Slashdot Mirror
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.
Apple, have you stopped beating your wife yet?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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
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.
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.
Cameras, assistants that googles shit for you.. all irrelevant noise to me.
Apple is an annoying company because they prioritize crap nobody cares about like artistic monoculture designs, how much shit weighs and being a bunch of pricks (e.g. "courage") over usability, locking people into walled gardens and charges ridiculous prices for mediocre hardware.
The most amusing part of all of this is MOST people walk around with their expensive pretty little works of art iPhones in cheap bulky rubberized cases. Every time I see one ... can't help but smile at the absurdity of the whole dynamic.
Expecting Apple users to grow a brain is like expecting Trump supporters to grow a brain. Neither are likely yet both are an entertaining freak show to behold.
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
Oh gosh, where to start?
Soldered RAM.
Soldered storage.
Glued MacBook batteries.
Glued iMac screens instead of magnets.
Replacing tactile MacBook keys with a touchbar.
No more matte display option on MacBooks.
Dropping USB-A connectors from MacBooks.
Dropping MagSafe from MacBooks.
Dropping FireWire interface from MacBooks.
Dropping Ethernet interface from MacBooks.
Dropping SD card slot from MacBooks.
Dropping integrated video output connector from MacBooks.
Requiring a fistful of dongles to plug damn near anything into MacBooks.
Insisting on a super-low-stroke keyboard that nobody wants. Doubling down when it turns out to be crap.
Claiming that key condoms are the solution to dust and crumbs causing those keyboard to fail when they're not.
Stupid-expensive fees to replace those super-low-stroke keyboards when they go bad.
Heavy focus on making MacBook Pros slimmer despite pro owners voicing disdain, demanding for return of removed features.
Stupid-expensive configurations.
Because everything is soldered and glued, requiring buyers to commit to a more expensive machine today because they'll invariably need more RAM and/or storage in a few years.
Selling years-old hardware at as-if-new prices.
Tied to that, taking years to upgrade hardware specs.
Highlighting more emojis as a feature with every OS update. (Hint: hieroglyphics are not a feature. More hieroglyphics even less so.)
Nagging to install new OS versions whenever there's an upgrade.
Annual OS upgrades when there's not that much compelling to warrant a whole new version. (There was a time when we could go multiple years without new OS versions. Look at Windows XP and Windows 7, for example.)
Genius Bars stocked with less-than-geniuses.
Refusing to service computers. (See the long-running adventures Linus had with an iMac Pro.)
Vindictive treatment of third-party service companies who are willing and able to fix things Apple won't touch or wants to gouge for. (Search for the adventures of Louis Rossmann.)
Refusing to acknowledge and address engineering flaws. If they eventually do, it's long after those affected have given up trying to get assistance and/or someone has filed a lawsuit.
I could go on...
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.