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I share a widespread feeling that Apple has never known which end is up in the business world.
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Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983
T h e R o a d L e s s T r a v e l e d
Despite its finger-in-the-air attitude, Apple responded quickly to bugs in Tiger
May 25, 2005
By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2005, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2005, The Post-Standard
I advised my readers to hold off when Apple introduced the newest version of OS X at the end of April. I suspected that Apple would need a couple of months to fix the inevitable bugs that show up in every new piece of software.
I was wrong, but not in the way you might think. Apple missed a gigantic bug in the new operating system, OS X 10.4, nicknamed "Tiger," so my intuition was serving me well. And serving you well, if you took my advice.
But instead of taking a few months to fix the problem, Apple got a fix out to OS X users in a couple of weeks.
I was amazed. You already know that I'm a big fan of Apple's computers, but you might not realize that I've seldom felt that same fuzzy feeling for Apple's management. I think, as many other observers do, that Apple is looney for refusing to advertise the Mac's advantages over Windows. I also share a widespread feeling that Apple has never known which end is up in the business world.
Oh well. The company makes great computers and has a superb J.D. Power customer service rating. That surely makes up for the other nonsense, right?
This is how I've felt about Apple for years. I forgive it for the dumb stuff. But now I have a respect for Steve Jobs and Co. I didn't have before.
When it came out with OS X 10.4, Apple made a lot of noise about Dashboard, a new feature that lets Mac users install helpful programs called Widgets that can do all kinds of useful things. That's a great idea, or rather that would have been a great idea if Apple had stopped there.
But Dashboard was designed to allow anyone to put a Widget on your OS X 10.4 Mac. Web sites could do it on the sly. And that meant that Web sites run by idiots could do bad things to your OS X 10.4 Mac. There were reports that a malicious Widget was already in circulation, and it supposedly wiped out files in the user's own folders.
Dumb design. More than dumb, maybe. But instead of stonewalling, Apple did the right thing, and did it quickly: It came up with a fix for the security problem -- in the fixed version, Dashboard doesn't let these things get installed without explicit permission -- and sent the fix out through its automatic update system quickly and effectively.
I can't help but be critical of Apple for such a programming mistake. There's no excuse. But I can't resist pointing out that Apple acted as quickly as possible. I'd love to see companies that make other operating systems act just as rapidly when things go wrong.
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