It does not just work!

Morning all, fair warning what follows is a journey into tech dorkness that I do not normally air to the masses.
Apple this week announced its latest and greatest versions of OSX and the iphone. As a result the internet is a flutter with praise of the new stuff. I don’t mind this at all, what I do mind is the fanboy love that is associated with this praise. Apple has some truly impressive products, but the general praise is like this stuff is manna from heaven and the non apple world only eats haggis. Now if you get into discussions with these guys you will hear the same phrase over and over again: “it just works.” This at best is a half truth.
Let me repeat this, apple does in fact make revolutionary products, so this is not an indictment of apple or its products. This is just a splash of reality to the fans. Here is an example: how do you right click on a mac laptop? For those who don’t know it’s control-click. It’s a little thing but that little thing has big consequences in the engineering world. Or how about this: use your iphone as a portable hard drive. Again this can be done, there are multiple solutions, and a quick google search will show them to you. Or how about the often mentioned copy and paste on the iphone? Yeah you’ll get it in a couple of weeks. The point of these examples is not to point out the weaknesses of the apple line, because like I said there are solutions to these and pretty much any of the problems often named in the myriad of flame wars that take place over the internet on this subject. My point is though that a lot of these solutions are as complex and involved as the problems you face with any other device be it a windows box, a linux box, a symbian phone or otherwise. Apple does not have some secret immunity to viruses, malware, bugs, limited features or incompatibilities that any other gadgets have. The truth of the matter is that the landscape needs apple. The iphone changed how we viewed the mobile interface, and yes everyone rushed to follow suit because it was really what we needed, but apple is still playing catch up in enterprise support and they still don’t have (and will probably never offer) a dedicated keyboard. When the ipod came out it changed the game, but how long did it take to add video support? Overall the landscape is better because we have multiple companies creating new and innovative products.