My reason for using Apple products is fading away
I was a big fan of the clean and easy way doing work on OS X, being a Solaris/Linux person which was always annoyed by working thirteen years on DOS, then Windows. But the last iterations of Apple products make me sad, there are pop-ups popping in my view, hardware (especially laptops) failed on me, it seriously seems to loose quality for a release early, release often product strategy. I would love to have at lease lenovo and hp offer high quality workstations and laptops bundled with OS X. This would seriously bring Apple under pressure, to bring a laptop which isn't total crap in quality. Things as better keyboard feel, better display resolution, rugged laptop design would start to appear.
But by violating the own interface guidelines, disappearing functionality to make the iPhone look better e.g. bluetooth modem support partly broken in 10.5, they make me seriously considering going back to a horror named X11. At least there I can stop complaining and burn time in improving things that should be done ten years ago.
The documentation of Apples Software is good when the software was done in the years of 10.2, because there was a competition to Windows and Linux. Now, in the iPhone and Vista World, Mac OS X just have to be slightly better than the competition because everybody has become used to "upgrade" phones or OS every three years. But people can switch back, and my 2nd laptop (IBM Thinkpad T40) already runs opensuse 11 with a minimal XFCE interface. I don't mind doing things in the command line, when it would be 15 clicks away anyway. And the most used stuff is a shell script in the "Dock". So it looks tempting.
If I switch to Linux, I probably would switch the company I work also in the long run. For now, it is a Mac-Desktop-only company.
Please Apple Inc, do something for the "Power User", and a minimum of documentation, where can I set the bluetooth connection parameters in 10.5 would be a start.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
