Almost fifteen years ago I switched from Windows to Linux, as I was very frustrated with the way Windows turned out to become. Linux was perfect, apart from the fact that it cannot be considered a professional workstation platform due to the lack of business applications and the constant fiddling necessary to do even the most basic of tasks. So I have switched to Apple Macintosh about 12 years ago. Since then I have never looked back, until now.
Perhaps it is because Steve Jobs is no longer at the helm of Apple, who knows. All I know for a fact is that the quality of the Mac OS X platform has taken a turn for the worse. I am particularly referring to my "brand new" Mac Pro (Late 2013). Mac Pro had always been the pinnacle of Apple's computing platforms. Not necessarily the most innovative, but certainly built for their purpose - to be a workhorse workstation for professionals that demand the ultimate from their machines. They are ridiculously reliable, redundant, fast and scalable. But all that changed with the Mac Pro 2013.
In the beginning I was excited that finally Apple released an update to their ageing 2010 model Mac Pro. By 2013 their Mac Pros were using grossly outdated Xeon processors and were pretty much obsolete. Since I was already invested in the Mac OS X ecosystem, I could not just switch platforms. Besides - I loved their new laptops, both the retina MacBook Pros and the MacBook Airs. When they announced the new systems in late 2013 I placed an order for an almost maxed out system. It consists of one 6-Core Xeon 3.5GHz E5-1650v2 CPU, 64GB RAM, D500 AMD FirePro GPU and a 1TB SSD drive. Build and price the model for yourself - it works out to CAD 6300 before taxes. It is a lot of money for a computer. To top that off I have two 27" Apple Cinema displays connected to this machine - one via Thunderbolt and the other via the older Displayport interface.
WTF is wrong with domain registrars and certificate authorities? They send you warning notices about 8 months ahead of time that your domain / certificate is about to expire. They send these emails almost weekly, for a period of about 8 months leading up to the actual expiry date. It usually takes 1-2 days to renew a certificate and even less for a domain.
What makes these organizations so special? It frustrates the living crap out of me. They make it sound like it is the forthcoming doomsday of all life on this planet. And, if you DO renew early, at least for SSL certificates, the new date starts from the date you renewed - i.e. you lose the amount of time you had left on the old certificate. Good way to make money.
Microsoft (and pretty much most of the industry) have decided that it is a good thing to save on screen real estate when designing applications. In specific, you will notice that on a Mac, the URL bar for web browsers, and their buttons, are now in the title bar space. Nice - we saved 30 pixels of previously unused space.
Same with many other applications, and now - with Office 2016 for Mac. Only problem is... There used to be a very good reason WHY we had the title bar of a window. To grab it with the mouse to drag the window around. I know we can drag windows in Mac using the footer too, but that is just weird.
So how am I to quickly grab this stupid window with EVERYTHING in the title bar?
Apple has just unveiled the launch dates and pricing of their new Apple Watch. Needless to say, like any Apple product they have gone to great lengths to make a brilliantly well built device. From manufacturing a new type of gold alloy to stronger steel, they have definitely gone the extra mile to make these new devices last a very long time - just as a watch is supposed to be.
A mechanical watch can easily last a century if looked after well enough. Why? Because mechanical watches are timeless. Even in 1000 years they will still be marvelled over. A quartz watch - not so much. That being a watch driven by a quartz crystal and electronics - there just is not the same timelessness to these watches.
Which brings me to my point - Apple is touting the brilliance in the well designed, strengthened watches that was obviously built to last - but it is based on a premise that people would WANT to keep these watches forever. Since an Apple Watch is nothing more than a small iPod, which is 99.9% electronic and actually REQUIRES an iPhone5+ to work at all, in the end the case might last forever but the pressure to upgrade the watch by replacing it with the next model, as is now standard on all Apple devices every two years, would render the timelessness of it void.
