Yeah, Apple taking so long to update their Macs (for instance) isn't a manufacturing issue, it's their own development issues (all of which were brought on themselves).
Look I'm not an expert, but maybe if they stopped adding useless features and they end "The War on Ports" they'd be doing better. Right now their sales are driven by hype (and I guess an iMessage monopoly), not quality or value.
Please don't post uncivil or unsubstantive comments, regardless of how wrong someone else is. The 'economics' of that are backwards in that it damages the container more than any value it contributes.
customer satisfaction is what drives their sales, more than advertising/hype: not everyone is satisfied though the fraction which is satisfied tends to compound, evidently. The fraction which is not satisfied tends to complain and take their business elsewhere, which is good for all.
I switched to a PC for quality/value reasons recently after waiting too long for update to Mac Pro.
Everyday I hate that I don't have iMessage on this machine. And my phone is constantly propped up against my screen so I can stay connected to my text messages.
I had no idea how much this would effect me and if I can find a third party solution that connects me to iMessage I will probably be switching back soon.
One of the features of iMessages is that they're encrypted and can't be unencrypted by anyone but the Apple-authenticated recipient. This has the downside that the only way to access those messages on non-Apple devices is to create some kind of man-in-the-middle attack.
I still think it's crazy that if you bought a MacPro or MacMini when it launched and bought Apple Care it would have long run out, and the same computer is on their store.
Apple is still selling "new" Mac Pros with Xeon E5-1650 v2 CPUs for $3K. I just picked up a like-new refurbished HP workstation with the exact same CPU for $350 on NewEgg.
How many people do you talk to that were going to buy a Pro or a Mini? iMacs and laptops, which most people buy, have been regularly updated. I don't agree that it has hurt them because the obsolete lines are barely visible* to people who don't understand how to evaluate a computer purchase, and presumably anyone who understands how to shop isn't avoiding all of Apple over this.
I've always recommended getting a "Pro" or Mini and recommend avoiding the iMac completely. Throwing out a huge, decent monitor simply because you need more processor power and/or storage is (sorry) asinine.
Sounds like an opposite situation. GP's comment was about people avoiding buying the lines that haven't been updated, and you are only recommending the un-updated lines, so you aren't trying to steer people away from those old machines.
Has that been the result? I've heard fans complain about the quality of software decreasing. So they're shipping buggy products slowly?
I'm tired of companies in general putting out junk. The complete lack of embarrassment or care about putting out (and charging for) broken stuff frustrates me to no end. What I especially hate is instead of companies recognizing that and fixing it because they actually want to be better, they make excuses.
The market, afaict, no longer properly associates a game with its publisher/developers in the general case. In which case, companies don't have to try very hard to get out of problem release: few even know who they are.
I think such quality collapse is evident across many industries today. It might be related to wage stagnation. Can't afford to buy quality, and no incentive to produce it.
You don't need any 10x PhDs. You need some competent, well paid QA devs to go over the product and make sure the obvious stuff is working before you ship.
I've heard of a bunch of companies cutting QA staff in the past year or so. Upper management sees them as an obstacle to shipping and middle management sees them as the "source of all the bugs" and an entire office not "producing" anything so they're clearly not useful.
It doesn't help that there are a to of automated test zealots telling management that if you put your effort into automated tests you won't need manual testing. If you listen carefully the experts are really saying that is the ideal, not that it will ever be the reality.
I think the issue is that in software you can only get promoted by writing whizbang new features. Until the time companies figure out an incentive system that properly rewards responsible stewardship of an existing product we will be stuck in the current quagmire.
That won't happen until consumers figure out they care and put their money where their mouth is. When people buy the latest and then complain companies learn that the complaints are meaningless. When people start buying "brand-quality" devices only after they have been in the market for a while companies will learn that building a quality product pays because it has a longer life.
Airplanes and medical software is much more reliable (though both have major problems)
Apple has no need to increase their quality: their customers are loyal at the current levels. Their customers will say it is because the competition is worse overall (the truth of this statement is different debate).
Look at Microsoft for an example of how you can ignore quality for a long while before it catches up to you. (To their credit Microsoft did a stellar job of climbing out of that hole).
Meanwhile with Linux, you can have many people writing and testing bugfixes. Open source OSes don't have this problem where you have to wait for one company.
This. If anything, Apple has been guilty of shipping buggy _software_ earlier than it should, _not_ the hardware. And while Tim might be an expert at operations for shipping hardware, software dev is a different ballgame.
The iphone 6+ was not rigid enough to withstand bending during normal use.
The iphone 6s battery could not last more than 18 months of daily use. After that it would not provide a stable voltage, causing the phone to randomly shutdown. The "fix" was sneaking in a permanent throttle at 20, 40, 60% of normal performance to hide the problem.
The new keyboards in the recent Macbook Pro redesign are hyper-fragile to the point that Apple's own service technicians have trouble fixing keys and end up having to replace the entire thing.
The Mac line has a history of graphics card failures due to excessive heat from poor thermal design.
"The new keyboards in the recent Macbook Pro redesign are hyper-fragile"
The new keyboards are not fragile in my experience. I'd say that they're probably more robust than the old keyboards in terms of standing up to normal use.
The issue is that they are very difficult to service. You can't easily remove the keys to clean out debris etc like you could with the old version, which could be a problem if they accumulate dust and grime underneath the keycaps.
the issue is the amount of dirt it takes to cause issues is extremely small. i've seen machines that were only used on a desk in a clean work space, and never even removed from that desk develop issues within a few months. meanwhile, i've seen previous gen models that were incredibly grimy and used outdoors with no issues. it's a problem that's ONLY effecting apple keyboards right now and that's pathetic
I know what you mean. I occasionally get crumbs and who-knows-what jamming up my keys, but so far it's always been quick to resolve by either mashing on the key for a bit or blowing some air into it.
I do worry about what they'll be like after a few years of use, however. What if stuff keeps accumulating under there, with no easy way to clean it out?
It's not like Apple was perfect before and these QA issues are somehow something new.
- The keyboards on the old MacBook Pro models (back when were silver) were also terrible. The keys kept falling off mine.
- MacBook graphics glitches also go way back (they even had a recall back in... 2010?). Several macOS releases had an issue where the screen was garbled when you got back from sleep.
- They've had tons of little USB issues, especially related to audio.
- My 2015 model has an issue where sometimes coming back from sleep, the internal keyboard no longer works. Everything is fine except no keyboard input.
There were GPU issues with 2011 MBP machines. There was a class action lawsuit. I had to bake mine (well, the logic board) in the oven for 7 minutes. Plus i forgot to remove the speaker which melted so that cost another $15 to replace and was an overall unpleasant experience.
If you look to video games for lessons in this, then sadly most people want their shinything on time, even if it’s broken. A lot of people don’t, but we’re utterly drowned out by the wallets of people who buy day 1, every day. As with security and lots of other issues around tech, people need to be educated. We need better laws too, but that also requires an educated populace.
People seem to treat software and now hardware in ways they’d never dream of treating a meal, a car, or any purely tangible object.
Meals are bought often enough that you learn what you like over time. Cars are so expensive nobody can afford not to think about quality. Software (and many other things in life) is in that area where you don't buy often enough that you learn, and not so expensive that you need to do research.
You missed the entire point of the article – the products are going to ship when the products are going to ship (when they are ready). Yet he's committing repeatedly unforced errors by promising dates he can't cash. Ask it this way: What's the benefit to promising a date early, especially one you can't hit and sully the launch of?
Ruins the entire point of being secret as shit too.
I'm not going to subscribe so I can read one article every month or two. If WSJ wants to ignore the long tail of potential readers that's their right, but we shouldn't be condoning it by posting links here on HN.
The mods have been clear on the HN policy regarding paywalls:
From a recent comment by 'dang:
> "The paywalls suck, of course, but banning NYT, WSJ, Economist, New Yorker, and all other such publications would suck worse. I realize not everyone agrees with this, but it seems the right call to me, which doesn't mean I like it any more than you do."
WSJ has changed their paywall policy over time, so I don't expect any policy written in the past to be optimal for the current reality - which is no access without a subscription, period. I know NYT allows a limited number of articles per month, and I'm fine with that. Don't know about the other two but I don't remember having any trouble accessing them.
If you already have a subscription to WSJ I expect that you'd be a heavy enough user that you don't need a HN link to inform you of content to check out.
> "so I don't expect any policy written in the past"
The comment I quoted is from 20 days ago, and the mods tweak policies with some regularity. 'dang commented specifically on the WSJ just over two weeks ago here:
> "WSJ is an edge case, but paywalls with workarounds are ok "
They're well aware of the situation. Yeah, paywalls are frustrating, and the mods are handling it as they deem best for HN. That's not to say it won't change in the future, of course.
I had the impression Apple was under pressure to announce products at their conferences because of their yearly cycle, and since they had not enough material to fill the two hours they announced what they plan to do. They also had to do some damage control and calm the professionals because they completely neglected this segment and had nothing to show.
Yeah it seems less a case of missing shipment dates and more a case of announcing earlier in the cycle. Jobs tended not to announce stuff until it was ready to ship. I think Jobs had fewer leaks to deal with, which I think forces Cook to announce things earlier.
I know Apple doesn't have divisions, but would it seriously harm the brand to have a B team keeping the Mac Mini (and other established products) updated?
The problem is that Apple doesn't want to have a "B team" on anything, they'd rather have an A team or no team. This is just a personal observation, and I don't really agree with it as it means I sometimes have to go outside the Apple ecosystem for specialty things I need.
I wonder if Apple campus (the newly developed area) tied up all the design resources. I really can imagine the Apple designers going nuts on stairs and handrails and curvature of windows, designing everything meticulously, and having only little time for the actual products.
The B-team concept is tricky to pull off. If certain products get a reputation of being a tar pit where careers go to die, as is commonly reputed to happen at Google, then good people won't want to work on them and good executives won't want to manage them.
I don't know what the right approach is. If your company has a mixture of products that are widely preceived as being divided into "sexy" and "boring" categories, there may simply be no good answer.
Maybe the difference is that Apple has, recently, been announcing products well in advance of their official release date. We knew about the HomePod and the iMac Pro months before they failed to be released on the date promised. Maybe nothing has changed about their ability to deliver products, we just know more about their failures.
Apple is really good about not pre-announcing new versions of existing products, but when it’s an entirely new product unlikely to cannibslize existing products, they are happy to pre-announce way sooner.
Seems to me Tim Cook's legacy will be similar to Steve Ballmer at Microsoft. Great for shareholders, terrible for the company's long term competitiveness.
I am deeply impressed by the tech that Google puts out but it seems that Pichai has not really improved Google's biggest issues : a complete lack of focus and over-reliance on ads.
IMO there's a nasty undertone of money-grubbing accumulation for its own sake that wasn't there during the Jobs days.
The iMac Pros are nice-ish machines, but I can't see Jobs trying to sell a >$10k BTO Mac as anything other than a very special edition with a whole marketing circus supporting it - not as a ludicrously expensive mainstream SKU with a "This is the price, you're going to buy it because it's a Mac, take it or leave it" attitude underlying the sales pitch.
Apple seem to be becoming increasingly tone deaf. The money may keep rolling in, but sooner or later there's going to be an event - a competitor, a new technology, a software disaster - that makes the wheels fall off.
I don't know about an event. I think people will just stop buying Apple because of all the frustration with their products. I think it'll be subtle and one day we'll just all realize that, "hey, Apple used to be worth $900 Billion, now it's worth half that."
> I can't see Jobs trying to sell a >$10k BTO Mac as anything other than a very special edition with a whole marketing circus supporting it
Remember Next or the Lisa or the original Mac? Jobs was pretty good at trying to sell very expensive computers. The original Mac was priced equivalent to $5,877 in today's dollars. The Lisa was priced equivalent to $24,600 of today's dollars.. and we all know how expensive Next was.
That was a huge problem of his that he fixed the second go-around (mostly - the Cube was beautifully expensive and would fracture). But from like 2000 to 2013 or so Apple would put out stuff that was a little more expensive than the competition but usually had enough features and quality to make it easily worth it.
Now they're selling $1,000 phones, gold watches, and machines that are way overpriced for what they offer. It's a noticeable shift.
A thousand dollar phone is only a few hundred more than the old phones, and is incredibly affordable. I’m still struck dumb by people bent out of shape about its price, when they are paying far more for their phone service.
I’m going to sell mine for $400 in two years, having cost me $25 a month in total For something i use a hundred times a day and take all my family photos with. I could have saved $10 a month by getting an iphone 8, big deal.
You may disagree with the components they chose for the iMac Pro, but they certainly aren’t profiteering off it. You can’t build an ugly box with the same parts for more than 10% less.
When was Ballmer ever good for shareholders? Windows/Office was already a super profitable juggernaut, he misinvested every dime of their profits. Expedia/Zune/Windows Phone/Nokia/Original Surface, etc, etc, etc. Even the XBox was a money loser for its first decade.
Tim Cook hasn’t incinerated shareholder funds. Most of the profits have been returned to shareholders as dividends, or saved overseas for them. His bad acquisitions have been relatively tiny, like Beats.
And as far as competitiveness goes, the Mac market share is at all time highs, iphone sales are st all time highs, and iPad still dominates the tablet market. Plus their app store and apple music dominate as well. Oh and Apple watch is the biggest selling watch by revenues in history, both now and it’s launch year.
Apple hasnt been wildly creative under Cook, but is still designing innovative new devices, Apple Watch, Airpods, the 5K iMac, HomePods, iMac Pro. Let’s just agree to ignore the touchbar macbooks;)
He’s not Steve Jobs, but has done better than i ever thought possible.
For pretty much everything that wasn’t consumer facing. Office 365, Exchange, Azure, CRM and SQL Server all saw huge growth under Ballmer. He really killed it in Enterprise, but as you mentioned, consumer facing products had several missteps (and where a lot more public).
It's probably difficult to have the resources of Apple at your disposal and really internalize that you can't do some stuff.
We used to think the same naive thing about Microsoft. "Why can't they just fix <X>. They've got all the money in the world." Sure, but at a certain point, it stops being about resources. Two women can't make a baby in 4.5 months.
We often use construction metaphors in software, but a structure is at least expected to be done at some point, not growing in size and complexity forever, unbounded. I'd bet there's a point where even in the physical world a construction crew would be paralyzed by the amount of variables involved in moving forward.
Shipping brand new tech isn't like shipping a new T-shirt, where, for example, the only change might be the print design. From the T2 processor in the new Mac Pros to the iPhone X Ai/VR chips, from new filesystems to brand new cloud services, Apple's 'critical path' is in R&D. How can an operations guy accelerate that?
97 comments
[ 1.4 ms ] story [ 151 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I switched to a PC for quality/value reasons recently after waiting too long for update to Mac Pro.
Everyday I hate that I don't have iMessage on this machine. And my phone is constantly propped up against my screen so I can stay connected to my text messages.
I had no idea how much this would effect me and if I can find a third party solution that connects me to iMessage I will probably be switching back soon.
I just want a secure messaging solution that I can use with anybody, regardless of what device/service they use.
Now I have to people them what Apple models to avoid like the plague.
* See a Best Buy in-store display or https://www.apple.com/mac/ for evidence of this.
I'm tired of companies in general putting out junk. The complete lack of embarrassment or care about putting out (and charging for) broken stuff frustrates me to no end. What I especially hate is instead of companies recognizing that and fixing it because they actually want to be better, they make excuses.
Is product quality not a priority anymore?
I've heard of a bunch of companies cutting QA staff in the past year or so. Upper management sees them as an obstacle to shipping and middle management sees them as the "source of all the bugs" and an entire office not "producing" anything so they're clearly not useful.
Airplanes and medical software is much more reliable (though both have major problems)
Apple has no need to increase their quality: their customers are loyal at the current levels. Their customers will say it is because the competition is worse overall (the truth of this statement is different debate).
Could it be related to MBA thinking? Seems like today's corporate leadership shamelessly focuses on nothing but short term financial numbers.
The iphone 6s battery could not last more than 18 months of daily use. After that it would not provide a stable voltage, causing the phone to randomly shutdown. The "fix" was sneaking in a permanent throttle at 20, 40, 60% of normal performance to hide the problem.
The new keyboards in the recent Macbook Pro redesign are hyper-fragile to the point that Apple's own service technicians have trouble fixing keys and end up having to replace the entire thing.
The Mac line has a history of graphics card failures due to excessive heat from poor thermal design.
The new keyboards are not fragile in my experience. I'd say that they're probably more robust than the old keyboards in terms of standing up to normal use.
The issue is that they are very difficult to service. You can't easily remove the keys to clean out debris etc like you could with the old version, which could be a problem if they accumulate dust and grime underneath the keycaps.
I do worry about what they'll be like after a few years of use, however. What if stuff keeps accumulating under there, with no easy way to clean it out?
- The keyboards on the old MacBook Pro models (back when were silver) were also terrible. The keys kept falling off mine.
- MacBook graphics glitches also go way back (they even had a recall back in... 2010?). Several macOS releases had an issue where the screen was garbled when you got back from sleep.
- They've had tons of little USB issues, especially related to audio.
- My 2015 model has an issue where sometimes coming back from sleep, the internal keyboard no longer works. Everything is fine except no keyboard input.
(Etc.)
People seem to treat software and now hardware in ways they’d never dream of treating a meal, a car, or any purely tangible object.
Ruins the entire point of being secret as shit too.
From a recent comment by 'dang:
> "The paywalls suck, of course, but banning NYT, WSJ, Economist, New Yorker, and all other such publications would suck worse. I realize not everyone agrees with this, but it seems the right call to me, which doesn't mean I like it any more than you do."
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author:dang%20paywall&sort=byD...
If you already have a subscription to WSJ I expect that you'd be a heavy enough user that you don't need a HN link to inform you of content to check out.
The comment I quoted is from 20 days ago, and the mods tweak policies with some regularity. 'dang commented specifically on the WSJ just over two weeks ago here:
> "WSJ is an edge case, but paywalls with workarounds are ok "
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15977257
They're well aware of the situation. Yeah, paywalls are frustrating, and the mods are handling it as they deem best for HN. That's not to say it won't change in the future, of course.
Apple seemed pretty unique in this, in the industry.
Lately Apple is more like everyone else -- announce early, rushed to meet dates, not so polished and much more buggy.
I don't know what the right approach is. If your company has a mixture of products that are widely preceived as being divided into "sexy" and "boring" categories, there may simply be no good answer.
My thought is that even if the Mac Mini team was filled with jaded workers, it still would be in a better position than it is now.
Horrible article.
Maybe Sundar Pichhai but he is young in his CEO role so it's too early to decide.
In tech: Google before Alphabet, the former Yahoo, the former Sun. Twitter did their musical chairs act, as well.
The iMac Pros are nice-ish machines, but I can't see Jobs trying to sell a >$10k BTO Mac as anything other than a very special edition with a whole marketing circus supporting it - not as a ludicrously expensive mainstream SKU with a "This is the price, you're going to buy it because it's a Mac, take it or leave it" attitude underlying the sales pitch.
Apple seem to be becoming increasingly tone deaf. The money may keep rolling in, but sooner or later there's going to be an event - a competitor, a new technology, a software disaster - that makes the wheels fall off.
Remember Next or the Lisa or the original Mac? Jobs was pretty good at trying to sell very expensive computers. The original Mac was priced equivalent to $5,877 in today's dollars. The Lisa was priced equivalent to $24,600 of today's dollars.. and we all know how expensive Next was.
Now they're selling $1,000 phones, gold watches, and machines that are way overpriced for what they offer. It's a noticeable shift.
This is no longer the case - the most expensive Apple Watch has a ceramic case.
I’m going to sell mine for $400 in two years, having cost me $25 a month in total For something i use a hundred times a day and take all my family photos with. I could have saved $10 a month by getting an iphone 8, big deal.
Tim Cook hasn’t incinerated shareholder funds. Most of the profits have been returned to shareholders as dividends, or saved overseas for them. His bad acquisitions have been relatively tiny, like Beats.
And as far as competitiveness goes, the Mac market share is at all time highs, iphone sales are st all time highs, and iPad still dominates the tablet market. Plus their app store and apple music dominate as well. Oh and Apple watch is the biggest selling watch by revenues in history, both now and it’s launch year.
Apple hasnt been wildly creative under Cook, but is still designing innovative new devices, Apple Watch, Airpods, the 5K iMac, HomePods, iMac Pro. Let’s just agree to ignore the touchbar macbooks;)
He’s not Steve Jobs, but has done better than i ever thought possible.
For pretty much everything that wasn’t consumer facing. Office 365, Exchange, Azure, CRM and SQL Server all saw huge growth under Ballmer. He really killed it in Enterprise, but as you mentioned, consumer facing products had several missteps (and where a lot more public).
What made Apple exiting was their visionary products. With Johnny designing and Tim getting them launched on time, Steve could be Steve.
We need a new Steve.
We used to think the same naive thing about Microsoft. "Why can't they just fix <X>. They've got all the money in the world." Sure, but at a certain point, it stops being about resources. Two women can't make a baby in 4.5 months.
We often use construction metaphors in software, but a structure is at least expected to be done at some point, not growing in size and complexity forever, unbounded. I'd bet there's a point where even in the physical world a construction crew would be paralyzed by the amount of variables involved in moving forward.