I would like to offer constructive criticisms to Apple's CEO Tim Cook about their recent software releases. It's easy to see why you are proud of Apple's product line of hardware; I use many of your products and love them.
However, it also seems clear to many of your long time Mac users that your eye was taken off the recent iLife and iWork releases. My primary message is:
• Never release new versions of applications that remove highly used features.
The rest of this post gives examples of the issue mentioned above. In my opinion, an important component missing in the instructions given to the software teams on these projects was "use common sense." For example, the iLife and iWork teams were likely told to:
1. Create 64 bit versions of the applications.
2. Make them easier to use for novice users.
The missing instruction was:
3. Never remove a heavily used existing feature.
Existing users of Apple's Mac applications have hundreds, perhaps thousands, of hours invested in your applications. When you remove a feature that we find very helpful and important and we've imbedded in our projects, you impact our ability to continue to update our projects. Can you imagine having hundreds of hours invested in your company's video only to find out that after upgrading, the video editing app no longer allows you to add the editing feature that was central to the theme of the video? Or that you can no longer organize your hundreds of Events and Projects into simple folders, but rather they are now all bunched into one Library that you must scroll through to locate!
I have seen quite a few forum posts that agree with my preference to pay for new releases and get additional helpful features rather than getting updates for free but losing valuable features because there wasn't time/resources to add them back into a new 64 bit version. This is a very serious issue to many of your Mac users!
A rumor is that Apple wants to get the Mac and IOS versions of Apple applications as similar as possible, and that is why some previous Mac features were removed to be closer to the IOS version. We Mac users hope that is not the case. I have reverted to using the previous version of iMovie.
Please focus on this issue and let your loyal Mac users know you are aware of the problems and will fix them very quickly. And just as important, you won't let this happen again.
Thank you.
