Love(d) Apple
I converted to Apple in 2001 and since then my wife and I have used only Apple devices. We have a 2014 27-inch iMac, a 2011 MacBook Pro, iPhone 5s and 6s, iPad mini and iPad Air, iPod touch and an old iPod Classic. All of the devices we have had over time and up to the latest iterations have been superb in meeting our requirements. As the old saying goes, It just works – until recently that is.
I was one of those who held off upgrading to the latest software until at least the obvious bugs were uncovered and resolved, but gradually my confidence in Apple grew and I became an early adopter, downloading the latest versions of the operating systems within a couple of days of release. Recent experience has made me regret this.
I have El Capitan running on both computers, and iOS 9 running on the iPod touch, iPhones and iPads. I noticed almost immediately that my internet speeds dropped to snail’s pace. I thought my router may have been hacked and somebody was stealing my bandwidth. Why else would all of my devices slow down? I quickly discounted the conspiracy theorists who fill the forums with speculation about the software deliberately slowing older machines to force us to upgrade. After hours of testing, I discovered the culprit was Safari. Several more hours trying solutions posted on forums, some of which were extremely complicated, did not resolve the slow speeds. I then found the solution in Google Chrome. I sacked Safari as my browser and hey presto, my blistering Virgin Cable broadband speeds returned.
I have begun to suspect that there is something wrong in the corporate structure at Apple. Are the wrong departments being given all the power. Are the arty designers holding sway over the technical designers? We buy computers for their functionality and resilience primarily. If it looks good, that’s a bonus, but what is the use of something that looks good but doesn’t do what you want it to? Why has Apple broken its own product? Who is responsible for designing software that doesn’t work with its own family of apps? How is it that Google can design a browser that works with El Capitan perfectly, and Apple can’t? Michael Wall
Alan Stonebridge says… We will always hear about upgrades and experiences with new software that hasn’t gone so well, but the volume of issues experienced by OS X and iOS users must have fallen dramatically. We still get a lot of enquiries to our SOS pages, but Apple has definitely extended the ability of OS X and iOS upgrades to work on quite ageing hardware and they deserve a lot of praise for that – few companies share this level of backwards compatibility. As for Safari, we’d need more detail in order to find out what your issue may have been, but Chrome is a popular choice for OS X anyway.