Steve Jobs is Dead and I’m Not Feeling So Good Myself

The days of “We don’t ship junk,” are over for Apple.

They do indeed ship junk, and they are unrepentant about it. Microsoft and its wobbly products that give users nightmares ain’t got nothin’ on them. No longer is using a Mac like giving a glass of water to someone in hell.

Steve Jobs is dead and the Apple “dna” of “We don’t ship junk,” is dead as well.

My husband and I are both victims of the new operating systems that Apple recently unleashed on its trusting customers. First, the “upgrade” bricked my husband’s iPhone. Not only that, but the Apple “genius” managed to permanently erase all his photos in such a way that the supervisor “genius” couldn’t get them back.

Rod ended up buying a new iPhone, which also acted up and, when he took that to the “genius” at the local Apple store, he was told, “Yeah. That’s a thing. They’ll issue a fix.”

Uh-huh. Tap, tap, tap. We’re waiting for the fix. In the meantime, the “genius” disabled the feature that was causing the phone to be unusable.

Then came High Sierra. Long story short, High Sierra turned my Mac Pro into a paperweight. I had to reboot it from an old clone of the hard drive and then reformat it. Ditto for my MacBook Air. It, too, had to be reformatted after going wonky over the upgrade.

Even that wasn’t enough to make it work right. I am not using my extra monitor on my Mac Pro because I don’t want to crash it, and I had to reinstall High Sierra — again — on the MBA to get back my usb drive.

It was a miserable experience that took a long time. It was the sort of experience that I buy Macs to avoid. There is one reason I buy Macs and that is their trouble-free use. That, all by itself, makes them worth their premium price tag.

If Apple is going the way of Microsoft and shipping craptastic software that causes misery, I’m probably going to look at switching when upgrade time comes. I have a heavy investment in Apple products and I won’t be dumping them until the time comes, but if this level of horribleness continues, they are history.

I do not mean the computers alone. I will switch everything. It will be bye-bye iPhones, iPads, and computers alike. I may not be able to do better, but if they’re gonna start shipping junk, there is much cheaper junk out there for me to buy.

All this leads to the main point. Steve Jobs was the magic. It was wonderful, buying products put together by a man who cared so much about the quality of what he produced.

Buying products made by companies with that old bean-counter mentality is always a hair-puller, and when that product is a computer, it can make you miserable. What’s happening to Apple, this dive to the dumpster that is apparent in this latest operating system, is endemic in American business.

The founders of American businesses are magic men and women who work for love as much as profit. They drive the engines of commerce with their work ethic and commitment to building and making.

But when they’re gone, the bean counters move in, and the companies degrade to a predatory relationship, first with their customers, and then with our whole society. Before you can say I’m a little teapot, they are buying elected officials with massive campaign donations and demanding that the public treasury be shifted to them.

In lieu of building and making, of competing and winning, they head for the public trough and begin draining the wealth of this nation into their own pockets. This country is being bankrupted by welfare queens, and I’m not talking about the down and outs that the powers that be love to tell us to hate. I mean the real welfare queens, the ultimate pork slicers, and that is our rich and richer corporate predators.

It all begins when they stop shipping inspired products and begin shipping junk. Like High Sierra.

High Sierra is, according to the computer reporting press, a “hit.” Uh-huh. And who’s paying their advertising?

This operating system was not ready to ship. Not by a long sight. It is the very definition of clanking, computer-crashing, device-bricking junk. I remember when Steve Jobs got called out for firing a couple of executives who shipped the messy Mobile Me. He was considered a terrible guy because he shucked the people responsible.

Now Apple puts forth an operating system from hell that bricks people’s iPhones and computers left and right, and their press commentaries tend to put the responsibility on their customers. When it was pointed out that High Sierra had a big-time security flaw, they issued a statement saying that the customer could still refuse to download software. They did, after this non-apology, follow through with a fix on that one. But where’s the rest of the repairs for High Sierra’s endless bugs and glitches?

Are we supposed to forego using two monitors, wave bye-bye to our USB ports, give up on seeing the whole screen in our iPhones? Is it now customary to have to reformat our computers after a Hail Mary save from an old hard drive when we install new Mac operating systems?

As I said earlier, if that’s what I want, I can get it for a whole lot less $$ by buying a pc.

The title of this post is a riff on the title from Louis Gizzard’s book, Elvis is Dead and I’m Not Feeling So Good Myself.