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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."
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...
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.
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.
Seriously. Their excuse was "we can't get the parts/drives to make them anymore". Ummm... they have hard drives on chips now. At work some of our laptops have "hard drives" that are nothing more than a chip about the size of a laptop DIMM physically with 256GB or more space.
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
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.
It's not Google. That's all the reason I need.
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.
I have an iPad, an iPod touch, mac book pro and iMac at home. (However my day job involves an awful lot of Microsoft based products and systems)
I find for the systems I have that "they just work" , no need to fiddle with them to get something working that should have been there out of the box. Yes they have their own quirks as to how things are done. Yes they keep changing things ahead of the curve (EG loss of floppy). Yes they annoy this shit out of me at times ( as does MS and linux systems I have used) . In the end I tend to agree that OS X is what linux on the desktop *should* be.
BTW the Apple tax is an old chestnut that has been discounted many times. I'll willing to bet that if you try and configure *any* laptop to meet the same specs as an Apple system you will end up at the same or greater price - and by that I mean all specs including weight and volume. (however don't mention the premium they put on additional memory for drive space :P)
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
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.
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.
The problem with Apple is you can't get a device speced for what you need. I Still don't need a glowing keyboard, or a high resolution video camera.
I would love a system with the general specs of a Mac mini, but cheaper that is bigger and fatter.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Or a newer, more expensive charging/synching cable
As a disclaimer I have an Android phone, have owned two iPads (one is still used by my wife), but own a Surface Pro 4 now. My last laptop was a Macbook Pro with Windows installed, but now I have a Lenovo. I am certainly not an Apple fanboy but still feel they offer great products.
Apple's hardware is underpowered.
This is rarely true. Because there is only one manufacturer of Apple devices and they only refresh them about once a year, there are usually more powerful Android / Windows devices on the market for most of the year. But you rarely have to wait more than 6-9 months for Apple to catch up. Apple also tends to wait for the bugs in newer drivers to be solved, which as an owner of a Surface Pro 4 I can tell you is not how Microsoft handled their device launch. It took about 5 months before my Surface Pro 4 drivers started functioning properly all of the time.
The OS software is so oversimplified that it's hard to use.
This is probably only because you are a power user. I also sometimes find OSX difficult to use, but not for 95% of my usage. Only when I am trying to customize my experience do I run into problems, and I assume the primary reason is I am used to other OSes.
There aren't many useful applications unless you're doing audio or video editing
I would agree that Apple doesn't really have a killer app on the desktop, but in the iOS world they are clearly #1 in applications. You may not find those applications useful, but the majority of consumers disagree with you.
Apple hasn't innovated in ten years.
That is nonsense. It still takes innovation to incrementally improve products. You don't have to reinvent an industry to be innovative. I may agree that Apple hasn't innovated much in the last 2-3 years, but certainly not 10.
The Apple Watch was a mistake that tried to solve a problem that doesn't exist.
Agreed.
Apple products are incredibly expensive but wouldn't even be worth the cost of a typical Android or Windows product.
The apple tax is mostly a myth, and at best comes to $50 on many devices. For instance the iPhone 6+ cost $50 more than my Note 4 when I purchased it two years ago. Apple also tends to only build devices with top of the line hardware, so they are more expensive that the vast majority of other devices. But when compared to Android / Windows devices with similar specs the prices are very similar.
Can anyone explain to me why anyone would use Apple products?
Overall I don't use Apple products because I don't think there is enough variation of products, and I generally feel a more open marketplace creates better products in the long run. For at least 5-6 years I have felt Android phones were superior primarily because I had more options to choose from. If I had to choose between Samsung and Apple I probably would have chosen Apple until 4 years ago, but I never had to make that choice since I also had Motorola / HTC / etc to choose from. Same thing with other Apple devices. For a short time I felt the Macbook Pro 17" laptop was the best on the market, so that is what I bought, but I don't think that has been true for a while.
But regardless of my complaints about options from Apple, they still make great devices. Its just not for me.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
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.
Or you know the ability to get a current model video card with out the added Mac Tax (and yes in that area there is a HUGE fucking markup for a mac compatible video card and your still a generation or 3 behind)
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
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."
There is a slight premium (tax) still, but nothing major unless you need to install Windows.
For me, I see our company Macs as being more reliable both in terms of hardware and operating system than the Dell/Windows workstations (high end machines). Macs don't have the profile/registry corruption issues that seem to cause more IT overhead. Doing a remote pull backup on a Mac is trivial (and free).
... without this colorful florolastomer watch band?
#DeleteChrome
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.
I personally have always preferred Windows Phone. Microsoft gets no credit for having - by far - the fastest and most innovative interface. I persisted in using Android for years for personal use, for the apps of course. My addiction to one night stands means I've got to have a mainstream OS so I can use Tinder et al.
But Android phones are just too unreliable. Too slow. So, I gave up and at the end of the year got a Lumia 950 for my business and iphone 6s.
The iOS operating system has no features really, and the sea of icons is extraordinarily cumbersome. But, it doesn't lag like Android, and it more or less works all the time within its limitations. And let's not forget Android has the most security problems and is effectively spyware for google.
Hopefully in time, developers will see that Windows 10 is the superior OS for phones, but it seems like a rough road ahead for Microsoft.
These are strange days when it comes to phone tech.
Seriously. Their excuse was "we can't get the parts/drives to make them anymore". Ummm... they have hard drives on chips now. At work some of our laptops have "hard drives" that are nothing more than a chip about the size of a laptop DIMM physically with 256GB or more space.
You don't just put a new drive or new drive technology in an existing device. There's engineering and testing and all that good stuff out there. And no doubt, they looked at the size of that market and said no thanks, we'll spend our time elsewhere. I'm not saying there aren't hundreds of thousands or possibly even millions of people who would like an iPod Classic sized device with a 512GB SSD, but that's probably not a big enough market for Apple to care about. Also, while coming down, the price of a 256GB or 512GB SSD compared to an equivalent spinning disk would probably remove many of those potential buyers anyway.
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.
The tech 'challenges' in getting an iPod classic to accept flash are ... uhm ... how to put it. Solved.
They use a standard (in antiquated) interface which you can readily buy an adapter to use an SD card.
http://www.imore.com/iflash-co...
$60 buys you a 256GB flash drive from a dozen different retailers
Apple just loves to artificially inflate the cost of memory in it's devices to drive up profits. They could easily make a cheap, large iPod ...but it would invalidate why they charge so much to get 128GB in an iPhone.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
Assuming you're sincere, there's a few reasons.
.. still.
While with the newer generation of Androids this might not hold true, but I bought an iPhone 5 some years back because:
1. The iPhone5 camera is far superior to an S4 or previous. No contest.
2. The phone is simply responsive and reliable. No hangs or freezes. It's quick. Neither my Nexic 7 nor S1 could make that claim. It's there when I need it, since it is above all else, a phone. My old S1 wigged out too much to be trusted. Good thing my car never broke down when that was my phone. (Granted, that's a long time ago) I have an S4 now for work, and it's better in that regard, but still flaky, IMO.
3. I bought an iPhone so as to familiarize myself with at least one Apple product, just to broaden my technical scope
4. Some apps are only available for IOS.
5. Simple, solid interface.
iPhone Downsides:
1. No SD card slot
2. Ridiculous price difference in upgrading from 16GB to 32 or 64. Heck, 32GB isn't even available anymore, and that's the sweet spot!
3. No easily replaceable battery.. (I just did it last month, it was a minor nightmare) But even the Samsungs are doing that now, so that's a wash.
I'm due for a new phone though, and I'm still considering an iPhone6. I'm not that crazy about Samsung's UI, and never looked that deep at an HTC, LG, or Droid.
I might switch though, as I'm not a fanboi or hater of either product.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
The tech 'challenges' in getting an iPod classic to accept flash are ... uhm ... how to put it. Solved.
They use a standard (in antiquated) interface which you can readily buy an adapter to use an SD card.
http://www.imore.com/iflash-co... $60 buys you a 256GB flash drive from a dozen different retailers
Apple just loves to artificially inflate the cost of memory in it's devices to drive up profits. They could easily make a cheap, large iPod ...but it would invalidate why they charge so much to get 128GB in an iPhone.
That is how YOU solve the problem of upgrading YOUR HDD designed iPod. That's really not the way a company would go about making an iPod Classic SSD edition. But hey, go for it. I'm sure iPod Classics are pretty easy to get on eBay.
Never said it was challenging to do. I said they didn't care to bother based on the way the market is today. I'm staring at my iPod right now. It probably hasn't been plugged in to charge for months. Truth is, I'm RARELY without WiFi or Cell coverage. When I am there's usually some cached music on my phone, plus tons of downloaded Podcasts. My bluetooth headphones have a few gigs of memory for downloaded music. And eventually, I'll get off the plane and go back to having my entire library available for streaming. And even THAT is old fashioned since it seems the market is moving away from streaming YOUR library and towards subscription services such as Spotify or Apple Music.
I know it's hard to believe, but Apple isn't going to just drop an SD card adapter into the iPod Classic manufacturing line. First of all, they'd have to spin up an iPod Classic manufacturing line. And right there is probably reason enough not to bother. It's just not worth it.
Millions of iPod Touches and tens of millions of iPhones. 128gb and less space because streaming. That's just what they're focused on. I'm not saying guys like you don't pine for an alternative. I'm just saying guys like you aren't really where Apple is focused.
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.
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.
"The OS software is so oversimplified that it's hard to use."
Your nuts. I develop on Windows for a living but my Mac is a piece of cake to use. The OS is Unix under the GUI so you can do just about anything you want with the command line.
" There aren't many useful applications unless you're doing audio or video editing."
Really?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
...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.
" I'm sure iPod Classics are pretty easy to get on eBay. "
If you're willing to fork over $400+....
And Apple is slowly dying because they've forgotten to satisfy the public and instead just want to be "hip"
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.
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).
Unlocked Xiaomi phones (@aliexpress) are pretty interesting for their price points ~$400 Xiaomi's compare favorably to major manufacturers $600-$700 flagship devices, and ~$200 matches up to the majors $350-$400 offerings.
Dance for us, pseudo-Jobs, show us your wares!
Apple's been slowly dying for many years now depending on who you ask. I hope I die that slowly. But even if they are (one "bad" quarter aside there's little evidence), it still doesn't mean there's a huge demand for iPod Classic. Even if they sell for a lot of money on eBay. That just means the extremely small base of people who want them are willing to pay a lot because of the relative sparse availability. MP3 players, especially HDD ones aren't big anymore. Ask SanDisk. Microsoft. Ask anyone.
Be honest, if Apple produced a $300 iPod "Classic" with a 256GB SSD and an option for a $400 512GB version... would they make a $10 billion business out of that? Because if it isn't that big, there's just no chance they are interested. When they did a billion in AppleTV a few years back it was a "hobby business".
Apple's hardware is underpowered.
This is rarely true. . .
I find it is true for high-end users; however, most consumers buying computers these days rarely need a lot of power. Realistically a tablet to surf the web and emails is all the power they need. Gamers and creative professionals are a different breed.
The OS software is so oversimplified that it's hard to use.
This is probably only because you are a power user.
I hear this a lot and normally it comes from people who don't really use OS X at all. They don't know that Terminal exists. I use it 90% of the time to manage Linux boxes. I've only used AppleScript a few times to do things but it very powerful.
Also I don't know if that person has seen Metro. Yes, OS X is somewhat minimalist but it's also streamlined. The travesty that is Metro leaves much to be desired. Some Linux distros are very minimalist and some are not.
The Apple Watch was a mistake that tried to solve a problem that doesn't exist.
Agreed.
Not so much a problem but I don't think the hardware is quite there. What would be nice is to replace the smart phone with a watch. However like flying cars, it's not remotely practical due to things like the limited UI, battery, etc. As a 1st generation, we can hope it gets better as 1st gen smart phones pale in comparison to today's models.
Apple products are incredibly expensive but wouldn't even be worth the cost of a typical Android or Windows product.
The apple tax is mostly a myth, and at best comes to $50 on many devices. . .
Agreed. The word used was "typical". That's like saying a Mercedes Benz is expensive compared to a "typical" Ford. Many consumer computers are designed to be cheap but they also suffer from low build quality.
Can anyone explain to me why anyone would use Apple products?
Overall I don't use Apple products because I don't think there is enough variation of products.
For me, it's about quality vs price. If all you care about price, you get what you pay for. My MacBook has lasted 10 years and is still going although it is now quite outdated. I don't think any PC laptop every lasted more than 3 years for me. So even at 3X the price, it paid for itself.
The other thing is that I want to administer as little as possible at home. I have a PC, Linux box, and Mac at home. By far the Mac required the least to maintain.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
The higher-end iMac 27" With Retina 5K is good value. The screen alone from another brand in those specs will cost you over 2/3rd of the price of the iMac and be less handsome. And for what's left of the money, you get a really smooth high-end computer.
They could put more than 16GB of storage into the iPod Nano, but they seem unwilling to do so for some reason. They even refreshed the lineup with new colors, but left the storage capacity the same even though the price of flash memory has crashed since the product was introduced FOUR years ago.
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."
Yeah. They could. They didn't. They might never. I just don't think everyone understands how little a market that is, and how unimportant it is. It's called atrophy. Phones have almost completely supplanted MP3 players. If you're looking for music playing innovation, watch the phone space. People are playing music on phones, largely by way of subscription services. That kind of leaves the non-Spotify, non-Apple Music running, non-cellular connected iPod Nano market as not an afterthought, but a non-thought. Apple doesn't care because hardly anybody else cares. Or maybe nobody else cares because Apple doesn't care. All I know is, the fact that they haven't discontinued the Nano or the Shuffle or the iPod Touch doesn't mean we should expect huge innovation in that space.
I don't even think they have competition anymore in that space. Is anybody seriously marketing an MP3 player? I don't think it's SanDisk's main target. Microsoft left. I don't think Sony ever did much in that space. Who is the major company that cares about this market right now? Samsung discontinued their non-phone music devices. I'm embarrassed I even type this much on the subject.
I have an iPad, an iPod touch, mac book pro and iMac at home. (However my day job involves an awful lot of Microsoft based products and systems)
The part in parentheses goes a long way explaining why you have bought so much into Apple.
For me, it's about quality vs price. If all you care about price, you get what you pay for. My MacBook has lasted 10 years and is still going although it is now quite outdated. I don't think any PC laptop every lasted more than 3 years for me. So even at 3X the price, it paid for itself.
Agreed. I only recently got a new Macbook pro when my last one started having trouble running certain programs. I had to check to see when I purchased it, and was surprised that it had lasted me eight years.
It's like a good pair of shoes - if you pay for quality, they'll last and probably save you money in the long run. However, if you try to skimp out, then don't be surprised when you have to replace something early and often.
"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
" I'm sure iPod Classics are pretty easy to get on eBay. "
If you're willing to fork over $400+....
And Apple is slowly dying because they've forgotten to satisfy the public and instead just want to be "hip"
In a discussion where people slam Apple for not being innovative, you blame them for not increasing the storage in a device that others have declared dead almost a decade ago.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
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."
Try not to laugh but, and it pains me to admit this, I am really enjoying my time with a Windows phone. I haven't upgraded it to Windows Phone 10 yet but I guess I can and it's supposed to work just fine. I'm a pretty happy Linux user but I gotta be honest and say that this Windows phone isn't bad at all. It's actually good. The specs make one think it's slow or whatnot but it isn't. Contrary to popular opinion, there's a number of apps for it - there just aren't 803 versions of Candy Crush and 9254 versions of a flashlight. The apps are all fine and I'm not seeing any compelling reason to swap back to Android.
I did pre-order an Ubuntu tablet. I did not order the phone. If the tablet is any good and the reviews of the phone indicate that it is worth it then I'll order a phone. It's hard telling. Maybe... I really am pretty happy with my Windows-based phone. It's snappy and responsive. It does everything that I want it to do - I am, literally, not missing any features that I'd get with any other phone. I'm sure there might be a few apps that it doesn't have, for example, but I'm not missing them.
Get this... I'm not even being paid (or coerced) into making this post. It's all good that you pick what you pick but there are other options besides Google and Apple. They range from Ubuntu to Microsoft to a few custom things - and BlackBerry still has their own OS going on. So, there are options.
"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.
For me, it's about quality vs price. If all you care about price, you get what you pay for. My MacBook has lasted 10 years and is still going although it is now quite outdated. I don't think any PC laptop every lasted more than 3 years for me. So even at 3X the price, it paid for itself.
I'm a bit different of a customer since I refresh my equipment far more frequently. My MacBook Pro didn't even last three years since it didn't have an SSD, and those only became common about a year after I bought mine. Although admittedly SSDs are one of the few upgrades over the past decade which significantly affects the user experience. I don't really care if my electronic devices last more than three years, and even over two years is merely a luxury.
In my case I use my laptop for work, and in that case price is hardly a factor at all. I'm not going to waste money on a fancy video card or anything, but even with a two year refresh cycle a $2500 laptop is well under 1% of my salary. Any equipment I use for about half my working hours will be purchased based on features and capabilities, not a few hundred dollars of price difference.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
I'll willing to bet that if you try and configure *any* laptop to meet the same specs as an Apple system you will end up at the same or greater price
What about if you try to spec an Apple laptop with only the things you want?
Assuming you're sincere, there's a few reasons. While with the newer generation of Androids this might not hold true, but I bought an iPhone 5 some years back because:
Times have changed. The iPhone 5 was probably the cutover point when Apple lost the lead.
The wife has a iPhone 5 and she has issues just like everyone else (fucking lightning cables are ridiculously crap).
The difference for me is I hate being forced to do things I don't want, so the Apple ecosystem shits me. Like the un-configurable home screen or keyboard, the inability to replace a battery (I use my phone a bit and keep them for a while, so easily replaceable battery is a requirement), or inability for drag and drop storage.
Lots of little things that say "don't do it your way, we know better than you." that are deal breakers.
The Galaxy S7 does more and costs less. I have the Note 3 (2.5 years old now) and still goes well. I use the stylus, so it's funny after years of Apple taking the piss, they finally copy the idea.
I'll willing to bet that if you try and configure *any* laptop to meet the same specs as an Apple system you will end up at the same or greater price - and by that I mean all specs including weight and volume
Ok, and try and configure an Apple system to meet the same specs as most laptops - and you will end up with Apple system twice as expensive as the reference laptops.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
It helped build the company, sorry if you can't pull your lips off Apple's ass long enough to breath
It helped build the company
Bwahahaha. You were one of the people who in 2000 still complained they didn't drag along the Apple for yet another decade, right? What a Luddite.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
In the end I tend to agree that OS X is what linux on the desktop *should* be.
Please no.
Back in the late 90s and early 2000s, well meaning people thought Windows 9x then XP was where Linux on the deskotp "should" be. Then people changed to thinking OSX was where it "should" be.
It shouldn't.
Linux isn't Apple or Microsoft. If it tries to be those then it will never be more than a crappy knockoff of either, because the companies that produce those are different from the community that produces Linux. None of them has the management structure, culture or philosophy to produce what the others respectively can. What Linux can be however is excellent in its own right. And it is.
I don't use Linux because I can't afford a Mac or Windows (I have no less than two Windows VMs for various reasons and the laptop I have was rather expensive when new if a little heavy). I use Linux because I think it is a better UI than the alternatives.
Linux is unlikely to ever "win" on the desktop (whatever that means), however it will still appeal to tens of millions of people worldwide which in any measure is a huge success. If however, people keep trying to turn it into a cheap knockoff of other produces then it will lose out since it will be worse than the others without ever being good in its own right.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Also, while coming down, the price of a 256GB or 512GB SSD compared to an equivalent spinning disk would probably remove many of those potential buyers anyway.
I remember when the transition point for 4GB drives was crossed and that wasn't recently. I'm sure it's closer than you think now. Actually I'm going to check! ... checks ...
HOLY SHIT YOU CAN GET 256g SD CARDS!!!
That is incredible (and they go bigger). I'm completely astonished that's possible. The cheapest I can find is about 30 quid. So, stacking 2 would give you 512G for 60 quid. My 512G Samsung SATAIII SSD (much faster) only cost a bit over 100.
Compared to the 1.8" HDD in the classic, I can find a 100G one for 60 quid and a 160G one for about 75. 1.8" is a relatively rare formfactor. For 2.5", you can get a 500G one for about 30 quid, probably less.
Those are of course retail prices. However the overhead is worse for smaller (physically) and smaller (capacity) drives. My guess would be that at 256G and below, flash wins hands down, no contest. At 512G, I expect that for a 1.8" drive the competition would be very fierce and spinning disks would lose soon. The writing is on the wall so when you combine power draw, capacity and speed, flash has already won and no one makes those drives any more.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Like my tower just fine
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 ]