“What the heck is happening at Apple?” people ask me. “Has the company lost its mojo? Why no new product categories? Why didn’t Apple, instead of AT&T, buy Time Warner? And why are the new MacBook Pros so darned expensive?
After first getting out of the way the fact that Apple is still the richest public company in the history of public companies, let’s take these questions in reverse order beginning with the MacBook Pros. In addition to their nifty OLED finger bar above the keyboard, these new Macs seem to have gained an average of $200 over the preceding models of the same size. What makes Apple think they can get away with that?
Apple can get away with that because it always has gotten away with it. Apple has always prided itself on high profit margins and really socking it to the customer when a new product is released is a tradition in Cupertino dating back to the Apple III. Remember the original 128K Macintosh cost more than $2400 and it was close to useless.
High prices not only mean high margins, they also act to control demand, making it somewhat easier to handle problems that come with any truly new model. And those who are willing to pay more are often more understanding, too. Apple fanboys are proud to be the first and proud to have spent so much. It’s a luxury thing, I suppose.
What we can count on is that MacBook Pro prices won’t get any higher for many years and these models will decrease in price as production ramps up (expect $100 off just before and after Christmas) and especially when they are replaced by subsequent models with more powerful processors.
And as IBM reported a couple weeks ago, even at higher prices, Macs tend to be cheaper to own. I’m writing this on a mid-2010 non-Retina 13-inch MacBook Pro I bought six years ago last June. Yes, over time I increased the memory to from four to 16 gigs, took the hard drive up from 240 gigs to a terabyte Fusion drive, replaced both the battery and the keyboard when they wore out, but that still puts me only about $1600 into this device with which I have so far generated well over $1 million in revenue. I have no plans to replace it.
In the same period I have also gone through three Windows notebooks from Toshiba, Acer and HP.
This very durability presents a problem for Apple that they’ve tried to deal with by eventually stopping software support for older machines. That’s why the Mac Minis of my kids now run Ubuntu. Old Macs get handed down or sold on Craigslist and that’s a problem for Apple, but not nearly as big a problem as the fact that pretty much everyone who wants a smart phone now has one.
Yes, Apple has a problem — a problem most other companies would love to have: customers like the products too much so the market is becoming saturated.
All Apple needs is a new product category, right? Another iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad will do nicely. Where is it?
It isn’t anywhere and in that sense Apple has lost its mojo.
Apple has a problem of big numbers: unless a new product category can produce $5-10 billion in revenue its first year it almost isn’t worth doing. And Apple has such new products — headphones and Apple Music primarily — but those just don’t seem like much when Amazon — Amazon — seems to be inventing new categories all the time. But Amazon’s requirements for success are much lower than Apple’s and its tolerance for failure (Amazon Fire phone anyone?) are higher.
Apple, whether it admits so or not, has to live with the memory of Steve Jobs.
And so Apple is both paralyzed and isolated. These two characteristics have to be considered together to understand where the company stands. While I doubt that Apple is out of good ideas I also don’t doubt that the company is close to incapable of seriously committing to any of the ones it has. What would Steve do? And the absence of Steve Jobs is made even worse by the fact that Apple generally stands apart from the rest of the industries in which it competes. Where is Apple at industry conferences, for example? With the exception of technical standards bodies, where Apple shines, the company just isn’t out there. Rather than holding up a finger to test the wind Apple’s tendency is to examine its own navel because great ideas are supposed to, well, just appear.
Except great ideas don’t just appear. As Steve Jobs (and Picasso) said, they are stolen. And to my knowledge nobody from Apple has been out stealing anything for a long time.
So Goldman Sachs is upset that Apple didn’t at least bid for Time Warner. I’m pretty sure Apple didn’t even know Time Warner was for sale.
The basic problem here is that Apple insists on “thinking different” when in fact there’s not much real thinking happening there at all — just waiting for something to percolate.
And when it percolates, that something still has to not only be different, it can’t put a hurt on Apple’s sacrosanct margins, which means almost no new ideas qualify no matter how well they have been perked.
Leave it to me, then, to tell Apple how to get its mojo back. I have two ideas right now that qualify but I’ll only give one here. If Apple wants to hear the other (even bigger) one, Tim Cook will have to give me a call.
Apple doesn’t need to buy Time Warner to dominate the TV and movie businesses. Apple doesn’t have to create a studio, either. Nor do they have to even enter the content creation business in the same sense that Amazon and Netflix have.
All Apple has to do is control the writers.
Nearly all original ideas in Hollywood, and anywhere else visual entertainment is made, begin in the mind of a writer. Yet writers, like most actors, are notoriously underpaid. Apple just needs to create a welfare state for writers.
What Apple needs is an option for the online rights to every writer’s work. There are probably 10,000 “writers” in the entertainment business earning anywhere from $5000 to $5 million per year. I want Apple to put under contract every writer who has ever written anything that’s been produced, paying them each a guaranteed baseline of $40,000 per year (that’s $400 million annually) with an additional $600 million going to writers whose work is actually produced. Let’s say there are 2000 films and TV shows produced per year so that would be, say, $500,000 per movie and $50K per series episode.
These amounts are substantially above Writers Guild rates and what they’d buy is a streaming option. Apple gets its pick of everything.
The industry wouldn’t know what hit them as Apple steals the idea stream at its source. Apple would have to negotiate the deal with the Writers Guild, which would love it. Producers would hate it but would learn to love it because Apple would end up financing many of their productions.
Now that’s fundamentally different.
there’s not much real thinking happening there at all
Wow, Bob. That’s a Dvorak level of idiocy. Never thought I’d see that from you.
-jcr
total lack of any realistic perspective here – this guy lives in a dark corner of his own mind with no hope of ever getting out – move along searchers of truth.
This column is another unintentional joke. Welfare for writers… from a writer. LOL. NEVER GONNA HAPPEN.
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Cringe makes a mill over 6 years… yet he has to cheat people out of pennies for his game server. Yeah, sure.
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Apple innovation stops with Steve Jobs… predicted everywhere since the funeral. Finally Cringe wakes up and notices this.
One first needs to “get” Cringely or Dvorak. What he just wrote is that Apple will never get it’s mojo back. Why because: the first 5 paragraphs. Unless they do what is impossible.
About paragraph 6th:all my Mac’s, iMac, Air, and my iPhones have developed faults withing warranty period. And not that the iMac $2700 is out of warranty the back-lighting is faulty.
Eddy Cue from Apple had discussions to buy Time Warner, but it never went beyond that.
I would love to seem them cannibalize their lack luster, overpriced iCloud by introducing a “personal cloud” home server product (that would also be the hub for HomeKit, and all that other stuff). Apple getting back to their roots as a high-margin value added hardware company. NAS systems are terrible, especially when trying to integrate them into a macOS and iOS network.
But what they’ll do is what every big dominant player does, grow by driving internal costs down. Innovation will come from going cheap, which means instead of hiring away rockstar programmers, they’ll aim for C student grads and train them just enough to do what they’re told. Play around with accounting tricks. And even more marketing.
And the correct answer is:
.
D. None of the above. 😉
I second this! I need something that will allow me to burn my DVDs, store them in a home server, and make them accessible to all my Apple products (TVs, iPads, iPhones) throughout my home!
Is Plex not good enough for that?
But Plex isn’t made by Apple
/s
I left the cult a couple years ago, and while it may be true that not everything “just works,” and finding the best solution for any given “problem” takes a little bit of work on my part, I’m glad I left when I did, because things don’t seem any greener back on that side anymore.
Hell, my Dad has bled six colors since he worked for Apple back in the 70s/80s, and even he’s using Plex and Sonos (and has an Android tablet for the occasional shit Apple just won’t let him do on iOS)
Meanwhile, I’ve gone from a MacBook Pro and an iPhone to a Surface Book and a Pixel XL, and I couldn’t be happier.
Those new MacBook Pros are just sad, aren’t they?
And then Microsoft puts out the Surface Studio while Apple hasn’t thrown creative pros a bone in how many years?
I honestly don’t know what the fuck is going on in Cupertino anymore.
That’s why you shouldn’t use apple products. They restrict their devices like primitive fools
You still need a solution for DVDs? Wow.
Anyway, yeah. Plex. And then you Torrent every movie title you own, should take you an evening. Turn off seeding if you want to be super legal. The titles are yours. Much quicker than ripping.
Or just get an Apple TV or comparible and a couple of streaming subscriptions and watch what’s on offer. Cheaper, legaler and funner 🙂 And if you get a strong hankering to watch a DVD title, watch it on your DVD.
A NAS is more than just media. Plex is fine for what it is, but what I’m looking for is a file server. It can have Plex running as a service, but it should also have Time Machine, and basically do what iCloud does now, but with no monthly fee and terabytes of storage instead of a few GB. And my ISP has recently announced data caps. That means that most of the time I’m using my devices the meter’s running. After all, even though they’re “mobile” most of the time they’re used at home.
Synology does all that.
It’s not very Apple like but it does everything you asked and more.
“expect $100 off just before and after Christmas”
.
Nope. The *last* thing anyone should expect is for Apple to drop the price of anything just before and/or after Christmas. C’mon. It’s Apple! Until this past update, their laptops were mostly using 4 year old tech and they’d still *never* gotten a price drop!
Thanksgiving is when Apple offers discounts.
Discounts are already starting.
http://bgr.com/2016/10/28/macbook-pro-2016-price-discount-amazon/
And ending: “every model mentioned in this post is now sold out”.
Tim Cook, please call Bob!!!
Yes – I too remember the 1988 Writers Strike – that ‘s a great idea however, as we both know, it will never happen. American business runs on the basis that success must be rewarded (often with excess) which is a great idea and the bedrock of democracy.
However, the unspoken corollary in the American business mind is that failure must be punished – and while this proposal would give Apple almost complete control of the US entertainment industry, it would also inevitably “reward” bad/unpopular/non-mainstream writers. And that fact would doom it in the binary American business mind which has no room for anything that is merely a good, productive company.
Plus, a day after Apple adopts this plan there will not be 10,000 writers anymore but 100,000 and counting. Another reason why it won’t work.
In 20 years, Apple will be the new IBM. Any bets? 🙂
I wouldn’t make that bet with someone else’s money! It seems almost obvious from out here in the cheap seats.
20 years? At the rate they’re going, I’d say less than ten.
I’d guess that most people who don’t read Bob’s column, assume the world can do without the overpriced luxury items made by Apple, but IBM is too big and too important to the world’s infrastructure to fail.
Bob,
You seem to have missed that the Mac business (being a measly few billion $ a year) has become a rounding error compared to the iPhone business. They don’t have to care as much about it and so they don’t.
Indeed. Apple isn’t painting the back side of the fence when it comes to the MBP.
Didn’t Amazon/Netflix more or less follow your advice from four years back?
https://www.cringely.com/2013/01/04/silicon-valley-conquers-hollywood-part-3-think-small/
Seems more likely that Amazon will capitalize on your new ideas here than Apple. Amazon can afford it, and as you note, they can afford the risk. Apple cannot. Apple seems to be a short play, the only question is… when? Maybe just before the much anticipated iPhone 8 flops.
Apple just released a “pro” laptop that is maxed out at 16GB of RAM. Given that I have multiple VMs running at all times there is no way I could use the new 15″ MBP on a daily basis. “Thinness” is not a feature for a pro-level device. Performance and expandability should come first.
Your idea about the writers reminds me of Getty Images and what they did with gobbling up digital rights to photos.
Getty is a great example to illustrate exactly why this is not going to work.
If you just need some dumb picture and just about anything will do, the stock photos are awesome and allow you to escape some of the costs and work of shooting your own. It’s a little money for a simpler job. If, however, you need pictures to be a central part of your work, or particular sorts of pictures, then you don’t use stock. You shoot your own so that you get the exact thing you need and you own it. Stock exists for situations when you don’t want to bother doing an ancillary job with your own hands. But writing is not ancillary.
That’s fine, you say, these are not a single group of artists, but everyone in the world. You get the quality you desire because you choose who you want and hire them. Ha! The other reason, the *real* reason, this is not happening is that writers who have sold off a valuable part of their work can’t be hired by anyone who wants those rights. Aaron Sorkin sold his rights? Aaron can go back to Broadway, he’s done in TV.
Even if those contracts were hardened and enforceable there’s little chance they’d ever be challenged because any writers who signed them would never be hired. Picture the first few dozen who sign this deal, and then picture the reactions of Amazon, Netflix or any other corp that’s building a stable of shows for resale. Those pioneers would be blackballed so hard and so fast it’d make every head in the vicinity start spinning. The extra money on the table for the ones who wouldn’t sign would make the earlier adopters die a little until you had a bunch of them trying to break the contracts to get back to work. There might be some money in commercials and stage shows and whatever is so small-time that streaming is not a factor, but anything big or creative or personal really could only be sold to Apple. That wing-clipping would not fly for the best writers.
Just for a thought exercise, consider how much more heat something the size of the old unibody Macbook Pro* could dissipate and how much of today’s CPU and GPU could fit in the space, such a thing would make the prospect of buying USB/C cables and adapters more palatable, and would be thinking different.
*Not asking for reanimation, just serious power, Sir Jony could think of it as a “Gentleman’s Express”.
“After first getting out of the way the fact that Apple is still the richest public company in the history of public companies”
If you don’t adjust for inflation… The Dutch East India Company (first publicly traded company – worth over 7 trillion in today’s dollars), South Sea Company in 1720: 4 trillion.
Old Examples, but modern examples (post Black Tuesday) – Microsoft in the 90s (~800 billion), adjusted for inflation was worth more than Apple today. IBM, too, in 1967 was worth over a trillion of today’s dollars.
Despite Apple being the richest company there are no records of philanthropy, did not donate a dime to any poor nation or even domestically, shame.
https://www.philanthropy.com/article/After-Steve-Jobs-Apple-Steps/228899
South Sea Company, LOL!
Apple’s price to product innovation ratio is an absurd from the beginning. I don’t know where the money goes to.
Even with the iPhones, since iPhone 4 there is nothing new. And the products are laden with bugs.
What is interesting, the sentiment has just started to fall off the unreasonable marks, but not the stock (yet?).
Nadella: Our industry respects innovation, not tradition.
Everyone was so busy looking around Apple for the second coming of Jobs. Nobody ever thought to look around Microsoft.
I figure that Apple just hired the same “crack” team that you claimed was helping your kids on their Kickstarter project. That project is now over a year late on what was supposed to be a 21 day project that only needed custom cases before it shipped. It is an now an excellent example of creeping “features” and no project planning. You can’t even be bothered to update that project page.
Apple PCs are doomned, as they are a software company, not hardware, thus need third party to supply the parts, MB, CPU,GPU, the shell etc. Remember there are better machines out there for less money.
I’d say Apple is a hardware company rather, I do not see anything other than a more or less better usability story desktop and a few apps wrapped into Linux. Besides, years ago it lost the server market, of course they buy from their competitors and this is how the price point becomes inflated, but the hype, sentiment propels them further. Let’s see how much longer.
What software has Apple written. They license lots of apps from others. Perhaps the OS is theirs.
Certainly succeeded in making me cringe. Written like a true columnist.
I guess it’s easier to validate personal opinions with simple personifications of complex organisations, than with a financially unviable amount of data, research, or in-depth analysis.
I’ll start by giving you credit. This is both hilarious and brilliant. But it points out the universal problem that content producers are not fairly compensated.
Nifty OLED finger bar …
Come on, my kid’s plastic (toy) laptop had that before the mac
The Surface Studio is ugly and impractical as sin, and sales of it won’t take MS anywhere.
Said the television writer.
[…] What the heck is happening at Apple?By Robert X. CringelyOct 31 2016https://www.cringely.com/2016/10/31/heck-happened-apple/ […]
> With the exception of technical standards bodies, where Apple shines
I don’t think that is correct, anymore, if it ever was. When you look at the html5/js camp where there is a lot of competition and standardization it seems that it is Google, Mozilla and Microsoft that sit down and figure it out while Apple is a no-show. And in the c++ camp that also have accelerated its evolution of the language (for the better) in recent years, Apple also seem to be absent.
Apple hasn’t contributed to the C++ standardization effort because they don’t care about C++; they prefer Objective-C to C++ and now even Objective-C is being supplanted by Swift.
Apple uses an ancient language (Objective-C) with whizzy syntactic sugar on top (Swift). Google developed Golang, which boasts that it doesn’t even HAVE a shared memory model. To them and their fellow Valley firms, C++ is far too complicated, functional languages are a joke and anything beyond that will not bother to be comprehended. Why? The Valley is based on “productive” shallow-thinking high-speed code producers, either in house or off somewhere else. What does this mean? The wave following the next phase of programming language development will hit the place like a tsunami hitting Fukushima. This has happened over and over again in other industries… Kodak being one of the latest victims… and it will come to them as well.
Oh, Tim Cook did call Time Warner Cable to discuss a buyout. He’s still on hold waiting for a representative…
Frank — ROFL!
“What Apple needs is an option for the online rights to every writer’s work.”
Easy: just buy up DropBox etc. etc. All such things take a non-exclusive license to any content posted on them, and apparently there are people stupid enough to fall for that, as the uptake of such services has at least slightly exceeded zero. The non-exclusive license not only permits the owner of the storage to exploit the content in any manner they wish, but also destroys the value of any subsequent exclusive license or assignment of IP rights, such as underlies any conventional manner of exploitation.
You are making a cardinal sin, by carte blank stating the only people with good ideas are ‘writers’.
Sure the lucky few might come up with some ‘good’ ideas, but for the most part, the people who come up with great idea’s and a means to commercialise them end-to-end, are inventors.
Inventors too, realise that any idea, has zero value until payday, ie. the idea is commercialised.
It’s seems, writers never got the memo, on that small fact.
I am an inventor first and foremost and a writer second.
I kinda bought the cool aid for years Apple wise in the following way:
They say with a wink in their eyes they are working on something amazing they cant talk about “wink” — then a year or two and it finally occurred to me……. oh wait, thats all it was ??? Finally you have the realization its just some new piece of hardware or software, nothing more …… it might be really well built and look sexy, but its not nirvana and not a cure for cancer, its just a new phone/computer/operating system, et al.
Or a mouse with only one button. What a joke.
Two things,
.
1. buy up Dropbox to supplement iCloud file synching, which is crap in iCloud, although the app synching, contacts, etc, works ok.
.
2. Mouse support for iOS. I’ve jailbroken mine iPad Pro 12.9 and with a mouse it’s almost a true laptop replacement, now if Apple could only sort out file synching.. Oh. See first point…
.
If you’re proposal encompasses only Hollywood writers (i.e. TV and motion picture) there might not be as much value there as you think. As you say, the best ideas are stolen, and where do most of the TV and movie *ideas* come from? Books, plays, and other literary sources outside of Hollywood. Think Harry Potter, Hunger Games, all comic book movies, Tom Clancy, Steven King, Michael Critchon, Twilight, etc. So the Apple buy would have to be much larger to capture all of that. In fact there might be more leverage in buying some top book publishing houses.
Needs to be at arm’s-length due to antitrust issues. Google, on the other hand, could get even more juice out of such a shopping spree, what with all the arguments over ebook previews differing from libraries because the former can be counted and, since there is something to count, someone must receive rents…
Wow… I got to the part where you claim that you wore out three other laptops while owning this one mac and I just couldn’t take any more! Stopped reading. You insult us, sir! If even this is true all this really says to me is that you were doing all of your work on the Windows laptops while the mac thing sat on your desk looking expensive and impressive. Who needs any more than one laptop at a time anyway? You must be very bad at using technology, frankly.
Do you really think that this kind of durability is exclusive to any vendor? I have a Thinkpad T61p here that I used in my work for 8 years then gave to my son who still uses it, it was made in ~2005, I’ve replaced the HDD with an SSD, and it’s on battery #2 but everything else is original and golden.
Your number drop of the $1M of earnings is very impressive too, Bob. No really, I am very very impressed, I’ve only made a fraction of that with my Thinkpad. Geeze maybe I should have had four laptops instead of only one, and made damn sure that the most important one was a Mac!
I have been an on-and-off fan for a long time Bob, but I have just deleted the link to your site from my bookmarks toolbar. Bet I’m not alone…
Re; “…but I have just deleted the link to your site from my bookmarks toolbar. Bet I’m not alone…” That could be a mistake; it’s not just about reading Cringely, but the comments from his readers, like you. You do make a good point. I bought a 2009 demo model of an OQO umpc with an Atom processor off of eBay back then, since the company went out of business before production. Over the past 8 years I’ve used it on Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 10. I’ve upgraded the hard drive from 60 GB spinning, to 64 SSD, now up to 128 GB SSD. The tricky part was replacing a bad fan, but now I know how.
I agree. I’m also using a Lenovo T500 from 2005 almost daily, mostly in the field (think car & coffee shop). I upgraded the RAM, switched to a SSD and changed a battery. Runs Windows 10 Pro without hiccups. Dropped it a few times, too. Still runs. I’m sorry Bob had such bad luck with his machines. Mine just works…oops, that’s some other company’s tagline, isn’t it? 😄
Where did you get the emoji? It even works in Notepad.
Yeah, it’s clear that Apple is adrift. The most interesting parts of the new the operating systems are the version number. I thought iTunes and Safari were Apple’s “shot across the bow” that they were going to make Apple (apple music, apple tv, apple pay, etc.) ubiquitous.
It’s clear that Apple’s Tim Cook and IBM’s Gini Rometty are in some toxic dysfunctional codependent love affair where they smoke meth all day tell each other it’s Romeo and Juliet. Cloud this mobile that held together by this magical glue cognitive computing with no one having any earthly clue what any of this is. No one wants to be in the hardware business any more just apps on demand doing some weird half assed shit. Nothing ever has to be backed up or managed. Security is a legal problem.
You know what, you are absolutely right!!!!
Writing is 100% backbone and it’s what the actors crave!!!!
But you know, I think the public is SICK of Gerber TV shows and Movies.
Game changers. Thats hard.
You need a CEO with Diamond Balls.
Great column, Bob! Something huge is missing from Apple. Thinness makes a difference in desktops? Really, Apple? Someone with common sense and the gonads to scream the emperor has no clothes is needed.
What happened to Apple? Very simply, it’s following in the footsteps of the company Jobs admired and wanted to emulate — Sony.
Both used to pioneer new products, which often because known for excellence, if not the standard against which others were judged. Competitors couldn’t match them, and lots of money was made.
Both, flush with success and market power, then began to flex their muscle, veer disturbingly down the path of proprietary standards, dictate to their customers what they should want, as the executives retreated to the Ivory Tower in the belief that they could do no wrong, and that their feces didn’t stink. (Ive in particular)
Meanwhile, the competition had gotten much stronger, and had shrunk, if not eliminated the competitive advantage, with superior alternatives and lower cost.
What has yet to fully play out is for the products Apple has ridden to success, like the iPhone, to lose their mass appeal in an oversaturated market, and become commodities, but the signs are that has begun.
The cherry on top has been Apple’s inexplicable neglect of their computers, and brush off of its core customers who helped the company survive during the lean times (through sales and evangelism), and helped lead its renaissance. Three frickin’ years to develop a mini display with hot keys? That’s its excuse for the stagnancy? You gotta be kidding me!
A certain amount of cynicism has always surrounded the company, even among its biggest fans, but lately, it has reached heights not seen since the Spindler/Amelio era.
The people who work at Apple now don’t seem to have any clue as to what made their products, and company, great, and the products reflect that. Those who have been around are suffering some kind of fog in between their appearances at fashion shows, galas and designing Christmas trees.
Apple will be able to ride out their decline for some time thanks to their cash horde, but the descent has surely begun. IBM and HP will eventually see Apple join the club of formerly innovative companies now mired in irrelevance.
-An Apple user since 1979
“Leave it to me, then, to tell Apple how to get its mojo back.”
Do you seriously believe Apple will trust anything you have to say about mojo? I believe your Kickstarter is in far worse shape.
You used to be a name I could trust. Now I can only trust you will post here before giving updates to your backers.
Give it a rest, mojo. No one here cares about that Kickstarter except you. Find another outlet for your whining, and stop inflicting it on us.
Mojo makes a good point when he says: “Now I can only trust you will post here before giving updates to your backers.” Bob used this forum to make the project sound like a sure thing, not like a normal Kickstarter. The backers wouldn’t be posting here if Bob put any and all update on the Kickstarter page first.
>with which I have so far generated well over $1 million in revenue.
Mr. Cringley, you are making some dough
1 million in 6 years is 167k/year. We all make more than that.
I get the feeling Apple is probably a bit understaffed in certain areas. I imagine so many resources work on iOS, iPhone, etc., that the Mac has probably been neglected.
If putting an engineer on an iOS project will account for (making up numbers) an extra $10 million in revenue, how can you justify instead putting her on a MacBook project that will only add $9.9 million?
Now, I think this is shortsighted, as losing hearts and minds on the Mac side of the house can definitely bleed into other areas. Nevertheless, given a shortage of people (if there is one. Again, I’m speculating), this is what we end up with, perhaps.
Bob, while I think your analysis is interesting and mostly correct – I think something else is going on here with respect to macs. Apple next year is going to transition to Ax-series processors. This will be on a 2-year cycle – transitioning on the low end first, then on the high-end.
Apple is not lacking innovation, they are just trying to stretch out the product cycle a little longer, and align various SW-HW initiatives. The Ax-series processor will require the mac operating system to be re-written, but using a modern Swift 3.0/3.1 iOS foundation. To pull this off they will add a file system to iOS that works for mac as well. Now the value of iPads increases. But, these things take time …
I’m not sure I agree with the writer-thing – but a while back you recommended that Apple by Dolby – that is pure genius (and makes great sense). Apple could control the 4K/HDR standard, and drive the TV/computer industry. Have you noticed how Apple (for watch and laptops) has emphasized the brightness (in Nits) of their screens as of late? These technologies take time to develop and productize – this is another cause of their Mac delays.
Best Regards!
I started my old iMac (2007) last weekend and was amazed that it was still so usable. I watched movies on Netflix and used an older version of Photoshop with great results. The interface is still fresh due to the free updates of the OS and it still feels relatively spry.
Apple’s products are marvelous and I’m totally at a loss as to how Apple is supposed to come up with another iphone-like product when there’s no device space that’s present or emerging with that level of usefulness and growth potential.
I do remember having a Blackberry phone that was so user unfriendly that when I saw the iPhone I immediately ordered one for every family member.
So what’s out there now with that potential and why do some people think Apple can just create a new wonder device. I mean it’s not like Apple invented the cell phone, they just made it GREAT.
Bob, bob, bob… Why am I wasting my time writing about an old school former tech writer. WTF is up with his website banner & why are you holding an old school desktop keyboard like a preacher holding a Bible. Bob should be the one wearing the Carnac the Magnificent Turban (Google Carnac The Magnificent, Thanks Johnny Carson). MacBook is a new category idiot. “Yes, Apple has a problem — a problem most other companies would love to have: customers like the products too much so the market is becoming saturated,” HUH? “All Apple needs is a new product category, right? NO.
Also, Apple introduces new products at higher price points all the time and then lower them later. Where have you been for the last 30 years. Actually the prior gen MBPs with Retina had a higher percentage increase in price when they first came out. Now what price were they two weeks ago? Do you have Alzheimers or Dementia? “Remember the original 128K Macintosh cost more than $2400 and it was close to useless.” Yes bob, the difference is that you are useless.
“And those who are willing to pay more are often more understanding, too.” WTF! bob are you out of your Ring mind. People that pay more pay for quality. Where the F did you come up with that? bob then complains about how his old MB has made him a $1 Mil, and how his PC POS laptops are done. bob people with $1 mil don’t worry about a $1499-$2500 laptop that works for 5-10 years. They Appreciate the quality and upgrade whenever they Effing want to. Too much durability is not a problem bob, as I hand them down to PC users to convert them to future Mac users who now see the value. As I always tell my father-in-law bob, does your iPad or iPhone get virus’s? No I didn’t think so.
Microsoft had to live with Balmer. I’ll take Steve dead or alive thank you. One year of Steve (even one day) is better than Balmer or Gates
“And so Apple is both paralyzed and isolated…” As the most valuable company, Yes Isolated, but not paralyzed like you bob (Yes no more capitalizing his first name). bob, “thinking different” was a campaign from ’97-02. You are out of touch with reality and modern Apple as you can plainly see in your web page banner. Dementia is a sometimes difficult to diagnose. I had family members that had it. But bob, go get checked out for early onset before you forget to use the bathroom and Apple causes you to crap your pants.
bob, original ideas come from real people in the real world, and you are neither. Writers come up with ideas from others or real world experience.
No Apple fanatic here. I have PC’s, A surface, a Chromebook and a late 2011 MBP with a 1TB SSD. I heard in Macweek Steve was coming back to Apple. I didn’t think Gill would buy BeBox, so I took $5k and invested in Apple at around $8 per share. I’ll bet on Apple bob, and keep betting on them over you.
Re: “No Apple fanatic here. I have PC’s, A surface, a Chromebook and a late 2011 MBP with a 1TB SSD.” Why? If Apple were so great, you wouldn’t need the other stuff.
Mature.
Isn’t Apple car a good additional product line, or was that your other big idea(I suspect that is some sort of VC)?
Good luck upgrading the new Macbook Pro’s.
Unless you are REALLY good with a soldering iron.
Yes.. you are right.
[…] Robert Cringely (via Hacker News): […]
Apple Watch was supposed to (I think) be Apple’s revolutionary new product category, complete with a launch in the same venue as the original Macintosh. The fact that nobody has even mentioned it in the comments supports the product thus far lacks mojo.
At least Apple has broken even with their smart watch revenue. I don’t think any Android watch has broken even. It was a good try, nothing to be embarrassed about. In my opinion anyone buying a watch is lacking a good hobby.
tim cook is the steve ballmer of apple.
Bob, you know, because I’ve been writing it here for years what Apple’ path is. It’s a path that has its markers along the way, but apple has chosen to not see the markers or the path for unknown reasons.
When I wrote here that Apple’s iPhone was going to put RIM out of business, my software partner thought I was crazy but in a few short years, most people I know use Apple’s mobile devices. In such a short time frame it is proven that Apple can be disruptive.
Most people using iPhones don’t think of themselves as Mac users (read Apple users) but that’s what a massive portion of the world is using.
For some odd reason, Apple has not gone after the business market with hardware and software and that alone is one reason why new markets haven’t opened up for them. Business is stil using Windows and there are two reasons for that. Both reasons are Apple’s failing and both have stagnated their business advancement.
The first reason is that business has stayed with MS Office and the second reason is that Apple refuses to release mainstream financial accounting software. Microsoft owns around seven accounting software platforms. I don’t know many businesses that would stay with Windows if there were entry-level, mid-level and high-end accounting software available for the Mac. Without that, no business would gravitate away from using MS Office. With the financial systems, it would be just a matter of time before business moved away from MS Office the way the world dropped the standard of the Blackberry.
If business had Macs on their desks, at home we’d all have Macs too. I have said it so many times on your forum Bob, that Apple needs a TV controlled by an Apple Home Server. That Home Server will control the entire house and all home kit devices in our homes.
My sons are huge XBox gamers and for the life of me, I can’t understand why Apple hasn’t moved past simple mobile app games on an iPhone to provide XBox-like games on the Apple Home Server, serving that content to an Apple screen. Go figure!
Apple has squandered the opportunity to control most aspects of our lives with their hardware and their software platforms. There are lots of nay-Sayers to what I’ve written here over the years but they’ll all be proven wrong just as those that said Apple couldn’t knock RIM from the top of their business position in corporate America.
I’ve written before about this and the path forward for Apple isn’t going away any time soon. It’s still staring them in the face. Apple doesn’t need Steve Jobs to show Apple the way. What Apple needs to do, is have Tim Cook light a fire under Apple’s proverbial backside and just FOLLOW THE BLOODY PATH forward to where the world is going – with or without Apple!
Bob, Do you remember tha Apple Cube?
Apple has finally become a “public company” like IBM. What I mean by that is that the bean counters now control the company, and nothing innovative ever comes from bean counters. What made Apple was that Steve Jobs had the revolutionary (sometimes wacky) ideas and the money flowed out his “innovation pipeline”. He’s dead and that’s gone, so the bean counters have now taken over and there’s no Steve Jobs left to lead this company. I think Steve’s legacy will keep them whole between 3 and 5 more years, but after that, they need a new “innovation leader”. Or they become IBM.
There are plenty of other innovators in the marketplace. Plenty of ideas to steal, but they need a Steve Jobs looking at them to recognize that they 1) are new and innovative and 2) worth pursuing. Here’s my idea and it’s for Apple TV and iTunes. Cut out the middleman. Go after the cable and media companies.
Yes, they needed to buy Time Warner, but noone at Apple has enough “vision” to do that. But, I think the FTC will probably block the AT&T / TW merger, so they may get another chance.
Here’s my idea.
Make Apple TV and “open marketplace” an “ecosystem”. Offer every public channel of TV that is available for sale at a certain rate per month or show. Every NFL game, every NCAA game, every soccer game, every NBA game. News stations HNN, CNN, CNBC, TNT, everything. The provider of the content decides how much to charge and how often ( I would offer two models, one monthly, and one per show. ) Apple keeps 10%-20% of whatever they charge as commission and to collect the payment. Connect ApplePay to the AppleTV so folks just wave the phone over the AppleTV once (and it stores the payment) and wala, access to everything that’s on cable A LA CARTE!!! My cable bill would probably drop from from the U-450 I’m paying now at $100+ a month to about $35 a month, and still have the key things I need. And I could subscribe to HBO while Game of Thrones is on, then drop it once it’s off the air. And the NFL might even get a billion people paying $5 each for the Super Bowl. All on Apple TV. What would that be worth to them? I think the market would balance itself out, and most TV programs and stations would average out around $3-7 a month (including HBO), but if someone really thought their programming was that “special” they can charge more. It would be more of finding the right price point for the number of subscribers they want to have. And there are some really good “bean counters” that would really like to do those numbers for you.
I am with Bob all the way on this. My laptop is a mid 2009 Macbook Pro, put in the maximum 8GB of memory and its running perfectly. Never had a problem with it. Sure it’s not as fast as it used to be, but for my usage its still great! It’s been dropped and used a lot, but the build quality is fantastic. My wife has had 3 laptops and a netbook in that time, so she moved to a Macbook Pro and not looked back.
Are you guys just that rough with your computers or how do you go through them so fast? I have a 2007 Toshiba laptop that has had heavy use and it still runs fine, minus the DVD drive which is probably just dirty. I even ran BOINC on it 24/7 for over 2 years. The total cost of ownership has been $600. My main laptop that I still use for most everything is from early 2010. I had to replace the fan once ($8 from ebay) and I put in 8 GBs of RAM and an SSD. The total cost of ownership has been ~$1000. I don’t expect to replace it with a new laptop until 2020. Neither of these computers were high-end. I will say OS X is nice. Though I am more than happy with Debian.
I don’t really see the need to purchase a new Macbook Pro, especially the new ones with soldered memory and no upgrade path, what a bunch of crap IMHO. I am going with Lenovos now as they last just as long as the MacBook Pros and are easily upgradable. Yes, they do weigh more but at least they work well and last!
My mid-2009 13″ Macbook Pro is finally off the OSX software list so time to look for something else. Last year I purchased a Lenovo W520 workstation for $500, with 16 GB of RAM and an SSD, and it ran Windows 7 and 10 without a problem. However, due to Micro$oft’s problem with wanting to spy on my PC, I have decided to load Linux Mint 18 and VirtualBox for the occasional Windows program (yes I know about Wine but have two apps which don’t do Wine well). Linux Mint 18 works great but did have to do a bit if fiddling with the BIOS/EFI to get it to run properly.
Also have a Lenovo T60 that runs Windows 7 and the wife and I use it to surf the web and email, still working great, I think I paid $200 for it in 2010 refurbished, added the max RAM and an SSD so total investment less than $350.
Linux Mint is a great desktop OS. I can’t stand Windows anymore. I have a Desktop that I use for the software I can’t run under Linux and hopefully in a couple more years I can do away with Windows entirely. I haven’t fiddled with WINE in years but I don’t have a lot of faith in it working for my needs.
Why would people get such a small screen? I’d rather spend more and get the bigger screen, to reduce strain on eyes.
Only $1 million on a Macbook Pro? Last week I made $72 trillion just by helping a few nice guys in Nigeria transfer funds, all on a 2009-era PC that I bought off eBay for $1 (+$29.99 shipping). 🙂
The current state of Apple can be summed up thusly — if the iconic 1984 commercial were made today, Apple wouldn’t be the heroine hammer thrower, it would be the Big Brother figure on the screen…
“[…] It is now 1984. It appears IBM wants it all. Apple is perceived to be the only hope to offer IBM a run for its money. Dealers initially welcoming IBM with open arms now fear an IBM dominated and controlled future. They are increasingly turning back to Apple as the only force that can ensure their future freedom. IBM wants it all and is aiming its guns on its last obstacle to industry control: Apple. Will Big Blue dominate the entire computer industry? The entire information age? Was George Orwell right about 1984?” -Steve Jobs
Think Different no longer applies. Apple has become the company that tells you want you want, and what’s good for you. You will use your devices a certain way, you will recharge them every night, and your apps and entertainment shall come from our store, and your data shall be stored on our servers. 16GB ought to be enough for any “Pro.”
“Apple Engineer Talks About New 2016 Macbook Pro”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-XSC_UG5_kU 🙂
Now i need to carry two backpacks…one for the macbook pro and another for the dongles… oh cmon!!
That’s ok, at least you can put the iPhone headset dongle in there as well.
They could still buy Disney. Pair them with pixar and Lucas film. It would be like Sony buying Columbia. Some day their hardare might jot sell.
(((writers)))
Now that`s seriously dumb, even for a leftoid. Hollywood should be bulldozed wholesale with its inhabitants, preferably by Mel Gibson.
and replaced with what? YouTube?
Your point is absolutely right. Very interesting post. Thanks for sharing.
The problem with developing products with such great attention to detail, is when the the details are taken away, there’s more reason to complain. And it’s apparent that Apple is taking many things away from us these days, from features to products to ports.
Apple just announced that the AirPort Wireless Router is being discontinued. The AirPort was one of the easiest to set up and use, avoiding the complexity of the other brands. Just thinking of setting up a router was as bad as thinking of going to the dentist.
I bought two AirPort routers over the past year, replacing Asus routers that stopped working. I know I paid a premium over other makes, and they may not have been as advanced, but it took just a couple of minutes to set up and they both have worked flawlessly ever since. It also added to the enjoyable experience of using Apple products; I thought it was really smart of Apple to provide all of the essential elements to get your computer quickly running and connected, particularly a component that no one does very well.
What else has Apple taken from us this year? There’s the headphone jack, but enough has been said of that. Then there’s the MagSafe, a clever implementation of the pull-away magnetic connector found on rice cookers, that prevents your notebook from careening onto the floor when you trip on the power cord.
Another example? There’s the little LED light on the charging cord next to the mag connector that turns from amber to green when the charging is complete. There is now no light on the new USB-C cable that’s now required for charging the new MacBook Pros. In fact, there’s no way to know the charging state of a new MacBook without opening it up and turning it on.
The loss of the SD card slot is another disappointment to me. It’s not because only professional photographers need that slot, as Apple explained about its absence. It’s also the best way to move files between computers when you don’t have wireless or need to do it quickly.
One of the cleverest little features Apple gave us was the folding hooks on the chargers that allow you to wrap the cord for storage. Even that’s disappeared on the latest MacBooks.
It does seem like Apple may be pruning their product line, as well. There are rumors that the best notebook of all time, the MacBook Air is perhaps being phased out. In fact, when I was in an Apple store, discussing this product, I could tell it was the salesman’s favorite, and that he was not pleased with selling the new Pros, pointing to the wall of dongles needed.
Non-essential but complementary products such as AirPort Time Capsule and large displays likely weren’t big moneymakers. But they helped their customers set up and get on line. Everything worked together and if they didn’t, you had a single number to call for help.
With the elimination of all these features and product details that do require more engineering, it makes me wonder how Apple is going to fill up their new headquarters that more than triples their current office space. The router department is gone. The monitor department is gone. Perhaps there will be a new department to replace them called “Feature and Product Elimination Department”. Right alongside the Dongle Department.
As a Windows/Android user, I’d say “Welcome to our planet.” Can I interest you in a “smart TV” ?
Good idea for Apple to make money; and great idea as well to enrage even more people against them. Though I agree that likely wouldn’t matter. Still, ti would surely increase my desire for Apple’s rapid and complete dissolution (along with Amazon’s and so many of these other people abusing the captive market owned by the few). Would love to see Cupertino, along with so many others, smashed into the dust and the semblance of a free market revived.
I wish Trump were serious about combating over-scale managed capitalism, as with his threats against the Time Warner merger, but I’m unfortunately rather sure that’s all pose.
Apple doesn’t have a monopoly, the majority of people use a PC running Windows and a phone running Android.
Great article.