When you can't make a laptop with reliable screens or keyboards, or an iMac lineup that has CPU's 2 generations behind.. Maybe it's time to shut down the stupid vanity projects and focus on your core business instead?
If a company decides not to produce wireless routers (which were class leading) or monitors etc anymore, all because they're non "core" to a computer/mobile hardware company then I don't see how building automotive AI is core to a computer/mobile hardware computer company that has zero core competency in either car manufacturing or AI.
I don't see why Apple needs to stay within the bounds what what you think their "core" products are.
Automotive AI meanwhile is a future and they have to think about future with all the money they have now.
autonomous cars are so obvious and will eventually be so commodity
I'd argue the wholesome user experience will prove be more important for Apple in the long run than having a big profit margin on every product.
Automotive "AI" is not a future, more than so than the automotive "cloud." It does not even takes one to have a computer science background to figure out that claims of artificial "intelligence" there are a joke.
The technology is 90% there, perhaps more, but the last percentages that it will required for this to be a mass market product is going to take 20 or 30 years to reach. The current solutions are built using ideas and research grounded in the field of "Artificial Intelligence", but they are not "true AI".
There's also no AI in your Huawei phone. There's software using machine learning, which is a discipline under the umbrella of "artificial intelligence" as a computer science discipline.
The idea of Mac was always “it just works”. You could go to the Apple Store and get everything you needed and know that while it wasn’t cheap, it was amongst the best you could buy. You pay the premium for that experience and you remember how nice it was and come back next time.
Now that experience is broken, you need to shop around and make it work yourself. And if you need to do that then the experience is no better than anyone else’s.
(Or did you mean the keyboard doesn't happen if number of engineers is doubled? I don't think it can be that bad.)
But I guess the keyboard design is a managment problem not a engineer problem.
"The mythical man month" should not be interpreted dogmatically.
The unstated truth in the "mythical man month" is that you can't rescue a project by throwing people at it if the project is out of control because of poor management.
Stellar management can do almost anything.
Mediocre management bumbles around creating failures.
Eventually. At first it makes matters worth. And that's assuming your predicate is correct, that the department is understaffed.
It's left for the market to validate whether it was the correct decision or not.
Maybe I'm missing something.
Autonomous Vehicle, is basically a Giant Mobile iPhone that you can sit in it. There will be lots of custom silicon doing software calculation, LiDAR making 10s to million of input every second, a gigantic battery, and lots of softwares.
Although I still think AV is at least another 5 - 10 years away in real world usage.
Ugh. What's next? It seems in the future everything will look like an iPhone and is built by one company. Why can't we have more modularization in the economy, i.e. smaller companies that do 1 thing well, which sell to potentially multiple other companies that do 1 thing well too? Perhaps we should set a hard limit on the number of employees working for a single company, e.g. 1k.
I wonder what is taking Tesla so long to get their factory up and running.
When work started on the iphone, phone weren't core, but there was a vision that it could be. Routers were killed because there was no future where routers would ever be core.
Apparently Apple sees (saw) a future where automotive AI might be core.
Apple does have the money to pull it off, if they want to. I would just question if they'd profit from the project.
Former CEO of Palm.
Particularly when they make $200 billion per year in revenue.
Yes you don't want to be a total one trick pony, but if you do everything, you do nothing well.
Sometimes that's true, but I think that most often, these kind of transactions (M&A, spin-offs etc) are the result of political gaming on top of companies, rather than driven by actual business or financial needs. Top managers play their own game very well, and at the end of those transactions usually there is a bonus paid out, no matter the results 5 years down the road. It's not as if verticals within a large company hadn't their own specialized staff, focusing on their own products.
Is this absolutely the reason the laptops are a bit crap? No, but it is plausible that the lacklustre offering in hardware comes from the lack of it being a priority for the company. It certainly doesn't feel like a priority for them, and the offering doesn't feel like a lot of strategy has gone in to how it has evolved over the last few years - contrast that with the iphone.
I wouldn’t touch a Mac laptop with a ten foot pole except for maybe the Air if I was desperate, but the iMacs and Mac Minis are tempting. I don’t do development anyway without at least two external monitors and my favorite keyboard/mouse combo.
I think the reason why they don't rev their hardware as frequently as they could is because it doesn't pay to. The number of people choosing between a Mac and a Dell who go for the one with the newest processor has to be vanishingly insignificant.
In my view, people have a clearer picture of how much disk storage they want--the usage meters on their phones help drive that home. Other than that, they are confident that the machine they get today will be faster than the one they bought 4 years ago. But I suspect usage patterns have changed (e.g., more time in the browser; games are played on phones; etc.) so that speed bumps aren't the primary reason why people upgrade, anyway.
They are charging the same for almost two years old hardware than they would if It had been updated, but the user gets a worst product, and in the long run, experience.
Seriously, the GPU is the only thing you're likely to get a big win from at the consumer level, and you're restricted to intel's shitty IGP until you get to the top end MacBook Pro. Again: you are exceedingly unlikely to get a real day-to-day performance increase from the high end intel mobile cpus on a core-for-core basis, and adding a tonne of cores just eats your battery life (hell, ram alone is a significant power drain for laptops, hence the last gens 16gig limit)
Very often "cheaper alternatives" have stability issues like crashing. Or plug / unplug problems. Stability is more valuable than the quiet although silence matters when the entire rest of your workspace is silent.
The build quality for these enclosures is obviously cheap and low quality. You can tell by when you work with the ports on them.
Also, none of these builds have been supported by Apple. This product was cooperatively designed with Apple so the support is excellent. You have one Thunderbolt 3 cable for all of the things to the mac.
So the price is actually good for what it is.
Sell me a £1k phone that can’t connect to the £3.5k laptop you sold me because the phone comes with a USB-A cable and the laptop only has USB-C sockets.
This is precisely the sort of garbage Stveve was very much against yet Apple seem to now think ‘it’s ok’.
It’s not ok. To the down voters, the fanaticism only emboldens Apple to become more mediocre. Think about that a moment.
(unless perhaps you didn't hold it properly.)
But I didn't try to block calls with no disclosed id. Those disappeared from my view a while ago, so either it does block them by default or something changed on the part of the callers.
Steve Jobs is now gone. And your MBAs run the product management now. And those people have OKRs and targets to meet. And they seem to think if they make something that looks cute, utility be damned, as long as they meet sales and whatever targets, it must be ok. Then Apple also has enough loyal customers and brand they can milk. Eventually the public will tire out and move to something else. And so will they. There are enough companies to work at.
Having seen enough of this kind of sausage made. I can tell you no one cares. There are companies full of upper management whose sole purpose is optimizing for their careers. They survive because their kind, get hired by their own kind.
Eventually every one moves on.
Only real people who can make any change at all are the stock investors who hold big chunks of stocks. But even those guys care about 'percentage' of profits, and once they get it. They move on.
So no one cares really.
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MQGJ2AM/A/usb-c-to-lightn...
I mean, usb C has issues, but not being able to connect to an iphone isn't one of them.
However, it's a small thing, I think, compared to the cost of the mac laptops. If paying $20 for a cable is a big deal, then the macbook pro laptops and high end iphones are not for you.
People pay that kind of money with the expectation that everything works out of the box, not that they have to get extra adapters, which is usually only noticed after the fact. That isn't just extra costs, it's also the extra effort that people didn't want to have, that's why they paid the "premium price" in the first place.
In that context, $20 might not be "that big if a deal", but it would be even less of a deal for Apple to just include that stuff, while also making for a generally more customer-friendly experience without making them feel like being nickle&dimed every step of the way.
Depending on what I was buying the laptop for and the variety of batteries available, that seems totally reasonable.
I mean, not for the mac model of "you pay a lot extra but it works out of box, without having to make too many decisions" of course.
But if I was buying an expensive laptop 'cause it was powerful and customizable? yeah, it would be totally reasonable and even desirable to let me buy the battery I wanted; I'm a big fan of the old thinkpads, and they often come used with the giant battery that sticks out, which I dislike, because they make the laptop bigger and heaver. My buddy who is also a fan just bought a 'low profile' battery for his, which is even smaller and lighter than the regular battery I use.
I usually buy my desktops and servers entirely as parts, because I want to choose the parts I want.
But that's not really Apple's market. (of course, I do also have a non-pro macbook and an iphone; but in a lot of ways, I have different expectations for those than I have for my old thinkpads.)
>In that context, $20 might not be "that big if a deal", but it would be even less of a deal for Apple to just include that stuff, while also making for a generally more customer-friendly experience without making them feel like being nickle&dimed every step of the way.
right my point is that it's not the $20 that is the big deal there, it's the fact that you've gotta go order another thing, when you paid apple big money for it to work out of box.
> Sell me a £1k phone that can’t connect to the £3.5k laptop you sold me
Of course they can connect, via Bluetooth and WiFi and AirDrop...
If you mean your iPhone can't charge off a MBP, well, OK: MBPs are admittedly not the best charging hubs.
> This is precisely the sort of garbage Stveve was very much against
Yeah, that's baloney. Steve would ask why the iPhone still has any ports at all.
If so, the Chinese have Steve beat with a product like that ready to launch[1].
[1] https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/1/23/18194178/m...
Still, I wonder why Apple hasn't changed the connector from the iPhone to USB-C when it seems like the obvious choice. Maybe trying to avoid controversy like when they changed the old 30-pin adapter?
Apple started its slide the first time around 1989 - that was when Mac models started proliferating, when System 6 came out, and when its first sales decline happened. Jobs didn't return until 1998. That's almost a decade in between.
It's similar for other dominant companies - the writing was on the wall for IBM when Compaq & Dell started selling PC clones in 1983/1984, but they didn't need a turnaround until 1993. Sun Microsystems hit its zenith at the top of the dot-com boom in 2000, but its stock price didn't start sliding until 2007 and it wasn't purchased until 2010.
Apple has a ton of cash and the best HW/SW/Design on the planet. The company is not done making new things.
On the other hand, the declining quality, sloppier design, increased prices on already highly priced products, multiple conflicting product lines - all of those decisions will eventually have consequences.
Apple used to be about doing a handful of things really well and having a loyal customer base that would happily pay a premium for the quality/brand/premium-feel/coolness of their products - all of that has been slowly going away over the past 5-7 years.
Is this about iPad v MacBooks?
The MacBook and MacBook Air are also confusing - despite its name the MacBook is smaller, it’s more expensive, but lacks touchID.
Apple don’t make that many more products than they used to, but they are getting into these snarls for no apparent reason.
I actually don't agree about the XR v XS. Apple's in a situation where much of the market sweet spot for new iPhones exists within that $700-1200 range with a set of preferences around a 5.8"-6.5" size and expectations of certain features and capabilities. The smartphone market is gigantic and if you want to be a player in it at some point you need to differentiate the demand into two or more products, which means drawing the line somewhere in terms of price and features.
XS is 33% more expensive than XR, and the XR drops the dual camera and OLED, while being roughly the same size as the XS, plus a few things to lower cost. I don't know if there are other features you'd realistically want to cut, so it seems to cover the low-end of that sweet spot. The only thing Apple could do with it is maybe lower the price to $699. Meanwhile, I'm not sure what other tech the XS could add to move it further upmarket from the XR. I'm not sure I would have done it differently this year, given the available tech.
My guess from reading lots of peoples thoughts on this is there's a confusion in the relationship between size vs price. It'd be clean and easy if demand for larger phones correlated with willingness to spend more, but that really isn't the case for a lot of segments of that market. E.g. in China there's a preference for larger devices at lower price points. And there's also the quarter miss which is bringing a lot of these discussion up, which was mostly driven by China's massive recession, but fingers are I think unfairly pointing at the XR/XS lineup.
I've been watching the Apple product lineup closely for many years with a particular eye to market segmentation, and my take-away is that while Apple always strives to make it as easy as possible for consumers to choose their preference in product lineups, the fact is both the shifting cluster of preferences consumers have and the technology available to ship means most years they're off the mark by a bit.
Shifting a product line is a multi-year exercise and it creates anachronisms along the way - for instance, see the transition to iPad Pro in 2016-2018. It took a few years to sufficiently move the consumer iPad downmarket ($329) and the Pro upmarket ($799) to have meaningful distinction, and that had to be done incrementally both in testing the market's interest and in delivering on the key tech to do so. The iPad lineup during those years wasn't as ideally distinct as it could have been, e.g. the 9.7" iPad Air 2 and 9.7" iPad Pro both being sold in 2016 wasn't a big distinction, and the 12.9" was far afield from both. Then the next year the 10.5" Pro selling alongside the prior year's 9.7" Pro was also a bit weird, but made sense from a clearing out the inventory perspective.
When they were a smaller company, it was easier to distinguish market segments (e.g. Jobs' famous 2x2 of pro/consumer and desktop/laptop in 97), in part because they had to simply ignore many parts of the market, and because the tech was simpler and changed more quickly. I think the situation we're in now is in part because they went all-out on the X last year to create a distinction between regular and 'pro' models, and because rate of change in tech in general is slowing down. My guess is if they keep this going, in the next few years they will try to draw a bit more distinction between the two lines. The challenge to that going forward is much of the tech differentiation possible is now in software rather than hardware, and the whole zero marginal cost of software actually makes product segmentation harder.
None of which are Apple's problems.
Regarding CPUs, I'm personally much more interested in being able to run macOS on my computer, iOS on my phone, and tvOS on my TV and have them all work together in ways that make me happy. If Apple could add a car to that, I'd be thrilled. I'm always willing to try other options, but I've just never found a setup that worked quite as well for me.
For example, I have a computer I built from parts from NewEgg and Nvidia about a year ago. It has a Threadripper 1950X processor, 128GB of RAM, and an Nvidia Titan V card in it. I used it for about a week and then went back to my MacBook Pro. The custom-built computer is gathering dust in the corner of my office. My point is that different things are important to different people.
> [...]
> It has a Threadripper 1950X processor, 128GB of RAM, and an Nvidia Titan V card in it.
Yes, you are, you're rich. An Nvidia Titan V card on Amazon costs about $3k!
I had a 2006 MBP and every 3 - 5 years since, but after a few months with the latest line I jumped to a Dell XPS running Ubuntu, and I never looked back. Had to find new tools and learn new shortcuts, but after a month or so I adjusted, and I never have to endure that hellish keyboard again.
edit: punctuation exists.
EDIT: the worst MB I had was the white one... the case broke open, the color was yellow-ish in the end
What I really miss are the HDMI port and SD card slot.
And why should I trust them with an iPhone or car then, when the simpliest products were run into the ground.
Swift is a huge and thankless work totally invisible to the userbase and heavily targeted to improve development on Mac/iOS.
You just can’t brush it off to fit your narrative.
Jesus, calm the hell down.
It’s okay to have complaints about aspects of Apple’s products, but this wild exaggeration isn’t doing anybody any favours.
At Microsoft, the head of Xbox marketing reports to the head of Xbox and the head of Azure marketing reports to the head of Azure.
At Apple, there is no divisions, every Apple marketer is responsible for the success of every Apple product and reports to the head of Apple marketing. But the only way this is possible is if every single Apple employee is able to hold every single Apple product line in their head at the same time.
This is an enormous constraint but it's also foundational to Apple mythos because it allowed them to kill the iPod. Divisional orgs have an enormously hard time with disruptive innovation because it upends the power structures of those with the most power. At Apple, there wasn't any person with the title "Head of iPod" whose job would have been in danger if the iPhone overtook the iPod. This was the reason Apple and pretty much only Apple have ever aggressively obsoleted their very best selling product and emerged even stronger out the other side.
You can argue the merits of functional vs divisional all day long and many have but none of those arguments will gain any traction inside of Apple. Apple will remain functional until the day it dies because functional is what allowed Apple to kill the iPod.
Just to clarify: every public product line. If Apple is working on autonomous vehicles, there's no way that every (or even most) employees at Apple know about it.
Ridiculous. Apple has an incredible amount of secrecy across its different departments. Functional orgs don't require the hoi polloi to know everything, as long as mgmt does.
In 18th-century, "trade companies" (V.O.C., British East India Company, etc.) are strong enough to own a country.
Also, effectively, in the twentieth century, post-antitrust. Hence, why we have the term “banana republic”.
Cars are computers with wheels these days, and there will be to some extent a merger of initiatives.
Steve Jobs did several BD deals with feature-phone manufacturers like Motorola before the iPhone specifically to learn and internalize issues from that space.
When you're sitting on $100B in cash, your cost of capital is probably cheap, and existential risks abound.
It makes a lot of sense to be working on trends which are nearly 100% guaranteed to have a massive impact. Since we know self-driving cars are coming one way or another, it makes sense for them to be there.
In 20 years, 'MacOS' could be powering your car and other devices and we might have forgotten about this iPhone thing.
It sure did, to some people:
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/apple-should-pull-the-plug...
And with multiple product lines, company can have multiple focus.
It's just stupid people like us that buy their computers...
Stupid people like engineers at actual first tier tech corporations. First tier arts and entertainment companies and individual artists.
And has been shrinking since 2010... must be a coincidence as Apple introduced the iPad that year...
Apple is the most reliable computer manufacturer of all, according to ConsumerReports actual statistics.
Now according to BS fake news that is paid by Apple competition, yes, there are lots of problems with Apple computers (like 3 or 5 people that complained on Twitter), and nothing with Apple competitive products ever (unless it's a widespread recall like with Samsung...)
Also, what's your problem? If you have any problem, Apple will fix it for free. It's called WARRANTY.
God have mercy on your soul.
Really, is that the best that Apple competitors can do!?
You are all ridiculous, there are MILLIONS of MBPs out there, must all those millions live in a enclosed dome where no dust can get in.
Seriously, nobody has time for your anti-Apple nonsense, I don't know why I even replied.
You probably shouldn't have :)
Nowhere in that POS "article" the author justifies the title.
What is the "vanity project" in this case? I think it's pretty clear that Mac sales won't last forever, and it's not like Apple is strapped for cash and can't afford to pay for both teams.
So, in scale, it might seem like a vanity project, but Apple obviously knows something we don't. For example, Tesla hired a couple of chip engineers from Apple and designed their own chip (to replace the NVidia gpu they were using). Maybe Apple has something unique in the pipeline that would be applicable to machine vision or something else useful to cars and it makes sense to market that to OEMs (I highly doubt they're building an entire car with so few engineers, makes more sense that they would be supplying a component and/or software).
I believe Apple has significantly more employees disclosed on this project than that. This is clearly not a "vanity project".
They are crushing the competition, their profits show that and profits are the ultimate goal.
The word 'they' suggests some kind of hive mind at work. In reality it's more like 1 - 2 people at the top making decisions.
If those people drag their heels for ever, or just don't care it won't happen.
The real question is why should they care. I mean even if you give them stocks, by the time they vest, they would have got their money. After that you can go work for whomever you like.
So why should these people care?
Apple’s executive team is not known for ditching the company the moment their stocks vest.