Apple Needs a Snow Sequoia
59 points by nomnp
59 points by nomnp
This is a very good article. I distinctly remember going to the Apple store 16 years ago to pick up Snow Leopard, and it was a very refreshing update.
Apple has lost its way. Sure, they’re still making a lot of money, but it has become a company like any other, whereas it always had a ‘veil’ to it up until around 10 years ago, when I left the ecosystem for good because the signs were written on the wall.
Given the Mac is not their main source of income, but the iPhone/iPad is, I think it will boil down to the next big thing: Who will introduce the next iPhone? I have the feeling that Apple in its current state has become a bit complacent, and might not be able to adapt quickly enough. Remember Blackberry? It had a market cap of $63.61 B in 2007, right before the iPhone was released. And it had a lot of mindshare; everyone had a blackberry. And when the iPhone was released, many made fun of it, exclaiming physical keyboards were necessary for a mobile device.
when the iPhone was released, many made fun of it
Same thing with the iPad. I remember thinking who needs something that big.
The iPhone was pretty poor in comparison to existing things. My Nokia phone at the time:
The iPhone had a nicer display (my phone had buttons and a small LCD).
Later iPhones were a lot better but people often forget how bad the first ones were.
Everything you say is technically correct, but IMO it misses on the initial iPhone the same way the slashdot review missed on the initial iPod: “No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.”
I say that even agreeing that the first ones were quite bad in so many ways.
Oh, and one other major thing: my phone had a built-in SIP client, so I could make calls over WiFi for a fraction of the price of mobile calling (which was stupidly expensive back then). They were shiny toys, but they were toys. The second generation, when they launched the App Store, was a huge improvement and the third (when they finally supported UMTS) was actually good.
I had a few friends with the first generation and they were mostly frustrated. Web browsing on WiFi was the only thing they were actually good at relative to other devices (without WiFi they usually ended up using GPRS, which was slow and took several seconds to load even small pages).
All true, phones at the time were sold based on quantity of features, and not only did the original iPhone not compare in that regard I don’t think they were even trying.
It was a qualitative leap in user experience, and at the time it felt like they were selling people an expensive prototype of what the future could look like. They were right in the end, but I also remember less popular attempts at this like Palm’s WebOS that went nowhere.
Nobody else had Apple’s marketing muscle backed by totalitarian product design discipline. It’s a hard combination to beat. Google immediately copied all the key iPhone UX for Android, and by the time Microsoft tried to make their own mobile OS (no, not WinCE!) it was already too late.
backed by a totalitarian
product design disciplineCEO.
Steve Jobs was perhaps unique in that he could say “No,” and have the backing of investors (via the board). Don’t forget that between 1985 and 1997 (when Jobs wasn’t there), Apple almost collapsed due to declining quality of their products. Apple is in a similar situation, only Jobs can’t return.
Google immediately copied all the key iPhone UX for Android
Indeed. What makes this particularly impressive is the agility. Android already existed and there was prototype hardware, but it was a Blackberry clone. The giant Google saw immediately that Blackberry was toast and pivoted.
by the time Microsoft tried to make their own mobile OS (no, not WinCE!) it was already too late.
I disagree, actually. It was too early.
I moved to Czechia in 2014 and Windows phones were everywhere – it was the time they were being sold off cheap – and their owners loved them.
But the Windows phones couldn’t get also be Windows PCs. That was their potential USP and they never got there.
The Surface RT should have been a transformational device but Microsoft’s greed killed it. By the Windows 8 era MS had all the parts in place: a unified UI from phone to tablet to desktop, but it walled off the desktop as the only place you were allowed Win32 apps, and it wanted Apple App Store revenues so it intentionally crippled the phones and Arm tablet to Windows Store apps written in .NET of some hue.
The Surface RT should have been a killer Arm tablet, able to be a full Windows desktop, with a few ports and some expansion, able to run anything the user wanted, including other OSes.
But MS locked it down.
If the Arm Windows tablets had forged the way into a more open multi-mode tablet, which could connect to a mouse, keyboard, display and be your PC as well, and which seamlessly bidrectionally synched to your phone… it could have kept Windows Phone alive long enough for phones that were usable as PCs.
I knew some of it at the time as I described in 2013 but I hadn’t grasped the bigger picture.
A phone with Windows should have been a killer feature: the device in your pocket can dock and be a full PC. But MS screwed it.
It also screwed the Windows Mobile to Windows Phone migration: most devices with the WinCE kernel couldn’t be upgraded to the identical-looking product with the NT kernel, and owners were just abandoned. MS had the money to offer them all a cheap upgrade to a new handset and buy loyalty, but it didn’t even notice.
Could sync calendars and address books with my Mac over Bluetooth automatically when I brought it close
Could notify my Mac when it was ringing. The Mac would display the incoming number and I could send SMS from the Address Book app on the Mac
Were these features part of the OS, or were they implemented by whatever the Mac version of Nokia PC Suite was? On PC at the time you’d get essentially nothing unless you had the vendor’s sync software for your phone.
Also, was this a Series 40 model? While not as expensive as an iPhone, I remember the Symbian phones being a couple hundred at least.
These were all built-in features. OS X came with something called iSync, which did the synchronisation, and their Bluetooth support was great: the notifications for incoming calls and the button in Address Book were all standard features. I didn’t use SMS much, but I mostly sent from my Mac rather than the awful T9 input on the phone. Apple did a lot of work to make mobile phones integrate well with OS X, most of these features were removed in the years after the iPhone launched.
Oh, it was also trivial to use a mobile phone with the Bluetooth dial-up networking protocol for Internet connection from OS X. I used that while travelling a few times (though with a 25-40 MB/month cap, not very much, mostly just to grab email).
There were also some nice third-party things. I used something called BluePhoneMenu (free) which added some more features, such as being able to trigger events when the phone came into range. I used this to automatically lock my screen when I left my desk for a bit (before discovering that I came back into Bluetooth range when I walked past my desk outside the building on the way to the coffee shop on campus).
Mine was S60. It was a generation or two old, so was cheap.
There’s one thing you’re missing in that comparison … the very first iPhone was an iPod with a slick touchscreen that also worked as a phone.
Apple even released an “IPod Touch” at the same time that was cheaper, almost same size but slightly slimmer, and that did not work as a phone. It, too, I remember being a success.
You’re describing your Nokia as a next generation communication device. But that’s not why people wanted iPhones, at least initially.
Yes, it was one of the first (though not best) devices with a capacitive touchscreen. The problem was that there wasn’t really anything to do with it. They had to cancel the version of iTunes that could rip DVDs and sync them to iPods and iPhones, because they couldn’t get a CSS license that would allow it. The games that made use of the screen didn’t come until later models. The only thing where it was actually useful was Safari, and then only on WiFi because of the low speed of EDGE (or, rather, GPRS, since there wasn’t never an EDGE signal).
The iPod Touch came out just after the third generation iPhone, by which time they were decent devices and had an app ecosystem that made use of the screen.
the first (though not best) devices with a capacitive touchscreen.
What do you feel was the best, then? I’m curious.
I liked the Palm Pre, there was another that I can’t remember the name of that was also quite nice.
Huh. I did not see that coming!
The Pre looked like a nice design in several ways, for people with tiny hands who like tiny phones. I have huge hands – before I ruined my right arm in a bicycle crash 2Y ago, I could comfortably carry 5 pints of beer in straight glasses without the glasses touching and two pints in each hand was easy. Phones down around the 3.5” screen size are pretty much unusable to me. My two thumbs, side by side on the screen, cover about 90-95% of the full screen width of the original size of iPhone screen. This, clearly, makes typing virtually on the thing almost impossible.
I still have a couple of Palm devices, but as a heavy Psion user since the end of the 1980s, I was never a PalmOS user. The central use case for Palms as far as I could see was: “here’s the info from your desktop PIM, synced into a tiny pocket device.”
I didn’t use a desktop PIM: my PIM was my Psion. In other words a PDA instead of a PIM. I backed up my Psion onto my desktop. The reverse direction of data flow, and one I was very happy with, so the Palm model, with input and editing on the PC and access on the Mac was not appealing to me.
Thus, I paid little attention to any of the Palm smartphones.
I got a free TouchPad on their ‘let’s build a software ecosystem by seeding them to open-source developers’ programme. I did the original GNUstep Objective-C port to Arm on it and even had a little Objective-C to JavaScript bridge for using WebOS JavaScript on the front end and Objective-C on the back end.
Unfortunately, HP killed the platform before mine even shipped, so it was a dead end even while I was playing with it. A shame, the hardware and WebOS UI were very nice. My TouchPad fell down two flights of stairs, chipped a concrete corner on the way down, and was completely fine (yes, the concrete was chipped, not the device).
I was also a Psion user in the 3 era but didn’t really like the 5 (much worse battery life). I played a bit with PalmOS but didn’t like it much, because I hate pens (one of the few things I have in common with Steve Jobs). I wanted a usable keyboard not a pen to input text and the Psion had this, the Palm replicated the input model that I used computers to avoid.
I agree, but there is a massive caveat.
I used Symbian back then. I bought another generation after the iPhone: I bought a Nokia E90 Communicator.
In terms of form-factor, the best mobile I have ever owned, bar none. More small design flaws than I can enumerate but overall so good. Great for one-handed use when upright, great for 2-handed use when sitting or lying, fine in gloves.
But the UI, which was state of the art before the iPhone, was forbidding to non-techies.
And good UI is paramount.
Something Linux has yet to really learn, and the BSDs do not really care about.
Conversely, Haiku is pretty good at it.
Can’t agree more. Nokia hardware was amazing (I had an E61) but the software side was a mess. There were 2 browsers for some reason. I e-know a guy who made the best mobile IRC client I’ve ever used but I dunno if he even broke even during the time his app was on the market.
Or same thing with the AirPods, with everyone saying how ridiculous they looked and that nobody would use those for fear of losing them.
I don’t have as many issues as the author but there are some things which have changed for the worse.
Open Activity Monitor, and it takes six seconds for anything to be displayed. It used to be instantaneous. WTF is this thing doing?
Many other actions which used to be almost immediate are now slow and janky. Stop adding new features which I won’t use. Make the existing features work.
/me tries it
Huh. You’re right. <2 sec to open, but then nothing appears for 4-5 sec.
I don’t use it a lot – MenuMeters gives me most of what I ever need to know – so I hadn’t noticed.
I remember when Snow Leopard came out, I actually still encountered a lot of bugs in it, and I told myself I need to remember this, so I don’t get nostalgic for it later and forget how buggy it actually was. I don’t remember what they were anymore though. Probably just hanging or crashing.
I ran Snow Leopard on a cheap Dell mini-laptop, as a student. It was stable enough for my needs… indeed, it was the last MacOS I actually enjoyed.
Honestly, I don’t even find them “less glitchy than Windows 11” - there are lots of little bugs in iOS that are a frequent annoyance at this point. For instance, apps randomly not showing up in the Share menu or stickers being stuck in the emoji keyboard with that setting turned off. The Apple Music app is more stable for me on Android than iOS as well…
The worst thing I’ve seen so far was a 2FA code being rendered with only five digits because the leading digit would have been a zero. Eventually I figured out what was going on because I’ve made those sorts of mistakes myself, but I can imagine if you’re not a developer, you’d never come up with the idea of asking a leading zero.
Also some of the Apple services seem almost unusable if you don’t have an Apple device. I started subscribing to Apple TV, and it regularly puts me in a half-logged-in state where I can’t log in properly or watch anything, it often reloads the page when I’m scrolling, for a day or two it wouldn’t play anything on Firefox, etc etc. I assume it’s better if you use the MacOS app or use Safari, but on my home laptop I don’t have access to either of those things.
EDIT: Oh, and that irritating popup that started because Teams turned off the gesture emojis during calls. And also the gesture emojis during calls. I guess that’s not a bug but a deliberate feature, but a deliberate feature that never once appeared when I wanted to, and constantly appeared when I didn’t want it to, so I’d call that pretty buggy behaviour.
Is it just me that does not really want my operating system to gain (that many) features every releases besides new hardware support? I mean especially, as the author say, when you don’t pay directly for the upgrade anymore. I’m writing this on an M3 MacBook Air that I use pretty much the same way as my MBP with Snow Leopard all those years ago. There’s not a lot of new OS features that I find absolutely vital. It’s the applications and programs that make the computer ultimately useful, the OS should be the foundation on which those are built and not much else.
From OS X 10.0 to 10.7, most of the release notes came with features I actually was excited by. File Vault for home directory encryption. Quartz Extreme for GPU-offloaded compositing. Time Machine for automatic incremental backups. Spotlight, for extensible full-text search of documents. Each of these was a big quality-of-life improvement.
Recently, APFS was a big improvement (especially in making Time Machine more reliable). Beyond that, not much. The new version supports custom backgrounds in the camera (which is a better place for it than every video calling app to implement it themselves) but I don’t know why they didn’t add that when they did blurred background and weird animations.
For me, the real downwards step was when they started listing the number of new emoji as headline things in new OS releases. If 100 new glyphs in a font is the main selling point, you probably haven’t done much of value.
That said, the newer releases have added a load more kernel mitigations for various exploit classes. These never make the release announcements, but I’m glad they’re adding them.
On one hand I feel similar and don’t care about most new features because I don’t use the apps that get them (like Apple Mail or Safari). On the other hand I eventually discover newish features I wasn’t aware of that I find nice like easy copying between my phone and mac, which makes 2FA SMS easier to use or being able to seamlessly copy between two nearby books and control both with the same keyboard and touchpad (I believe this set of features is called Continuity).