Steve Jobs once prioritized a thing and found success. Now that Jobs is dead Apple is cargo-culting his past decisions.
See also: hyper-aggressive removal of ports. It made sense in 1998 when we were talking about clearly obsolete things like Apple's nonstandard DIN-8 serial ports and SCSI-1, less so in 2018 when we're talking about performant and ubiquitous standards like USB-A and the headphone jack.
Oh, wow, you really nailed it right on the head, here.
I still use a 'Pixar lamp/sunflower' iMac G4 for writing, design, and I have a massive collection of cartoon seasons that are nicely formatted for it that I watch on the side.
To look at the iMac G4, with it's stunningly beautiful design, and the insanely stable OS X 10.5.8, and compare it to the God-awful 2017 Touch Bar MacBook Pro that my work gave me, is to truly see a company, that in 15 years, has managed to go from creating one of the most inspiring (and still functional!) machines in computing history, to something that, in 2019, I can't even put a USB key in without a $50+ dongle, and can barely type on.
The 2017 MacBook Pro looks sorta like the 2015 MacBook Pro I have in my home music studio...but, with virtually the same i5 processor, the same 16GB of RAM, 512GB SSD, and 1.5GB of VRAM, the more-expensive 2017 model lacks: • standard USB ports that don't require adapters • a standard HDMI port • standard thunderbolt ports (of which I have purchased many existing dongles for) • MagSafe (has saved my butt more times than I could describe) • An SSD not soldered to the board (yes, the 2013-2015 models are still removable) • standard SD card port (I do video and photo editing. having one of these on the side is priceless)
To purchase a 2017/18 MacBook Pro to replace my studio laptop would be a significant downgrade in terms of functionality for my workflow. I mean, significant. These devices look almost identical - yet one of them is virtually useless for my needs by design compared to one from years before.
I loathe using my work laptop. I'm using it right now. I complained to my partner about the butterfly keyboard and yesterday I finally made her use it. She uses the 2015 all the time and made about seven mistakes in the first sentence. The lack of haptic feedback on the touch bar is baffling. These are the kinds of things Apple used to have the foresight to address ahead of time. Now we pay more, and get less.
How the mighty fall.
Apple patented it and refused to license the technology. Hopefully when the patent expires (2025?), we'll see more applications of it.
>The basic concept of MagSafe is copied from the magnetic power connectors that are part of many deep fryers and Japanese countertop cooking appliances since the early 2000s in order to avoid spilling their dangerously hot contents.[2][3][4] Apple was granted US Patent No. 7311526 on MagSafe ("Magnetic connector for electronic device", issued in 2007) as MagSafe was deemed to be a sufficient improvement due to the connector being symmetrical and reversible, and the fact that magnets within a connector are arranged in opposing polarities for improved coupling strength.
IMO, it's outrageous that improvement was enough for the patent not to have failed on prior art grounds.
I have one of those Japanese countertop cooking appliances. The magnetic connector is symmetrical. It's very obvious that Magsafe ripped off the design.
This is an unfair characterization. The new MacBook Pros have standard Thunderbolt ports, it just so happens that the new standard has a different shape than what you were used to.
The (2017/8?) MBP of my work collegue starts having problems with the keyboard, he can still type atm but it is annoying to think that soon a service visit with all the hassle might be necessary.
The Dolby HDR screens have a really bad red/pink tint out of the box (about +10% to +15% shift) and I had to buy a Spyder color colorimeter to fix it. The speakers are really terrible, even for speech-driven content like Duolingo. Using headphones isn't much improvement, the Realtek audio drivers are really bad with clicks whenever audio starts & stops (also happens on the X1 Extreme). [1]
Most notably, the laptop sometimes doesn't charge. The orange charging light would come on, but when I came back the next morning, the battery level hadn't increased. It would only charge while Windows was running. I think it's been fixed in a recent firmware update, but it's been frustrating.
I do love the keyboard and form factor though. I haven't returned it, but often wonder if I should've got a Surface Book or even a Dell instead. Honestly I'd switch back to Apple if I could trust their hardware to be reliable & upgradeable.
[1] https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-X-Series-Laptops/X1-Ex...
In any case I find it really annoying how things are going in PC-land. Around 2010 wasn’t just peak Mac, but peak everything it seems to me. Ubuntu 10, Windows 7, macOS 10.6(?), SSDs, fast and reliable I/O, it all came together. Maybe you can count till 2012 with Retina, but I’ve yet to wait for a machine with Hi-DPI that has both reliable hardware (GPU) AND software (i.e. without terrible scaling issues, especially when also connecting external screens).
I'm guessing you don't have kernal task 2000% CPU problems? Because my 2017 MacBook Pro is 5x the cost of my Chromebook and rarely more functional.
Apple prioritized thinness while Jobs was CEO, and Apple continues to prioritize thinness. Jobs is gone but many of the same product executives remain—Cook, Ive, Schiller, etc and many of their deputies. Is it really that surprising that the product goals are also unchanged?
Complaints about thinness are not a new phenomenon—look back at how the first MacBook Air was greeted for an example. (intro’d by Jobs)
My own suspicion -- buttressed with some off-the-record comments with Apple folks -- is that it's actually Jony Ive who prioritizes thinness over all else. Steve Jobs may not have been an engineer or a designer, but he was often an excellent "editor," of the sort who'd look at a design and say "Why do you need this" or "If you add this it'll be a thousand times more useful" or even "You're focusing on the wrong thing, start over." Post-Jobs, the executive who could do that with Ive was Scott Forstall. Post-Forstall, there doesn't seem to be anyone who does that with Ive anymore.
I'm hopeful that the string of highly visible problems with this most recent iteration of MacBooks will, if nothing else, give someone else in the company power to start pushing back. I don't hate my 2017-era MacBook Pro and I haven't had any real problems with it, but the fact that I'm worried about having problems with it in a way that I've rarely been with other Apple hardware is a problem in and of itself.
I think most of us just don't have enough insight into how Apple develops products to really nail this down (maybe you do; I certainly don't).
Does Jony Ive say "it must be this thin" (holds fingers apart) and then engineering has to go off and remove MagSafe and create a totally new keyboard? Or is engineering already working on new keyboard ideas, and they bring one to the table and say "hey what can we do with this?"
In any case, it's about how the team is operating. Jobs obviously had an impact on that, but where I disagreed with the GP was this idea that thousands of people at Apple just wake up every day and say "dwuhhhhh, what did Steve Jobs do" and then just dumbly do that. Let's give the folks there some credit--which also means holding them accountable for their own decisions.
> * Post-Jobs, the executive who could do that with Ive was Scott Forstall.*
Out of all the top Apple Forum, you are the only one I find who shares the same opinion as I do. So glad I am not alone.
Add to that is software design which Jony now also takes over, It was ( rumoured ) Tim Cook's idea to group the "Design" unit into one. And it was obvious hardware and software design has little in common, and Jony made a complete mess with iOS 7.
I don't know what went wrong. But I miss Scott Forstall. For some reason big companies has a tendency to force their best people out once their previous CEO mentor left their post, Patrick Gelsinger at Intel, Scott Forstall at Apple.
G4 Cube (thermal issues)
Water Cooled G5 (they leak after about 5 years)
iPhone 4 (Antenna issues)
I think it really comes down to software -- MacOS -- which is still significantly better for certain kind of work than Windows or even Linux. Until that changes, people are going to continue to tolerate these hardware problems with Apple computers. I'm definitely one of them.
Just for the record, I have two Touchbar laptops. One from 2016 and one from 2017. The 2016 one, when I first bought it, had the busted keyboard on day one, right from the Apple Store. I went back and swapped it for another one and that had the same issue but with different keys. The third one worked but it started having issues about a year into use. I had that one repaired and now it's having issues again, not even a year after (the symptoms show once the laptop has heated up a bit). It's comical how atrociously bad these laptops are in the reliability department.
My 2017 one was slightly better, in that it worked when I bought it, but it also started having keyboard issues about a year after. Several of my friends who bought the same laptop around the same time also had to take theirs in for service for keyboard issues.
I love my 2012 MBP, but ultimately it's been so unreliable (and I can't stand the new butterfly keyboards) that it pushed me into buying a Windows laptop. I still use the MBP quite regularly when it's working though.
For now I'm getting a Mac Mini instead. Seems like the option with the least amount of risk attached... It has a fast desktop i7, that should last 5+ years, and its not that pricey either.
Apple has had quality issues for much longer than most people realize. It keeps getting worse.
The mid 2012 laptop I bought new went through two separate optical drives before I stopped using the drive altogether and put in another hard drive. The laptop also had two bad logicboards from NVidias recall iirc. One board died a month after getting it new, and the other died almost 3 years later.
To this day it is still going strong. I am starting to run into some video ram type issues (I think). I get random lines on any screen (external / internal) and a full reboot "fixes" it. I don't want to replace it, but after all the Apple changes (iOS devices vs "Pro" devices mainly), I just don't think any of their laptops fit my needs for a device anymore.
Like you said though, Apple has always had some hardware type issues like this. I remember HP, Dell and Lenovo all having big issues like that too when I was on the bench.
"Your computer restarted because of a problem", and subsequently having 20 apps open up on login is the bane of my existence on MacOS. Same issue with my work touchbar MBP.
What I'm doing right now is just using my MacBook pro in lid-closed mode with an external monitor and the Apple wireless keyboard/trackpad, so I can avoid those keyboard issues entirely. It's very stupid I need to even do this, but here we are :)
Apple seems to have a very insular culture. They seem very resistant to even acknowledging external feedback, let alone changing course based on it.
> I think it really comes down to software -- MacOS -- which is still significantly better for certain kind of work than Windows or even Linux.
That, and the Apple brand still has a lot of premium cachet. The utilitarian fact that MacOS is the most successful desktop UNIX only really matters to developers.
Apple built up a lot of positive brand credibility over the second Jobs era. That credibility is eroding now, but that kind of erosion takes time to show up in sales figures. All that banked-up credibility can drive sales for a long time until it's completely drawn down. But operating that way is like living off the money in your 401(k) -- it lets you pretend nothing's wrong until the moment the balance hits zero, at which point everything goes wrong all at once.
Techies are more exposed to the details of hardware than normal people are, so Apple should be looking at their complaints as the leading edge of tomorrow's problems rather than as an outlier. Back when Apple couldn't sell computers to save their lives, the techies were the first to notice their products had improved enough to be worth recommending. Now everyone wants to buy their products, but the techies are the first to notice that maybe they shouldn't.
Like the brand keeps its aura of quality longer than the quality as been maintained? That would just be a phase shift between the reality and perception.
That's a phenomenon that actually exists, and is deliberately exploited by private equity. A stark example is newspapers: there's a company that's aggressively buying them up, and once they acquire one they slash the newsroom staff to drastically cut costs. That results in a much inferior product, but it takes time for their customers to realize and even longer for them to cancel their subscriptions en masse. In the meantime they collect greater profits as they kill the business.
The fact that lots of customers buy a thing does not necessarily mean that thing is presently a good product that serves their needs.
That's been the norm for the newspaper business since at least the 1970s. The current company you are probably thinking of doing that is Digital First Media, which has mostly been getting attention for it's unsolicited bid for Gannett, a company that was well know for doing the same thing during the 1970s-1990s (and was recently considered a threat for doing that again with it's—ultimately abandoned—bid to take over Tribune Publishing.)
Apple of all companies has never been about mass volume, but instead higher revenue and profit per unit. It’s the same with iPhone compared to Android.
I’d much rather own a company with 1000 units sold at 10mil revenue over 100,000 units with the same revenue.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/276308/global-apple-mac-...
HP is doing very well compared to mfgs named after a fruit. That is accurate.
I'll double down though. The Dell developer editions are far superior than any MacBook
What I feel is a stronger and more measurable critique is that the quality of Apple has gone down (i.e. I might be wrong, but there are numbers to decide).
It would be strange to see U2, U2 Country, U2 Jazz. Apple in this example is probably better compared to a music label than a single rock band.
Oh good gawd, please, please, please, don't let Bono see that as a suggestion
I worked in electronics OEMs since 2007, and I tell you that such things are way more widespread than you think.
When Amazon was making its first forays into electronics in 2007 with Kindle, the agent who was working for them was squeezing my first employer very, very hard. We were one of companies in the chain for sourcing accessories.
They were literally asking us to shave single microns from plastic parts, and deliberately guiding us into using underrated components. The phrase "planned obsolescence" was never said out loud, but it was 100% clear that they wanted it.
-----
As somebody in engineering, I can add that even cheapest Chinese mechanical sliprings have no problems at all transporting the EDP signal.
One of the most "egregious" omissions was either a floppy or an Iomega Zip drive. But a few short years later USB thumb drives became ubiquitous.
USB-C is the future, we're already seeing a plethora of displays launching with them, and they obviate the need for another power supply. Yes, right at this moment it's a bit of a pain (not massively though, I have a dock at work and plug a single cable in and my dual monitors, keyboard and mouse just start working - with my 2015 MBP I had lots of ports, but had to plug and unplug 3 cables each time I wanted to move my laptop).
I'd argue that maybe they went a couple of years too early, but they saw what the next big thing would be and jumped.
Apple is one of the few companies that can act as a market maker, bringing tons of consumers with money over to a new technology. The strategy was sound, and worked in the past (see iMac's USB in 1997, iPod connector, and lightning connector), though I think USB-C proved a bit too complex for many peripheral manufacturers to put out good products right away. These days though there's a ton of great USB-C peripherals out there.
Before the iPhone, traditional cell phones already had smaller headphone jacks: a 2.5mm one was pretty standard. One of the innovative things the iPhone did was replace the smaller port with a standard 3.5mm jack, which allowed people to use regular (potentially high-quality) 3.5mm headphones with it, rather than a crappy 2.5mm headset. The decision eliminated pointless proprietary-ness to integrate with a more vibrant ecosystem.
Job's decision on the iMac to embrace USB and drop the Mac's proprietary ports could be seen in a similar light.
I wish those kinds of decisions were the ones present-day Apple decided to cargo-cult.
Whenever a USB port is involved, it's usually smashed and requires soldering to fix. Given that most modern phones have AMOLED screens, and those cost 200$+ just for our store to buy the part, and that many phones require you to remove the screen to get to the charging port.... Well you see where this is going.
The explanation that made sense to me mentioned 2 design constraints:
1) the jack surface-mounted to the PCB took up space that conflicted with an edge-to-edge LCD/OLED display. If you've ever disassembled an iPhone, you'll see that removing the home button and extending the backlight assembly to the bottom edge means the headphone jack has to go away.
2) waterproof phone. The traditional jack was always an entry point for water damage.
Apparently, Apple studied millions of phone users and determined that more people wanted waterproof phones with bigger edge-to-edge screens than the headphone jack.
Samsung has no problem making waterproof phones with headphone jacks. I'm not sure why, if you can put a USB/Thunderbolt/whatever jack on a phone and still be waterproof a headphone jack is some an intractable problem.
The explanation (possibly inaccurate) I read was that the waterproof jacks were more expensive. I noticed the new Samsung A8s has copied Apple's decision to remove headphone jack. Sony also removed the headphone jack. There seems to be an unavoidable engineering+cost motivation that causes multiple companies to remove that jack. Is it the edge-to-hedge screen? extra space for the haptic feedback? Better battery life because it doesn't feed the analog circuitry for that 3.5mm jack? I don't know.
Sure, and there are perennial rumors that real soon now that will be reflected on flagships (first the S10, but then that faded, now the rumor is either the Note 10 or S11.)
> There seems to be an unavoidable engineering+cost motivation that multiple companies (including Sony) to remove that jack.
Well, yeah, of course, if nothing else, it takes space that could be used for something else. The Samsung Note 10 rumor centers around trading it for a bigger battery, for instance. Obviously, it's not a trade-off free choice, and what it's traded for may not be the same between different manufacturers that decide to axe it. (The same with SD card slots, which lots of manufacturers have done—even Samsung several flagship generations back, though they reversed.)
I personally think that more headphones should have the threaded 3.5mm jack on which you can adapt either the 1/4" jack or say, a usb-c or lightning adapter. This would effectively make it a permanent addition to your headphones without having to keep track of a separate dongle.
I was looking for one because one of our cars has no bluetooth, and the other has bluetooth that won't talk to any recent iPhone, and my iphone 5S is getting flaky. Wish I hadn't missed the SE over the weekend.
We're good enough. We don't need to go thinner. Similar to battery life. After 10-12 hours, there's no point in it, except for a small few.
However, the 10-12 hours of battery life is kind of misleading. To get that, you have to be doing the absolute minimum on the laptop. Doing anything graphics related requiring the GPU to kick in means your not going to get anywhere near that time.
This isn't a decision you get to make. I want thinner, lighter. Always. Most people do.
Still I'd love that port to be there, event if I used if only couple of times a year.
It's almost as if they should've kept USB-A connector but improved the interface for future...
They have decided that form over function is the way to go. I was considering purchasing a Macbook - not any more!