What’s Apple’s competitive edge going forward?
blogs.harvard.edu
blogs.harvard.edu
Another competitive edge is chip design. Apple's A9x has a custom PowerVR implementation that blows its competitors out of the water in terms of power and efficiency. They seem to be consistently ahead in this regard.
Apple's major R&D investments right now are in Music, VR/AR, and the car project. They're working on some cool things in music that I can't talk about, but IMO music is too small of a market with too small margins, and Apple is putting way too much effort into it. Apple has made some really good VR/AR hires, but Facebook, Microsoft, and Alphabet have better teams. Who knows how the car project will turn out.
Apple is currently investing more in R&D than they ever have before. This scares me because their successful projects have almost always been on the thin side investment wise. Apple has traditionally launched products with the bare minimum of features and built up from there. People hate them for it, but it works. I hope they're not moving to a more monolithic model.
Lastly, Apple seems to have had a collapse in quality in the past year or so, especially with phones. This is anecdotal as I haven't seen any actual data on it, but I know so many people who have gone through numerous iPhones (for the most part 6s's and 6s Pluses) that have had one problem after another. I've been pretty lucky, but I have a 6, not a 6s. My previous 5s, however, barely lasted a year.
This is interesting because it wasn't why people started switching in droves, it was because customers perceived the product to be much better than the competitions.
Many things that Apple does in the supply chain are completely out of reach for it's competitors either because of resources or culture.
The latest iPhones have curved glass displays, even more accurate color reproduction retina displays, much more advanced baseband and OS, multiple microphones, etc, not to mention it's thinner. These advances come with trade-offs - the more parts there are, the more likely it's to break.
"Mess"
Billions of smart phones, dozens of smart phone makers, dozens of different operating system customizations and problems, dozens of different environments to get used to. Will HTC's lineup be any good this time around? Motorola?
Apple solves all of that for consumers. They remove the swamp of potentially bad choices. Apple so far has done a tremendous job of reliably delivering a high quality product each generation. Only Samsung can claim that in the Android world. I've had a good experience with the Galaxy S line of phones, most of the other Android phone makers are very hit or miss year to year.
Sadly the software quality and leadership needed to ensure it isn't.
But the reality of the 'secret sauce' is pretty a banal. They basically just stamped down more clusters, and introduced an interconnect. This is not something other vendors haven't done in the past. They didn't make major architectural changes.
It would be like claiming that taking two Intel CPUs, and arraying them with a custom bus means you've changed the design of the CPU cores.
He apparently caught Jobs' attention when he worked with samsung to ensure steady supply of RAM and display for Apple.
Their sales may have levelled but they are pretty profitable. News from summer 15:
>Apple Inc. recorded 92% of the total operating income from the world’s eight top smartphone makers in the first quarter, up from 65% a year earlier
With Samsung being the other profitable company. Since then:
>Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO said in a statement. "Our revenue grew 30 percent over last year to $74.6 billion
and:
>Samsung Electronics warned that its profits could fall again this year, as it announced a 19 per cent fall in net profit for 2015. The drop was largely driven by a 31 per cent operating profit decline for its IT & Mobile division – dominated by the mobile phone business, which has continued to lose market share to Chinese rivals
Which suggests Apple may be making over 100% of phone industry profits. Not a bad competitive position.
Abstract: A guy fuels the brand war using a "harvard.edu" domain, some hand wavy anecdotes, and ugly English.
I've been looking for a replacement for my x201 thinkpad for about two years, for me, it's the last high quality laptop that exists with linux support. Taking OSX is fine because it's widely used and has a POSIX backend/bash/etc
So, if you want high quality hardware and a POSIX OS then OSX/Apple is definitely where you go.
and it runs linux better than most laptops /anyway/.
For me a well crafted tool is more important than a highly performant one in terms of GPU/CPU throughput.
Build quality and driver support mean a lot to me, which is why I'm still using a 5-6 year old Thinkpad X201
I also used Thinkpads as long as I was on linux. But I dropped linux because it took so much more time to administrate compared to OS X.
Let's say I read that the HP Xbook 2788Q is the greatest laptop ever and has perfect Linux support, and want to buy one. First of all since HP has so many different laptops, finding a store that actually carries a particular HP laptop is very tricky so it's basically impossible to get a hands on look at the laptop before buying. Then it turns out that HP doesn't sell the Xbook 2788Q in my country, they sell the (visually similar) 2789P instead. Are there any major differences? Is the reviews for the 2788P relevant? There's no easy way to tell, making it very difficult to compare and buy laptops.
Apple makes it easy, a MacBook is a MacBook all around the world so I know exactly what I'm getting.
Which is another problem as well. Everybody has plenty of experience with terrible machines from HP/Lenovo/Dell making it more difficult to accept that this particular machine might actually be awesome. Almost no one has used a terrible Apple computer.
Revenue from Mac (laptop and desktop combined) sales was only 13% in 2013. Moreover looking at the year-over-year growth Mac sales saw the biggest decrease. I guess more recent numbers are not much different.
The problem for Apple is also that their laptops are consumer machines not business machines (no docking station, subpar integration in Microsoft ecosystem). The Notebook market is shrinking and I suspect consumer market is shrinking much faster than business.
I wouldn't be surprised if they sell the Mac division and concentrate on iPads with keyboards. The new 2015 MacBook is a hint in this direction.
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/01/these-ch...
I am no Apple fan per se; I loved their laptops but I got burnt; I forgot the English/American term for it; monday laptop or something I think it is?
The best laptops I had before Apple were Fujitsu... And the warranty. US/EU companies should be so ashamed. For not paying more they would get the laptop from my home and give me a new one mostly, no questions asked. Dropped, water damage, whatever. They still do that for company laptops but they are not so interesting anymore. They were then (8 years ago?) for me, especially the P1510/20 series. Panasonic took that over but they are a lot more expensive. My last P1510 works fine still. Brilliant stuff. Anyway.
After that;
My first 2 Macbooks were magic. I dropped an entire pot of tea on my 2nd one; it was before the moist sensors and it was under warranty so they replaced it. Very nice. While it was in 'repair' I needed to work; I bought a Macbook Pro and it was horrible. I got the old Macbook back and the Pro which should be faster was slower. Brought both to Apple (in Amsterdam) and they said it had something to do with my software. Yeah. VIM. It's super heavy. Very nasty experience. Battery life on the Pro was not there either but they couldn't find anything so I had to suck it up.
I bought an Air 11 inch. What a GREAT machine. Excellent battery life (I USE VIM 90% OF THE DAY FFS), light, looks good.
A friend told me the Macbook pro is excellent. So I gave the Air away to a friend and bought a kitted out Pro. The misery. No battery life and it was slow with max mem and cpu. Slower than the Air on everything. Again; Apple says it isn't. I won't mention Vim again.
Having said all that; smartphones. I want to use Android. I want to believe in Android and Android phones. I have tried all top phones for Android. But no, it doesn't work; iPhone really feels so much better. And tablets there is no comparison; iPad wins hands down. The MS stuff starts to get somewhere but i'm not using tablets for productivity as it still feels annoying and without productivity iPad really feels so nice. Maybe it happens (I'm trying) one day.
When I leave home on long trips I bring an iPhone, iPad and Lenovo X220 (18 hours battery). There is currently nothing that works better for me.
Edit: X220 is with Ubuntu; I cannot get into Windows for the past 33 years; I went from Basic -> CP/M -> MS DOS (very shortly) -> Unix (forgot the flavor) -> SunOS/Solaris -> Linux; Windows feels distinctly alien. It is not hatred or anything else than that I really cannot into it or see how I could work efficiently with it.
For the type of stuff I do at home, games and graphics, CPU and discrete GPU matter a lot.
So given the price difference from a Macbook Pro to similar specked Windows laptops, I could never justify the 1000 € price difference specially when the hardware has issues unjustifiable for a 2 500 € laptop (2.5x the average engineer salary on my home country).
Are you implying there was some hardware reason your Macbook Pro was slower than an older Macbook?
And contrary to all CPU/HD/Memory specs and benchmarks and reviews for the respective models?
I'd be surprise if it was not software related.
And while you might "only" use Vim, that doesn't mean much. I'm pretty sure you also browse, check email and do other things, so you do use many apps, Vim is just what you use most frequently.
In any case, all it takes is a single rogue app to make a machine crawl -- some haxie you installed that provides some third party functionality but don't consider an app you use because you don't interact with it, or even Spotlight with a corrupted index.
>A friend told me the Macbook pro is excellent. So I gave the Air away to a friend and bought a kitted out Pro. The misery. No battery life and it was slow with max mem and cpu. Slower than the Air on everything. Again; Apple says it isn't. I won't mention Vim again.
It's not just Apple saying those machines are faster.
I can't understand how a developer (since you use Vim) can make such statements. It's not very difficult to compare the specs of the baseline configurations of the two models.
I've done heavy graphics, 3D, 4K video editing and DAW work on Macbook Pros and Airs -- while recent Airs are decent, there's simply no comparison. And it's trivial to show it in all kinds of benchmarks and tests.
I am making statements of what I observed. If benchmarks show that the Pro is faster but to me it feels slower would that matter to me? Not really. I do not do 3d work or video editing and maybe it is faster in that; to me while coding it just does not feel as snappy and I can just show the beach ball to you on the pro while I have never even seen it on the air during work.
But that is nothing compared to the battery life; this is not subjective; I just get a few hours out of my macbook pro's battery while, again with the same config, my air did basically all day (6-8 hrs) and my x220 does 12-13 hours. OpenPandora does an easy 10 hours. The 2015 pro is by far the worst I have while for me battery life is more important than speed. I really don't need speed for what I do even while devving games (2d).
Whatever the issue; I will never buy that again; Apple did do nothing to help even though I showed them, in person, the issues. I might buy an air again though ; especially if the battery life improves to 12+ hrs.
So, clearly, unless you SSH, you also install all kinds of stuff to support those languages (compilers, runtimes, linters, the whole of cabal, etc).
>I do not do 3d work or video editing and maybe it is faster in that; to me while coding it just does not feel as snappy and I can just show the beach ball to you on the pro while I have never even seen it on the air during work.
Well, I'm a coder too, and I use Vim too (also ST3, Eclipse, XCode and Idea for different stuff) and I've never seen the beach ball while coding with vim on my MacBook Pro. So what now?
In any case, I don't think a support team in a company is the one to solve such software issues. They are just some random guys (not even CS degrees) with general knowledge of computers, that mostly run through "customer service" scripts.
Given that it's 100% a software issue (and not e.g. a faulty HD causing slowdowns), the best way for someone who is a programmer is to go down and trace the root cause themselves. Try booting from another drive. Run dtrace (or what's called on the Mac). Check Activity Monitor. Etc.
Whenever I have such issues, on OS X, Windows or Linux it's just a hour or so to find the culprit. At worst, a day, after you already have a strong clue.
The battery life seems to be of the same origin. Increased CPU usage depletes the battery faster. I get 6-7 hours from my MBP, with Chrome and programming and mail and stuff going on, and it's a 2 year old machine.
It sounds like you would have allowed a burn-in period, but it has to be said: Rendezvous, et al., and a lot of other things in the OSX consumer package, need to be turned off - if you want a Pro config, out of the box-like ..
(PS; I followed the same path as you, albeit a more SGI/Mips/Linux-oriented, and you can have my rMBP when you pry it from my cold, dead hands. Or, when its battery dies, or something like that.. Can you imagine if SGI had made a laptop?)
He isn't wrong, you are just looking at different sets of measurables.
Take it to the store, you dummy. People are so used to the complete lack of customer service from everybody else that this doesn't occur to them.
The whole point of paying more for Apple stuff is that they make and sell high quality gear. On the rare occasion when there's a quality issue, you just take it to the store and they fix it right there and then, or if it can't be fixed there, in 2-3 days.
As to what the advantage is, they're the only ones that know how to make easy to use, high quality computing devices. They could easily go for the marketshare, but that's not the game they choose to play. They choose to own the profits, not market share. Perhaps an old fashioned way of doing things, but I like it.
It's great to be the only one who knows how to do stuff properly. Netflix is the only company that knows how to properly run a streaming video business. Amazon is the only one that knows how to properly sell stuff on the internet. FB is the only one that knows how to do social networking. Google is the only one that knows how to do search. Tesla is the only one that knows how to properly make a luxury electric car. And so on and so forth. When you're the only one that knows how to do stuff, your lead is nearly insurmountable, since the competitor has to not merely be as good to win, it has to be twice or three times as good, which is impossible to do in some markets.
All joking aside, they have a net of something like $165 billion in cash. That's a very large competitive advantage indeed, even if they had to take a large tax hit on it in the process of repatriating. Basically every other phone maker except Samsung has to be careful not to make a big mistake from one generation to the next, or it might be their last.
This is exactly opposite to what Jobs wanted (focus on 2 or 3 things). I think Jobs philosophy was necessary as long as there was one super good guy who needed to make all the calls. This is extremely fragile system. A much better system is 100s of product designers working on 100s of internal experiments and 10% of those passes internal scrutiny on quality and advancement of art to finally face the market except that not every product is expected to become billion dollar market. Just 10s of million dollar market supported by small a team should be good enough. Create a long tail instead of keep looking for that lucky unicorn.
When I walk into an Apple store, I see the three main product lines and I see a few others scattered. I see a great staff (35 floor employees on a Thursday afternoon!) helping people with new purchases, teaching people how to use their Macs, and occasionally a tutorial on a specific subject. In your vision, I would be walking into a Walmart.
Your assertion about brand dilution and attention to detail are incorrect. Good brands have been able to scale historically. GE - in their heydays - was worshipped for its ability to deliver countless appliances designed with very high quality, innovations and care. HP in its heyday had 100s of products known for its innovation and quality. Microsoft in its heyday had dozens of products that were either in top or close second in their category. Pepsi Co currently produces 100s of products under different brand names, many of them huge market leaders. Google has dozens of products (Email, maps, news, book search, scholar, docs etc etc) - all of which are pretty high quality and either in top or close.
Eventually companies don't sell product, they sell their philosophy and culture. Only anti-fragile way for long term survival is ability to scale and embed this philosophy without single braking point and by creating a long tail.
Apple's strength is to apply design to make superior products. They need to scale this strength to work on every aspect of life instead of just 3 devices. You should also read Talib's book on anti-fragility. Apple's (and Jobs) strategy is anti-thesis of that philosophy. Businesses are rewarded because others can't copy them easily. Apple will be rewarded if they can scale their design philosophy and process precisely because others have failed to do so.
PS: it's pretty bad form to down-vote because you don't agree with opinion.
Businesses are rewarded because they serve the community honorably at a profit.
Ignore single downvotes; they're often mistakes and usually corrected.
Also:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658683
> IIRC we first had this conversation about a month after launch. Downvotes have always been used to express disagreement. Or more precisely, a negative score has: users seem not to downvote something they disagree with if it already has a sufficiently negative score.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
> I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.
> It only becomes abuse when people resort to karma bombing: downvoting a lot of comments by one user without reading them in order to subtract maximum karma. Fortunately we now have several levels of software to protect against that.
There's another one from pg saying the same, but I can't find it at the moment.
But he did also say this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1057347
> My plan for dealing with downvoting is just not to display points on comments any more. The hard part is that to make that work, I also have to come up with alternative ways for people to find the comments they're most interested in on big threads.
I agree that people should avoid downvoting for disagreement, but it's probably more important to avoid accusing someone else of downvoting you for disagreement.
Apple has been selling computers for almost 40 years that cost more than their competitors. The average selling cost of Macs are still much higher than the industry average. The fact that Microsoft can sell any of their products at all when most people could easily use free open source alternatives means that MS must have some type of competitive advantage.
For both companies, good enough is not good enough for their customer base. For me personally, the integration of their products is a reason I choose them.