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Apple: Losing Out On Talent and In Need of a Killer New Device (theguardian.com)
mspohr writes with a link to an interesting (and rather dour) take at The Guardian on the state of Apple, which holds that: "Despite its huge value, Silicon Valley developers are turned off by [Apple's] 'secretive, controlling' culture and its engineering is no longer seen as cutting edge." From the article: "Tellingly, Apple is no longer seen as the best place for engineers to work, according to several Silicon Valley talent recruiters. It's a trend that has been happening slowly for years – and now, in this latest tech boom, has become more acute. ... Or as Elon Musk recently put the hiring situation a little more harshly: Apple is the "Tesla graveyard." "If you don't make it at Tesla, you go work at Apple," Musk recently told a German newspaper. The biggest issue for programmers seems to be a high-stress culture and cult of secrecy, which contrasts sharply with office trends toward gentler management and more playful workdays."
The other Steve was what made Apple technically great
From TFS, what's the deal with expecting playful workdays? Most of us in the world have expectations to meet, management that holds us to those expectations, and a culture of needing to get the work done. It doesn't mean that management has to be harsh and unreasonable, but they expect work to be productive. Why would people expect playful workdays? I get providing incentives for exceeding expectations, which is very beneficial in raising productivity. But playful workdays implies lowering expectations and less time working, which is the antithesis of productivity. Why is this a good thing, and why do millennials expect to be coddled and not have to work hard on the job? Success comes from working hard and being better prepared than the competition, whether as an individual or as a company.
The lack of innovation is perhaps a legitimate criticism, but there really isn't a massive amount of innovation going on with smartphones and computers right now. Apple has always been reluctant to adopt technologies quickly (e.g., 3G, LTE) and is known for removing features quickly that they think will become antiquated (like Firewire). It's worked for them over the past 15 years with all their products, so I don't see why they should change now. The innovation is usually coming up with a completely different and new product, not in providing the latest features in hardware and software. The culture of secrecy is probably necessary to prevent the competition from beating them when it comes to developing new ideas. That really isn't a legitimate criticism.
The ghost of Steve Jobs walking the halls with you, at your side, talking to you, day in, day out, never letting you get a word in edgewise. Ah, Apple. Eve, what hath thou done!
It's the end of Apple again?
Why is Apple In Need of a Killer New Device ?
Who...bases a business on jumps from device to device? Car companies and small minds.
The article simple repeats the competitors opinion, i.e. that of Musk.
But, when a CEO talks about you, you are a threat to their business model!
At one point in time Apple was attracting new blood with cutting edge technology ideals. They still have some of that, but after their initial success those people now move away from Apple to other projects. I think too the designs of Jony Ives puts a constriction on engineering making everything super thin and eliminating ports, and other useful function to devices simply dumbs down a device not improves it. Apple though has always been a more design conscious technology company then a engineering company. The design comes well before engineering and that is because you have a Jony Ives obsessed with design not necessarily function.
You also see plenty of good engineering people working for other companies who probably get more freedom to advance a product beyond what the corporate minimalist ideal is. Apple's problem is they have simply become a limitation of their own philosophy.
Apple just needs to hire more women and minorities and forget this meritocracy nonsense. That will surely jumpstart their performance in the sectors they compete in.
Umm... care to inform us what Apple has done marketing-wise but to claim they reinvented the wheel every time they came out with a new device?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
As insane and nasty as Steve Jobs apparently was as a person, he at least seems to have had a technological vision. Which seemingly cannot be said of the current CEO, whose vision seems to extend as far as adding new Emojis to the line-up.
The sad thing is that Apple would be uniquely positioned to introduce a whole range of new technologies into the consumer marketplace. On their devices, they control the entire technology stack: from hardware to software, it is all theirs. And they are the only player who has this sort of position that allows paradigm shifts to be done in-house.
For instance, they would be the only ones who could, conceivably, do a seamless job of integrating HDR into the user experience. Or WGD (Wide Gamut Displays). The latter would be particularly cool: if you are capable of doing something like a Retina display with its minuscule pixels, there is nothing that limits you to good old RGB anymore. Make it RGCB (Red Green Cyan Blue), or R/YG/BG/C/B/P (Red Yellow-Green Blue-Green Cyan Blue Purple - perhaps in some hexagonal pixel arrangement). And watch people swoon when they see the colours such displays can show. Purple and blue flowers, plants, sunsets, skies - all suddenly look vastly more natural than on an sRGB device. Cameras (at least SLRs) record wide gamut colours already, it is the displays that can't keep pace.
And what does Apple do? They now offer pink iPhone case options. Yeah, sure, guys. Makes me want to work for you - such vision, wow! :)
Small companies and startups tend to be more "playful". The only two things they care about are that you have the skills to do the job and you can get the work done on time. if you want to put up pictures of your family/girlfriend on your cube wall, that's OK. One trend with employers is that of "hot desking". You just go into the building, find a free desk/computer, login and start working. Then you leave at the end of the day. Others give you your own desk. Some places just give you a desk that is 1 meter wide and you are sitting side by side with ten other people. Some companies have a "no personal belongings" rule in your workspace (avoids problems with theft). Animators/artists like to surround themselves with action figures, furry toys like giant penguins or spiders, so that rule would drive them nuts. Others have recreation areas like ping-pong tables, console systems, have after-hours Chess clubs, card games, and even Yoga clubs.
If you're late in by 15 minutes because of bad traffic, they understand, so long as you make up the time. Some large corporations expected you to be in by 8am on the dot, no excuses, with the result that everyone leave at 4pm on the dot. For lunch, some companies take a dim view of you going outside/away somewhere for lunch, they expect you to use the work canteen. Other employers are located right downtown, so going to a different eatery each day is expected since they don't have their own food service. And there will be team parties every quarter. You might just get 15 minutes to eat your lunch at your desk, or you get flexitime for lunch.
Some companies dislike employees socializing outside of work, and might just send a couple of "heavies" to keep an eye on you.
With project management, you might have the freedom to view all tasks in the current sprint using Jira, and the whole team gets to decide what the objective will be. Other companies, only the producer gets to see all the tasks and hands them out one by one in no particular order.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
It just needs a device that everyone can afford and needs. Such a shame that they priced their phones way above what the majority can afford, They would be WAY more popular if they had focused on the base instead of the "Elite".
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Not sure why I am bothering to reply to an AC, but ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?
$76B in revenue and $18B in profit in the LAST QUARTER.
For a doomed company, that ain't bad. If you disagree, please point out another company that made more profit in 2016. Hint, that's rhetorical, there isn't one.
Apple may need "another killer device" to continue to grow to that predicted "1 trillion dollar company". But holy fuck, how is not going from the biggest market cap in the world to the even biggerest market cap in the world "doomed"?
...never having to say your sorry.
When the P to E is high, that means the stock is a bubble and everyone should sell. When the P to E is low, that means there's no confidence in earnings and everyone should sell. Meanwhile they are compared to Facebook's 109 P to E in a completely serious manner.
Still increasing sales of desktop computers means the non-phone side of the business is being ignored.
Moving 8 iPhones for every Windows Phone means the former is dead and the latter is a viable product.
Apple's non-iPhone revenue is comparable to Microsoft's *total* revenue. The impact to Apples revenue due to just currency fluctuations is comparable to Facebook's *total* revenue. Maybe a case could be made that that is a business in decline, but no one seems to be doing so.
Not sure why I am bothering to reply to an AC, but ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?
$76B in revenue and $18B in profit in the LAST QUARTER.
Well, at least it is consistent. Slashdot has been declaring Microsoft dead for a decade now, despite MS having increasing revenue and profit all this time. Their profit was $7.9B last quarter. Less than Apple, but about the same situation vs the doomed predictions here.
Apple is doomed in the same way that Microsoft has been doomed for decades. Very profitable doom with very significant market share, but if you're not on an exponential growth trajectory then people think of you as as a stale relic.
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All it really needs to do is to make the prices of it's existing devices competitive in the marketplace.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Apple have never really invented much. But, they have brought together technology and made it into amazing things.
The imac. It was colourful, compact, got rid of legacy ports. It was insanely great. The iPod put a Hard drive in a MP3 player, and made it easy to hold your entire music collection.... The others on the market just were shite in comparison. This was insanely great. OSX, bringing together open source Unix, with a Java JVM installed as standard, using open API's and with a GUI that was far ahead of anything at the time...... Insanely great.
But now....
Soldered in Ram - not insanely great. Non upgradeable SSD - not insanely great. no USB ports on latest macbook, and charging premium for a USB-c adapter. not insanely great. Charging $1,099 for a 2012 model laptop with 4gb ram and crappy i5-3210M processor......FFS, not insanely great.. For heaven sake, I remember Steve jobs reducing prices of models every single mac world presentation. No more.... Not insanely great.
Apple are dead. Maybe not in the financial sense - they have enough money to keep them going for decades. But, in the sense of what brought them back from the brink of bankruptcy back in 1998, they are dead and buried. I only wish Microsoft were a better company so I could switch back.
There is a lot of demand for the iDildo by Apple fans. Linked to an iTunes account it selects and plays sensual musical accompaniments perfect for setting mood. The tempo of the selected track is chosen by a proprietary algorithm using sensors inside the device that measure the speed with which the iDildo is being thrusted. The best in sexual entertainment, the iDildo is guaranteed to get its user steamy and provide multiple orgasms.
The iDildo makes use of the previously patented iPod scroll wheel to choose settings from the device's base to allow the user to dial up the pleasure. Amongst the features are thoughtful inventions that also provide additional health benefits to the stress relief and endorphins that multiple orgasms provide; Mozart for foetuses and, prostate massaging.
Features of the iDildo have been carefully selected to appeal to Apples main user base of Hipsters, Faggots and anti-vaxxing crunchy mothers. Forecasts predict the sale and shipment of up to 25 million devices per year starting at $500 each. A variety of shapes and designs will be available, available in both white and black, with premium models using designs sourced from Bad-dragon.com
Follow up fleshlight alternatives are expected from Q2 2017.
Old data is just that...old data. Apple needs to become much more price competitive if it is going to succeed in today's marketplace. Your name can only get you so far.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
The iGun could seamlessly integrate with the whole Apple ecosphere using a low power bluetooth connection
Apple is the "Tesla graveyard." "If you don't make it at Tesla, you go work at Apple," Musk recently told a German newspaper.
It seems that whatever entity it was that possessed Steve Jobs and gave him his boundless arrogance has found a new host.
Other issues aside with displays, you know Apple doesn't make their displays, right? The only thing they had to do with "retina" was the marketing term retina. Their displays are made by LG and Samsung. Apple doesn't do any LCD or OLED research, they just buy what the display makers can sell them.
Apple is dead. I don't see them ever launching another hit like the iPhone which by all means won't be the last massive hit in the tech sector. Apple will slowly fade away. Without their (relatively low yield) dividends and the massive 218 billions in cash the stock would be pretty much worthless now.
Michael Dell is that you?
Starting with this bullshit from someone who's never worked there:
I've worked at Apple three times, starting back in 2002, and nobody ever yelled at me. VPs are too busy to go around doing that shit. As for the 60-80 hour weeks. that's a myth. We put in long hours when a deadline was close, but it was never a constant grind like that.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Apple's doing just fine.
Where's the multi-billion dollar Linux company? Ooops there is none.
We won't see a repeat of Apple running into the ground because the people responsible for that aren't running the company. Microsoft, despite a lot of missteps, is still making money hand over fist.
The people who are concerned that Apple is running out of steam are people who just want to squeeze more money out of Apple and run it into the ground like they do with every company.
No need to yell. Only a silly person would think that Apple could replicate the success of the iPhone again. The profit and revenue is massive but so are the revenues of weapons makers during a world war. iPhones are the bullets and guns of the social media age. Once something new comes along they are obsolete.
Revenues and profits should also be inflation adjusted. Also, what matters are the profit margins which for Apple have stagnated or even decreased. Apple is big and doing fine but if people don't even want to work there any more (the Big Blue anyone?) then that is a bad sign.
Market capita is also a useless (inflation anyone?) metric and Alphabet is catching fast as AAPL goes down in price.
Just as Microsoft drifts along in a sort of commercial terminal velocity, so too will Apple.
Tech companies that size can't do anything dramatically good or bad in the short to medium term because of their size. There are no dramatic systemic risks in their business model or market either - unlike oil companies with their exploding wells, or pharma companies with their lethal drugs.
Few companies last more than a couple of generations in any case. I would expect Apple to be around in a quasi-zombie state for about another 30 years or so before being broken up into a bunch of smaller obscure entities - a bit like IBM probably. Or Standard Oil... Kodak... Rockwell...
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
...or maybe it's a New Killer Device they need? Grammer's like so compleceted.
Apple needs to become much more price competitive if it is going to succeed in today's marketplace.
What does the word "success" mean to you? Where I come from, a company that's making more profit than any other company in the world is successful.
Got any more idiotic comments to share?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Alphabet is catching fast as AAPL goes down in price.
Apple could pull the rug out from under Google anytime by making any other search engine the iOS default.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Go ahead, dump all of your 401K savings in Apple, I dare you.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Apple is doomed in the same way that Microsoft has been doomed for decades.
Nope. Microsoft has had incompetent senior management since Ballmer got the big chair to throw around. Apple's management is the best in the industry.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
apparently we don' know what culture we really want
- apple's is too secret and yell-risky
- google's is too playful and company-religious
- tesla's is too elite
- amazon's is too cost-focused and work-aholicly
- facebook's is what? too much Zuck all day long I would think
- twitter's is too much of a job risk at this time (4000 employees? really? to automatically transport 140-char text messages across the globe? WTF?!
conclusion: different people like different environmens and company cultures. oh and there's bills to be paid...
They tried for the watch. It didn't do as well as they'd hoped. The next step is glasses (VR or AR), or a wearable Mac (belt power and CPU, glasses for monitor, and glove or other finger sensors for input).
If I were them, I'd be going for the wearable PC. Not a gimmick for fitness, as so many watches/wearables are, but a full computer, just distributed around the body and worn. The main reason phones have taken off for computing devices is that they are convenient. So imagine something more convenient and 100 times as powerful. But, like the phone was not just the phone, but the development power behind it, and the usability of it, the wearable Mac isn't just the device, but the usability of it. And that's what Apple can spend a few billion getting right before they bring it out. That and AR apps. VR is lame. AR is cool. People don't want immersive gaming that removes them from reality, but AR. The world, but better. Real time face recognition, so you'll never forget a name again. Live compass, sonar/radar, and movement overlay to show a game-like HUD over the world. What for? Ask Apple. If they put me in charge of the division and gave me $10B to fund it, I'll guarantee them 95%+ of the share of wearable tech profit for 10-20 years. But that'd never happen.
Learn to love Alaska
I don't see how that would negatively impact Google honestly. Apple provides their own map software, yet everybody I know with an iPhone uses Google maps. Apple already uses duck duck go for Siri, yet again everyone I know with an iPhone still use Google. Just because the default was changed, many still use their preferred service.
A problem that would have caused Google problem five years ago. Nah, it might be hindrance but I wouldn't see it as a Google stock killer.
Look at FaceBook. Google and Apple both have the power to pull the FaceBook app. But it doesn't happen.
Apple is good at making devices. Google is good at selling ads Both companies make money doing different things and getting caught up on how each other could hurt each others business is precisely whats wrong with the technology "cartel" of 2016. Remember your "treat" is the same as what Microsoft did to Netscape back in the day. That didn't fare well for MS.
Although Steven Elop or Steven Cook or whatever his name is sure is no Steve Jobs.
He might be good at milking a cow --- and deserves credit for at least not screwing things up --- but yeah, the empty pipeline ... it's real disturbing.
The idea that phones have reached their peak as far as sophistication goes is a joke --- our phones are quite primitive.
With the technology available, a smart phone should start to rival a Star Trek Tricorder --- able to measure distances by pointing at something, be a stud finder, have a new sensor every year or 2. It's why Steve Jobs made them be able to run apps and gave them a camera and an acceleometer --- to expose capabilities to inventive developers.
I guess Cook views a bigger screen and social media integration and Apple Pay as to height of development of the smart phone. If so, he's pissing away what in retrospect will be a lost opportunity.
Steve Jobs was as much about engineering as marketing, and never trusted people to know what they wanted.
Do you realize your login name (initials?) appear at the top of every one of your posts automatically? You don't need to append it to each post
Steve Jobs was captivated by calligraphy and forward looking ideas for a better tomorrow as a new exciting experience. Hence, old black and white Mac, the iPod, the colored Macs, NEXT Step, the Aqua interface in original Mac OS X.
He was a salesman, but that is so missing the point. Michael Dell was a salesman and so was Ross Perot.
Apple's doing just fine.
Where's the multi-billion dollar Linux company? Ooops there is none.
We won't see a repeat of Apple running into the ground because the people responsible for that aren't running the company. Microsoft, despite a lot of missteps, is still making money hand over fist.
The people who are concerned that Apple is running out of steam are people who just want to squeeze more money out of Apple and run it into the ground like they do with every company.
Well there is Google and their Android OS. They decided to use the Linux kernel which was a good decision but then they messed up by running Java on top of it.
Well, let's see, Apple is a high-pressure workplace, to which people go when they cannot make it at Tesla. Wait, what???
The article is mostly based on the opinion of a single hipster jackass who felt that he was too good to apply at Apple, backed up by the opinion of a few other people who don't want to work there, and a recruiter. Note the lack of information from anyone who has actually ever worked there.
Not sure why I am bothering to reply to an AC, but ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?
$76B in revenue and $18B in profit in the LAST QUARTER.
For a doomed company, that ain't bad. If you disagree, please point out another company that made more profit in 2016. Hint, that's rhetorical, there isn't one.
Apple may need "another killer device" to continue to grow to that predicted "1 trillion dollar company". But holy fuck, how is not going from the biggest market cap in the world to the even biggerest market cap in the world "doomed"?
Exactly. 90% of companies would kill for Apples worst performance. It's going to be a long damn time before anyone has even the right to declare a company as large as Apple as "dead".
$150 billion in cash reserves tends to give you that flexibility.
Let's put this another way. Apple products are 80% marketing and 20% technology. The only "killer" Apple needs to sustain is marketing peer pressure, which clearly hasn't been hard for them. In fact, they're the best in the world at it.
Apple vs. Tesla. They are really two different markets. Tesla is attracting engineers, because what they are producing seems something useful and world changing, while Apple products while nice, and remain to be great products. But Musk's empire Tesla, Space X, and SolarCity. are bringing grander changes to the world, Something that perhaps history will look back with fondness, on our generation and say we accomplished something. While the generation preceding this Apple was credited for the personal computer for the masses, the iPhone and iPads while wonderful technology are at best would be footnotes in history. We know about Edison and Marconi, Ford and Einstein, Jobs and Gates. Because of what they did to change the infrastructure of the world. However Apple is profiting off the infrastructure it help built, while Tesla is building a new one.
If you were to talk to your grand-kids in 30-50 years, what would you like to say to them. That you invented a slightly thinner iPhone, which would still look bulky to your grand-kid. Or that you were involved in making electric cars practical for average use, helping get us off the dependency of polluting oil, giving you cleaner air to breath, and slowing down global warming, so you have the ability for a prosperous life.
That is why Apple is now second tear for engineering. Their business is in old stuff like personal computing, the future is in green energy.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
All the best programmers used to work for IBM. IBM ruled computing. Who buys anything from them anymore? The great ideas started to come from other places, and IBM couldn't adapt. Apple may go the same way. Remember, IBM is still a big company. Just not cutting edge any more.
There have been a lot of stories like this over the brief history of technology. IBM is a really good example. Their senior management is doing everything they can to sell off the company bit by bit while collecting money, and they still can't kill it. Microsoft is another excellent example, riding Windows and Office through to their current states. They're currently poised to pull the ultimate vendor lock-in trick with Azure and subscription software because they have loads of money to spend. Some companies, especially those with huge cash balances, can manage through transitions. Others will just keep beating money out of their cash cows for as long as possible (again, IBM is the perfect example.) Others, like Sun, end up getting bought at fire sale prices. All of the companies mentioned were absolutely dominant at one time or another. IBM is a total joke these days, but in the 70s/80s they represented the state of the art in all things computing.
Apple's problem is that they are now too consumer-focused and don't have a pipeline of expensive gadgets to sell them. Whether they'll use that huge pile of cash they have to buy into the next trend remains to be seen.
Well, look at the last horse race for Apple. They had the market in the 80s and kicked Jobs out and ate through their cash and then begged Jobs back. Know your history. They have the cash, but will have a slow death, just watch.
Well all you're saying there is that Apple overcharge a huge amount and people don't act rationally in a free market like capitalism supposes.
I mean, for fucks' sake, why are they SITTING on a trillion dollars???
The smartphone combined the portability of a mobile phone with the internet access of a desktop PC. Being able to send and receive emails, view web pages (and then view maps, book taxis, train journeys and hotel stays) are the *must have* functionality for someone working.
The biggest improvements would be longer battery life and more CPU/GPU power. Something that could be worn like a pair of sunglasses with headphones and could provide augmented reality but without looking like Joe 90. So you could find your way around a large city without having to stop and look at your phone. The most annoying thing is being caught in the rain and being unable to use the screen because the rain keeps scrambling the touch screen. The only shelter is standing under the porch of the building with the nanocell tower, which cuts you off from data services.
Or maybe Apple could bring out the iTelevision. I've seen Android Smart TV's, but Apple doesn't seem to have a iTelevision, even though the supermarkets only seem to stock Apple iPhone USB charger cables.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Joy of Tech from a couple of days ago summed it up pretty well.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Apple has become a design and fashion company, where all the important decisions are made by simplicity loving rounded corner loving designers. Designers are great, and I have nothing (well, not much) against design and fashion companies (OK, it annoys me when, in the name of simplicity, useful tools such as Aperture are removed from a product).
But as a software engineer, I prefer to work for a company that puts a higher value on my skills. Google and Facebook were founded by coders and have many mechanisms to allow ambitious early code to see the light of day. I like a company with more scope for experimentation. A playful corporate culture is an (imperfect) indicator of experimentation and risk taking, while a rigid controlling culture is an (imperfect) indicator of the opposite.
Also, the best way to strike it rich is to join a company on an exponential growth curve. That was why, int the 1990's, Microsoft could hire the best and the brightest, who would cash out 5 years later as millionaires. Both Apple and Microsoft made a lot of millionaires in their day, but today ambitious folks look elsewhere.
(((posting as AC because I have mod points)))
Calling Apple a superior technology integrator is a tremendous compliment.
Woosh
That's what state-of-the-art of the window systems were in the late 1980's.
http://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/t...
Compared to the early desktop PC's back then, the high-end print workstations that ran PostScript natively in true-color 24-bit mode window display. Hundreds of fonts to choose from of any size and italic slant angle, and in any size. What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get was the rule with a color laser printer. Steve Jobs had attended a talk on display systems and fonts and saw that as the future. Instead of having 50+ different binary files of the same font, each at a different size, a font engine could store a single font, and generate the character bitmaps on the fly only when needed.
Previously, everyone else had to either hand-draw everything or use Letraset catalogs and buy individual fonts at a particular size on transfer sheets, light boxes, stanley knives, scissors, colored filters and any other arts/crafts tool they could find. Early film special effects involved physically editing the film frames on a editing table.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Or maybe all those engineers have taken the news of wage collusion and anti hiring agreements seriously?
Does anyone think that the lawsuit actually changed Apple's internal culture? Maybe if they were a 10 person company, but that mentality is, by now, entrenched in every fiber of the company. Sure, the Steve isn't CEO any more, but lame policies about anti-poach and wage suppression are really formulated and executed by middle management - and there's hundreds of those folks at Apple.
If nothing else, there's an internal equity problem. If they hire new people at fair market wages the new guy or gal is making more than the guy or gal who's been toiling in obscurity for the last 10 years. And nobody at Apple wants to give every engineer a raise to ensure parity, nor a bonus for the back wages they were defrauded out of.
I wish I was "DOOMED" like that!!
It's doomed because Android is taking over the world. Most children first exposure of computing is thru Android. Maybe this is not noticeable in the USA but there's like 7 billion people in the world and you can buy an Android phone for a few dollars. And if you have a phone then you're a dev. I have seen children to click together an app in a few hours use. Play store is choking full of creative tools for free. Google allows GPL stuff on their market. It's exactly the same thing why M$ blow in the 90's.
Srsly I think currently Android is the most important thing in tech, like M$-DOS was 30 years ago. If Google does this right and does no evil they can take over the world in 10 years.
And that right there is what can cause HUGE problems for Apple.
If someone get's Johnny Ives to leave Apple.. Suddenly a shitstorm of magnus proportions will start inside the company. I do think they have faltered a bit, but that is mostly because the guy who started the company is now gone.
This happens to all companies. Microsoft has been in a non stop turd fall since Gates left, HP, etc...
A hired CEO never has the love and drive for a company like the people that built it from nothing.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
What a load of shit. How about engineers are more attracted to companies that respect a healthy work/life balance. That's it. Really. I'll come to work, bust my ass for 7-9 hours and go home, 5 days a week. You can keep your foosball, cafeterias, yoga, happy hours, . I'll take the perk where you pay me to go on vacation though.
They may be turning huge profits, but they certainly haven't released anything groundbreaking since Jobs died. They are starting to trend towards Ballmer's Microsoft and Heins' Blackberry, that's all the article is saying.
" Apple is dead."
The bad news for Apple is that too few people are saying that right now. The last time everybody did, in 1997 when Wired ran that famous cover of an apple wrapped in barbed wire and captioned 'Pray', before the Intel switch and before OS X, you could have bought the stock for forty-seven cents a share in today's terms.
The game is about to change again. The device isn't going to be as important was what is behind the device and the Human Machine Interface. Everyone knows this which is why the valley is pushing into machine learning, autonomous system, big data, and thinking/learning machines. This is where the next trillion will come from unless someone can engineer a phone that thought controlled.
Other big money areas are battery technology. Imagine if Apple could put out a smartphone with a patented battery technology that lasted 1 month between chargers, that would be a game changer and everyone would flock to it. Material science, vehicle engineering, and embedded medical devices will also be other larger growth areas.
We now have the power, silicon, and networks for some amazing technology to blossom, but it is handwork and will take dedicated teams working together over many years. Google, Apple, Microsoft, IBM, and even Amazon all have a shot at making this a reality. Anyone can make a flat thin square with a touch screen and voice recognition that talks to a cloud backend. Now it is time to see how far we can go with this new platform and how it can benefit humanity or at least make money.
He tripled their profits and doubled their revenue in his time there. Not Apple level perhaps but hardy incompetent.
If you disagree, please point out another company that made more profit in 2016.
saudi aramco
You HAVE to hear what these assholes think about themselves.
15 years down the line, Tesla will become another Apple for a cool company. It doesn't mean shit, except that Elon Musk has a HUGE ego. Not backed by anything that is considered worthwhile engineering, of course.
Elon Musk just happens to have money, with which he's getting good engineers to do the good hard work. But nothing prevents good engineering from outside his stupid company. And remember that before listening to him.
Trained as an engineer, I will say that Apple's apparent problems recruiting those with technical and engineering skills aren't surprising. All you need to do is look at what drives Apple's entire product line. It's what, when I was studying engineering was called the "artsy, fartsy." At Apple, artistic silliness trumps good engineering design. The result are constricted, constipated products that are pretty in a little-girl, Barbie-doll sense, but function poorly.
First and foremost in the pretty above all else madness is Apple's weird, strange obsession with thin that probably traces back to the RAZR cellphone craze of about a decade ago. To save a few hundredths of an inch in thickness, the battery life of iPhones is limited. To save it for their laptops, ports are reduced to as few as one in the current MacBook. The older white MacBook had eight.
The result, in the case of Mac laptops, are products that cost more and deliver less user value than any other laptop on the market. That lack of ports means that users must buy can lug around various adapters for every conceivable situation. It also means Apple's pricey laptops end up stripped of useful features. Apple sells tablets with built-in cellular. It doesn't sell a laptop with that feature. Why? That silly obsession with thin.
Apple's decision makers, particularly its artsy-in-chief Ives, don't seem to realize that for a laptop, thinness is almost irrelevant. The laptop has to be large in two dimensions to accommodate a decent screen and a full-sized keyboard. The remaining dimension makes no difference to a user who much carry it about. It could be two or three times thicker with no change in portability.
Apple, for reasons that defy good sense, still thinks it can sell its laptops to schools. Even a glance at the MacBook Air shows how unsuitable that frail little hot-house plant of a laptop is for middle-school students. A closer look with show that that maintaining it in-house is virtually impossible. The total cost over the lifetime of a MacBook Air for a school must be at least twice that of a competing laptop. Apple used to make an excellent school laptop, their white MacBook. Why they don't still do so defies imagination. Many Apple executives still live in the late 1990s, when Steve Jobs returned to the dying company and justifiably slashed their product line. Now Apple makes too few products for its larger market. And yet Apple still stubbornly refuses to make a great variety of products.
Worst of all are Apple's line of all-in-one desktops, the iMac. I owned one and never want to repeat that blunder again. It was actually better than Apple's current, obsessed-with-thin line. But fixed problems, in my case a jammed-inside DVD, was an utter nuisance. I promised myself I'd never buy an all-in-one computer again.
There's a reason every other PC manufacturer makes and sells few all-in-one computers. They make no sense for business and savvy home buyers. With an all-in-one, any failure is a disaster. Upgrading and repairing is difficult and costly, particularly with Apple's ill-designed products. Any upgrade requires everything to be upgraded. Businesses that might consider Apple for the benefits of OS X don't bother. The hardware downside outweighs those benefits. And people who might consider if they used one at work buy Windows at home instead.
Where's the innovation? Someone needs to create a desktop that builds in Drobo-like functionality. Drobo is, after all, merely a very smart set of hard drives. Apple could do that? Any chance they would? No, that sort of technically superior engineering is foreign to Apple.
From an engineering standpoint, Apple's designs are poor, placing unnecessary burdens and limitations on users. From a marketing standpoint, Apple is also being stupid. It's leaving large holes in its product line, businesses and schools, that competitors can exploit to send Apple sales in design. Apple's chief advantage is its operating systems. Does Apple really think its competitors will let that stand? They'll close that gap and when they do, the many inadequacies of Apple's hardware will pull it down.
The cover of the January 16, 2013 issue of BusinessWeek magazine has a large photo of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer (now replaced by Satya Nadella) with the headline calling him "Monkey Boy". See the BusinessWeek cover in this article: Steve Ballmer Is No Longer A Monkey Boy, Says Bloomberg BusinessWeek. The BusinessWeek cover says "No More" and "Mr.", but that doesn't take much away from the fact that the magazine called Ballmer Monkey Boy -- on its cover.
Worst CEO in the United States: Quote from an article in Forbes Magazine about Steve Ballmer: "Without a doubt, Mr. Ballmer is the worst CEO of a large publicly traded American company today." Another quote: "The reach of his bad leadership has extended far beyond Microsoft when it comes to destroying shareholder value -- and jobs." (May 12, 2012)
Google's Android has vastly more marketshare than iOS.
iOS users may be willing to pay higher premiums for the device and spend more in the app store, but that hardly matters to Google's search engine.
Hell Microsoft has a full on desktop monopoly, they set the default search engine to whatever their search engine is called these days. People just change it when they install real web browsers.
.
The AppleTV is trying to find its niche within an already existing market, and in Apple-relative terms, is doing barely just OK.
So where is, what is, Apple's next attention-getting and market-creating product?
"Or maybe Apple could bring out the iTelevision."
They seem to have decided that a good set-top box is a better idea than branding the highly competitive commodity screen on the other end of the HDMI cable. What Apple TV still lacks is content. Apple is frantically trying to make the deals it will take to enable you to say, "Hey Siri! Play the X-Files Season One episodes that were directed by Joe Napolitano."
During the upcoming recession, watch for a giant entertainment industry buyout announcement.
None of that sounds like fun. I hear a ton of rules and mgmt interference.
Fun is...being creative.
Fun is...being trusted.
Fun is...managers that largely leave you alone and occasionally ask you reasonable -- i.e. non-cookie-cutter -- questions.
Fun is...systems that correct errors quickly. I know, I know, this almost never happens. But if you are doing some of the above, you might get there one day.
I come here for the love
Old data is just that...old data. Apple needs to become much more price competitive if it is going to succeed in today's marketplace. Your name can only get you so far.
Exactly. Look at all the high end products that are no longer with us because they refused to join the race to the bottom.:
Rolex watches - gone, should have made a swatch like $1.99 digital watch.
Lamborghini - too bad they didn't copy the Yugo or Ford Pinto. Now they are on the dustheap of history
Rolls Royce - A sad story. Gone out of business because they just didn't realize that the only metric in cars is cheap.
The entire diamond industry collapsed because people know that it's just overpriced glass in those rings.
So many more examples where industry has found out that only attending to the lowest common denominator is the only path to profit. If you want cheap, buy cheap. Just don't assume that everyone does.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I think the problem is, Apple should be dying if it can't keep producing products.. but part of the problem with the economy is that once you get to be the size of Apple you can float and when you get in trouble you complain to the government about how many jobs will be lost and they bail you out.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
How fast Apple started "falling apart" after Jobs died, which makes me think Jobs really was Apple and can't be replaced, or now that he's dead people aren't afraid to point out Apple's flaws.
In either case, the Koolaid appears to be wearing off for even the die hard fanbois.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
The bigger they are, the harder they fall, and it's extremely hard to get out of a cultural rut. They may never recover without regressing first back to their former poor company. Not to say they aren't doing well now, but that's only because of their momentum.
Go ahead, dump all of your 401K savings in Apple, I dare you.
Your logic is.... fascinating. Why would anyone, even the mythical most simpering hipster clueless Apple fanboi, engage in monoculture investing?
You have an interesting outlook on life. You should put out a newsletter or something.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Let's put this another way. Apple products are 80% marketing and 20% technology. The only "killer" Apple needs to sustain is marketing peer pressure, which clearly hasn't been hard for them. In fact, they're the best in the world at it.
That 20 percent Technology - does that include all of the OSX Only software I use professionally?
Since I also use Windows OS, I get to compare the different systems and software. My opinion is always wrong, but always based on experience.
And as for peer pressure, you haven't seen anything until you work for a PC centric group that tries to force you onto Windows only solutions.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Let me preface this by saying that I believe in giving credit where credit is due, so this will not be an anti-Apple comment despite the fact that I am not an Apple fan. At all.
Apple earned such a strong position on, I believe, two fronts.
The first and foremost prong being a robust philosophy, appealing to users who like to think of themselves as independent thinkers. This was really cemented by their famous Super Bowl commercial rejecting the Orwellian drones: a marketing coup, to be sure, since Apple is and always has been rabidly anti user freedom. People who identify with this take strong pride in their allegiance to Apple. This is brand loyalty. The gadgets Apple makes really take a backseat to the "Why" that people perceive about them. Users display the logo proudly. As Simon Sinek pointed out, Apple's laptops and notebooks are the only major brand where having the lid open displays the logo right-side up to observers.
The second prong is that they have repeatedly entered industries where they did not conventionally even belong, brought novel innovation that both revolutionized those industries and, for a time, allowed the company to dominate them. Take cellphones as the prime example: before the iPhone, there were a handful of shitty flip handsets available, the capabilities and limitations entirely dictated by the phone service carriers. Smartphones did come to exist, but were a niche market almost entirely confined to business people using them as work phones, and a handful of bleeding-edge tech geeks. But when Apple (a computer company) entered the cellphone business, THEY dictated what the phones would do, and the carriers were given the option to cede control or watch the iPhone debut on a different carrier. AT&T accepted, the entire industry was flipped on its head, and now iPhones and Android devices are THE dominant devices.
As a side note, yes: Steve Jobs was famously a lunatic control-freak. But he was a visionary, and together he and Wozniak ensured that his vision stayed consistent by controlling both the hardware and the software, and he wasn't afraid to enter what are nominally considered unrelated markets. With the death of Jobs, the company remains in a strong financial position but may lack the leadership to continue to innovate.
Nokia
lightning and micro usb chargers at my local supermarket.
He took a company with a monopoly and the world at its feet and ensured that they succeeded at nothing for a decade. Satya is working hard to change the revenue model to a sustainable flow for MS, but in doing so, he's creating enough backlash that companies are abandoning MS products. Had Ballmer had an iota of intelligence, he would have migrated MS to the subscription model when he started. At that time it likely would have succeeded and MS would have much more than doubled its revenue in his tenure.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Well, by that argument we're all doomed because the universe will eventually slide into entropic heat death. In the long term every company that enjoys a dominant position is going to screw up and lose that position. So we need specific reasons why Apple is going to screw up in the relatively short term, and I can think of only one: the expectations game.
Apple's always had its share of product flops, but now that it's iconic leader Jobs is dead, we look back at his admittedly brilliant tenure with rose-tinted glasses. We're looking for signs that the mojo is gone, and every time a product is less than a home run it's inevitably seen as the harbinger of Apple's demise. The truth is that while Jobs is certainly responsible for Apple's design-centric corporate culture, he didn't actually design any of Apple's big hits. The design choices that were actually his doing were really not very good.
Musk smack-talking Apple has a considerable element of strategic self-interest involved. Not that it doesn't ever happen, mind you, but if he can create the impression that only losers who can't get a job at Tesla work for Apple it makes competing with Apple for employees easier. The uncertainty about whether Apple can follow up on its past successes in a post-Job era is an opportunity for him to create FUD. In any case while Apple engineering has been good, it's not the secret sauce of Apple's success; design is. But it is true if enough people believe the magic (ugh) is gone and never coming back, then Apple won't be able to attract top talent, or stave off investors demanding quick financial results.
Apple is by any stretch of the imagination very well positioned now, and all things being equal being well-positioned at present is favorable to your future. Will they lose their mojo eventually? Sure. But nobody will really know when that will be until it's apparent in retrospect.
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Unfortunately, the genius at Apple is clearly gone. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm a computer-enthusiast (and professional) from wayyyyyy back in the day. I would have vastly preferred it if today we were arguing over Commodore, Atari and Be. But we aren't. Mainstream users got stuck with Apple or Wintel, so that's what we have to work with. I build what I need for PC gaming and occasionally buy an Apple product when they produce something I actually want (currently, nothing). Apple under Jobs was brilliant far more often than not. Perfect? Not a chance, but the Windows and Linux fanboys like to pretend that Jobs just marketed. That's blatantly and completely untrue, and if you believe that you are no better, and no smarter, than the Apple fanboys who thought (and for the most part blindly still think) that Apple could do no wrong. You can pretend that Jobs wasn't brilliant. You can pretend that Apple has always made shit. That doesn't make you correct. It doesn't make you smart. Maybe it makes you "cool" in certain crowds of like-minded fanboys. But what it certainly makes you is an idiot, because ALL Fanboys are idiots. What Jobs understood, and what nobody else seems to clearly understand, is that the single most important aspect of any kind of computing device is how it functions when a normal human interacts with it. NOT a computer-geek who can and will simply memorize and repeat any random and meaningless series of computer-related tasks regardless of their intuitiveness or logic. Sure, I can go into Terminal and create basic RAID arrays, but most people can't. Know what though. Pre the El Capitan nightmare all it took for a normal-human to create basic RAID arrays on the Mac was 2 minutes, a Google search and a few clicks. (And that's just one example of how Apple use to be run by a brilliant man and is now run by complete morons: Heck, just look at the bizarre UI decisions post-Jobs at Apple. They have almost completely destroyed their brilliantly intuitive UIs on both the Mac and iThings). It's going to take a while, but Apple is going to take a huge, colossal, fall. Eventually the vast majority of Apple fanboys will wake up and say "hey, Apple has really turned to shit." We've seen it over and over again in other industries that lose their way. Under Jobs they did, probably, 75% of everything right. Now they do 95% of everything wrong. Working in the industry it's a downright nightmare watching the once unassailable usability of Apple products go down the drain with such speed. Apple's new advertising should simply be: "The New Apple, Rotten to the Core."
Musk is 100% as much an asshole boss as Steve Jobs, perhaps more so since Musk demands a high-stress work environment 365 days a year.
Apple could pull the rug out from under Google anytime by making any other search engine the iOS default.
It has been leaked that Google pays $1bn for the privilege. What hasn't been quite liked is whether that was total up to some date, or per year, or whatever.
What could kill Google would be a search engine that isn't catered to advertisers but to letting people find what they are looking for.
If Apply does make a car, they should call it the Apple "Peeler".
In many of those companies I was thinking of, managers are either sitting right next to you. Some places just employ entry-level graduates, so they pack everyone from the project manager to the team and tech leads in together in school desks sitting together in one group. There's only been a couple of companies where managers had their own room and everyone else had cubicles.
Game and animation companies are more fun and creative than general IT software houses who use Jira, Agile and Scrum. But the downside is that you have producers who will break up a task into separate stages but won't tell everyone what all the task are; implement a basic single-threaded animation system. Get the parallel processing guy to make use of multi-threading on the CPU. Get the GPU engineer to optimize it to use the GPU. Now get the VFX artist to add more functionality.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
But playful workdays implies lowering expectations and less time working, which is the antithesis of productivity
Actually in practice most people rarely use those options, and if they do usually it's on break time anyway or as a place to sit down for a meeting. It puts everyone in a good mood, improves morale and encourages breaks which means people aren't burnt out and improves productivity as a result. It also encourages socialisation and bonding, which makes better links between team members and gives a chance to exchange ideas and bounce thoughts off each other. It's a mistake to think that everyone is just playing. They're not, if they were the company would go bust. It's about making a more enjoyable atmosphere which does give real rewards.
Microsoft has a subscription model. You buy a new version of Windows every one or two years. Except they blew that one up by constantly changing the GUI layout rather than simply polishing the fonts and theme to take advantage of higher resolutions.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Microsoft had Uncle Bill to keep the shareholders at bay. Apple had Steve. Every company needs a borderline celebrity CEO to keep that pack of jackals off long enough to succeed. Otherwise the second profits dip an "activist" shareholder swoops in and they get Bained.
Think of it this way: You know how every layer of Management exists to protect employees from the next layer? The Shareholders are at the top of that, and your CEO is protecting you from them. If a few lucky shareholders can drain the value out of Apple like vampires think about how many billions their pocket for themselves. Sure, everyone else gets screwed, but that's what the "Winner Take all, I got mine, FU" stockmarket is all about. And if you think it can't happen because Apple's stock is set up to prevent it all it takes is one Carly Fiorina to undo all that.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Did Netcraft confirm that?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
On additive and subtractive color spaces: http://cruxcreative.com/rgb-vs-cmyk-when-to-use-which-and-why/
I see a lot of comments talking about the tech and lack of vision. That's surely part of it. But that sounds like an awful work environment. If you can work someplace that isn't high stress and respects you as a human being (or is even, FUN), then of course you'd lean that way. Hopefully Apple wakes up and changes their tune.
Apple now has so much money and such dedicated followers/aficionados that I'm pretty sure they can release 0 successful products for the next ten generations (human generations - not tech generations) and still have enough assets, on hand, to buy Finland and several of the higher ranking African nations. Apple has more money, currently, than quite a few countries have as their GDP. Their revenue is greater than the GDP of some countries.
I'm probably preaching to the choir but the above is quite true (as far as I know - someone posted stats with links not long ago). They could probably go even longer just making 1:10 products a moderate success and 2:10 break even.
As I sit here (and I'm told I have a good imagination) I am unable to think of a single realistic scenario where Apple doesn't exist for the next 200 years. I really can't. Aliens... Aliens might come and kick Apple in the nuts - then leaving the planet and taking all of Apples assets with them. Apple will be involved in the design of the Mr. Fusion. It'll probably be called the iFusion and people will still buy it just because it has an Apple logo on it.
On that last part... At this point, I can't really blame them for doing so. I don't own anything but an iPod. I've owned some iStuff but my daughter's a fan and she "borrows" it, like borrowing my Carhartt sweatshirts, and I'll never see it again. She's borrowed my iDevices in much the same way she's borrowed my money. As much as I do not prefer iDevices, I can not say anything bad about them that is logical - other than price and that's subjective.
To be clear, I do technically own a whole bunch of Apple shares. I have no idea how many. They are not in my play portfolio. I can find out if anyone really needs to know. I've also, oddly enough, probably purchased more Apple products than anyone else here. No, they weren't for me. Yes, I'm actually going to be buying more. Yes, I agree with their product choices and even made those choices for myself at times - I elected to buy them and was not forced to buy them.
An example of the latter is that I'm currently waiting to find out if they'll give me a damned discount if I buy 28 (the number has gone up) iPads for a children's wing in a hospital. No, I'm not entirely sure how I get into these situations. Yes, I feel a bit conned. However, they're cute and tough kids. I've met some of them and couldn't put up with half their pain and would shoot myself if my own life had such a bleak outlook. Oh, no, I do not tell (or indicate) such thoughts to the children when I visit.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
For some people, and I make no claims other than that of observation, it's a bad thing if you're not an extremist. If you're not an angry zealot, you don't care enough. That could mean (to them) that you don't like a product, don't hold a political view, don't support a software license, and many other things. While not specifically applicable in this case, it should be noted, that they're heard saying things like, "If you're not with us, you're against us." I'd further add, a non-sequitur is the most minimal of their logically fallacies in many cases. It's also their most frequent.
So, the person you're replying to probably believes that if you're not 100% invested (emotionally and financially) then you're not a "believer." It'd be, and you know this, completely moronic to invest everything in one single entity - in the vast majority of cases and certainly in an 401k designed to give steady growth and provide for a reasonable retirement. But, if you don't invest completely, that means the company is a complete and utter failure and proves you have no faith in the company.
It goes well with many other thinking patterns exhibited by this group of people. I think they exist for most any belief and, it would appear, they even exist for this.
They remind me of children... "If you love the tree so much, why don't you just marry it?!?" (Kids still say that, right?)
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
You do realize Apple invests heavily in battery research and designs their own batteries?
www.wired.com/2015/03/apples-new-battery-tech/
http://www.patentlyapple.com/p...
etc....
The stock flatlined over the Ballmer years.
http://media.ycharts.com/chart...
I really like Apple hardware. I bought the Macbook Pro I'm writing this on from a Mac fan on the upgrade treadmill. I'm not a big fan of MacOS, I prefer Mint or Xubuntu, or if it's a server, Debian, but MacOS works well enough I can't be bothered to replace it since I do most of my work in virtual machines anyway, and now increasingly in the cloud. Given the build quality a used relatively high end mac is -- not exactly a good deal, but a good enough deal for hardware you like.
Anyhow, having lived to see Digital Equipment go from a tech juggernaut to being sold off to Compaq, then seeing Compaq sold to HP and HP turn into the sick man of the computer industry, I'd say don't be making any 200 year predictions. The thing that keeps a company going is cash, which Apple is swimming in, but a few years of lackluster profits and investors will start to think about better uses for that cash (e.g. selling the company's parts off and pocketing the proceeds).
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Let's put this another way. Apple products are 80% marketing and 20% technology.
Reality: Apple's biggest competitor is Samsung. Samsung's marketing spend dwarfs Apple's. When you have great products, the word of mouth marketing comes for free.
The idea that Apple is mostly marketing comes from people that don't understand why most people consider Apple the best available tech products. Either the one they buy, or the one they aspire to buying. Because they don't understand it they assume it must be mostly marketing rather than technology. But it's neither, it's design.
At what point do you imagine Apple will be unable to produce products? Duh!
Rolls Royce is gone. Bought by BMW more than a decade ago. The gas turbine manufacturer still exists, though. Lamborghini is gone, it is owned by VW now. Rolex has a cheaper brand (Tudor). What was your point again? X
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
If you promise to not be too pedantic... I'd like to ask...
Do you mean a computer or a iPad/iPod type of computer? So, a bit more specific would be good. (Yes, I know they're both computers.)
The iPad/iPod are a bit locked down, walled garden, devices while I see a computer as being more open. With both the iPad/iPod it really is (and this ties in with your "what for" part) are devices also made popular by what developers are able to do on it. There's a limit to what can be done, reasonably, and I'm thinking the least limit idea would be good.
My thinking is, perhaps wrong, that a more open device would be better in the long-run. A bunch of neat hardware, put together well, and someone will find a creative way to use it for you. Apple doesn't have to provide all the benefits - developers can. They can do so on a more closed system but I'd expect something that is more open to have greater potential.
Hmm... I'm not articulating that as well as I'd like. Ah well. Hopefully you can figure out what I'm thinking/asking. Also, it's not what will Apple do that I'm interested in. I'm interested in what *you* would do.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Agreed. In a nutshell, OS upgrades should not invoke learning curves.
Just a point of order, as I've been with HERE since before Nokia, when we were called NavTec. Apple maps has nothing to do with us. They built it in house after their deal with Google ended. That was a disaster, as you may remember. Apple then poached some of our employees to fix their app, but they have never used our technology and I don't think (although I am not sure) they use our data either. It was Microsoft that bought our tech.
Previously, everyone else had to either hand-draw everything or use Letraset catalogs and buy individual fonts at a particular size on transfer sheets
And of course there was a fairly long period of time where people would send the copy out to be typeset and printed, then they'd get the lino back and physically cut it up with an xacto knife or whatever and then hot wax it down to the board... holy shit that was annoying
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Umm... care to inform us what Apple has done marketing-wise but to claim they reinvented the wheel every time they came out with a new device?
They also like to claim that vendor-lock in is different thinking, or that buying a computer that you can't even open without a special screwdriver and which Steve Jobs didn't want to even let you have an expansion port on is like smashing a fascist state.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I think I merged your two scenarios -- big and small companies -- together when I responded. And you never used "fun" but I did. Even though I hate the word "fun" as it is usually so poorly defined: "My idea of fun is to scare the snot out of you when you come around the corner!" So, mod props to you.
I come here for the love
Other big money areas are battery technology. Imagine if Apple could put out a smartphone with a patented battery technology that lasted 1 month between chargers, that would be a game changer and everyone would flock to it.
Right, but Apple doesn't spend money on fundamental science. They would have to buy such a patent just like anyone else would, and there's basically endless money in licensing such a patent to everyone and not just Apple, so nobody in their right mind would sell it to them to begin with.
Material science, vehicle engineering, and embedded medical devices will also be other larger growth areas.
Right, but again, Apple doesn't do material science research, they don't do vehicle engineering, they don't do medical research beyond the most trivial product testing. They're not doing biotech. The only place they seem to be doing significant research that is clearly a growth area is in automobiles, where they are dramatically behind Tesla... which is why we are discussing this article.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Apple has ~76,000 employees -- there will be "good" departments and "bad" departments, but to paint the entire company with the brush used by the Guardian article is just incorrect.
I work for Apple (that's why I'm posting as AC) but I do not speak for them. The article is wrong on just about all points. The only thing they're right about is secrecy -- it is a secretive environment and I don't see why that's bad. The #1 source for leaks and IP theft is internal employees (in ANY company) and Apple does a great job of keeping a lid on theft.
"Negative, so strict, so harsh"? No way. I am surrounded by smart, competent, supportive co-workers, have great work-life balance, and have never been yelled at or demeaned. I work 40h a week, more if I WANT TO (and I usually do because I love my work).
The food is not free...which is good else I'd be snacking all day and gaining weight. Even if I spent $15 a day on food in the (excellent) Apple cafeteria (a high estimate) that amounts to $3900 a year (5x days/week, 52x weeks/year). It's really not that impressive a benefit relative to total compensation (salary, RSU's, healthcare, 401k match, employee stock purchase plan, etc.)
I've worked at a typical Silicon Valley company with the ping-pong table, free snacks, unlimited vacations, etc. and I do not want to go back. Apple is where the adults work.
The absolutely most incorrect quote in the article is "Apple’s not an engineering culture". I can't overstate how wrong that is.
I kept mentioning PC and Mac. A full-on Intel PC. Worn on the body. The parts that normally go in the case around a belt. A full i7 processor, and all that. An iPad isn't a Mac. If it weren't that, then you have an iPhone in a pocket with a bluetooth headset monitor, and bluetooth keyboard. We can do that today. Maybe that would be second step. The iPod to the PC. But someone should be able to play Crysis 7 in 3D VR with a wearable PC, or whatever the benchmark PC game is.
Apple never wins from "open device". Sure, some customers prefer it. But Apple has proven most prefer usability over "open". The walled garden isn't for everyone, but it does work.
Like last time. Apple came first. Apple set the bench mark. Then came an open competitor. The open competitor sells lots, but doesn't make as much profit. The idea of a small, usable smartphone that's all screen wasn't first with Apple, but Apple made it popular, and opened it up for others to follow. If we didn't have Apple, we wouldn't have Android. Windows phones were everything the iPhone was, long before the iPhone, just done poorly. The Windows Pocket PC phone pre-dates the iPhone by about 7 years. And it wasn't until after iPhone when we got the first Android versions.
As for what I'd do, rather than Apple, I really want AR. Better than self-driving cars is a HUD built for driving. Put it in a AR headset and you can fix most traffic problems. Optimal speeds for coasting to the stopping cars. Visible traffic patterns analyzed to minimize braking and increase economy and decrease travel time. Warnings for the bad drivers. Highlight errors in driving to improve driving with real-time feedback. Adaptive driving AR designed in the bad driver to increase safety, and in the good driver to improve efficiency.
Now, that could be met with a PC in every car, or wearable computers.
That's another idea. Forget the idea of the PC. Move to the SC. Shared computers. You walk into the McDonalds, and you don't join your computer (or handheld) to their WiFi, but you walk into the McDonalds with your Open Computer headset and keyboard, and McDonalds spins up a personal VM (PVM)locked down to web browsing. And you connect your KVM to PCs, rather than connecting your PC to networks. Walk into work, and your worn KVM connects to the "desktop computer" at work. You do work. Done there, go home. Hop in your car or the bus, and get a PVM on there. Do what you want, and leave when done. You'll have some local storage, and some cloud storage to choose from for things that persist beyond the PVM session.
There, that's the seed for what I'd do. At your work computer, you wouldn't use a PVM, but an AVM (application virtual machine). Want to run Word? It spins up in its own AVM. The VMM (vitrual machine manager) would manage the VMs much the way we manage windows of apps now. Work, being work, wouldn't limit you to a single browsing PVM, like McDonalds would. Compute is cheap. VM management is easy. We just don't have anyone bringing it all together.
Learn to love Alaska
But none of those "premium" brands commanded 50% of the market.
At some point the $100 cell phone will be good enough, and then Apple is in big trouble. The only thing saving them so far is that for some reason the hardware prices aren't dropping the way they normally do, because even quality Android phones have remained expensive. But at some point a Chinese company will solve the price problem.
iTelevision is called Apple TV. It may not be what you want, but it's already out there. Buy your TV as a monitor, and plug in Apple TV. Make any television a display for Apple TV.
Apple doesn't care if you prefer Plasma for its better colors and blacks, or LCD for the higher resolution per cost. So no need to stock billions of options of TVs in Apple stores. Go to the other stores and get your TV, then come to Apple to get the device that makes it work better.
Learn to love Alaska
It it doomed in the sense that it is the next HP. Basically a ghost of its former self.
Rolls Royce is gone. Bought by BMW more than a decade ago. The gas turbine manufacturer still exists, though. Lamborghini is gone, it is owned by VW now. Rolex has a cheaper brand (Tudor). What was your point again? X
That you are not terribly quick on the uptake. Whoosh for maximum levels of whoosh. Who owns any of these companies has nothing to do with my point.
My point is that there are people in this world who will pay for quality. There are also people who want rock bottom cheap and will stop at nothing to get the cheapest poorest quality they can get.
I learned a long time ago that cheaping out only ensures cheap. You don't have to pay top dollar for everything, but if your metric is that apple isn't competitive because they are overpriced, then go out and buy a Digiland Tablet. Now to your smashinig ripost and utter destruction of my entire premise, which is somehow declaring these outfits don't exist any more, or that all Rolex watches are cheap bacause of producing a less expensive model....
Here is Rolex http://www.rolex.com/ Go tell them that all their watches are the equivalent of Swatches because they have a less expensive model.
Here is Rolls Royce. https://www.rolls-roycemotorca...
Since they are "Gone" as you put it, you might do the company and the dealerships a favor in telling them they are selling air or something Get on that, and tell me how that works out for ya. Gotta put these idiots straight.
Go tell them they don't exist any more
Here is Lamborghini http://www.lamborghini.com/en/...
More air being sold, eh?
Go tell them they don't exist any more.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Is google big enough for you? Android is more used than ios.
Won't this exact thing happen to Tesla once they plateau? Things move much slower in the auto sector, but Tesla hits 50% market share in a few years/decades, then they'll be facing the exact same problem. They'll be part of the old established club and fancy new startups will be taking all their talents.
This is just how it works. More at 11:00.
My insight is mostly financial but I've given it here before. While there is no doubt that Apple is a great, very profitable company, people often exaggerate something they heard somwhere and the facts don't support it (mostly things like Apple's profts are larger than the GDP of Australia or whatever). Whatever, I think Apple is awesome. In my house we have at least 15 iDevices/Macs and maybe 6 PCs and other assorted things like GoogleTV and Amazon FireTV.
Now, this is just my observations as a geek dad. I have 5 kids, including 3 pre-teenish girls that have like a bazillion friends. They hang out at our house all the time (we're sort of the neighborhood hub I guess) since my wife stays home and takes good care of all the kids. We have a lot of fun things to do and really good wireless, technology, and toys.
Anyway, what I've notcied is that for the girls Apple products are a status symbols. They bling their iPhones, iPods, watches, all that stuff.
The boys, however, have very little interest in Apple. They like things they can take apart (perhaps metaphorically as well) and that aren't so "girly" or whatever. Moms and girls have iPhones. But the boys around here (and man of their dads) don't use iPhones. iPhones are regarded as girly. My son has an iPhone and he won't take it anywhere. It just sits until the battery drains and I recharge it. I have to stick it in his bag when he leaves so he has an emergency phone. He's embarrassed by it.
Remember, iPhones are almost 2/3's of Apple's revenue. That's a lot of eggs in one basket.
Now, before you go calling me sexist, an Apple hater, or whatever.... I spend a lot of time with all my kids, especially the girls, on STEM, hacking EV3s, showing them what's possible with technology and just having fun with it. I am a coach at a robotics league and I do some extra things to encourage girls to join, explore, and stick with it. Same thing at work. I realize that there are some barriers for them and I'm trying to help them (as best I know how) to not let them get in their way. Also, I'm one of the dads that owns an iPhone because I like them and it helps keep the girls happy.
I also wonder about the Facebook effect (is that even a term?). I don't know a single kid under 18 that's on FB, they're mostly on Instagram. They don't want to be on FB so their parents can't see what they're doing. I have iCloud Family Sharing set up and the kids give me grief about that. But it's more than that, it's natural for kids to want to do their own thing. If mom and grandma are using iPhones I *guarantee* you kids won't be for long.
You might thing I live in some back-country, hill billy, place and perhaps there is a bit of that, but I live in the Midwest near Chicago in a somewhat progressive area.
Chance favors the prepared mind.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
I read the report and it gave examples of places that are beating out Apple for talent - Google and Facebook. I can understand Google being competitive but Facebook? I remember reading many times how Facebook was not a place to work if you wanted a challenging and interesting work experience... Sorry, but I don't believe Facebook has better tech challenges than Apple.
My guess would be that until we see something from this, it is just random speculation from a business site. Given that this article is literally from a month ago and is all hearsay, well let's just put a hold on making and kind of conclusions until there some actual information, shall we?
For all your wanking about the greatness of wide gamut displays you seem totally unaware Apple is already there with the retina iMacs, and no doubt the phones will soon follow.
The whole premise is absurd really; industry-leading ARM chips, fingerprint sensors, high-accuracy pressure-sensitive touch panels, etc are in-house designed and take great advantage of the software-hardware integration have all been integrated into Apple products in the last few years. Plus a new open-source programming language that is hugely popular. Yes, it's frustrating there are things we don't know about until they see the light of day (there are always rumors, or things inferred from patents like in this case).
You seem to think Jobs released a revolutionary new product line every year or something. iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad... An average of 4-5 years between each of these things, with straightforward incremental improvement for each product after release. He wasn't a wizard, FFS.
They succeeded in growing their server and database market where they don't have a monopoly and pushed their way into the console market where they don't have a monopoly either. Google have had a similar number of failures but no one ever seems to jump on them. They didn't fail, they just became boring like the previous monopoly, IBM.
Actually, Apple is already seeing it. Their forecast for iPhone sales is way below last year. Probably partly because people are looking for cheaper phones, and early because they are keeping their old ones longer.
Of course a lot of this has to do with the fact you can't sustain the growth of a high end product like the iPhone once you have already reached all of those who can afford it; the new customers are going to have to start coming from countries and income classes that just can't afford a $600 phone.
I have another theory about this decrease in sales, though - now that all of the carries in US are switching from subsidized contracts to bring-your-own phone and/or a leasing model, people are finally starting to realize just how much they have been paying for their phone hardware over the years, and it's made them a lot more price-conscious about their phone purchases.
That would hurt Apple as much as Google, and maybe more.
Google pays Apple more than $1B a year to make it the default, as well as a share of ads served on iOS, estimated at being up to another billion. Looking it up, Google made about $9B on iOS ads, but only about $4-5B was from mobile Safari (the rest is from in-app ads, etc).
Even if the default was not Google, many users would just change it back to Google (I know I would - Yahoo and Bing suck ass), so say Google would lose $2-3B in revenue but then save $2B in payments to Apple. So it's a good deal for Google, but not a great deal. And, it's a also a good deal for Apple, because unless can find another ad provider who will pay more and generate more ad revenue, Apple would lose some amount that $2B a year they get from Google.
So, they are both making a reasonable return on the deal, and would both lose out if they cancelled it. Which makes sense, they are both very well run companies who don't throw around money without understanding their return on investment.
If they had to actually pay tax
Yeah, seriously, it really doesn't matter what they put in the iPhone.
As long as they follow their current annual strategy of "even year, increment number, slightly redesign case, odd year, add an S, hype a bit more RAM and CPU in a live announcement in San Francisco" they are pretty much guaranteed to bring in $200B a year for the foreseeable future...
Most children first exposure of computing is thru Android. Maybe this is not noticeable in the USA but there's like 7 billion people in the world and you can buy an Android phone for a few dollars.
Wow, you really just don't get Apple's business, do you? They don't care about consumers looking for a low end phone, their business is focused on huge profit margins selling at the high end of the market. A big part of Apple's continued growth is due to the fact that the iPhone's high price and reputation makes it a status symbol in Asia. Tarnishing that with ultra low-end products won't help them. They'd rather sell one iPhone at $200 profit than 10 Android phones at $10 profit.
(actually, this article claims LG's profit margin has dropped to $0.01 per Android phone. And HTC has lost so much money selling them they are on the verge of bankruptcy).
Market share doesn't really matter in this case, it's the portion of the market they control that matters. And even if that weren't the case, as long as the total market is increasing all companies can grow regardless of market share changes.
should not invoke learning curves.
That's the worst. As the techie in the family (including the families of friends and distant relations), even though my job has nothing to do with computers other than I use them at work, I'm constantly bombarded with questions like why won't my internet work. Fine, I'll help, should take 20 seconds and save someone from a lot of misery. Wait, where did all of the settings pages go? Google for ten minutes, wrong version, google another ten minutes...an hour later the internet is working again. W.T.F. The only thing these people use a computer for are solitaire and chrome.
Google pulls the same crap. Yes, I can figure it out. Yes, I have much better things to do than learning a new interface for zero productivity gain. People have been using the same interface to drive a car for the last 100 years. If car companies operated like software companies, besides being all dead now we would have gone through joysticks, paddle wheels, slider buttons, push buttons, hand gestures, foot pedals, voice control and mice just to make a right turn. And the left turn would have yet another interface. And they would alternate between them on different models.
engage in monoculture investing?
That's what Warren Buffet says to do....
Do not put your eggs in many baskets. Put all your eggs in one basket – and proceed to watch that basket.
Even if you ignore the fact that any chip designers would find Apple the only interesting place to work at currently, Apple is also the one advancing web browsers (WebKit), compiler toolchains (LLVM) and even one of the few companies doing really unique work in computer language design (Swift) along with all of the integrated tooling (Xcode) to make it happen...
There is not a single large computer company I would consider working for outside of Apple.
The people who don't want to work there as per the article are a bunch of whiny losers afraid of hard work.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
He not only saved the company from itself, he also wasnt invested in being an outright spook with the company.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
When products that it's competitors sell are so inexpensive or even free nobody would think of paying for them.
bought the stock
I have a good friend who did just that - and at the time we all thought he was throwing his money away; it seemed really stupid. Unfortunately (for him) he sold it all as soon as it went up a little bit.
Right over your idiotic head.
Michael Dell now owns Dell, and we'll see in five years whether he can bring Dell back the way Jobs brought back Apple.
Having to explain to your parents why you are gay.
Lamborghini - too bad they didn't copy the Yugo or Ford Pinto. Now they are on the dustheap of history
Rolls Royce - A sad story. Gone out of business because they just didn't realize that the only metric in cars is cheap.
Ironically these two companies are the exact opposite of the point you're trying to make.
Both Lambo and Rolls have been bounced around between owners for decades, bought up by starry eyed companies, sold when they realised they weren't making much money from halo cars. In the 90's Lambo changed hands 3 times and wasn't really profitable until Audi/Vokswagen got a hold of them and mass produced the Gallardo (the single model has accounted for half of Lamborghini's sales through out it's entire history). Lambo is doing well by producing lackluster cars these days (the Hurracan is not as exciting as a Gallardo was, I have driven both, its not hard to find a place where they let you track supercars for about US$4-00 a pop).
Rolls is the same, Vickers sold it to Volkswagen who sold it to BMW who have diluted the brand. The story is similar with most supercar brands, I pretty much consider it the death knell when a supercar brand introduces an SUV to cater to the mass market.
If you want to see real incest, look up a chart of who owns who in the automotive world.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
engage in monoculture investing?
That's what Warren Buffet says to do....
Do not put your eggs in many baskets. Put all your eggs in one basket – and proceed to watch that basket.
The thing with Buffet is that he probably owns the basket; that makes it a lot easier to monitor (and make corrections).
It wouldn't be the first time Apple snatched defeat from the jaws of success.
And this time Steve Jobs will not be returning to bail them out.
Cook Mandate: Hire ... The Queer.
Could be that Apple has the largest LGBTQ work force on planet Earth.
Trouble is that putting a perversion or sexual preference as a hiring mandate, and paying a graduated scale for L, G, B, T and Q (Queers get the biggest pay check) who do not have any education, skills, training like knowing what BASIC, let alone C++ is, could be Cook's death wish. We wish Cook, bon voyage.
Ha ha
PS All this "Virtual Reality at Apple" started when a "confidont" gave Cook a bootleg VHS tape of the movie "Brainstorm". Now Cook has ordered a significant number of Apple employees who really do know C++, to build him his Gay Sex machine, like the virtual sex episode in the Movie that rendered an employee "stunned" for several months, in the movie story line.
Big Bang Theory
But that isn't a new product. They can only milk the iPhone cow for so long, and that time is coming to an end.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Google is destined to dethrone Apple financially. Have you ever heard of the bell curve analogy? What goes up, comes down. Period. Read up--you may learn something.
--M
>As I sit here (and I'm told I have a good imagination) I am unable to think of a single realistic scenario where Apple doesn't exist for the next 200 years.
The people assessing your imagination are not very skilled. :)
How about a private equity firm doing an LBO of Apple, re-organizing the company to "unlock" efficiencies, paying itself special dividends and fees for its management expertise, and then re-floating the shares in an IPO a few years down the line?
I'd be surprised if Apple could survive even 10 years of that kind of financial engineering.
Dairy farmers still exist, and milk isn't a particularly new product.
If people upgrade their phone every 2-3 years (and that has been the trend), there isn't a need for a "new product". Of course, Apple wants to grow and diversify so they will come up with new products, but that's not strictly necessary for a business to succeed.
Google are an advertising company. They're not particularly innovative.
I question Facebook, too. I can't imagine anybody in their right minds wanting to work in Menlo Park. IMO, the peninsula is the worst part of the Bay Area in which to work. From anywhere that mere mortals can afford to live, figure half an hour of driving at two miles per hour up 101, and an hour driving back in the evenings. That entire time is basically spent just going through Palo Alto.
And if you don't eat at FB's cafeteria (I assume they have one—I've never worked there, just near there), good luck finding any food at all. There are two tiny shopping plazas that have a couple of restaurants, none of which are walking distance from anywhere. The parking lots are full from about 11 to after 1, so you either drive around for ten minutes waiting for parking or drive a couple of exits up the 101.
Compare this with, for example, Apple, where there are probably a dozen restaurants within an easy walk of the main campus, and where you're right at the confluence of two major highways, one of which is usually passable at any given moment, and right next to De Anza, which is a viable city street alternate for 85 if you're heading south towards Los Gatos, Saratoga, or Santa Cruz or north towards Sunnyvale. (Unfortunately, Stevens Creek isn't a viable city street alternate, in my experience, thanks to very poorly timed traffic lights. Otherwise, Apple's location would be utterly amazing.)
But Google stealing people from Apple? Sure. It happens all the time. And startups steal people away from both of them. Honestly, Apple is a victim of its own success in many ways. Nobody goes to Apple thinking that they'll get stocks and options that will skyrocket in value these days, because the stocks aren't going that direction at any appreciable rate. And lots of the old talent made enough money off of AAPL to let them retire, so the company would have to be God's greatest gift to humanity if it wanted to retain most of those folks.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Damning the industry with faint praise?
A used relative high end Dell Latitude laptop is also a good deal. Much more a good deal that anything Apple. I paid $250 for my four year old i7 Latitude. It's even one of the models well supported if I want to make it into a Hackintosh.
Nobody cares about those companies. Sure, they still exist. But they sell exclusively to the 1%.
I would absolutely and completely love it if Apple became so successful that they only sold their products to the 1%.
And as for peer pressure, you haven't seen anything until you work for a PC centric group that tries to force you onto Windows only solutions.
We've all dealt with you Apple weirdos for years. A cranky old engineer that I had to work with back in the very early 90's comes to mind. He spent so much time ranting about his Macintosh and trying to get working engineering-grade software that would run on it, while the rest of us just did our work.
Go back to Appleinsiders.com where you can feel safe.
No, not really. They brought PDA technology to the masses in a way that Palm et al failed to do repeatedly. Unfortunately, now that Apple has done that, there's really no more room for significant innovation in that space. The products exist, and the market is mature; you can make small, incremental improvements, but otherwise, the only thing left to do is to drive the price down to the point where everyone can afford one, and that's not likely to increase profits by much.
Apple's biggest problem has nothing to do with coming up with the next iDevice, and everything to do with the flawed assumption that this "killer new device" should be an iDevice in the first place. Apple has gotten into a rut where every new product since the QuickTake (or, arguably, the iPod) has basically been a new variation on a computer. I mean, an iPad is basically a laptop without the keyboard. An iPhone is basically a smaller iPad. So when you look at it from a high enough altitude, Apple hasn't really come up with any new hardware products in two decades. Even the Apple TV is basically just a little general-purpose computer. Apple is basically a one-trick pony at this point, and they've had an amazing run at it, but like all companies that are too focused on a narrow area of technology, there's only so far that they can go down that path before the market becomes saturated. And eventually, a disruptive player will enter the market and start eroding its market share, and then the company will become another Microsoft, and that new disruptive player will become the next Apple.
There's only one way for Apple to avoid that fate, and that is to expand its focus by building something that isn't just a glorified computer in a different form factor. Apple could do this either by disrupting an existing, struggling market or by starting a new market for a new class of products. That second one is hard, but the first one is easy. And Apple's existing technology could be used synergistically to dramatically improve the products in those markets.
If Apple is willing to take on a niche market, the DSLR market has a lot of room for improvement. It won't ever be a huge market, but it is likely to remain a solid pro market for the foreseeable future, and would be easily disrupted by a company with the hardware engineering resources that Apple could bring to the table. And if they bought Canon (market cap 30.59B), they'd get a great collection of well-built lenses, good lens engineers, and a respected brand name that they could build upon. Now imagine a DSLR that integrates well with iOS, runs a better OS under the hood, and has a more capable CPU to allow for amazing features that just aren't possible right now.
Apple could also buy iRobot and add iBeacon support to Roomba's existing Wi-Fi triangulation to produce an absolutely jaw-droppingly accurate automated vacuum system. It could automatically avoid areas that you mark as sensitive, use visual sensors to avoid sucking up your Lightning cables, and so on. It could tell the difference between the cat and a piece of furniture, and slowly creep up on the cat until it gets the message and moves. And they could bring the price down to something that normal people can afford, by taking advantage of the Apple hardware teams' skill at reducing manufacturing costs and increasing yields.
Apple could buy Tesla, use their battery tech to improve Apple's laptops and cel
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
With just a little more focus and market research, Apple can probably become a company that sells exclusively to the 1%.
Ooops. What sort of market share is that???
$19 for the lightening. $8 for the micro usb.
People figure it out after awhile. We're all cheap at heart, though some like to pretend at affluence by spending more on their credit card.
You had to link to a fanboy site for your citation??
Your anecdote of "everyone you know", has exactly what statistically relevance?
Good thing we have data....
http://download.cnet.com/blog/download-blog/apple-maps-vs-google-maps/
If only there were a way to buy a lightning cable other than from Apple....
I just bought one for $5 from 5 Below.
I've been putting pretty much all of my money into AAPL since 2002. It's worked out quite well for me.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I do it because it irritates newbs.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Wow, you really just don't get Apple's business, do you? They don't care about consumers looking for a low end phone, their business is focused on huge profit margins selling at the high end of the market. A big part of Apple's continued growth is due to the fact that the iPhone's high price and reputation makes it a status symbol in Asia.
This only continues to work as long as they maintain their reputation. Most people I know switch back and forth between iphone and android phones regularly. I have several android devices and several apple devices. My current primary phone is an iphone 6. At the next upgrade cycle, I will likely go back to android as I like google voice search better than siri and google maps better than apple's maps. I also like the flexibility and customization that you can get with an android as well as having more choices of phones. Apple is making lots of money because they have no competition on the iphone side while there is lots of competition on the android side but as everyone upgrade every few years, it would only take a couple years of people starting to prefer android (like me and many of my friends) for their profit margins to start to erode. As long as they can maintain a quality product and noone on the android side starts to get good name recognition then they will be fine but if they start to slip and people start jumping ship (to what they already know on the android side), it wouldn't take long for them to disappear.
Nobody cares about those companies. Sure, they still exist. But they sell exclusively to the 1%.
I would absolutely and completely love it if Apple became so successful that they only sold their products to the 1%.
No one cars, which is whty they are still in business.
If I dumbed it down enough, would you agree that some people might pay a little for quality? Or is your bubble so strong - and it is in many - that you believe that low cost is the only metric? After all, I once saw a couple of Window's guys almost come to blows over a 5 cent difference in RAM price.
There is an old saying - If you want high quality hay, you must be prepared to pay a fair price. However, if you'll take the hay after it's been through the horse, you can save a lot of money.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Old data is just that...old data. Apple needs to become much more price competitive if it is going to succeed in today's marketplace.
You're not the first person to suggest that, and you certainly won't be the last. But you'll be just as wrong as everyone else who has said that for literally decades. Apple does not generally engage in the "race to the bottom" that so many weaker hands have succumbed to. HP, Dell, Compaq, Gateway, and even IBM took turns largely destroying each others PC business more than a decade ago. A whole new crop of phone makers, failing to take any lessons from history, have done the same thing recently. And yet, there's still no shortage of armchair quarterbacks insisting to their dying breath that Apple needs to lower their prices. Why? What is it about a race to the bottom that is so hard to understand? And why would any company willingly engage in that game when the outcome is -- at this point -- as clear as day?
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
Most people I know switch back and forth between iphone and android phones regularly.
And most people I know are religiously tied to one or the other (and the older they get, the less they want to change). ie. anecdotes are useless.
Apple is making lots of money because they have no competition on the iphone side while there is lots of competition on the android side but as everyone upgrade every few years, it would only take a couple years of people starting to prefer android (like me and many of my friends) for their profit margins to start to erode
And you don't think that's significant? Android's price advantage is due to the cutthroat competition that I mentioned in my previous post. What will happen when HTC, LG, Sony, etc give up on the market because it's not profitable? You will have Samsung on the high end and a couple Chinese companies on the low end. And who knows, once Samsung owns the non-iOS phone market, they could just dump Google and do their own thing. If that happens Android is much more at risk of irrelevancy than iOS devices...
Free things are crap. You can get GIMP for free, but every designer I know uses Photoshop.
My point is that there are people in this world who will pay for quality.
This statement may apply to the Apple of the past, but they haven't been providing above average quality for more than ten years. Apple (or more precisely, Steve Jobs) discovered that people are willing to pay even more for good marketing than for good products and they rebuilt the company around that idea.
On the other hand, Microsoft SQL Server is quite expensive, but PostgreSQL is free (and there are many similar examples, where the free product is vastly superior to many things that you can pay good money for). You picked a reasonably good example where this is not true, but in general, software is pretty much the one major exeption to the rule that paid is better than free.
Where's the multi-billion dollar Linux company? Ooops there is none.
You deny the existence of both IBM and Google?
That was probably when they sold their factories about fifteen years ago.
Hans Reiser might have some insights on killer devices.
A Macbook with a current friggen GPU. Especially for the prices that get charged.
*flips table*
And as for peer pressure, you haven't seen anything until you work for a PC centric group that tries to force you onto Windows only solutions.
Until you go to work at a place that is 'mac' and they force you to use that above all else. The amount of times I've heard people say macs are better at ... but no one can ever give a reason why.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
The idea that Apple is mostly marketing comes from people that don't understand why most people consider Apple the best available tech products. Either the one they buy, or the one they aspire to buying. Because they don't understand it they assume it must be mostly marketing rather than technology. But it's neither, it's design.
No, that's marketing. Without the marketing, people will see the nice looking device in shops, notice it's practically twice the price of equivalent models and move on. Sure enough they would still get sold but nothing like the numbers they do. You'll notice a lot of iphone users aren't exactly the premium customer.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
While I like Apple's products, it's certainly plausible that it doesn't exist at some point in the future. Before the iPhone, Nokia was the king of the hill - and today, they are in no way recognizable. While it's hard to imagine what an disruption will be, we know they will exist.
They can last, for a very long time, without a successful product. Even moderate success means they'll be able to stay afloat from now until 100 years from now. Hell, they can probably drop half their cash-on-hand assets and buy a country and *STILL* be afloat in 100 years, even if every new product is a complete flop with a negative profit.
They have BILLIONS in just cash reserves. If they tried to build a Scrooge McDuck tower, to dive and swim in the cash, they'd probably bankrupt the mint of several nations. They probably couldn't even store all of their cash, in physical form, without having built the tower.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
And as for peer pressure, you haven't seen anything until you work for a PC centric group that tries to force you onto Windows only solutions.
Until you go to work at a place that is 'mac' and they force you to use that above all else. The amount of times I've heard people say macs are better at ... but no one can ever give a reason why.
Since I've used and supported both Windows (or MS-DOS) and Macs since the late 80s, I'll tell you why.
Longevity - Since I've been buying, using, and supporting both systems, the replacement rate for Windows machines is roughly 1.5 times the replacement rate for Macs.
Construction - I've never cut myself working inside a Mac. Some WIndows machines are so progressed on the race to the bottom, they don't even remove the sharp edges from the stamping. That has improved somewhat, but still behind Apple's construction. Failure rate much lower on Apple machines -The worst plroblem I had with Apple's was with the dreaded electrolytic cap failure. I was lucky in that the replacement cycle on our Macs kept me out of most of that. I only had an Xserver power supply go down. Fortunately Cupertino had a new one for me when I arrived at work the next morning. That was it, aside from the occasional hard drive or RAM issue. The Dell servers we had had the same issues, based on some Chinese Electrolytic company was using a bad recipe for the electrolye in the caps.
Service - When I have had the opportunity to use it, I'll give an example. One evening I had an apple Wireless mouse go bad on my personal machine. I saw that the electrode contact on the mouse had jiggled loose, so I called Cupertino. After convincing them that it was indeed the problem - understandable because most the time its a battery issue, they told me to send it back. They mailed me out a box with a new mouse in it, which I got the next morning, with instructions and shipping lable to send the old one to them, so they could do a postmortem on it for QC. So I had a new mouse about as quickly as possible from California to the east coast. All on Apple's dime.
Off warrantee issues on Windows machines are usually cured by buying a new Windows machine. And the few times I've had to ship something out, it usually took a long time - and time is money, which is why I sometimes cure warranty issues with a new machine.
Operating system follies. At this point in Windows, I'll regularly see XP, Vista, 7, 8.1, and W10. OS X, is generally only a couple OS' to pay attention to, and they are very similar. At the point I retired from my day job, a few years back, my workplace like so many others, was still running XP, two versions behind Vista and was experimenting with W7 on a couple machines. Never had to do that with OS X.
Flexibility - I can run a lot more applications, because I can run Windows on my Mac. Parallels or Bootcamp. I use Bootcamp and W7 because I like the direct hardare access instead of squishing everything Windows through the processor.
Unix. Between OSX Unix and Linux, the Windows system is becoming the outlier.
Only my experience, so I'm not trying to argue from authority. Both machines work and do their jobs, but if I had to choose only one computer, it would be a Mac Pro, and run bootcamp and W7 or 10.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Seriously, this is like an original Apple story on slashdot. Hardly an authority on Apple; the owners regularly short the stock on their doom-and-gloom cycle of stories.
/presses windows key /types keyword of setting in looking for
That was easy
Go ahead, dump all of your 401K savings in Apple, I dare you.
Go ahead, short AAPL with all your savings. That should make you $20 if you are right.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
My wife did that for a while, before she got into software development. That worked much better as a career choice.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
On an assembly line, playfulness is inefficiency. The old grind-it-out jobs are going away, and the ones that are going to last either involve skilled mobile labor or creativity. Creative jobs need some level of playfulness.
Ever work hard on a project, find out it wasn't going to work anyway, and realize that if you hadn't been so focused on doing a good job on it that you would have realized what was wrong much earlier? Straight hard work is often inferior to working hard sometimes and spending some time goofing around to see what might be possible and desirable.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The problem was: everyone was sure they had to use every font in a one-page brochure. Boy, was that ugly!
Microsoft has a subscription model. You buy a new version of Windows every one or two years. Except they blew that one up by constantly changing the GUI layout rather than simply polishing the fonts and theme to take advantage of higher resolutions.
They have a subscription model, it's called Enterprise Licensing. Technically, the company I work for has bought the thousands upon thousands of Win10 licenses for all of our machines and rebuy them yearly, but we have the ability to downgrade to Win7 which we do and will continue to do for the foreseeable future.
Worst CEO in the United States: Quote from an article in Forbes Magazine about Steve Ballmer: "Without a doubt, Mr. Ballmer is the worst CEO of a large publicly traded American company today." Another quote: "The reach of his bad leadership has extended far beyond Microsoft when it comes to destroying shareholder value -- and jobs." (May 12, 2012)
Good try, but I'm still not clicking on the link, you Forbes shill. :-P
I don't see how that would negatively impact Google honestly.
Google wouldn't pay $1 billion (or more) each year if it didn't affect them.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Apple could pull the rug out from under Google anytime by making any other search engine the iOS default.
It has been leaked that Google pays $1bn for the privilege. What hasn't been quite liked is whether that was total up to some date, or per year, or whatever.
Overhyped leak - we already knew in 2013 it's per year: http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/...
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
But that isn't a new product. They can only milk the iPhone cow for so long, and that time is coming to an end.
So for when do you predict the end of the smartphone?
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
I don't know what's sadder, the tale of the guy who couldn't get his Mac software to work, or your attempt to make us believe it.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
With just a little more focus and market research, Apple can probably become a company that sells exclusively to the 1%.
Yeah, they probably could - if they took advice from you, or the other experts telling them for years that they are failing.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
They've got enough cash to make that last for generations of people. They literally have more money than some nations have for a GDP. Hell, I seem to recall someone's list as having quite a few nations on that list. It is BILLIONS of dollars.
Not that they can't get screwed up - it's just going to take a very long time to do so.
How to put it in Slashdot terms? Oh... It'd be like killing a Terrasque (spelling?). You gotta whack on that forever and then you still need to wish it dead.
That's Apple's financial position, right now. Not to mention, which private equity firm can buy them? Apple still has controlling interests in their company. They still own the majority of shares. Even if they did buy those shares AND find some way to do a hostile takeover - at least of the board - they'd still not be able to pound Apple into the ground for generations and generations. They've got that much money just in the assets on-hand.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
The smartphone doesn't have to end. There just need to be enough products with better customer experience at a much lower price.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
"Forbes shill"?
BusinessWeek called Ballmer "Monkey Boy". (See the link.) In comparison, Forbes saying Ballmer was the "worst" is somewhat mild.
Design isn't simply "nice looking devices". Design is how it works.
And I repeat the FACT is that Samsung's marketing spend dwarfs Apple's. As in several times.
"But playful workdays implies lowering expectations and less time working, which is the antithesis of productivity."
This is the number one thing bad managers fail to understand. Time spent working != productivity. It's quite possible to become more productive if you spend less time working and are more refreshed, happier, and more focused.
There is a balance, but the idea that more time at work inherently means more productivity is complete nonsense, there's a point where your returns not only diminish, but go into reverse. Someone working 7 hours a day who loves their job with a passion will typically still get more done than someone who works 10 hours a day and fucking hates it.
If you're in management, please step out, or learn a few things about how to make sure staff are effective and productive, because based on your comment you're part of the productivity problem.
The smartphone doesn't have to end. There just need to be enough products with better customer experience at a much lower price.
Bwahaha. So when do you predict that will happen? I mean apart from claiming just that has already happened for years?
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
This advice is worth what you paid for it, but you are exposing yourself to massive risk by doing this. Individual stocks are REALLY volatile in value. This volatility can work for you if the stock goes UP, but can destroy you when it goes DOWN. May I suggest since you've made a mint (I assume) by riding it UP, don't be so greedy now and take some profits by selling some Apple and putting it into less volatile stock or stock index fund. If it's bad news for Apple one day, your profits could go *poof* and be gone for a decade or maybe more. Don't be blind to this risk. I give you Sun Microsystems as a warning example.
Been doing that since 2004, on a mac. When did that come to Windows? 2010?
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I give you Sun Microsystems as a warning example.
If Apple's board appoints Jonathon Schwartz as the CEO, then I'll follow your advice and bail. Until and unless that happens, I'm quite happy staying long on AAPL, thanks.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
mdsolar, is that you? Your post is pretty clearly irrationally biased to be about things you like.
Nothing tesla is doing is world changing. They haven't invented anything new really, just compiled stuff others have done.
NASA made SpaceX what it is, not Elon Musk. Musk has used fame and notoriety to get SpaceX to where it is today and thats GREAT! But they haven't really invented anything special about rockets. They're just reusing information that NASA (and other space agencies) have learned over the last 70 or so years.
Same with Tesla, though I don't know enough about SolarCity to comment I can safely presume its the same. All they are doing is putting fame on existing technologies and combining things in a meaningful way to make something that was done before them better/more appealing ... hey ... wait a minute ... THATS EXACTLY WHAT APPLE DOES.
Gets better.
BASF. We don't make the things you use. We make the things you use BETTER.
I.E. neither of these companies are doing anything special in and of themselves, but they are making people aware of them and being popular is what people remember.
I mean for fucks sake, you mention Edison and NOT Tesla ... you're guilty of remembering the popular guy with a massive company and fortune that claimed to invent everything (Edison) instead of the less popular guy who actually built the shit that (Tesla) you're crediting to the first guy.
You're proving that the exact opposite is true.
And for fucks sake, get a clue, the batteries every tesla uses when it rolls off the fucking assembly floor are more damaging to the environment then the entire production run of a 'gas guzzler' and everything it will do to the environment during its entire fucking life time. The CO2 isn't going to kill you, chemical poisoning will get you years before that, but go ahead and keep being ignorant and trendy.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Doubtless you could have gotten 2 micro USB cables from that vendor for that price.
Article begins with a coder who quits at Goole to do freelance work primarily on iOS apps - but it's Apple losing talent.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
The advice they are taking is 'Sell at a premium price to only upper-middle-class people who want to think they are members of the 1%.' Not from people like me. My advice would be: 'quit paying so many fucking lawyers to harass your competitors.'
A weird engineer who couldn't find engineering software to do real work on his Mac SE in 1989? We're taking the kind of person who goes out of his way to be offbeat.
There wasn't engineering software to get to work in that era. You had Ashlar Vellum and you could compose pages on Pagemaker. And Excel.
It was also $5 for a micro-USB cord.
But none of those "premium" brands commanded 50% of the market.
At some point the $100 cell phone will be good enough, and then Apple is in big trouble.
Why? If the $100 phone is good enough, it's buyers will stick with it and not buy any other phone until it falls apart. The iPhone buyers OTOH will keep buying a new iPhone every 2 years just like they did before.
IOW your scenario will spell doom for anyone but Apple.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
A weird engineer who couldn't find engineering software to do real work on his Mac SE in 1989? We're taking the kind of person who goes out of his way to be offbeat.
And I thought we were talking about Binge Shitter, a person known to make up stuff as he goes.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
See what I mean? Makes up shit as he goes.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.