Screw you, Apple

You know, I haven’t updated this blog in some time. Why not? I haven’t been irritated enough to rant about anything lately.

Now, I’m not talking about the decidedly heavy social issues of the day, our rotten federal government or the general mess that our nation has been drudging through since the dawn of the 21st century. No, it’s more fun to rant about trivial things that annoy the living hell out of me.

The iPhone 4S is the gift that keeps on giving in that regard. I hate this phone more than I thought it was possible to hate an inanimate object, but the iPhone 4S is so obnoxious that it feels more like a prank than a device that’s supposed to be convenient. It has proven to be a consistently awful phone and one has to question a lot of moves it made after Steve Jobs died. Remember what Apple was like without Jobs in the mid-1980s to mid-1990s? The company went from one of the world’s leading technology companies to one that churned out junk. Folks, they’re heading back down that path again. Jobs was Apple and the company isn’t worth two damns without him.

Let me explain. Back in August 2010, I got an iPhone 4. That thing was a brick. It was reliable as all get out in spite of the fact that I’m hard on cell phones and tend to tear them up fairly quickly.

In February 2012, I moved on to the iPhone 4S and that was a mistake. By September, the 4S was having problems connecting to either WiFi or cellular networks. No, the phone had to be completely reset several times a day in order to restore connectivity (and that’s annoying). I took it to the local Apple Store in Little Rock and those folks did a clean reinstall of the OS. That didn’t fix the problem and the Apple Store decided to replace the 4S with a new one in December.

Problem solved, right? Nope. Within a couple of months, my new 4S developed a new problem – the sound likes to cut out from time to time. Yes, it’s silent for a few minutes then starts working again for one unknown reason or another.

If my original 4S was garbage and its replacement is garbage, it’s not too hard to conclude that Apple has some serious quality control issues with its phones. Is the new, Jobs-free Apple utilizing cheaper Chinese slave labor to build these things? It’s hard to tell, really.

The point here is this. Apple has gone, once again, from an international technology innovator to one that is cranking out substandard garbage. Without Jobs, the company is one that is simply resting on its laurels.

I’m curious about whether the iPhone 5 is as much of a disaster as the 4S, but it’s hard to get a straight answer on that. People tend to be zealots about Apple products and zealots are rarely objective.

I’m due a new phone in a couple of months, so it seems my time in the Apple camp is rapidly coming to an end. My tablet is Android, so it makes sense to grab an Android-powered phone, too.