Silicon Valley Veteran On Apple: Company Has Become Sloppy, Missed Updates, Delayed Refreshes (chuqui.com) 293
Silicon Valley veteran Chuq Von Rospach's blog post, in which he has criticized Apple for the things it did last year, has received quite a few nods from developers, analysts and users alike. Von Rospach, who has previously worked at Apple, has lambasted at the company for, among other things, how it has handled the Mac Pro, a lineup that hasn't seen any refresh in ages, and the AirPort routers, which too have been reportedly abandoned. From the post:Back when I was running most of Apple's e-mail systems for the marketing teams, I went to them and suggested that we should consider dumping the text-only part of the emails we were building, because only about 4% of users used them and it added a significant amount of work to the process of creation and testing each e-mail. Their response? That it was a small group of people, but a strategic one, since it was highly biased towards developers and power users. So the two-part emails stayed -- and they were right. It made no sense from a business standpoint to continue to develop these emails as both HTML [and] text, but it made significant strategic sense. It was an investment in keeping this key user base happy with Apple. Apple, from all indications I've seen over the last year and with the configurations they've shipped with these new laptops, has forgotten this, and the product configurations seem designed by what will fit the biggest part of the user base with the fewest configuration options. They've chopped off the edges of the bell curve -- and big chunks of their key users with them. The most daunting sentence from his post, according to Nitin Ganatra, who worked at Apple for 18 years and headed engineering of iOS, is, "If you just look at the numbers, things are okay."
how often are Mac Pro's upgraded? (Score:2)
I'm thinking apple knows how long most of these are supposed to be depreciated on balance sheets and times the updates on past sales volume each year
sure some people are screwed, but it's not like most companies will let you buy a new one yearly or every two years without a good reason
Re:how often are Mac Pro's upgraded? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:how often are Mac Pro's upgraded? (Score:5, Interesting)
GPU Improvements (Score:2)
While most computers don't get monumental improvement gains anymore
That is only true for the CPU not the GPU which has seen huge improvements over the past 4 years. Since the Mac Pro comes with its GPUs soldered to the board the ONLY way to upgrade them is to buy a new machine. A quick google (which admittedly did not return the most reliable looking of pages!) suggests that a single 1080 today is 50% more powerful that both the Mac Pro GPUs combined which, if true, would mean that a dual 1080 machine would have about three times the performance of the current MacPro. I'd
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GPU increases can be measured multiple ways. Indeed performance has increased dramatically when you measure by frame rates in AAA games running on Windows.
But what matters greatly for Apple is OpenCL performance. No matter how much you may love certain GPUs for Windows gaming, the reality is Apple build Final Cut Pro on OpenCL.
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While most computers don't get monumental improvement gains anymore
That is only true for the CPU not the GPU which has seen huge improvements over the past 4 years. Since the Mac Pro comes with its GPUs soldered to the board
Wrong [ifixit.com]. Unless you are talking about the actual chips. Then - so what?
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I thought the GPUs in the Mac Pro ARE Upgradeable. Well, the Graphics Cards ARE replaceable (theoretically); but no one has produced an Upgrade.
True. Ifixit's teardown [ifixit.com] suggests that the video cards could be quite easy to replace. Also it is possible to replace the whole MB and CPU as well.
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Performance users would look at cloud computing for extra horsepower. Apple did a presentation where they had hooked up a Mac Pro to a cloud computing server to do video editing in real-time. The old standalone system had a progress bar that moved slowly across the window. The new cloud computing system just did it in real time.
Re: GPU Improvements (Score:3)
Sigh.
Uncompressed 4k video takes about 720mbits of bandwidth even to move..
That's in one direction. So double it for real-time processing (in and out).
Care to price up both ends of a low latency 1.5gbit network just to get to your remote 'cloud computing' server?
And then of course you don't need the Mac pro in the first place.. Since a low end machine will do the job as it's just a display server.
So. No. You going have a clue.
The only reason for such workstation machines is heavy local work, and the Mac pro
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It's been more than 3 years. Mac Pros are not for your average consumer. It's for the professionals. While most computers don't get monumental improvement gains anymore like they did in the 90s, incremental gains are most likely wanted by the top end, the professionals.
The professionals? I've never met a doctor or lawyer who really needed anything more powerful than your typical consumer PC.
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Mac Pros are not for your average consumer. It's for the professionals.
*were
Re:how often are Mac Pro's upgraded? (Score:5, Insightful)
I get how it is hard for Apple to justify a sku that brings in less than $50MM a year (or some random number), but the problem is Apple is built on mindshare. Pithy example, but my company switched to iPhones (back in the day) because of me, our sole Mac user; Apple no longer makes a computer well suited for my personal needs. This leads to erosion in core markets over time, and is hard to recover from.
So, sure... there is no profit to be had in a better Mac Pro, or a laptop that has built in Ethernet, or whatever. Worse, the designers run things now, and other functional items are eliminated for better visual appearance.
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The people who generally purchase Mac Pro's as the same that think nothing of dropping $2000 on a new lens because it has .0001% less chroma aberration. These are not the 'good enough' folks. These are the folks that develop the techniques that others write books about. And, the folks that Apple used to cater to.
As much as Microsoft was rightfully maligned under Bull-Headed Balmer, the new leadership is starting to make some very interesting inroads into Apple's turf with the Surface line. Specifically
Re:how often are Mac Pro's upgraded? (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. I switched my entire family, and all my in-laws, from PCs to Macs years ago. There are thousands of stories like yours, where one or two people on the upper end of the user bell curve led an entire community or company to switch by proselytizing the Apple experience. If Apple stops manufacturing laptops and desktops that those power users want to buy, the drop in Apple's marketshare will be increased by orders of magnitude.
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That sounds like the demise of SGI - "people will always buy our expensive workstations because of the little shiny logo on the front". When they were coming out with the Indy workstations, start-up film production companies were building their own render-farms using clustered PC's. It didn't matter if one PC blew up or melted down, the others would pick up the load. Apple managed to edge in by buying up all the video editing software companies. Microsoft bought up Softimage, and SGI bought up Alias|Wavefr
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To add to your sentiment, the high end of the curve brings in more than just the revenue for its sales, and Apple should be smart enough to calculate this.
Plus, the people developing apps for their other, big revenue generating products need computers worth using for development.
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To add to your sentiment, the high end of the curve brings in more than just the revenue for its sales, and Apple should be smart enough to calculate this.
Plus, the people developing apps for their other, big revenue generating products need computers worth using for development.
Steve Jobs (peace be upon him) knew this by instinct. Not so, it seems, his corporate successors.
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So, sure... there is no profit to be had in a better Mac Pro, or a laptop that has built in Ethernet, or whatever.
The only thing that they can do right now with the Mac Pro is make it join the USB-C/TB 3 crowd (which I expect they will do this year), and possibly upgrade the GPU and SSD. From what I understand, there really ISN'T a better Xeon CPU than it already has, which of course isn't Apple's fault; but yet the blame gets laid at Apple's feet.
As for the MacBook Pro, in Apple's "mind", they did upgrade it, quite significantly, even over the 2015 model, to wit:
1. Much better thermal management, meaning that the
Re:how often are Mac Pro's upgraded? (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't this exactly the strategic short-sightedness the article was talking about? Sure, on the spreadsheet, you can do this sort of calculation. However, then you neglect the real people who need, or simply want, to be more up to date. While there aren't necessarily a lot of those people compared to, say, iPhone users, they probably include people who write the apps that make products like iPhones and iPads viable, or who use Apple gear to its full potential and then champion it when discussing tech with others. These people are a strategically valuable part of the market, and if you lose them, you risk damaging other, possibly much larger, parts of your business indirectly as well.
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I'm thinking apple knows how long most of these are supposed to be depreciated on balance sheets and times the updates on past sales volume each year
sure some people are screwed, but it's not like most companies will let you buy a new one yearly or every two years without a good reason
This is a good question. One who needs a Mac Pro would probably go for a fully loaded can, and then not look back at upgrading. The only upgrades I can think of would be models that would toss in more cores, RAM and SSD density on it. There however may not be that big a market for the upgrade
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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You supply email in text and HTML format because people who do real and meaningful work on desktops and laptops want to see the text, not HTML.
So .. I'm don't do real and meaningful** work because I like to see HTML in emails? Way to go to invalidate me as a person.
Sure, plain text has a place, but with HTML I can reply to a colleagues email and highlight my comments or point out issues in various colors in the body of the email* rather than breaking things bit by bit as I would have to do in a plaintext email.
* See what I did here? I used HTML to emphasize the point I was making. How would you easily do that in plain text?
** I suppose then I
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> Sure, plain text has a place, but with HTML I can reply to a colleagues email and highlight my comments or point out issues in various colors in the body of the email* rather than breaking things bit by bit as I would have to do in a plaintext email.
> * See what I did here? I used HTML to emphasize the point I was making. How would you easily do that in plain text?
You're right. There is *absolutely* NO way to _emphasize_ a point in regular text.
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Yup
> Top-posting is evil.
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Apple's Problem: Shallow Business School Thinking (Score:2, Interesting)
Tim Cook is a business school type thinker. He is an accountant. He makes his business decisions as a pure profit maximization game, increasing profit margins and eeking out as much money from the market as he can. The problem with this type of thinking is that it ignores the subtle realities of the Apple computer market. Macs specifically have been perceived by many as "professional" machines. Graphical designers have used OSX because it has been a reliable and relatively trouble-free platform on which to
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Flash ad loaded web sites used to kill Firefox and others with them hitting 100% core usage and that is why you really needed ad block and now flash is not auto load default any more.
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Is there a particular way you disable beacons, or does that all fall under the "show remote content" option?
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People usually rebut this with the (perhaps overly concise) "Then you have two problems."
Hammer X ought go ahead as planned, and a second hammer be found for Z.
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Then just send an attachment as a picture or a PDF document, or a link to an online PDF document.
Stark Contrast (Score:4, Funny)
"Silicon Valley Veteran On Apple: Company Has Become Sloppy, Missed Updates, Delayed Refreshes By Long"
By contrast, if the company you work for has always been sloppy and slipshod, people simply lower their expectations and it's no big deal.
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This is true. But unlike "the company you work for," Apple has distinguished itself in the past by NOT being sloppy, missing updates, and delaying refreshes. This is the whole point, that Apple is now merely mortal like the rest of us.
While I don't totally disagree (Score:5, Insightful)
E-mails? Really? THAT's Apple's problem? And spouting off about HTML in e-mails? HTML is total inconsistent crap. What looks fine to one user on one platform and one browser looks totally different to another. That said, this post reminds me of the time that Steve Jobs came into a meeting as asked what some particular software product was supposed to do. After receiving an answer he said, "Can anyone tell me why the f*ck it doesn't do that?" Apple has indeed lost its way. They have all but abandoned the power users and power developers (there are plenty of things that Android developers have access to that iOS developers don't). Why the hell did Apple buy Beats? Seems like they're focusing on trying to make the next big thing and that's sucking all the resources away from other product lines.
Re:While I don't totally disagree (Score:5, Insightful)
He's not saying that emails are the problem. The email story is one illustration how Apple used to consider "power users and power developers" instead of just the mass-market consumer. Apple used to say "only 4% of people use this, but they are still important;" while Apple now says "only 4% of people use this, f*ck them."
Re:While I don't totally disagree (Score:4, Interesting)
In the early aughts, around os 10.2, Apple was all about designing and supporting hardware and software for high end producers. G4 and G5 Mac desktops were unbelievably awesome machines, OS X was super stable with all the functionality of Unix available, final cut pro, logic and aperture were state of the art and fun to use.
And the tiBook, while not the fastest, was surely the awesomest laptop a person could own.
Later, the 12" powerbook.
The fail seemed to set in about five years ago. It's a good example of what happens when you don't have good competition, cf Windows Vista.
Re:While I don't totally disagree (Score:5, Interesting)
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Why the hell did Apple buy Beats?
I would guess the licensing agreements that Beats had with the music companies to stream music. I would also guess that when Apple approached the same music companies for licensing rights, the music companies wanted a great deal of money as Apple has it. So they bought out another company that already had the agreements. They really didn't buy Beats for their hardware. That's my best guess.
I do agree with you that Apple seems to lost their way with power users and developers.
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There are better examples of Apple software dumbing-down than this. iPhoto users used to be able to, after importing pictures from a camera, change the default chronological names of shooting day folders to something like "Maui," and then create new folders ("Hawaii") in which to move day folders. But iPhoto users who upgraded to the successor Photos application on computers found their entire folder structures blown away and images filed chronologically again, with their entire personal organization disap
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You have an odd definition of 'never able to survive'. More money than God (well, not the Catholic Church but most others). A brand new glass donut for offices. The highest brand recognition in the world.
What, in your august opinion, does it really take to survive? Because if Apple isn't doing that, the rest of us are in real trouble.
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I remember the interim years. Apple was perpetually on everyone's dead pool list. They had few users and little support outside of their multi-media niche. The part of Apple that is drives their success now didn't exist until Jobs returned.
See auto manufacturers and racing (Score:5, Interesting)
Porsche, Audi, Mercedes, BMW, etc. don't make race cars and compete in things like 24 Hours of LeMans, WRC, etc. because those cars and those events make them money. They do it because 1) It provides a venue to show off cool new technology 2) It provides them marketing cachet, name recognition, and bragging rights.
Apple has lost sight of this. Apple is happily making Corollas & Caravans - which sell large volumes and make a profit. But it has forgotten the high-performance end of the bell curve where the bragging rights are earned and new tech is shown off.
Re:See auto manufacturers and racing (Score:5, Insightful)
I see it more as Apple makes Corollas and Caravans that they market and price as a BMW.
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Apple seems stuck in profit trap (Score:5, Interesting)
Any potential innovation costs money and fails to produce the same levels of profit as existing products will be seen as a failure, so Apple is stuck doing nothing because its the most profitable thing in the short term.
The problem seems to be by the time the highly profitable products stop producing huge levels of profit they won't have any new products available because no innovation is likely to produce the same profits, so they don't do any innovation as it will be only a cost or cut in overall profitability.
What I'm curious is whether investors will be happy with innovation-less profit or whether they will respond to public criticism of lack of innovation and put pressure on Cook to pursue more meaningful innovation even if it hurts short term profitability. And more meaningful innovation means real stuff, not grinding users for headphone dongles or new wireless headphones.
Re:Apple seems stuck in profit trap (Score:5, Insightful)
If Apple falls into the no innovation trap, they could eventually join Blackberry in market oblivion. Blackberry was on the top once. If you wanted a mobile phone with all the latest features, you got a Blackberry. Their fans were just as rabid as Apple fans are (for better or worse - not saying that being a rabid fan is always a bad thing). But as other companies (notably, Apple) innovated into their space, Blackberry insisted that they didn't need to keep up. They were on top which (to them) meant that they were doing what the users wanted which meant they didn't need to change. Even as they slid down, they still insisted that they didn't need to change. By the time they realized change was needed, they were too far gone.
If Apple's not careful, they can wind up as another Blackberry. Short term profits are nice, but can blind you to long term trends.
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I would agree with you on the effect but the iPhone was a game changer. RIM did rest on its laurels, and outwardly they tried to reassure users that every was fine. Internally they were panicked over the iPhone.
RIM's technology was slowly getting out of date; their software model left a lot to be desired. The problem that RIM and other smart phone makers didn't see was that while their smart phones were for power users and corporate types, consumers wanted a smart phone designed for them. Blackberry consume
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Well Apple has been on brink of oblivion before and come back. However this time there visionary founder won't be returning to help them, should that situation arise.
The thing is it won't happen though. Apple isn't RIM. Like M$ they have so much cash they don't actually need to make anything. Apple could decide to stop selling computers, software, phones, and tablets and simply reinvent it self as a hedge fund and continue forever.
Actually that might be the smartest move. You stand to benefit from a l
Re:Apple seems stuck in profit trap (Score:5, Insightful)
I parted ways with Apple when OS X would not run on the several $5000+ computers in my household. I had fond feeling towards Apple, but was no longer interested in their products.
When the iPhone came out, I realized that in five years everyone would have such a phone, but with a dozen different brand names other than Apple. Just like the Mac vs PC when Apple would not license it's OS.
When Apple became a litigation factory, I realized that the end was near. Slide to unlock, really? Rectangles with rounded corners? Apple argued in a foreign court patent suit that Samsung could have made their tables thicker and heaver, as if thin and light were some exclusive Apple right. Here we are ten years later from 2007 to 2017 and the headlines in industry trade rags are beginning to paint the fall of Apple. Hey, it happened to IBM. Then eventually to Microsoft who is trying to grasp at relevance and embrace the open source world. Why can't Apple fall? Unthinkable? Think different! It could happen. (And some of us would say good riddance after enduring the snobbish fanboys.)
Today's Apple fanboys are little more than ditto heads. They protested that Apple's was not a patent troll. Yet Apple and Microsoft together formed Rockstar, one of the biggest patent trolls around, in order to shield their good brand names while patent trolling.
It may just be what happens to big corporations when they grow past a certain point. Hey Google are you paying attention? They become too conservative. They can't rock the boat that generates today's huge profits. They can't invest too many resources into the future. They don't have vision. They can hire people with vision, but then they won't believe what those visionary people tell them. It seems to be a common story of successful tech companies.
If Apple does go away, it won't be overnight. Not quickly. And maybe not even completely. Just a gradual slide into irrelevance. But Apple was once great, and had a good long run. And from my once fanboy days, I'll point out a saying of the early 1990's: people have been predicting the demise of Apple every year since 1981.
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Even up to the mid 1990's, the Macintosh was an exciting platform. Apple's inability to build a modern OS, after three attempts, was starting to look pretty bad. While I haven't had bo
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Any potential innovation costs money and fails to produce the same levels of profit as existing products will be seen as a failure, so Apple is stuck doing nothing because its the most profitable thing in the short term.
The problem seems to be by the time the highly profitable products stop producing huge levels of profit they won't have any new products available because no innovation is likely to produce the same profits, so they don't do any innovation as it will be only a cost or cut in overall profitability.
What I'm curious is whether investors will be happy with innovation-less profit or whether they will respond to public criticism of lack of innovation and put pressure on Cook to pursue more meaningful innovation even if it hurts short term profitability. And more meaningful innovation means real stuff, not grinding users for headphone dongles or new wireless headphones.
The funny thing is with all the cash they have on hand Apple could easily fund R&D and innovation without impacting profits at all. Who knows, 10-20 years from now Apple might turn into the new Microsoft because they've spent the time coasting along on inertia rather than trying to find something new.
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I think in a lot of ways Microsoft has kind of been the cautionary tale for Apple.
Microsoft has spent billions on new products (I'm hesitant to call it innovation, since many products were market-chasers) but how many actually became market factors? Really, only Xbox.
And then there's the (relative) open nature of Windows, which has handcuffed Microsoft into years of legacy application support and lots of hardware to support. I think Apple feel they've beat this by keeping iPhone/iPad closed devices and mo
Re:Apple seems stuck in profit trap (Score:5, Interesting)
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Now that's a very interesting thought. Parent should be modded up +1 interesting or insightful.
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Well, the Mac lineup suffered because there was nothing you could do to them. Faster CPUs were AWOL - Intel made Kaby Lake processors for just a handful of uses. This year we'll see meaningful refreshes, because Intel just released the rest of the Kaby Lake lineup that everyone has been waiting for.
Apple can refresh laptops every 6 months like they used to, but given the few improvements Intel makes, it would really be more "meh" than the new MacBook Pro that was released.
As for innovation, the wireless he
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However tricky the headphones may be, they're really only marginal improvements over Bluetooth. My phone magically pairs with the car's infotainment system and when I turn on my headset by the computer it pairs to my phone, and that's just generic Bluetooth.
I think the bigger problem is that both of their major products, phones and computers, are (like everyone else's), so mature they're kind of at conceptual dead ends. The only improvements are minor and incremental to the underlying technologies -- fast
Re:Apple seems stuck in profit trap (Score:5, Interesting)
It was right for Sculley to strip Jobs of power. Steve left on his own. He could have continued to be the visionary.
But Steve Jobs would not allow reasonable amounts of memory. Nor expandability. Definitely no slots ever! No color, ever. Just his vision of a single configuration appliance computer with a small number of expansion items like floppy drives, a hard drive and printer.
The appliance computer vision is great. But was not practical at the time. The Late 1990's iMac was a good realization of that vision. The high speed USB made his vision of external expansion more practical. And today, most computers never see any internal expansion other than possibly memory. (I said most, not all.)
The 1987 Macintosh II with color, card slots, external monitors and other great features was a huge expansion of the Macintosh vision that never would have happened with Jobs. The real irony was that Jobs' NeXT computer did all the things he wouldn't let Apple do.
Mac pro got to thin and the lack of loop back cabl (Score:2)
Mac pro got to thin and the lack of loop back cable system for TB like other pro workstations boxed them in.
The PSU does not have the power to run the system at full load and also the heat limits it as well plus only 1 cpu also limits the pci-e lanes to a point where they only have 1 storage port.
Right now getting TB3 in there will be hard with out adding more pci-e switches (with video cards taking an bandwidth cut down) / adding an cpu / cutting down to 1 video card (still needs an pci-e switch to feed ou
"powerful blog post" (Score:2)
It's obvious (Score:2)
Diminishing returns.
Do what maximizes profits, ignore the rest.
Considering the cash Apple has, they're on the right track.
Note: I don't agree with said track, but the edge users don't justify the costs involved, so out they go.
Business 101: Cash is king.
And as long as Apple makes bucketloads of cash from their current iProducts, they will. When it stops, they will re-evaluate where they are in the world, but not before then.
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In the weirdest coincidence of all time, this is also the course description for Guns, Germs, and Steel 101.
I like how this is an example of how Apple doesn't (Score:2)
... care.
But they still cared enough to analyse what the actual usage numbers were.
You can say, "Hey, they looked at raw numbers and didn't think their power users depend MORE on those messages than the rest do."
But you can't say, "They didn't bother to look at all."
And I'm RIGHT UP THERE with Apple shit-talkers. But you gotta come with real arguments before I get behind you.
Tail wags the dog... (Score:5, Insightful)
As a developer/power user who sits at the far end of the bell curve, here's what I see as the folly of Apple's ways.
I switched to Macs after working on a beta version of OS X in the late 90s. Unix + sensible desktop was enough to keep me off the Linux train for daily use. That the hardware was also well designed with a good level of performance was also important. For the next 10 years or so, that held true.
But, in the last 5 years:
- the hardware has stagnated (e.g., I'd really like to buy a MacMini for my kids, but there's no way I'm shelling out Apple prices for 3 year old processors)
- new hardware decisions make it difficult to use existing peripherals (music is a hobby - no way am I dropping a few grand on new audio interfaces just b/c I upgraded my Mac and need to support new ports)
- Apple has ignored sensible design decisions made on the non-Apple side of the world (specifically, touch screens on laptops - my wife as an HP for work and the touch screen is useful, those old studies that claim otherwise are just that, old and dated).
- The OS continues to have a slew of undocumented features that may or may not be useful, but definitely affect performance (the real dig here: just document the features Apple, I hate discovering things OS X has done for years on random blog posts)
- The iPhone and OS X still don't work well together
Why does this matter from the perspective of the bell curve and my place on it? Simple: I switched not only my family, but also my company over to Macs. The middle part of that curve was filled by people following people like me into the Mac universe. I'm seriously considering dropping Macs for computer use and (horror of horrors) going back to Windows + Linux. If I go that way, it's just a matter of an upgrade cycle or two before those in my sphere of influence abandon Macs as well.
Apple seems to have forgotten that it's us geeks that couldn't wait for Linux on the Desktop that helped drive adoption 15 years ago. Kinda like the Democrats forgetting that the working class matters.
-Chris
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I think you have to understand that Apple has morphed into a tech-bling company. The iPhone, iPad, MacBook Air, Apple Watch and AirPods are all high visibility items. The Mac Mini, Mac Pro and to some degree even the MacBook Pro? Mostly stuck on someone's desk or shelf and not for showing off. Well not just showing off but like a premium car, I could get here just as fast in a clunker but I'm doing it in style. They've realized that if the only thing they're fighting on is tech specs it's not really a busin
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All very good points.
In our house my wife is a Mac/Apple gal, while I grew up mac and switched to PC about 20 years ago because for engineering that was where the tools were. My wife has been getting frustrated with how things have stagnated, and how a lot of little things have gotten rougher around the edges after each update.
I keep wanting to go back to Mac's, but time and again it is outrageous mark-up for low end and outdated hardware. I don't want an all-in one. I started to get sucked into the halo
Let HP and / or DELL take over for the pro worksti (Score:2)
Let HP and / or DELL take over for the pro workstations.
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Have you ever called their support? I don't want to touch either company with a 10ft pole.
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Let HP and / or DELL do the design. Apples looks and thinnest does not work with pro workstation design
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Nah, Apple should go full Dark Side and license the Mac line to Lenovo.
There's an opportunity here for Google (Score:5, Interesting)
Right now I'm using a mid-2012 MacBook Pro that I've just upgraded with a Samsung SSD. The reason I chose to upgrade the storage instead of buying a new MacBook Pro was that I couldn't justify spending $3000+ for a laptop that was unrepairable and unexpandable, and would have to be sent to the recycle bin if it broke after the AppleCare warranty expired. I'm hoping this upgrade will get me through the next couple of years, but what happens after that?
At some point I will need to buy a new laptop. So what are my choices, if not another MacBook? A Windows 10 machine? Absolutely no way in hell. Put Linux on a PC laptop? Maybe, but avoiding the time and effort of supporting a Linux installation is the entire reason I use a Mac.
But what if (for example) Google decided to take a page from Apple's playbook? What if Google were to develop its own laptop with a real Linux / UNIX / BSD OS with a nice GUI, and support it the way Apple does? Not just a Chromebook, but a laptop with a new OS to complete with MacOS? And what if that laptop had a sane upgradeable / repairable premium design, without Apple's obsession for thinness and appearance over functionality?
If such a laptop existed, I would buy it in a heartbeat. And when I did, I would almost certainly switch from an iPhone to a Pixel, and from the Apple to the Google ecosystem. Everyone says "Google is the new Apple", so why shouldn't that be true? Google has the culture and the resources to play the game by Apple's rules, and take a huge chunk of mindshare away from Apple. Not to mention the fact that Google apps like Assistant and Maps already leave Siri and Apple Maps in the dust.
There needs to be a new option for laptop and desktop machines. Apple and Microsoft have both gone off the deep end, pursuing development paths that are leaving power users in the cold. Google could step in and become the new king of the mountain in very short order - if it has the will to do so.
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What if Google were to develop its own laptop with a real Linux / UNIX / BSD OS with a nice GUI, and support it the way Apple does? Not just a Chromebook, but a laptop with a new OS to complete with MacOS?
I can take that one. They'd do a pretty good job. The new OS would get a power users excited. Then just as it seemed to be gaining traction, Google would suddenly kill it, leaving the project's fans to wonder (a) why pull the plug now and (b) why even do this in the first place?
This is the conclusion I've come to: Google is a company with a fascination with shiny new tech, and plenty of cash to indulge that fascination even when they don't have any clear business rationale.
Google may do it just for their developers (Score:3)
As far as I know the vast majority of Google's developers use a MacBook Pro (previous generation).
A good half of those at least will shudder at the thought of no proper Esc key and gratuitous omission of at least one regular old USB 3 port, and 16GB RAM is looking small for a development box these days. Oh, and the sheer horrible design thinking exhibited by omitting the amazing magsafe connector will be enough to sway some of those.
So confronted by grumbling developers threatening to order Surface Pros, Go
Software quality is my biggest disappointment (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason I went to OS X was that its *nix under the covers (and gave me all of the programming/scripting power I needed) and also was incredibly stable. I would literally go for months without rebooting and without native (X86, not PPC emulated) apps crashing...at all...ever.
I feel that from a stability POV OS X peaked around 10.6. Ever since then, a pattern of increasing crashes and decreasing reliability has followed every release. The amount of instability is still very small, but when as a user you are used to 0 problems, it is very frustrating. (iOS seems to have followed a similar trajectory lately as well.)
I don't know what's happened to the QA process at Apple and I also don't see the point in rushing out a new OS every year. I would love for them to go back to the simpler, more stable approach that they have 5-6 years ago.
Obligatory Cixin Liu (Score:4, Insightful)
The article didn't mention a frequent user complaint: Apple's obsession with trumping the competition by making the whole universe two-dimensional. The newest release of every product is thinner than the last, even though users in every single online forum keep wanting to trade some thinness off for more battery life. In the face of all that reaction the next release will be thinner still, even to the point of compromising structural integrity (iPhone Plus, iPad) and ports (MacBook Pro) and hardware features (iMac).
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Vogons are slug-like but vaguely humanoid, are bulkier than humans, and have green skin. Vogons are described as “one of the most unpleasant races in the galaxy—not actually evil, but bad-tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous", and having "as much sex appeal as a road accident" as well as being the authors of "the third worst poetry in the universe".
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the MBP is not in the running. The Surface is looking pretty good. I already started to migrate out of the Apple ecosystem. Just a few last ties left then I'm free.
Apple --> Microsoft, is that really the path to freedom?
Re:MS Surface has been on my mind lately... (Score:5, Insightful)
*nix is the path to the Dark Side.
Linux leads to Apple. Apple leads to MicroSoft. MicroSoft leads to the Suffering. --The Penguin
I jest, Windows 10 has been remarkably stable and good on the 5 year old work computer I;m using ... enough that, based on how shitty MacOS hardware has been looking, I'm considering going back to windows for my next home computer ... for the first time in 15 years.
My iPhone is about 3 years old ... I expect I'll start looking at replacing it shortly and I'm open to looking at alternatives. ... Apple's moves may costing them more future revue than their calculations are predicting.
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Don't forget the new Linux subsystem for Windows 10. This erodes much of OS X's "but it's runs Unix" advantage over Wintel PCs.
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Enterprise is pretty decent.
Re:MS Surface has been on my mind lately... (Score:4, Interesting)
If you want a laptop as opposed to a tablet you can stick a keyboard onto, I've found the Surface (both 2 Pro & 4 Pro) to be disappointing. The folding keyboard and touch pad are miserable to use. The feeling of the keyboard is really .. I dunno.. sloppy.. Tough to describe in words, but no fun to do any amount of typing on. The touch pad has both a right/left mouse button, but there's no visual or tactile delineation where the mouse "button" stops and the normal pad starts nor where the border between left & right buttons are. I'm constantly getting right when I want left, or tapping too high for right & getting the default left on the main body of the touch pad. The pen input is nice-ish to take hand written notes, but the Apple Pencil on an iPad is much more accurate. Looking at MS OneNote where I've taken notes on both devices, the Surface looks like I'm writing in crayon compared to the sharpness of the Apple Pencil notes.
I still get more use out of my five+ year old MacBook Pro than I do the Surface. The Surface does a lot of the functionality of both a laptop & a tablet, but it doesn't do any of it nearly as well as the separate devices do. If you're looking to travel light & small and don't mind dealing with daily annoyance on a lot of the functionality, maybe the Surface is good enough. I just find it annoying to use. I'll grab it when I'm going out for an evening and *might* need to answer a call for work, but if I'm actually planning to get any real work done, the Surface collects dust & I grab a real laptop.
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Re: They have six hundred billion dollars (Score:2, Insightful)
True, they've been successful for ROI. Their business approach focused on visual design and appeal to consumer ego has ultimately paid off.
Most economic theories I'm familiar with assume consumers make informed, rationale purchasing choices and understand trade offs. When you erode that assumption away and instead manipulate the consumer psychologically through marketing, Apple is basically what you get. It works. It's sad, but it works.
I view it all as part of the 'post fact' Era where as a society, we see
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An iPhone can be a rational choice. It depends on the consumer's values. Apple limits customization, perhaps, and might "lose" on some raw specs, but it wins on style for many people, also many people value the status which iPhone confers, as well as arguably more security.
If you are concerned that valuing style and status are irrational, you may be right, but your time among humans will probably be unpleasant.
Which customers? (Score:4, Insightful)
They won't for long if they keep pissing off their highest revenue-generating customers.
I'm curious who you think those "highest revenue-generating customers" actually are. I'm willing to be it isn't who you think it is. Just because you buy a Mac Pro every few years doesn't make you a "highest revenue customer". Well over 50% of Apples revenues come from the iPhone and you can tell that Apple's focus is more on that product than any other. Also the customers generating the most revenue are very likely to be a different group than the most profitable customers. At the end of the day it's profits, not revenues that matter.
Re:Which customers? (Score:5, Insightful)
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That was then, the world is now a different place, and Apple has too big of a user base to serve to be able to mind details like that. I don't care either way, I'm not an Apple fan or a product user (besides my 4 year old iPhone 4S) but I don't really think they had a choice -- it was either grow insanely to where they are now or be eaten by competition, no middle ground.
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Yes, but in the Android ecosystem there's actually different manufacturers, leading to a choice. You don't have that in the iOS ecosystem.
Re:Which customers? (Score:5, Insightful)
All true, but the real question is also if they are losing the "Decision Makers".
These are probably not either the "highest revenue-generating customers" OR the "most profitable customers", but are the ones that influence others in their purchasing decisions.
Personally, I buy computers infrequently. My home computer is ~4-5 years old, my phone is 3 years old. I am not the "Ooo shiny! Must have!" buyer who is going to make Apple money every year with a new phone purchase. However I also have been responsible for collectively having 5 people get iPhones, and 4 MacOS purchases based primarily on my recommendation. Will I still be recommending Apple products? Probably, but it will be much more qualified. Windows 10 is pretty good also for most users, and Apple's treatment of hardware is pretty abysmal from my perspective making it harder to recommend them.
End result, I may only be two sales, but if I don't see them as serving my needs, they may lose 11 sales total (mostly from people who fit their bell curve) because the decision maker is now outside the curve.
On the scale of Decision Makers, I'm peanuts compared to real Influence Peddlers such as reviewers, or other vocal critics that Apple is now hearing from. I would also disagree with TFA. While I agree Apple isn't a car with its engine on fire, I disagree that it is merely an engine that needs some tuning. It is an engine with the timing belt failing. It needs to be properly replaced/fixed soon, or the whole engine is likely to come to a crashing halt when you least expect it and in a way that will be very difficult to repair after the fact.
Next Generation (Score:5, Interesting)
All true, but the real question is also if they are losing the "Decision Makers".
It's not just the decision makers of today they seem to have lost but also those of the next generation. A few years ago when I looked at my students many would have mac laptops open with the rest a mix of different PCs. Now there are far fewer macs and it seems that many of the students who had deep enough pockets for a mac have Surface Books and Surface Pros. Since this was last term it also means that MS was beating Apple BEFORE the latest MacBook Pro disaster so I expect the trend will be even stronger next year.
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To further your "decision maker" argument. I'm responsible for a budget where we regularly buy a large number of mac computers every year. Everywhere possible, we have held off on mac purchases. In some areas, we are actively planning to move to PCs. While I am a life long (30 years) Mac user, I find myself frequently advocating against the Mac precisely because of what Chuq articulates. Apple is an enormously successful company, and they have found success in walking in IBM-like footsteps. They make prod
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Well, owing to the fact that Apple had its more colorful rainbow-like logo for almost 2 years before the rainbow flag was used for the first time as a symbol for gays, It's dubious that there was any intent on Apple's part to show such affiliation.
The changing of Apple's logo from its original colorful one to the current grey one was coincident with Steve Jobs return to Apple in 1997.... This change was one of perhaps about a dozen other significant changes that Jobs was making in the company at the tim
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