Forget old habits. Try new ones. Without Jobs, I think Apple has failed to create anything new that is compelling. Just doing the normal corporate old habit of focusing on only what affects this quarter's profits. If Apple were to fall back on old habits, it would be fantastically innovative and technically brilliant.
Even up to the mid 1990's, the Macintosh was an exciting platform. Apple's inability to build a modern OS, after three attempts, was starting to look pretty bad. While I haven't had boyfriends who turned out bad, I point out elsewhere here that by 1999 I was using Linux.
Apple temporarily fell on hard times due to a big management blunder. While Apple was convincing both customers and developers that PowerPC was the future, Apple continued to build a BILLION dollars of inventory of 680x0 Macs that suddenly nobody wanted to buy. Why did they keep building what they were telling everyone not to buy? That billion dollar hit was a huge writeoff that goes right to the bottom line.
If this is a NEW app, then it proves exactly the opposite of the article headline. Indeed, Netflix HAS FORGOTTEN its dvd subscribers and has only just now suddenly remembered them after a long period of neglect. (psssst . . . hear that Apple?)
But such is corporate and government speak. Whatever they say is a euphemism for something that means the opposite. An attempt to disguise something. It doesn't fool anyone.
Same here with books. Dead tree format every time. Why? Because DRM. If I can't download a DRM free copy, then I didn't actually purchase anything. It's just a long term borrow.
Most of what Hollywood produces is not what I want. Let's talk about mp3's.
I can easily buy DRM free mp3's, say on Amazon, for a reasonable price. I can put them on all my devices. And on all future devices I will ever own. I feel like I actually purchased something. I have no reason to pirate music. The inexpensively purchased mp3's are high quality with good audio engineering and uniform volume. Despite the reasonable price and ease of purchase, people still pirate music. Those people probably would never buy it under any circumstance. I just pointed out that purchase is quick, inexpensive, and DRM free.
Too bad Hollywood doesn't figure this out for movies.
Too bad eBook authors don't figure this out for eBooks.
You can be entertained and challenged at the same time. But most people don't want that.
NBC cancelled Star Trek. History shows it was clearly way more geared for nerds who would watch it for more than five decades. A lot better than other sci fi of that time.
Movies and TV market to the largest audience possible rather than to a more loyal but smaller audience.
My local theater (12 screens) has remodeled. Fewer but larger very nice reclining seats. Motorized reclining and footrest. Large cup holders. So much leg room that people can walk in front of you without you having to move at all.
Yet I only go to movies I really want to see. And there are few of those.
Part of the problem is that most of what Hollywood turns out is crap. Or sequels of crap. Or remakes of sequels of crap. Etc.
The other part of the problem is that I have a decent 60" screen and sound system at home. I can pause. Rewind to hear what they actually said or check out that cute guy again. Pause. Get some more popcorn -- or other favorites. Pause to look at IMDB or have a conversation. Or not pause at all. A form of freedom that you don't get at the theater.
My recent experiences with this remodeled theater are good. Yet I find that there aren't very many movies that I am willing to go there to see.
What Apple did was to help pioneer HUMAN interface, not user interface. Now it is all about graphic design. They've totally lost touch with what human interface even means. Now the interface is not about how to interact with humans better, but about style and marketing. Like Microsoft trying to force people to it's failed Windows Phone interface, but that's a different story. Google and Amazon are much closer to fulfilling Apple's vision of The Knowledge Navigator than Apple is. Siri is loaded with cutsey answers to loaded questions. Cute, but not useful. Useful requires a deeper level of work. Google can tell me how many inches per second are in an atto parsec per micro fortnight while Alexa cannot.
Hey, Apple. It's not all about design only. FUNCTION OVER FORM. Function is more important than form. Form is great. But function is more important.
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.
Apple was once a great company. Back in the day Apple was ahead of the industry in just about every way. BYTE magazine wrote that the history of the microcomputer industry was an effort to keep up with Apple. In the 1980's and 90's I was a card carrying Apple fanboy. Then I got hooked on Linux in 1999.
I parted ways with Apple when OS X would not run on the several $5000+ computers in my household. I had fond feeling towards Apple, but was no longer interested in their products.
When the iPhone came out, I realized that in five years everyone would have such a phone, but with a dozen different brand names other than Apple. Just like the Mac vs PC when Apple would not license it's OS.
When Apple became a litigation factory, I realized that the end was near. Slide to unlock, really? Rectangles with rounded corners? Apple argued in a foreign court patent suit that Samsung could have made their tables thicker and heaver, as if thin and light were some exclusive Apple right. Here we are ten years later from 2007 to 2017 and the headlines in industry trade rags are beginning to paint the fall of Apple. Hey, it happened to IBM. Then eventually to Microsoft who is trying to grasp at relevance and embrace the open source world. Why can't Apple fall? Unthinkable? Think different! It could happen. (And some of us would say good riddance after enduring the snobbish fanboys.)
Today's Apple fanboys are little more than ditto heads. They protested that Apple's was not a patent troll. Yet Apple and Microsoft together formed Rockstar, one of the biggest patent trolls around, in order to shield their good brand names while patent trolling.
It may just be what happens to big corporations when they grow past a certain point. Hey Google are you paying attention? They become too conservative. They can't rock the boat that generates today's huge profits. They can't invest too many resources into the future. They don't have vision. They can hire people with vision, but then they won't believe what those visionary people tell them. It seems to be a common story of successful tech companies.
If Apple does go away, it won't be overnight. Not quickly. And maybe not even completely. Just a gradual slide into irrelevance. But Apple was once great, and had a good long run. And from my once fanboy days, I'll point out a saying of the early 1990's: people have been predicting the demise of Apple every year since 1981.
You forgot to mention bad sequels. Hey, we had this successful movie once, let's make a cheap sequel to make more money, riding on the back of the success of our earlier movie!
Or this . . . let's make a movie of some TV show from the golden age of television.
Or, let's do a remake of some old movie, but ruin the plot in various gratuitous ways.
Or, let's make a sequel to a remake of a sequel of an old movie.
Oh, I know !!! Let's make a movie with a huge special effects budget and then add a little bit of plot to it after all the special effects are complete!
However, once in a while there is a movie with a new idea. But not very often.
If you go to the theater to see a movie it is because you REALLY want to see it. So badly that you are willing to endure the movie magic experience of the theater.
Screaming kids, people getting up and squeezing out through the row of seats, and then back again later, and cell phones, and people talking, and telling their life story, along with narrating the film, people kicking the back of your seat, throwing popcorn . . .
It's all part of the movie magic! The theater experience. You wouldn't want to get less than you paid for.
And let's not forget being treated like a criminal before admission into the dignity of the theater experience. And 45 minutes of ads.
Preventing people from getting your movies for free may simply drive them to other forms of entertainment. Like trolling on web sites that were once for nerds.
As the Narn, the Minbari and Vorlon were turning to leave, Luke Skywalker raised his hand with his fingers parted in a V and said "Live Long and Prosper".
It is nice if China relaxes the laws requiring Tesla to share with a local manufacturer. However, they will still have to share. If not directly, then through spying by employees planted within the manufacturer.
Consider the concept that the planet could trap more heat than it radiates away. More heat is trapped as greenhouse gas concentrations increase in the atmosphere. The unprecedented sharp increase in these gasses is due to human activity. There are actual measurements of both the greenhouse gas concentrations, and the increase in average global temperature.
I would also point out that a thermos DOES radiate away heat. In fact it is the only way a thermos loses (or gains) heat to equalize temperature of its contents to that of its environment. The low pressure between the inner and outer walls of the thermos means very low loss due to convection. Heat must radiate from one thermos wall to the other. Some can conduct through the neck, but good designs try to minimize this.
Desktop Linux may arrive, indeed may already have arrived in a form nobody expected 15 years ago. Chromebooks have been outselling Windows laptops for years now on Amazon for example.
Just as IBMs computer monopoly was disrupted, but not in a way anyone (at the time) expected. These nuisance "toy" microcomputers came along. They were under IBMs radar because they were not a threat. Just as Linux was under Microsoft's radar for a long time. Before long, a manager could buy, within their own purchasing authority an Apple II with VisiCalc and have it on their desktop -- without involving any of the mainframe people and the attendant hassles of dealing with them. When IBM introduced their PC they thought there was a market for maybe a couple million units. Little did they know that a de-facto standard of clones would unleash a huge software industry that would drive the need for more of these cheap "toy" computers. And you know the rest. Those "toys" now dominate the industry and then formed the basis of large data centers full of hardware derived from these "toy" computers.
Disruption sometimes arrives in forms you don't expect. Microsoft was also quite unprepared for Android and still hasn't found an effective response.
Microsoft stated that the reason for the Linux on Windows subsystem was to attract developers back to Windows. WTF? A direct admission that open source was more attractive to developers? Yet in all the innovative things I've seen developers present in public, they largely seem to be running open source -- even if on Mac hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
Windows 10 has been installed on this computer.
To restore this computer to a usable state
please send 3 bitcoin to Microsoft.
The problem is that there aren't many good movies. It might be nice to go to the theater more often.
Forget old habits. Try new ones. Without Jobs, I think Apple has failed to create anything new that is compelling. Just doing the normal corporate old habit of focusing on only what affects this quarter's profits. If Apple were to fall back on old habits, it would be fantastically innovative and technically brilliant.
Even up to the mid 1990's, the Macintosh was an exciting platform. Apple's inability to build a modern OS, after three attempts, was starting to look pretty bad. While I haven't had boyfriends who turned out bad, I point out elsewhere here that by 1999 I was using Linux.
Apple temporarily fell on hard times due to a big management blunder. While Apple was convincing both customers and developers that PowerPC was the future, Apple continued to build a BILLION dollars of inventory of 680x0 Macs that suddenly nobody wanted to buy. Why did they keep building what they were telling everyone not to buy? That billion dollar hit was a huge writeoff that goes right to the bottom line.
If this is a NEW app, then it proves exactly the opposite of the article headline. Indeed, Netflix HAS FORGOTTEN its dvd subscribers and has only just now suddenly remembered them after a long period of neglect. (psssst . . . hear that Apple?)
But such is corporate and government speak. Whatever they say is a euphemism for something that means the opposite. An attempt to disguise something. It doesn't fool anyone.
Same here with books. Dead tree format every time. Why? Because DRM. If I can't download a DRM free copy, then I didn't actually purchase anything. It's just a long term borrow.
Most of what Hollywood produces is not what I want. Let's talk about mp3's.
I can easily buy DRM free mp3's, say on Amazon, for a reasonable price. I can put them on all my devices. And on all future devices I will ever own. I feel like I actually purchased something. I have no reason to pirate music. The inexpensively purchased mp3's are high quality with good audio engineering and uniform volume. Despite the reasonable price and ease of purchase, people still pirate music. Those people probably would never buy it under any circumstance. I just pointed out that purchase is quick, inexpensive, and DRM free.
Too bad Hollywood doesn't figure this out for movies.
Too bad eBook authors don't figure this out for eBooks.
You can be entertained and challenged at the same time. But most people don't want that.
NBC cancelled Star Trek. History shows it was clearly way more geared for nerds who would watch it for more than five decades. A lot better than other sci fi of that time.
Movies and TV market to the largest audience possible rather than to a more loyal but smaller audience.
I liked how Interstellar showed the time dilation that occurs in a gravity well. That appealed to me.
But it didn't have ninja moves and laser blasters. So it may not appeal to a more general audience.
The cops will never decide that they, themselves are the bad guys. Even if they are the only ones with guns.
My local theater (12 screens) has remodeled. Fewer but larger very nice reclining seats. Motorized reclining and footrest. Large cup holders. So much leg room that people can walk in front of you without you having to move at all.
Yet I only go to movies I really want to see. And there are few of those.
Part of the problem is that most of what Hollywood turns out is crap. Or sequels of crap. Or remakes of sequels of crap. Etc.
The other part of the problem is that I have a decent 60" screen and sound system at home. I can pause. Rewind to hear what they actually said or check out that cute guy again. Pause. Get some more popcorn -- or other favorites. Pause to look at IMDB or have a conversation. Or not pause at all. A form of freedom that you don't get at the theater.
My recent experiences with this remodeled theater are good. Yet I find that there aren't very many movies that I am willing to go there to see.
What Apple did was to help pioneer HUMAN interface, not user interface. Now it is all about graphic design. They've totally lost touch with what human interface even means. Now the interface is not about how to interact with humans better, but about style and marketing. Like Microsoft trying to force people to it's failed Windows Phone interface, but that's a different story. Google and Amazon are much closer to fulfilling Apple's vision of The Knowledge Navigator than Apple is. Siri is loaded with cutsey answers to loaded questions. Cute, but not useful. Useful requires a deeper level of work. Google can tell me how many inches per second are in an atto parsec per micro fortnight while Alexa cannot.
Hey, Apple. It's not all about design only. FUNCTION OVER FORM. Function is more important than form. Form is great. But function is more important.
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.
Apple was once a great company. Back in the day Apple was ahead of the industry in just about every way. BYTE magazine wrote that the history of the microcomputer industry was an effort to keep up with Apple. In the 1980's and 90's I was a card carrying Apple fanboy. Then I got hooked on Linux in 1999.
I parted ways with Apple when OS X would not run on the several $5000+ computers in my household. I had fond feeling towards Apple, but was no longer interested in their products.
When the iPhone came out, I realized that in five years everyone would have such a phone, but with a dozen different brand names other than Apple. Just like the Mac vs PC when Apple would not license it's OS.
When Apple became a litigation factory, I realized that the end was near. Slide to unlock, really? Rectangles with rounded corners? Apple argued in a foreign court patent suit that Samsung could have made their tables thicker and heaver, as if thin and light were some exclusive Apple right. Here we are ten years later from 2007 to 2017 and the headlines in industry trade rags are beginning to paint the fall of Apple. Hey, it happened to IBM. Then eventually to Microsoft who is trying to grasp at relevance and embrace the open source world. Why can't Apple fall? Unthinkable? Think different! It could happen. (And some of us would say good riddance after enduring the snobbish fanboys.)
Today's Apple fanboys are little more than ditto heads. They protested that Apple's was not a patent troll. Yet Apple and Microsoft together formed Rockstar, one of the biggest patent trolls around, in order to shield their good brand names while patent trolling.
It may just be what happens to big corporations when they grow past a certain point. Hey Google are you paying attention? They become too conservative. They can't rock the boat that generates today's huge profits. They can't invest too many resources into the future. They don't have vision. They can hire people with vision, but then they won't believe what those visionary people tell them. It seems to be a common story of successful tech companies.
If Apple does go away, it won't be overnight. Not quickly. And maybe not even completely. Just a gradual slide into irrelevance. But Apple was once great, and had a good long run. And from my once fanboy days, I'll point out a saying of the early 1990's: people have been predicting the demise of Apple every year since 1981.
Approximately coincident with OS X, Apple changed its logo from a bright gay rainbow to a dull impotent boring gray. What does that tell you?
Look guys. It is possible to take turns. Or do something else. But on a different website.
Pirates do not represent a Lost Sale. The pirates are not going to buy anyway.
You forgot to mention bad sequels. Hey, we had this successful movie once, let's make a cheap sequel to make more money, riding on the back of the success of our earlier movie!
Or this . . . let's make a movie of some TV show from the golden age of television.
Or, let's do a remake of some old movie, but ruin the plot in various gratuitous ways.
Or, let's make a sequel to a remake of a sequel of an old movie.
Oh, I know !!! Let's make a movie with a huge special effects budget and then add a little bit of plot to it after all the special effects are complete!
However, once in a while there is a movie with a new idea. But not very often.
If you go to the theater to see a movie it is because you REALLY want to see it. So badly that you are willing to endure the movie magic experience of the theater.
Screaming kids, people getting up and squeezing out through the row of seats, and then back again later, and cell phones, and people talking, and telling their life story, along with narrating the film, people kicking the back of your seat, throwing popcorn . . .
It's all part of the movie magic! The theater experience. You wouldn't want to get less than you paid for.
And let's not forget being treated like a criminal before admission into the dignity of the theater experience. And 45 minutes of ads.
Preventing people from getting your movies for free may simply drive them to other forms of entertainment. Like trolling on web sites that were once for nerds.
As the Narn, the Minbari and Vorlon were turning to leave, Luke Skywalker raised his hand with his fingers parted in a V and said "Live Long and Prosper".
Protectionism works just fine if you have a large enough domestic market.
It is nice if China relaxes the laws requiring Tesla to share with a local manufacturer. However, they will still have to share. If not directly, then through spying by employees planted within the manufacturer.
Consider the concept that the planet could trap more heat than it radiates away. More heat is trapped as greenhouse gas concentrations increase in the atmosphere. The unprecedented sharp increase in these gasses is due to human activity. There are actual measurements of both the greenhouse gas concentrations, and the increase in average global temperature.
I would also point out that a thermos DOES radiate away heat. In fact it is the only way a thermos loses (or gains) heat to equalize temperature of its contents to that of its environment. The low pressure between the inner and outer walls of the thermos means very low loss due to convection. Heat must radiate from one thermos wall to the other. Some can conduct through the neck, but good designs try to minimize this.
Your post would have more credibility if you had also brought up Hillary's emails. You could have also replied by saying . . .
WRONG. (Snnnnniiiiiiiiiiifffffff)
Desktop Linux may arrive, indeed may already have arrived in a form nobody expected 15 years ago. Chromebooks have been outselling Windows laptops for years now on Amazon for example.
Just as IBMs computer monopoly was disrupted, but not in a way anyone (at the time) expected. These nuisance "toy" microcomputers came along. They were under IBMs radar because they were not a threat. Just as Linux was under Microsoft's radar for a long time. Before long, a manager could buy, within their own purchasing authority an Apple II with VisiCalc and have it on their desktop -- without involving any of the mainframe people and the attendant hassles of dealing with them. When IBM introduced their PC they thought there was a market for maybe a couple million units. Little did they know that a de-facto standard of clones would unleash a huge software industry that would drive the need for more of these cheap "toy" computers. And you know the rest. Those "toys" now dominate the industry and then formed the basis of large data centers full of hardware derived from these "toy" computers.
Disruption sometimes arrives in forms you don't expect. Microsoft was also quite unprepared for Android and still hasn't found an effective response.
Microsoft stated that the reason for the Linux on Windows subsystem was to attract developers back to Windows. WTF? A direct admission that open source was more attractive to developers? Yet in all the innovative things I've seen developers present in public, they largely seem to be running open source -- even if on Mac hardware.