Hacker News Reader

Comment by appleiigs | Hacker News Reader

For the past decade I've been blindly buying Apple products (but been using Macs since late 90s), while looking at alternatives with disdain. Paying the Apple premium allowed the tech to get out of the way. Very happy to continue paying, but it seems like Apple is forcing me to leave. In this relationship, I'm the one getting dumped. I'm not sad about it, but from a business perspective why they are actively pushing me away? Canceling product lines (routers, mac pro), not updating the active ones (mac mini, iMac), and being difficult with the products they do update (MBP, iPhone).

On a relative basis, Apple has infinite resources. It has cash, the brand and can attract the right people to run the business. Each product line, like the routers and mac pro can be focused on because they have the resources to do it. Most companies re-focus on core products because they are spread too thin - Apple is not.

View on HN

From its actions, it's becoming quite clear that Apple does not know what to do with its financial muscle or no longer knows how to do things in parallel. The recent product abandonments seem to point to a future where only iPhones and iPads exist along with one laptop model (Apple TV may also disappear in a few years if Apple cannot or does not want to somehow get into large content production). Everything else is useless in the eyes of Apple and is easily dispensable. I wouldn't be surprised at all if by this time next year the only "computers" from Apple one MacBook Pro w/Touch Bar and one single iMac.

To a lay person, this doesn't look like better focus. It looks like:

* Incompetence in management, because of all the outdated stuff still being sold at high and old prices

* Inability to attract and/or retain good talent, because Apple is not expanding teams to sustain its product lines. It's instead closing down and collapsing them into the iPhone/iPad/MBP lines.

* A complete lack of vision, because nothing is being done for years on several product lines. If that's not shameful, I don't know what is.

It's very sad to see this unfold, but I guess all good things come to an end, and this is happening sooner than expected.

Tim Cook was supposed to be a logistics guy. "In parallel" should be his thing. To have years in between updating products is the opposite of what I expected to happen. Thought he'd put Apple on a schedule with periodic updates, like ducks in a row. This plus the lack of vision is sad for a company that had both.

EDIT: And look at Tim's wikipedia page, there's a quote: "You kind of want to manage it like you're in the dairy business. If it gets past its freshness date, you have a problem"

That's why you can't have administrators leading an innovation company. Administrators and beauracrats lack creative vision, and that's what sustained Apple all those years.

The sad thing is that creative vision is one of those things that all of us start out with, but then it gets beat out of us through the course of childhood and mandatory education.

Referring to Tim Cook as an "administrator" or "bureaucrat" betrays a stunning level of ignorance of his achievements. His significant optimizations of Apple's massively complex supply chain is the reason the company has been able to sell over one billion iPhones (and countless other devices) to date. So he has plenty of innovations under his belt. They are just operational innovations, so most techies tend to either not be aware of them or take them for granted (since it's not their domain of expertise).

What made Steve Jobs different was that he was a product guy and an incredible visionary to boot. He had the rare ability to care about details of individual products while also having a solid grasp of the big picture in terms of how those products should come together to form an ecosystem. I think Tim Cook tries to delegate those things to people who just aren't as good as Steve Jobs (naturally), which explains the questionable decisions Apple has made recently regarding their products.

So he's a supply-chain dynamo. Vastly different skill set than that of a strong-willed and opinionated designer. You are right though, he is delegating the 'vision' parts of his assignment to his inferiors and Apple suffers for it.

I don't know if you have ever hang around supply-chain people, but with the ones I know, I would not want them designing stuff.

You make it sound as if he single-handedly sold over a billion phones. What else helped sell over a billion iPhones? Saccharine, simplified, cheery, brain-dead UI; an army of Apple loyalists, explainers, and apologists (still mourning the loss of their Beloved Leader); several metric fuck-tons of marketing and advertising spend, a panoply of factors that result in a once-per-year or once-per-every-other-year purchase cycle, and a phalanx of impeccably-decorated retail locations, among other things. Sure, Mr. Cook plays his role, and Apple's SCM is best-in-the-world, but I think there are more Tim Cooks out there than Steve Jobs.

That quote is about Inventory and Just-In-Time production.

Not product freshness.

> no longer knows how to do things in parallel

Doing things in parallel isn't how the org is setup: instead of vertical feature groups like most other companies (a Mac division, a phone division, accessories, etc), the company is split into design/hardware engineering/software. Means you get more integration with each part and less cross-org battles that Microsoft was famous for back in the day. Downside is that when the next iPhone was all hands on deck, they were pulling people off of Mac OS to work on it.

The impression i have is that Apple under Jobs was about pitching products to one guy, Jobs. If he wanted to use it, it went on sale, if not then forget about it leaving the lab.

>A complete lack of vision

Actually its the complete opposite. They have a strong vision of the future and are shaping whole company to be ready for it. That means dropping all the things that will become irrelevant/commodity in ~5 years. Personal computer is one of those things.

In Apple vision future iteration of iPhone will replace _everything_. Small portable gateway to the cloud.

Yes, this means dropping all the pro-summer products. Apple doesnt need top 5% consumers anymore, the Final Cut Pro/Aperture fanatics, the DTP market, education, software devs. This was important in early 2000 to establish leading brand thru influencers. Today all of it gives marginal return on investment, so why bother when you can concentrate on volume?

Apple are clearly abandoning the concept of an all-Apple solution, and the concept that all their products are part of an ecosystem. I've said it before, iPhone and iPad are successful because "there's an app for that" and if Apple doesn't look after developers and content creators, how is that going to work? If they don't own the whole experience then how do they deliver "it just works"?

People go Apple because they want the integrated experience, but if that's not on offer anymore, if you have to actually research which is "the best" of any component in your setup, why not re-evaluate everything? Eventually it will get to the point where it's as much hassle to use Apple as it would be to use Windows or Linux and at that point, it will boil down to a decision on price, and Apple will lose heavily. Those HP Mini Workstations look pretty sweet, compared to a Mac Mini...

Yeah I'm starting to get disappointed in the direction they're moving. My mb pro is from early 2013 and runs fine, but I'll be looking to upgrade in the next couple years. Nothing I'm seeing in the product line is very encouraging at this point. I'm very disappointed if this router news is true. Router firmware updates on most products are non-existent, but with my Apple router I haven't needed to worry about that.

Yes, Apple shouldn't have given me any reason to look elsewhere, because I might like what I see. Which I did recently - for less money as a MBP, I bought a near top of the line desktop (dual boot Win 10 and free linux) and still have money left over for an ultrabook (which I might not buy because I'll try my iPad for mobility)

For all we know Apple is just canning Airport and launching a new product that replaces it and does other things.

It seems kind of silly for Apple to sell a handful of separate products --each replaceable by outside companies' offerings -- when they could instead sell one integrated Apple TV/Airport/Time Capsule/MacMini/whatever. Slap a touchscreen on it call it (Apple icon) Home and sell it for $299 (or $499 if you want a decent SSD).

Apple Airport Time Capsule is now $399, with 3 TB HDD.

"The Time capsule doubles as a backup storage hard drive for Mac computers."

It seems that they won't offer even anything like that, when the "people familiar with the matter" are right. From the article:

"Apple began shutting down the wireless router team over the past year, dispersing engineers to other product development groups"

"Apple hasn’t refreshed its routers since 2013 following years of frequent updates to match new standards from the wireless industry. The decision to disband the team indicates the company isn’t currently pushing forward with new versions of its routers."

> Time Capsule is now $399

Yeah maybe add $x00 to my examples above.

> "Apple began shutting down the wireless router team over the past year, dispersing engineers to other product development groups"

It specifically says they put some of them on the Apple TV team and Apple is generally pretty secretive about entirely new offerings. "Apple is getting out of the router business" is clearly an extrapolation from "Airport is not going to get future updates". That may be correct but it's not a 'matter' that the sources are likely to be 'familiar' with unless they are senior executives.

I'm guessing because when it comes to beefy desktops and chubbier but port friendly laptops, the Windows ecosystem beats them out on price. They don't want to get in a price war with anyone as they will drive down their famous 30-40% margins. I also think Apple is dedicated to stop being a traditional computer company entirely and to become a mobile-only entity in the long run.

I think Cook and other leadership are really focused on Jobs' vision of the post-PC period. The problem here is that the PC's never went away. We just stopped updating them as often. I'm afraid Jobs died when it was looking like PCs could ultimately be replaced by mobile devices in most circumstances. I imagine Cook is under pressure by the board to "fulfill Steve's last bullet points" which was an email that was famously leaked recently. It seemed very 2007-2010-ish level of thinking, when the mobile revolution was in full force, but come 2011-2016, suddenly tablet sales stagnated and PC sales didn't bottom out and have recently gone up.

Sadly, with VR and AR possibly being the new big thing, a beefy video-card is all but mandatory and not the kind of thing that can be shoved into a 3-5 watt SoC. That's another big thing Apple is going to ignore because it goes against its mobile-only vision.

Apple is in a strange position because no one there seems to have the political clout to say "Steve was wrong, the post-PC world isn't happening and we need to beat Lenovo, MS, and Dell on laptops, desktops, and accessories. PC's arent going away guys!" Jobs as a dead prophet is unquestionable. This is the problem of having a cult of personality instead of proper flexible leadership. Cook has become a caretaker to Jobs' vision and Jobs' vision is probably wrong. The moves they are now making are probably wrong.

> the Windows ecosystem beats them out on price

Just from a "Apple Laptop" vs. "Windows Laptop" perspective, the MS Surface laptops are a bit pricy if you're only looking at the lower end of Apple's offerings.

That's the beauty of it though. If you want something slick and powerful, there are options. If you want a $250 piece of shit laptop, there are options. If you want to build a workstation taylored to your workload, there are hundreds of companies making parts you can incorporate into your build.

You have backup plans for your hardware, and your software. If either one starts to reek, you can replace it without losing the other.

AFAIK Jobs' vision of the post-PC era never meant the PC died or was abandoned. It simply was no longer the only tool in the box. iPads are great. iPhones are great. I have both. But I (and many others, not just developers) need capable and performant desktop computing devices.

I think the answer is margins.

If you're not making 40+% profit margins you're bringing the company's overall margins down and have to go.

You're probably right, but if so, Apple is taking a short-sighted view.

We're moving on from product and platform wars to ecosystem wars, and the core feature of Apple's ecosystem is all Apple software and hardware working together (preferably to the exclusion of non-Apple products, but not always). Having control of everything gives you the best chance of making everything just work.

Dropping products (X-Serve, monitors, routers etc) and neglecting products (Mac Pro, Mac mini etc) makes the whole ecosystem weaker.

For comparison, the main rival ecosystems are Google and Microsoft. Google's is based on doing everything online and creating a complete Google stack. Microsoft's is based on supporting everything cross-platform (Windows, iOS, Android, MacOS and increasingly Linux) both online and offline.

You could also argue that it makes the ecosystem smaller and easier-to-manage. It can make it so small that the ecosystem fails to be an ecosystem at all.

That's the bean-counter mindset that ruins companies. (See the auto industry.)

Apple had an integrated vision for computing. Wireless routers were never going to be more than a round off error on their balance sheet, but they did it anyway because they wanted it done right.

With apple giving up on monitors, it's been a sad year: the bean counters are clearly in control.

>That's the bean-counter mindset that ruins companies.

I was laid off from a semiconductor company years ago because the product we were supporting was aging, and their projections for the successor product did not show a 40+% profit margin, so they decided to simply exit the market altogether and dump their customers, who were really pissed.

Maybe it's the margins. But I prefer cash in the bank. Revenue dollars up, net income up. If you add up all the "mini product lines" together that will move the needle. They can't continue to have blockbuster products and too risk to rely on that. Samsung can burn their phones and be OK since they have other product lines.

Its not about margins (well, it is, but not primarily): its about story.

The AirPort line was born during a time when your ISP only provided you with a modem, if that. Wireless connectivity was a brand new world that required new hardware.

We're not in that world anymore: ISPs set up (and support!) wireless access with their networking at no extra charge. To most consumers, the AirPort went from being the simplest gateway to wireless coverage to being an accessory for the Apple-centric household. That's why you saw so many features added to the AirPort over time (hard drive, print server, airplay server). Bluetooth speakers, airplay receivers, AirPrint, etc. have over time obsoleted these uses.

There's another story for the Mac Pro - although many professionals who look to the Mac as an option among many systems probably won't like it.

The ISP story you're talking about does not apply to the entire world. There are hundreds of ISPs who still charge for a WiFi router separately. No firmware updates coming in is a huge concern for all these routers and devices.

Indeed. And where I live, pretty much everyone has municipal fiber. There is no ISP-provided default router—just an ethernet jack in your wall.

Yeah, but it's not just AirPort that's shrank. Apple appears to retreating on a whole bunch of fronts.

ISPs also charge you monthly for these services on top of your already existing service.

Usually for very mediocre equipment, and (if you have Comcast) it broadcasts publicly by default.

All of this makes sense if the routers they give you worked well. They don't. I find it impossible to airplay to the apple tv over the default comcast gateway, for a couple different reasons. So the idea that their products will 'just work' with the default setup is STILL laughable.

Not that their Airport Extreme is the best on the market, but it's still something substantially more reliable than whatever ships with your cable modem.

As others have said, ISP wireless routers are terrible and many charge you monthly. A big, still unsolved issues with wifi is coverage. Most people only have one router and dead spots. Wifi repeaters exist, but have issues of their own and aren't user friendly. My ISP charges me monthly and my neighbor wanted my WiFi password because his won't reach the other side of his house.

Acquiring something like Eero would help improve that story. Integrate it into a bunch of Apple devices would help the ecosystem.

I feel like Apple has given up a bit on Wifi and moved to out of band wifi and Bluetooth. I wish they had stuck to Wifi. I can't really use AirDrop because my laptop is too old and doens't support out of band wifi. I was very confused why two AppleTVs showed up when trying to use AirPlay until after googling I found out one was Bluetooth and the other was WiFi.

Margins don't matter. What matters is ROI and ROA.

When was the Mac Pro line cancelled? I can't find any reference to this.

oh sorry, I thought when the MBP touch bar was released the Mac Pro was no longer available from the Apple Store. I swear I confirmed that myself, but it's up for sale now. My mistake.

But, Mac Buyers Guide says hasn't been updated since Dec 2013.

Rumours to ATP.fm podcast (very close ties with apple employees) has heard a bunch of stuff including "No one is working on the Mac Pro"

Well, I can't imagine what they would be working on with the Mac Pro if they had people working on it for 3 years without any sort of update.

No updates for 3 years and the product page still points to Aperture, another canceled product. I'd say the MP is as good as dead at this point.

Actually, I stand corrected. It appears they updated the page to use Pixelmator benchmarks instead of Aperture. This update must have just happened because a friend of mine and I were joking about it a week or two ago.

http://www.apple.com/mac-pro/performance/

I wouldn't be surprised to see it cancelled sometime in the near future either. They've all but given up on their pro software - they're not exactly promoting Logic Pro or Final Cut X with any vigour.

Top end Macbook Pros are capable enough for their current audience for running the likes of Logic or FCP. So what's the point in maintaining top end hardware if they don't have the software?

I'm sure Apple will continue to do well with what it is these days, a fashion house. I'm not sure what my next laptop will be but I fear I've dug myself into a hole with OSX/MacOS. I spent most of last night and half of yesterday toying with Ubuntu and sadly it didn't do it for me. Sure, I was running it on my Macbook Pro and so the keyboard was all out of whack, which I'm sure is solvable, but I found it unstable.

So who knows. I'll keep this early 2013 Macbook Pro until it gives up the ghost (I think I'll have another couple of versions of MacOS in it before it's resigned to the scrap pile) but after that, no idea. Things don't look especially bright for Apple users outside those who are only interested in iOS devices.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com