Apple product ecosystem has fast become a solution looking for problem combined with touchy feely hokus pokus aided by synthetic exclusivity and nonsensical differentiation.
Why the hell do we need the iPad to take over the PCs? Why the hell do we need ARM CPUs in Macs? Nobody is solving any real problems with those things - it's only purpose is to make Apple's margins and control even greater. And we as consumers are supposed to pay attention to the news outlets droning on about it for no benefit!
I think Apple will do well going back to the basics - simplifying the product lines, selling what matters and focusing on increasing the reach of its products to price conscious buyers. I don't think the market has a big enough appetite for more BS however well marketed it may be.
Happy iPhone and iPad user here... but I can't help but think Apple is walking down an unfortunate path these days.
The recently refreshed MacBook Air and Mac mini really smacked me in the face. Astonishingly, ridiculously high prices for the specs. Upgrades at even crazier prices, even by Apple standards. Such a shameful show of greed and contempt for their customers.
I can't help but think Apple has decided it'll be the brand for rich people only (and people who haven't yet maxed out their credit), and to hell with everyone else. These days, the Genius Bar seems more interested in selling you upgrades rather than fixing your problems.
I think the more they build, the more they'll screw up. I've yet to see anything good coming out of Apple in the last few years.
- force-touch touchpads are so useless than not even them use the technology to any meaningful extent
- the Touchbar is completely useless, and anecdotally people stop using it after a few days
- their new butterfly keyboards are a nightmare to type on (albeit that's definitely subjective), and stop functioning with dust particles, and they haven't even acknowledged the problem before being hit with 2 class actions
- they've removed all useful ports from their laptops, and headphone jacks from their phones.
So much for the frequent claim that Apple is all marketing and no new technology, I guess.
Analysis like that tend to focus on single technologies like capacitive touchscreens or e-ink displays. Pretty much all the different single technologies many recent Apple products brought together existed in some way, shape or form before in consumer products. Single technologies don't make a product. Oh, and the UI matters. Having the same exact hardware with a better UI really does matter.
The problem with Apple is that they have solved certain use cases and form factors - and once solved, there is less and less money to be made on fine tuning and iterating on those designs.
For example:
Apple solved the laptop computer with the aluminum, unibody macbook (air ?) with chiclet keys and glass screen/trackpad. That's it. It's over. The laptop computer is solved - and all anyone wanted was a retina macbook air. That's it - that's all we wanted. The same old macbook air with magsafe, multiple USB ports and a graphics port. With retina.
Another example is the Mac Pro (tower) - this is a long-standing form factor in computing that is now solved. There is no doing this better than Apple did it with the last versions (2009 and later) of the mac pro tower. All anybody wanted was a Mac Pro tower with sata3 and usb3 and newer gfx connections. That's it - it was solved.
But we didn't get any of those things, did we ?
Minor iterations of existing designs are not enough for Apple - they have to do new things for economic reasons.
Honestly, as someone who has no interest in an ipad or an iphone or an iwatch and has always worried that focus on those items would cannibalize Mac and OSX ... looking back I wish they had focused even more on the iDevices and just left the Mac products alone - albeit with the little iterations of processor/ram/usb3/sata3/etc.
I think a lot of people are missing the point of the article. My take on it is that Apple is, again, losing it's way and the article points out some specific examples. Things like maps and Facebook integration are just the icing on the cake. I just can't shake the feeling that Apple doesn't care about the customer anymore.
With every new OS release Apple has moved toward homogenization of their product line. Soon there will be no difference between what's on your desktop and in your pocket, and I think this is a bad thing. Apple's main strength has always been its ability to attract "makers", however with this new direction I see them turning their back on developers, artists, writers, etc. Maybe that's a valid market and a good long term vision and if so then good for them.
However, for the first time in years I am looking for other alternatives for my future computing devices. And that makes me sad. I've really, really enjoyed (most of) their products over the last 20 years, but I guess like any other company, Apple has run out of steam.
To be honest, I am super unexcited by this. What I want to see from Apple is a move back to high software quality, high hardware quality and real vision for their products. At the moment their convergence between iPad and Macbook has essentially been to add sub-par versions of macbook features to the iPad and to make the macbook a second class citizen in terms of quality.
My big worry is that actually this is just acting as cover for deep underlying issues in a lack of real vision for how the iPad can become a real replacement for laptops and no vision at all for the desktop line. How crazy is it that Apple is pumping out products that re-implement Microsoft features from 5 years ago (after spending 5 years mocking Microsoft).
Apple is such boring stagnant soulless void, I don't know why people wouldn't want it chopped up just to see the component parts trying to innovate again.
What have they done in the last few years? Minor incremental updates to existing products, release another screen-strapped-to-face product years late to the party while also failing to figure out what to do in the software space to justify the device, and started issuing credit cards because they needed to branch out from just getting a cut of all sales that happen on-platform.
Not to mention Apple's making the same mistakes over and over. Same shitty glossy screen. Same idiotic mania to make products thinner at the expense of battery life (especially stupid from the company that swears you never need to change a battery). Same keyboards with no real Delete keys.
Now glued-in batteries. Soldered-in RAM.
This entire decline of Apple's product line reflects massive failure to recognize what Apple has helped prove: a lot of people don't need a computer. Computer users and tablet users are DIVERGING, so the last thing the devices should do is CONVERGE. If someone fires up a computer now, he needs a COMPUTER and not a crippled gimmick. Why would I buy a computer if it's just a tablet with a keyboard? I can buy... A TABLET WITH A KEYBOARD.
People are finally realizing that Apple is sadly detached from real-world usage, but they've been getting a free pass on it for decades. Literally decades. They capitalized when the competition simply showed greater stupidity than they did:
1. Creative Labs utterly blew the design and marketing of MP3 players.
2. Everyone blew the UI and functionality of cell phones, which pretty much fell off a cliff after the StarTAC.
3. Microsoft became moribund, lost, and increasingly irrelevant as the only things a lot of people needed to do were surf the Web and play media.
The sheen is off. It may be fiascoes like Maps that started some critical thinking, but there are many more fundamental problems that reveal Apple's dire need for a common-sense overhaul of its product line. Stuff like this: http://goldmanosi.blogspot.com/2012/06/will-apple-ever-fix-i...
It's about the ecosystem. in fact, it's about the perception of the ecosystem.
All of the changes - decaying Mac Pro, mediocre gimmicky MBP, end of this, end of that, confusion over Titan, Watch, which no one cares about - all suggest that Apple has lost the concept of brand and product synergy.
It looks trivial but it's actually fatal, because it undermines the perception that when you buy Apple you're buying Special.
Now you're just buying. And when a company is selling overpriced commodity hardware, it absolutely needs to convince its customers that it's offering more than that.
The only good news would be... if apple decides to "reverse course" questing for non-discerning-consumers, all the "crazy ones" will breathe a sigh of relief and buy a pile of new hardware.
I remember when apple gave up on its "apple-inward-looking" powerpc hardware and shipped intel machines. All of a sudden apple machines could run windows too, people could see more possibilities buying apple and the market for apple hardware became much larger very quickly.
A another feather in Apple's cap of woes, my issues with apple are:
1) Overpriced: While some Apple products outperform others, many are just pricey status symbols.
2) Walled Ecosystem: It's a no-go for developers. Why can't I write a simple program and run it on my phone without jumping through hoops?
3) Fragility: Apple could make their devices more durable without increasing costs. Instead, they opt for fragile designs that aren't easily repairable.
Honestly, it's like they're begging for a downfall and Id short their stock if I could.
Right in so many points:
"Now, it's all about the style": that's right, it's an accessory, it's the long awaited iPad pro + keyboard, a glorified browser for your social network, check photos and look chick and trending.
Why are we here? People have decided with their pockets, Apple is now the biggest company in the history of humanity.
Don't get me wrong, Apple has done a lot of stuff right, the amount of design and engineering behind the original iPhone it's incredible, and yes maybe a lot of the technology already existed but they polished the combined products until they got something that worked in such a nice fashion; that's the "magic" behind their products but from there is downhill.
iPad: bigger iphone.
iPad mini: mini- bigger iphone.
MacBook Air: let's trade some some performance and take away the capability of upgrade the machine in a pursuit of a more thinner machine.
MacBook: let's take the least powerful CPU from Intel (the reason behind the no-fan design"), cripple the typing experience, take away all upgrade-ability, cripple the semantics of touch from the track pad, take away all the ports.... WTF.. charge for the hub... and make it more expensive.....
But I think the problem is not Apple but the people buying their products and how they use them. It's a super glorified version of "I belong to the better group" psychology.
now that I type all this... it could make some sense to start looking all this not as a computer... or apple as a computer and software company but a boutique selling accessories.
I would love to tell you that thinkpads still make sense but the "no leds" and "screw keyboard" may prove me wrong.
I personally never found the Apple ecosystem very appealing because it's prohibitively expensive and they seem to want everything done "their" way whether that's software or repairs.
It really does come down to status. Apple isn't really a computer company anymore, it sells "Luxury Goods" and gets the same sort of value boost you see in diamonds, Rolexes, and Armani suits.
This isn't to say the components are trash, but if you removed the cachet of the brand, and the lock in afforded by OSX and iOS, you wouldn't see nearly the current stupidity.
I agree with you on many points and it seems obvious that apple is spread too thin these days and tries to do too much.
I dont think this statement is true however:
> The core market for Apple until quite recently was not the everyday user but developers, designers and the more tech savvy.
Historically the core market of Apple Computer has been graphic-designers, journalists and the education market. Developers have only been on the platform post OS X because of unix.
I agree with everything except Apple only being concerned with giving toys to geeks. The way Apple works is to introduce something new in a broad, gentle use and keep iterating with more use cases and improved performance from there.
So many comments about product features and dongles, USB-C and certain design elements of Apple notebooks… these are all trivial.
Apple’s growth for the last 10 years has been very heavily weighted towards the iPhone, and now everyone has one… or two or three or their are on their 11th. The market saturated. Everything is an iPhone, even non-iPhones. It wasn’t going to continue forever. It’s why they’ve been creating new products like the Apple TV and Apple Watch. But they haven’t yet found something like the iPhone that literally everyone wants. Maybe they find a universal computing platform, maybe they don’t. But Apple’s future doesn’t rest on adding back the headphone jack or getting rid of the touchbar or so-called “game changing” or “killer” features on existing platforms.
If you want Apple to sell one billion devices again then it’s gotta be some real sci-fi level shit. As pretty as the iPhone was, it’s the software that made it magic and set a new standard for how we interact with machines. That “next thing” is probably voice, but no one even seems close. Siri, Alexa, Google Now, Cortana… it’s BlackBerry, Nokia, Palm, etc.. Give me that Hollywood-level magic where the machine gets it right 99% of the time, goes beyond what I thought possible and responds instantly. Impossible? Maybe. But so was a fully optimized touch-based OS before someone did it.
Apple sells outrageously-overpriced commodity technology, coupled with gimmicky features, buggy software, and planned obsolescence, to naive consumers who buy it every year regardless.
AND
Apple’s products are so well-designed and reliable that customers remain satisfied for years and don’t feel the need to upgrade on an annual basis because their current devices do everything they need.
Also, Apple’s constant incremental innovation combined with the fact that they stopped all innovation a decade ago (save for headphone jack removal) will be the death of the company.
I am disappointed that Apple decided to emphasize form over function. Once upon a time, Apple products Just Worked. They were easy to use. You didn't need to read the manual. Updating to the latest version of the OS consistently made things better.
Nowadays the keyboards break. The UI is full of arcane non-discoverable features. Upgrading is a total crap shoot. It might make things better, or it might make things that have been running reliably for years suddenly stop working. And if that happens, it's really hard to go back. (On an iOS device it is usually impossible.)
The competition is even worse. No one makes a computer that Just Works any more. And that makes me sad.
Why the hell do we need the iPad to take over the PCs? Why the hell do we need ARM CPUs in Macs? Nobody is solving any real problems with those things - it's only purpose is to make Apple's margins and control even greater. And we as consumers are supposed to pay attention to the news outlets droning on about it for no benefit!
I think Apple will do well going back to the basics - simplifying the product lines, selling what matters and focusing on increasing the reach of its products to price conscious buyers. I don't think the market has a big enough appetite for more BS however well marketed it may be.
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