Andy recently called me a Mactard…and sowed seeds of doubt about Apple’s place in the universe.

• I recently lost a lot of my personal data upgrading my laptop to 10.5. The installer crashed. Yes I’d backed up and I no I won’t bore you with the details of how and why Apple’s idea of backing up doesn’t work (and never has).
• I lost a lot of someone else’s work upgrading to 10.5 having made a full backup but then had to downgrade back to 10.4 (10.5 doesn’t work on old powerbooks) and then couldn’t access the backup files (oh goody)… The only reason I upgraded this machine was to get automatic-over-wifi-backups in the first place, oh irony of ironies. How we laughed…
• Now my iphone apps all crash, all the time. I have a phone with dubious reception that would double up as a spirit level but doesn’t. See: iPhone 3G apps crash on startup and … having got all excited about the iPhone, then having become jaded by its underwhelminess, to be made to “just get it to work” is a total joy. And even better… the reason why it’s crashing is probably to do with poorly implemented DRM… something I didn’t want or need implemented so bad that it stops me from using the entire device… Yippee!
  
• The difference between iTunes (on my iPhone) which is actually the Apple Music Store and iTunes (on my Mac)… which is actually iSync with iTunes added and with the Apple Music Store… screams to me that Apple need to sit down and all agree what exactly is called what. I mean I have an icon on my iPhone called iPod!
• OK, so now, what is the difference between your Apple ID, your Mobile me login and your iTunes Music Store/AppStore login? The answer is, “Who knows?” because I have to login into the same account with different details depending on whether I’m on my mac or on my iphone… one uses the username and the other the full email address of my mobile me account.
• And where will your MobileMe data go/be/be resolved? The big question here is not whether it works or not but are the users expectations set and met? Does the user get a clear picture of what should happen, and what will happen (when)?
• And now AppStore is moaning about authentication….

You spend long enough riding by the seat of your pants and putting things back together and you start to wonder why you’re even bothering. I guess I should have read Apple’s small print which says something along the lines of “Hey it’s shiny, so shut up and buy something else”.

When Apple sold me the idea of the computer for the rest of us, I didn’t realize that the rest of us were all IT technicians fixing broken computers.

The worst part of all of this is feeling like a moaning minnie. I’m pretty geeky, I can use computers and I haven’t a clue what is going on with Apple or worse, if I did have a clue, if I’d agree with it.