The Mac App Store’s in people’s thoughts of late. Marco Arment recently wrote about how sandboxing (essentially, a much stricter set of entitlements every app—bar Apple’s own, naturally—has to abide by) has impacted on available apps. Some developers have had to reduce the functionality of their product or remove it entirely. Arment said he’s now

lost all confidence that the apps I buy in the App Store today will still be there next month or next year. The advantages of buying from the App Store are mostly gone now. My confidence in the App Store, as a customer, has evaporated.

This, he argues, has the knock-on effect of causing problems beyond the world of geeks. Pretty much any user who suddenly finds an app no longer available on the Mac App Store might get annoyed at the developer, but they’re at least as likely to lose trust in Apple. Arment:

To most of these customers, the App Store is no longer a reliable place to buy software. This jeopardizes Apple’s presumed strategic goal of moving as much software-buying as possible to the App Store. By excluding so many important apps and burning the trust of so many customers, the App Store can never become ubiquitous.

Neven Mrgan adds that the Mac also isn’t iOS. With casual users increasingly opting for iPads over Macs, there’s the possibility Mac users will skew slightly away from the casual end of the spectrum, but they’ll be faced with a Mac App Store lacking advanced apps, apart from Apple’s own or those neutered to work within Apple’s sandboxing rules:

[Put] the two facts together—the loss of casual users to iOS, and the loss of non-casual apps on the App Store—and it starts to look like a problem.

In a follow-up post, Arment argues against the assertion that the issues currently being experienced will only affect geeks, and Lex Friedman for Macworld today also suggested customers should be wary of the Mac App Store.

My own thinking with the Mac App Store has been the biggest U-turn I’ve had since first owning my own Mac in the 1990s. I started off loving it. It was, I thought, the future, especially when setting up a new machine. No more hunting for DVDs and installer files! Just type in your Apple ID, download your software and—boom—sorted! And then a critical Coda update arrived for the direct version but only for the Mac App Store release a week later. And then the new version of Moom was direct-sales only. And then WriteRoom started to suffer annoying sandboxing issues regarding switching formats and saving a file. And. And. And.

My confidence has gone in what should have been Apple’s biggest and best feature from the Lion era. I had planned to rebuy apps on the Mac App Store and transition to it as fully as possible; now, I just don’t see the point. I’d sooner deal direct with developers, because then I won’t run the risk of an app I use daily being forced to cut itself back or be removed entirely at the whim of Apple. But this isn’t due to me being a geek, but through being repeatedly burned by a store I thought I could trust. That’s something anyone can and will empathise with, not just people who live, breathe and eat Apple.

Tap! magazine deputy editor Matthew Bolton has written about IAP in iOS gaming, complaining about its increased dominance and the way that many developers don’t know where to draw the line. He talks about two different approaches: ‘complete’ and ‘endless’. The former is where you have a finite amount of game, chop it into bits, with some of said bits being premium upgrades. Hero Academy is a good example on iOS—a game where you can happily play for free, but where you must pay to unlock alternative teams and cosmetic upgrades. The endless approach is the one I’ve complained about before, where you require an in-game resource that either demands constant payment or that possibly recharges in a glacial manner, sapping enjoyment and increasing frustration. Bolton cites the bafflingly highly regarded CSR Racing as an example of this kind of freemium title; depressingly, it also manages to kill the satire in my piece that I linked to, in actually demanding payment for petrol. In a racing game. I think the phrase rhymes with ‘clucking bell’.

Bolton says greed is the problem (and that’s certainly the case in games that would otherwise be pretty good, such as EA’s latest Tetris for iOS, ruined by the freemium system), and he wonders if freemium will cause iOS gaming to be held back in terms of creativity:

If it looks like invasive IAPs are the only way to be successful, will brilliant games that don’t fit that model end up going elsewhere? When games are being created with the Endless model in mind, do traditional game mechanics, such as progression, fall by the wayside? I played No Zombies Allowed for a while, but gave up after a few days, because all I was earning was more of what I already had. I was accumulating, but for what? The game didn’t escalate. I was just building and building. What if all devs interested in offering a game with an actual pay-off abandon iOS for Sony, Nintendo or Microsoft platforms? That would be a huge regression for iOS gamers.

Those of you with long memories will argue we’ve been here before. In the early 1980s, arcade games were designed with a fixed chunk of time in mind for your 10p or your quarter, but if you got good—really good—you could sit on an arcade cab for hours. Those were the finite games of their day, and they were about challenging gamers to beat them. After the gaming crash in 1984, and with the realisation that almost every arcade game was selling fewer cabs than its predecessor, cynical business models took over. Games no longer gave you three lives and a stern challenge: instead, they eventually got to the point where they were totally impossible to beat, but they’d give you that wonderful option of the continue. “Feed me more money,” they’d say, a glint in their eye, “and you can carry on from where you just left off. Your time won’t have been wasted! Go on! You know you want to.”

To my mind, far too many iOS freemium games are now the ‘continue’ of modern gaming. They are designed around keeping you hooked through the time investment you’ve put into them, rather than around addictive, exciting, engaging game design. The problem is, money talks, and with top-grossing titles typically being the most exploitative money-gouging games on the App Store, why wouldn’t more developers head in that direction? My hope is that something—anything—will make them change course, or at least leave enough of the really great developers playing a fairer game, because otherwise the greatest platform since the dawn of home gaming will end up bloated and dying on the floor, surrounded by mouldy piles of pointless Smurf berries and tarnished ‘coins’, which are only accepted currency for a stupid pixelated hat or a hateful paid-for fuel top-up for a virtual car.

According to Apple, today is OS X Mountain Lion release day, which means tomorrow will be “OH GOD MY HARD DRIVE JUST WENT TO CRAP AND I’VE LOST EVERYTHING” day for quite a few people. Here are some facts: hard drives sometimes die; installs—especially for entire operating systems—can go horribly wrong; data is very easy to lose. To be fair, relatively few people suffer from such problems, but that won’t be comforting if you lose all your movies/music/photos/email/documents.

Here’s one more fact: if you back-up and/or clone your Mac, each data copy reduces the likelihood of permanent data loss. And another: doing so is relatively inexpensive and not that difficult.

My advice when it comes to a new version of OS X is much the same as it was last year: buy an external hard drive (which can cost as little as £40) and ensure you at the very least have a full back-up of your Mac before upgrading to Mountain Lion. If possible, I recommend using software that clones your Mac’s hard drive rather than simply backing up the data, because that leaves you with a bootable drive if something goes very wrong. (Time Machine does enable data restoration, but the back-up drive itself is not bootable.) The steps are:

1. Format your drive using Disk Utility

Launch Disk Utility and select the back-up drive from the sidebar. At the foot of the window, check its Partition Map Scheme is GUID Partition Table, which will enable you to use the disk to start-up an Intel Mac. If it shows something else, click ‘Partition’, select ‘1 Partition’ from the ‘Volume Scheme’ menu, click ‘Options’ and select ‘GUID Partition Table’. Click ‘OK’. Name the volume using the ‘Name’ field and then click ‘Apply’ to reformat your disk.

Use either SuperDuper! ($27.95) or Carbon Copy Cloner ($39.95) to clone your Mac. If using SuperDuper!, select your Mac’s hard drive from the ‘Copy’ menu and your back-up drive from the ‘to’ menu. Select ‘Backup – all files’ from the ‘using’ menu. Click ‘Copy Now’. If using Carbon Copy Cloner, select your Mac’s drive from the ‘Source Disk’ menu and the back-up drive from the ‘Target Disk’ menu. Click ‘Clone’. The process may take several hours and it’s best to not have any active apps running (i.e. do not work on projects and save things, nor download anything while the initial clone is being made).

3. Reboot and test

Once the clone is complete, restart your Mac while holding the Option key (also labelled ‘Alt’) and choose your back-up drive as the boot volume. It will take longer than usual for your Mac to start from this external drive. Ensure the back-up works: test some apps and launch some files. Once you’re done, reboot back into your Mac’s drive.

Should your Mountain Lion install not work, you now have a bootable clone that will enable you to continue working, or from which you can clone everything back to your Mac. However, once you have a clone, you should continue safeguarding your data daily by using incremental updating (whereby only files that have changed are cloned to the external volume). SuperDuper! refers to this feature as ‘Smart Update’, accessed in the main pane’s ‘Options’ button; Carbon Copy Cloner has an ‘Incremental backup of selected items’ setting within ‘Cloning options’. Both apps have automated scheduling capabilities.

As noted earlier, more back-ups and clones reduce risk, and so if you can afford it, use multiple cloning drives and switch them regularly. Add a Time Machine back-up alongside your clones. Also consider online back-up services such as CrashPlan. This might all seem a little paranoid, but for the sake of a couple of hard drives, a piece of OS X software, an online back-up service and a few hours of your time, your data will be as safe as it’s ever going to be. Really, that’s not paranoia, but common sense.

Analysts have reported a miss on their guesswork for Apple’s Q3 earnings. “Apple provides guidance every quarter, but we keep ignoring it and getting the final figures wrong,” said an interchangeable analyst. Another interchangeable analyst pointed to problems regarding context: “We hear there are ongoing problems in European economies, which strengthened the US dollar, and the new iPhone’s obviously on the way, but we never bother to factor such things into our figures,” she said. “Instead, we just take Apple’s guidance figures, add a small chunk and cross our fingers. But in again using what we thought was a foolproof method, we nonetheless managed another miss.”

A third interchangeable analyst told us while Apple had sold 26 million iPhones (a 28 per cent year-on-year increase), 17 million iPads (84 per cent), four million Macs (two per cent) and 6.8 million iPods (ten per cent down), he was expecting more, “just because, well, it’s Apple, right? I mean, those guys talk about their magical devices, so why can’t they magic more sales out of thin air, to match our guesswork? I just don’t understand it.”

Asked for comment, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer said: “Those guys are fucking idiots. Every damn quarter we give them guidance, and every quarter they get more and more ‘confident’ about how much shit we’ll sell. I can’t believe anyone pays these people. How can they be so wrong so often and still in their damn jobs? It’s amazing they’re not all in government.”

Apple made more money than the same time last year, and more than its guidance said it would, but less than some ‘analysts’ pulling figures out of thin air—or using the high-end analytical technology known as ‘guessing’—thought it would. Apple’s hugely profitable quarter has therefore been labelled ‘disappointing’ by pretty much everyone, given that guessing is clearly more important than hard facts.

In other words, the same as every fairly recent Apple earnings call.