I'm now in my third period as a Mac user. The first period was in the late eighties working with Word (and later Aldus PageMaker) to create a bulletin for the students computer club (Tromsøstudentenes Dataforening). The next period was in 1997 when I visited Lancaster University for six months and a Mac was put on my desk. However, my main computer (where my programming has been done) has always (since 1987) been some sort of a Unix computer (starting with Ultrix, followed by HP-UX, and between 1993 and 2002 NetBSD). It is not a surprise then that my third period as a Mac user is related to Mac OS X, the first Mac OS with a Unix core. I think I bought my first 15 inch Mac PowerBook G4 Titanium in the autumn of 2002 with Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) on it. And I'm still a Mac user. One of the main reasons is that it is a Unix computer. I have access to a shell and the large number of command line tools to I master and use frequently. One big difference since 2002 is that now I know for certain that Apple and its product will be here for a long long time. They will change and evolve, but Apple the company will not be gone. And I think OS X and my preferred shell will be available on Mac computers for many years to come. So when you hear that Apple is in trouble, it doesn't mean that Apple and its products will soon be gone. It only means that the marked values of it shares lower that it used to be.

Stock market analysts also believes that Apple is far away from bankruptcy. But comments like «Apple will always have a place in the market because it has a very loyal fan base» are wrong. The large amount of people that buy Apple products today do not buy their products because they are loyal fan. They buy them because the like the products. Like I bought my first Mac with OS X because I liked the combination of the power tools (Unix) and a good selection of desktop applications (this was never the strength of NetBSD), and I bought my first iPod because it was the best music-player/software combination available, and I bought my first iPhone because the combination of the best phone and best music-player available was unbeatable.

But I also enjoy and encourage competing products. I really hope that the new Windows phones will be a great success, and I think Android and all the different Android products are important for pushing the future of mobile devices towards even greater products than we have today. I find several examples of features in non-Apple products that could improve the current Macs and iPhones. For instance, in a research projects I am part of we have experimented with NFC technologies for years, and Android is a perfect platform to experiment with this. One day I might find that another product matches my requirements better than my iPhone or Mac, and then I will buy the better product (and I might regret or enjoy it). Support for NFC (ticketing, door-locks, info-posters and so on) could be such a feature.

A long list of features and great specifications are not enough to create a good product. One of Apple's strengths is the ability to find a balance between features, specifications and usability. To not include LTE because battery life is important for the users is an example of this strength. As a user I would say yes to LTE in my iPhone 4S, but I would not have accepted a shorter battery life (or a thicker handset) as a result of this feature. But sometimes a user (and the user can be me) is willing to take the extra cost (like shorter battery life) of a feature that is important for that user. Apple are not providing the perfect products matching the need of all users. They are providing products that they believe is best for most users.