Apple's Achilles Heel | Hacker News Reader

Apple's Achilles Heel

daringfireball.net

66 points_pius48 comments

> The product that helped save Apple from bankruptcy 20 years ago is now turning into a barrier that is preventing Apple from focusing on what comes next.

I truly hate this attitude.

If you have a shit ton of money, you focus on what's right, not what makes you more money. There isn't an obvious Next Big Thing in computing, not like an iPhone anyway. The watch shows that. Apple should make the very best computers and wifi routers, and monitors, and NAS's, and cables possible. They should be beautiful, cost a bit more and they should just work. That's what makes apple special.

Now about those Apple routers, monitors and NAS's... ;-)

Without the vision, all they can look at is the balance sheet. Shame.

It's a publically traded company, if you just do "what's right" and ends up losing ton, they will be liable for the losses to the stakeholders. Size doesn't matter.

But Apple needs a better vision than just trying to keep the company afloat. It can be dead in 20 years.

The cloud is the Achilles heal in reality. The cadence for Apple was really this:

1. The computer is the hub. Your devices link to this.

2. The Cloud is the hub. We will pivot to a distributed system so all your devices can sync with/o wires.

3. The Phone is the hub. Your phone is a private mobile cloud-- an extension really; so you can still use the watch as a wallet and the phone camera and integrated sensors in upcoming devices to relay data to the cloud.

I am not going to comment on the strategy but the article says much of what I am saying in a different way. The phone is pretty damn good; but I think the heal is the cloud. It still has many issues and that costs user trust. The phone is a relay but the foundation is Shakey.

Also, Apple is going to lose users because the computer provides the lock in. I was priced out of Mac a month ago. Ubuntu is pretty great. I built a hackintosh that was on par with the 1999.99 iMac offering.

Sure it had no screen but included in the cost but it was $580 w/a Skylake i5.

The point is; shortly after I broke my phone. I just went Android. It's wayyy worse but I didn't need the iPhone to complete the relay because I have no Mac and because of the sync on iCloud "optimizing" storage it takes literally 8 days to copy the 16gb folder.

Tldr It's a foundation. The heal is iCloud.

In passing, "The heal is iCloud" should be heel, if there's still time to correct it...

Maybe what you wrote makes accidental sense.

One cynical takeaway from the story of Achilles and Thetis is that one can never do enough for one's children (or conversely) there's always an opportunity to blame someone else ;)

In this case-Apple, as the proud parents of the Mac, iPhone and iPad, a possible strategy, much like Thetis dipping her son again in the River Styx, is to find ways to take advantage of the same R&D across their product line.

I've always thought that a greater convergence between iOS and now macOS was in store. Maybe as a "pro" I wouldn't want that - but if it could make both better then that convergence in terms of financial and technical focus would be a win-win for Apple and its customers.

As the owner of a Late 2013 MacBook Pro (the best iteration IMHO) and the user of the latest TouchBar MacBook Pro (work laptop) I am bemused by some of the decisions Apple has made. Of course this article comes out on the heels (yeah, yeah, sorry) of the announcement that Apple now has 246 billion in the bank, so what the hell do any of us know.

The thing is, I don't think Apples focus was diverted to the iPhone - I strongly suspect it was diverted to other projects we don't even know about.

When it comes down to it, there isn't a ton of innovation coming out of the desktop on any platform lately. The focus in the industry is web and mobile, not on the traditional desktop ecosystem that underpins those two things.

Really another reason for Apple to "drop the ball" on design and just re-relase the old Mac Pro shell with upgraded internals.

Sometimes a half-assed effort is better than none.

As long as its the old ironsides one and not an upgraded trashcan.

I'd say Microsoft Studio was an innovative desktop platform, and so is the HP Envy Curve. There's interesting stuff happening in gaming desktops, too, including VR add-ons.

If you include laptops as part of the "traditional desktop ecosystem" then there are lots of innovative 2-in-1s, detachables and convertibles, including the Lenovo Book (a laptop with no physical keyboard).

The "traditional desktop ecosystem" in the form of Windows has also added a lot of features from the mobile ecosystem including sandboxed apps maintained from an app store, notifications, and a voice-controlled AI (Cortana).

The mobile world has reached the stage where you have to look pretty closely to tell one high-end phone from any other high-end phone, and the tablet market is in steep decline. The PC market looks quite innovative in comparison.

The sad thing about commercial products is that when a company stops working on something, you’re screwed.

Perhaps Apple’s real Achilles Heel is not wanting to give up full control. Yet Apple could still benefit significantly from even a slightly more open environment on both the software and hardware sides.

Consider: for every “minor” free OS update in recent years from a bored Apple, open-source software developers could have made huge improvements in an open Mac environment. Someone might have boosted the App Store back-end to have package-manager-level robustness, completeness and convenience, for example. Similarly, with open hardware we probably would have had some really cool pro equipment and 3rd-party things like displays may not have so many issues. And heck, somebody probably would have figured out a great way to integrate iOS devices. All of that benefits Apple, which is not bad for a platform that their heart wasn’t in.

Of course there is evidence that Apple still invests in the Mac but there is no doubt that they keep making one minor thing worse for every 4 things they fiddle with. This means they might be starting to lose their focus on end-to-end perfection (a Jobsian trait). And if I’m going to work day-to-day on a system that has loose ends requiring my attention to deal with, a big part of the Apple advantage is being lost.

Apple is a mass of DRM and private cloud, with access points via ios and osx. I'm writing this on a macbook air (an old one) which I use like a chrome book.

Apple doesn't hang together as a contiguous platform at all, their world is very janky and inconsistent, extraordinary given their colossal wealth and expertise.

If they are going to continue as a closed environment they have a lot of work to do on all fronts to polish up all aspects of their user experience IMO.

gruber's rebuttal of the cybart article doesn't make sense. an achilles' heel is a small, obscure weakness that can bring down an otherwise invincible competitor.

cybart seems to be correctly using this analogy (whether you agree with the argument or not). gruber however calls the iphone apple's achilles' heel, but the iphone is a highly visible, dominant aspect of apple's business. it's obvious that if you can successfully attack the iphone, apple would be in serious danger.

in any case, cybart's analysis makes some sense. the macbook pro, mac pro and macOS products buttress the iphone and app store businesses, so they're strategically important and deserve more attention and investment than they might otherwise seem to warrant.

underinvestment in the ($23 billion) mac businesses allows companies like microsoft and google to undermine the brand and goodwill that apple has developed over the past many years, so it does seem to be a potential achilles' heel.

with a $246 billion surplus you can focus on more than one product at a time with at least 10 times the budget of a company that can only focus on one product. If you can't figure out how to grow profits at this scale, you are terrible at training and management and deserve to go out of business.

The true Achilles heel of Apple is the cult of Steve Jobs. He was possibly the only effective micro-manager. The company can't run by filling a Steve Jobs shaped hole with anyone else. They need to learn to breed drive a vision in the heads of their divisions, give them the autonomy to push the limits the way Jobs did and then strive to reproduce these traits and abilities in all of their leadership while spreading out the responsibility. They can only spread their focus through properly pooled intellectual resources and vision.

Throwing money at problems doesn't magically solve them. In fact, much of the time it just gives you more problems.

Absolutely. I've been concerned about Apple lately, for various reasons, but the last thing I'd want them to do is 'scale up', become more like a 'normal' huge corporation. It might be better for me in the short term, but worse for Apple in the longer-term.

On the timescale that I care about, I feel my concerns are premature. In the decade that I've been using Apple stuff they've surprised me often enough (iPhone, iPad, possibly Apple Watch, and the AirPods). I think a primary reason for the success is their 'weird' way of operating (similar to Nintendo, I feel).

The same thing has happened before, both at Apple, and at NeXT, which was the company Jobs started that resulted in the NeXT OS becoming OSX.

Apple: pre-Macintosh days: has the Apple IIe (IIc also, all with 8 bit 1Mhz CPUs) etc. minting money, but Apple has no clear upgrade path to more powerful computers. Note that the basic design of the Apple II dates to 1977...

They try the Apple III (with a 2Mhz CPU!) as a method of market segmentation but it doesn't take off as well as they hoped. They continue milking the 8-bit, 1Mhz Apple IIe market until 1993 when it is finally discontinued. (They sold a plug in card for certain Macs that allowed Apple II era software to run under a combined software and hardware emulation layer).

So after letting the IIe linger (1977-1984, 6 or 7 years of the same basic design) they come out with the Macintosh - completely incompatible but really a new class of machine.

The 68K-based Macs go through a similar period of sliding into a moribund, twilight existence - being overpriced in comparison to "Wintel", and not fixing dumb bugs like having the mouse button interrupt and stop all activity on the system, for instance. An attempt at a new OS (Copland or whatever they called it) fails miserably.

The NeXT systems that Jobs designed, were often BETTER than the equivalent SPARC systems, and were proce-competitive. Why didn't NeXT sell tons of desktop workstations in competition with Sun?

Well, the US Federal Government requires all systems (or at least UNIX based systems) they buy to be able to provide POSIX as a layer, to ensure interoperability. This is why Windows NT had a (probably rarely used) POSIX subsystem, to make sure they could check that checkbox on GSA procurement forms.

Despite it being easily able to be added to NeXT's OS, for some reason, Jobs never made sure it got added. So no GSA contracts for NeXT... and at that time, the US Federal Govt was one of the largest buyers of Unix-based systems in the world. The only exception is the NSA and maybe CIA, who don't have to answer to GSA procurement, and love using Interface Builder and other tools to rapidly create their custom apps.

See any patterns here? Apple is wholly unable as part of its DNA, to consistently create stable growth. They blaze a trail, leave others in the dust, then get lazy or lack inspiration, and others catch up to them.

Their model is the "blockbuster" model and when something isn't a blockbuster (Newton PDAs, rackmounted XServes) they drop it and forget about it. iPhone and iPad are basically the Star Wars franchise in terms of longevity and profitability...

I don't think any particular product is Apple's "Achilles Heel". Rather, it is that Apple seems unable to focus on multiple products at once, despite their billions of dollars in the bank. Is this a result of their particular internal structure?

It's quite hard to ramp up R&D, sure you could throw money at it but if you want to make sure it's effective then it takes time.

I'm going to suggest that the focus on one product category is the wrong approach here.

It doesn't matter if it's an iPhone, iPad, Mac, or whatever else. They are all just computers. The difference is in the Jobs To Be Done, and I think it is a very minor, yet important difference.

I suspect the lack of focus on Mac is because Apple has to know that it is a dying product. This is also the direction Microsoft is going with Windows. In the future, we won't differentiate between our different devices in the strict terms we do today.

For the average consumer, their phone can run all the productivity apps they need. For developers and artists, this is not yet true, but it is surely coming.

> For the average consumer, their phone can run all the productivity apps they need. For developers and artists, this is not yet true, but it is surely coming.

I cannot say anything about artists, but for developers Apple is actively preventing this:

- no way to write apps that allocate executable memory

- hard to sideload applications (though possible with a developer account)

- no way to gain root access in a legal way (necessary for example to create raw sockets; cf. https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/36230)

Development still isn't great on iOS devices. Nevertheless, the activities you mention are a subset of all developer use cases. Not all developers need root or raw sockets, just like not all developers need access to modify physical hardware. The landscape has shifted so that those needs which were once very important in development are now much less prevalent, and are thus not optimized for.

Much of the misunderstanding that I've observed around iOS relates to overgeneralizing the failings of some specific use cases. Like, (artists won't like this) because (it can't do specific use case in art that only some in the field do, and many/most don't).

Framing it this way is a bit unfair, because it limits the comparison to how much iOS can replicate the desktop experience, rather than seeing the new use cases that iOS unlocks. We don't realistically expect iOS devices to have low level hardware expansion ports like PCIe cards to supercharge its video or whatever, but somehow we have software comparisons that seem roughly equivalent.

I'm not saying you were doing this, just something I've observed in comments a lot regarding iOS and its capabilities/purpose/usefulness.

My central point was not about whether the iPhone/iPad is suitable for some use case or not, but about how Apple is actively preventing people (in this case developers) who need these capabilities to be able to do their work on iOS.

I understand it is not ideal, but I think you're still looking at this through the lens of today. What if Apple is aiming for a tomorrow when you won't need to do such things as gain root access or manage the allocation of memory.

Clearly, they don't want you sideloading because it doesn't fit their business model.

Theoretically, if they had a version of XCode on iOS and you could load your programs you are developing somehow, they could possibly be getting around the limitations you list above.

> What if Apple is aiming for a tomorrow when you won't need to do such things as gain root access or manage the allocation of memory.

How do you come to the idea that in the future this will not be necessary anymore? My personal (but this is perhaps biased by my personal values) thoughts on this is such properties will become much more important in the future than they are now.

Why this?

A lot of the advantages Moore's law gave in the past have ended. So it will become much more important in the future to apply more "clever low level hacks" (e.g. use special units of the CPU) to get more speed (allocation of (executable) memory is one such trick).

Also Snowden's revelations have shown that it is very dangerous not to have complete control of the device anymore (at least in Germany these lead to a deep distrust in cloud/SaaS offers for many companies, since these companies fear industrial spying). For this having root access is essential (though not sufficient, since there might be other backdoors).

Laptops won over tablets. The whole post-PC era just isn't happening. That is Apple's problem, they're stuck in the year of 2010 and can't escape.

Nowadays, people want to have a phone and a laptop. Tablets are dumbed-down computing devices, for kids, the elderly, or as toys for the rich.

This is a really encouraging trend. For all the things I love about iOS (not to mention all the years supporting myself on iOS dev work), I love the fact that on desktop platforms, developers can just write a program, throw it up on the Internet, and have people use it or even pay for it without any middleman.

I don't have some deep moral objection to software walled gardens (if that fits your use requirements, more power to you!), but if that model ever wins out, it will be a sad day for innovation. Software's one of the most powerful tools in recent history for disruption, and having a centralized entity wield control over that creates a dangerous bottleneck for this relatively new, extremely powerful medium for human expression. Good to see that, on at least some level, the market agrees with me.

According to IDC, iOS devices sell more than the whole Windows market (all brands).

PC sales were 60 million, taking Apple's share of 4.2 million, it's 56 million, give or take.

Last year, Apple in this period sold 51 million iPhones, 10 million iPads. And it was a "bad" year.

You might say "but I need my desktop, my IDE, my Photoshop, my etc."

Yeah, but you are one programmer or photographer or video editor, most people don't create anything, or just do some very light editing (like removing skin imperfections from photos), and thus, a media consumption device is most right.

We are in the Post-PC world, live with it.

For Apple I think you are referring to quarterly sells

Figures are for quarterly sales in both cases, of course.

Sources

Apple: investor.apple.com IDC: IDC Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker, April 11, 2017

Actually hybrid tablets/laptops won over plain tablets.

The classical laptop has become a product for creation professionals.

You're still thinking that there is a separation of these things. I think it is still to early to tell.

Remember when everybody said the Microsoft Surface was a failure because nobody wanted a 2-in-1?

I don't disagree that tablets aren't quite a big thing, but I think we'll see another device which fits more use cases.

The obsession Apple and other companies have with the post-PC concept reminds me of Thomas Edison's own obsession with the Nickelodeon. Edison thought no one would ever sit down to watch any length of film beyond five minutes. The idea just baffled Edison to no end and he tried hard to promote the Nickelodeon parlor concept. Obviously, it flopped hard but it didn't stop Edison from trying his damnedest. It seems to me that Apple and company have to have their own Nickelodeon moment where their prized cloud services crater outside of the enterprise markets. In a way, I have a bit of hope that day may be coming sooner rather than later (note: I don't see streaming services as cloud services, these are more about on-demand consumption and not about where or what device the consumption is done).

At this point, Apple could just take their cash stockpile, dump it in mutual funds, and be profitable, basically, forever.

You think it's locked in a safe? I'm sure it's invested in a healthy mix of funds.

Sorry, maybe I am being dense, but isn't that pretty much where it is? I mean, when articles talk about "cash reserves" don't they precisely mean immediately liquid assets, or does that include invested income as well?

It means "readily convertible". So stocks, mutual funds, other currency reserves, bonds, etc. Things that if you needed cash right now you could quickly turn into cash.

An example of a non-liquid asset would be real estate.

"The iPhone hasn’t suffered because Apple is focused on the Mac. New iPhones come out like clockwork every year."

The iPhone 6 was released in 2014. The same design is probably going to live on until 2018.

I'm not sure what it is they are working on, but it better be good.

Meanwhile, the internals inside that same casing have improved drastically, some might say stunningly, over the past few years.

Here's some of the things they've worked on in the timeline you mentioned:

- A10 Fusion high/low power cores with surprising levels of performance approaching desktop performance and even surpassing some low-end desktop processors.

- Solid state home button

- The Haptic Engine.

- Touch 3D

I can take or leave the gimmicks, but Apple's progress with ARM processor design has been stunning, year after year. For the past few cycles, their phone CPU has comparable performance to a good laptop from about 3 years prior.

Yes, because it's the exterior that counts?

Achille's Heels are some peoples Achille's Heel.

Am I reading this wrong or was that article just 3 paragraphs?

Here we go again. Another blogger (while John Gruber deserves a lot more credit and weight than the average bear) telling Apple what they are doing wrong. Nevertheless, there is a disconnect between what Apple "professional" users want, and what's best for the company and shareholders. Full disclosure, I am long-time shareholder.

Don't get me wrong, I love my Mac's and continue to watch for new and innovative computers. However, taking advise from developers on how to manage the most successful company in the history of the world... Not so much.

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