My theories on why Apple’s "Old Guard" has degraded into whiny toddlers.

[Adriendod]

The Haus of Rose-Tinted Glasses: How a Thousand Minor UI Tweaks Killed "My Will to Live"​

There’s an old saying:

You can’t fix your mid-life crisis by just yelling at a trillion-dollar corporation.

These fans have memories. They have more than enough memories. But what memories cannot buy—at least not directly—is perspective, adaptability, and a chill pill. And those are exactly what Apple’s veteran user base is missing right now.

Most people don’t sit around dissecting icon corner radiuses, transition animation speeds, or the exact hex code of the Settings menu gray. What they do notice—loudly, and annoyingly—is that their blood pressure starts creeping up when they ask themselves:

“Why isn’t this exactly the same as it was in 2012 when I was still happy?”

A feature that looked like a glossy, stitched-leather calendar in iOS 6 has now been "silently deprecated" into a clean, functional white square, and you can no longer feel the skeuomorphic texture of your wasted youth. A Mac that used to make a loud BONG sound that woke up the entire neighborhood suddenly starts booting up silently after you upgraded to the latest version. You find yourself writing multiple paragraphs on Reddit, and “I’ll just stay on macOS Mojave forever until Tim Cook personally apologizes,” and before you know it, you’re living in a digital bunker held together with resentment and 32-bit apps that haven't been updated since the Obama administration.

It’s not one catastrophic bug.

It’s a thousand minor inconveniences to your muscle memory.

And I don’t think this happened by accident.

What follows is a connected web I put together—from the removal of the headphone jack to the tragedy of the Dynamic Island, from the death of FireWire to the "woke" emojis—that, in my view, explains how Apple’s old fans slowly dug themselves into the hole of misery they’re in now… and how, if they’re smart, they can still touch grass.

Spoiler: Spoiler: long thread

Nah nevermind.

 

[Slartibart]

well, your somewhat self-aborted discourse suggests ego-protective termination preceding maybe some additional adjacent affect - on the surface there seems to be some intellectual insight here, but without corresponding emotional integration.
You appear to utilise comedic distancing to manage existential anxiety and identity concerns symbolically displaced onto a consumer technology paradigm. Oh, and your premature closure does indicate some resistance to therapeutic processing of underlying material, doesn‘t it?

I might be wrong so, I am an »old fan« 😂🤣

 

[Apple_Robert]

Dwelling on something like this is a waste of time.

 

[Abazigal]

Apple seems to have always been subject to a great deal of cynicism and negativity for as long as I can remember, even from its own user base. It started with the iPod, then the iPhone, the iPad, AirPods etc. It feels like nothing can make them happy, and reality is that Apple got to where it is today precisely by marching to its own beat and not caring two hoots about what anybody thought or felt.

One theory I have is that they are comparing Apple too much to other companies, and they are not allowing Apple’s unique attributes to speak for themselves or recognise how Apple is able to set themselves apart from the competition. There is too much focus on specs and not enough on the user experience. And therein lies the most delicious irony of it all - that the loudest, most self-styled "Apple fanboys" here are perhaps the ones who have failed to understand Apple the most.