10 11 2015

After having some great years with OSX since 2007 and iOS soon after that, it becomes time to say good bye. Why? – We’re experiencing more and more problems. In 2014, we got really mad about Apple’s ridiculous AppStore policies, claiming that our e-learning app was useless (as opposed to Flappybird!), just because it loaded content via http/https from a server (just like the memleaking facbeook app, by the way!). Therefore we’ve stopped actively developing apps for AppStore last year already, of course still supporting our clients with their AdHoc deployed apps that we have developed for them. But even this becomes quite a pain, maintaining the Apps to stay compatible with new iOS versions is constantly taking away manpower, all kinds of things that have been working nicely keep breaking with iOS updates.

OSX used to be extremely reliable and stable – but – stability degraded continously over the past years. While “great” new useless pseudo-features have been introduced to OSX, fundamentally important features are either being completely removed (e.g. disk tool: encryption) and/or suddenly becoming buggy (e.g. finder).

With “El Capitan”, things became worse to the point where it costs us a lot of money. The once rock solid, stable system became buggy and sucky. Problems in Finder, not being able to login anymore with iTunes/AppStore/XCode are just a few things to mention. – We’ve just lost yet another two three workdays because something simply doesn’t work. Macbooks keep crashing (either because of the 2011 macbook pro GPU problem, or due to software issues with the mid-2012 macbooks (afaik this also applies to some iMacs): as soon as GPU switching is enabled, the machines keep crashing approx. once per day. By disabling the HD4000 we managed to get the systems running stable again.

Dear Apple, it was a really nice time we have spent together since 2007, but times have changed and we are heading towards linux now. – The price/value for your new hardware became ridiculous as the software becomes more and more unstable and unreliable, while prices for hardware are exploding. – The latest laptops offering just about the same speed as a MacBook from 2011 with SSD and proper RAM. Well yeah, the display is better. But wait: it’s glossy, i hate glossy. We are willing to pay a premium price for a solid and stable system (and non glossy!) with a working GPU. ^^ Considering all the problems from the last few months, we have seen enough. Luckily, we have seen this coming and evaluated various Linux distros over the last two years. So don’t worry about us, Apple, we are well prepared.

It was a good time we’ve had together, but it is time to say good bye. – With end of the year, we will be migrating our main machines to be running on Linux.

Steve, we miss you. Really hard.

p.s. i will keep posting about all the steps of of our migration from OSX to Linux.

ATTENTION: Android Backup (adb) not working properly on Googles own Nexus5 phone: better look for something else! iOS 9.x blocks all http:// accesses, therefore need to patch exported projects from Unity 4.6.9