When you can't make a laptop with reliable screens or keyboards, or an iMac lineup that has CPU's 2 generations behind.. Maybe it's time to shut down the stupid vanity projects and focus on your core business instead?
If a company decides not to produce wireless routers (which were class leading) or monitors etc anymore, all because they're non "core" to a computer/mobile hardware company then I don't see how building automotive AI is core to a computer/mobile hardware computer company that has zero core competency in either car manufacturing or AI.
I suppose they're getting downvoted because "why are you working on X when Y has problems" is kind of a silly argument. The problems with the butterfly keyboard design are almost certainly not a result of all the keyswitch engineers having been foolishly reassigned to work in the automotive group.
It would seem to me the issue is because of bad product design decisions.
Apple decided having user serviceable reliable keys was less important than making the thinnest laptop they possibly could.
It's left for the market to validate whether it was the correct decision or not.
Having returned my 2018 "improved butterfly keyboard" MBA because the keyboard died after 3 weeks, I suspect that the issue isn't being taken seriously. A minor design revision that didn't pick up or resolve a recurring issue is a death march for a product.
Okay, but on the flip side I used the 2017 MBP for a year with no problems whatsoever. It's hard to figure out realistically how much of a problem this is for them.
Well there has to be a reason, people are assuming it’s resources, because incompetence which isn’t noticed and fixed by management is hard to understand
The existence of the Autonomous Car Unit was also a management problem.
The unstated truth in the "mythical man month" is that you can't rescue a project by throwing people at it if the project is out of control because of poor management.
Stellar management can do almost anything.
Mediocre management bumbles around creating failures.
Besides what the commenters are saying, physical keyboards have been a solved problem for what, 2 decades now? Even slim ones. There's no new basic research needed and even the engineering should be quite obvious by now...
They stopped making routers and monitors not because they are non “core” products, they stopped making them because there is not much money in it. You buy routers ones every 10 years probably, and margin is limited, but supporting them throughout this period is quite expensive. As for monitors, there is so many competitors right now, that it’s hard to make it worth building your own monitor, Especially if you want to win the market share you need to distinguish yourself from competition, and there is very little you can do to make your monitor distinguishable from your competitors.
Automotive AI meanwhile is a future and they have to think about future with all the money they have now.
If Apple truly cares about the user experience they would have kept the wireless routers in their portfolio. A great opportunity missed to have a product that is more user friendly than the competition.
I'd argue the wholesome user experience will prove be more important for Apple in the long run than having a big profit margin on every product.
The “user experience” for most users trying to use a third party router instead of the one bundled with their internet service where support comes from their ISP would be worse.
Sure, they could have been the ones launching the Unifi line of routers and switches, instead of Ubiquiti, but that would mean caring about and supporting non-mac equipment and computers in the offices.
Another option, assuming core Apple processes don't need more funding: they could pay out that cash as dividends, and let the market think about the future (getting the money to companies who's core actually is about automotive AI, if investors actually think so).
The other way of thinking about it is that autonomous cars are so obvious and will eventually be so commodity that Apple not sticking their logo on this market would be about as dumb as them not making the bigger phones the market demanded.
autonomous cars are so obvious and will eventually be so commodity
Apple's core business (smart phones) will be commoditized way before autonomous cars - we're already seeing smart phone improvements becoming more and more incremental, longer device lifetimes, people less willing to spend for the latest and greatest
I would be scared to buy an Apple car. Let there be a design flaw: It will take a class action suit for them to acknowledge it. Until then, anyone who drives to their Apple Car Store will be told to pay out of their own pocket for fixing it, that they obviously mishandled the car, Apple is not to blame, it is not covered under warranty.
Or a GM car where they do the math to see if its worth it to issue a recall for cars that shut themselves off out of nowhere or Ford where they did a cost benefit analysis on a recall of Pinto fuel lines.
> Automotive AI meanwhile is a future and they have to think about future with all the money they have now.
Automotive "AI" is not a future, more than so than the automotive "cloud." It does not even takes one to have a computer science background to figure out that claims of artificial "intelligence" there are a joke.
That's going to be an unpopular opinion on HN, but I really agree. Getting self-driving car to where they are currently is impressive, but the technology isn't close to where it needs to be.
The technology is 90% there, perhaps more, but the last percentages that it will required for this to be a mass market product is going to take 20 or 30 years to reach. The current solutions are built using ideas and research grounded in the field of "Artificial Intelligence", but they are not "true AI".
There's also no AI in your Huawei phone. There's software using machine learning, which is a discipline under the umbrella of "artificial intelligence" as a computer science discipline.
non “core” products, they stopped making them because there is not much money in it
The idea of Mac was always “it just works”. You could go to the Apple Store and get everything you needed and know that while it wasn’t cheap, it was amongst the best you could buy. You pay the premium for that experience and you remember how nice it was and come back next time.
Now that experience is broken, you need to shop around and make it work yourself. And if you need to do that then the experience is no better than anyone else’s.
They don't, but as a public company they do have obligations to their shareholders which at least suggest they shouldn't be neglecting their core business.
I think the shareholders are the main reason why Apple actually stopped making routers and monitors. There isn’t much money in those products, and shareholders wants to see revenues, they don’t care what products you build as long as they make them money
Do you think before the iPhone came out that Apple was experts in basebands and antenna design? Were you bitching about that when iTunes was a PoS in 2005? Were you ranting that the Wi-Fi bugs in 10.4 weren’t getting fixed because they were working on phones and tablets which they had no core compentency in back then? Point being, everyone is calling doom for Apple saying they’ve not invented the next great thing, yet when they work on the fields that will likely be the next big thing, they get ridiculed by folks like you. Seems they are damned either way, no?
I kinda feel cars are core to Apple. Essentially they are a screen company if you think about it. Their job is to own all your screens and make a quality experience across them, both the bonus of upselling services to said screens. A car dash is the last (others?) of the more used screens they haven't covered yet. So probably a market they dont want to miss out on, especially as it ties in with other areas so well like music, maps and in the future apps.
Which is actually pretty good. Had one in a rental a month or so back and I was, wow, a vehicle entertainment system that actually works rather than being primarily occupied with sucking the contacts off my phone.
It's really not that confusing. Routers, discrete monitors, or cars are not core to Apple's existing businesses. But of the three, only cars represent a market large enough to be worth pursuing. So that's where Apple invests and attempts to develop competency.
It's hard to see them making any money on cars anytime soon. Autonomous cars are at least 20 years away. Profit margins on cars isn't even close to that of an iPhone. Also it would be entering an entirely new field of business that not only require the R&D to make the car, they also need the infrastructure to handle sales and repairs.
Apple does have the money to pull it off, if they want to. I would just question if they'd profit from the project.
“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone, PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”
>then I don't see how building automotive AI is core to a computer/mobile hardware computer company that has zero core competency in either car manufacturing or AI.
Autonomous Vehicle, is basically a Giant Mobile iPhone that you can sit in it. There will be lots of custom silicon doing software calculation, LiDAR making 10s to million of input every second, a gigantic battery, and lots of softwares.
Although I still think AV is at least another 5 - 10 years away in real world usage.
> Autonomous Vehicle, is basically a Giant Mobile iPhone that you can sit in it.
Ugh. What's next? It seems in the future everything will look like an iPhone and is built by one company. Why can't we have more modularization in the economy, i.e. smaller companies that do 1 thing well, which sell to potentially multiple other companies that do 1 thing well too? Perhaps we should set a hard limit on the number of employees working for a single company, e.g. 1k.
Apple doesn’t even “make” the chips, they design them. TSMC and GlobalFoundry have been the fabs historically that have done the actual “making” of them.
The point is that if Apple's obsession with supply chain integration continues, then at some point even the fabs might be assimilated. This can happen e.g. if their CPU design division needs tighter control over fabrication, or if they develop a key technology at the silicon level that they want to keep out of the hands of their competitors.
You have core now, core in the future, and never core.
When work started on the iphone, phone weren't core, but there was a vision that it could be. Routers were killed because there was no future where routers would ever be core.
Apparently Apple sees (saw) a future where automotive AI might be core.
I think ulfw’s argument about product line focus makes sense, but the parent was implying Apple can’t make laptops, whereas compared to most manufacturers their products are incredible (but still imperfect).
Apple makes the products Apple wants to make; that those product choices might not align with everyone's preferences (I'm pretty happy with my 2018 MBP, for instance) doesn't mean the company can't walk and chew gum at the same time.
Particularly when they make $200 billion per year in revenue.
Well thats my point - it seems that they can't chew gum and walk at the same time. If they could, we'd have Macs that are updated to the latest gen hardware in a reasonable amount of time, and issues like the faulty keyboard would have been fixed by now after 3 years.
I don't think this viewpoint is shared by the vast majority of people who buy personal computers. Gigahertz, number of CPU cores, Intel processor families, etc. mean nothing.
I think the reason why they don't rev their hardware as frequently as they could is because it doesn't pay to. The number of people choosing between a Mac and a Dell who go for the one with the newest processor has to be vanishingly insignificant.
In my view, people have a clearer picture of how much disk storage they want--the usage meters on their phones help drive that home. Other than that, they are confident that the machine they get today will be faster than the one they bought 4 years ago. But I suspect usage patterns have changed (e.g., more time in the browser; games are played on phones; etc.) so that speed bumps aren't the primary reason why people upgrade, anyway.
It shows a lack of respect for their users, and for their users money.
They are charging the same for almost two years old hardware than they would if It had been updated, but the user gets a worst product, and in the long run, experience.
Apple has a ~40% profit margin, and you think them not updating their HW specs in a timely fashion is what shows they don't have respect for their users money?
Attacking the CPU is dumb - mobile cpus have not increased significantly in performance, so why pay a premium of more than x% for <x% performance increase to have the latest gen?
Seriously, the GPU is the only thing you're likely to get a big win from at the consumer level, and you're restricted to intel's shitty IGP until you get to the top end MacBook Pro. Again: you are exceedingly unlikely to get a real day-to-day performance increase from the high end intel mobile cpus on a core-for-core basis, and adding a tonne of cores just eats your battery life (hell, ram alone is a significant power drain for laptops, hence the last gens 16gig limit)
Since you mentioned it, I just added the Apple / Blackmagic eGPU to my 2018 Macbook Air and holy smoke it is a major change for docked 4k workstation with a mac laptop. This eGPU is underrated bigtime.
I read this a lot in comments about this product but this is a really simplistic description of what this product is in comparison to building your own eGPU right now.
Very often "cheaper alternatives" have stability issues like crashing. Or plug / unplug problems. Stability is more valuable than the quiet although silence matters when the entire rest of your workspace is silent.
The build quality for these enclosures is obviously cheap and low quality. You can tell by when you work with the ports on them.
Also, none of these builds have been supported by Apple. This product was cooperatively designed with Apple so the support is excellent. You have one Thunderbolt 3 cable for all of the things to the mac.
If you're resting most of your argument / feeling on whether Apple is shipping latest gen hardware you might want to examine that more closely. This is a very common misconception and a bit of googling will tell you either a) they are shipping latest gen, or b) the differences between latest and prior gen are negligible.
It will still take up senior management and board time. THis is something recognised accross corporate governnce - see recently GSK spinning off it's over consumer health and the counter portfolio of drugs, to focus on what it's core business is; novel pharmaceuticals.
Yes you don't want to be a total one trick pony, but if you do everything, you do nothing well.
Sometimes that's true, but I think that most often, these kind of transactions (M&A, spin-offs etc) are the result of political gaming on top of companies, rather than driven by actual business or financial needs. Top managers play their own game very well, and at the end of those transactions usually there is a bonus paid out, no matter the results 5 years down the road. It's not as if verticals within a large company hadn't their own specialized staff, focusing on their own products.
Phones, Tablets, Mac computers, Cars, iTunes Music, App sales, Headquarter building, Share price, tax strategy. There are a lot of things that take up bandwidth of senior management. We've all seen many companies where something doesn't get the focus it could were it not for other priorities.
Is this absolutely the reason the laptops are a bit crap? No, but it is plausible that the lacklustre offering in hardware comes from the lack of it being a priority for the company. It certainly doesn't feel like a priority for them, and the offering doesn't feel like a lot of strategy has gone in to how it has evolved over the last few years - contrast that with the iphone.
Laptops have gotten attention, they made design mistakes but it wasn’t for a lack of trying. I doubt that the board would have been knowledgeable enough to know they were making a bad decision.
I wouldn’t touch a Mac laptop with a ten foot pole except for maybe the Air if I was desperate, but the iMacs and Mac Minis are tempting. I don’t do development anyway without at least two external monitors and my favorite keyboard/mouse combo.
Sell me a £1k phone that can’t connect to the £3.5k laptop you sold me because the phone comes with a USB-A cable and the laptop only has USB-C sockets.
This is precisely the sort of garbage Stveve was very much against yet Apple seem to now think ‘it’s ok’.
It’s not ok. To the down voters, the fanaticism only emboldens Apple to become more mediocre. Think about that a moment.
Besides the connections the software doesn’t work between those two out of the box. My mom bought 2k MacBook Pro from the Apple store and a 1100 Iphone xs and we got home and plugged it in to back up her saved backup and iTunes wouldn’t let us. I can’t recall the exact problem but the solution was downloading the latest software for both devices. Several hours later it was working but out of the box? So disappointing.
That seems like a negligible issue. It's really not unusual that both device and software need to be on the same or latest version to work as intended.
I don't know what you are talking about: my new Samsung phone with USB-C connects perfectly to my Macbook :P
Still, I wonder why Apple hasn't changed the connector from the iPhone to USB-C when it seems like the obvious choice. Maybe trying to avoid controversy like when they changed the old 30-pin adapter?
>>This is precisely the sort of garbage Stveve was very much against yet Apple seem to now think ‘it’s ok’.
Steve Jobs is now gone. And your MBAs run the product management now. And those people have OKRs and targets to meet. And they seem to think if they make something that looks cute, utility be damned, as long as they meet sales and whatever targets, it must be ok. Then Apple also has enough loyal customers and brand they can milk. Eventually the public will tire out and move to something else. And so will they. There are enough companies to work at.
Having seen enough of this kind of sausage made. I can tell you no one cares. There are companies full of upper management whose sole purpose is optimizing for their careers. They survive because their kind, get hired by their own kind.
Eventually every one moves on.
Only real people who can make any change at all are the stock investors who hold big chunks of stocks. But even those guys care about 'percentage' of profits, and once they get it. They move on.
this seems like the biggest problem. there are a bunch of spam call filtering solutions available from third parties that require me giving third parties a lot more of my data than I'd like; if apple would come up with a solution to the spam call problem, I'd pay good money for that.
Really? It seems that it is a very easy thing to do.
Obviously you need to grant permission to the app to monitor every inbound call, but I am sure that it could be an open source project that is not using that data for anything apart from the stated purpose.
I'd pay for the same on Android
FDroid has a very good call blocker. It integrates with everything so you don't even remember it's there.
But I didn't try to block calls with no disclosed id. Those disappeared from my view a while ago, so either it does block them by default or something changed on the part of the callers.
yeah, come to think of it, I don't get a lot of blocked ID calls anymore, either. But I do get multiple spam calls a day, which is what I took OP's complaint to mean.
>Sell me a £1k phone that can’t connect to the £3.5k laptop you sold me because the phone comes with a USB-A cable and the laptop only has USB-C sockets.
I mean, yes. If you buy a mac laptop, they should include the usb c -> lightning cable as a courtesy. It's not a cheap machine.
However, it's a small thing, I think, compared to the cost of the mac laptops. If paying $20 for a cable is a big deal, then the macbook pro laptops and high end iphones are not for you.
With that kind of logic, you could justify any kind of price/attachment gauging. Like selling expensive laptop without batteries: "You already paid $3k for the laptop, why are you cheaping out on the extra $500 for the battery?".
People pay that kind of money with the expectation that everything works out of the box, not that they have to get extra adapters, which is usually only noticed after the fact. That isn't just extra costs, it's also the extra effort that people didn't want to have, that's why they paid the "premium price" in the first place.
In that context, $20 might not be "that big if a deal", but it would be even less of a deal for Apple to just include that stuff, while also making for a generally more customer-friendly experience without making them feel like being nickle&dimed every step of the way.
>With that kind of logic, you could justify any kind of price/attachment gauging. Like selling expensive laptop without batteries: "You already paid $3k for the laptop, why are you cheaping out on the extra $500 for the battery?".
Depending on what I was buying the laptop for and the variety of batteries available, that seems totally reasonable.
I mean, not for the mac model of "you pay a lot extra but it works out of box, without having to make too many decisions" of course.
But if I was buying an expensive laptop 'cause it was powerful and customizable? yeah, it would be totally reasonable and even desirable to let me buy the battery I wanted; I'm a big fan of the old thinkpads, and they often come used with the giant battery that sticks out, which I dislike, because they make the laptop bigger and heaver. My buddy who is also a fan just bought a 'low profile' battery for his, which is even smaller and lighter than the regular battery I use.
I usually buy my desktops and servers entirely as parts, because I want to choose the parts I want.
But that's not really Apple's market. (of course, I do also have a non-pro macbook and an iphone; but in a lot of ways, I have different expectations for those than I have for my old thinkpads.)
>In that context, $20 might not be "that big if a deal", but it would be even less of a deal for Apple to just include that stuff, while also making for a generally more customer-friendly experience without making them feel like being nickle&dimed every step of the way.
right my point is that it's not the $20 that is the big deal there, it's the fact that you've gotta go order another thing, when you paid apple big money for it to work out of box.
Uh... 2 gens? iMacs are on Kaby Lake which is last gen. Anyway, the iMac doesn't have Coffee Lake CPUs because they're barely any different than Kaby Lake, or even Skylake for that matter. Intel is basically rebadging CPUs at this point while they sort out their 10nm process. The main driver of a refresh would be upgrading the GPU and some connectivity options at this point.
It reminds me of the Apple of the early 1990s. So many stupid vanity projects, some of which were actually pretty cool: Newton, Dylan, Copland, Taligent, OpenDoc, etc. And yet they couldn't succeed at their bread and butter of selling computers. There's no Steve Jobs to bring them back from the brink this time.
What precipice does Apple need to be walked back from? Certainly not the current one, where they rake in an amount of money roughly equal to the GDP of Luxembourg in a single quarter.
Money is a lagging indicator for product quality. When a company's built up a strong brand, it can take years (or sometimes decades - witness Sears and Applebees) of bad experiences or outdated products before it starts to show up in sales numbers. But when it does, it usually ends up cascading rapidly, oftentimes faster than the company can react.
Apple started its slide the first time around 1989 - that was when Mac models started proliferating, when System 6 came out, and when its first sales decline happened. Jobs didn't return until 1998. That's almost a decade in between.
It's similar for other dominant companies - the writing was on the wall for IBM when Compaq & Dell started selling PC clones in 1983/1984, but they didn't need a turnaround until 1993. Sun Microsystems hit its zenith at the top of the dot-com boom in 2000, but its stock price didn't start sliding until 2007 and it wasn't purchased until 2010.
But there is no great lagging indicator of products in development apart from this reorg on autonomous systems. What about the glasses? Tablet interfaces have obviously peaked, yet there is no stronger ecosystem to support an AR product than what continues to mature around iOS.
Apple has a ton of cash and the best HW/SW/Design on the planet. The company is not done making new things.
Financial performance during the biggest market bull run in history (which lasted almost 10 years) isn't that indicative of the future of company.
On the other hand, the declining quality, sloppier design, increased prices on already highly priced products, multiple conflicting product lines - all of those decisions will eventually have consequences.
Apple used to be about doing a handful of things really well and having a loyal customer base that would happily pay a premium for the quality/brand/premium-feel/coolness of their products - all of that has been slowly going away over the past 5-7 years.
Which product lines are conflicting, and is that conflict a really big deal or just a minor one? Apple has always been self-cannabilizing, see iPod v iPod Mini v iPod nano. The company is much much larger than all these fond remembrances of golden days, which means product lines are going to grow a bit to hit different market segments which each have millions of customers.
Agree on MacBook v MacBook Air. I think the intent was to kill the MacBook Air and service the market segment it once occupied with a combination of the MacBook and MacBook Pro non-touchbar. However that didn't seem to work out the way they planned because consumers kept buying the old MBA, probably b/c MacBook Air also was the low-cost entry point to Mac ecosystem, and there's a noticeable difference between a 12" and 13.3" screen.
I actually don't agree about the XR v XS. Apple's in a situation where much of the market sweet spot for new iPhones exists within that $700-1200 range with a set of preferences around a 5.8"-6.5" size and expectations of certain features and capabilities. The smartphone market is gigantic and if you want to be a player in it at some point you need to differentiate the demand into two or more products, which means drawing the line somewhere in terms of price and features.
XS is 33% more expensive than XR, and the XR drops the dual camera and OLED, while being roughly the same size as the XS, plus a few things to lower cost. I don't know if there are other features you'd realistically want to cut, so it seems to cover the low-end of that sweet spot. The only thing Apple could do with it is maybe lower the price to $699. Meanwhile, I'm not sure what other tech the XS could add to move it further upmarket from the XR. I'm not sure I would have done it differently this year, given the available tech.
My guess from reading lots of peoples thoughts on this is there's a confusion in the relationship between size vs price. It'd be clean and easy if demand for larger phones correlated with willingness to spend more, but that really isn't the case for a lot of segments of that market. E.g. in China there's a preference for larger devices at lower price points. And there's also the quarter miss which is bringing a lot of these discussion up, which was mostly driven by China's massive recession, but fingers are I think unfairly pointing at the XR/XS lineup.
I've been watching the Apple product lineup closely for many years with a particular eye to market segmentation, and my take-away is that while Apple always strives to make it as easy as possible for consumers to choose their preference in product lineups, the fact is both the shifting cluster of preferences consumers have and the technology available to ship means most years they're off the mark by a bit.
Shifting a product line is a multi-year exercise and it creates anachronisms along the way - for instance, see the transition to iPad Pro in 2016-2018. It took a few years to sufficiently move the consumer iPad downmarket ($329) and the Pro upmarket ($799) to have meaningful distinction, and that had to be done incrementally both in testing the market's interest and in delivering on the key tech to do so. The iPad lineup during those years wasn't as ideally distinct as it could have been, e.g. the 9.7" iPad Air 2 and 9.7" iPad Pro both being sold in 2016 wasn't a big distinction, and the 12.9" was far afield from both. Then the next year the 10.5" Pro selling alongside the prior year's 9.7" Pro was also a bit weird, but made sense from a clearing out the inventory perspective.
When they were a smaller company, it was easier to distinguish market segments (e.g. Jobs' famous 2x2 of pro/consumer and desktop/laptop in 97), in part because they had to simply ignore many parts of the market, and because the tech was simpler and changed more quickly. I think the situation we're in now is in part because they went all-out on the X last year to create a distinction between regular and 'pro' models, and because rate of change in tech in general is slowing down. My guess is if they keep this going, in the next few years they will try to draw a bit more distinction between the two lines. The challenge to that going forward is much of the tech differentiation possible is now in software rather than hardware, and the whole zero marginal cost of software actually makes product segmentation harder.
This is a completely different time than the 90s, when Apple's market strategy was failing, they were fast running out of cash, and had too many SKUs. The scale back then is orders of magnitude different than now, and the health of the company is a complete reversal. All this perpetual doom and gloom around Apple is silly.
The same amount of hell as for the issues that were happing when he had the reigns? And that we then still had to endure because they got ignored or not fixed in time?
I must be pretty lucky. I've been using Apple products since the original iMac and the only problem I've ever had was when I dropped my phone on a rock and cracked the screen. Apple was great about replacing it for me too.
Regarding CPUs, I'm personally much more interested in being able to run macOS on my computer, iOS on my phone, and tvOS on my TV and have them all work together in ways that make me happy. If Apple could add a car to that, I'd be thrilled. I'm always willing to try other options, but I've just never found a setup that worked quite as well for me.
For example, I have a computer I built from parts from NewEgg and Nvidia about a year ago. It has a Threadripper 1950X processor, 128GB of RAM, and an Nvidia Titan V card in it. I used it for about a week and then went back to my MacBook Pro. The custom-built computer is gathering dust in the corner of my office. My point is that different things are important to different people.
Why did you build a machine with 128GB of RAM and then not use it? Was there a specific task you built it for? Why didn't you just rent some instances from AWS?
Yes, I built it for a project I was working on. I planned to use the machine for development and maybe gaming afterward but kept going back to my laptop since it was easier to use. I hadn't really expected that to be the case, but that's how it turned out.
Post 2015? Maybe I'm just spoiled, but I can't type on them to save my life.
I had a 2006 MBP and every 3 - 5 years since, but after a few months with the latest line I jumped to a Dell XPS running Ubuntu, and I never looked back. Had to find new tools and learn new shortcuts, but after a month or so I adjusted, and I never have to endure that hellish keyboard again.
Yes, 2018. I have been using MBs since 2004. So I was very skeptical because of all the bad news I had heard. But since it is a company standard I didn’t have great choice. And I have to say: it is really a great product. It is fast, the screen is amazing, it is silent and the keyboard is just great (for me).
EDIT: the worst MB I had was the white one... the case broke open, the color was yellow-ish in the end
People fail to appreciate the fundamental differences between functional and divisional orgs and how that constrains Apple.
At Microsoft, the head of Xbox marketing reports to the head of Xbox and the head of Azure marketing reports to the head of Azure.
At Apple, there is no divisions, every Apple marketer is responsible for the success of every Apple product and reports to the head of Apple marketing. But the only way this is possible is if every single Apple employee is able to hold every single Apple product line in their head at the same time.
This is an enormous constraint but it's also foundational to Apple mythos because it allowed them to kill the iPod. Divisional orgs have an enormously hard time with disruptive innovation because it upends the power structures of those with the most power. At Apple, there wasn't any person with the title "Head of iPod" whose job would have been in danger if the iPhone overtook the iPod. This was the reason Apple and pretty much only Apple have ever aggressively obsoleted their very best selling product and emerged even stronger out the other side.
You can argue the merits of functional vs divisional all day long and many have but none of those arguments will gain any traction inside of Apple. Apple will remain functional until the day it dies because functional is what allowed Apple to kill the iPod.
> But the only way this is possible is if every single Apple employee is able to hold every single Apple product line in their head at the same time.
Just to clarify: every public product line. If Apple is working on autonomous vehicles, there's no way that every (or even most) employees at Apple know about it.
"But the only way this is possible is if every single Apple employee is able to hold every single Apple product line in their head at the same time."
Ridiculous. Apple has an incredible amount of secrecy across its different departments. Functional orgs don't require the hoi polloi to know everything, as long as mgmt does.
Yes, but obviously they cannot fix the more urging problems in their core business: Keyboards, laptop CPU's and memory, macOS development. It's a desaster area every developer working with their products wants to leave as soon as possible.
And why should I trust them with an iPhone or car then, when the simpliest products were run into the ground.
Keyboards, laptop CPU's and memory, macOS development. It's a desaster area every developer working with their products wants to leave as soon as possible.
Jesus, calm the hell down.
It’s okay to have complaints about aspects of Apple’s products, but this wild exaggeration isn’t doing anybody any favours.
I see what you're saying, but given that developers have to have an Apple computer to develop for iOS and macOS, the computer lineup does rather underpin everything else.
The iPhone itself may very well have seemed like vanity project at the time.
Cars are computers with wheels these days, and there will be to some extent a merger of initiatives.
Steve Jobs did several BD deals with feature-phone manufacturers like Motorola before the iPhone specifically to learn and internalize issues from that space.
When you're sitting on $100B in cash, your cost of capital is probably cheap, and existential risks abound.
It makes a lot of sense to be working on trends which are nearly 100% guaranteed to have a massive impact. Since we know self-driving cars are coming one way or another, it makes sense for them to be there.
In 20 years, 'MacOS' could be powering your car and other devices and we might have forgotten about this iPhone thing.
If so, then the irony is everyone complaining of Innovation is dead at Apple. Lot of OS improvements, especially for the older model devices. But does Apple get appreciation for that or for Airbuds?
And with multiple product lines, company can have multiple focus.
I am pretty sure laptops (and other computers) are a vanity project for Apple at this point. They need some way for people to be able to write iPhone apps, and the history of Apple kind of makes it difficult to say "buy the latest version of Windows and use our Visual Studio plugin", so they make Macs. But I'm not sure it's a good business decision. The number of people that use a computer outside of work seems to be dwindling. Should probably focus everything on making sure they are using an iPhone, not something else.
The point is that that market is tiny compared to the people that buy iPhones. I also think Apple is doing good things on turning the iPad into a general purpose computing device. For my use cases (ssh somewhere to do work), it is way easier to manage than a laptop, and smaller. I imagine that as the product improves more people are going to make the jump, leaving MacOS in a weird place. (I switched from a Surface Pro 4 to an iPad Pro as my "laptop" and I am much happier. I still use a Windows workstation for everything that can't be done by ssh-ing to a Linux box, though, and of course prefer dual monitors and a mouse when I'm not travelling.)
Apple is the most reliable computer manufacturer of all, according to ConsumerReports actual statistics.
Now according to BS fake news that is paid by Apple competition, yes, there are lots of problems with Apple computers (like 3 or 5 people that complained on Twitter), and nothing with Apple competitive products ever (unless it's a widespread recall like with Samsung...)
Also, what's your problem? If you have any problem, Apple will fix it for free. It's called WARRANTY.
Reliability is one thing, and whether it's "excellent" or "great" is a small difference. Apple laptops radio the top spot in different categories on consumer reports. And the ones they trade with are typically far cheaper.
Reliability? They can't make a laptop keyboard that survives an encounter with a crumb and if you open your laptop too many times the video cable gets severed: https://ifixit.org/blog/12903/
> Maybe it's time to shut down the stupid vanity projects and focus on your core business instead?
What is the "vanity project" in this case? I think it's pretty clear that Mac sales won't last forever, and it's not like Apple is strapped for cash and can't afford to pay for both teams.
I assume he's talking about the car project. It seems like they now have fewer than 1000 engineers on that project, so I can't imagine what they're doing with that few engineers. That would be pretty small scope in the auto sector. There's one large automaker I consult for and they've got more people than that just working on software they use internally.
So, in scale, it might seem like a vanity project, but Apple obviously knows something we don't. For example, Tesla hired a couple of chip engineers from Apple and designed their own chip (to replace the NVidia gpu they were using). Maybe Apple has something unique in the pipeline that would be applicable to machine vision or something else useful to cars and it makes sense to market that to OEMs (I highly doubt they're building an entire car with so few engineers, makes more sense that they would be supplying a component and/or software).
Somehow they manage to make their entry level stuff to higher quality, nobody is complaining about the iPad 2018, at their high end it's not just that people have higher expectations it's that their process is broken, they're churning out expensive, flawed devices.
Apple is a very profitable company, with massive cash flow. I would love to know why their laptop lagges in hardware. Seriously can’t they hire 200 people to work on it or on iOS and really crush the competition
The word 'they' suggests some kind of hive mind at work. In reality it's more like 1 - 2 people at the top making decisions.
If those people drag their heels for ever, or just don't care it won't happen.
The real question is why should they care. I mean even if you give them stocks, by the time they vest, they would have got their money. After that you can go work for whomever you like.
> The real question is why should they care. I mean even if you give them stocks, by the time they vest, they would have got their money. After that you can go work for whomever you like.
Apple’s executive team is not known for ditching the company the moment their stocks vest.
