Five Products Apple SHOULD Keep Making

Bloomberg is certainly one of the most reputable publications out there, but when it comes to opinion pieces, well, everybody's got their own. For example, when they feature stories like “Five Products Apple Should Stop Making.”

They start out with Safari, which I personally found as one of the worst arguments you could use to kick off such a feature story.

In what parallel dimension would a hardware vendor kill off the proprietary web browser its computer / tablet / smartphone ships with? How’s the customer going to access Google to look something up? Even if you do want Firefox, Chrome, or whatever, you still need Safari to download them. You can’t even find these in the Mac App Store.

Moving on to Game Center.

“I just know it as the annoying thing that pops up before I want to play Angry Birds,” editor Sam Grobart laments.

Ok Sam, you may have something here. Nobody really likes Game Center, I guess. But it’s still required as a first-party multiplayer solution. Not everyone plays only Angry Birds on their iPhone or iPad, you know.

Pages

“Pages. This is Apple’s word processing application, but it’s the third player in a two-player contest. For most people, there’s Microsoft [...] Word, and there’s Google [...] Docs. One’s bloated and powerful, the other’s limited but streamlined. Nobody needs another word processing program.”

Really? Can I just download the Microsoft Word app on the Mac? No, I can’t. But what I can do is get the standalone Pages app from the Mac App Store for like a quarter of the price Microsoft charges for Word alone on Windows.

Numbers

“Another Apple version of software that doesn’t need to be. Numbers is Apple’s challenge to Microsoft’s Excel, but for better or worse, Excel is the standard here,” writes Grobart, who obviously seems to favor Microsoft’s solutions over Apple’s, any day of the week.

Here’s the deal. Numbers, just like Pages, is part of the iWork suite which is a first-party, Apple-developed solution that has been perfectly optimized for the Mac. If I want it, it’s there in the Mac App Store as well for $19.99 (€15,99).

Mission Control/Launchpad/Dashboard

This time I’m not even going to quote. Any argument you may have against these three key elements of Apple’s Mac operating system is invalid.

Mission control enables you to get a birds-eye view of all your running apps (and windows) with a click. If you don’t want to use it, you don’t have to. But it’s there for those of us who really understand how to get real work done with a Mac.

Launchpad also gives you a birds-eye view, this time for all your apps. And it does it in the most visually appealing manner possible. Just like Mission Control, if you don’t want to use it, you don’t have to. If someone gave you a Mac with the Launchpad icon removed from the dock, you wouldn’t even know it existed. Plus, Launchpad is a very good applications manager. It can beat Microsoft’s Control Panel any day of the week.

And the Dashboard is OS X’s one-stop widget warehouse. Why would I forgo a secondary desktop space that can be toggled on and off in a second, where I can get quick info on the weather, stocks, or do a quick dictionary search, and all kinds of handy things?

Honestly, Dashboard alone is a selling point of OS X. To say Apple should scrub it means you probably haven’t become acquainted with the Mac all that well.

Via: Five Products Apple SHOULD Keep Making