I’ve seen a couple posts online saying that Apple’s quality has diminished and that they need a release of their various operating systems which focuses on fixing bugs instead of adding new features. Back in the day, Apple got off track and was able to course correct by shipping Snow Leopard. The reason they got off track was that their implementations and intents were out of alignment. They really just needed to fix some bugs to fix the problem to get themselves back into alignment, where their intents and actions match.

That’s not what’s happening today. Modern Apple’s intent is malicious. They want to capture more and more of your hard-earned money. The old Apple built Time Machine, which was designed to scale to your needs. You could buy a hard drive and plug it in to implement the basic support for incremental backups. If you had a fast network and AFP, you could use a network share instead. This could be way faster and could support redundant storage, so your data was safe from losing a disk. It was a “Choose Your Own Adventure” of how you wanted to implement the solution with Apple’s protocol.

New Apple built iCloud Backup, which was designed to scale to their needs of ever-increasing profit. They control how much it costs and how it’s implemented. As the cost of implementing this backup decreases, they’re pocketing the difference. Over time, they’re providing the same amount of storage for their users, but they’re making more and more profit.

Across much of Apple’s ecosystem are tools and products which are increasingly designed to extract your wealth, instead of the original goal of being a creative professional’s tool. In order for Apple to fix their software, they’re going to need to course correct upstream of the software. The leaders of the company must set goals of valuing users’ creative potential above profitability and those intents need to trickle down to the team leads, and then finally to the actual code itself.