How I stopped being an Apple Evangelist

Last night over dinner we all had a intense discussion about Apple. You see it all started when I saw for the first time an iPad. Our Nuffnang Australia office has one so I was playing around with it yesterday. It was cool and all but in 5 minutes it went from everybody crowding around wanting to play with it to being left on the table alone doing nothing.

The conclusion was... I'm not going to buy one yet because I really don't know what I would use it for yet. I think I'll just let everyone else use it first and show me how they use it on a daily basis before I think of getting one in the future. Besides, in a few months they're probably going to come up with better versions of it.

So anyway back to Apple. My first Apple product was an iPod. I bought it in London because in London where you walked a lot you kinda wanted an MP3 player and the iPod seemed to be the default choice. I loved it but it wasn't exactly enough to turn me into an Apple Evangelist.

Then right after I graduated and before I started Nuffnang with Ming, I bought myself my first Macbook. That was when it happened. I loved the Mac OS.

Suddenly all my frustrations that I had with Windows disappeared and using a computer became so easy! I turned .... straight away into an Apple Evangelist.

Then I followed up with buying some other Apple products. Not stuff like the Apple TV or iPod Shuffle because I thought they were useless but the iPhone for one. This is when it started going downhill from there.

1) The first iPhone I got was the iPhone 2G. It looked cool and flashy and all that but it lacked a lot of important features like 3G, the ability to forward SMSs and etc etc. I even wrote an entry about this back then.

Shortly after, Apple came up with the 3G which and 3GS with upgrades of what the iPhone should be able to do as a normal phone. I couldn't help but feel led on. As an Apple Fan, I bought the product as soon as it came out but only to find that the product's features were inferior even in those times. Why? Companies these days when they come up with expensive high-end electronic products they make sure it has the best features of its time. Why deliberately wait if not for the reason to just make us buy another one again? I eventually bought the 3Gs when it came out so if that was the reason it worked perfectly!

2) Then recently the leaks of the new Apple iPhone come out. Apparently found in a bar. The minute I saw this I thought that this was getting totally old. Heck even CNN who reported it was asking experts if this was just another marketing ploy by Apple. Sure... you use it as a marketing ploy once, great. Use it as a marketing ploy as many times as they did, I think it just starts to insult my intelligence.

But the Apple evangelists eat it all up and go all the way for it.

3) So what else does Apple do?

Jason Chen is the tech blogger in the USA that "leaked" it. He apparently bought it from a guy who found it in the bar just to write about it. So Apple got the police to ask him to return the phone which he did but that wasn't enough.

They got the police to raid his home and confiscate all his computers and all that.

What is this? Because somebody in Apple slipped up (assuming this was a real leak and not a marketing ploy), the blogger who blogged about it gives the phone back eventhough he's paid good money for it. And you still go in and confiscate his stuff. Not to mention that it is these tech bloggers and journalists that give Apple all the hype it gets anyway.

And of course with this raid and all... some people may think that oh.. yeah maybe it wasn't a marketing ploy. Maybe this time it was a real leak. Well call me cynical but I'm thinking.. maybe they knew everyone was thinking it was a marketing ploy so they decided to do this raid to convince people that it wasn't. It worked at least to some extent.

4) There are a lot more reasons to why I've lost my faith in Apple but I'm going to go to the most recent one that was the ultimate tipping point for me.

Just recently I upgraded my Macbook Pro and bought a new one.

It's the one on the right in this picture.

The new Macbook Pro I realize has a unibody. So that means you can't take out the laptop battery when you've plugged it in. Now in my experience, when you leave your laptop battery in when you plug in your laptop to power, it will slowly kill the battery life. Eventually you'll have a laptop battery that lasts like 5 minutes.

I was totally frustrated when I found out about that. I travel a lot! How can I not have a laptop battery that works?

So I tweeted my frustration and some of my dear followers replied that the new Macbook Pro has a chip that regulated the power between the charger and battery so even when it's plugged in, the battery life doesn't die like traditional notebooks. I was impressed... and happy for a while. Until I checked with a number of my friends with Macbook Pros and they tell me that all their batteries after a few months or a year, don't last very long.

So is that chip just marketing speak again? Or does it not work?

What does Apple want us to do? Send back my Macbook Pro every 2 years to get them to change my battery for me or to just buy a new Macbook Pro?

Because of this frustration of knowing that my laptop battery ain't gonna last... for the first time ever I actually considered moving back to a Windows based laptop if this Macbook Pro battery dies on me in no time. That's right... goes against the saying "Once you've had Mac you never go back".

So everyone, that is why I no longer love the Apple Brand as much as I did before. Sure I still use their products and I still probably will buy more of their products. But I will be very objective when talking to people about them. I won't go "THIS IS THE BOMB THIS IS THE BOMB" without evaluating myself. I would probably just go "This is good but this is what's not good about it.". I will no longer love the brand anymore.

Maybe one day I will have my faith in Apple again.... until then... this is it.