----- Original Message ----- From: "Nathan S." <n.crazeddoberman at gmail.com>
All this talk on Jobs prompted me to join the list.
-------------- Cool. Welcome!
I'm perfectly willing to talk shit about Apple. I worked there 1989-1998, so I can do that.
But I will say one thing in defense of Apple. The quality of the hardware I used was superb.
Stuff worked and worked and worked and kept working. I can remember one crash, maybe. And even hardware challenged me was able to set things up, configure them, etc. effortlessly.
My teenage daughter bought an iBook some years ago, brought it home, plugged it in and was surfing the net ten minutes later.
For a long time, only Apple gave you that experience.
Quality mattered. I did very techie tech writing for them -- wrote their first low-level debugger manual (MacsBug) in 1991 -- and did a lot of O/S and tools docs after that. We all knew that the books had a life expectancy of roughly three years, but we had editors, artists, and review cycles that actually happened, and the books were treated like they needed to be of publishable quality.
I suspect some of that has changed. And I'm not an iTunes, iPad, or iPhone person, so I can't say what that's like.
Joanna