greenmind wrote:
it is not viable for me either. ... the cloud wouldn't be entirely a bad idea, if they gave the user the option of what they wanted to be in the cloud, and what they didn't. some users may have some data, they don't want or can't have in the cloud.
You reminded me of mentioning another severe fault in the way iCloud works compared to the Local Sync worked prior to Mavericks. Under the Info tab in iTunes, now gone, you could control what Contacts were put into the iPhone or vice versa. The same was true with bookmarks for Safari.
Now everything is on the iPhone, its overwhelming and unnecessary. As a researcher, I have thousands of bookmarks sorted into dozens of folders, none of these make sense on my iPhone, where the greatest use of Safari, for me, would be a brief lookup.
iCloud would be far more powerful and return user choice if they provided some kind of device filtering. But I still want to have Local Sync back as soon as possible. I will repeat, if a user has one mobile device and one laptop or desktop, iCould makes no sense.
I needed the latest version of flashplayer, and the only way I could download wt my mac, is by upgrade to maverick. I've used apple products for the past 30 years, but ever since Tim Cook took it over, the good name of mac, has turned to garbage. PC here I come.
Here I have a bundle of sympathy, some strong agreement and some strong disagreement.
The biggest mistake Apple made with the Mac public when they released Mavericks was not making it clearer what a significant change in technology it was. It was a major change under the hood.
Apple instead spent most of their public communication effort on pointing out that Mavericks was free and gave the appearance that it was, in many ways, an incremental upgrade. I am used to the prospect of replacing this and that during an OS change, Mavericks required the replacement of a half dozen critical utilities that collectively added up to about $500. Some apps had to be upgraded as well, with further cost.
One impact that has no direct dollar amount was the time it took to make the OS transition. I expect about 2 to 4 days, this move took nearly a month before everything was working without issues. Much could have been avoided if Apple produced complete documentation on their OS and software and made it easy to find. I am not interested in the urban legend on the Internet, or the gamble of Genius Bar or Apple care.
I can appreciate the desire for Apple to make everything simple and easy to understand for the common computer user, I am a user experience designer, I get that. But in the past Apple always had an opportunity for the pros and the long term users to get the 'good stuff.' No longer.
I have also been with Macs for a bit of time, Mac Plus in late 1984 and dozens after that, so I am, as well, coming to my 30 year anniversary. Here is where I start to disagree, Tim Cook has littel to do with this, the strategy was solidly in place long before he took the helm, devised by Steve Jobs. I deeply admire Jony Ive as a industrial designer, but as a UX and UI guy, not so much.
Seriously, after 30 years on the Mac can you really entertain a move to the PC? I know I can't and that may be part of the problem with Apple, they know we, the long term users, can't move and new users will not know the differrence.
The most we can all hope to do is raise our voices and maybe to put some bumps in the public relations parade.
