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Is Apple Still the Company That Leads the Way, Or is it Just Getting Better at Locking in Users To Its Own Increasingly Subpar Experiences? (theoutline.com)
Readers share a column: Apple is no longer the king of the smartphone camera, but that's just a small component of a company in (highly profitable) stagnation. It wasn't that long ago that anyone who cared about taking great photos on their phone was destined to buy an iPhone (whether they wanted it or not) just by sheer brilliance of its miniaturized camera tech. But something happened over the last 18 months that's changed the dynamic for consumers in the market: Samsung and especially Google have started producing handsets that equal or surpass Apple's devices with their picture-taking quality.
[...] But Google is not Facebook, and while I give up some of my data to the company, what I get in return has sizable value -- apps I use for hours every day, predictive services that actually work, photo processing that means I'm less likely to miss an important moment. To be clear: the stuff Google and Amazon are doing right now isn't just cool and doesn't solely serve their corporate interests -- it matters in very real ways to consumers, with touchpoints they encounter every day where Apple can't even get a word in edgewise.
[...] Coming in second in the camera space alone might not be that big of an issue, but Apple has also had significant problems with its hardware recently -- not just with quality control, but in pure design terms as well (who could have predicted that in 2018 people would be touting Microsoft as the industry leader in design?). Siri continues to be a running joke among most people I know -- tech enthusiasts and average users alike. Apple's iCloud efforts have amounted to little more than a "hard disk in the sky" (a famous Jobsian turn of phrase). And is it the best experience for consumers to be forced into Apple Mail, Apple Maps, iTunes, Apple Music, and Apple Photos at every turn? Can you honestly say they're the best at what they do?
[...] But Google is not Facebook, and while I give up some of my data to the company, what I get in return has sizable value -- apps I use for hours every day, predictive services that actually work, photo processing that means I'm less likely to miss an important moment. To be clear: the stuff Google and Amazon are doing right now isn't just cool and doesn't solely serve their corporate interests -- it matters in very real ways to consumers, with touchpoints they encounter every day where Apple can't even get a word in edgewise.
[...] Coming in second in the camera space alone might not be that big of an issue, but Apple has also had significant problems with its hardware recently -- not just with quality control, but in pure design terms as well (who could have predicted that in 2018 people would be touting Microsoft as the industry leader in design?). Siri continues to be a running joke among most people I know -- tech enthusiasts and average users alike. Apple's iCloud efforts have amounted to little more than a "hard disk in the sky" (a famous Jobsian turn of phrase). And is it the best experience for consumers to be forced into Apple Mail, Apple Maps, iTunes, Apple Music, and Apple Photos at every turn? Can you honestly say they're the best at what they do?
apple needs to not over think the mac pro or price it with to high of an starting point.
Or false choice, clickbait, flamebait?
Is Slashdot still interesting, or does it just post stories that are blatant, pointless shit-storms?
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
They're still good in some areas, in others not so much.
If the so-called low-cost MacBook Air replacement also has that fucking nightmare of a keyboard (butterfly mechanism) then I'll be forced to start looking at OpenBSD/FreeBSD or something.
Whoever at Apple thought that a keyboard with almost no travel was a good idea should have been fired immediately after the launch of the MacBook Pro that used that keyboard. Instead we're now at the third revision of this pile of crap. Admit it's a failure, go back to the old keyboard design and increase the thickness of the laptops by 2mm to compensate. It's not the end of the fucking world. As a bonus, you'll be able to increase the size of the battery.
#DeleteFacebook
No question Apple makes beautiful equipment and user experiences, but "leading the way" is a little excessive.
Increasingly expensive? Absolutely. Increasingly abandoning opinion leaders (us)? Yep.
Truth be told: Apple can afford to drag their heels on hardware updates and offer sub-optimal support and repairability. Apple is by now a full blown fashion brand. Being expensive is a value in itself for Apple customers. Is their stuff bad? No, absolutely not. Do they care about is developers anymore? Nope, not really. It's up to Google and Microsoft to pick up that ball now I suppose.
I've stopped buying Apple hardware which I've been doing since 2003 (12" iBook G4 - legendary!) and if they want to win me back they better start delivering a minimum base of good price performance products. Which they stopped doing a few years back.
Bottom line: Apple is doing just fine for people who can't calculate or judge hardware by it's specs. Which is 99% of all people. Other than that, I'm moving towards custom/special Linux hardware once again.
My two eurocents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
The trouble with Apple it doesn't listen to its users, at all.
Macbook pros had great keyboards , the new low profile keyboards suck. Mag safe was a great idea , gone. People like to be able to pull their drive and upgrade when necessary but no soldered ram and ssd drives ... I think they began losing the plot around 2012. It's kinda sad that they will not give us what we want.
These days the best performing macs are hackintoshes and that really is a problem when you can put together your own system that beats the official product.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
Where do I mod this story Troll ?
Actually, where can I flag this story as Inappropriate ?
Can we get msmash (4491995) banned ?
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
> What experience is sub par?
Gee, soldering the RAM and SSD to the MBP mobo ISN'T a dick move???
Stockholm Syndrome much?
I love my MBP and iPhone 7+ too but let's cut the bullshit of Apple's anti-right-to-repair shenanigans.
Their gimping of the Mac Mini also isn't winning any fans.
Instead of embracing Vulkan (or OpenGL) they have NIH syndrome with Metal.
HTF am I supposed to charge AND listen to my wired headphones on the iPhone now? Oh that's right buy your shitty overpriced Beats headphone garbage. NOT. Fuck this "courage" nonsense.
Apple has lost their way. All they care about is branding and making money. The _also_ used to care about technology at one time.
WOZ wasn't behind their most successful products. He is for certain an engineering genius.
Apple has still the best ecosystem around. Perhaps some of their pieces are sub-par, but the giant can still only focus on so much for so long. Apple has back-burners their Macs for a while, and focused on making their phone utterly brilliant. It has faceID tech that no one has truly copied, it has the very best CPU, which no one can deny, and it's camera has gone in a strange direction. Can the Samsung Phones and Google Phones do the same AR workload an iPhone can?
They have gone to pour more into the "taking pictures" function of a camera, but Apple has made the camera have other uses. Try the Measure app, it's amazing, and accurate!
Apple will circle back and update their Mac computers, and their apps will have incremental updates that make them a good part of the ecosystem, though I will admit not the best.
No watch compares to the Apple Watch, in terms of fitting in, no TV device fits like the Apple TV device in terms of fitting in. Your apps automatically install on the TV and Watch, your content resumes where it left off, and it is by far the best content aggregator there is (their TV App). It did that in a short time period.
Apple has expanded its ecosystem so big that they can only focus on so much at once, that much is clear. And clearly there are trade offs for the privacy protection you get. Siri is still the only one that does most of the work on device when possible.
Given the alternatives: the walled garden is still the nicest real estate, by far.
When did Apple actually "lead the way"? Remember the old joke: "to see what is coming on the new iPhone, look at what was new on Android 2 years ago".
Apple has rarely been a technology leader.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Unless your time and certainty has no value, apple laptops are the lowest total ownership costs as far as I can tell. Even IBM agrees with that. So much time is spent screwing around with the dissappointment and incompatibilieis or learning experiences it takes with changing models year to year with other brands there's no point in spending that money whey you could just get an apple, know how much it's going to cost you right up front in time and effort and certainty it will work. The macs tend to last longer too.
Sure when I'm hunging for cheap like in servers or for secondary computers or ones for specific missions I always buy Linux machines. No argument there that they are way cheaper to buy. And as long as I know they will work for what I plan in a specific situation there's no reason to buy apple.
And if all you want is a machine to check your twitter account and do google docs then the machine with the absolute lowest chance of letting you down is a chromebook.
But if you want one computer that can do everything, take on new missions, and act just like your old one did with perfect continuity of operations, then an apple is it unless hourly rate of pay isn't very high. Ever waste a day screwing with a computer? your salary+benefits+lossed_sales == what it cost you that day.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
A shaky, but mostly accurate analogy for Apple would be the young, upstart politician, breaking rules, breaking new ground, etc. to get elected, only to ossify into the old, staid, politician who wants to get re-elected.
The Mac, iPad, iPhone, AppleWatch and iTunes, etc will be refined and refined and refined and thus become predictable and boring.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Yeah, we really need a new technology company to shake things up. The Apple/Amazon/Google/Facebook/Microsoft tech Oligopoly all seem to be in a race to copy each other's small product improvements, but none of them are really trying to do something genuinely innovative at the moment.
I am typing this on a MacBook Pro, and I use and iPhone 8. What experience is sub par?
The stack of dongles to plug everything in, the insanely high price, the keyboard's lack of movement, the lack of function keys, the lack of a decent GPU, the less-than-cutting-edge CPU, the lack of a pro desktop whose design is less than 5 years old, the inability for the power cord to magnetically disconnect...and that's just off the top of my head. I used to use Apple and dropped them when they dropped the ball on their macs. The mac mini now only has two cores - that's less than their laptops! - and until the new update comes out they are still trying to peddle a 5 year old Mac Pro at full price!
Their iOS devices have faired better but they have not only dropped the ball with their Mac line they no longer even remember where the ball is or what it looks like.
You are 100% incorrect. Apple absolutely listens to its users. The problem is that you don't understand that you are a minority, and the vast majority of apple users don't care about what you care about.
"People" do not like to be able to rip apart their laptop and upgrade it. You like that. I like that. But not people in general. Not half of people, not even 10% of people like that.
Apple has successfully changed to market itself to the mainstream population, and they are not like us.
When their MBP hardware really stagnated, they got rid of magsafe, and I got tired of their incessant iCloud nagware, I realized that they had moved on from where I am as a customer. That's life. My Dell precision running ubuntu isn't quite as slick as my 2012 MBP was when new, but it's better than that laptop these days, and better than the current line of MBPs. Thin, light, powerful, user-upgradable, and relatively inexpensive.
If a company isn't making a product you want, move on to one which is.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
It's very hard for new companies to enter the market with China out there ready to copy product and erase profit margins. That the iPhone was successful at all is purely because it was lightyears ahead of its competition, and they bet their entire company on it. If they had biffed that, there would be no Apple right now. If you think about it, people who are in the position of having significant financial resources, but also have really good reason to take huge risks are pretty rare. By the same token, if the iPhone clones had become good enough, fast enough, Apple would also probably have failed.
It would be better if companies could sort of succeed in this market, without being immediately run down. In a way, China has become the new Microsoft, and many are afraid to innovate. That money would be better spent on other investments which may have lower upside, but also lower downside.
But is it really a positive move to solder down normally swapable components like SSDs, RAM, etc? Is it saving them money somehow? Or is it just a revenue generator because if something needs upgraded at all, it's whole new computer time?
Shit like that is consumer hostile, even for those that "don't care" up front.
In a PORTABLE computer, like a MacBook (all flavors), CONNECTORS are the ANTITHESIS of RELIABILITY.
Soldering fixes that.
But, for example, if you want to be at a live music performance, doing a multitrack recording with Logic Pro X running on your MacBook Pro, do you REALLY want to be treated to a nice, fat KERNEL PANIC screen because your RAM or SSD socket glitched when someone bumped the table your laptop was sitting on?
No one stops to think of THAT one...