Ping is Garbage; Plus More Apple-Related Gripes

APPLE has always held itself to a high standard and invited its loyalists to do likewise. The company was never overly—or overtly—concerned with market share. Above all, it's a company run by idealists (or more accurately, "idealist" in the singular) for idealists; its aim is to make quality, thoughtful, industry-shaping products, and if buyers recognize that en masse, all the better.

Ever since the iPod took off, Apple has enjoyed the best of both worlds: brand integrity and popularity among consumers. It continued to release products true to its own vision, products that pundits predicted would fail, that tech nerds deemed inadequate, that haters gleefully reviled. Not only did they sell in record numbers regardless, those same pundits, tech nerds, and haters were often forced to recant, however reluctantly, when they stopped looking at the spec sheet and actually held the gizmo in their hands. Longtime Apple champions experienced the repeated thrill of vindication.

But of late, in my own small sliver of the world, the spec sheets of Apple's offerings have proven more impressive than the real-world use. And for once I'm inclined to agree with those normally wrongheaded loudmouths who accuse the company of prizing form above function.

I'll start with iTunes 10. Icon furore aside (let's face it, the icon really is drab and uninspiring)—along with the GUI changes that once again turn the bloated media app into the black sheep of the Apple software family, and the sudden break with Firefly and OS X's own Automator support—there's Ping.

Ping is one of the most half-baked "features" Apple has introduced in a long time. It's unintuitive, limited, dull, derivative, unambitious — a Last.fm wannabe that lacks that service's basic and essential features like scrobbling. In its current form, there's nothing particularly social about Ping; it's really only a way to publicize one's activity on the iTunes Store.

The list of complaints and shortcomings is about ten times as long as what Ping claims to offer. The service is only accessible through iTunes' bastard interface. There's no way to properly rate songs or albums; you can only say you "Like" something in the inane manner of Facebook (support for which mysteriously vanished a few hours after iTunes 10's protracted debut). If you want to "Like" a particular band, you can only pick from an existing pool of Ping-sanctioned artist pages. Searching for concerts by artist or area is impossible. Interaction with other users is restricted to a simple search field — there's no way to browse for friends or fans by geography, common favorites, or even Address Book entries. The songs in your library, Genius submissions, or "currently playing" notifications are conspicuously absent.

Come to think of it, the very fact that Ping keeps hounding me to follow 50 Cent is proof enough of its inadequacy.

I wish Ping were the only Apple-related letdown of the past few weeks. But it isn't. Since upgrading to iOS 4, my iPod Touch (2nd gen.) has been nothing but pocket-sized frustration. The music library can take up to a minute to load. The whole OS freezes regularly and requires a hard restart. The interface is unresponsive. Last week an important voice recording of an interview became a 29-minute-long, 0kb file, totally unsalvageable, which forced me to have to make an embarrassed call to the interviewees. Text notes routinely vanish, reappear, double, triple. Battery life is about half of what it was with iOS 3. Syncing with iTunes has stalled frequently.

Combine all that with the strange absence of iLife '11, the silence surrounding OS X 10.7, the peculiarity of the revamped AppleTV and the iPod nano (a touchscreen on a thumb-sized device? really?) plus the iPhone antenna issue, and my general impression is that Apple is getting sloppy. Microsoft sloppy. Sony sloppy. Apple has been on a multi-year high, leaping deftly from tech sensation to tech sensation, and I worry that its resulting arrogance, fragmentation, or overreach has caused the company to lose the attention to detail that, for example, timed the pulse of the sleep light with the human breathing, or that earned the brand a justifiable reputation for being one that "just works."

The larger problem here is that, when Microsoft's and the PC world's products got too cumbersome and unreliable for use, I was able to turn to Apple. If the time comes when Apple's products are too cumbersome and unreliable, what's the alternative? Where's the competent, focused, idealistic, visionary underdog to act as the Apple to Apple?