Apple is regressing to their 1990s identity
triosdevelopers.com
triosdevelopers.com
The thing is that consumers (clearly) don’t care about that stuff. There is no such thing as “overpriced” as long as the item is selling. Consumers determine the price of something based on the single factor of “what they are willing to pay”. If Apple can sell devices at that price, and consumers are willing to pay it, then it is by definition not overpriced.
Opennes is also overvalued for techies. While I am on the side of openness myself, the vast majority of consumers don’t care about it. They only care about the value they are getting from the product. There might be a few people who really want to crack open the case, but they do not have any significant presence in the market.
What consumers do care about is feeling good about their purchase, and the Apple of the 1990s had so many products and was so unfocused that none of the products were good, and consumers felt bad when they bought them.
The SKU problem is the same as today. Now you have half a dozen iPads to choose from, and a number of laptops that all seem to be the same except for half an inch between models. No matter what you pick, you leave the store with a sense of FOMO, not knowing if you really picked the right model. That is really what Steve did — you went in and bought the only option they gave you, and you felt confident you got the right one.
It is not a magic number, it is all the work of the company creating the desire, brand and product to create demand for the price they want to charge.
Luxury brands are either one of two things, they're either a superior quality product over engineered for the consumer's use case, or they're a $40 chinese made t-shirt with a logo on it.
When people learn about the problems with the butterfly keyboard, and the display connectors shorting out -- The luxury good becomes more like an overpriced t-shirt.
Companies don't typically buy $40 abercrombie t-shirts for their employees. Nor will they buy $2000 laptops with a 10% failure rate over 2 years or ownership.
I will say that quality is the biggest factor though. Apple sabotaged its Macbook Pro with that stupid touchbar and terrible keyboard. My (female) friend who's only ever owned iPhones is going to switch to Samsung next time unless Apple makes a small iPhone because she said the next design is really ugly.
Apple deserves their current troubles because they destroyed their formerly top of the line products. Closed systems might not matter to the average consumer, but it's one of the main reasons I've never owned an iPhone and refused to buy a Mac until I had to for work. Perhaps I'm in an even smaller minority there, but it's certainly false to say that all customers don't care about that.
The iPad has excellent, pro-level graphics apps (and a pretty nifty pen from what I've heard).
It's an excellent media creation device.
Second off I didn't tell her to buy it, just to check it out. Perhaps I should've clarified that she told me first that she was considering alternatives to the iPad due to its hefty price and heating issues. I simply presented her an alternative to research.
Also, the Samsung tablet was recommended to me by another artist who uses it exclusively. I was just passing the message along.
Though I will say my 14 year old Palm TX is still alive and kicking...
Recently though, Apple has lost the ability to make me feel good about their products (again I might add). It’s gotten so bad that I sold my MacBook Pro 13” i5 2018 edition and replaced it with a Surface Pro 6 also i5. The MPB never felt right, while the surface feels like something that was designed by Apple. This is completely anecdotal of course, but I find that I’m often not very unique. I mean, I’ve mainly bought Apple products because they “felt right”, so I’m fairly mainstream that way. If I’m not the only one who’s fallen off the bandwagon like this, then Apple might be headed for another no-jobs slump on the computer front.
You’re probably also right about the closed eco-system. I mean, I’ve personally been looking for an alternative because iOS is too closed for me, but I do agree that most people probably don’t care. It’s not like there is an alternative anyway, at least not if you want security, privacy or the ability to install your banking app.
Similarly, they could sell the iPhone for $10k and maybe sell a million of them.
I guess "overpriced" is a subjective term. But if Apple sold the iPhone at cost, Apple could certainly sell a lot more of them. If Apple sold it for a margin more in line with other manufacturers, Apple could still probably sell a lot more...
Apple doesn't care that much about total shipments, though. They care more about total revenue & profits.
I think it's fair for people to call something overpriced even if tons of people are buying it -- especially if there's an argument to be made that a substantial portion of consumers are buying an alternative based mostly on price, and that the comparison product has a much higher margin than the alternative.
Again, this doesn't make it a bad business decision. If there's one thing I guarantee Apple knows more than anyone on Hacker News, it's what the optimal price is for their product to meet their business objectives.
There will always be lower priced competitors who are happy to be in a race to the bottom. Apple is smart to recognize that they cannot do this, for it would spell the doom of the company.
Luxury brands don’t do races to the bottom. To do so would violate their entire reason for existence.
Sure, you might want that Ferrari or Lamborghini to be given to you on a silver platter, or sold to you for just $10.00 each, but do you really honestly expect them to be that stupid?
https://www.ped30.com/2019/03/10/defense-apples-14-billion-r...
Edit for context: in 2018, 11.6bn or 5.1% of revenue. Compare to Amazon it's half as many dollars and 1/3 the percent.
Apple's total R&D spending is well below their contemporaries as a % of revenue.
Looking at all of the money that Google spends on research - they still make 90% of their revenue on ad sales and have had a string of failures and also rans.
No one can seriously argue that Apple’s ARM processor designs aren’t top notch, they just took over Intel’s modem division and they still depend on Intel for much of their computer hardware - except for the T2 chips that are part of their ARM designs
What else do you propose that Apple spend money on?
Horace Deidu just posted a graph on twitter showing that just their services revenue is larger than all of Apple’s revenue a decade ago.
Their spending (as percent) is approximately 1/3 of other phone makers, 1/3 of software developers, or 1/4 of other chipset manufacturers.
These numbers are all very rough of course because, as you point out, all of these companies work in multiple sectors and R&D spending is not disclosed in that much detail.
Like for example, this: https://www.redmondpie.com/why-most-2018-smartphones-have-ch...
Or literally designing their own chips for use in their products which very few other manufacturers can do.
I got him (and my mom) iPhones, knowing that they cost a lot (and in my eyes, overpriced) because once they both are on the same phones, he could walk into an Apple Store, and get issues resolved. They could share with one another about how to use the phone, etc...
If it breaks, he could talk to a person to sort out what to do, and get swapped with a replacement.
I sold an old Nexus 6 to a friend, and eventually an OTA update borked it. He was on the phone getting the run around to recover it.
I know I could work with a much cheaper phone, but for the use cases above, I'm not just paying for the R&D and the hardware and a margin on top, but the services and peace of mind.
Of course some relatives like my mom were cheapskates and did not buy Macs but then their problems are now somebody else’ problems. My personal life quality improved a lot after drawing the clear line.
And no, Macs are not completely problem-free but anecdatally a lot easier :)
Definitely would not suggest windows for non-technical people if you can avoid it. And if you don't need local apps, omg chromebooks are great.
I do agree Openness is overrated. Who cares if Mac are using Metal or proprietary Secure Chips if every thing is working well, and all software had its support. The last part needs working on....
>The thing is that consumers (clearly)....
But Consumers don't buy Mac any more. Most of them don't. It is either business, Software development, aka Professionals / Prosumers and Students. Most of the Consumers went or are going to iPad or Smartphones.
And this obviously screws the Sales Data a lot, Business like Fortune 500 doesn't care about the price tag much, they care about TCO / Total Cost of Ownership, and whether their employees are happy or more productive with their equipment. So business will continue to replace them every few years. And that is why these Enterprise business are so lucrative, they stick to the ecosystem for a long time and don't change very often. There is also a huge hallow effect from iPhone.
I have seen some of these argument all around, it is selling, and therefore it is good. Windows is still the number one selling OS on the planet, do you agree Windows's experience is any good or worth the price?
Seeing that Windows is still the mainstream OS, the market must think it’s good...
- iPad Mini (compact)
- iPad 9.7 (cheap, mainstream)
- iPad Air (Larger screen still affordable)
- iPad 11 (edge to edge display, more expensive features. Not everyone wants a larger/ more expensive iPad)
- iPad 12 (if you really want a large screen)
The laptop line is also simpler since they killed off the 12 inch MacBook, and got rid of the no Touch Bar 13”.
If you want a choice of Android phones, laptops or Windows PCs you have dozens of choices. Apple has to cater to all of the market segments that it cares about.
http://www.howtoanalyst.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Steve...
They create one option in each category. That's all.
5 is really kind of pushing for one consumer focused product if you don't want your buyers to feel like they could've made a better choice, or at least feel like they've missed out on something: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice
In general, people like a few good options. Given a lot of good options, they can get an equally good outcome, and feel less good about it at the end.
I think Apple has banked on that in the past, but not so much with 5 active models of iPad, in my opinion.
While Steve Jobs was alive, they had four iPods by 2011: the shuffle, the Nano, the Classic, and the Touch. The iPhone was really just an iPod with cellular capabilities during its first four years and it was treated as such - same connector, still required iTunes, and to this day it still can use the old iPod protocol to connect to iPod compatible devices.
When Jobs came back they were a struggling company. Worth $4 billion. Now they are worth $1 trillion depending on the month. He had to focus Apple. He had to focus Apple.
- iPad ==> Mini
==> Regular (preferably 10.5")
- iPad Pro ==> 11"
==> 12.9"
What benefit is there from doing that for either Apple or consumers?
People still don't get it. It's not a game of pattern matching with their past. Not only have they and their customers changed, but the world has changed. Computing has changed.
These articles always fail to consider context in favor of the easy, selective, myopic pattern matching.
Don't take this to mean that Apple is above criticism. They're not. But articles like this are lazy.
Outside of phones, their MacBooks are teetering on the edge of no longer being competitive. The sole reason I most recently bought a MacBook instead of a different PowerBook with a tablet screen is that Linux support for tablet screens is still lacking, and my desire for POSIX overrode my desire for a touch screen. The next time I buy, I doubt that will be true of Linux. Either Apple will come late to the game with touch screen laptops (rather exemplifying the article's point that their hardware lags the competition), or they won't, and it will make far more sense to get a faster third party tablet book and put a free OS on it. And I doubt the average customer will care as much about POSIX as I do, but again, as in the nineties, serious developers aren't going to take Apple seriously forever if this keeps up.
Our devs on Macs use them for Objective-C, Swift, Java and .NET Core.
When you put it like that it really does bring Apple's dominance into sharp relief.
(the only attribute of apple that is 5% of US GDP is market cap.)
This compares apples to oranges. In case anyone else is curious:
Apple's worldwide revenue (258 billion) is 1.2% of America's GDP (19.9 trillion) or 0.3% of World GDP (84 trillion).
Apple's value (market cap) is intrinsically tied to the stock market and America's growth.
But thanks for posting the revenue calculations as well. I think those numbers still support my point (because they too, are crazy)
Apple even just 15 years ago was a scrappy company trying to find its footing and had nowhere near the customer base it does today.
It's technically a stock vs flow difference. Not trying to correct, just expand.
Thanks!
https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/01/28/2103622/if-apple-were...
Others have recently estimated Apple GVA to be 0.5% of US GDP and 0.15% of world GDP.
I appreciate you pointing out an alternate methodology though.
The 1.2%/1.6% and even 0.5% figures quoted by others in this thread are still high numbers for a single company, but I submit that "more than 5%" would be a very different number (3x-20x, depending on which of the other numbers you believe) and is a gross exaggeration.
Ugh. Comparing a dollar number with a dollars/year number is really ugly. It's not even the same unit!!
I truly appreciate the UNIX foundation and heritage of OSX, but "fundamentally open" is not a phrase I have ever associated with either or with UNIX.
OSX is UNIX the way AIX, Irix, Solaris, HPUX, etc. are (were) UNIX. None of these are open in any meaningful sense (Solaris being an exception, but that's relatively recent.) The author seems to under the impression that because OSX is UNIX, it's suddenly in the same category of openness as the BSDs and Linux.
To tech-minded people in the 2000s, Apple was no longer this closed, proprietary, expensive tinker toy. They were a decent UNIX workstation manufacturer that fostered openness.
UNIX workstation? Yes. Fostering openness? No. The Apple of the 00's was essentially, and arguable remains, a closed, proprietary, expensive, consumer oriented UNIX workstation.
But since then, it seems as if Apple has continually made decisions to move back in time to the 1990s. Rather than adopting open standards in their operating systems, they started focusing on developing their own, intended to work within their own ecosystem only.
Maybe I'm missing the point. There certainly are Apple hardware changes and trends that I've not been happy about. I also recognize that there are software changes and standards deviations that are unfortunate. However, the idea that Apple was somehow a bastion of openness, and that their OS was open and now isn't seems inaccurate.
As long as smartphones remain most people's primary form of computing, I don't really see Apple beig hurt in any significant way. They've effectively created a monopoly on iOS software, so that developers have to put up with the experience, no matter how bad it gets, if they want to make any money. And until some major new technology comes along that Apple doesn't have, it doesn't seem like there's any reason for consumers to abandon Apple's ecosystem in favor of something else.
Then when they developed a new competitive moat in iPhones, they were able to move back to closed.
Even NeXT wasn't that open to UNIX, for them that was just a way to have a foot on the young workstation market, NeXTSTEP hardly leveraged POSIX for the framework APIs.
I don’t see that Apple has a solution in this space, but maybe they can do something based on the Apple Watch platform.
Don’t look behind you to figure out where you’re going in the future.
https://www.cnet.com/news/steve-jobs-promised-to-make-faceti...
What about all those Window managers that copied from NeXTSTEP?
Modern Apple platforms are an evolution from NeXTSTEP.
”The company was founded in November 1990 as Advanced RISC Machines Ltd and structured as a joint venture between Acorn Computers, Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.) and VLSI Technology.”
I'm speaking mostly about their mobile platform... Mac laptops / desktops are another thing... Specifically, I think the lack of a reasonably affordable desktop solution for developers is kind of a bumper. We need upgradability and openness for drivers to make it viable. There are use cases for a less expensive desktop that developers would buy.
You can buy some shitty Windows laptop to make Android apps on for $400. Will it be a good experience? Absolutely not; but at least you can get it done.
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/FREA2LL/A/refurbished-133...
It's a cool machine, but the tiny form factor is fairly limiting.
It's a bit sad to trade reliability, GPU performance, tidiness (since the external enclosure adds more boxes and wires and power supplies), price, and CPU power just for a smaller core computer though.
It gets even worse when you want a couple of big HDDs which would have just gone in drive bays with a traditional computer. With the mac mini, you'd have to add even more expensive external enclosures to your desk, which is expensive and messy. Suddenly, instead of a nice self-contained smallish desktop, you have an impressively small core machine box, with a wire to your GPU box (which has to be on top of the desk due to the short length of thunderbolt cables), a wire to your HDD box, and you still have the slower CPU.
I don't really mean to say the Mac mini is a poor choice, it probably fits a bunch of desktop use cases reasonably well. It's just not as optimal as it could be.
To illustrate how a real small and powerful desktop from Apple could've been: I'm using a really small (though not as small as the mac mini) Fractal Design Node 304 [0], with a 2.5 slot width, full length GPU, a 3.5" drive, two 2.5" drives, an m.2, and a standard ITX card with regular RAM and CPU slots. I have a 1080Ti and an i7 6700k in it with no thermal issues. Apple could've made a similarly expandable machine in a smaller form factor with better thermals and looks, but they... don't.
[0]: https://www.fractal-design.com/home/product/cases/node-serie...
EDIT: More importantly, where are the other companies that are selling billions of dollars worth of this kind of hardware?
PS: My use case would be for CUDA stuff. It being a Mac is nice because I can directly use it as a development machine. So having a Linux desktop at home is the best alternative and SSHing into it.
UNIX were interesting camouflaged as Irix and NeXTSTEP.
Linux interesting bit was trying not to toast the monitor while attempting to get X working at all.
Apple's is the third most valuable company in the world. You'd have to be delusional to think the future is open.
Pack it in, fellow tech-priests, we lost this one.
There's a lot to be said for open platforms. I'd also be surprised if given a few years that WebAssembly doesn't bring more open application options, even to closed ecosystems like Apple's iThings.
But recently I have to shell out $3000 USD for something with limited ports, a touchbar without a clear use case, poorly designed keyboards, and constant upcharging for docks, dongles and services.
I get where they are going... appeal to pros who don’t care how much stuff costs and consumers who will pay anything for apple devices.
I'm glad they did. MacOS is more clean and secure than Windows and Linux, and is a primary driver for Apple hardware sales. You can make Linux almost as secure, with enough tinkering, but it is not out of the box experience. Think Gatekeeper code signing.
If anything, I would describe that behavior as "extreme NIH syndrome".
AirDrop, AirPlay, iMessage, FaceTime
The 1990s was when Apple didn’t have Jobs for many years. Then Jobs came back and saved the company. Now Apple is without Jobs again for many years.
But saying Apple chose closed solutions? That’s classic Jobs. He ended the open clones program and OpenDoc etc. and brought it all in-house. The only thing Apple ever did that was really open under Jobs was probably bringing NextStep UNIX onboard!
Nit: Jobs did not make this decision as he was not part of the company when it was made.
NextStep was like night and day. It breathed new life into Apple.
Reference? That seems to be attributing malice when bad design (or design trade-offs) are more likely.
At least 1990s Apple users were computer fans in an era when that was a rare thing. Today, strippers and drug dealers carry iPhones (and are proud of it).