Apple Reports Second Quarter Results
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I wonder why?
Edit: It appeared after I purchased a new MacBook. Seems like an Apple Arcade voucher was included with the purchase and it nags me to activate it.
In 2014 I thought the Services Revenue Growth will be coming from bundling of iPhone + iCloud + AppleCare+ in subscription like services. Sort of like the current iPhone upgrade programme, with upsell of other things like Apple Music, Netflix or HBO where they get some sort of commissions. ( Similar to current App Store sign up commission ). Using something like Apple Credit Card ( that was long rumoured and somehow only launched in 2019 ) where Apple could afford to have revenue spread over a much longer period of time all while increases iPhone affordability. Think 36 Months instead of the usual 24 months. Apple has too much cash on hand and this delayed account receivable is something that could be used to Apple's advantage.
Instead they went with AppleTV+, Apple News+ Apple Fitness+, Apple PodCast+, Apple Arcade, and bundling them into ONE all to dilute their $10+Billion Annual raw profits from having Google as default search engine. I mean what's next? "Apple Bank" because their Hardware features and customer data which Apple do collect so they can provide better Banking services? "Apple Insurance" because Apple Watch provides Data to Apple and Apple cant share to other for privacy reason? Apple Cars with special design U1 integration of whatever that only works with Apple Find My Network? And "Apple Taxi" once Apple figure out how to do LV5 AV?
This is not Steves-Apple. This is very Tim Cook's Apple.
It's remarkable to see the success that AMD and Apple are having without Intel.
Does Apple have equivalents of those features? Discover Weekly is incredible.
I have a suspicion that if I'd actually paid for Spotify and stuck with it for a few years, though, the reverse would be true. My gut feeling is that these two services just aren't different enough in practice to make switching between them worth it for most users, unless they want a feature in the larger ecosystem (e.g., AirPlay 2 or Spotify Connect).
My musical preferences did not lend themselves well to Spotify’s discovery, I don’t think, and Apples has been a similar experience. Both have been ok, but neither stellar.
Switched to spotify and it has all worked better and the recommendations are better.
Last year they updated it and removed the Android widget completely - we absolutely revolted blasting them with 1 star reviews, etc. They timed it with the launch of their India service so I have this theory that they knew they'd lose a bit of customers (they had no idea how many Android use widgets apparently) and negative reviews would come in but replace them with revenue/reviews from India which knocked their stars right back up.
Literally same day. I don't like the company because of things like that but it's still IMO the best music service. I'm using Tidal as well for its hifi/masters now.
I'm not the only one
But the alternative for Maps is Google, and the last thing I want to do is give them a bead on my current location and all the places I want to go and explore. With Google's ownership of so much information, I think anybody avoiding Google Maps is very well justified.
However, in the early days of Google Maps, when MapQuest was still around and before cars had in-dash navigation, Google Maps did give me bad directions for driving, that I had printed out, and made me late. I still ended up using Google Maps, and they got better.
I will still use Google Maps to discover biking routes in unfamiliar areas, so I do give up my location to them occasionally, but in my experience that's the only edge that Google Maps has these days.
What is masterful is how they redirected the desirable-number-du-jour to be something that is both 1) proprietary and 2) not cutting into their service revenue (e.g. larger storage = less people shelling out for cloud storage)
Don't take my word, look it up.
Around launch date, everyone in the universe will post "new MacBook Air is by far the best laptop I've ever used. It has fantastic battery life". Then the same model 6-12mo later "I loved the thinness, but now it's being too slow for X so I might get a macbook"
Not just marketing speak. If they can keep up this momentum with M2, etc... they'll be creating some defensive moats around their laptop/desktop business.
The air has had great battery for a while that's true, but now it has great battery and great performance.
For one short year, in 2020, due to the ARM transition, Apple repeated that feat. It could keep on going, if for example, the refresh of the Macbook Air comes out in 2022 and beats the Pro machines that came out in 2021.
Form factor basically same, screen the same, OS the same, yet somehow the qualitative feel changes with the new responsiveness. I don't switch to any Mac other than the M1 now except of necessity because of the instant ability to feel the downgrade.
The designs seem to make a bit more sense now, I was always perplexed at Ive's 'thinness at the expense of everything else' mindset (butterfly switch keyboard, ugh)
So Apple appears to have been asleep at the wheel with the Mac (which is perhaps why Ive's had so much leeway with clearly unpopular decisions like the keyboard, missing escape key, etc...) resulting in its worst years ever. The laptop keyboard is one example, but the iOS-ification of the Mac is another (i.e., moving towards the iOS security model), as is the stagnate Mac Pro.
Now things are back to normal, see the M1, the new Mac Pro, the new iMac, etc...
The M1 transition going so smoothly, and with such an emphasis on backwards compatibility (they ported OpenCL! they helped with Blender!) is my favorite example of this, contrasted with the complete &$@^*% you! treatment that developers got with things like notarization, new security features, and pretty much everything recent going all the way back to Mac App Store Sandboxing, which I'd personally consider the start of the dark years (and I'd also consider that the single worst decision in all of this, worse than the keyboard, that's the one that fundamentally broke the Mac ecosystem, maybe forever).
iOS-ification of macOS in particular is incredibly overblown, power users have been playing up a few security design changes and modernized APIs (e.g. kext > system extensions) as if they're huge negatives that will "ruin" macOS. I just don't think those issues matter.
If the Mac itself improving was part of the Q2 results, you wouldn't have seen the similar levels of iPad revenue spike. There has been no significant change to the iPad lineup that would convince someone to buy or not buy in the last couple of years.
That's why I think this is 100% Covid or whatever you call this current spike in demand.
Do we honestly think apple is going to reverse course on this? I highly doubt it. Open platforms are not their m.o. for many years. They've let the walled garden around macos have too many cracks and holes, and they're going to recapture those users that have taken advantage.
Apple is not deaf to their users, they know how important Homebrew is. Apple themselves gifted hardware to the Homebrew team:
"Particular thanks on Homebrew 3.0.0 go to MacStadium and Apple for providing us with a lot of Apple Silicon hardware and Cassidy from Apple for helping us in many ways with this migration. Enjoy using Homebrew!"
A very important percentage. E.g. Final Cut used to have a 60% market share. Now it's may be 25%?
There's most likely a dip among every other category of professional users.
We don't know because Apple doesn't report it, but I would surmise that Final Cut has had a consistently growing user base.
- Final Cut X was a major re-write that didn't support importing old project formats for something like two years and didn't support all required video formats for the same period
- Mac Pro was abandoned, twice. Once for years before the trashcan design. Once for years after the trashcan design.
I don’t really get the Jony Ive hate. The only particularly bad thing I can think of him being involved in was the butterfly keyboard, and the fact that the Apple Watch is the only real success among smart watches more than makes up for that.
They just reached a useful minimum, I don't think it has anything to do with Ive.
IMO the guy got bored and focused on building the museum-like HQ building and took eyes off the ball of actual products, while maintaining total control. Even for an elite, top of his field individual, you need to focus to win.
In terms of laptops, HP built some very nice high end business laptops that were more like evolutions of the 2014 MacBook Pro than the garbage Apple pumped out and wasted many millions of dollars on for warranty claims.
[0] from the OED: a) To make drawings for the construction or creation of (something, as a building, object, garment, etc.) according to certain aesthetic criteria; (b) to make plans for the production of (a device, product, etc.) according to structural or functional criteria (sometimes without the implication of aesthetic requirements); (c) (in extended use) to conceive, devise, plan (something immaterial, as a scheme, system, programme, etc.).
Never owned an Apple Watch so can’t compare but I really like my Garmin. It is a little large though so not everyone’s cup of tea. Smaller versions probably last a bit shorter.
Offer not valid if I do an hour of exercise during the day, or game heavily (I've been known to zone out on 2048 pretty hardcore), but for normal use, sure.
Apple Watch isn't trying to be anything other than a charge-daily device, it's honestly kind of incredible that something that small can be a full-fledged cell phone and still last a full day.
It should be noted that Garmin's battery life drops to 36 hours (fenix 6) once GPS mode is on, which is comparable to the Apple Watch.
Long battery life is a lot less important in this category than you'd think. You throw your watch on your night stand every night and forget about it.
How do you wake up then? One of the biggest advantages of my pebble classic is that i can wear it to bed and have vibrate mode wake me up silently.
For exercise, i already have my phone on me, so it tracks everything for me and the pebble shows stats on the watchface.
I think we've lost something by not treating the "smart watches" as thin terminals.
It charges pretty quickly; quickly enough in my experience that even if I forget to charge it one day and I find it dead at an inconvenient time, I can usually throw it in a charger for long enough to get through the rest of the day without much inconvenience. I’ve had my series 5 for about 18 months and in that time, only once have I had it die on me when I was trying to use it.
If I ever go back to working in an office, my use pattern might change, but for the most part I think the inconvenience of charging daily is overstated.
Edit: It also will notify you 1 hour before your configured bedtime if it doesn’t have enough juice to get through the night. I thought this was silly when they announced it but in practice it is great.
As of right now I usually don't use an alarm to wake up. I just wake up. Or I use a standard audio alarm on the phone. But I guess that's kind of a cop-out answer?
The vibration alarm was nice, not a must-have considering I had to wear something around my wrist when I slept: not as comfortable as not doing that.
I disagree with you about the concept of smartwatches that should be "thin terminals." The things I don't miss about my Pebble classic involve how basic it was.
I can totally understand someone wanting much more of a basic device with time, fitness tracking, basic notifications, long battery life, and that's about it. However, I think that in the scope of what is marketable to the general public, it's a more of a niche.
I think that most people:
1. Don't actually want to sleep with any jewelry (watches) on.
2. Aren't deep into fitness tracking beyond the basics, i.e. they wouldn't sleep with jewelry on just to get sleep tracking. For most people fitness tracking means a few graphs and figures that make them feel good about themselves for getting on a treadmill for 20 minutes.
3. Choose their watch based on the fact that it's a piece of jewelry. In my mind, Apple gained a lot of early traction (and high-margin revenue) by focusing on the fashion part of it with the way the bands are easily changeable.
Pebble wouldn't have folded if they had considered how high-margin the jewelry business usually is. The original Pebble should have been designed with replaceable bands like the Apple Watch. They shouldn't have said "oh hey these are standard sized bands, just buy your own!" They just surrendered revenue right out the gate!
4. Want something that's more of a general purpose extension of their smartphone.
In the long term, I don't see a huge amount of reason why smartwatches can't entirely replace the smartphone, at least for the people who aren't interested in content consumption, or to give people flexibility to leave their phone at home for evenings out or other situations.
Apple Watch does do sleep tracking. I've heard reports from people of success with just charging the Apple Watch while they're in the shower or getting ready every day. If you take something like 30 minutes to get ready you'll never need to charge the watch at night.
- for the first x years of apple, everything was legitimately thick
- so each generation Ive wanted to make things thinner
- it entered the culture (of the design division perhaps) that you had to make each generation thinner than the last to please Ive
- Then when things got to a comfortable thickness for users, people kept making each generation thinner to please Ive
- Ive never told them to stop making things thinner so they didn't stop.
- snowball effect and we got those horrible products
- he had to leave to stop the cycle
> - he had to leave to stop the cycle
Or, you know, correct people on their misinterpretation of his desires, if indeed there was any.
I'm trying real hard to not see this comment as some sort of Apple logic distortion field showing itself in an overt manner, but not having much luck.
Apple's software support for all their devices lasts much longer than the competition, and their hardware tends to last many years out of warranty. Not always of course, but this is a numbers game, and there is a robust secondary market in everything Apple makes.
Objectively, a laptop, phone, or tablet, will have a longer service life if manufactured by Apple, than anyone else, with the possible exception of ThinkPads.
Sure, if you want more RAM or what have you, you have to buy a new computer and sell the old one. That's expensive, but all that matters with respect to the environment is total service life of a given machine, and again, as an objective matter, Apple is peerless there.
It's tempting to compare this record against imaginary competition which doesn't exist, but I don't see the point.
That's true for mobile products.
On desktop no one beats Microsoft's support time spans. Apple cares significantly less for desktop longevity.
An apple device with upgradeable parts would be even better for the environment. Apple's software support has no effect on the environmental impact of non upgradeable computers compared to upgradeable computers.
In general I think this is less of an issue today, since usb-C is both generally great and very small, so you can just use it. But, if thinness came at the sacrifice of common connectors like USB-A (or like HDMI), the opportunity cost of standard connectors might be lost.
I'm ignoring that like many of apple's ports are just better than USB-A to focus only on the waste argument here though.
The 12” MacBook was the poster child for the search for ultimate thinness. As was the disastrous butterfly keyboard (it was suggested this only shaved off 0.5mm).
Look at the iPad Pro refresh just announced. It’s actually slightly thicker because that’s needed for a better display. This would never have happened with Ive at the helm of design.
The thinness and smallness of the computer was genuinely a very nice thing about it. You could hold it open in one hand easily, fit into any bag, didn't add any weight. Computers don't have all that much differentiating them anyway, so these things are actually a very good goal to shoot for. I'm guessing that they will probably end up bringing the form factor back with the M1 at some point.
So dust kills a keyboard that is an expensive replacement and was such a fail Apple had to replace who knows how many keyboards for free. Epic fail. That's kind of my point.
> Biggest downside is that it got very hot during video calls
Exactly. It was too underpowered. Compare that to the Macbook Air (2010 onwards, not the earlier 2008 model). This was such an awesome machine. Relatively cheap and a good compromise of power and portability. It was actually amazing how good this machine was. For years no Windows hardware could compete with that price and set of features.
But it languished for years when all it needed was more memory and a retina display and instead we got the one-port 12" Macbook abomination. All for the holy grail of thinness.
Design is the art of compromise. The 12" Macbook shows you exactly what happens when you don't compromise.
> I'm guessing that they will probably end up bringing the form factor back with the M1 at some point.
While waiting for a Macbook Air refresh my heart sank as soon as they announced the 12" Macbook. Why? Because I knew there was no room for the (then) 11" and 13" Airs with a 12" SKU. And I was right. That mistake was corrected so I don't see the 12" model coming back anytime soon with the 13" Air here and on M1.
if anything, I think that niche has been filled with the iPad (poorly). I mean there's lots of things I like my iPad for but it's no laptop replacement.
The thinness trade offs with the butterfly keyboard and USB C actually make sense for an ultraportable (as opposed to a desktop replacement like the pro).
> I had some issues with dust in the keyboard I use a keyboard cover to get around this.
> Biggest downside is that it got very hot during video calls, which wasn't as big of an issue in 2016 as it is now. Agreed, it's not great for video, esp. since the camera also kind of sucks.
I'd totally buy an updated version.
This is verifiable nonsense, given the iPhone increased in thickness between generations several times with Ive at the helm.
It's crazy to think about, Intel 10nm was supposed to be available for the entire butterfly/touchbar era.
I can't find the link, but I heard when they launched the new Mac Pro, Ives tried to show Tim Cook what it looked like, but Tim responded with "I get it... its a computer", and didn't see the design until the public launch event.
Right-clicking became so ubiquitous and even consistent on Windows. You needed the same behaviour on Macs but had no second mouse button so got that by using modifier keys. Some apps it was Option, others control and so on.
The problem was that those modified clicks had no discoverability and less consistency than right-clicking. Windows users on the other hand learned that nothing bad could happen with a right click.
Force Touch as a similar kind of UX fail with no discoverability. There was (and is) no consistency with what a Force Touch means or should mean or even if it's an option at all.
But yes, Force Touch did make the iPhone thicker and heavier.
And yet now we have the new iMac, the "thinnest iMac ever" at just 11.5mm. So it seems like Ive wasn't the only one at Apple obsessed with being thin.
But they did choose to make the new iMacs thin rather than small, they could have tucked the computer part behind the display and done away with the chin, but they didn't.
Really moving into the lifestyle product market.
some have also mentioned potential synergy with future MacBooks, which might also adopt this port on the power brick. that could bring a magnetic connector back to laptops _and_ ethernet without a $30 dongle
1. Lot of use cases for SD cards besides cameras. Audio recorders, notably.
2. A fair number of high-end cameras are no longer using SD cards, or at least, not exclusively; lot of CFexpress for the big boy cameras out there now. (I mean, they used to use CompactFlash cards, but it’s not like they’re gonna jam a CF card reader in there.)
Sure, but it was removed from the main device.
Honestly I think that’s an inspired bit of design. It solves for Apple’s desire to keep clean lines, and, in many offices I’ve been in, the Ethernet is wired in close to the power, so it’s very functional. Win-win.
You say that like it’s a bad thing. The iMac gets an Ethernet port, and there’s one fewer cable to run up to the machine. That seems like a win all around.
But I don't think it's entirely fair to just call that failed experiment the pursuit of thinness at all costs. Scissors are a bit mushy, you can move your fingers around on a keypad and feel them wobble. The sound is kind of dull, the action lacks a clean tactile break.
The butterfly keyboard felt great, to me at least. Crisp, clicky action, rock-solid pads: to my taste, the tactile experience is superior. If they had found a way to make them absolutely reliable, I'd have called it a win. Although the square arrow keys and lack of a physical escape key were ergonomic disasters, that's orthogonal to keyboard action, they could have fixed both of those things while sticking with the butterfly switches.
These are ultimately aesthetic considerations. Someone else certainly prefers the sound and feel of the scissor switches, I respect that, I just disagree is all.
So I don't think shaving a half millimeter was the be-all and end-all of the decision to iterate on the ultimately unworkable butterfly keyboard design. I imagine Jony Ive thought it was a nicer keyboard and just spent more time trying to make it work than was really justified, especially since it proved to be impossible.
Was it the best on the market? Well, no, obviously not, one of the worst considering the reliability.
Is Apple's current scissor keyboard the best on the market? No, it was clearly shoehorned back in from older designs with minimal changes.
I would have loved the butterfly keyboard to have just a hair longer travel...and there was something about the key shape/spacing/size that made me slightly less accurate finding the correct keys.
It really was "almost there" but they had to throw it out because it was a PR disaster.
I will add that I have no real idea about Ive's design leanings. I guess it is possible to conclude that either he wasn't the driving force behind "extreme thinness" or he managed to convert people inside of Apple to this way of thinking and they still remain influential.
Obviously dramatic over simplification but it doesn’t seem to be the usual kind of thin for the sake of thin design - this iMac seems objectively better than its predecessors and its thickness (or lack thereof) doesn’t seem like a problem or unnecessary constraint.
Again, they don’t have to solve the mobile/tablet issues on this product, it’s never going to be a portable device.
They made a trade-off to make it look uglier/bulkier/worse from the front when actually using the machine, just so that if you happen to glimpse it from the side it's a little thinner. There's not even the argument of portability to support the pursuit of thinness here as with most of their other devices. So I would argue the opposite, this new iMac is just about the pinnacle of thinness for the sake of thin design.
(You could of course argue that it's not ugly, that's totally subjective, but they clearly went out of their way to make it as thin as possible).
They will always be two different use cases, desktop/mobile.
Apple is clearly selling to the masses here.
Most people don't know or care who Jony Ive is, and the MacBook Pros and iPads don't look meaningfully different in any way.
I'm shocked anyone thinks Ive's departure is relevant at this scale.
You need some balance. The key is to produce the best looking product without compromising functionality or usability.
Not sure how that has anything to do with the parent's argument.
It wasn't usable for the majority of the market. Even in the infamous mea culpa Apple made about it, they admitted they designed themselves into a corner. It was designed so poorly, they had to take years to undo it after admitting it needed to be done.
GP was complaining about the common and incorrect trope that design is limited to aesthetics.
In theory.
In practice, designers design for two things: market demand, and personal predilection.
To be fair, Apple acknowledged the problem and provides free out-of-warranty repair/replacement for keyboard issues on the affected models. But it took them years to come out with a better keyboard.
Yes, Ive was a bit of a farce. Under Jobs he flourished. Without guidance from Jobs he proved to be comically bad. It will take years for Apple to recover from the damage he did. For example, copying Flat-UI from Windows Phone. Apple hasn't recovered yet.
I mean, he did basically design the Apple Watch which has been an absolute runaway success, the most successful new entire product category since the iPhone.
So not exactly sure how that's comically bad.
Not sure about that.
I was impressed by how Apple-y the Apple Watch was, especially before the first software update. I am convinced this is due to Steve Jobs' influence [1]. As soon as the first software update was released I noticed a marked decline, much like the decline we saw in iOS 7.
[1] https://www.cultofmac.com/427636/steve-jobs-may-have-influen...
I don't think that any of this is due to the design either.
Windows and Linux (desktop and server) user for ~15 years before getting my first Mac (at work) around 2011 (DOS user even earlier). Other keyboard+OS combos are so frustrating now. Not in the "this is unfamiliar" way macOS was initially, but in a "I know this and the Apple way now, and this is worse, why the hell do you keep doing this, and not either just copy Apple or come up with something even better?" way.
Point is: you'll get used to it, and probably like it. But you might permanently be slightly irritated when using anything else, afterward.
(Try Spectacle, or something similar, if you want somewhat better window layout management from the keyboard. It's in Homebrew. It's pretty much the only OS-behavior-modifying thing I install on Mac—my other tweaks are just in the settings GUI, mostly just making CAPS lock an extra ctrl. The default spectacle shortcuts are a bit wild, but 95% of what I use is just split-half-screen left, split-half-screen right, and fullscreen, and it'd be worth using if you never used any others)
Option is Alt. Used to modify some keyboard shortcuts like the above, sometimes on its own, and often used to type in alternate characters than standard on your keyboard (Option+e e gives you an accented e).
Control is honestly something I use often outside the terminal on macOS. I think Control+<left/right arrow key> gets you linear navigation with multiple full screen windows or multiple desktops. It probably does more, I don't know.
If you notice people complaining about something in numbers, there's a reason for it.
There were people who held out for years because MacBook Pro designs were anti-consumer and people held out for compromise. I know I did. Everyone I know did. It wasn't some niche. There's an entire professional class that relies on good tooling.
Huh? If anything, everybody and their dog were yelling at Apple against the non-flat "skeuomorphic" UI at the time they made the switch.
And while the first version was undercooked, the current (and 2-3 years) iteration of the flat UI is just fine...
It turns out everyone did want to do that, and in fact iPhones weren't big enough, so the flat UI was designed to take the same device and make it look bigger and brighter.
Huh?
What a skilfully crafted piece of rhetoric that is. For a moment, I forgot I was in the gutter and imagined we were all united, looking at the stars.
I’m pretty impressed with the M1 Mac Mini and look forward to follow ups and the Linux porting efforts, too.
With other companies announcing their own custom CPU designs, I wonder if we are entering into a new era of some kind.
My daily driver is a 2015 Macbook Pro. My iPhone is a 2016(?) 6S. My iPad is the original Air. I'd be happy to upgrade but for someone who lives in Books, Safari and Excel all day, they all work fine. I just can't justify it.
The M1 equivalents are leaps and bounds faster and there are plenty of people who need that power and more but... will 99.995% of Apple users notice further upgrades? Where do we go from here? What's the future of personal computing?
(Fingers crossed for lightweight fully immersive no wires VR in five years)
For instance, this year is not only the year of the M1 but also the Mini-LED ('XDR') displays we see on the new iPad Pro. 1000nits (peak 1600) is a massive improvement as is the improved contrast.
Meanwhile users are on their own personal replacement cycle (say 2-4 years for phone, 3-6 years for iPad and Mac). So by the time the user is thinking about replacing their device, there's several years of accrued changes across many/most components that make the latest device really compelling.
You're right that at this point all the Apple devices have at least a good 5-6 years of 'works fine' in them. But this fall when you go to look at a new MacBook Pro and it's got an XDR screen and an M2 chip that together have you 3-5x screen brightness (vs your 2015's 300nits), 3-5x graphics, 2-3x cpu, 2-3x battery life, better webcam, etc, all compared to your slowly wearing out macbook... that'd look pretty darn enticing to anyone.
As for the future? At some point component capabilities (like cpu/gpu perf per watt) reaches a point when entire new categories are unlocked, like AR/VR or computational photography effects, but those have to be incremented to as the pace of component progress allows.
I'm sure they'll increase the graphics performance and make NVIDIA-level GPUs at some point, probably to drive VR/AR. Maybe they'll try to take the premium server market too (e.g. Graviton for non-cloud offerings).
I wish running multiple iOS and Android simulators didn’t need so much memory.
You can say "16gb is enough if you swap efficiently", but I run models that need 100+GB on the regular. I'd love to see what a super high-end Apple core can do to that workload!
"I am in the 0.0001% of the people that need 100+Gb ram", so it seems this massive hit of a cpu/laptop, where everyone is raving about it, is not so good when I compare it to what I need that are thousands of a percent of what regular people use.
I'm a developer, I bought the M1 mbp with 8 (yes eight) gb of ram, for testing and was supposed to then be my gf's machine. You know what, almost 6 months in, she still hasn't touched it. I would maybe go for 16gb in the next one, but she will pry it from my cold dead hands before I get a newer model and she can keep this one.
I bought an M1 for my partner and they aren't using it. I am. The battery life is incredible and it feels snappier than the macbook pro I have for work.
I bought APPL after trying this out
Looks at fanless M1 MacBook Air, with 14+ damn hours of battery life in my real-world use
I mean... OK? My minivan isn't an aircraft carrier, either.
> It really has trouble with the high-end laptop club too.
If you're memory-constrained or doing something with GPU, that might be true. Otherwise, benchmarks plz. And again, high-end laptop... looks at big desktop-replacement laptops, then back over at tiny little fanless MacBook Air
But we haven’t seen what they can really do yet. The M1 sure “feels” like an iPad SoC, what with the weirdness with some of the ports and bus limitations. (External displays: little off-kilter right now in terms of limitations.)
I’m optimistic they are preparing some real firepower for a 30-inch iMac and 16-inch MacBook Pro. Or at least, I sure hope so, as I type here, looking at this damned useless OLED strip above my keyboard as my leg hairs are slowly burned away.
All in all, I think it’s impossible to draw any hard conclusions from here. We all have to wait and see.
70% up.
Edit: typo
But you know what Tim Cook didn’t do? He didn’t screw it all up. Which sounds like faint praise, but I really think it’s inarguable that Jobs remade Apple, stem to stern, blood to bone, software to hardware. And to step in and take over a company that had been reborn like that, and not nickel-and-dime it into mediocrity? Remarkable.
I don’t think anyone is really arguing Cook is a product visionary—I certainly don’t think Cook is himself. But just navigating the political landscape alone is truly impressive.
It reminds me of Macs back in the 90’s. Very few used Windows for creative work. The MacOS had ColorSync and professionals in photography and print, publishing, etc refused to use anything but a Mac due to the need for colour accuracy in their workflows. To an outsider it may have seemed baffling as to why these computers were considered professional tools when everyone else in business was using Windows.
I perhaps don’t see the Pro in iPad Pro because I am wanting it to basically be a Mac, but tablet. Maybe it is truly an orthogonal product that does pro work differently. But the software story just still feels incomplete. Just feels so limiting in terms of file system and such.
The iPad Pro is a pro device for creative professionals in visual arts only, to my knowledge. It’s definitely not a pro software development tool or anything else of the sort we’d use a Mac for. In some sense you can think of the iPad Pro as an attack on Wacom’s market.
I’m not a creative pro by any stretch of the imagination. I use my iPad Pro for tutoring people remotely in mathematics, a task it excels at. I also play some games on it and use it for FaceTime calls because its front-facing camera is nicer than the one on my M1 MBA.
I’m really happy with my iPad Pro even though I was hesitant about buying one for over a year. I was expecting buyers’ remorse to set in but it thankfully hasn’t. I keep finding new things to do with it. Scrolling through PDFs on the device is way smoother than the MBA, for example, so I’ve used it as a second screen for reading documentation while working.
(I will note my college illustration professor loves her iPad Pro with a passion that would fill an Apple keynote—she ditched her Wacom instantly.)
But though I’m iffy on the Pro in iPad, I am pro iPad, if only because my somewhat elderly parents love the thing. They are like some Platonic ideal of iPad users—they have totally and completely ditched their Mac, and do all their banking and medical records and weather (old people love weather) on their iPad, with a fluency they never, ever came close to achieving with a mouse.
Folks on HN have a strong tendency to label any computer-thing not serving that last use case, for which the iPad Pro is it no help at all, as a toy or "just a consumption device" (not saying you are, but it's a common sentiment on here). It's a kind of occupation-induced blindness, I think.
Oh I am 100% guilty of that, and I admit that. I have been using Photoshop in some capacity since 1994, and I am 37 years old. So that “teeny tiny click targets and lots of keyboard chording” is just baked into the interaction homunculus in my head. It is admittedly difficult to for me to think of an iPad as a “Pro” tool.
A blind spot I am working on, but once you get to be my age, you get set in your ways. You kids and your TikTok…
I pay $2.99 a month for 200GB of iCloud, and what I get in return is a folder on my desktop which is shared between phone, tablet, and laptop. It "just works", I have no complaints. I'd be paying that money anyway just to back up my photos.
The other way of doing things is the 'share' button, and when it works, it's really great. Sometimes it doesn't, because the app I want to use next hasn't registered itself properly or something, so I have to use Save to Files as a fallback. Which is fine and has never failed me.
I agree. However, he is a master at providing the infrastructure and logistics to make other people realise their vision. And he does have a long-term plan.
The scale and efficiency of Apple’s operations, as well as their continued success is mind boggling. There have been a couple of hiccups every now and then (and some tours de force as well); overall it is quite impressive.
I get that.
But.
Having used many iPads, my favorite sizes are the 12.9" (Pro) and the Mini.
Why (for the pro—I trust my love of the mini needs little explanation)?
The 12.9" is so big that it's about the size of an 8.5x11" sheet of paper, which turns out to be a really convenient size for reading anything based on... paper. It's outstanding for reading PDFs of, say, textbooks, as it's large enough you might be able to get away with reading it in landscape, and is the best device I'm aware of for reading comics (ditto on the landscape mode, it works great, it's just a little smaller than a real two-page comic book spread). Yet it's light enough not to be a giant pain to hold.
It's amazing for art (with a Pencil). Nice and big, very responsive. The larger screen makes almost anything you'd do on a normal iPad a little better. Movies, browsing, games. Low-distraction writing device with an external keyboard. It's a great companion for music where, again, the larger size is really nice for displaying sheet music or... well, almost anything else music-related you want to do. Last I checked the cameras & mics beat the hell out of most laptops, including Apple ones, for video calls.
Know what it's very close in size to? A 13" MBP or Air. Know what it can do? Become a portable external monitor for same. Damn nice.
2-player board games. Again, the size helps a ton.
My personal uses barely call for all the extra horsepower of the "pro" line, actually, aside from maybe drawing (which, AFAIK, has more to do with specialized hardware on the screen than with CPU power or memory) but holy crap, the screen size. It's glorious. If I could have only one computing device in my house I'd seriously consider making it the 12.9" iPad Pro (assuming I could keep my mechanical bluetooth keyboard, too). I can always SSH/Mosh to a unixy command line somewhere else, but none of my unixy machines are much good for most of what I use the iPad Pro for.
In the 70s, components were expensive and thus the market was mainframes and big company sales, so required a sales leader to extract the most, and the product could be average (like IBM, HP).
In the early 80s, components were getting cheap enough to be affordable by regular people, so a product leader was needed to define the personal computing sector, as the product could not be average (not Commodore, TI, or IBM PC).
In the late 80s - 90s, commoditization meant it was about capturing the value of the personal computing sector, so it required a sales leader to extract the most, and the product could just be average (like Windows, beige PCs).
In the late 90s - 00s, it became cheap enough to start internet companies at scale and opened up an entire market, so it required product leaders to define the core internet offerings of cloud, social media, search, and ecommerce, and the product couldn't be average (not Yahoo, Myspace, or co-lo ISPs).
In the mid 00s, components were getting small & powerful enough, so it required a product leader to define the mobile computing sector, and the product couldn't be average (not Nokia, Blackberry, Win Phone).
In the 10s - now, with mobile and internet now defined, it required sales leaders to extract the most and the product could be average (like Android).
Jobs was a success when product vision was necessary (early 80s, late 90s-00s), and a failure when it was not (late 80s-90s).
Ballmer was a success when sales/extraction was necessary (90s) but a failure when it was not (the 00s), as I consider not leveraging a leading market position into multiple adjacent trillion dollar business sectors a failure.
Cook has been a success for the past decade because the market really needed someone to execute well on the things that were just defined (mobile devices). According to the above theory, it should have been the decade of Android, but Apple's execution has been so much more competent than Google's that they ran away with it.
Of course, the Mac is some insignificant portion of the Apple's footprint these days, but I have to say their mobile offerings have been kind of a yawn too. Don't get me wrong, perfectly competent, no need to switch or anything, but iPod to iPhone happened in 6 years (!), and I don't think the Apple Watch is anywhere near that level of consistent culture defining technology that kind of defined "the spirit of Apple" from the original iMac to the iPhone (I'd like to say "to the iPad", but unfortunately the product has been kind relegated to a side purchase vs. the Mac-replacement I think it honestly had the opportunity to be -- and I guess could still be, its not like any "window" has been missed, just hasn't really done much in the last 10 years either, in terms of definitive changes in workflow like the iPhone did).
As a customer, the subscription stuff is honestly just somewhere between boring and annoying. "Apple One" with its 3 different plans and still tremendously confusing options (if I let my parents have access to the movies I've purchased, they can no longer buy their own movies -- what? why? It's strictly more profitable for Apple to let them ALSO use their credit card instead of locking them out of being able to make their own purchases just because I shared my content). Honestly, I have to strain really hard to remember what "Apple One" includes aside from Apple TV+. Oh right, News or something? The ability to not get annoying iCloud space errors that users remain not fully comprehending?
Now, flip that around, and investor-wise, you are spot on! I am LONG $AAPL, just short Apple products (software specifically). Which is unfortunate, because they are still probably the best, just no longer... "good". It used to feel like a premium experience, for a premium price, now just the latter.
Apple can be seen as an excellent MBA course in operations, as probably to be expected. I'm not going to say Steve was a all knowing genius, but it's a pretty dang smart move to put someone in place who will put the company on such firm economical footing while you wait for your next big thing (person) to emerge from the organization.
> Those keyboards were really bad, and not everyone has the ability to just swap them out with the new fancy computers coming out now, so many will be feeling them for some time to come.
The butterfly keyboards are the only laptop keyboards made to date that I can type on for a full day. So speak for yourself: long may I be “stuck” with mine.
They are doing well in hardware and services. Software, not so much. Design they have gone downhill.
I mean, maybe compared to Apple 2011. But compared to Microsoft 2021, Google 2021, Linux 2021, Android 2021, HP 2021, Lenovo 2021, Dell 2021? They're definitely on top.
Which ain’t exciting, but, the rotting corpse of Compaq over there in the corner stands as warning of what could have been.
Ups and downs. The M1 iMac is very interesting. I am not sure I love it but it is encouraging to see some more playful design and new approaches.
Seems Jobs was bang on with wanting Tim Cook as his successor.
Oh yes. Jobs could be stubborn and did make mistakes every now and then. The first iMac mouse was another ergonomic and reliability disaster.
Under Jobs, they would regularly create whole new categories and concepts of technology and revolutionize others. I don't recall it happening since; they capitalize on everything that was created under Jobs (and do it well).
I think if we peeled back the facade, we can begin to see that it's been an operations play since Jobs died, and though the M1 is pretty dang amazing, what probably brought it over the line is the insane profit margins and 'upcylcing' Mac sales for folks having a M1 vs M3, etc...
But as everyone here has said - it could have been worse.
In a sense, they are diluting their products.
Remember the apocryphal story that when Jobs came back to Apple, he split a whiteboard into four quadrants and listed just one product in each?
Now Apple has several dozen products. And each category is anywhere from 1 to 4 different products often with differences so minor as to not make any sense (iPhone 12 Pro vs iPhone 12 Pro Max, the difference is slight size increase and cameras, that's it; or iPhone 12 Pro vs iPhone 12; there are four different iPads; etc.)
Apple looks like it's trying to cover every niche, and often does that semi-satisfactorily.
Slightly tangential: they've completely dropped the ball on MacOS software side: there hasn't been a good software release from them literally for years. The only exception is the new Messages in BigSur, and they spent untold hours in close collaboration with the Catalyst team to make it work. Almost every other new first-party app from Apple on MacOS for years has been an unmitigated disaster that has never seen a designer in a vicinity and that breaks any version of Apple's own HIG guidelines.
That said, it could've been much much much worse. So, count our blessings :)
He showed that during keynotes (I remember he used that to unveil the first iBook).
The situation then was a bit different, though. Apple needed to be much more focused and had fewer resources to throw at new devices. They also needed a clean break from the past and could not start from scratch 10 different product lines. But Jobs himself did away with the 2x2 matrix, for example with the eMac and the Cube. The 12’’, 15’’, and 17’’ PowerBooks used the same name, but the differences were more significant than between the various iPhones 12.
Examples
- first iPhone doesn’t support MMS
- cut the headphone plug in new iPhones
- stop supporting Adobe Flash
- load apps through the App Store only in iOS
Abandonment of the floppy drive.
Abandonment of the CD drive.
Abandonment of Firewire.
You got me until this point ngl
Sure, the accessoires and e.g ram are steeply overpriced
That company is a money-making operation that doesn't even seem to slow down. This worries me, as that seems like it inevitably leads to pursuit of profit over all else, to the detriment of everybody but shareholders.
AAPL is up 3% after hours (so $60bn or so)
The markets trade on whisper numbers, which are what people with skin in the game are expecting. This is why you often see a name that beats estimates and drops...it’s because they missed the whisper numbers.