Why My Fantastic New iPhone Annoys Me

I just upgraded from an iPhone 7 to an iPhone XS, and the experience has left me in a state of high annoyance with Apple. No, not because of any problem with the XS. Quite the opposite, actually.

The issue is that the XS is just so much better than the iPhone 7. In only two years Apple has upped the bar so much it ridiculous. It’s a dramatic improvement in almost every way. It’s really an engineering triumph. I mean, check out stuff like this:

The iPhone XS is faster than an iMac Pro on the Speedometer 2.0 JavaScript benchmark. It’s the fastest device I’ve ever tested. Insane 45% jump over the iPhone 8/X chip. How does Apple do it?! ✨ pic.twitter.com/5nCKZUCAYK

— DHH (@dhh) September 21, 2018

But… isn’t that a good thing?

It would be if everything else in Apple’s product line were also going along gangbusters. But it sure looks from the outside like all the engineering talent and energy is directed at the iPhone. Maybe also the Watch, but I hate watches so I don’t pay any attention to that. and maybe a few folks working on the iPad, but that’s pretty much just a big iPhone anyway.

But are there any engineers at Apple actually still working on the Mac?

Let’s take a look at the the progress in the Mac lineup over those same same two years since the iPhone 7 came out (that is, since September 2016).

Mac Mini
Not updated at all in those two years. Not even a minor speed bump, literally nothing whatsoever. Not since… 2014. I have this vision of one guy who’s been moved to the basement, like Milton in Office Space. He’s the lone guy working on the Mac Mini. He has no budget, no timetable… and they’ve even taken away his stapler. Poor guy.

MacBook
One minor update 15 months ago (June 2017) with a small speed bump and increased RAM capacity. Not an increase in the default amount of RAM, though, just an update in what you could order. And Apple always charges such reasonable prices for increased RAM, right? Could have been executed by a trained money, or more likely, a summer intern. (I can say that, I was a summer intern at Apple once upon a time.)

Mac Pro
Hahahahahaha… What a travesty. No, not only not updated in the last two years, but not updated at all since 2013. Well, really 2014 because it was announced in 2013 but didn’t actually ship that year. You remember this announcement, where Phil Schiller smugly declared “Can’t innovate anymore my ass.” And what was the “innovation” here? Non-upgradability? Hey, Phil, how about you worry less about doing something radical and do something flaming useful instead?

The best Mac I’ve ever owned was the last Mac Pro before this one. God, those were great machines. Room for four hard disks, on great modular sleds. Easily accessible RAM. Optical audio in and out. Tons of ports. Slots galore. Built like a tank, and while it could put out some heat, it was still quiet.

And then we got… the wastebasket. At leas it was pretty fast when it first shoed up, which was nice, but that was where it ended. I’ve been using Macs since 1987, and this is one of the worst machines I’ve ever had. Even in the days of OS8 my machine didn’t crash as much as this one did. Eventually they patched the OS enough that this got under control, but by then the hardware was two years old, surely to be soon replaced by… oh yeah, nothing. And nothing until 2019. Wanna bet that it’s not gonna be the first half of 2019?

iMac
Probably the most progress here, just because more than one thing happened. The first was, in June 2017 (sounds familiar) we got… a spec bump across the line! We did get something real in December 2017 (again, not really in 2017 since these didn’t really arrive for most customers until January 2018) with the iMac Pro, which was a concession to the fact that the Mac Pro both sucks and hasn’t been updated in forever, and won’t be for a while yet. I bought one of these and… it’s OK. In all fairness, the specs are very good. It’s fast. It has a reasonable, but not overwhelming, number of ports. The display is indeed fantastic. It is in no way expandable or upgradeable, but that’s what you get with an iMac and why I haven’t bought one before (other than for my lab). It’s also insanely expensive. I guess it has that in common with the iPhone. But, there was some actual engineering effort put in to it, which is more than you can say for the rest of the list before this.

MacBook Air
They still make these? Does anyone buy them? What exactly is the big differentiation between these and just regular MacBooks, again, now that MacBooks have SSDs and weigh 2lbs? Ahh, these have slightly larger screens and are slightly faster than regular MacBooks. Makes perfect sense. Anyway, updates in the last two years… A minor bump in specs in—wait for it—June 2017, and added an SDXC slot. Probably the same summer intern that did the regular MacBook.

MacBook Pro
Ahh, the other “pro” machine, and one might be tempted to think that this is where all of Apple’s Mac engineering resources not devoted to the iMac Pro ended up, because here we have something actually new: the TouchBar!

Except the TouchBar is, to put it lightly, crap. An utter waste of engineering resources. First, it’s basically just eye candy, but has almost zero actual functionality. The only thing I use it for is to change the display brightness, but that’s because they removed the normal keys that handled this function and moved it to the TouchBar, so I have no choice. What else is it good for? I cannot even begin to tell you, in no small part because the actual regular keyboard on the MacBook Pro is an unmitigated disaster. I use an external keyboard with my MacBook at every available opportunity, so most of the time, the TouchBar isn’t even within easy reach. So even if it were great, I’d still basically never use it.

And then there’s the disaster that is the port situation with the current MacBook Pros. 4 Thunderbolt3 ports (more or less USB-C ports) and nothing else. Look, I get that TB3/USB-C is the future and keeps the machine slim, and I love that I can dock the machine to all my peripherals and displays and such with one cable (thanks to the not-inexpensive third-party Thunderbolt 3 dock I had to buy), so I fully approve of having a couple TB3 ports on the machine. TB3 is the future and all that, couldn’t agree more.

But no other ports at all? Really? So when I give a presentation (like, you know, when I teach, which I do several times a week), I need TWO dongles. One for HDMI to connect to the projector because literally zero projectors at my university have USB-C connections (and I bet it’s ten years before that changes), and one USB-A dongle to connect my presentation remote, because nobody makes those yet, either. (I guess I was supposed to buy a Bluetooth one when I bought all those Bluetooth headphones for the iPhone 7. I missed that memo and still have regular USB-A remotes that still work great.) Could you just have given us those two legacy ports, please?

And then there’s MagSafe. MagSafe was one of Apple’s great triumphs. MagSafe put all other power connections to shame. If I had a dollar for every time I saw a laptop (including mine) saved by MagSafe, well, I guess that iMac Pro wouldn’t have been so bad price-wise. MagSafe was a masterpiece. But because USB-C is the future, that had to go, too. I guess Apple profits whenever someone has to replace their laptop because it goes flying off a table. (The good news is that at least someone gets it; Griffin Technology makes something they call a BreakSafe USB-C power cable that’s clearly inspired by MagSafe. $40, of course, but what else are you going to do if Apple abandons a great technology they pioneered?)

The best laptop I’ve ever owned? The 2015 MacBook Pro. Decent keyboard, useful set of ports, solid Retina display, just slower than the current models. I handed mine down to a graduate student and whenever I see him with it, I feel pangs. Almost worth downgrading.

So, yes, Apple has devoted some engineering resources to the Mac in the last two years, but in this case, they spent time and energy to make a machine that’s actually worse—substantially worse—than the one preceding it. (Not quite as bad as the 2013 Mac Pro, but still.)

Scorecard
Two years of iPhone progress shows clear evidence of a large team of talented engineers working furiously. The last two years of the Mac?

No evidence of engineering, 0 points: 4
Some engineering progress, 1 point: 1
Backward engineering progress, -1 points: 1
Net total points: 0

It reminds me of that scene from The Usual Suspects:
Cop: I can put you in Queens on the night of the hijacking.
Hockney: Really? I live in Queens. Did you put that together yourself, Einstein? What, do you got a team of monkeys working around the clock on this?

Really, Apple, it’s great that my new phone runs JavaScript like a bat out of hell, but frankly I’d really rather have new Minis, a decent laptop, and a new Mac Pro—one that is actually a “pro” machine. I can live with JavaScript being the speed it was on the iPhone 8, honest. Move some engineering resources around, would you please?

Final Thoughts
Apple has always charged a premium for hardware, but in my judgment it’s always been worth it. In part because of macOS but also because it has generally been solid hardware. (I managed to avoid buying a Performa back in the day, so I dodged one of the previous bullets.)

The problem is that I’m locked in to macOS. Windows is a pile of hot garbage and, as a result of being a Mac guy for now thirty years, I have a lot of material in Mac-only formats. Back in the late 1990s I considered dumping Apple for Linux because of software; OS8 was pretty awful. Now I’m considering dumping Apple for Linux because of hardware, but I’m reluctant because of software. Oh, the irony.

The part of this I really don’t get is how it could ever actually get this bad. Don’t Apple’s own engineers use Macs? How have they not heard a roar internally for better hardware? How do the folks at Apple who work on the A12 not go crazy? Do they use Linux boxes inside Apple these days? I have a hard time believing iOS is being developed on something other than macOS. Or are people unhappy but just not being heard? Hey, we’re a trillion-dollar company, who needs good hardware to do engineering work? It simply makes no sense.

This may be a screed, but it’s not a screed from some Apple-hater. If anything, I’m a long-time Apple loyalist. And if even I’m disaffected, that cannot be a good sign for Apple.

Many moons ago, I used to work in Greg Joswiak’s group, and from that I know Greg is a reasonable guy. (Greg is now Apple’s VP of marketing. Someone who ought to have Tim Cook’s ear.) So, Greg, how have you not thrown your MBP through the wall when typing on it? Surely you have to connect to something other than USB-C when you give presentations when traveling—got all your dongles handy? Anyone sent your machine flying for lack of MagSafe? No?

So, yes, I really like my new phone. I’m super-impressed by it. I just wish I could generate the same enthusiasm—heck, just any enthusiasm—for Mac hardware these days. But I can’t. And that’s a problem.