As I have made abundantly clear in this blog I have been having ongoing issues with Apple's Magic Mouse maintaining connection with my MacBook. Lately my entire system has been simply randomly locking up (even if the mouse isn't even connected), forcing a hard reboot.
This kind of behavior is new to my experience with Apple. In fact, the lack of having to constantly reboot was one of the perks I enjoyed after the continual rebooting I had to do with Windows; lately all that is changing.
But my problems are nothing compared to what Ben is going through. Between his phone, his watch, and his Mac I'm expecting one of them to be violently thrown against a wall any day now. And multiple trips to the Genius Bar have solved nothing. Their standard response to any of these problems? Wipe and reinstall. Wipe and reinstall. That's a Microsoft response, Apple; not something we expect from you.
I used to enjoy going to the Apple Store. Now I dread it.
As I wrote earlier, I've all but given up any hope of getting my bluetooth issues resolved. But this raises the issue of that legendary Apple quality that prompted so many of us to join the church to begin with. How many iterations of an OS do we have to go through before any of these issues are addressed—if at all—much less resolved?
I'm not about to abandon Apple; returning to Microsoft would be a nightmare in my opinion, but it looks to me like Apple is going through a rough patch. It's not as profound as in the 90s, but there's trouble afoot. Whether the folks in Cupertino are aware of it and simply choosing to ignore it is a question that's up for grabs, but based on the steadily declining quality of the software side of the house over the last several years, it's obvious that too many lines of business are taking their toll on quality control. I hate to haul out this old trope, but if Steve Jobs were alive today, none of this shit would be happening.
At this point, I'd even be willing to forego the now expected yearly updates and pay for OS upgrades again—as long as these ongoing, lingering problems were finally cleared up.