waffle

You know, Apple has got a spectacular number of things wrong with the current Mac experience. It’s got many things right, like most of the out-of-box experience, but there are still way too many loose ends.

• .Mac, aka “dot mac”, the mostly sub-par internet services available for a $99 annual fee. Its sole reason for existing is that it would otherwise be much too hard for Aunt Tillie to configure web host settings, because without .Mac you’d need a web host for most of the services it enables. (For some reason, .Mac manages to snag an entire tab on apple.com. iPhone gets its own tab, the whole iTunes+iPod thing gets its own tab but the Macs themselves don’t, and if you miss the dot in .Mac and click its tab thinking “this way to Mac computers”, you’re thoroughly confused.)

• QuickTime Pro. After buying a computer for several hundred, or more likely several thousand, dollars and getting otherwise good value as far as bundled software goes, Apple’s trying to upsell you on a bullshit “QuickTime Pro” product. No-one bought it when it was for editing only, and so now Apple’s made fullscreen viewing of video files a “Pro” feature. This is ridiculous in so many ways: a) “And after all this I have to pay $30 just to watch fullscreen videos?”, b) Fullscreen mode is readily accessible via AppleScript, so not only is a a bullshit restriction, it is badly implemented, c) The “Pro” is just locking down QuickTime Player, not the actual QuickTime API, so you can use any other QuickTime API-based player and do everything right and d) The locked-away features are hideously badged with “PRO” icons in the menus, and faux-disabled-grey coloring, but selectable – when you choose them, you get a sales pitch. For fucking shame, Apple.

• No NTFS write support. The next Mac OS X version is nearly here, and people will start using the final version of Boot Camp as well, in addition to Parallels and VMWare Fusion, and they still can’t write to their old USB/FireWire external hard drives unless they reformat them with FAT32 or buy MacDrive for Windows HFS+ support and reformat with HFS+. No, no-one’s licensed NTFS write support from Microsoft. No, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. Yes, I am aware of how good HFS+ is, and how FAT32 works with both if you’re prepared to use small files and volume sizes. I don’t care: people need full NTFS support.

• The iLife suite of applications is disjointed from the OS, and you don’t get new versions even when you plunk down $129 for an operating system upgrade.

Put me in charge of the Mac Marketing department and I would immediately and without failure do this:

• Bundle iLife with the OS again and offer all updates to it for a $19 fee.
• Slay QuickTime Pro. Everything is free.
• Change .Mac’s name.
• Bundle .Mac service for free for 3 years with every new Mac and offer prolonged subscriptions for $19. Offer trade-ins for Apple Store credit if you don’t want .Mac.
• Alternatively, kill .Mac out-right if the technical issues can be worked around.
• Offer gateway kits to allow you to use your own hosting instead of .Mac.
• Lower the cost of Mac OS X updates to $49, or $29 if you bought the Mac within the year.
• License full NTFS support from Microsoft. If they refuse, talk them into writing their own file system plugin, sponsor it and have them sell it.
• Raise the cost of all consumer Macs by 2% to cover some of the cost; swallow the rest.
• Give the Mac family its own tab on apple.com right next to the other central products and highlight all of this.