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."

Comments

See auto manufacturers and racing

[jasenj1]

Porsche, Audi, Mercedes, BMW, etc. don't make race cars and compete in things like 24 Hours of LeMans, WRC, etc. because those cars and those events make them money. They do it because 1) It provides a venue to show off cool new technology 2) It provides them marketing cachet, name recognition, and bragging rights.

Apple has lost sight of this. Apple is happily making Corollas & Caravans - which sell large volumes and make a profit. But it has forgotten the high-performance end of the bell curve where the bragging rights are earned and new tech is shown off.

Re:how often are Mac Pro's upgraded?

[UnknowingFool]

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.

Apple seems stuck in profit trap

[swb]

Any potential innovation costs money and fails to produce the same levels of profit as existing products will be seen as a failure, so Apple is stuck doing nothing because its the most profitable thing in the short term.

The problem seems to be by the time the highly profitable products stop producing huge levels of profit they won't have any new products available because no innovation is likely to produce the same profits, so they don't do any innovation as it will be only a cost or cut in overall profitability.

What I'm curious is whether investors will be happy with innovation-less profit or whether they will respond to public criticism of lack of innovation and put pressure on Cook to pursue more meaningful innovation even if it hurts short term profitability. And more meaningful innovation means real stuff, not grinding users for headphone dongles or new wireless headphones.

Re:Apple seems stuck in profit trap

[DickBreath]

As a once Apple fanboy during the 80's and 90's I'll point out that Steve Jobs was just plain wrong about some things.

It was right for Sculley to strip Jobs of power. Steve left on his own. He could have continued to be the visionary.

But Steve Jobs would not allow reasonable amounts of memory. Nor expandability. Definitely no slots ever! No color, ever. Just his vision of a single configuration appliance computer with a small number of expansion items like floppy drives, a hard drive and printer.

The appliance computer vision is great. But was not practical at the time. The Late 1990's iMac was a good realization of that vision. The high speed USB made his vision of external expansion more practical. And today, most computers never see any internal expansion other than possibly memory. (I said most, not all.)

The 1987 Macintosh II with color, card slots, external monitors and other great features was a huge expansion of the Macintosh vision that never would have happened with Jobs. The real irony was that Jobs' NeXT computer did all the things he wouldn't let Apple do.

Re:Apple seems stuck in profit trap

[Erbo]

My opinion of Apple is that it's become kind of like the Soviet/Russian space program: both of them produce some really impressive hardware, but you can still see the dead hand of their chief innovator (Steve Jobs for Apple, Sergei Korolev for the Russians) in all of it, and you can also see that they don't have another innovator of that same caliber to carry them forward. Chuq's describing what appears to be a symptom of that, in that they've lost the person who's capable of thinking strategically instead of just focusing on the business numbers.

There's an opportunity here for Google

[timholman]

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.

Next Generation

[Roger W Moore]

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.

Re:While I don't totally disagree

[TJ_Phazerhacki]

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.