Calling an iPhone "essentially useless" is an absolutely ridiculous thing to say. Literally hundreds of millions of people run their lives on them. They must all be stupid?

OK, "essentially useless" was hyperbole. And when I wrote that I had Macs in mind more than iPhones (and Mac laptops in particular). But I will stand by the substance of my comment: Mac laptops have gotten a lot crappier in just about every way over the last 10 years.

I am using a 2013 MacBook Pro as my daily driver, hosting Zoom classes, etc. It works fantastically. And I will sell it on eBay next year for a few hundred bucks and buy a 2021 MacBook. They are fantastic pieces of technology apart from the recent keyboard issue.

You’re still within the window of time where you can edit your original comment and clarify your position. I’m sure many people would agree on the point about the quality of Macs.

Thanks for reminding me. I've added an update.

> Personally, I think Apple products are (now) crap, beautiful to look at, but with a UI/UX that has jumped the shark so badly that they are essentially useless.

You’re right in criticizing Apple on certain things. But the alternatives are far worse, and to use the topic appropriate term here, “crappier”. For all its faults, I still prefer some Apple products and wouldn’t touch the competition even if they paid me to.

> the alternatives are far worse

Yes, I agree. That's why some day someone will have to pry my mid-2013 MBP from my cold dead hands.

I held onto mine until late last year. The keyboard on the late 2019 model is OK again. It ought not be surprising nor noteworthy that a premium-priced laptop would have a fully functional keyboard, but here we are.

> But the alternatives are far worse

Strongly disagree, and I think this is part of the problem: Apple positioned itself as "The Good UI Company" so strongly that people cannot imagine a good UI which doesn't come from Apple. Therefore, they compare all UIs to what Apple's doing now and take points off for not being Apple, as opposed to evaluating based on usability and fitness for purpose. The ultimate expression of this is people deriding UIs like Window Maker, essentially the NeXT UI, because it isn't Apple, when it's from the same mind as the "Wonderful Apple UIs" everyone seems to love.

Yes, you're probably right. I can only affect change on those around me that will listen. Fortunately since I'm "the computer guy" people do listen. But for most people it's just easier to buy cheap junk and replace it when it craps out.

Sometimes I blame greedy computer repair people of the 90's and early 2000's for this mess. I remember my friend opened up a repair shop (I helped weekends as a side gig). There were companies in our town charging OUTRAGEOUS prices for very easy repairs, and doing a really bad job. Then we would end up fixing the "repair" and then the original problem, which of course was always more than the original problem. It was really sad.

Now I live in a town with NO computer repair shops, and the closest thing is the Best Buy which is the KING of overcharging for repairs and doing a crappy job.

It's no wonder people just started buying cheap computers after being ripped off.

/rant

Yes, repair is another significant aspect of the dynamic. One of the things that distinguishes a quality good is the ability to repair it if it does fail, but the economics of repair have very badly misaligned incentives. It can also be very hard for someone to tell if they are being ripped off, especially for complex products like computers. It's a lot easier to tell if a cabinet is well-made than a cell phone. But if the product is cheap then it matters less that it is crap. As long as you get some use out of it before it fails you can still get your money's worth if the price is low enough.

As the Elton John song says, it's a sad, sad situation.

Back in the early days of browser highjackers, we'd regularly charge $90 to re-install Windows 98 or XP. The same people would come back a few weeks later and pay for it again after getting a bunch more bugs.

I repaired computers for free and I doubt that is the reason. Cheap computers are good because they're cheap, in they all reach a point of diminishing returns very quickly for basic browsing, so much that a basic arm phone that is free with prepaid is more than sufficient.

Desktops are luxury items that aren't needed anymore, laptops are quickly becoming those too. People don't need computers, their computing needs change too and the iPad is better at mobility so many people just get a tablet rather than a computer anyway. Even I question my need of using a full gnu Linux phone once I was able to get chrome desktop extensions in a browser on Android.

Because they're not crap. Opinion aside, we get 5-6 years out of each one we buy. My ipad air2 just got an update to iOS 14 (probably the last one it'll get) it's going on 7 years old.

Is Apple overpriced? I dunno, the rest of the market is priced similarly. But the hardware is no better or worse than the competitors, and it can be argued Apple supports it a whole lot longer than the competitors.

Once upon a time Apple products were terrific. I was a big fan. They were solidly made. Their UI/UX was the best in the business by a wide margin.

Then Apple made a conscious decision to emphasize form over function. The result was products that fail often (e.g. the butterfly keyboard), cannot be easily repaired (if they can be repaired at all), and have a terrible UI/UX. Discoverability, configurability, and reliability are things of the past. Every software update (which are no longer optional, BTW) is a crap shoot (no pun intended) with regards to whether it will introduce more problems than it fixes.

> we get 5-6 years out of each one we buy

Then you're talking about products that were built before this trend really took hold. The butterfly keyboard was only introduced 5 years ago. The UI/UX horribleness began with Yosemite, which only came out 6 years ago, and didn't get really bad until Catalina, which is barely two years old.

Since when are software updates mandatory?

I also think you're being too nostalgic about the Apple of yore. Apple has always had quality issues, both in hardware and software. Apple Cube cracked. Macbooks had screen delimitation. Titanium laptops discolored (as did the plastic iBooks). Video cards failed due to bad drivers. I had a 1st Gen Intel Mac Pro that burned through video cards every 3 months while I was on a World of Warcraft binge. Apple ended up replacing 3 for me while it was under warranty. Apple released OSX before it was ready for primetime, and the result was an OS that was markedly slower than OS9.

As for OSX/macOS UI/UX, people griped about bugs and poor design decisions from day one. Whether it was monochrome stripes in window elements, or too much candy colored buttons, to bugs so annoying that Apple released an OS that was basically just a hard reset of bug fixes.

> Since when are software updates mandatory?

I don't know, but my iPad updated itself without my approval a few days ago. That had never happened before, so I assumed it was a change that came in with the last update that I did approve.

As far as nostaligia, I have two mid-2013 MBPs that I use on a daily basis. One runs Mavericks, the other runs Catalina. The Mavericks machine does everything I need it to do. It is stable. It runs flawlessly for literally months at a time. The Catalina machine is buggy, has to be rebooted on a regular basis, and once needed the entire OS reinstalled from scratch because the disk filled up with crap and no one could figure out how to get rid of it. (The only reason I use it at all is that one of my clients requires me to use it for security reasons.)

They've also quit using the butterfly keyboard and replaced it with something arguably better than any keyboard they've ever put in a laptop. Apple has had plenty of missteps over the years, there was never really a Golden Era.

And right now, there aren't really any better alternatives. I use MacOS, I use Windows, I use Linux. I have Android devices, and iPads. Apple's devices are every bit as good as any of the competition. They are ahead in a couple key areas like privacy and long-term support.

>didn't get really bad until Catalina, which is barely two years old.

Catalina got released in October 2019, less than a year ago.