Today marks ten years since Apple Cofounder Steve Jobs passed away after a prolonged battle with cancer, and the company that started in his parents' garage is now valued at over $2 trillion. Apple Inc. is the largest company on the planet with massive revenues and earnings to boot. In one of his last public interviews at D8 in 2010, the Apple CEO said that the massive financial success of the company (which had just surpassed Microsoft's market capitalization at the time of the conversation) "doesn't matter very much. It's not what's important. It's not what makes you come to work in the morning. It's not why any of our customers buy our products."
Ten years after he passed away, the company has spent hundreds of billions of dollars buying back their own stock, and billions more chasing cool with the Beats acquisition and the advent of Apple TV+. While many customers may not notice any difference, Apple has lost the keen attention to detail that Steve Jobs held in such regard in his time at the company he founded. The company is not the same, and has ignored many of their core values in my opinion.
This article is not meant to disparage the hard work of Tim Cook and his team at Apple, but will instead highlight several moments over the past decade when the company deviated from the path Steve Jobs laid for them. Apple has moved from being an underdog driving innovation and risk-taking in the late 90s and 2000s to a company focused on iteration and maintaining market share today.
Throwing away the simple genius of iPod
Apple has had many near-death experiences in its 45 years of existence, and it is safe to say that the iPod saved the company back when it launched 20 years ago this month. Like many of the products Apple has released over time, the company didn't invent MP3 players. There were plenty of competitors already on the market when Apple began shipping the device in 2001. What Apple got right with iPod highlights a lot of what they did right under the leadership of Steve Jobs as the product was easy to use and featured an elegant way to navigate through thousands of songs and organize them how you liked. And it fit in your pocket!
When iPhone launched, Jobs even described the product as one part iPod. iPhone had an iPod app built in, and it brought over a lot of the functionality of the preceding smash hit product. While the iOS developers certainly tinkered with the iPod app over time, it let users pick how they wanted to navigate their music and video collections with moveable buttons on the bottom of the screen. This all changed when their Apple Music subscription service launched, and the company decided to ignore the brilliant simplicity of the iPod.
Buying cool with the Beats acquisition
On May 28, 2014, Apple Inc. acquired Beats by Dre for $3 billion. This is still one of the largest acquisitions ever made by the company, and it ultimately lead to the release of Apple Music. Apple Music was truly the first step the company made into streaming music with a subscription model, but the acquisition was truly a departure from Apple's do-it-yourself strategy of product, software, and service design.
When Apple created iTunes, they didn't have to acquire a company to execute on their vision. With Apple Music, it really felt like the company was attempting to buy cool for the first time. iTunes and iPod never really seemed to need that extra juice with their amazing and iconic market campaigns, and seven years after the acquisition, it is hard to understand why the company made the Beats deal.
At the time of the Beats by Dre deal, Apple CEO Tim Cook said, “Music is such an important part of all of our lives and holds a special place within our hearts at Apple. That’s why we have kept investing in music and are bringing together these extraordinary teams so we can continue to create the most innovative music products and services in the world.”
It makes sense for Apple Music to exist, but the introduction of the service on iOS truly lead to a worse user experience for customers who were used to the easy navigation of the iPod app. Four out of five of the buttons on the bottom of the new Music app push Apple Music while users have to click on Library to navigate their owned iTunes music content. This was a huge step back from what made iPod the dominant music player, in my opinion. I would have preferred a separate app for Apple Music or at least the option to change the bottom row of buttons like in previous versions of iOS.
The iPod app wasn't broken when the original iPhone shipped back in 2007, and today's Music app design is a fine example of Apple pushing their services over friendly and easy-to-use user interface design to the detriment of iOS as a platform.
The fall of iOS
When Steve Jobs revealed the iPhone at MacWorld in 2007, the phone's operating system was truly revolutionary. Sure, the company didn't invent multitouch technology, but iPhone was a stunning package of emphasis that created a whole new era for smartphones.
When the iPhone launched, Apple truly had a five year lead in software development which it has since squandered. The most recent release of iOS 15 highlights just how iterative the operating system's updates have become, but it goes beyond that. Apple no longer introduces new features that are truly different from the rest of the market. Most of the WWDC 2021 iOS 15 announcements were features that have existed on Android for years. Apple spent way too much time talking about widgets and continues to make design changes that move the iOS experience further and further away from the original user experience.
Things really began to falter with the introduction of iOS 6 and the release of Apple Maps. Apple and Google had previously worked together on some tremendous iOS apps for YouTube and Google Maps, with Apple helping on the front-end design. It seems likely that Steve Jobs would have also pushed for an Apple Maps application, as Google's Android was gaining steam, but I sincerely doubt that he would have shipped it in that sorry state.
Tim Cook had to issue an apology for the terrible Apple Maps launch, and Scott Forstall ultimately left the company as a result. Forstall's name is featured on many patents for iPhone features that we see to this day, and is widely regarded as one of the best engineers to ever work at Apple.
Following Forstall's departure, Apple put industrial design expert Jony Ive in charge of iOS software design, ushering in a new era of flat design. This was a huge departure from the skeuomorphism style of most Apple software products, and iOS 7 was another moment when I couldn't help but think that Steve Jobs probably wouldn't have done that.
Mac is no longer for creative professionals
"You know that if they'd ever used a computer, it would have been a Mac," said Steve Jobs about the historical icons featured in the Think Different brand advertising campaign that kicked off his second tour of duty as Apple CEO. 1997 was a tumultuous time for the finances of the company, and Jobs threw out the existing product lines and streamlined their offerings. Just a year later, customers would get to see the new iMac revealed. While that product had some very odd design decisions, it was a turning point for Apple. The Mac was back and at the center of the next twenty years of the company's growth.
Over the next decade, Apple slowly clawed back PC market share with its Mac line. A focus of a lot of their marketing efforts centered around being able to create and edit content on their computers. Famous movie directors were frequently featured in Mac announcements and commercials, and software offerings like iMovie lead to the release of the truly professional software suite Final Cut Pro.
The past decade has seen the Mac slip in terms of power under the hood, and many creative professionals have left the platform entirely due to the product lines inability to keep up with competitors. Many Mac Pro or MacBook Pro models cost more than their competitors and come with less impressive hardware.
This lead our own Shacknews Head of Video Production Greg Burke to leave the Macintosh ecosystem after being a lifelong user. "It was a very sad day for me when I woke up and had to choose if I was going to continue to use the Apple operating system or make the switch to PC. What made it easier was the complete lack of optimization I had faced on the Apple platform over the years leading to my switch. Dumping literally thousands of dollars into proprietary raid cards, NVIDIA-specific compatible graphics cards, and lots of other things. Despite the upgrades my Mac Pro still ran pretty poorly in terms of performance when compared to equally-powered Windows machines. It was when Apple dropped CUDA support that I knew I needed to make the switch. CUDA compatible software and hardware was relatively new at the time. Being able to export, render and run apps via the GPU rather than the CPU was a huge game changer in the video production department. To this day I believe Apple doesn't use CUDA, but rather its own proprietary version of it that they didn't release until many years after I made the switch."
Many creative professionals have made the jump to Windows PC workstations, and Apple still keeps using extremely underpowered AMD GPUs in most of their Mac offerings. The lack of NVIDIA GPU support across the Mac line is just another example of Apple moving further away from what made them the counterculture PC company of the late 90s, but to be fair much of this was put into motion while Steve Jobs was still alive.
Financial engineering is some of the only innovation left at Apple
One thing that Steve Jobs did not really care about was Apple's share price. He presided as the company's CEO over many bear markets and never once issued a buyback or a dividend. Due to his frugal nature, Apple was in a very strong financial place when he passed away in 2011.
Apple had stopped paying a dividend in 1995 before Jobs returned to the company, as their finances faltered. Less than one year after Steve Jobs passed away, Tim Cook and Apple's Board of Directors issued a dividend and announced a massive share buyback. Nine years later, Apple has returned nearly $200 billion to shareholders.
This is another philosophical difference that highlights just how focused Jobs' successor Apple CEO Tim Cook is on keeping Wall Street happy. At the 2012 shareholder meeting, I asked Tim Cook to please avoid buying back their stock and issuing a dividend and to instead focus on acquiring companies that could help Apple grow revenues for years to come. Apple could have attempted to acquire hot companies like Netflix and Tesla for pennies on the dollar and gone after some more distressed consumer electronics companies like Sony or Nintendo with that money. Apple doesn't have much to show for their buyback other than a decreased amount of outstanding shares which has propped up their earnings-per-share results which have been experiencing decelerating growth for the majority of the last decade.
Share buybacks and stock dividends are not what cool and innovative companies do, and it is pretty clear that Tim Cook is more focused on keeping institutional investors happy than doing what is in the best interests of the company's long-term future. Jobs left the balance sheet with zero long-term debt when he stepped down as CEO in 2011, and the company now has over $100 billion of long-term debt that was all issued to pay for the share repurchase and dividend program. Much of Apple's cash resides overseas, and the issuance of debt in America circumvented the company paying a hefty repatriation tax to execute the buyback. One has to give Cook and company credit for coming up with an innovative way to do something that every stodgy Dow Jones company is lauded for on Wall Street, but none of that leads to great products that surprise and delight customers.
Iteration instead of innovation with no attention to detail
At the 2010 Shareholders Meeting, when asked why Apple didn't buy a game studio or Netflix, Steve Jobs said that the company didn't want to be a content producer because they believe that other people do a better job at that. Apple in 2010 was happy just being a storefront for successful video streaming apps and mobile games, but things have changed over in Cupertino. Apple TV+ is the most "hello fellow kids" moment of the post-Jobs era at the company. Apple is dumping millions of dollars into TV shows that are fine, but have not broken out the numbers of how many subscribers they have.
The company's Services revenue segment is one of their fastest growing divisions, and has been a focus of Wall Street analysts as they have rerated the stock with a focus on recurring revenues. This is another example of Apple focusing on appeasing shareholders instead of making something truly different.
The other side of Apple continues to show a disappointing lack of attention to detail across many product lines. From HomePods leaving rings when used on wooden tables, to the massive camera bump that makes iPhone 13 Pro wobble when using it on flat table, much of Jobs' maniacal attention to detail is absent from most of the product lines. In the Walter Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs, there is story about how his father Paul taught him to paint both sides of the fence. Jobs carried that lesson into his work at Apple, spending hours and days working on a detail that no one would ever see or notice.
I would argue that Jobs' attention to detail is the most sorely missed aspect of his management style. He had a borderline tyrannical focus on making products, manufacturing processes, and software experiences better and more user friendly. Many of Apple's recent updates across all their offerings seem to be moving in the opposite direction.
Instead of innovating, Apple has truly fallen into the trap of solving problems that don't exist. No one asked for a Touch Bar to replace the F keys on the MacBook Pro. In fact, the removal of the Escape key drove even more people away from the Mac. The reintroduction of MagSafe wireless charging is fine, but the company still hampers their iPhone product line with their proprietary Lightning port. Some of these frustrating design decisions may have been made with Jobs in charge, but it seems abundantly clear from the past decade of failures that Apple lacks their "idea man." Even if the company made a stupid design decision, Jobs would figure out a way to spin it as a positive.
Epic vs Apple, #AppleToo, and the restaurant at the end of the universe
It’s been a very long 10 years without you. pic.twitter.com/Uv8faKyIfj
— Productive Citizen ✌🏾💙🙏🏾👊🏾 (@technosucks) October 5, 2021
In the decade since Steve Jobs passed away, Apple has become the company that they used to lampoon. In their 1984 ad, they painted the Mac and their company as a counterculture icon that was to be viewed as the little guy. That is certainly hard to do with a market capitalization over $2 trillion, but we are starting to see the company behave in a way that Jobs painted Microsoft in the 90s and 2000s.
The Epic Games vs. Apple Inc. case highlights this in the context of the App Store. Apple has created a walled garden for apps that Epic claimed is anticompetitive, and even though Apple has been able to defend these claims of antitrust, the battle rages on. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney now finds himself in the same role of Jobs and fellow Apple Cofounder Steve Wozniak back in 1984. Sweeney is willing to sacrifice millions of dollars of Fortnite mobile revenue in the name of doing what is right for his view of the metaverse. Sweeney definitely provides an interesting foil for Apple CEO Tim Cook, who is clearly very focused on the company's financial performance.
Apple has become that which they demonized in the past in a lot of ways, and it extends beyond the company's products, services, software, and relationships with competitors. In recent months, dozens of stories have been posted under the #AppleToo hashtag, with several Medium blog posts hitting the wire over the past few months. There are countless stories of women, lgbtq+ individuals, and other minorities being ignored by Human Resources and management at Apple. This might not be attributable to the absence of Steve Jobs, but it just highlights how Apple is no longer the company fans worshipped in the iPod days or even in the early years of the iPhone's rise.
CEO Tim Cook faces a lot of challenges in managing the technology behemoth that is Apple Inc., and I commend him on his ability to follow up one of the greatest tech executives in history with very strong financial results, but it has become pretty clear that Apple is just not the same ten years after the death of Steve Jobs. Perhaps the company really does have one more thing somewhere in their R&D facility that will knock our socks off with true innovation, but as of right now it seems like they are coasting on the hard work of Steve Jobs and the team that executed the most amazing corporate turnaround in the last 30 years.
This article is meant to express the opinion of the author and does not necessarily reflect the thoughts of the entire staff. It is only meant for educational purposes, and should not be taken as investment advice. Please consider your own investment time horizon, risk tolerance, and consult with a financial advisor before acting on this information.
Full Disclosure: At the time of this article, Shacknews primary shareholder Asif A. Khan, his family members, and his company Virtue LLC had the following positions:
Long Apple Inc. via AAPL shares
Short Apple Inc. via AAPL put options
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Shacknews
replyCaptain Business posted a new article, Apple has lost its way in the 10 years since Steve Jobs' death
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Generally agree. They’re coasting but it is kind of amazing how far they’ve taken a coast.
I think it would be only professional to actually say you, Asif, are the author of the article if you’re going to talk about conflicts at the end of it. -
Their products are solid and supply chain etc is top of the line but I don’t expect them to innovate like they used to. That was something that left with Steve’s passing.
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This is what happens when you put the CFO in charge of the company, the bean counters have taken over that company. I dislike Tim Cook's direction of the company greatly. I took notice of your multiple mentions of Scott Forstall. I believe he would have been a vastly better CEO than Cook.
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There's a difference between performance/R&D innovation versus user-facing product innovation.
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Yes, I have an M1 MacBook. It's great from a pure performance and technological innovation perspective.
But for a large majority of Apple's users, they won't see any difference except that a newer laptop is faster and have better battery life. So again, it's not a trend-setting user-facing innovation that will change how electronics are used.
You can argue semantics all you want, but you get the point I'm making. A hardware innovation that doesn't revolutionize or even really change how customers use technology or alter the role technology plays in our day to day lives isn't the market shifting innovation that made Apple the company it is today versus 20 years ago. That type of innovation left with Steve jobs.-
being able to watch twitch or youtube without the laptop getting hot is pretty nice. steve wouldve been all over the m1
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Yeah, folks who say stuff like this I’m pretty sure have just never used one.
Without being all gushy apple fanboy, it truly is a complete change to how I even think about laptops.
I member the days of JNUC having to try to find an outlet and share power strips with folks, and that’s just… no longer a thing. I don’t even think about battery at all any more for an entire work day. Zoom calls, video streaming, whatever. Plus I run iOS apps on my laptop.
I recently opened my intel test device, and the ~5 seconds before the screen came on felt weirdly long and I actually started reaching for the power button thinking the device wasn’t on yet—while waiting for it to wake up.
It’s really so very much more than just “a faster processor”.
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As stated above, I have an M1 MacBook. but you guys just keep leaning on your self-affirming assumptions.
That doesn't change the fact that outside of a small percentage of consumers who care about these kinds of things (a demographic which is highly out of proportion on the Shack), a lot of consumers aren't going to see the M1 as being some sort of market revolutionizing innovation. A lot of consumers don't know the difference (or care) between M1, Intel, etc. All they know is "new laptop is faster and has better battery life" just like every other new laptop they've ever bought before. Yes, we like to geek out over how cool the M1 chip is for us, but it's not even close to the same industry shift as things like the iPod, iPhone, iPad, iTunes, Facetime, etc.
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Yea wtf, the m1 is a bigger leap in computing than ssd’s were
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It’s so much better than the switch to SSD, my baseline air runs pretty much everything as fast as a maxed out previous generation pro. SSDs didn’t bring nearly the same level of across the board performance leap, and the m1 does it all with insane battery life.
There’s just no comparison, really.-
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Well it’s pretty obvious you don’t use one on a day to day basis, I’ll say that much.
SSDs are nice, but there’s a whole lot more to computing than just opening a file real fast.
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I think the real innovation is that the Mac now is independent from CPU roadmap bottlenecks. Things like the 2016 MBP not being able to do 32GB was due to Intel falling behind on their roadmap. And Apple being the one platform vendor company willing to make major changes like this - with backwards compatibility in this case of course - is the one willing to make it happen.
But yeah in so far as laptops are concerned, the idea that your phone can go all day on a charge and your laptop could only go a few hours, that concern will fade over time.
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is the trajectory of the laptop market different because of the M1? Or the trajectory of the tablet market? Or any product category for that matter?
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SoCs have been around forever, Apple made an optimized one for it's laptop users. News at 11? Innovation is something a bit different than fast hardware. People have mistaken fast shit like 120hz displays and super speedy launching of apps as amazing UX, when it's so much more than just interface responsiveness.
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What is an "M1" and why should I care? Serious question. I don't follow Apple and I don't have any clue what this product is. And I don't think I care, either. But educate me.
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it's an ARM CPU for laptops which is better than their previous x86 based laptop CPUs from Intel
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To say it is “better” is a bit of an understatement.
As said above, it completely changes how I use my laptop.
I unplug my prod machine in the morning, jump on zoom calls, build code, stream music and YouTube in the background, and end my shift at like 40-60% battery. It blows my mind.
It feels weird and foreign to me to hear the fans on my intel machines and see how rapidly they drain battery and how slow they are at some processes.
It’s truly a revolutionary tech in a way I didn’t think was possible until owning one.-
We must have different ideas of what 'completely changes' means. I suspect you use your laptop in all the same places as before. Now you plug it in less at all the desks that were already equipped with power. There are things that used to be slow that are faster now. It doesn't get as hot on your lap as the last one.
This is how every new laptop is. I haven't gotten an M1 precisely because for as nice as they are it changes exactly nothing about how I use a computer day to day. I would still have it planted at a desk plugged into a bigger monitor and a mouse most of the time where there's a power cord situated. I could take it to more meetings without needing to charge as much. These just aren't revolutionary changes. The thing stopping me from doing work on the couch or bed or at Starbucks is not a lack of 6+ hours battery life or fan noise.-
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I don't think most people are doing 8-10+ hours of work on their laptop away from their desk all day every day. I pick up my laptop and take it to a few hours of meetings (where my laptop often isn't even in actual use), then I return to my office for an hour or two and plug it in because the charger is right there, rinse/repeat. It's not like it's a big inconvenience.
Of course you'd rather have a laptop where you think about the battery less and bring a charger less often but it's not changing my behavior very much compared to any other newer, modern laptop. Just as one comparison The Verge's Surface Pro 8 review today says they're getting 8.5 hours out of a charge (compared to the claimed 16 hours). Even If the M1 gets an actual 16 that's just not changing most people's average day. You're getting through a full cross country flight (including airport time) with either option. Obviously if you're upgrading from a 5 year old thing with 2 hours of battery life it's a big deal by comparison.
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OK, so just another incremental improvement. Cool cool.
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It’s really not tho.
The SSD analogy is actually a really good one. or like, dialup vs broadband.
Member turning on your computer and then going to go make coffee and hoping your computer was almost booted by the time you were done?
Yeah, ssd and broadband internet are technically “incremental improvements”, but they change the way you are able to interact with your tech. Streaming (which accounts for the vast majority of internet use for most people) just wouldn’t be possible without broadband.
I really believe M1 is similar, and will change the mobile computing landscape in similar ways.-
Broadbrand changed what you could actually do with the internet. Entire new categories of products and services that were previously impossible were now available. For most users an SSD did nothing of that sort, it simply made things a bit faster (even for gamers it took a long time before SSDs did more than improve load times). The M1 is the same story. There is nothing you're doing on an M1 that can't be done only slightly worse on another laptop.
Built in LTE is a more transformative change to a laptop for most users than an M1 is. The problem is the business model of built in LTE is abysmal thanks to our telco system, muting the impact significantly.-
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I think an SSD is a fine analogy, which is to say this is a nice improvement, I would never want to give it up, and it changes nothing fundamental about how or how much I use my computer. Of course I want my computer to boot faster, load more tabs more quickly, and compile code faster. That's what every computer upgrade I've ever done has been about.
I think peoples' memories of SSDs are a little distorted. We used to buy new PCs every couple years and they'd make everything faster and it was great. No one would want to go back to a slower CPU. But each CPU wasn't some revolutionary change in how you used a PC (especially if you were the average user that just uses a web browser). We just long ago hit a point of diminishing returns on CPU/memory improvements and were in that trough for so long that people hadn't experienced a real noticeable speed increase in day to day work on a computer in awhile. Then SSDs became mainstream and we got a big one for the first time in a long time. Where upgrading your computer for a faster CPU didn't matter upgrading for a new SSD did. But what you were doing was the same thing you always did. Buy better harder for some faster moment to moment experiences with the things you always did with your computer.
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M1 is about 5x faster* for the same power draw. It's the biggest tech improvement for many, many years. We're used to annual CPU updates adding a few percent, and this is nothing like that.
* the m1 mac mini uses 3x less power than the 2018 coffee lake i7 in the previous model, but is more than 50% faster.-
The people who think SSD’s were a bigger jump are fucking crazy. There’s a reason consoles didn’t bother to use them until current gen, and gaming is where they are arguably the most useful.
Like I’ve said previously, there’s a lot more to computing than being able to read/write to disk really fast.-
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Of course it's because they were expensive, but even the PS4 Pro and Series X (both released relatively recently) passed on SSD's because they just weren't worth the added cost. SSD's weren't massively expensive in 2018 or whenever those consoles were released.
Anyway - I think SSD's are great, don't get me wrong, but it's just not as big of a jump, especially not for a regular user. The vast majority of people would never know if they had an SSD or HDD in their machine, because it's just not that noticeable once your computer is booted up. Having apps that aren't sluggish as fuck on cheap hardware and a battery that doesn't drain immediately are two things that pretty much every user, even your fucking grandma, will notice right away.
I remember the first time I installed an SSD in my laptop, I wondered what the fuck the big deal was because other than slightly faster boot times the user experience was pretty much exactly the same. This is definitely one of those things still burned in my mind as "motherfucking shacknews overhyping the everloving shit out of something"
Now, if we're talking server side hardware, that's a completely different story.-
last-gen consoles are a terrible example of SSD performance. games on consoles have to be designed around tight specifications. console games can't automatically take advantage of the added performance like PC games can.
a regular user who's only loading up Edge might not notice a difference. but that doesn't mean there isn't a difference. the amount of work the OS does in the background to move things in and out of memory is insane. beyond that, using actual applications to do things that require constant reads and writes to disk received an incredible boost to performance.
all that said, if you think the M1 would be just as fast with an HDD, you're absolutely fooling yourself.-
I never said the M1 would be "just as fast with an HDD", and I'm familiar with how computers work but thanks for the lesson.
And a "regular user who's only loading up edge" is basically 90% of computer users. You guys live in a bubble if you think the vast majority of end users are working on large files. Most people spend the vast majority of their time using collaboration apps (zoom/teams/slack) and web browsers, when they do file IO it's usually to open a small word/excel file, and laptops have more than enough ram to make swapping to disk completely unnoticeable even on mechanical drives.-
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Literally everything I've said has been about perceived difference. If you've interpreted that as "actual performance" that's your problem.
And mobile devices in their current form "simply do not exist" without ARM processors and about a hundred other innovations that no one here is even mentioning.-
except your initial comment. limiting it now to just perception shows how hard you’re trying to minimize just how monumental the impact SSDs had across technology in general in order to continue an absurd argument.
disk access was the single largest performance bottleneck across the entire system before SSD came out. CPUs spent time waiting for data to load into memory, time spent doing nothing. -
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Eh, I'd also pretty hard disagree. SSDs are literally tens to hundreds of times faster at random I/O than HDDs were, and there's a reason Apple yanked them completely out of their MBP lineup completely in 2013, years before everybody else started to (and also led the charge on high performance PCI cdisk storage on their laptops/phones).
We deal with it pretty often at work, and a ten year old computer with an SSD generally feels better to use than a 2020 one with a hard disk. Without SSDs, the CPU usage for regular users would still be sitting bottlenecked at 10% or something because they're simply waiting on the disk I/O all of the time, and they'd simply not be able to see the performance side.
The M1 vs. the Intel CPUs is also an interesting case of running into Intel having mobile CPUs that draw a *ton* more power than people expect, and people assuming that's normal - we've basically been getting higher power draw factory overclocks of the same CPU for the last 2-3 years now. They're already being handily beaten on the power/heat front by AMD within the X86 space, so M1 is just "lolol" on top of it and wrecking both of them anyway.
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Yep, and an innovation no one thought would work or gain traction.
The shift away from x86 is a ballsy move, one we weren’t convinced would produce competitive performance (or even greater perf) and find an market willing to buy into these computers.
Bigger than you all think-
It's insane. Programs running under an emulation layer are still pretty much as performant as they are natively on intel processors, and that's on the first gen CPU.
But, naa, being able to open a file real fast is totes a bigger paradigm shift, for sure. lol
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Apple gained a dominant position in the market and got conservative. That’s what always happens. Why innovate when you can make incremental updates and still sell millions of devices every year?
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“billions more chasing cool with the Beats acquisition and the advent of Apple TV+.”
Beats was years ago now, and the whole point of Apple TV is to build a services bundle across games, iCloud, video, fitness, and more- and retain their already dominant position in extracting more and more value from their customers.
I hardly think they’ve lost their way -
I think the services business mostly plays into this narrative. It's largely a bunch of copycat rent seeking services to extract more yearly revenue from iOS users. It's not changing much of anything. Apple's services revenue is up because people are using Apple Music and iCloud but what does that mean for the computing industry? Nothing. It's just Apple leveraging their dominance to eat up some share from existing, equally good options in Spotify and DropBox or whatever. Meanwhile the dominant portion of their services revenue is just rents taken from the App Store and Google paying for default search placement.
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That’s fair, but it’s a logical move for them to expand and grow their overall business.
I would take a different approach to this criticism of them- what product or service should they be investing in that matches their strategy overall and meaningfully grows their business? How do you even grow a firm past $1T in market cap?
For example, I disagree that moving away from the iPod is something meaningful/away from “vision”. Firms have to change direction and strategy at times. What should they have done instead? Looking at Jobs and his influence is fine but it’s not really clear what Apple should be doing differently that both “stays true” to Jobs vision that would have changed where they are today.-
And I missed it, there is a mention of the services business. My mistake.
My takeaway from this article is “Apple should be doing something different because it’s what Jobs would do, and they’re now just making money and making shareholders happy, which is kind of lame.”
What should they have done, NOT launched a services business ?
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Disagree only because of how much the products have improved over the last decade. They've never been better or more feature packed. The fact that they moved to a place where they are no longer reliant on anyone else's chips is also huge.
Losing skeuomorphic design alone was a big win (no disrespect to the dead lol)-
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He may have changed his opinion on that once the iPad became more capable. In its original iterations there were serious hardware restrictions for multitasking that didn't feel like shit. He flipped on things many times in the past so its reasonable to think he would have done so here too.
We'll never know!
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You're just operating from a very different definition of success. The iPhone is one of, if not the most, successful and transformative products in history. The iPad was also enormous although less transformative due to Apple's mismanagement and refusal to allow the platform to blossom (a preview of things to come). These are obviously very high bars to compare to but all the things you mention are basically just nice products that have transformed basically nothing.
The Watch ended up being much less transformative than Apple hoped. There's almost no software ecosystem of note. The smartwatch as a category basically doesn't exist because no one could make a software ecosystem for it that was worthwhile. It's largely a fancy FitBit with some iOS integration now which is nice but not changing the world. Likewise AirPods are just a nice, Apple branded wireless earbud, of which there are many options (many before Apple launched theirs). Neither of these devices were transformative (I own both for reference). They're just add ons to an iOS household. The Apple Pencil and iPad Pro are even less transformative (I own both of these). They're just straightforward iterations of existing technology. Likewise for the M1. It makes a good product better. It doesn't change much of anything fundamentally.
People are looking to Apple for truly transformative things. There were opportunities to do things like this where they haven't done so. They failed at doing that with Siri. They failed to open up iOS on iPads in a way that would allow it to supplant laptops. Now everyone is waiting to see if AR/VR is where Apple will actually produce something revolutionary again.-
I think AR will be their next opportunity to do that. Its important to note that the foundation for the iPhone started in 2001 or 2002 with their giant iPad prototype. It was a matter of waiting years for the technology to catch up with their ambitions. We're getting to a place where wearables that don't look idiotic will be performant in the way that it needs to be.
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for sure, everyone is anxious to see what they do there. The Watch and Airpods obviously are nice trial runs for miniaturization along the way too. And if they have a true hit in the way AR/VR optimists believe it'll just be even more clear exactly how much things like AirPods and the Watch are incremental blips in their history compared to how revolutionary things like the iPhone and an AR device are.
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I think it may be one of those things where each individual piece doesn’t seem like much, but looking back over a long time period may present a different view.
In a vacuum, the Watch and the AirPods seem incremental. But 10 years from now I could envision the Watch being the primary device, and pods being the size of a hearing aid that you just wear all day. Add in glasses or a contact lens that provides a HUD, and now you have all these capabilities that function almost like cybernetics. Get in the car. “Hey Siri, navigate to the nearest titty bar.” Maps pops up in your vision as an overlay to the actual road. Green arrow in the lane you should be in, etc, etc.
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Why are Apple, moreso than perhaps any other company, trashed for not constantly “changing the world”? Is it not enough to make some of the best consumer electronics products on the market?
My AirPods Pro might not be cold fusion, but they have made a huge impact on my QOL when it comes to using headphones. Easily and automatically connects to everything I have when taking calls, listening to music, etc. Battery lasts damn near all day. Great noise canceling to the point that I can mow the lawn and barely hear the power. Heck, now that I have a running watch with music, I just throw the pods in my ears and go. No more putting an iPod in my pocket and running headphone wires up my shirt.-
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Well that’s what I’m getting at. Apple did something brave, called it brave, and now every other thing they do gets mocked as “brave”. Apple faces a level of scrutiny that doesn’t seem to be applied to any other consumer device company. It’s like anything they ever do has to get judged in the context of everything else they’ve ever done.
Samsung gets heat because their foldable screen thing is legitimately a mediocre product, not because of how they chose to market it. If any Apple feature has issues, the response is always “LOL IT JUST WORKS AMIRITE?”
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yeah Amazon has like 10k employees working on a product line that only exists because Apple did such a poor job with Siri for tasks around the house that there was an opening for something better
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It wasn’t a tradeoff problem. They’ve just failed to execute. They were busy trying to ship Siri like a yearly hardware update instead of an internet service that needs constant, regular updates. They refused to cede any control of the experience so they had a voice assistant that could only control first party apps and couldn’t do any of the things customers actually wanted to do with 3rd party apps. On and on.
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It was a huge a trade to do personal assistant things entirely on device rather than having the cloud and all of the user tracking around it do the heavy lifting. There's clear reasons why Amazon/Google's method is so much more effective than the limitations of what on-device combined with user-privacy focused obfuscation is capable of right now.
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I think this is a convenient excuse for poor execution. They didn’t have the cloud/services infrastructure or skill. Privacy was not a serious selling point when Siri launched. It wasn’t nearly as much a privacy conscious era. People just loved Siri when it launched and then it decayed because Apple didn’t know how to treat an online service.
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Siri isn't any worse then Google or Amazon's implementation though. I have used all three and all three are pretty much the same. If anything Siri seems to work most reliably in my experience, even though it fails from time to time as well. Hey Google seems to work 50 percent of the time for me. Alexa was worse then that. The real problem is that home automation is a mix of different thing from different companies who don't all work with each other. Philips Hue Lights, Sonos, Nest, etc, all kinda sorta the best in certain areas but none of them all work great together without having a technical person involved.
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AirPods are an example of what Apple is today, and I’m still okay with that. I tried three other high end Bluetooth true wireless earbuds before the AirPod pros came out. AirPods are pretty far and away the best because of user facing touches from how consistently and quickly the reconnect to how satisfying and easy the charging puck is to use. Add the pretty excellent noise cancelling and they’re fantastic. I’ve tried earlier Bluetooth products over the years and always went back to wired headphones eventually. These are the first thing that was truly better than wired earphones for a phone. Was the product itself a huge innovation? No. But it combines lots of little things that together make for a better product.
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AirPods definitely deserve a mention. I get away with enjoying music in places and situations that would just be impossible before which is just pushed to another level with the noise canceling tech on the pros.
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how are they letting you enjoy music in places you couldn't with wireless bluetooth headphones before?
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yeah I mean I will never buy a non-AirPods headphone thanks to the auto switch between whatever iOS device I'm using but even that isn't transformative. I use my headphones the same way, just as much, they're just less annoying to use.
For reference, a transformative earbud experience for me would be something like "I now watch TV with my earbuds because I get better sound than my speakers (thanks to surround/spatial audio/noise cancelling), don't have to worry about annoying my neighbors, and the earbuds automatically adjust and allow me to hear someone entering the room to ask me a question so I don't have to constantly take the earbuds in and out to converse around the house". Maybe AirPods are even that product eventually but I don't think we'll look back on the AirPods as transformational/revolutionary if it takes 10 product iterations to get to that point.
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He can enjoy it better because people can see he has airpods on.
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Well I wouldn’t dare take my xm4’s out for a jog because they’d threaten to fall off and I’d worry about sweat getting inside.
Also this is just colloquial evidence but I see so many people wearing AirPods while at work (often when they shouldn’t be?) and that is just the more discrete nature of the product shining through.-
sure but there were a variety of good sporty, sweatproof wireless bluetooth headphones you could've gotten for running prior to the existence of the AirPods. Of course the AirPods are better since they cost much more and Apple does a better job at a lot of that stuff in the end.
I definitely keep my AirPods in more than with the old bluetooth options which is partly comfort improvements and partly battery improvements (I have wondered how much battery life an idle AirPod uses in the ear just from sensors and stuff). -
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That's why I haven't bought a $120 or however ridiculous the price is, pair, because I'm certain they'll just fall out like other ear buds but worse there's no cord to catch 'em when they do :p
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Yeah I really would like a pair TBH but I’m just afraid that they wont stay in my ear like all other earbuds and I will lose them or break them or whatever
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Something that has bothered me about Apple over the past 10 years or so is that Apple can't seem to be able to focus on more than one or two things at a time. They concentrate on the phones, the computers get long in the tooth. They give some love to the computers and the iPads don't get a big update for a couple of cycles.
HP has a large share of the pc market and finds ways to update every product range every year. Even if it's just stuffing the latest version of the 14mm architecture, HP had versions of every generation. Apple let the Mac Mini go years without any updates. It was constantly 2 generations out of date. I mean, do they just reassign everyone after updating a Mac every few years? How does a company this massive not have the capacity to keep its products at lease recent if not current.-
I’m hoping the computers sitting stale was a product of ramping up the M1 transition.
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I’ve bought more Apple products over the last 10 years then the proceeding 35. Huh…
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Apple related: my 2020 MacBook Pro shit the bed last night when I started an OS update. Got hung up on the update. Forced it to shut down, restarted and logged in, then it went back to black screen and apple logo and continued to hang.
I took it to the apple store, they said I needed to format it and hoped I had done a backup recently (I did a time machine backup in August, and most of my important docs are stored on iCloud, so I’m pretty sure I’m safe). I didn’t have the time to do it at the store, so from home, I tried booting up in recovery mode, tried first aid, tried reinstalling the OS. Still comes back to the loading screen. So fuck. I really needed that shit for work this weekend, now I gotta spend my day off with support on the phone to fix it. Pain in the ass. -
Were people expecting them to do an iPhone level device every 5 years? The iPhone is a once every 25 years success.
Apple is honestly firing on all cylinders right now.-
Yeah, that was my first thought as well. They’ve had less than a handful of truly revolutionary products in their existence as a company but even one revolutionary product is more than most companies.
Some decisions they’re making lately are shitty and some software quality is suffering, but they’re still doing very, very well. -
The funny thing is when Apple does announce a milestone product like the iPad and AirPods they get laughed at by the tech nerds like us.
"Don't the Apple fanboys know that tablets already exist? Why would someone want to buy a large iPhone when it can't run desktop apps?"
"The AirPods are fuck ugly. I wouldn't be caught dead wearing those things in public"-
Same as it ever was. People trashed the iPod too. Remember when the iPhone was going to fail because it didn’t have a keyboard?
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Most people here (myself included) had a good laugh at the AirPods when they were announced. I think some of it has to do with Apple's marketing team being so far up their own ass. They make it very easy for people to cast doubt on why Apple's "next big thing" isn't all that.
So it's funny watching people criticize a company for lacking vision or innovation yet they can't recognize those things when it smacks them in the face.-
Honestly I think people mock Apples marketing as over the top at about 10x the rate that Apple is actually guilty of it. Every company promotes their incremental improvements as more revolutionary than they are. That’s just marketing.
I’d say I encounter about 100 Apple “anti-fanboys” for every Apple fanboy I meet. People have somehow convinced themselves it’s cool to be vocally against the leading brand, as if anyone actually cares whether you use an iPhone or a Galaxy.
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"No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."
And really the iPad is still just a big iPhone that can't make phone calls*
Anyone who pays laptop prices for an iPad and then is bummed it can't be a laptop replacement... just isn't paying attention.
*technically if you have it all set up right and (I think) you're on the same wi-fi network and your iPhone is nearby the iPad can take the calls from the iPhone but you can't use an iPad as a phone by itself. Now watch someone tell me that thanks to Google Voice an Cellular data blah blah blah-
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Yeah I should have pointed that out, it's just the king of nerds blowing off what winds up being the market killer.
To be fair Apple at the time was a circling-the-drain computer company, market share wise, and here they come up with an MP3 player that can only connect to Macs, which comparatively few people used. People only knew something was up when Windows developers started trying to make programs to sync it with PCs over FireWire.
And talk about poorly aged magazine covers - this came out five months after the iPhone was released
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DfrAfXjUwAAaE-A.jpg
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I iPad has evolved way past being a big iPhone. I actually prefer it for most of my computing these days, unless it is something very specific.
*Technically your iPad can answer a call from your iPhone no matter where it is as long as it has some sort of data connection. If you really wanted you could leave a cheap iPhone at home plugged in and use an iPad everywhere. I doubt the uptake on that setup is very high though, lol.
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They had been on that trajectory, no?
iPod was about 5-6 years prior to iPhone. iPad less than 5 year after iPhone.-
Neither of those were even close to the iPhone. Both the AirPods and Apple Watch have sales greater than peak iPod
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Yeah the iPhone makes its own gravity.
Famously, Motorola had that RAZR phone which is hilarious in hindsight but at the time it was considered a "sexy" phone.
Then they partnered with Apple to make a phone called the "ROKR" that could sync with iTunes. At the time the idea of your phone playing music was still new and different.
Besides the fact that the first ROKR models were just downright fugly devices, there was a hard limit of 100 songs from iTunes. Like, when Apple would advertise the iPod they'd say "10,000 songs in your pocket*" with the asterisk pointing out estimated number of songs to fit in the space, if you had a bunch of short songs at a decent bitrate you might fit more. If you had a bunch of long songs at a high bitrate you might fit less. But the "100 songs" thing for the ROKR was literally a hard limit no matter what would fit.
Apple had bragged about selling however many million iPods but cell phones? The cell phone industry sold a million cell phones every day back then. Maybe more now. Everyone knew what was coming - Apple was going to make their own phone so they gimped iTunes integration with Motorola.
And of course the speculation was right. But the point is that the cell phone market is unique. Not everyone thinks they need a computer. Or a tablet. Or wireless headphones. But everyone needs a cell phone (or thinks they do). The margins are high, the market is competitive, and people can justify spending the money on the small computer that fits in your pocket that does everything. I don't think there's going to be another product category like that again.
I don't think the points in this article are invalid but I think he's underestimating the extent to which innovation and feature saturation exists in the iPhone. Some of the features the iPhone 13 sports could be handled by the iPhone 12 they're just there artificially.
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Yeah I love the Mini. It's super nice to have a few spread throughout the house.
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