Are Apple losing their touch?

Apple have constantly been able to amaze customers with their products. But is that all changing? First, the iPhone 4 had the antenna issue, then all the complaints about Final Cut Pro X. And now, some customers are feeling like Mac OSX Lion was a bit over hyped.

As an Apple customer, I am obviously concerned about these issues. I am waiting before upgrading to Lion, and these problems are making me think twice about buying Apple products. The new Mac App Store helps us see what people think of the products that Apple are releasing. I was having a browse around the store and noticed that “Motion 5″ has had a few negative comments posted about it: features removed without warning; unhelpful user interface changes. All these comments suggest that Apple could be losing their touch of creating great products and are getting out of touch with the consumers.

Another problem with Apple is because they are so used to being the underdog with other bigger companies ruling the markets, now they are becoming more popular and ruling some markets, it seems as though they are going a little crazy with power. For example, anything that is sold on an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch will have to give 30% of the revenue to Apple. And with the Mac App Store, it seems as though this could be hitting desktops very soon, too. They are wanting complete control over a market. And why can they do this?

Because of multi-touch.

The technology Apple bought, patented and prevent anyone else from using. All other touch screens are inferior to Apple’s. And this is a problem.

In my opinion, Apple are slowing down innovation by taking 30% of the revenue (meaning less money goes to the developers – you know, the people who actually build the apps and create the content) and by locking other people out of the best technologies, for example multi-touch, with patents and expensive legal support. Nobody can compete with that.

Apple are taking the p***

The iPad has finally been released for pre-order in the UK. Not only is it months after the US release date, it is from £429. That’s $640! $140 dollars above the US pricing. Man, Apple are taking the p***. The idea of the iPad was so it would be affordable for the average person. In fact, on the iPad webpage, it clearly states “A magical and revolutionary product at an unbelievable price.“. It is more expensive than an average PC-based laptop.

For the same price from Dell, you can get a laptop with 4GB RAM, a 320GB hard disk – oh and you can have control of it. With an iPad, you have Bluetooth – but you can’t use it. You don’t have Flash support. You can only use things that Apple personally approve. You can’t really control what you put on it – if Apple don’t like you buying books or apps from another store, they’ll stop you.

If they really want to take control of the tablet computing market, they are going to have to have a fair international price, so that people can’t be exploited because of their geographical location. It’s appalling!

Compatibility

Now I’m going to talk about something we sometimes take for granted: compatibility.

Generally, in computers, people try quite hard to get compatibility between systems. For example, transferring files between Windows and Mac machines is quite easy. I can open most of the same types of files on both systems, and if I can’t I can usually find some free software to do it for me.

However when the iPhone came out, people realised something – wow, how incompatible! With the iPhone, you can’t Bluetooth music, videos, photos, notes or anything between them, but with any other phone you could. Other phones had compatibility with each other which meant that you didn’t need to find phone buddies to send files to, you could send files to anyone. Easily.

The iPhone cut out any compatibility. You could only send files to other iPhones if you both had the same app for sending files. You couldn’t send music, videos or photos. There was no central file storage. There were angry customers who were on 2 year contracts which were worse than what they had.

One of the big compatibility mistakes Apple made with the iPhone, and now the iPad: Flash support. You can view websites without the “baby internet”, but you couldn’t get Flash. Big mistake!

Now we are in an age of social networking, it occurred to me that the social networks aren’t compatible with each other. If they could talk to each other, communicate things you have been doing and transferring friends and profile data between them then it would save so much time. To an extent, with APIs this is happening, however it could still be a lot simpler to share data between friends across several social networking websites. Twitter to your LinkedIn buddies, post on the “wall” of MySpace friends, share your new “skin” with Facebook chums!

It could be so much simpler than it is…