Apple's Feet of Clay

Getting an iPhone 2 yesterday turned out to be a non-starter.

My company is involved in iPhone services so I plan to get one of the new models to be able to test our stuff with the new GPS-equipped model, but I confess I'd be getting one anyway in order to take advantage of the higher-speed 3G network services. I took Friday off in hopes that I might be able to get one, but the early reports of availability weren't encouraging.

My buddy Archie was going to attempt to get an iPhone from the AT&T Store near his house in the East Bay. Unfortunately when he got there he found that a lot of other people had the same idea. The line was at least 150 yards long. He gave up, went home and took a nap, and then tried again later, only to find that the store had run out before he could quite get up to the door. Evidently someone ahead of him in line threw a hissy fit, cursing AT&T (but not Apple) for making him wait for nothing.

Archie and I got together for lunch and decided to try an AT&T Store in my neck of the woods before going to see "Hellboy 2". (A terrific movie, by the way.) We walked over to an AT&T Store in downtown Redwood City but they hadn't even gotten the iPhone 2 to begin with. Apparently not all of their stores were lucky enough to get them in stock.

We decided to bag it for the day and spent the rest of the afternoon at City Pub trying out some of their ales, beers, and porters. And then seeing the movie, of course. Although it was a lot of fun I was a little disappointed that I didn't manage to get one of the new models.

I have an older iPhone that I was fortunate enough to be able to successfully update with the new 2.0 software on Thursday. (We managed to get a link to the software on Apple's distribution network and downloaded it manually.) It's extremely cool, and a huge upgrade from the previous version. Being able to install applications is going to be huge. HUGE. As it turns out, it's a good thing I upgraded on Thursday, because an upgrade Friday would've meant a useless iPhone for a good chunk of the day.

Unfortunately Apple has made a lot of missteps in this launch. They didn't anticipate the level of demand (either that, or their server infrastructure is sadly underpowered) and many iPhone 2 customers spent yesterday trying unsuccessfully to activate their phones over the network. AT&T blames Apple, and as far as I know, Apple hasn't pointed any fingers back at AT&T.

The rollout of MobileMe, the replacement for .Mac, has also been fraught with failures. Although my Mac Book Pro received the MobileMe software update on Thursday, my iMac at home still can't download it, even though I've run Software Update several times. My iDisk was unavailable for the better part of three days, and the .Mac Preferences Pane just today finally started showing my account status correctly again.

Apple has been showing a quality-control strain for a long time now, and finally some of their hubris is starting to get public exposure. Mac OS X Server 10.5 "Leopard" is as buggy as an ant farm. The client software is quite stable, but the server version is really problematic, especially with respect to Windows interoperability.

(For example, for months my Windows users have been unable to connect to network services using the Leopard VPN server. We had to move an older 10.4 server up to our office from the data center to provide Windows users a way to connect to the office. There's any number of bugs in the Leopard SMB server, including two really heinous ones: the Primary Domain Controller occasionally takes a nap and doesn't wake up again until you restart it, so Windows users can't even login to their domain accounts.

The other one is that the file server has a bug that adds "extended attributes" to some files when you copy them up to the server. You can't copy back to your Windows machine the very same file you just copied to the server! Insane! This bug is apparently a very old one, but it just started hitting us very recently. I've found mentions of it in Apple's support forums dating back many months. But has Apple seen fit to fix it yet? Take a guess.

The best feature of this bug is that it can prevents Window users from logging into their domain profiles, so the can't get access to anything they've stored on the server until the offending files are deleted. Hoo-frickin'-ray. (You can't even use the "xattr" command line tool to delete the problematic extended attributes. Believe me. I tried.)

Apple had better get on the quality control bandwagon, and I mean, right now. As much as I love Apple's products, I'm no fanboy. We're going to get real Windows servers for our Windows users and turn off the interoperability features on our Leopard server, because they're too unreliable. Supposedly the next version of OS X is supposed to be focused on quality, but damn, I'm losing faith in Apple's ability to deliver it. The iPhone 2 snafu is just a symptom of a much bigger problem, in my opinion.

Apple is growing too fast for its own good. It had better exchange those feet of clay for Seven League Boots before it stumbles and falls.