It is a rule generally acknowledged, yet seldom spoken aloud, that Apple is showing no sign of recovering from the passing of Steve Jobs. In fact, I found myself wondering this morning how I’d be coping trying to maintain a stiff upper lip, a sunny disposition and a positive outlook if I was still working for “Australian MacWorld.” 

Back then. I’ll be blunt, shit mostly worked, and Mac Users gave a rip. Not any more. Nowadays my new iPhone 13pro has face recognition, which works *probably* 20% as well as the fingerprint system in the iPhone7. I actually miss my old 8. Then, since I’m actually here, there is simply no fucking way Steve Jobs would have signed off on “Ear” Pods – I put the word “ear” in quotes because the longest those damned gorgeously sculptural objects stayed in my head was maybe five seconds before they jumped out of my ears like rats jumping out of the portholes of a torpedoed freighter. The add-on, little silicone sleeves that would fit on the ear-pods they would stay in longer of course, but the silicone things that made them into the new premium product“EarPods PRO often as the ear-pods themselves. Simply put *ear-pods* looked really great and technically worked well but when they wouldn’t stay in my ears they were useless.

Next there is fucking integration. Back in Steve Jobs’ day iTunes probably wasn’t really anybody’s favourite program but at least the bastard thing mostly worked. Then Apple decided to ‘copy’ Spotify and invented Apple Music and instead of treating the subscription service as a separate application, it got the bright idea to ‘Frankenstein’ it into iTunes which makes it very difficult to tell where the stuff you have purchased (from the iTunes store) for actual money is and you repeatedly find yourself railroaded into buying it again from the iTunes store or pushed into Apple Music. It is a bit like trying to get an intelligent conversation out of a Salvation Army band. A simple idea had been turned into an unwieldy SNAFU for reasons of greed. 

Don’t get me started on fucking iBooks, what in the name of god have they done with that? First they squeezed book purchases into iTunes. Now they have even rendered getting the books you have already purchased just about impossible. You purchase an audiobook from the store and then when you go looking for it you can’t find it.  Click the link ‘AudioBooks” and you are back at the store.  It taken me weeks to figure out that the audiobooks I have downloaded are hidden under the ‘Collections’ menu at the top of the Library page (took a while to see that tiny arrow on the right and wonder what it was – thought the collection in question was the one listed below the word). This part of the library seems to have been organised by a wall-eyed schizophrenic. 

*Build quality.   

 I use a 12 inch 2016 MacBook. It has no DVD/CD drive. When I bought it, the man at the apple store said “ No problem – just plug in a USB external one – and besides Disks are obsolete now.”

Yeah, true, a DVD only carries some 6 gigs of data and a thumb drive will carry vastly more -and faster. So, in one way, Steve Jobs was right, but reality has a tendency to fuck up the best plans unbelievable quantities of “Static data” in the form of movies, music and photos, still reside on disk, inaccessible, by the most used screen in the house.

I’’ll admit that Steve Jobs was more correct than not with the arrival of DCSS on the scene, content disks simply became  “soft targets”- galleons full of data waiting to be stormed by pirates. With the largest content creator in the world – Disney, being a major stockholder in Apple, a solid stance against piracy was inescapable and disk drives became extinct in Apple-land.

(c) Alex Rieneck 2025