Does the Apple of my eye have a black eye?

I've been using Macintoshes and other Apple products since September 1984.  Maybe for the first 20 years I was eager to update to the latest releases.  Especially when I was a Certified Apple Developer so that I could make sure my software ran on the new release.

Then I started getting "burned" by new releases.  One time the migration from one computer to another crashed.  Many times software that should have worked on the new release had new problems.  Often it seemed like I was an unpaid debugger of software (not just Apple but Microsoft and other software publishers).

One of the latest was the introduction of iOS 6 followed by iOS 7.  Many were the problems that I had with each, and Apple's "Community" web site was filled with similar complaints or others that often were never answered.

The latest was the new release of Pages, Apple's supposed challenger to Microsoft Word.  As I would like to move away from Microsoft Word, I was interested in Pages.  Especially so since the rumors are that Apple will be providing Microsoft "competitors" free, even for new versions, in the next year or so.

I looked up Pages in Apple's App store.  Hoo boy!  Many users were angry! Over half of those rating Pages gave it only one star.  A representative comment is:

"But the fact remains that Apple removed so much functionality from what was once a decent, viable and affordable option for desk-top publishing for the Mac platform."

Oh, yes, on top of all those problems, Apple, which pioneered cut and paste, does not allow copy from its App Store!  I had to retype the above comment.

This is another case of the "Corp giveth and the Corp taketh away".

Watch also for "Computer glitches? What's new?" that will appear in the Reader Weekly of Duluth later this week.  It's about how computer problems are not limited to the software for the Affordable Care Act.

Magree's software laws

Magree's first law of software is that the complexity of software rises to meet or exceed the capacity of the fastest systems available to run it.  Don't believe me?  Try accessing almost any web page on a 24kb dialup:)

From this discussion and others I've come up with Magree's second law of software: the number of problems rises exponentially with the complexity of software.  It's kind of hard to believe if you consider the bad old days of mainframes having a good day without a crash.  But on the other hand, I've had more problems this year with software than the previous three years.