Apple’s ‘Behind the Mac’ ads have a double meaning | Hacker News Reader

Apple’s ‘Behind the Mac’ ads have a double meaning

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68 pointsmikece72 comments

Honest question... how is this happening? Apple has 123 thousand employees (assuming whatever I just read is correct) and has the largest market cap of any publicly traded company. They're sitting on way over $200 billion. I would think they have the people and the money to make everything AMAZING, but so much of what they are putting out now seems... I dunno, just meh.

What are all those people working on? I don't think it's fair to expect them to reinvent and innovate the heck out of everything all the time, but after reading this I can't help but think "what are they doing?".

They have SO SO MUCH. So many people, so much money, so much everything, but... I dunno, from where I sit I don't see much interesting coming out.

I could be wrong, maybe I'm missing some things they're doing. I don't mean to say they're not doing anything, but with all they have, it seems like they could be doing so much more. Or am I wrong?

Maybe that’s the problem itself, they have too much of everything; they’re not hungry anymore.

Nor foolish (in a good way)

Creativity and innovation don't necessarily scale linearly with size. You can have loads of money and loads of employees but that doesn't automatically mean you have the best products.

Plenty of big companies stagnate and decline after long periods of growth - as companies grow, corporate structures get convoluted, inefficiencies arise.

Does it really require creativity to replace the CPU in the Mac Mini?

Presumably Apple has looked at a lot of these issues and decided the return on investment isn't worth it.

In isolation, maybe. But there is a goodwill element that is very hard to gain and very easy to lose. Keeping the MacMini competitive, even at a slight loss, would ensure people keep a certain category of projects in the Apple ecosystem; goodwill levels would stay high and ensure people keep buying profitable iPhones and iPads.

It looks to me like Cook still lacks a certain vision for the ecosystem at large. He can clearly make individual products extremely profitable, but he can't really tie them all together in a coherent manner -- at least not on the techie side. He has a very good feeling for the consumer market, but a pretty bad one for the geeky niches. And the software is getting terrible -- typical for a traditional electronics company, which is what he's turning Apple into.

Yes, I think you're right: I suspect it may be short term thinking to some extent on Apple's part.

I know I'm considering trying to leave the ecosystem because there's no upgrade for my Mac Mini.

Have you considered a Hackintosh?

Yes, I occasionally go look at the guides on Hackintoshes, but the difficulty with macOS upgrades puts me off.

Operating systems are sticky. If there is no up-to-date Mac hardware when I want a new computer, I will switch to Windows/Linux and not come back. Apple's strategy is one for slowly killing the Mac (but they can't intend that because they keep pumping out new versions of macOS like clockwork). I can't detect any logic in what Apple is doing.

I'd argue that, by default, companies slow in innovation and creativity with size. It takes a special culture and constant effort to stave off the ossification that comes with growth

> I don't think it's fair to expect them to reinvent and innovate the heck out of everything all the time

I think the problem is that Apple themselves want to reinvent and innovate the heck out of everything all the time, so they're making it harder than it needs to be. New Mac Mini? Easy: spec bump the current form factor. New Mac Pro? Easy: put the latest and greatest CPU/GPU in the old cheese-grater enclosure. But no, Apple needs to contantly make everything smaller/thinner/lighter/quieter, so they redesign the enclosure and reengineer the internals from scratch. While they're busy doing this, they continue to sell the old unimproved products for years.

Yes, Apple, we know you can innovate. But you say that for every "yes" there are a thousand "nos". Have you considered saying "no" to a complete reinvention of your hardware when your current offerings are so out-of-date? Your customers would be happy with a spec bump of the current form factors.

That's a great explanation that I want to believe but the series of meh iPhones doesn't support. I think it's that Apple has the same priduct org structure when Jobs was directing and whoever is the bottleneck now doesn't scale as well.

It’s unacceptable to me. Their resources provide them more than enough to at least keep their specs up to date. Everyone else in the industry at least does that. So what’s holding them up? The best hypothesis I’ve heard is their desire to move to their own chips.

They’ve effectively left the laptop/desktop market. And there’s no strong indication or rumor mill about them doing anything other than a run at their own chips.

> I think the problem is that Apple themselves want to reinvent and innovate the heck out of everything all the time, so they're making it harder than it needs to be.

This right here is what I believe to be the central problem with the Mac's strategy since about 2013. Somehow, “can’t innovate” became this thorn in the side for Apple management, this black eye that they felt they had to come back from, to prove everyone wrong. No moment better expresses this than Phil Schiller's infamous “can’t innovate, my ass” ad-lib on the 2013 Mac Pro unveiling.

And so what we have now is a pendulum that has swung entirely in the opposite direction, arguably further than it ever was on the supposed “can’t innovate” side: Every Mac launch must be “innovative.” Every new Mac must showcase new design and technologies or break new ground, and products that can’t support this level of engineering investment (like the Mac Mini) get left behind.

In other words, the entire Mac business unit has transformed into a vanity project. My dream would be for “vanity project” to become the new “can’t innovate” - a challenge that spurs Apple to action in correcting course on its oldest product line.

And perhaps some day, Schiller will take the stage to announce a boring, but pragmatic new line of workhorse Macs, and mutter “vanity project, my ass.”

> New Mac Mini? Easy: spec bump the current form factor.

Except using the 2012 modular, upgradeable approach. It's sad that we all know that has a snowball's chance.

The disease that's infected Apple is addiction to services revenue. Everything is a revenue stream. Their stores and "Geniuses" won't be profitable if everyone can repair and upgrade their own devices.

Maybe all their best employees got pulled/asked to work on the self driving car project. That's also my (unsubstantiated) theory of why their software quality has dropped in the last few years.

Meanwhile when having to decide between buying a new laptop and my choices were Macbook Pro vs Surface Book 2.

I started it up and Cortana started talking to me. I responded and she understood what I said during the setup process. It setup my unlock to my face and a pin. Later after it was setup they logged me into Skype (which I use for professional calls) without me making the effort.

I gotta say Apple needs to get off their ass (pardon my French) it saddens me they're not competing more. I still feel they need a new CEO that is a bit bolder and takes the company back into amazing innovation. Till then Microsoft and co will pass them by.

Agree on the CEO. Cook excelled as COO (EVP, Operations, actually), but many COOs suck as CEOs. The positions require very different skill sets.

Yeah you need a certain type of vision as a CEO. He's better as a COO. It's a conservative decision they need to have him become COO again and find someone else... Apple has SO MUCH POTENTIAL and yet, not enough to show for it currently.

The decision model is centralized.

Jony has people to type for him, so defective keyboards that look cool are totally acceptable.

Meanwhile Dell is making better laptops.

I'm baffled too. Then again the largest company I've run had tens of people. Things change as you get bigger. :)

I am a bit surprised that they can figure out an iMac Pro apparently quite quickly but only after all the bad press about losing interest in the Mac. Surely their engineers are as disappointed by lack of Mac Pro, Mini and adequate Macbook Pro as the typical HN thread? So where was the internal feedback? They must have thousands of people fully aware of interesting things in other markets like Intel NUCs and that much of their current range, phones excluded, is as you put it just meh. Or touchbar was solving a non-problem.

How to fix it? See first paragraph, they won't be calling me. :)

Increasing number of people working on something actually has a better chance of making that something worse than better.

The employee count is huge because of part-time store employees, not developers in engineering, which is a small fraction of total employees. [ disclaimer: was engineer at Apple for years ]

So I wonder what the endgame is for Apple. Apple has for many years positioned itself as a maker of premium products. This strategy has worked well for them, as the margins tend to be a bit better at the upper end. The desktop market is drying up, the margins on laptops have deflated. What's the next step? What computer hardware can best make Apple money in the next five years?

>What computer hardware can best make Apple money in the next five years?

I think the GPs point is that they have the resources to figure that out (as opposed to some random HN commentor), but they seem to be stuck in a rut.

Their hunger is gone.

Growing complacency. They're likely more focused on shareholders and stock-price than anything else.

(At least the decision makers, not the individual workers doing the work)

Kind of a rip off of this blog post[0] from Rogue Amoeba, down to the same screenshot and everything.

https://weblog.rogueamoeba.com/2018/06/14/on-the-sad-state-o...

At least the author credited him. Seems kind of lazy to just paraphrase the bottom half of the original blog post.

Extensive HN discussion about the original blog post here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17312588

It's fine to criticize the Mac, but using the marketing phrase to do so makes no sense except to say it's false. If it had a double meaning that would mean other computers were... behind the Mac. How would a double-meaning on the phrase make it sound like the Mac was behind other computers?

I've been a mac user for a long, long time... but their approach to their hardware offerings has been abysmal over the past couple of years.

The pivot from being the tool of choice for professionals to being the word processor and social media browsing terminal for ignorantly enthusiastic consumerists has been unappealing to say the least.

A home build with Linux and the new OnePlus 6 is starting to look like a very attractive alternative at this point.

Why do you have to put people down who aren't professionals and who consume media as 'ignorant'?

Not requiring a high-spec machine makes you 'ignorant'?

$2000 for a machine used only for Netflix streaming, Facebook, and basic web browsing, is pretty ignorant.

For a college student. But not if you have $2000 to spare. People spend way more on kitchens.

It's not ignorant, it's just a choice you personally wouldn't make. Maybe people value the design of the device rather than the tech specs? Who knows?

Why is Apple still selling any of this stuff?

Presumably people are either: a) still buying these devices, or b) they aren't

Either case can be used as a reason not to bother updating them.

I'm running a 2012 AMD rig at work with GTX 650 Ti and four displays, and at home a late 2012 Core i5 MacBook Pro Retina, and I don't feel compelled for technical reasons to upgrade to anything faster.

It's not like a new Mac or PC will play streaming movies any better. I'm actually glad to see the end of needing to upgrade every few months.

In my company IT upgrades the laptops. Most people hate it, but IT doesn't care. This is the reason apple is still selling that crap. Apple is running on Inertia. Pretty soon people will move to other alternatives.

That’s pretty true for me. Deploying one kind of laptop makes life easier for me as the de-facto IT person. I don’t have the time to research what kind of Windows machine would be best to deploy because there are actually hundreds of them. Apple offering just a few doors has made it easy to pick one and stick with it, although it’s pretty clear that the value of the machine considering its specs and price is pretty low.

Apple becoming the thing they rallied against in the early 2000s is a sad state for the company despite its earnings. But investors are aware that they need to get ahead on something to keep that going at least.

When Microsoft’s Surface series looks really attractive to me after 15 years of OS X and Mac investment, I’m not sure if Apple really can pull ahead without a massive game changer. Incremental changes so far are pointing to IOS application-ification of the entire Mac ecosystem.

Is it really such a mystery?

They probably underestimated the time and resources needed to move to ARM (or whatever substantial update they have in the pipeline) and therefore didn't invest appropriately in the "plan B" of incremental updates. Oops.

It could be anything. Optimistically, perhaps they are taking the criticism of the 2016 Touchbar MBPs to heart and redesigning them to be more practical. Doesn't excuse the lack of updates to the Mini and Pro though.

I got one of these new MacBooks at my new job (I requested a PC so I could run Linux, but they had already ordered a Mac) and I think I lasted on macOS for two days before I installed Linux. It was a pain to get working, but I'm really glad I did:

https://penguindreams.org/blog/linux-on-a-macbook-pro-14-3/

I haven't been a fan of osx since Snow Leopard, back before they destroyed Expose and replaced it with that Mission Control rubbish and completely mutilated Final Cut Pro.

I've always stated that Macs are a User's machine, not a Pro machine. And no number of "Pros" on stickered macs in conferences will convince me otherwise. The thing with a User's centric machine is that there are WAY more users than pros. Pro is a niche market. A sizeable one, but still niche compared to User space.

I honestly think everyone is missing some cues Apple has been sending.

They're building their own chip for desktops. Wait... let me hypothesize and break it down for you one time.

One, the recent privacy concerns and backdoor built in for AMD and Intel chips. They riding that we care about your data train.

Two, their homegrown Axx chip is in all new mobile devices. Whats to stop them from making a bigger one or use the same one for desktops? Probably why the new Mac Pro has been delayed as well as other device refreshes. And letting the profit of the under spec'd overpriced Imac Pro fund them in the mean time.

Three, their recent poaching of Intel employees and hiring of linux devs too. I would assume for low level engineering. Maybe even integrated graphics too?

Four, Macs originally used to have their own custom ARM chip, so Apple has a history of being self contained. One of the adages to tech is build, partner, buy. You usually do one until you can do one of the others.

I suspect you will see them release a new desktop(s), running their newly made chip, possibly with integrated graphics like they do now for the mobile devices. Some abilities to upgrade, so they can get you on the over priced upgrades and accessories. Like RAM, HDD, and maybe, just maybe CPU. That last one I am on the fringe with, I know.

Again this is just my observation, and hopefully I can look back on this post some day and either laugh or be like I told ya'll so.

Thanks for reading this post.

The real message is exactly the opposite of what the article supposes. The real message, now directly from Apple, is "fuck you, our old ass shit is good enough for you cause we say so." This is obvious because they are spending money on marketing rather than on actual products. Probably, they aren't planning on releasing anything new this year nor fixing their egregious issues with both hardware and software. Why would they when most people are perfectly happy to give them money for inferior, outdated, and recently garbage products? Apple doesn't care about customers, they care about numbers and the numbers are telling them there is no market for laptops and desktops anymore. Too bad there's more to running a business than numbers and I suspect Apple is about to find that out the hard way over the next decade. From the brink of bankruptcy to the brink of bankruptcy would not surprise me at this point given their horrific product offerings these last three years, including ios and iphones.

I bought the late 2016 mbp on a whim (the price in Japan was just too good to ignore) but I'm so disappointed. The keyboard is trash, I dread every time I have to work without an external one. I barely ever use that keyboard, and yet after 14 months the "b" key is somehow faulty. I had to start putting all dongles in checked-out baggage because airport security now thinks I'm carrying bombs -- nobody would have that many short cables in a carry-on! The enlarged trackpad is almost comical, without actually helping anything; and the touchbar is just another set of lights I never look at.

I'm now worried I'll never be able to flog this for even 20% of what I paid, and I'm so tempted to switch to a prebuilt Linux laptop -- there are a few options with chassis that look a lot like the 2015 MBPr...

The feeling of complete technological triumph that I got from the previous MBPr model (5 years of service, barely a scratch) has fully evaporated, and no amount of propaganda will change that.

I am glad I am not alone in feeling like this. I too have a mbp, and somehow, Apple has lost the magic that once captured me. Even adding apple care, now has to be when you buy the device. Its no longer, one year, plus at the end of the year, add some apple care to extend it for a total of 3 years.

I have been leaning towards some of the same ideas and laptops. You may want to check out System76 if you haven't already.

Should be re-titled "Behind ON the Mac" to fit better.

I use my early 2015 MacBook Pro for some heavy work, I would love to upgrade soon but TBH I'm looking more at Thinkpads than Apple products right now...

me too... current dell and thinkpads are very good specwise and lookwise, even the touch pad is pretty good. if they sell Linux laptops I will get it the next day.

Dell sells Linux laptops.

Thinkpads are Linux certified, I've installed Ubuntu on everything from ancient models to a just-released X1 Yoga and in my experience all the important things (excluding, say, fingerprint reader) "just work" out of the box.

I'd caution against this, because I've done it. I'm using a 2016 MacBook Pro for basically everything from design work to development. Getting fired up and setting up my workflow took no effort. I bought another laptop to run linux/windows and my god everything took so much longer to do. Most applications would require me to pull up some third party documentation to install. By the time that was done the task would have already been done on the MacBook. Now that laptop just sits and hosts a plex server or plays some games.

But that doesn't mean I wouldn't like things to get better because Apple is seriously dragging their feet. The touchbar is super annoying and really miss having actual buttons. It's beautiful hardware but would love more focus on figuring out the mess of port issues. Too many adapters!

I used linux for 10+ years before switching to Mac and riding the iPhone gravy train. I'm transitioning back to backend work, so I don't need the GUIs anymore.

I spend most of my time in a text editor and terminal, so avoiding underpowered hardware and a terrible keyboard are completely necessary. The sad thing is that Apple used to be top-notch on this.

It's not hard to do spec upgrades. They do it for their iPhones. They can certainly do it for their desktop/laptop computers. As a developer, I really like my late 2016 MBP. However, I think it's absurd that I can walk into the store a few years later and purchase the exact same computer.

Seriously Apple, no one expects innovation every year on the desktop. But for christ sake, update the CPU and increase the RAM since you soldered it on a few years ago.

It takes a lot of guts to use an early Daniel Johnston song in a national ad campaign.

It does. And it's one of my favorites. But I really don't know what Apple is trying to say. It's not a song that fills me with positive feelings.

I honestly think having a operations guy in charge is worse than having marketing in charge. At least marketing listens to the customers. Apple needs another product person who cares about quality of the Apple experience and not maximizing profit margin in the supply chain by producing older models or making questionable quality affecting decisions.

I'm pretty over maintaining Linux on my laptop, Windows 10 in general, and most hardware coming from the "PC" side of the market. I'm also looking to get into iOS development.

What do I buy? I'm thinking the cheapest Air. I don't want to drop twice that for something that seems so reviled that they must update it soon. But can I do iOS dev on an Air? Are refurbed previous gen MBPs good quality for the price?

Do I wait till September and cross my fingers for an improved next gen that isn't $200 more expensive?

I'm not sure about "good quality for the price", but the 2013-2015 rMBPs are quite good.

The 15" models have quad-core processors that will still stack up well vs the dual-core processors in many laptops today, and they maxed out at 16GB of ram - still the max in the current gen MacBook Pro.

I'm curious: what distro do you use? There are definitely distributions that don't require much maintenance load.

I'm using Fedora right now, I've tooled around with others. I have a love hate relationship with Gnome 3, frequently contemplate the glory of an overly customized i3 or sway environment but not the amount of time I would put into making it. At the end of the day, I don't mind using Fedora with Gnome on my desktop since that's the self built toy anyway. Ubuntu is out of the question, too many anti-community decisions in that camp IMO (sorry if that's your camp).

I've gotten to a point in life now though where there are some things that I need to "just work". I used android devices for 10 years until I was forced to use an iPhone 6s at work and well now I happily own an iPhone 7 in my personal life. The UX made me go from disliking having a pocket computer to being ambivalent, net win. But having an iPhone and two Linux machines is inconvenient as hell and I'm really looking to get that laptop to just work now too.

2 years ago I got a 2013 model Macbook Air with 512GB SSD / 8GB RAM for app development. Turns out I now use it as my daily driver and I had preordered the original Surface Book. Being a Windows user something made me switch (first Mac with an SSD and an ultrawide monitor).

I basically leave it docked all the time. I really want to upgrade because I need more RAM and for video editing. But to give you an idea, I'm using it perfectly fine with XCode running docker containers with Mongo/Neo4j etc. Email, web and office stuff is no issue at all.

I paid about £940 ($1200) in Jan 2016. After all this time, I can sell it for £300 (30% of it's original value).

Ah that's pretty encouraging. I see an $809 model right now from 2015 with 8GB/128GB which is all I need for my current day-to-day.

I'm not even sure how iOS development works yet, but you think the <2 GHz processor is fine with the whole toolset? Any complaints at all? Like any CPU intensive aspects that get bogged down

I'd worry a bit about the 128GB SSD if you are getting this for iOS development. My Mac is at home (so I can't check) but the current version of xCode + iOS simulators/dev tools is in the tens of GBs (40 or so GB, IIRC).

I honestly think macOS + xCode + Office is really close to 128GB by itself, but I am going from memory here.

The CPU is ok, not brilliant but works. I agree with the sibling comment that the 128GB will be a squeeze. For me RAM and storage (SSD) are most important.

I've also used VirtualBox a lot on this little thing and played in the iOS simulator (mainly to reproduce web bugs).

Minor nit: In case anyone was confused as I was, "lose the plot" is a British idiom [0]. It means, "To lose sight of an important objective or principle; to act contrarily to one's own interests through concentrating on relatively unimportant matters."

[0]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lose_the_plot

Seeing a post about the decline of the Apple product line is like a daily ritual on this site now.

When the gap between products was short the Apple secrecy could be fun and exciting. That is no longer the case. Now I just feel like they have contempt for me.

This is an embarrassingly empty article. They used the word “behind” in an ad... so here’s a bulleted list of things people complain about regarding their products?

They should be using their insane amounts of cash and market power to completely re-invent personal computing.

It's better than the Apple ad about "facilitated communication" -- a completely discredited way of getting non-verbal people to "talk" with what is essentially a Ouija board. _That_ was the most distasteful Apple ad ever.

That voice over on the video was pretty annoying.

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