It can be frustrating to those of us who don’t work at Apple to support Apple products. Here are the top 3 weakness of Apple and how to deal with them.

Secrets – This is deadly for enterprise support. How can a company invest in Apple products like the Xserve/Xraid array and they are EOL (end of life) with no transition? Too many times, Apple ends software/hardware support with no migration strategy. This is very difficult for everyone. While other companies end support, they often can be replaced by other vendors. However how can you replace something like the Xraid? Sure you can buy other equipment, but what happens when what you have breaks? Third-party market is unreliable and not a good idea for any company.

More generally its more than the roadmap for products that prevent Apple adoption. It is that using Apple services like MobileMe has no kind of management for legal or compliance issues. Apple can’t compete when there is no transparency about what it does and doesn’t do with its services. Yes there is a competitive advantage to not being transparent, but it also means that they lose business that they could have had. I have never seen any kind of information if MobileMe could be SOX/Hippa/PCI compliant. If they said they were, I bet they would see a huge surge of customers. Apple misses opportunities when they aren’t honest with the limitations of their services.

What is more surprising is that when Google and Facebook are being investigated for anti-consumer practices, Apple isn’t proactive about this possibility. It is almost axiomatic that the larger a company grows the more likely it will be investigated. It seems clear to me that Apple will be investigated in the future. So this is the choice they are making. I think they are trading on the goodwill generated by their products that they won’t be investigated. I don’t think this will happen.

How to deal with them: Don’t promise future support for investments, don’t beta-test new services on individuals, don’t be afraid to use third-party stuff when it is better.

Design – Apple gets compliments for its design so how could that be a weakness? Well it is a weakness because often they make right decisions, they just as often make wrong ones. Apple tends to drop support for technologies way more aggressively than their typical customer is ready to. This can be very costly and disruptive.

List of design choices that were mistakes: No support of Blu-Ray, lack of basic I/O devices like the cheapest PC’s have, odd and questionable ideas like the Apple Cube, puck mouse, Apple III, iWeb/Galleries. Why didn’t they just buy WordPress and Flickr? Those are applications that have serious market respect, and yet Apple choose to compete instead. Apple forgets what Steve Jobs himself said. “It is a mistake to think that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose.” Apple has a design opportunity to include web-based services as part of its OS yet it focus on its own attempt to ape those winning products.

It is curious isn’t it? Apple clearly has many successful products, but they continuously try to reinvent the wheel. While that sometimes results in new products like the iPhone, sometimes you only have to integrate, not reinvent. Apple is so creative, that I believe it blinds them to the opportunities that are so plentiful. To make the services on the web integrate in a manner that is beneficial to their customers and those of other Operating systems. For example, Xmarks syncs passwords across browsers. How wonderful that would be if Safari/Chrome/Firefox bookmarks/favorites were able to be shared no matter what their source? This is something that Apple could easily and clearly do. This would be a fantastic service that they are missing because they are focused on competing on too many fronts like Google.

Every design choice says volumes about their priorities as a company. Jobs have said that they have to say “no” to good projects to focus on great ones. Well I would submit that many products/projects are not great and their current success does not guarantee future success. I think that Apple is drifting away from its customers when customers are ok with not buying Apple products. If you don’t create a product people miss, then you haven’t created a magical product. I have met many Apple customers who had an Apple failure and then start using a pc product. If using a mac is more difficult than easy, people will avoid it. Apple still is more difficult to use than a PC in many ways, and better design would fix this.

For example, I don’t understand why Apple didn’t buy VMware or Parallels and incorporate their product into the OS. For the average person to just be able to install and use a VM image, or their older Windows software would have been incredible. In many places in the US there is not a close Apple store, so until Apple stores are on every corner, they need to work in a Windows-centric world. Apple needs to think about how their machines can have even more feature parity with Windows machines, and do everything they can to allow people to have options. They need to realize that people may not want to have multiple machines just to have them. That they might one like machine that can do everything. Having the ability to have PC I/O ports and software would effectively let people buy a mac with total security. That was what was so awesome when they had a PC card in their machines in the past. Having two machines in one is a fantastic value. I think that if they did this, they would put the writing on the wall for PC vendors.

How to deal with them: Don’t use the default Apple programs just because they are free, look at the track record of third-party companies, consider the goal of your organization and find ways to simplify and centralize.

Black/white thinking – This manifests itself in so many ways. Everyone has a right to make choices. The problem is that when you are a company, your choices have real consequences to others. I shared earlier my problem with one of Gmails features that was embarrassing for me.

Apple has this arrogance that many people have commented on that their way is the best way. Every company believes this, but Apple is in a unique position. It used to be that Apple was more proprietary and too often they took advantage of that. I remember reading that a famous writer invested thousands of dollars in equipment and needed a simple printer cable. When he called Apple they charged him $50 for it. He was so upset that he had no choice but to pay it, because no one else made that cable. Too many times I see customers who are in this position. Their computer fails, and the repair cost is sometimes more expensive than a new one is worth. That kind of policy is not only unfair, but results in a loss of future business.

Also this manifests in trying to deny reality. Apple sometimes has had to be sued into admitting that their products have defects, and should be repaired under warranty. Too often Apple has tried to deny and cover up a problem, when it would have been better to just admit it up front. Their employees seem more concerned about preserving the reputation of Apple, than in fixing issues it is responsible for. These things are not forgotten by the Apple community and the more this happens, the closer to the breaking point people become and consider other options to use.

The recent moisture sensor is another sign of this kind of unhelpful thinking. It was put in to see if their products were being abused and I understand that. The problem is that when people did not abuse their system and the sensor showed moisture, what happened. Rather than believe their customer (can really everyone be lying), they denied repairs when they showed the sensor that showed moisture. Any kind of new technology will have bugs, so there should be a “trial” period to give people the benefit of the doubt until a system is established beyond any doubt. Your customers are not your enemies but your friends.

How to deal with them: Don’t depend on Macs for critical infrastructure without a dedicated mac support, don’t take what Apple employees say at face value (Genius are instructed to not tell the whole truth on some issues), get Applecare if you buy any Apple product, find a Mac genius you can trust.

Conclusion – Apple isn’t perfect, but of the competition is the best for me at the present time. If it could address these situations then it would truly be “magical”.