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Silicon Valley Veteran On Apple: Company Has Become Sloppy, Missed Updates, Delayed Refreshes (chuqui.com)
Silicon Valley veteran Chuq Von Rospach's blog post, in which he has criticized Apple for the things it did last year, has received quite a few nods from developers, analysts and users alike. Von Rospach, who has previously worked at Apple, has lambasted at the company for, among other things, how it has handled the Mac Pro, a lineup that hasn't seen any refresh in ages, and the AirPort routers, which too have been reportedly abandoned. From the post:Back when I was running most of Apple's e-mail systems for the marketing teams, I went to them and suggested that we should consider dumping the text-only part of the emails we were building, because only about 4% of users used them and it added a significant amount of work to the process of creation and testing each e-mail. Their response? That it was a small group of people, but a strategic one, since it was highly biased towards developers and power users. So the two-part emails stayed -- and they were right. It made no sense from a business standpoint to continue to develop these emails as both HTML [and] text, but it made significant strategic sense. It was an investment in keeping this key user base happy with Apple. Apple, from all indications I've seen over the last year and with the configurations they've shipped with these new laptops, has forgotten this, and the product configurations seem designed by what will fit the biggest part of the user base with the fewest configuration options. They've chopped off the edges of the bell curve -- and big chunks of their key users with them. The most daunting sentence from his post, according to Nitin Ganatra, who worked at Apple for 18 years and headed engineering of iOS, is, "If you just look at the numbers, things are okay."
Porsche, Audi, Mercedes, BMW, etc. don't make race cars and compete in things like 24 Hours of LeMans, WRC, etc. because those cars and those events make them money. They do it because 1) It provides a venue to show off cool new technology 2) It provides them marketing cachet, name recognition, and bragging rights.
Apple has lost sight of this. Apple is happily making Corollas & Caravans - which sell large volumes and make a profit. But it has forgotten the high-performance end of the bell curve where the bragging rights are earned and new tech is shown off.
It's been more than 3 years. Mac Pros are not for your average consumer. It's for the professionals. While most computers don't get monumental improvement gains anymore like they did in the 90s, incremental gains are most likely wanted by the top end, the professionals. Also previous Mac Pros could be upgraded internally with better GPUs, expansion cards, etc so a few years between upgrades wasn't as big a deal. The new Mac Pro has very little that can be upgraded. I have to say that ignoring the pros is something Apple shouldn't do. Under Tim Cook, the focus has shifted from making great products to making lots of money.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Any potential innovation costs money and fails to produce the same levels of profit as existing products will be seen as a failure, so Apple is stuck doing nothing because its the most profitable thing in the short term.
The problem seems to be by the time the highly profitable products stop producing huge levels of profit they won't have any new products available because no innovation is likely to produce the same profits, so they don't do any innovation as it will be only a cost or cut in overall profitability.
What I'm curious is whether investors will be happy with innovation-less profit or whether they will respond to public criticism of lack of innovation and put pressure on Cook to pursue more meaningful innovation even if it hurts short term profitability. And more meaningful innovation means real stuff, not grinding users for headphone dongles or new wireless headphones.
If you want a laptop as opposed to a tablet you can stick a keyboard onto, I've found the Surface (both 2 Pro & 4 Pro) to be disappointing. The folding keyboard and touch pad are miserable to use. The feeling of the keyboard is really .. I dunno.. sloppy.. Tough to describe in words, but no fun to do any amount of typing on. The touch pad has both a right/left mouse button, but there's no visual or tactile delineation where the mouse "button" stops and the normal pad starts nor where the border between left & right buttons are. I'm constantly getting right when I want left, or tapping too high for right & getting the default left on the main body of the touch pad. The pen input is nice-ish to take hand written notes, but the Apple Pencil on an iPad is much more accurate. Looking at MS OneNote where I've taken notes on both devices, the Surface looks like I'm writing in crayon compared to the sharpness of the Apple Pencil notes.
I still get more use out of my five+ year old MacBook Pro than I do the Surface. The Surface does a lot of the functionality of both a laptop & a tablet, but it doesn't do any of it nearly as well as the separate devices do. If you're looking to travel light & small and don't mind dealing with daily annoyance on a lot of the functionality, maybe the Surface is good enough. I just find it annoying to use. I'll grab it when I'm going out for an evening and *might* need to answer a call for work, but if I'm actually planning to get any real work done, the Surface collects dust & I grab a real laptop.
Right now I'm using a mid-2012 MacBook Pro that I've just upgraded with a Samsung SSD. The reason I chose to upgrade the storage instead of buying a new MacBook Pro was that I couldn't justify spending $3000+ for a laptop that was unrepairable and unexpandable, and would have to be sent to the recycle bin if it broke after the AppleCare warranty expired. I'm hoping this upgrade will get me through the next couple of years, but what happens after that?
At some point I will need to buy a new laptop. So what are my choices, if not another MacBook? A Windows 10 machine? Absolutely no way in hell. Put Linux on a PC laptop? Maybe, but avoiding the time and effort of supporting a Linux installation is the entire reason I use a Mac.
But what if (for example) Google decided to take a page from Apple's playbook? What if Google were to develop its own laptop with a real Linux / UNIX / BSD OS with a nice GUI, and support it the way Apple does? Not just a Chromebook, but a laptop with a new OS to complete with MacOS? And what if that laptop had a sane upgradeable / repairable premium design, without Apple's obsession for thinness and appearance over functionality?
If such a laptop existed, I would buy it in a heartbeat. And when I did, I would almost certainly switch from an iPhone to a Pixel, and from the Apple to the Google ecosystem. Everyone says "Google is the new Apple", so why shouldn't that be true? Google has the culture and the resources to play the game by Apple's rules, and take a huge chunk of mindshare away from Apple. Not to mention the fact that Google apps like Assistant and Maps already leave Siri and Apple Maps in the dust.
There needs to be a new option for laptop and desktop machines. Apple and Microsoft have both gone off the deep end, pursuing development paths that are leaving power users in the cold. Google could step in and become the new king of the mountain in very short order - if it has the will to do so.
The people who generally purchase Mac Pro's as the same that think nothing of dropping $2000 on a new lens because it has .0001% less chroma aberration. These are not the 'good enough' folks. These are the folks that develop the techniques that others write books about. And, the folks that Apple used to cater to.
As much as Microsoft was rightfully maligned under Bull-Headed Balmer, the new leadership is starting to make some very interesting inroads into Apple's turf with the Surface line. Specifically the Surface Studio. That should be the next iMac. While I wouldn't call it revolutionary, it is definitely innovative - and specifically targeted at the pro market.
It is going to be very hard to justify Apple's anal-cranial extraction so long as they are profitable. Which means we will be on this course for a long time to come.
FredInIT
In the early aughts, around os 10.2, Apple was all about designing and supporting hardware and software for high end producers. G4 and G5 Mac desktops were unbelievably awesome machines, OS X was super stable with all the functionality of Unix available, final cut pro, logic and aperture were state of the art and fun to use.
And the tiBook, while not the fastest, was surely the awesomest laptop a person could own.
Later, the 12" powerbook.
The fail seemed to set in about five years ago. It's a good example of what happens when you don't have good competition, cf Windows Vista.
All true, but the real question is also if they are losing the "Decision Makers".
It's not just the decision makers of today they seem to have lost but also those of the next generation. A few years ago when I looked at my students many would have mac laptops open with the rest a mix of different PCs. Now there are far fewer macs and it seems that many of the students who had deep enough pockets for a mac have Surface Books and Surface Pros. Since this was last term it also means that MS was beating Apple BEFORE the latest MacBook Pro disaster so I expect the trend will be even stronger next year.
Many moons ago, OS X was extremely attractive to people who needed a computer to do work, but who didn't want to take the time to learn Windows and deal with bugs. The G4/G5 era was great for Creatives, and that naturally meant that the people who made all the dongles and the software treated OSX as their primary platforn. I supported IT at a music studio and an architecture firm, and the apple logo was EVERYWHERE. The problem wasn't that XP or 7 was 'bad', it was that the tools that people used were developed for Mac. We had desks that had 2 computers at them - a Mac for whatever the job function was, and a Dell laptop for everything else (Outlook being the primary culprit.) The problem is that Macs have been overwhelmingly shitty computers for years now, but because of the inbreeding, it takes major product shifts to drive brand-loyal users away; so here we are - lowest-common denominator consumer machines with a price premium for the brand, and professionals ripped away because they physically cannot do work anymore.
Physics is nothing like religion. If it was, we'd have an easier time trying to raise money!
Tim Cook is a business school type thinker. He is an accountant. He makes his business decisions as a pure profit maximization game, increasing profit margins and eeking out as much money from the market as he can. The problem with this type of thinking is that it ignores the subtle realities of the Apple computer market. Macs specifically have been perceived by many as "professional" machines. Graphical designers have used OSX because it has been a reliable and relatively trouble-free platform on which to create. Software developers have often used Macbooks to develop on because OSX is a fairly polished Unix platform (though they likely often use virtual machines). Myself, I have enjoyed using Macs because of features such as the outstanding integration of the pdf format into OSX. I often use Preview's ability to take vector based snippets of a pdf file. Doing this on other operating systems is impractical, but on OSX you just draw a box around a pdf graph, choose "copy", and then "New PDF from Clipboard". In other OS environments, you can only copy a bitmap version, but on OSX, you get the actual vector version.
Most users probably don't use this pdf feature. However I find it essential. Under current management, because few users make use of OSX advanced pdf features, it might be seen as something that can be neglected or removed. If they removed it, then I would lose much of my enthusiasm for OSX. And my enthusiasm matters, because I often pass that enthusiasm onto my students. In 2007 my enthusiasm for OSX resulted in at least 20 new Macbook purchases that I am directly aware of. As OSX shifts to MacOS and seems to go towards merging with iOS, I find my enthusiasm begin to wane.
As Apple continues to assert more and more control over how I use my machine, on the apps that I install and the settings I can change, I find I am becoming increasingly against the agenda of Apple. I believe that our computers should be Turing Complete, that we should have full control over our devices. My students are more likely to hear me grumble about my Mac than to wax poetic about its unique capabilities. Tim Cook doesn't seem to realize the importance of users like me. In my own localized way I had an outsized contribution to Apple's explosive growth in 2007-2010; I see 200+ students every year, and my enthusiasms and views rub off on many of them. Apple's seeming assumption that they can ignore the tails of the bell curve of their user base is short-sighted and in my opinion will eventually compromise Apple's valuable brand image.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Don't forget the new Linux subsystem for Windows 10. This erodes much of OS X's "but it's runs Unix" advantage over Wintel PCs.
Performance users would look at cloud computing for extra horsepower. Apple did a presentation where they had hooked up a Mac Pro to a cloud computing server to do video editing in real-time. The old standalone system had a progress bar that moved slowly across the window. The new cloud computing system just did it in real time.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads