Bitching and Moaning

Or, as I like to call it, further adventures in Apple, Fix Your Shit!

I honestly don't know why I do it. Every time there's a new OS available I immediately jump on it. It's not just an Apple thing; I used to do the same thing with Windows. In fact, as I'm sure I've written here before, it was a misbehaving Windows 7 Beta that sent me into the arms of Steve Jobs to begin with.

Sadly, Steve is no longer with us, and perhaps more importantly, Apple's signature truism "It just works!" also apparently died with him.

Having learned my lesson with the Yosemite Betas a couple years ago, I eschewed loading either El Capitan or Sierra on anything more than an external hard drive until the final product was released to the public. With Sierra I actually jumped the gun a bit: I loaded the Gold Master Beta right before the public release and had no issues whatsoever (beyond the ones I'd been having with every OS since Mavericks).

The public release of Sierra however brought a slew of new glitches. They aren't work-stopping or kernel-panic inducing, but they are annoying as hell.

The most visible one is the fact that no matter how many times I check off boxes in any of the System Preferences panels to show their particular icons on the menu bar, they won't stay turned on. With each reboot, all the icons have disappeared.

In fact, the only way I was able keep the icons appearing on a consistent basis was by doing this:

Yes, I had to manually add every .menu item to the Login Items panel that I wanted to actually reappear when I rebooted.

The next problem was the inordinate amount of time it would take to shut down or log off. We were talking minutes—something that all previous versions (including the Gold Master Beta) did not suffer from. I traced that glitch to something with File Vault, Apple's whole-disk encryption scheme that I'd been using without incident since Mavericks. I solved that issue by turning it off.

I tried using the new Photos app—going so far as to import all my personal photos because it was nice to see everything arranged in time and space in an easily-accessible format. But damn if it didn't send my MacBook's fans into overdrive (much like Adobe Bridge, but that's a rant best saved for another time) even when it wasn't actively loaded. (It apparently does its piss-poor facial recognition and indexing on the database when the application isn't running.)

Then there's iTunes, the bloated Frankenstein monster that Apple apparently has no intention of breaking apart into separate components as much as it needs to be done. "Slap another coat of paint on it and call it a day. No one cares about the Mac anymore. Aren't you needed over in iOS?"

I'm sorry, but that's the feeling I'm getting from Apple lately. Everything is about the iPhone. They stopped being a computer company years ago; those devices are just a sideline to their phone business.

And that's sad, because as much as I like my iPhone, it will never replace my laptop.

But who am I? I'm in a demographic that doesn't even register on Apple's radar any more.

And yet I'm still not ready to jump ship and return to Microsoft. Supporting that nightmare if only on a professional basis still sends my stomach acid churning, and for all the bitching and moaning I do about Apple, it's still far and away my preference for my own computing needs. I have thought about reverting my OS back to El Capitan, Yosemite, or even Mavericks, but even that process has become unnecessarily cumbersome, basically requiring that an entire day be set aside for the OS reinstall,  reloading of every single application, and manually transferring all my data. I'm sorry, but that's one of the many reasons I gave up on Microsoft…