It's been a while since I switched from an HP to a MacBook Pro to start digging into the iPhone and OSX development. It took me quite an effort to get used to OS X and now I can see there's no point of comparison with Vista, nor good or bad - they are just different things with different purposes. An interesting fact, the MacBook Pro is performing really nice with two partitions and I use BootCamp to boot a Vista partition. Performance is amazing in Vista but energy is less optimized than in Leopard. I love this machine and the unique purpose it serves to me, I would recommend it to anyone. Anyway, not everything is as cool around Apple products as people tend to think; there are lot of issues related to usability, accessibility, design and even development.

Altogether I've seen a lot of mistakes in Leopard User Interface Design, so Windows Vista is not the only one working improperly. If you're interested take a look to some of the issues found by users at AeroTaskforce for Vista and AquaTaskforce for OS X. Have in mind that the community started as a Vista UI improvement forum and it was extended to support OS X inquires, that's the reason why the vast majority of traffic is generated by Windows users.

We all know that Apple haven't been that much time developing laptops, something we can appreciate in many of the design decisions taken. For example, using laptops (in terms of Apple) is for mobile people, not for desktop workers. Ok, I can agree that if you spend most of your time at desktops it's much better to have a computer designed for that purpose, but what happen if you're an hybrid user? Hybrid, to me, states for traveling a couple days a week, attending some events and spend remaining time at home or the office. In this case, a MacBook Pro can give you more than a headaches.

As a laptop for Hybrid users (mobile + desktop, the role where I include myself) the MacBook Pro lacks a docking port, the process of plugging and unplugging is really tedious. I tried to look for a better solution and searched for any third-party option. Sure I found something. Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you the BookEndz Dock for the 15" MacBook Pro:

WTF?!?! A docking base that plugs connectors in all the ports around the laptop? Wow! This surprises me a lot, such a bad conceptual work for an Apple product is just... how to say it... lame? I guessed there should be something better out there, and it wasn't that long till I found the Balmuda Floater MacBook Dock:

Once again, the same thing. Just a support-base to hold the laptop and a bunch of cables to connect each time. Both things are selling around 300$ each, I guess the only thing that is designed for Apple customers. This may seem quite stupid because those two products where designed by third-parties using the specifications of the MacBook, and it doesn't provide a dock port so it's the only way to solve the problem... it makes no sense to talk about it, you may think.

Let's talk about something directly under Apple's control and design: the MacBook Pro itself. The machine is really nice and sleek but I guess nobody thought about its intended use on desktops. If you work at home with an external display, a cabled-network connection, a mouse and an external drive you will use most of your ports. The ports, as you've seen before, are located on the sides of the machine, so if yo plan to use a mouse: move it quite far away from the laptop; near field are for connectors. Why didn't they chose the rear panel to put all the connectors? Oh, yes, I know... it's designed to look cool from the outer perspective if anyone is looking at it... but what happens with my point of view?

And what's in Apple for developers? How do they treat them? Almost nothing good to say here, at least related to iPhone development... you have to pay to create and publish applications, you can't say anything about the SDK (there's an NDA, so don't blog, articles, tutorials or anything related. It will be banned), after paying for publishing applications you'll be deducted 30% of your income from AppStore sales and, finally, the developer acceptance program takes too much time just to find out that, at the end, your application is can be rejected if Apple is already providing similar features. The last statement of course is decided by Apple, not the users.

I'm not an Apple enemy, I really like the design of their products and I have most of them in my life. I really want to use them and try to expand the developer community around them. But why don't they look at how Microsoft opened all the communities to developers during the last years? They should be more open to accept criticism and expect people to create amazing things innovating around their products. Just let the magic happen, don't kill the wizards.

To me, this is affecting the brand image that they've invested so much to create.