Tim Cook Stumbles at His Specialty, Shipping Apple Products on Time
wsj.com
wsj.com
Horrible article.
Now I have to people them what Apple models to avoid like the plague.
* See a Best Buy in-store display or https://www.apple.com/mac/ for evidence of this.
Apple seemed pretty unique in this, in the industry.
Lately Apple is more like everyone else -- announce early, rushed to meet dates, not so polished and much more buggy.
Maybe Sundar Pichhai but he is young in his CEO role so it's too early to decide.
In tech: Google before Alphabet, the former Yahoo, the former Sun. Twitter did their musical chairs act, as well.
The iMac Pros are nice-ish machines, but I can't see Jobs trying to sell a >$10k BTO Mac as anything other than a very special edition with a whole marketing circus supporting it - not as a ludicrously expensive mainstream SKU with a "This is the price, you're going to buy it because it's a Mac, take it or leave it" attitude underlying the sales pitch.
Apple seem to be becoming increasingly tone deaf. The money may keep rolling in, but sooner or later there's going to be an event - a competitor, a new technology, a software disaster - that makes the wheels fall off.
Remember Next or the Lisa or the original Mac? Jobs was pretty good at trying to sell very expensive computers. The original Mac was priced equivalent to $5,877 in today's dollars. The Lisa was priced equivalent to $24,600 of today's dollars.. and we all know how expensive Next was.
Now they're selling $1,000 phones, gold watches, and machines that are way overpriced for what they offer. It's a noticeable shift.
This is no longer the case - the most expensive Apple Watch has a ceramic case.
I’m going to sell mine for $400 in two years, having cost me $25 a month in total For something i use a hundred times a day and take all my family photos with. I could have saved $10 a month by getting an iphone 8, big deal.
Tim Cook hasn’t incinerated shareholder funds. Most of the profits have been returned to shareholders as dividends, or saved overseas for them. His bad acquisitions have been relatively tiny, like Beats.
And as far as competitiveness goes, the Mac market share is at all time highs, iphone sales are st all time highs, and iPad still dominates the tablet market. Plus their app store and apple music dominate as well. Oh and Apple watch is the biggest selling watch by revenues in history, both now and it’s launch year.
Apple hasnt been wildly creative under Cook, but is still designing innovative new devices, Apple Watch, Airpods, the 5K iMac, HomePods, iMac Pro. Let’s just agree to ignore the touchbar macbooks;)
He’s not Steve Jobs, but has done better than i ever thought possible.
For pretty much everything that wasn’t consumer facing. Office 365, Exchange, Azure, CRM and SQL Server all saw huge growth under Ballmer. He really killed it in Enterprise, but as you mentioned, consumer facing products had several missteps (and where a lot more public).
We used to think the same naive thing about Microsoft. "Why can't they just fix <X>. They've got all the money in the world." Sure, but at a certain point, it stops being about resources. Two women can't make a baby in 4.5 months.
We often use construction metaphors in software, but a structure is at least expected to be done at some point, not growing in size and complexity forever, unbounded. I'd bet there's a point where even in the physical world a construction crew would be paralyzed by the amount of variables involved in moving forward.
What made Apple exiting was their visionary products. With Johnny designing and Tim getting them launched on time, Steve could be Steve.
We need a new Steve.
I don't know what the right approach is. If your company has a mixture of products that are widely preceived as being divided into "sexy" and "boring" categories, there may simply be no good answer.
My thought is that even if the Mac Mini team was filled with jaded workers, it still would be in a better position than it is now.
From a recent comment by 'dang:
> "The paywalls suck, of course, but banning NYT, WSJ, Economist, New Yorker, and all other such publications would suck worse. I realize not everyone agrees with this, but it seems the right call to me, which doesn't mean I like it any more than you do."
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author:dang%20paywall&sort=byD...
If you already have a subscription to WSJ I expect that you'd be a heavy enough user that you don't need a HN link to inform you of content to check out.
The comment I quoted is from 20 days ago, and the mods tweak policies with some regularity. 'dang commented specifically on the WSJ just over two weeks ago here:
> "WSJ is an edge case, but paywalls with workarounds are ok "
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15977257
They're well aware of the situation. Yeah, paywalls are frustrating, and the mods are handling it as they deem best for HN. That's not to say it won't change in the future, of course.
I'm tired of companies in general putting out junk. The complete lack of embarrassment or care about putting out (and charging for) broken stuff frustrates me to no end. What I especially hate is instead of companies recognizing that and fixing it because they actually want to be better, they make excuses.
Is product quality not a priority anymore?
I've heard of a bunch of companies cutting QA staff in the past year or so. Upper management sees them as an obstacle to shipping and middle management sees them as the "source of all the bugs" and an entire office not "producing" anything so they're clearly not useful.
Airplanes and medical software is much more reliable (though both have major problems)
Apple has no need to increase their quality: their customers are loyal at the current levels. Their customers will say it is because the competition is worse overall (the truth of this statement is different debate).
Could it be related to MBA thinking? Seems like today's corporate leadership shamelessly focuses on nothing but short term financial numbers.
The iphone 6s battery could not last more than 18 months of daily use. After that it would not provide a stable voltage, causing the phone to randomly shutdown. The "fix" was sneaking in a permanent throttle at 20, 40, 60% of normal performance to hide the problem.
The new keyboards in the recent Macbook Pro redesign are hyper-fragile to the point that Apple's own service technicians have trouble fixing keys and end up having to replace the entire thing.
The Mac line has a history of graphics card failures due to excessive heat from poor thermal design.
The new keyboards are not fragile in my experience. I'd say that they're probably more robust than the old keyboards in terms of standing up to normal use.
The issue is that they are very difficult to service. You can't easily remove the keys to clean out debris etc like you could with the old version, which could be a problem if they accumulate dust and grime underneath the keycaps.
I do worry about what they'll be like after a few years of use, however. What if stuff keeps accumulating under there, with no easy way to clean it out?
- The keyboards on the old MacBook Pro models (back when were silver) were also terrible. The keys kept falling off mine.
- MacBook graphics glitches also go way back (they even had a recall back in... 2010?). Several macOS releases had an issue where the screen was garbled when you got back from sleep.
- They've had tons of little USB issues, especially related to audio.
- My 2015 model has an issue where sometimes coming back from sleep, the internal keyboard no longer works. Everything is fine except no keyboard input.
(Etc.)
People seem to treat software and now hardware in ways they’d never dream of treating a meal, a car, or any purely tangible object.
Ruins the entire point of being secret as shit too.
I switched to a PC for quality/value reasons recently after waiting too long for update to Mac Pro.
Everyday I hate that I don't have iMessage on this machine. And my phone is constantly propped up against my screen so I can stay connected to my text messages.
I had no idea how much this would effect me and if I can find a third party solution that connects me to iMessage I will probably be switching back soon.
I just want a secure messaging solution that I can use with anybody, regardless of what device/service they use.