So in the last week and change, Apple has:<\/p>\n
* Let go Sal Soghoian, the legendary Apple director for automation technologies – the drum major for AppleScript, Automator and support for scripting technology within Apple products. He is not being replaced.<\/p>\n
* Reassigned the engineers working on Apple\u2019s AirPort and Time Capsule routers and backup devices to\u2026something else.<\/p>\n
* Released a $300 coffee table book of Apple\u2019s design in the last 20 years, dedicated to the late CEO who upon returning to Apple sent all of its historical memorabilia to Stanford rather than dwell on the past.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Something is going on in Cupertino and I don\u2019t care for the direction it\u2019s taking. The new MacBook Pro has come in for more of a lashing than any Apple product in recent memory, and most of the heat is coming from actual professional users frustrated not only by the too-little-too-late of just now shipping a Skylake-based laptop and prioritizing thin and gimmicky over high-end firepower. Made worse, no doubt, by the fact that the Mac Pro – \u201ccan\u2019t innovate any more my ass\u201d – literally hasn\u2019t changed in any way since it was introduced three years ago.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s difficult to get the impression that Apple is more convinced than ever that it\u2019s a phone-and-tablet company, and that the Mac is not only no longer the bread and butter, but not worth committing high-end resources to. The ancillary technologies that support the Mac, that allow you to easily have an integrated experience – the AirPort line, the Thunderbolt Display – are gone by the boards. The additional technology that helps with using Macs in an enterprise environment is going – there isn\u2019t so much as a rumor around Apple Remote Desktop 4 and Apple has basically relinquished enterprise support and management to JAMF in every way that matters, never mind the absence of a rackable server product since the demise of the late lamented XServe. (Not that I lament picking up those RAIDs, though. Those bastards weighed 110 pounds each fully packed.)<\/p>\n
When I left Apple in 2007, it was out of fear that the role I was in was insufficiently technical – my job was six hours a day of scheduling and checking inventory and tasks that could have been handled by a competently-designed database and a few well-crafted scripts, and two hours a day of dockwalloping and forklift-pulling. I wanted to be working on computers and with computers, not just moving them around. The problem is, since 1994, my life has largely been built on the use of and support of the Macintosh. And now, on the eve of my 20th year in the IT sector, it\u2019s rapidly becoming apparently that the Macintosh isn\u2019t that much of a priority for Apple anymore.<\/p>\n
On the one hand, fine. I\u2019m about to embark on a career as a JAMF administrator, in addition to my other duties, and JAMF is basically the whole of enterprise-grade Mac management at present. It\u2019s also an iOS management solution, and the perfect bridge to a world where, to be honest, the Apple-made market share in business is greater (the instances of iPhones in enterprise FAR outstrip the presence of Macs). It\u2019s also, insh\u2019allah<\/em>, a job that doesn\u2019t require as much of a physical on-site presence once things are up and running – the sort of job that could be based in the Bay Area but actually carried out remotely from the Central Coast. Or the Oregon Coast. Or a village in Ireland an hour\u2019s train from Dublin, perhaps.\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s also a job doing something that may not have the long-term demand to carry me the rest of the way home. Like it or not, I\u2019m probably only about halfway through my working career. I don\u2019t have a realistic path to retire before 65 – which gets even more unrealistic if they decide to kill off Medicare for anyone too young to be a Trumpshaker – so I\u2019m going to have to be able to do something for twenty more years. And to be honest, modern workstation IT is less than thirty years old. During my ill-fated temp stint before I started my first real job out of school, I was told \u201cthe computer has an internet explorer\u201d as if it were an unusual feature. LAN-type setups for anything but printing and maybe some basic file storage were new (hell, when I started at National Geographic, internet access was a function of what floor you were on and whether the switch passed TCP\/IP). So to assume that the world of \u201cworkstation support\u201d will look anything like 2017 in, say, 2027 – let alone 2037 – is an awfully<\/em> big ask.<\/p>\n And we\u2019ve already established that Silly Con Valley, as currently constituted, is a bad place to be in your 40s if you\u2019re not already a millionaire VC. It\u2019s definitely a bad place to be if you\u2019ve been in the same job for seven years, which is apparently a red flag about your lack of ambition and never mind how much more you were doing in the same role with the same title by year six of the seven. It\u2019s not the sort of neighborhood where I\u2019d want to find myself looking for work at age 58, let alone 63.<\/p>\n So maybe I try to stick around where I\u2019m at. If I could somehow carve out a niche where \u201cplatform engineering\u201d becomes \u201cplatform support system administrator\u201d for a little more money and a lot more remote-working, where we could easily go someplace else to hide out from the rest of the world when need be, where I could just punch the clock and let something else be how I measure my life\u2026that wouldn\u2019t be the worst thing in the world, right?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So in the last week and change, Apple has: * Let go Sal Soghoian, the legendary Apple director for automation technologies – the drum major for AppleScript, Automator and support for scripting technology within Apple products. He is not being replaced. * Reassigned the engineers working on Apple\u2019s AirPort and Time Capsule routers and backup … <\/p>\n