farther back, it was long-time dedicated Apple users who booed when Jobs announced the deal with Microsoft.

Being a long-time dedicated Apple user is a shitty job. You don’t get paid, have no input, and are constantly disappointed. And Apple does not care about you.

I strongly suggest people should throw this notion away. It does not matter how long you’ve bought from a big company, they owe you nothing. If the latest product seems good, buy it. If not, don’t. Any more emotional investment than that is going to cause pointless unhappiness.

Save your customer loyalty energy for businesses where you can actually establish a connection, like a restaurant you like, or a local handyman.

>> it’s a company that I feel has lost its alignment with me and other long-time Apple users and customers.

> When OS X debuted there was a daytime radio talk show in my area called “The Computer Guys.” They capably covered all sorts of computing topics, but were clearly long-time Apple dudes. And they spent weeks complaining about what a disaster OS X was. The Dock was useless and violated Apple’s HIG. The Finder made all the same mistakes as Windows did. And a text terminal? Like DOS?? Who the hell is ever going to want to use that on a Mac?

I kind of see it differently. That is, Apple did in fact lose the alignment with the Classic MacOS fans but Apple did it on purpose. Objectively, by 2001 standards MacOS sucked and you wouldn't want to align with people who think otherwise. As the result Apple broke out of a small stagnating niche and won a big market.

This is different from today's situation where it feels like Apple breaks the alignment not on purpose and not by innovation but rather just slowly drifts out.

There's a theory in the comments that they want to align with "people who want the best camera array and have money to burn". This could be true but even then it doesn't look like a good strategy to win a big market long-term. More like a retreat back into a small niche that may stagnate in the future, like "people who want the best publishing software and have money to burn".

Save your loyalty for people that matter in your actual life.

There isn’t a single business in existence that cares about you. Even companies in the business of keeping you alive will only do so while doing so makes them a profit.

I say this as the example of the local handyman is one where you will matter more. It’s a human relationship with a real person not a fake relationship with one person and a spreadsheet

> The Finder made all the same mistakes as Windows did.

Tbf, the Finder is still crap (if only it would be nearly as good as Windows Explorer was in its heyday I would probably use it more), and the UNIX terminal is pretty much needed to make a Mac usable in the first place - which is fine though, because the UNIX-ness was exactly why I switched to Mac ;)

I had been fairly anti apple my entire life. Believing they were massively over priced, and lacked support for many of the things I did personally.

In my younger years I was pretty big on graphic design, still big on video editing. People used to always say "Mac is better for design". I would ask, where did you get this from? Adobe runs on both platforms and updates often come out for Windows before they are ported to Apple (Adobe updates). And my Windows machines had powerful graphics cards, unlike macs.

However. A couple years ago I built myself an insanely expensive computer build with the best parts I've ever put into a machine. It died 2 years later.

I decided I just couldn't go through that anymore. I'm done building computers. I'm done with the little problems they always get. I'm done fixing my machine more than using it.

Since the $500 Mac mini, Apple has started looking interesting. Finally I bought the Mac Studio M3 Ultra.

So far so good. I wish I could play more games, but I could be looking into things like Crossover. There are a few old bespoke programs for old versions of Windows I also wish I could run once in a while but nothing too major.

And best of all, Apple Care +. I'm not dealing with a broken machine again. I'll be buying warranties for it until I'm done with it. Bought 2 years for I think about $200, and my understanding is I should be able to renew that service/warranty at the end of the two years. After that, we'll see.

> If the latest product seems good, buy it. If not, don’t.

There is another aspect to this though. As a user of an ecosystem, you're committed in many ways. As Apple or Microsoft or Google releases a new version of their operating system you're going to run that on hardware you already own. You're going to run software that you already own on that the OS. And you're doing to use skills and knowledge of that software to accomplish something useful.

In some ways it doesn't matter if the product is good or bad -- you're pretty committed. You're going to be willing to suffer some pain because the alternative is too difficult and too expensive. The only thing you really can do is complain.

> Save your customer loyalty energy for businesses where you can actually establish a connection, like a restaurant you like, or a local handyman.

Couldn't agree more. But I'd add that some (smaller?) businesses, where you still can't really establish a connection, can be worth your loyalty if they have a mission that resonates with you, and they are actually true to that mission. Of course, be prepared for the day when they get too successful and start acting in ways against the principles they were founded upon.

But yeah... I think the best place to use our energy is by evangelizing people first and foremost, not businesses. Send people to your favorite restaurant because the owner is always there, chats with customers, and seems to love what they do. Recommend the person who regularly cuts your hair and cares enough to remember you and ask about your life. Refer that great handyman to others, who you trust to be a straight-shooter, pride themselves on the quality of their work, and not gouge you on cost.

> The Dock was useless

> The Finder made all the same mistakes as Windows did

Aren't these basically true, even now? If I could easily, completely remove the Dock and Finder, I would.

Launching apps via search (e.g., Spotlight) is quicker and easier than hunting for icons visually (especially given the amount of clutter on the Dock by default), and so is switching apps via search (e.g., Contexts, Witch, etc.).

Finder is the least capable file manager I've ever used since the Windows 3 days. If I could replace it wholesale with CyberDuck or something, I would.

The biggest reason for me using Android is simply because of how much competition there is in the space. If I use Apple products and don't like something they do then I'm stuck on an older version at best and need to migrate everything from their walled garden (at great cost) at worst.

With Android, I can use Samsung one generation, switch to Pixel the next, and give Motorola/some other smaller company a chance later. I can choose a phone that has the exact features I want - better battery life? great camera? best performance? great display? cheap price? smaller display? larger display? There's a phone for each of those.

Don’t forget the waves of rage when Apple removed the CD-ROM drive from laptops.

Or when USB Type A ports disappeared in favor of USB-C ports.

Or when the iPhone dropped the headphone jack. People still seethe about this decision even though Apple sells an excellent DAC for $9.99 that rates extremely well when tested by the audiophile obsessives and is easy to leave permanently attached to your headphones.

There are two types of long-term Apple users: Those who can go with the flow and shrug off the changes, and those who are deeply pained whenever anything changes. The latter group mostly comes around after a couple years and the issues are forgotten.

> Save your customer loyalty energy for businesses where you can actually establish a connection

I feel like modernity has brought about an identity for people as consumers. Much like a pro sports team who you have no relationship with beyond proximity, brands have slowly gained the same kind of consumptive identity associations. I see it by for the most in golf, where people literally wear caps repping their favorite club and ball manufacturers, rather than athletes.

For me, I’m prefer to associate with brands that have some kind of editorial voice that align with my own. Like media outlets, university, or individuals.

Save your customer loyalty energy for businesses where you can actually establish a connection

To be fair, I find despite the various foibles, Apple has always looked out for me when it comes to accessibility -- where none of the competitors bother. Maybe I shouldn't act out of loyalty, but they will keep getting my business as they keep it up (despite Liquid Arse stuffing up accessibility quite a bit).

The worst Apple era for me was the butterfly keyboard / touchbar era of Macs. They went too far in the pursuit of thin and light - removing ports, going with a keyboard design that felt bad to type on and was prone malfunction, and the touchbar, which I actually thought sounded cool at first, ended up being much less useful than a row of function keys.

I didn't feel betrayed by Apple, I just decided not to buy a new MacBook until they fixed their keyboard issues. I switched to Linux for a couple of years, and switched back once they released the M1 MacBook Pro. I'm perfectly happy with my Macs (I have 3) now.

I actually really like the current era of Apple where their motto seems to be give people what they want. MacBook Pros with HDMI ports and SD card readers. iPads finally getting viable multi-tasking support and a real mouse cursor (although iPadOS still sucks IMO). The iPhone 17 Pro is slightly thicker than the 16 Pro to allow for a bigger battery. Their storage and memory upgrade prices are still ridiculous, but at least Macs come with a usable 16 GB memory minimum now, and iPhones start with an honestly better-than-I-expected 256 GB storage.

It's not all perfect - especially on the software side. The settings menu on iOS is kind of a cluster. Apple Music has a terrible UX, as does the recent update to Photos. And I haven't tried Tahoe and Liquid Glass yet - but I'm definitely a little concerned.

> Any more emotional investment than that is going to cause pointless unhappiness.

Agreed 100%. If you're writing 2,000+ word blog posts out of anger and exasperation, you should take it as a moment of self reflection that just maybe you're too invested in a corporation.

>> The Dock was useless and violated Apple’s HIG.

Oh, the atrocities of "simplification" made during Ive's later years of leadership are so numerous that they beggar belief. Many aspects of iOS and macOS no longer conform to even the basic principles of UI affordances.

> It does not matter how long you’ve bought from a big company, they owe you nothing

The same can be said of employers. The company does not care about you no matter how many years you’ve been there. If you’re not c-suite, you're just a cog.

> HIG

Thing is, the Human Interface Guidelines were a sort of contract with the user, and the same goes for the ethos or culture or principles a big company has, if any. So in a sense they do have a connection with customers, via "community", if they choose to do so (and choose to be sincere about it instead of faking). I mean a business can be bigger than a local handyman and still go down the friendly path, for years potentially, until it decides that the friendly strategy was wasteful and streamlines it away.

> And a text terminal? Like DOS?? Who the hell is ever going to want to use that on a Mac?

Why complain about something you don't need to use if you don't want to?

What's great about the commandline? Scriptability, automation, configurability, composability, the easy re-running of complex commands with a small tweak, access Unix commandline tools that have been fined tuned over decades.

And to compare the terminal to DOS is not to understand the gulf in quality between them.

> Who the hell is ever going to want to use that on a Mac?

Developers & scientists. They are people too :-)

Agree, completely.

Also aligns in spirit with "company is not your family" idea.

The original post reads like an aggregation of complaints. I have some too! In particular stating that the Apple Watch is too complicated to use resonates. I have/use regularly but I am never pleased w/the interface.

AirPods on the other hand - a gem. They just work. Sure, they sometimes awkwardly disconnect/connect to other devices (when I have more than 1 vying for attention) but they're rock solid for me thus far.

> Save your customer loyalty energy for businesses where you can actually establish a connection, like a restaurant you like, or a local handyman

Thank you for saying this

I believe the term is "parasocial relationship".

I found this article quite weird. It would be one thing if it were (yet another) "Company X has lost its way..." kind of article. But this post seemed more along the lines of "Apple built these things that I don't care about."

Umm, so??? Obviously some people do, and this article struck me as someone complaining that Apple isn't building exactly what he wants. Furthermore, his analysis seems way off base to me: "Relying on legacy and unquestioning fanpeople, for whom everything Apple does is good and awesome and there’s nothing wrong with it, can only go so far." Apple stopped relying on "legacy and unquestioning fan people" a long time ago, ever since they basically became "the iPhone company" to a majority of their userbase.

Arguably, they were wrong on all these points. Unix roots (text terminal) gave the one of the strongest boosts to Macbook sales in terms of newly minted developers. Deal with Microsoft brought not only much needed liquidity, but also Office, which was "the killer app(r)" for that era. Let me add one more - people complained about PowerPC->Intel switch, and then same people complained about Intel->Arm switch (both brave and visionary decisions which has been years in the making. The naysayers may complain about everything and nothing but Apple continues to prevail - I am saying that as no Apple fanboy - viva la Amiga!

It's not just about emotion or loyalty. It's about built-up knowledge and the difficulty of switching.

When you're a long time user, you know how to do everything with what you're using - whether that's an operating system, a programming language, or something else.

The latest product isn't good and your suggestion is "don't buy it." OK, what do I do instead? Buy a Windows or Linux laptop where I have to re-learn a decade's worth of knowing-how-everything-works? Build up my natural flow in a new OS? Find whatever are the Windows alternatives for all the little things that I do on my Mac?

I'm not saying that companies owe things to their customers, but I think it's really simplistic to say that it's just an emotional investment and misplaced loyalty. People have a tool and then a company makes that tool worse. There are other tools, but it takes time to learn them, figure out their differences and how to get everything done with them, etc. Pretending that there's zero cost to switching is disingenuous.

For example: if you're a software engineer and someone made your main programming language bad, there's a high cost to switching to a new language. Even if you're excellent at learning new languages, you don't know which libraries are good, you don't know what various functions are named, you don't know what warts are in the build system (and how to avoid them), etc.

It's not just some emotional response or misplaced loyalty. It's that you've built up skills over many years that are tied to that thing.

I’ve also come to this realization as a longtime Mac user. Granted, I’m not old enough to have used the classic Mac OS as a professional, though I did use it in my childhood. However, I was in high school and college during the Jobs era of Mac OS X, and that’s when I started using Macs as my daily drivers from 2006 until 2022 when I retired my 2013 Mac Pro and 2013 MacBook Air and switched back to PCs running Windows.

Before Apple’s success with the iPhone, Apple was essentially the Macintosh company. Its fortunes were tied to the Mac, and Apple seemed to be attuned to the needs of Mac users. In return, there was quite a strong Mac fandom. The Mac was more than just a tool or just a platform. The Mac was a philosophy, and what attracted people to the Mac was the philosophy of the Mac and its ecosystem.

Ever since the iPhone became a major hit, and especially since the passing of Jobs, it became apparent to me that my best interests as a computer user and Apple’s interests as a company no longer align. Apple no longer needed to cater to “the Mac faithful” to survive. In fact, Apple is one of the biggest companies in the world thanks to the iPhone. It also seems that macOS is losing its distinctiveness.

The unfortunate thing, and I think this is where some Mac users get emotional and disappointed, is that there’s nothing else out there in the personal computing landscape that is like the glory days of the Mac. Windows is an inconsistent mess filled with annoyances, and the bazaar of the Linux ecosystem is nothing like the polished cathedral of the Mac. Everything is a step down from older Macs, even modern Macs.

However, while thankfully we can enjoy retrocomputing for hobbyist use, many of us still need to use up-to-date platforms to browse the Web and to get our work done, and so clinging on to, say, Snow Leopard is not an option outside of hobbyist activities. Hence, why I use Windows. It’s not Snow Leopard but it gets the job done for now.

The beauty about software, though, is that we don’t have to resign ourselves to accepting whatever Apple, Microsoft, and Google releases. Many of us reading this forum have the ability to write our own software. FOSS projects such as Linux have shown that it’s possible for user communities to write their own software that fit their needs without needing to be concerned about business matters such as market dominance.

So, yes, this is a hard lesson for many longtime Mac users about being loyal to a company; companies change. But this lesson also creates opportunities. I think if enough disaffected longtime Mac users got together and pooled their resources together, we could create a FOSS alternative that is community-driven, one where the evolution of Mac-like personal computing is driven by the community, not by Apple or any other corporation.

> And a text terminal? Like DOS?? Who the hell is ever going to want to use that on a Mac?

Had they never used MPW?

FWIW, I use macOS everyday since more than 15 years (I also have a PC running various distros) and it’s true that the dock is absolutely dogshit. It’s unclear what will happen wen you click on anything, it’s useless if you have multiple windows of the same application, it’s even more of a mess if you have multiple windows but some are minimized.

And of course in 2025, all applications icons are some variant of the same red green blue yellow colors so nothing stands out of the dock because it doesn’t show anything else than the icon.

Yup, I hate the dock :)

The crowd you’re talking at say things like “I love Apple” unironically as an expression of self-discovery and identity.

I wish it was possible. I bought an iPhone 13 mini that was running well.

now if I want to stay secured I got to regularly update the phone and eventually get iOS 26, which will make the phone horrendous.

What choice do I have ?

Ok but who do I buy from? I agree Apple isn’t good but who is better?

  what a disaster OS X was

"If the latest product seems good, buy it. If not, don’t."

Well, they have done a good job with lock in. If you've bought a bunch on Apple Music, you need an apple device laying around to get it. Maybe some people just keep there old phone around just for this. But it can be a hard transition.

Really, 'lock in', is the key to a lot of technology these days, so be aware.

This is such a unfair interpretation, it's a false equivalence argument. "OS X added Terminal and throwing out HIG for a UNIX-y UI" is a moot point.

It's not about loyalty, it's about Apple's own coherence and vision as a creative-technology company, and a bunch of sophisticated users offering a critique of it over time. Read it that way and it makes a lot more sense.

Beneath the Apple "fandom" or any fandom there are valid reasons why they came to be (the quality of the product), and we ought to elevate that than call customers naive for not adopting the very corporate cynicism that is a result of anticompetitive economics.

> And a text terminal? Like DOS?? Who the hell is ever going to want to use that on a Mac?

Me. I have to use a Mac at work, and I use the text terminal more than anything else on the computer. It doesn't help that Mac's don't have a good UI, everything is hidden behind extra key-presses, and switching between windows is a PAIN.

On a mac every window for an app is considered the same, so there's no concept of switching between windows (except with special hidden key presses).

When a window is in the background it doesn't receive clicks, so you have to click on it twice.

The menubar of a non-active window doesn't exist, so you need an extra click, first to activate the window, then to go find its menubar and do an action.

It's just a bad UI.