Recently, I learned programming for the iPhone, using Apple’s new programming language called “Swift”.
To me, it looks like after Steve Jobs, Apple just doesn’t have any vision or control left. The programming language, Swift, reminded me of another programming language called Ada. Like Ada, Swift has everything but the kitchen sink. (On second thoughts, maybe there _is_ a kitchen sink somewhere in there, I don’t know the complete language yet 🙂 ) Like Ada, Swift is one of those _have to_ learn languages. If you want to program iPhones, you have to learn Swift. If you wanted to program for Defense Department, you had to learn Ada. This forced learning by the US DoD did not save Ada from rapid demise. (By contrast, Android picked a slick programming language already popular, Java.)
Good programming languages do not include every feature available in the technology – the designers’ brilliance shines through in deciding what features to include and how to combine them. Swift designers had a lot of knowledge, but no sharpness at all – they just couldn’t decide what to leave behind.
This shoddy approach extends to the development environment. I have worked in a lot of development environments, and have never seen anything as shoddy as Apple’s development environment Xcode.
My take – Apple has no good leadership anymore, the company is going down the tubes. Modi government I think just gave them a lifeline, but China appears rather angry at them, just the Indian market might not be enough to keep this lost company churning.
I don’t know much about apple products. Of late my son has become a great fan of mac-book, mainly because of the excellent quality without compromising on ‘customizability ‘ . Recently , I learnt that in Ipad , you cannot even rename a file ! what kind of a device doesn’t let you rename a file , I can’t fathom. Despite the availability of high quality , inexpensive android phones, I think the market share for apple product in India is on the increase. Status symbol, may be.
My son has one too!! I think Apple used to be quite a fine company and have some great products – I am just not sure they can recover from the death of Steve Jobs. It seems it was kind of a one-man-show company, and he didn’t pick his successors very wisely perhaps. Or maybe all the top lieutenants didn’t have much initiative, cause he didn’t give them free rein or picked people like that.
Apple has built up a reputation as a reliable product. The pricing, the design, the software – all of it has been made to keep it exclusive, not inclusive. A Rolls Royce maybe reliable but if it is sold cheap, who would want it? Take the case of the Tata Nano as a classic example. In every movie I have seen, the most common laptop in use is a Mac, with the logo staring at you!