Steve Jobs Foretold the Downfall of Apple | Hacker News Reader

Steve Jobs Foretold the Downfall of Apple

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14 pointstomkin10 comments

Really this video seems more like a statement that having a monopoly nullifies a company's incentive to care for the quality of their product (not like that really needs much elucidation).

Well, Apple has a monopoly on Apple customers, and their recent products sure seem to have been the result of a nullified incentive to care for quality, so that seems like a fair assessment.

To whatever extent Apple has a monopoly on Apple customers, the same can be said for essentially every other company, making this a meaningless statement.

I don't think so, because to a very real extent there's a solid core of Apple fans whole will not leave the company's products, no matter how shoddy, no matter how buggy, no matter what. Granted, not everyone is a John Gruber making silk purses out of sows' ears[0], but many folks simply don't consider anything other than an Apple iLife™ to be worth living — never mind that Jonathan Ive's stuff isn't terribly attractive (someone please get that man some colours, and maybe a French curve), macOS usability has fallen hard, and the (real) benefits of Apple's walled garden simply aren't worth the (also real) costs.

[0] E.g., of the iOS i-issue, he writes (https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/11/07/ios-11-i), 'What I’ve heard is that this is a machine learning problem — that, more or less, for some reason the machine learning algorithm for autocorrect was learning something it never should have learned,' which is about the most lenient take one can have on the problem. I'm actually a little surprised that he hasn't posted that the impossibility of using the iOS calculator is deliberate, to force one to slow down and reflect.

> because to a very real extent there's a solid core of Apple fans whole will not leave the company's products, no matter how shoddy, no matter how buggy, no matter what.

This is pretty much irrelevant because this core is too small to support Apple. Apple very much needs to sell to the masses, outside their “core”, to keep afloat.

Let's guess who's the apple hostage...

Presumably you're referring to me, so I should let you know that I work for Microsoft.

If everyone was like me, they would have 0 customers left.

I started with switching to Android, and I'm now typing this on an Asus running elementary OS after a regretful MacBook Pro buy.

They're not going anywhere, but their product are really starting to suck, and with those price tags that's unacceptable (at least to me).

The tipping point for Apple users is around $30/hour. If you make much less than that Apples advantages aren’t worth it. If yo make more than that, it’s foolish not to use Apple products. Your time is too valuable to cheap out on less productive equipment.

> If you make more than that, it’s foolish not to use Apple products. Your time is too valuable to cheap out on less productive equipment.

I find that I'm far more productive with Linux, StumpWM, emacs and a modern userland than I am with macOS, Finder, either Cocoa emacs or another Mac editor and an ancient set of BSD tools. I find that I'm more productive running Termux on my Android phone & tablets than … running nothing at all on an iPhone (unless something has changed recently).

Moreover, with open source software I have freedom, and that's worth far more to me than my hourly rate.

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