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Comment by blakesterz | Hacker News Reader

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?

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> 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 Have you considered saying "no" to a complete reinvention of your hardware when your current offerings are so out-of-date?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.

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. :)

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.

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

Nor foolish (in a good way)

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.

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

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.

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.

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 ]

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)

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