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Tim Cook Defends Apple, Teases Exciting New Products In The Pipeline (bgr.com)
anderzole quotes a report from BGR: Apple's earnings report last week saw the company report a year over year decline in profits for the first time since 2003. The biggest contributing factor to the decline, not surprisingly, is that year over year iPhone sales dropped by 16%. Notably, Apple's most recent quarter represents the company's first iPhone sales decline in history. Consequently, the usual contingent of pundits and analysts have come out of the woodwork, all exclaiming that we've reached 'peak iPhone' and that Apple at this point has nowhere to go but down. In an effort to inject a bit of good news and all-around optimism to a particularly negative Apple news cycle, Tim Cook earlier today appeared on CNBC with Jim Cramer where the Apple CEO teased that Apple's still has a lot of innovation left to do and some interesting items in the product pipeline. "We've got great innovation in the pipeline," Cook said to Cramer. "New iPhones that will incentivize you and other people that have iPhones today to upgrade to new iPhones. We are going to give you things you can't live without that you just don't know you need today. That has always been the objective of Apple is to do things that really enrich people's lives. That you look back on and you wonder, how did I live without this."
Show me what you got!
So their great new innovation in the pipeline is.. a new iPhone.
Stick a fork in them.
We've got great innovation in the pipeline... New iPhones that will incentivize you and other people that have iPhones today to upgrade to new iPhones
Yeah, right...
Are they going to give us back the iPod Classic?
They need a new mac pro tower (the new one sucks and they are at risk of losing a big part of the creative market) and better laptops (stop going for thin)
Put up or shut up!
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Or will they resurrect the Jobs? (Captcha: skeletal)
Apple's hardware is underpowered. The OS software is so oversimplified that it's hard to use. There aren't many useful applications unless you're doing audio or video editing. Apple hasn't innovated in ten years. The Apple Watch was a mistake that tried to solve a problem that doesn't exist. Apple products are incredibly expensive but wouldn't even be worth the cost of a typical Android or Windows product. Even previously successful products like iTunes are now unmitigated disasters.
Can anyone explain to me why anyone would use Apple products? I suspect I'll be modded down to -1 so people can pretend my post doesn't exist and not answer the tough questions.
Do you remember when instead of telling us that the next trick will be impressive, They would just do the next trick and let us be amazed? If you need an applause sign, you've officially failed. Just sayin,
Within the arms of tragedy, there is little comfort in being right.
If they're going to do new iPhones, they need one that costs $99 or less. He spends time talking about the Chinese market, but they're not going to grow in that market anytime soon unless:
1) the phone is capable and cheap, as the market of Chinese people who can afford a $699 phone is saturated
2) the phone is made in China and likely co-marketed by a Chinese phone manufacturing company as the Chinese government wants to move their industry up the value chain
Those two things will be really hard for Apple to do. Outside of that:
Apple Watch - a big misstep
iPad Pro - it's a cheaper version of the Surface Pro with a mobile OS instead of a laptop OS. A misstep
For that reason, anything "enterprise" related they're just not that good; they've gotten better in recent years but Windows and Office are too universal in the enterprise setting.
MacBook Air - this is a pretty good product
iPad Air - eh, good product but the tablet market is starting to wind down or be saturated so the growth isn't there
After that, what have they got? Apple Car? They're not a car company; how the heck is this going to work? I'm not a Tesla fan but Tesla's way ahead of them on advanced modern cars, and GM, Ford, Toyota, and Honda are still churning out millions of cars; I don't see how Apple actually launches this successfully unless it's some Apple developed tech that is licensed to a real car manufacturer. Besies, Apple is in the business of high-margin hardware; in cars margins are slim on the hardware and all the money is made on financing to the consumer. This would be a very strange business for Apple to get in to.
Apple Home Automation? Maybe, but I doubt it. As much as Nest is making missteps these days by force-bricking their old products, they're still way ahead of Apple and have Google's backing and there are plenty of other guys out there in this space.
The only one i see is some form of consumer healthcare product to make the Apple Watch a health sensor platform integrated with other Apple products, but the drop in FitBit's sales and stock show that step counters won't cut it; it needs to be something a doctor can act on and that means getting loads of doctors and research behind the use of something as well as getting FDA approval. That's hard and expensive, but something Apple likely has the resources to tackle. To me that's the best shot at a big growth area and fits their customer base who are generally hipster quantified selfers who would love to brag and share how healthy they are via iMessenger.
I spit on your meager earnings. Apple, you are going down !
The difference between truth and fiction is that fiction has to be plausible.
They are going to come out with a VR headset. Barf. Bring back Jobs!
the word on the streets is that they integrated the iWatch functionality into the next iPhone. this way you can see what time it is without an iWatch!
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mVHFRNU3q_k
Is a more common question than "How could I live without this?"
Innovation is not making something slightly thinner or lighter or faster or missing a port or with a better screen.
We are going to give you things you can't live without that you just don't know you need today
I can't wait to buy your competitor's version for half the price!
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
is "innovation" the new codeword for copying Google's self-driving car? or perhaps does it mean churning out yet another iteration of the same product every 18 months?
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Aka more planned obsolescence useless garbage they will peddle as an absolute necessity and the latest fashion trend for hipsters. Almost all Apple products without fail are overpriced garbage nobody needs. For every such product there are alternatives that are better, cheaper, and do not lock you inside a deliberately hostile environment in which Apple decides what you can do with the device you purchased. Thanks but no thanks. I'm glad to see that Tim "Queer" Cook is running this whole scheme into the ground. They will fade into obscurity along with Microsoft soon and good riddance.
Basically Apple products are for people who make emotional, impulse-drive purchases. If you spend more than ten seconds thinking about your actual needs and make a simple analysis of costs and utility, you will never even look at Apple products. They're poor, severely overpriced (we're talking 200-300% more expensive than comparable products), and mostly useless.
the new iPhone is going to be 17% more iPhone!
iPhone!
Because you don't want to look like some sort of peasant, do you?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
"New iPhones that will incentivize you and other people that have iPhones today to upgrade to new iPhones. We are going to give you things you can't live without that you just don't know you need today. That has always been the objective of Apple is to do things that really enrich people's lives. That you look back on and you wonder, how did I live without this."
Or more accurately, they'll continue to build phones with built-in obsolescence, and increase the amount of Apple lock-in to ensure you can't leave their ecosystem without losing all your content.
1. Invent marketing-changing product (Apple II, Macintosh, iPhone)
2. Be unable to demonstrate wider relevance
3. Watch as competitors zoom by
4. Repeat
and better laptops (stop going for thin)
Specifically fundamental parts being serviceable! RAM, M.2 SSD, and the battery should be replaceable post warranty expiration; especially for the high cost of the laptop in the first place.
Life is not for the lazy.
Cook will never go back to the tower MacPro.
The new MacPro (arrgh!) is smaller and lighter to ship, that means more profit for Apple. I still have my old MacPro (2006), built like a tank and still does it's job. Even though its stuck on an old release of OS X
Cook is an operations guy (and a very good one) but not CEO material. He's been riding the Apple wave for many years now, now its going to start to unwind for him. Hopefully is only has a few more years before he gets the boot!
What do you see as missing in the MacbookPro?
They do need a way to keep their headless offerings much more current, despite the smaller volumes in that segment.
Or a newer, more expensive charging/synching cable
Innovation is not making something slightly thinner or lighter or faster or missing a port or with a better screen.
It is if you charge enough for it.
We are going to give you things you can't live without that you just don't know you need today.
Apple's new slogan: "We give you solutions in need of problems."
you know you can install a small bootloader that allows you to install newer versions of osx?!!
... without this colorful florolastomer watch band?
#DeleteChrome
Bingo. The canister Mac should be marketed as a desktop machine, and the Mac Pro tower brought back. The main reason is that the tower has a niche which few can fill. I've seen Mac Pros used for development and Q&A for a lot of Verilog/VHDL stuff, and this can't really be placed on a PCIe/Thunderbolt breakout board.
Plus, a flagship machine with just a SSD as its only internal storage? Apple at least needs to offer the facility to have a SSD, 2-3 internal HDDs, or even multiple M.2 slots. Higher end PC motherboards already have multiple M.2 slots. It would be nice if Apple could make an upgradable machine, even if it did cost as much as the old Mac II models.
Apple should consider changing their tack. There is a recession looming ahead, part due to the election (as the economy tends to tank around that time), and the fact that there is a global economic slump. Even though people say Apple is recession proof, people said the exact same thing about Sony in the early 2000s before the iPod. Apple might consider doing razor/blade marketing and selling upgradable computers. An upgrade like a hardware accelerator card for a desktop may not be as profitable as a new desktop computer, but it is better than nothing. Apple made it through 2008 because they had a product that people wanted, and opened up a new market. Unless they come with something genre-making, they are going to face a world of hurt come the upcoming recession.
Don't under-estimate the absolutely catastrophic repairability of iPhone.
Yes, "we've reached Peak iPhone", in the sense that most people are happy with their current phone and don't need to exchange it with one with more features. The market is saturated, nearly every customer who would like to buy an Apple smartphone has already done so...
BUT
The modern smartphones arent the old non-smart phones of before. Those back then were durable to the point of being nearly indestructible, and weren't that hard to repair either. The only reason someone would ever have to buy a new phone would be if the newer had features that the previous didn't, and those features are becoming absolutely needed (e.g.: emergence of smartphones, apps, online services, etc. - phones becoming slowly pocket computers).
Nearly all modern smartphones are very fragile - they'll break very easily - and are a pain to repair.
(e.g: In the name of making even thinner devices and shinier metallic surfaces, they'll bend easily and crack.
replacing screen is a real pain where you basically need to re-assemble all the innards over the new screen, and using a heat gun to melt glue is as frequent as unscrewing screws was before. Don't forget to bring a soldering iron if you have the boldness to try replacing the battery.)
The main reason someone will buy a new smartphone is because the previous one is broken/needs a new battery, and the whole procedure costs nearly as much as getting a new smartphone.
So yes, indeed, bringing a new iPhone is the best idea Apple could have to fight "peak iPhone".
Not because the iPhone 7 would be much better than the iPhone 6 to the point that people will need a new one.
But because all the iPhone 5 and 4 will fail any time soon, and it will be cheaper to buy a new one than trying to repair them.
The catastrophic repairability of iPhone is their best feature for Apple: mean that they'll keep selling new phones to replace the broken ones.
They won't sell them anymore at the same speed as back when they were entering new markets.
But there's going to be a steady need for Apple to keep producing phones to replace the regularly failing ones.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
.
More and more lately, Apple is beginning to sound like Microsoft did ten years ago, "wait for us, we're the leader."
Unfortunately for Apple, unlike future-seeing innovative prowess, luck is not reproducible at will.
Clearly, Apple is "beleaguered" and will soon file for bankruptcy.
[end sarcasm]
Innovation, to the nth degree! Man, it is going to rock the world.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
In some enterprise settings they need to be able to remove storage before sending a system in for warranty work. Dell, HP, others even let you destroy HDD's that fail.
Ethernet is needed in some settings and no one port changing / usb only does not really cut it.
OS downgrades are needed as well even if just temporary and I'm not talking about backing out updates.
MAC OS X SERVER that can run in a VM in ANY BASE HARDWARE. Is also needed can be done now but not legally or at least have a real rack mounted server with dual power hot swap, 3-4 HDD/ssd hot swap bays. 2-4 nics 1G or 10G at least 2 pci-e slots X16 At least at X8 speeds.
Apple has made mountains of cash selling iDevices for years now, and will continue to do so. They will also take a cut of all music, entertainment and apps people purchase on these devices. I'm not worried about them disappearing like they were about to in the mid 90s. What they may end up becoming is an IBM. IBM has guaranteed revenue streams from its mainframe business, which are basically safe until people don't need to bank, book airline tickets or consume vital government services. IBM has been able to survive every single attempt by their board of destroying the company. They've sold off most of their hardware production, moved most of the services jobs offshore, and they're still alive.
If Apple does come out with a self-driving car after all this, the pundits will be eating their words if they're able to hit that consumer sweet spot with it. Their products are shiny and nice, and work fine in the hands on non-technical users. I expect an Apple car to have the same level of "UX safety" while being super-complex under the hood. They're just facing a mature market for smartphones - even poor people have them and there's no reason to replace them every single contract cycle. Intel has the same problem and is scrambling to find the next big thing, even though it's clear people still need PCs and servers (but not to the same degree.)
I'd like to see Apple return to making at least a couple of laptops and workstations that are professional-focused and don't just look pretty. Having no way to expand memory or storage on a laptop just to make it thinner is a bad trade-off for anyone other than a throwaway gadget consumer. If they win back the professional users, they can still make the margins they want on hardware. Look at HP, Dell and Lenovo - they sell consumer crap PCs but they also sell workstations that cost five figures and sell well within their niche.
Apple's earnings report last week saw the company report a year over year decline in profits for the first time since 2003.
It's crazy the way people perceive things in the finance world. Read that first sentence again. Apple is not losing money, they are still making a profit. Just not as much as last year. In fact, they have had increasing profits for the last 13 years. There's only so much money in the world. No company can continue to increase profits year after year indefinitely. And when the company rakes in as much as Apple does, it's even harder to maintain that. They still have billions of dollars that they apparently have no idea what to do with.
Oh wait, what am I saying!. Run for the hills, this is obviously the death knell for Apple. In fact Silicon Valley is going to fall into the ocean now. The entire planet going to deorbit and fall into the sun. Apple is going under.
FWIW, I'm not an Apple fanboi either. I have a gen 5 iPod classic, my daughter has an iPhone (I don't), and my wife has an iPad.
I remember back when the first iPhone came out. I just had to have one and it was miles ahead of anything else out there. Then everyone caught up to them. Same thing with the first iPods and iPads. Not just in terms of build quality but ease of use and just really nicely packaged.
Now you have Macbooks that you can't add memory to. And phones and tablets that you cannot add storage to. The Android devices have caught up, and in many cases, surpassed the Apple offerings. Apple has always traditionally been a hardware company. But I think the days of selling devices at big premiums are numbered. For a lot of people, the phone or tablet they have now is good enough. The growth is in India and China and for those markets asking people to shell out $600 for a phone is a tough sell.
The question for Apple is what's next? The music streaming seems to be doing well. Maybe they should buy Netflix and really get a foothold in the streaming content business.
"Specifically fundamental parts being serviceable! RAM, M.2 SSD, and the battery should be replaceable post warranty expiration"
That is your answer. The price of ram and M.2 SSDs are dropping in price. My old Mackbook pro has 16 GB I put in and I replaced the HDD in my wife's.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
An Ethernet port, for starters. Until every location in the world has stable Wi-Fi, that's going to be a problem for some of us.
Yeah, yeah... I know that they make a dongle for that. It's a pain the ass to carry around extra dongles, though. Why can't someone come up with a "MicroEthernet" spec to resolve this issue for thin laptops?
What did they expect - "Tim Cook Trashes Apple, Says No New Products In The Pipeline" ?
I work in I.T. for a company that does marketing and corporate events.
We've long held a policy that we're "platform agnostic". If you start work with us, we give you your choice of a Mac or a Windows laptop as your machine. (We also had a policy of issuing people an iPad when they started, but that really came about because we had a division writing a few custom iOS apps for our clients. It made sense for our people to be familiar with what we were selling. Moving forward, I see the company issued iPad possibly going away, because we no longer do the custom app coding, and most people seem to own one already anyway.)
For 90% of the software our employees use, it really makes little difference which system they choose. So much is cloud-based or web-based these days, and you can run Microsoft Office or any of Adobe's products on either platform. The Mac users have a built-in advantage that they can edit PDF documents without the need of additional software. ("Preview" that comes with OS X as the default PDF viewer supports re-ordering pages in a PDF, deleting pages from one, and annotating or adding a digital signature.) In I.T., we've grown to like OmniGraffle Pro and standardized on it to do all of our network diagrams. (Although, if we decided to use Windows for that task, we could do the same thing in Visio Pro.)
As is so often pointed out, the Macs are far less vulnerable to malware/spyware - so that's a plus for us too. (Yes, I know... Someone who hates the Mac will pull out a list of the viruses and spyware designed for OS X. It does exist. But it's just not something we have to deal with much. On Windows, the battle is real. Out of all of the crypto-locker issues you've heard of in the news recently, how many of those happened to Mac users? As far as I know, zero.)
If you're arguing about the cost of a Mac vs. a Windows machine? I think for corporate use, you're really looking at it wrong from the get-go. Realistically, how purchasing happens in our company and every company I've worked for is like this: A certain budget is approved for I.T. to spend on equipment for users. The only "goal" is to get the employees the tech tools they need within that budget. The fact we could buy Dell laptop X for several hundred bucks less than Apple laptop Y is immaterial, as long as we have a way to juggle everything around so it all comes in under the budget total. When we look at things like the lack of a need for an anti-virus license for the Mac laptop and a lack of a need for a copy of Adobe Acrobat Pro to edit PDFs, the Mac is already looking like a wash vs. the cost of the Window alternative. Even if that weren't the case, though? I.T. would have to look at the big picture and decide which computers cost the company more in total hours of support needed as people used them. That's a *really* tough thing to nail down because so much goes into it that often is ignored. EG. How long does someone in I.T. have to spend on hold on the phone getting a warranty repair going for something that broke on a given computer? (That's one area where we do generally spend less time getting a broken Mac serviced than we do a broken Windows PC. Especially when we had HP, the hold times were awful!)
An ethernet port, user upgradable and repairable SSD "M.2" interface, user upgradable ram, and user replaceable battery.
The same for the iMac as far as the drivers and ram.
The MacPro needs SLOTS so you can upgrade the video cards. SATA-3 and M.2 ports so you can add mass storage.
Thunderbolt is nice but is it logical to have a small workstation like the Pro had have it tied to a external mass storage array with a cable like the old Commodore 64?
The MacPro was a good machine but it was too limited to be the best Mac you could get. Today it is lagging a generation in CPU power since Haswell on the socket 2011-3 is shipping and Broadwell is coming soon.
Add in the simple fact that in the obsession with think all the Apples desktops except the Pro are using lower powered laptop cpus.
As a user I would love to see.
1. A cheaper plastic Macbook with an HD display and maybe a Silverlake i3 for the education and low end market. M.2 drives and user upgradeable ram.
2. iMacs you can upgrade the ram and drives without have to use special tools.
3. A MacBook Pro with M.2 and user upgradeable ram and an ethernet port.
4. A real MacPro tower with Socket 2011-3, PCIe, Sata3, M.2 and ethernet.
5. My dream? A low cost desktop Mac that you can add a video card too. That is not going to happen in my lifetime.
Truth is that Apple is still making money hand over fist so they have no real need to make the changes I want as a user. To me the iPhone doesn't matter since I use android. Same for the iPad.
Now an iPod Classic with 256gb or 512gb would be cool.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
A version of iTunes that Just Works and Doesn't Suck!
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
...pation! Wow, a new iPhone! Maybe they will finally release a phone that's water-resistant! Now THAT is innovation!!!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Was when I upgraded my iPhone 4s to the iPhone 6s Plus as I really wanted the larger screen real estate.
Every other iPhone upgrade was because Apple released a version of IOS that basically nerfed the performance forcing me to upgrade.
So I guess that's what they mean.
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
"Now an iPod Classic with 256gb or 512gb would be cool."
True, but for everyone else using smartphones with micro SD slots, that is already trivial to have. That company was meant to bring out a 512GB micro SD card last year, but I don't know if they delivered. I have no doubt that 512GB micro SD cards will be easily available by the end of 2016.
I don't know how well a dedicated music player will sell these days. Personally I much prefer dedicated devices: music player, GPS navigator, portable HDD, telephone, etc, as I find the all-in-one smart phone concept often comes apart at the seams.
It's getting to the point that if the RAM is soldered in, the battery is also glued in as well. And while I don't know, I wouldn't be surprised if the SSD was soldered on the board too.
For many MacBooks, when you choose your upgrade selections, the webpage is doing nothing more than filtering the SKUs of which motherboard you want that based off the many permutations available. Fuck that! I wan't post-sales upgradeability.
Life is not for the lazy.
but those being user servicable won't allow Apple to continue paying their overpriced tech support and would limit Apples ability to coerce the masses to the next shiny!
Please, won't someone think of the tech support?
Define "need".
Because the Mac Pro, along with the Mac Mini, are the worst selling Macs in the entire lineup. And not because they're several years old - even the towers were poor sellers, and even when it was new and hot and fairly competitive it was still h0-hum sales.
It's one of the reasons they could afford to build it all in the US - it probably only sells in the US to any significant degree, and quantities are low enough that they can just hire some local CM to make a run of 10,000 to last the year.
The only reason they keep it alive is because of the professionals who demand they have something for them. And they probably only update it when they start demanding that their company is needing to replace them as it's part of the 3 year upgrade cycle.
The battery is replaceable post-warranty. Apple has a battery replacement program for all their laptops (and really, $200 is quite reasonable when replacement batteries generally cost $100-150 for most laptops - not NOS crap, but new) or do it yourself, which only requires the skill in finding an appropriate screwdriver. (If you can't figure out where to get such a screwdriver, you don't have the skills to replace the battery. It's not a tall barrier, but it's enough of one to keep Joe Average with a butter knife from wrecking his laptop).
But I am some sort of peasant.
captcha: recoil
Dance for us, pseudo-Jobs, show us your wares!
You can upgrade your MacPro1,1 to a 2,1 with a firmware update, and then with a sub $100 video card, you can run the latest OS with trivial effort. Clasic MacPro towers will run for years into the future.
The next version of iOS will be iOS X. That will merge both OSes. If I can get an iPad that runs OSX apps, and boot camp with Windows then they will fly off the shelves.
So a dongle is an inconvenience, but carrying your own "microethernet" cable isn't? Or do you honestly believe they will magically be available whenever needed?
Go back through the transcripts of EVERY Quarterly call and Keynote/Product/WWDC speech Tim Cook has given since he took over the helm from Steve Jobs...Cook has said, in pretty much the SAME TERMS, EXACTLY this same line. Every. Single. Time.
And what have we gotten?
* iPhones with bigger screens: Something the Android manufacturers had been doing for a few years before Apple, and something that would have been trivial for Apple's engineers to do. (In fact we knew, from various reports and Isaacson's Jobs book, that Apple had long been experimenting with MANY screen sizes, for years.) Chassis gets thinner, gains an unsightly camera bulge that Apple would have laughed at a year before if it showed up on a Samsung, battery life stays pretty much the same: inadequate.
* iPads with a smaller screen, and a bigger screen: see above
* an iPad Pencil: neat. (Had a pressure sensitive Wacom in 1994, so can't really get THAT excited. Everything old is new again, I suppose.)
* the Apple Watch: another response to another nascent Android-industry first; and product that a year after launch still does nothing appreciably better (and a lot worse) than the Android-ecosystem units.
* a Mac Pro: a "pro" computer that debuted to long manufacturing delays to replace a "pro" computer that Apple didn't bother to update for 3 years that hasn't been updated in over 18 months. Uh huh.
* Retina 27" iMacs: neat. Expensive.
* Retina 21" iMacs with 5400rpm 2.5" spinning drives, glued shut, and no expandable RAM: Uh huh.
* the one-port MacBook: charge your laptop or charge your battery-life-barely-decent iPhone. But not both. Charge your laptop or use an external monitor/projector. But not both. Or, buy this $80 dongle that weighs 1/4 the weight of the whole laptop. Uh huh. Oh, and EXPENSIVE. MUCH more $$$ than the ChromeBooks that K-12 is now buying...didn't the MacBook used to be an Ed Market target??
* a Mac Mini: same as the last, minus $100, with a 5400rpm 2.5" spinning drive, no expandable RAM. Slower than the year before's model. Uh huh. Now 18+ months old.
* no new Cinema Display. In fact, no new Display from Apple in several years. Despite improvements in Thunderbolt. (Oh, yeah, reminds me about that Mac Pro again.) What should I plug my MacBook Pro into again when I'm IN the office? Ahhh, a crap-ass HP or Dell monitor, gotcha.
* Bugs. Bugs. Bugs. Bugs. Bugs. At least 4 iterations of iOS and OS X that have each taken nearly 6 months to reach an acceptable level of "stability". Yet many people STILL can't seem to get Mail on OS X to display their messages correctly. Or notify them of new messages correctly. Or show messages in the correct folders. Or even show messages at all. Because email is "new", I guess. iOS updates that brick brand new iPhones' radios. iOS updates that disable hardware features. iOS updates that disable Wi-Fi. Bugs. A lot of bugs.
* Swift: cool. World can't have enough languages.
* Apple Music: I think I've seen this service before.
* iCloud: I think I've seen this service before. (Oh, and before you ask...NO, you can't merge your old iTunes account with your new iCloud account yet.)
* Apple Pay: don't know a single user who actually, uh, uses it.
* new versions of iTunes. Yeah. I'm just going to slowly walk away now...
I'm sure I'm missing something. But I really DO await all this magic sparkle fairy unicorn dust that Tim Cook is expecting Apple to fart out later this year. And next year's magic sparkle fairy unicorn dust fart will even be better! No doubt. Because he SAYS so.
Meanwhile, I spent 2 hours of my life today troubleshooting various Apple bugs for clients that Apple blames on every thing but Apple. Known issues. Apple software. Clearly...CLEARLY...not "a bug". "You're holding it wrong." Riiiiiight. I've been an Apple user since 1983. I sold Apple gear from 1989 until 1996. I worked for Apple in the early '90s. I've been working on Apple gear since. I have a hint for you all: that magic sparkle fairy unicorn dust they're farting out? Sometimes, at best, it is just hot air. You should HOPE it is just hot air. The downside is much worse.
(Look up the word 'hubris' in the dictionary.)
Scott
"Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid."
You can update a Mac Pro 1,1 to El Capitan if you're interested. There's fix for it: http://forums.macrumors.com/threads/2006-2007-mac-pro-1-1-2-1-and-os-x-el-capitan.1890435/. I've done with this with mine and it works great.
"New iPhones that will incentivize you and other people that have iPhones today to upgrade to new iPhones. We are going to give you things you can't live without that you just don't know you need today."
We are going to develop more "features" you do not want to further lock you into an iPhone and to force you to continue to use iPhones into the future, because profits, and you're our bitches. - love Cookie Monster
Yup. I've been saying this for a while. Apple can double their work-force and have every product be a complete flop where they only sell items to just their devoted fans (the ones who would buy shit and claim they loved it) and they will STILL have a huge nest egg of cash in the year 2216. They can have each employee do nothing but burn a $10 (American) bill on the hour, ever hour, and do nothing else and STILL have a huge nest egg in the year 2116.
I bet Microsoft is kicking themselves for not holding onto all that stock they had from when they bailed Apple out. Holy shit, that'd be worth a ton of money. Hell, it'd probably be worth more than a ton of gold.
Apple has more money than many, many countries have for a GDP - never mind how many more countries that would be counted if we used operating budget instead. I am not even sure what it would take for Apple to go bankrupt at this point. They probably ought to consider doing some of that whole "paying dividends" thing. I didn't realize a company could have that much cash on hand and not be required to give some back to the investors. No, really, I did not know that.
Full disclosure: I do own some shares but I have no idea how many. It's probably not a lot and any dividends they paid would either go right back into the market or would end up the property of Uncle Sam.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Sitting next to the ugly android phone. Now that they have uglified the UI, it looks like crap too.
Maybe their next innovation will be bringing the glass look back and creating icons that don't look like they are running on an 8 bit device.
Part of this is that Apple is afraid of cannibalizing the iMac.
They don't have an offering (in what would be for Apple) the mid-range which is where most people are looking. The Mac Pro is simply way over speced for what most people need (or can justify) and its custom hardware means upgrading the graphics system is impossible, but by the same token the iMac (thanks to the "thinness obsession" of Ives) has been compromised and can't offer the 3D performance that a lot of people need from a desktop.
Part of the problem is that the current Apple executives, and Jobs in the past, all went chasing after the easy money that the iPhone and iPad created. While there certainly isn't anything wrong with that, and the app store will help in the long term to keep customers, eventually those products will become commodity items and won't generate the profits they currently do. At that point the lower margin Mac business will help prop up the balance sheet, but only if it hasn't been crippled by the current indifference driving the customers away who are willing to spend large sums of money on hardware and software.
A damn Kensington slot or a viable alternative for locking it down.
Like my tower just fine
Apple customers are fools for continuing to allow Tim Cooksucker to get away with his bullsh!t crippling NFC on the iPhone because it is harming America's economy.
The Cooksucker continues to refuse to stop crippling NFC on the iPhone.
The EMV chip card and new payment terminals deployed throughout all of America run on NFC. That means new startups, new jobs and new software development opportunities coding NFC "taplications" (I coined this term for my startup tapABILITIES.com)
Except using an iPhone because Tim Cooksucker keeps the device crippled.
Apple in the early days was always a combination of two forces: Jobs' vision for consumer products, and Wozniak's ability to implement it in the simplest way possible. With the dawn of the Macintosh era in 1984, Wozniak faded because the task of computer design became more one of working with known computer components, and less of old-school electrical engineering. At that point, the consumer side had won out over the company.
No.... So far, nobody has ever come to us asking about a Linux PC (or any other Unix flavor).
We do, however, run Linux in "virtual appliance" form for several things, including the central administration console for our ESET anti-virus solution on the Windows computers. (ESET primarily supports a Windows Server based application for that, but they also offer it as a Linux VM image -- which we decided made more sense for us to run.)
I doubt we would formally/officially support Linux on an employee's PC though, simply because of the lack of native support for things like Microsoft Office. (We use hosted Exchange email and with all of the meeting scheduling, calendar sharing, contacts published from Public Folders, delegates handling things on behalf of others, etc. -- we can't really trust 3rd. party mail clients that claim to be "Exchange compatible" to behave 100% correctly in all of those scenarios.) Also, I don't think Adobe Illustrator runs natively in Linux and that's needed by at least some of our staff.
True, but there are exceptions.
I do know that there are exception.
We could also cite the FairPhone & FairPhone2, smartphones where repairability is among the main features that it's company is proud of (the other point being fair trade in regards of conflict mineral and proper wellfare in the factory).
This things are designed to be easy to repair alone without needing any shop.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Broken devices being replaced are a small minority...
Not in my experience: most of the people around me tend to break phone rather fast. About 1-2 years in, and the thing is basically good to throw away.
I'm actually the weird guy in this pool (I keep my smartphone and other such fragile electronics in holsters on my belt instead of leaving them in my pocket. I use screen cover, etc.)
And I'm getting question from friends about why I do keep old phones, instead of buying the latest iShiny.
and there's plenty of repair places to handle them as well.
But most repairs aren't cheap. And mid range phone's prices have fallen to the point were getting a new phone is getting interesting.
I only know two friends who are repairing their phones. :-P) and stick with it until she can get a new phone with her plan.
- One is starting to get her phone repaired, now that she has exceeded the replacements from her insurrance, maxed the number of phones she can get from her service provider, etc. Basically, repairing her broken phone is the only way she can have a phone short of digging some old Nokia from the cellar (which probably still has 50% battery left
- The other has bought a Fairphone for the explicit reason that it's easy to repair and she can ask me to quickly swap parts for her.
A $20 case will prevent the large majority of broken phones.
...which completely defies the current trend of trying to produce the thinnest and shiniest possible phone.
What's the point of buing a phone that is only 4mm thick and has its entire back body made of brushed aluminium, if you're going to keep it inside a thick layer of negative-shear-factor-goo ?
NOTE: I'm not against cases (I keep my phone in a holster on my belt), I'm against the stupid trend of thin phones and aluminium. Makes no sense when everybody needs to stick phone in cases.
Have a replaceable case part of the initial design (as it used to be with older thick PDAs and non-smart phones) instead.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]