2013: The Year in Apple and Technology at Large
daringfireball.net
daringfireball.net
- Correctly explaining how large of an improvement the 5S is over the original iPhone is not a valid argument for why 2013 was a "pretty good year" for Apple. Mac Pro was the biggest move Apple made -- for better or for worse -- and I'm surprised to see its omission.
- If you’re not excited by the performance of the A7 SoC or, say, the quality of the iPhone 5S camera, why even bother writing about technology? This is ridiculous in a multitude of ways: the most glaring of which being that some of the best technology writers on the web today don't concern themselves with consumer technology.
- You can't look at raw price point as evidence for iPhone's ability to resist depreciation because their starting value is so much higher than other smartphones -- though I do think Apple hardware ages better than other hardware. To answer his question of What other companies make cell phones that retain any value at all after two years?: Samsung, Google/Motorola.
- The whole arguments of iOS 7 spurring planned obsolescence comes from the theory that the transitions, parallax, etc. etc. were done not only from a design standpoint but from an inferior-hardware-can't-replicate-this standpoint, which I believe Gruber propagated himself (though in reference to Android, rather than older iPhone models.)
- Everything besides the 'jetpacks' line in the final section was great. Technology is something that should be celebrated with wary eyes, rather than blindly castigated.
Ultimately, he seems to be dragging Mims' argument to a greater extreme than it is and attacking it on those grounds: I encourage readers to read the original article -- which, at the very least, is interesting and thought-provoking -- and draw their own conclusions.
What stories did Gruber break this year? What exclusives? None! He has no special access at Apple, he has no insiders who give him the scoops, he's no different from any other armchair blogger.
In truth, John Gruber is an Apple PR stenographer. The sad thing is, he probably doesn't even know it, because he's so drunk on the kool-aid.
Two days after a story breaks no one cares anymore about the breaking of it. But a smart and thoughtful editorialist is likely writing pieces that hold value for years.
Certainly not everything Gruber writes is gold or even worth reading, but he is trusted for his opinions and insight, not for how early or accurately he gives you some "inside scoop" (even if he occasionally trumpets his playing of that game).
The list is pretty short - maybe Philip Elmer DeWitt, Benedict Evans, Ben Thompson and Horace Dediu - but none of them bring the deep and consistent product insight - they are more focussed on broader reporting, strategic assessments, or disruption/market theory.
Gruber, to the best of my knowledge, is the only writer that consistently tracks all the major apple developments with the quality of writing that he brings to the table.
Yes, he's a partisan, (Siracusa's term for him) - and writes for his audience, but his words are reasonably measured, and always have a reasonably rational basis.
I wouldn't continue following him if that weren't the case - I've dropped dozens of other Apple observers over the year, but Gruber is still on top of his game.
Gruber might do it better; I admit that I don't read any of his posts, not being much of an Apple watcher. I have a slightly negative opinion of him based solely on comments, on HN and elsewhere, that appear on submissions of his articles. They seem to indicate that he has a pair of horse blinders on when it comes to Apple. For people who don't already think what they offer is the best, I can see why it is grating. I would have to read his articles for some time to form an actual opinion, but as it stands I'll stick with Anand, as he covers, in depth, other entrants as well as Apple.
He used the 5s vs original iPhone comparison to make the point that improvement happens incrementally, not to make the point that 2013 was a great year.
I don't think anyone is arguing that Apple added those features solely because they perform poorly on inferior hardware. Perhaps that's a side effect, but Apple openly concedes that, as evidenced by graceful fallbacks included in the operating system which turn off features such as blurring and parallax on older devices, as well as manual options to disable various hardware-intensive aesthetic improvements.
Baring some weirdly cheap outliers the S4 comes in at £500 payg in the uk but that is via the networks and I don't know if they'll bugger about with it before it gets to you. You save fifty quid versus he 5S but you lose out in performance and it's made of plastic.
"The nature of progress is to move incrementally. The great leaps are exceedingly few and far between."
I have a few buddies working on tech at Apple & MSFT that is crazy cool, but simply because it's not a shiny new product sitting on my desk next to my coffee cup 2013 was a lull in tech?! Give me a break.
(Sidebar: one of my favorite advances in tech this year is the new Kinect. Seriously. Read up on its power and potential use cases sometime and it's f*ing mind-blowing. If MSFT only had the marketing power of Apple...)
You mean if MS only had Apple's talent for turning advanced technology into compelling products, right?
As for "advanced technology", Apple is far behind Microsoft and Google these days when it comes to cutting edge stuff, but this is mostly because they both have fingers in a lot of pies while Apple restricts itself to a few highly profitable niche areas.
I think there's a blurry place between marketing and UX where Microsoft falls flat.
For example, Windows got "Shadow Volume Copy", and then OSX got "Time Machine." Windows could have done something exactly like Time Machine given Shadow Volume Copy, but they didn't until Windows 8 (File History Backup.) And so people use Time Machine as the example when they ask questions like "but if my computer is getting backed up, and it contains my music library, is that fair use?"
Now, is that a marketing failure, a UX failure, or something that's not quite either? Either way, it's a failure to create something users will want to talk about.
That's a very long time for them to go with nothing to say. Sure, iOS 7 must have been a substantial amount of work, I'm really liking Mavericks, and the new Mac Pro is an interesting piece of hardware - but it does feel like Apple announced less this year than they have in previous years.
So it's got me speculating on reasons why. Did Forstall's exit result in a rocky few months as jobs were reshuffled? Is there some big product that gets announced in 2014 that's been sucking up all the engineering resources? Is Apple under Tim Cook becoming a company that moves a little more slowly and deliberately?
I don't know, but it's fun to think about.
That's a big bunch of products to roll out in one year. Which does not mean that we won't see something different, like a 20" tablet, or Kinect style controls on a new Apple TV, but the fact is that Apple have released a large number of best in breed products this year, so we don't need to speculate on where engineering resources have been spent - the answer is right in front of us.
What a strange straw man to pick. Isn't it glaringly obvious that progress happens in leaps and then incrementally in between the leaps? The leaps create opportunity that is exploited in the years following the leap.
If there is no leap for a while, this incremental progress starts to feel like stagnation. Some feel it earlier, some feel it later. It seems rather contrived to present this as some kind of fundamental contradiction.
So okay, two year old iPhones still sell for a lot. Does that really show that Apple makes the best phones today? Or does it show that they used to make the best phones two years ago? If people are almost as happy with a two year old iPhone as a new one, is that really an argument against Apple having had a "lost year"?
Actually, the screen size and Swype would be enough since I mainly use my phone for web browsing and composing email.
While i understand and respect that for a lot of people, these are compelling features that differentiates high end Android Phones from iPhones, it also seems to me that most of these are simply manifestations of the different priorities and compromises made by Apple and Google, Samsung et al. I mean, it's not like it's not within Apple's power to add each of these to the iPhone. It's just that they choose not to, because each of these come with some kind of compromise that is not acceptable to Apple. Which is cool and only goes to show that it's good that we have competition.
The reason I write though, is because I think it's disingenous to assert that Apple has somehow fallen behind, technologically, when they are very clearly keeping up and at the top of their game (look no further than the A7 chip). You may prefer a Samsung to an iPhone, because you find that you prefer the particular compromises made by Samsung/Google to those made by Apple. But understand that this has everything to do with what subjectively appeals to you and nothing to do with the actual technologically capabilities of each of these companies.
I didn't assert this. He asked what phone I personally prefer, so I answered. I said that if I had to use an iPhone, I would be bummed.
The fact that Apple has "lost a year" (which they obviously have) doesn't necessarily mean they've "fallen behind". It means that others have caught up.
Here's a link to Anandtech, where the 5S is tied with the Nexus in most (not "most") tests, and beats it in more than a few:
Samsung provides it's own version of everything, on top of the default apps. So what you get is:
* AOSP, OS and Open Source default apps. * Google Play stuff. Google requires devices with Google Play store to also include all Google apps. (Eg Gmail) * Samsung's apps. Samsung provides apps and includes all of them on full feature phones. Along with the Samsung phones.
If you try a Nexus 4 or a MotoG you will get something much closer to what should be on Android no Samsung bloated package.
Example: the SMS app is actually Google+ Hangouts. Had to dig for the AOSP SMS app.
Another example: he complains about Google automatically uploading photos to a G+ account that he doesn't care about.
Even "vanilla Android" is getting bloated. Why are users being forced into G+? Why is the default Android SMS app linked to a social network by default?
If you don't include Samsung, then you are ignoring the Android market leader.
Personally I think they still make the best overall phone. There are better phones out there for certain people but the iPhone is the best all rounder. However:
iPhones have been my only smartphones. Every time I tried an alternative I didn't like it. I recently got a Nexus 4 and was impressed but the iPhone 5 still beat it in a few key areas for me (camera, microphone - I use voice memos a lot -, and screen). A few days ago I upgraded to the iPhone 5S. I'm not impressed. Touch ID is nice but I could live with out it. Slow motion camera for me is a gimmick. Speed improvements aren't really noticeable. The only real innovation is the M7. Overall there was very little reason to upgrade. It certainly wasn't worth the cost.
It got me thinking that next time round, if Apple continues at it's current pace, I'll probably be purchasing an Android device. As a full time iOS developer, a Mac user, and someone deeply ingrained in the Apple ecosystem that's a pretty big statement I think.
I expect we'll see more of a difference when the next iPhone is released.
This comment suggests you had both a Nexus 4 and an iPhone 5. Did you upgrade from a 5 to a 5S? Or something else?
FWIW, my last iPhone was a 4, and the 5S blows it out of the water.
I upgraded from the 5 to the 5s and honestly can barely notice the difference. I've upgraded from a 4S to a 5 (another incremental update) previously and that seemed like a much more visible improvement in day-to-day use. I don't expect too much change in an 's' version but this year was particularly underwhelming.
Why should someone else "admit" to feeling the same way as you when they obviously do not?
> Why should someone else "admit" to feeling the same way as you when they obviously do not?
What? They shouldn't. They should admit it at the point where it is obviously true. I'm asking what it would take to get to that point. If the next HTC phone cures cancer and the next iPhone can't make phone calls, would we still articles like this from daringfireball? I think the answer is clearly yes. This site consistently reads like it is ghostwritten by Apple's marketing team. Whether my personal preferences align with this stopped clock at this particular moment is utterly irrelevant.
Fair enough. It sounded more like you disagreed with his opinion when I read your original post than a criticism of his thinking.
I can see how I misinterpreted that.
> This site consistently reads like it is ghostwritten by Apple's marketing team.
Except when Apple does something he disagrees with, then he complains about it.
He does expend a lot of energy arguing against Apple criticism, but he has also shown there is quite a bit of bad writing about Apple out there (usually because it attracts clicks). And he has owned up when his own predictions fall flat.
I usually find myself agreeing with about 70% of what he writes, which is more than I can say for other tech authors.
Apple makes plenty of bad products — I find their web services uniformly terrible — an area where Google excels. I like to think that if Apple produced similarly bad devices, Daring fireball would call them out on it.
This is so silly it reminds me of the time when XML was praised in computer magazines as the approaching revolution in how everyone, including desktop end-users, will work...
On Sean Hollister's lament at the death of the keyboard:
I’d say it’s not strange at all, for all of the reasons
Steve Jobs explained, in detail, on stage in January 2007
when Apple introduced the iPhone. Software keyboards are a
superior general purpose design. But that’s neither here
nor there.
The whole “planned obsolescence” thing — started by New
York Times economics columnist Catherine Rampell, but
promulgated by Mims himself after the ball got rolling –
was a pile of horseshit. No company in the computer/mobile
industry makes products that hold their value longer than
Apple’s.
Today we have mobile phones and tablets running on a 64-bit
desktop-caliber CPU architecture. Four months ago, we did
not. If you’re not excited by the performance of the A7 SoC
or, say, the quality of the iPhone 5S camera, why even
bother writing about technology?
No one could argue that iOS 7 wasn’t a major update, so
instead Mims takes to disparaging it. Is iOS 7 an
improvement in every single regard? Certainly not. But on
the whole, it’s quite good, introduces some well-needed
conceptual cohesion, and best of all, it shows that the
company is not afraid to boldly move forward from the
Steve Jobs era.
It's incredible how somebody with such obvious blindness and bias towards a company he loves is heralded as a neutral reviewer. Gruber makes some important points, such as Android's lack of support time, but he insists that Apple is better at everything that Mims criticizes Apple about than everybody else – which is ridiculous.
Just a disclaimer – I am not an MS lover. Neither do I hate Apple. But I have become more friendly with Microsoft, and less with Apple, just because of my own personal experiences.
I had been a die-hard Apple lover for years. Since I saw my first modern Macintosh in 2006, I've lusted after one. I finally got my wish granted in 2011 when I bought my MacBook Air.
For about a year, I was ecstatic. I bought an iPhone and bought completely into the Apple ecosystem. It was a big mistake, for several reasons. Let's start from the top:
1. Apple now makes no effort to ensure that its users have a good long-term experience with their product. It used to be that once you bought Apple, you could expect a lengthy time of ownership and support, partly because of the machines' ease of access, repair, and maintainability. In the fall of 2012, I became unhappy with my Air's performance. My needs had changed, and running several Windows and Linux VMs quickly bogged down my system with its paltry four gigabytes of RAM. Initially, I thought I wouldn't need any upgrades to this system, because Apple's software optimizations and the SSD would make swapping faster and more seamless (how stupid of me). No problem, I thought. I bought a 15" MacBook Pro and didn't look back.
Initially, when the Retina Display MacBook came around, I saw it as a middle-of-the-road product for Apple – not an Air, not a Pro, more of a premium flagship "halo." I had no idea at the time of initial release that everything including the battery, was soldered/glued to the main board/case and what little was replaceable was all proprietary. When I came upon this information, I was shocked. Didn't think much of it, but my past experiences with the Air made me leery of it, so I stayed away from the rMBP.
Come 2013. The classic unibody Pros are all but dead, and the MacBook Pros have become more proprietary. People will defend this in the name of thinness, but I call bullshit, because the Dell XPS 15 is nearly as thin but contains DIMM slots. It's just a ploy to move more units, and I'm not pleased in the slightest.
2. Apple provides no more useful features in their products that would interest anyone beyond the average consumer. Whaaaaat?! How dare somebody speaketh this heathenous, trite, vile, garbage! BURN HIM!!1
In all seriousness, this is now true. When I look at Mavericks' feature list, it's pretty weak. Multiple display support is something that should have been addressed in a point release. Timer Coalescing is something Windows and Linux have had for ages[1], and compressed memory is something we saw years ago.[2] There has been no new replacement for the aging and outdated HFS+ filesystem. There has been no integration for UNIX protocols like X11, and Applescript has been left out to rot.
Apple is now squarely focused on the iOS segment of their business. I don't mind it for them, but I can't help but miss my pre-2011 Macs.
3. This is probably the most important: they pride aesthetics over true usability. This philosophy of Apple's has always been somewhat prevalent, but it's been irking me more than ever post-2011. Thin aluminum bezels that cut into my hand. Sharp laptop edges that are hazardous to health. Keyboards that feel like you're banging your fingers against a packet of Dentyne. This ties into complaint #1 as well: the fact that form-over-function results in a loss of self-maintainability is no secret either. No Ethernet on a professional machine? I can understand getting rid of it on the ultraportable, but if you want something to be used as a heavy-duty appliance, it needs to have the necessary connectivity options out of box. If you're going to make users depend on an inconvenient dongle, at least include the damn thing inside the package.
This is going to be anecdotal and completely unrelated to what I'm talking about, but I was in Atlanta last weekend and decided to check out the Apple and Microsoft stores. The Apple store left me with a cold, decoherent vibe. Nothing seemed interesting. iOS 7 was underwhelming, and the iPads were just iPads. They didn't have anything new. Everything was whitewashed and covered in super-thin Myriad. Shades of grey prevailed throughout, and the staff, while helpful, didn't seem to have much interest in the user so much as heralding the merits of the product. Enter the MS store. Everything felt... so new. Inviting. There was a real sense of warmth in the store. I hadn't tried a Surface before, so I picked it up and started using it. Boy, was I blown away – the entire experience was incredibly different from what I had used. I had dismissed touch screens with a desktop OS as simply gimmickry, but the Surface integrated the two exceptionally well, especially with the Type Cover adding significant functionality. I perused through the other paraphernalia and I really felt a sense of innovation and creation that I never did in the Apple store. Unlike the iPad, the Surface was productive! It ran a real operating system! It came with a ton of memory and could be used as a full replacement for a laptop! The ultrabooks I saw had neat form factors, and although I couldn't find myself using the other modes much, the addition of touch screens made Windows 8.1 make a whole lot more sense. I came through to the Windows Phones, and the live tile approach to a home screen is just perfect: it affords a significant degree of customizability while retaining user interface consistency across devices, something neither iOS nor Android have managed to nail.
I sold my 4s and bought a Lumia, and while I'm typing this on that Air I talked about earlier, I can't see myself using it for much longer, and neither do I my MacBook Pro. Because when it dies in another several years...
...I won't be buying a new one.
–––––––––––––––––––––
I don't buy it. None of your gripes are problems that real users of Apple products would claim to be an actual problem. Your submission history seems to back this up.
Merriam-Webster:
been |bin| past participle of be.
>I had no idea at the time of initial release that everything including the battery, was soldered/glued to the main board/case and what little was replaceable was all proprietary. When I came upon this information, I was shocked.
Lmao. Good troll.
I'm not interested in a flame war. http://i.imgur.com/H3py0lR.jpg Besides, it is true – until the customary iFixit teardown, I was highly anticipating the release of the rMBP.
I see Apple's A7 as a breakthrough. They went from having nothing to having the best mobile SoC design and implementation in the industry in three years.
I really don't get your statement about the Lumia 1020. Who is arguing that it is "less significant" than the sensor upgrade in the 5S? Why can't people respect both technologies? You come across as incredibly defensive when no one is attacking your favourite product or making any claims like the ones you are defending against.
> People will defend this in the name of thinness, but I call bullshit, because the Dell XPS 15 is nearly as thin but contains DIMM slots. It's just a ploy to move more units, and I'm not pleased in the slightest.
It's not a "ploy". It is very obviously the computer that Apple wants to make. They tend to build for themselves, not for their customers (which seems to make a lot of people angry). I have no idea how you can begin to think this is a ploy to "move more units." If Apple were into money-making ploys they would have put stickers all over their laptops, bundled them with bloatware and other anti-consumer additions.
> In all seriousness, this is now true. When I look at Mavericks' feature list, it's pretty weak. Multiple display support is something that should have been addressed in a point release. Timer Coalescing is something Windows and Linux have had for ages[1], and compressed memory is something we saw years ago.[2] There has been no new replacement for the aging and outdated HFS+ filesystem. There has been no integration for UNIX protocols like X11, and Applescript has been left out to rot.
So it's a problem when Apple adds a software feature that is already present in another operating system? What a weird thing to write. It's good that they improved OS X and provided it as a free update. You are trying to spin this as a negative for some reason.
There are genuine improvements in Mavericks, the energy usage improvements alone have extended the time I can use my laptop without power by a significant amount. The scroll view content area caching is also very nice in practice, and the new frameworks like SpriteKit have been great fun to play with.
On a side note, multiple display support was never an issue under OS X and I fail to understand how Mavericks "fixed" anything in this regard — multiple displays have always worked better under OS X than under Windows.
> No Ethernet on a professional machine? I can understand getting rid of it on the ultraportable, but if you want something to be used as a heavy-duty appliance, it needs to have the necessary connectivity options out of box.
I use my retina MBP professionally every single day and have not once needed ethernet. It is simply not an issue for me, if it is an issue for you then that is why the adapter is available.
> iOS 7 is certainly... bold, if you could call it that, but what core improvements does it hold that make it so much better than 6? On the surface, it's a pretty UI makeover with an ugly icon makeover, and few user-facing features such as AirDrop and Control Center. Yawn. Shiny new APIs? Nice, but, again, there's little in the way of "bold" innovation as Gruber claims.
Gruber didn't claim it was "bold innovation," he claimed it was a "bold move," and it's hard to argue with that. It was a move that caused a lot of friction and controversy because many people did not like the change. This is a suitably bold move, especially relative to past updates.
You simply write a list of some of the changes and then "Yawn" at the end. It's easy to be dismissive and to play down the improvements, but the improvements were on par with most other major software releases. The frameworks have always been the best part of iOS updates, and that continues to be the case with iOS 7.
> The Apple store left me with a cold, decoherent vibe. Nothing seemed interesting. iOS 7 was underwhelming, and the iPads were just iPads. They didn't have anything new. Everything was whitewashed and covered in super-thin Myriad. Shades of grey prevailed throughout, and the staff, while helpful, didn't seem to have much interest in the user so much as heralding the merits of the product. Enter the MS store. Everything felt... so new. Inviting.
It sounds like you're simply bored with the Apple aesthetic and want to try something new. That's great, you should do that.
Huh? Most bloatware / crapware seems to be added by the manufacturers as a way to differentiate from each other. It usually has the effect of lowering the overall experience, but it doesn´t cost anything and it´s hardly anti-consumer.
And stickers? Makes it look a bit cheaper, but pull them off. It serves as a way of seeing which chipsets the computer comes with when siting on a store shelf. Hardly anti-consumer or money making ploy. q
Same thing with the stickers, for example AMD runs a "sticker program" where they pay manufacturers to include their marketing stickers on new laptops [1]. Back in 2010 AMD changed this program so that they paid manufacturers regardless of whether they wanted to use the stickers (a good move).
Edit: Intel also runs an "Intel Inside" sticker program. I found many articles implying that they pay manufacturers to feature their stickers. The Intel Inside partner program website also suggests this [2]
> The Intel Inside Program is a cutting-edge ingredient branding program that works hand-in-hand with your own branding efforts. The Intel Inside Program's key objectives are to:
> Reimburse you for advertisements that feature qualified products and Intel Inside Logos.
So yes, these are short term money making ploys that manufacturers have commonly engaged in.
[1]: http://blog.chron.com/techblog/2010/09/notebook-stickers-phy...
[2]: https://intelinside.intel.com/content/dam/iip/us/en/shared/m...
Here's another explanation: MS has a very, very large enterprise customer base. Maybe they're just keeping them happy, so that these customers redirect their capex to Windows 8 and Office 201X?
Here's a counterpoint: if MS really cared about value, would their phones receive all Windows Phone updates? Because right now they don't. The choice is up to the carrier.
Anyway, I can't find your thesis in #1. You bought a unibody MBP but the existence of rMBPs indicate that Apple doesn't care about your laptop anymore? There are many anecdotes that contradict your point, you can find them at /r/apple on Reddit.
#2 is subjective. I find Windows 8 to be a significant step backwards for MS in terms of usability. YMMV.
#3 is...yeah. It's what you get with Apple. They're bad at ergonomics. I won't defend this; the Magic Mouse is a usability disaster. Then again Win8 isn't exactly a pinnacle of usability.
http://connect.dpreview.com/post/9705313773/sony-xperia-z1-c...
Hardly a lost year in smartphones.
The Nokia Lumia 1020 does have a 2/3" sensor however.
Of course part of the reason he does what he does is because it's paid off so well for him through blogging as a business. His business has been his own creation, though, and that in and of itself is quite impressive.
I don't know if every word is genuine, but one doesn't have to be on an official corporate payroll to make money through coverage/praise of a popular subject.
To answer your question seriously, he has mentioned getting early demo devices by Apple (for a couple years, he's been in the in-crowd of journalists to do so) but I sincerely doubt he's a puppet paid under the table.