iOS apps do run on Intel using catalyst. I recently ported over my hacker news client from iOS to MacOS and it works well on catalyst with small changes to handle right click and toolbar color etc. I was legit pleased to see how easy it was to get it working.
The only things that keep me from moving over to Apple's plan are being able to import my playlists and liked songs (thousands!) from Spotify, and Discover Weekly and Billboard Hot 100-esque type playlists.
Does Apple have equivalents of those features? Discover Weekly is incredible.
Spotify is way ahead of Apple Music on everything to do with discovery. I tried to switch to Apple Music (mostly for the Homepod Mini support) and really disliked the apple music app.
It's interesting, I had the opposite experience. Years ago used Spotify and found that Discover Weekly rarely had anything I'd actually want to listen to, whereas with Apple Music's New Music Mix I'm adding the songs it digs up fairly frequently. Might have to do with preferred genres.
Some leaks in the past suggest Discover Weekly simply searches through other users' liked songs and if you like Artist A and they like Artist A and B, and you haven't checked out B yet, there's a better chance you'll like Artist B over C that neither of you have heard before.
I didn't have great luck with Discover Weekly either, but I also suspect that there was a familiarity bias in play -- Apple Music was the first service I paid for, so I stuck with it and found lots of things that I really liked. When I tried Spotify a few months ago for a while, it just didn't feel like it was materially better and I found the UI a little confusing (see: familiarity bias), so there didn't seem to be any reason to switch.
I have a suspicion that if I'd actually paid for Spotify and stuck with it for a few years, though, the reverse would be true. My gut feeling is that these two services just aren't different enough in practice to make switching between them worth it for most users, unless they want a feature in the larger ecosystem (e.g., AirPlay 2 or Spotify Connect).
I've used both on and off, for a couple years each. Ultimately what made me come back to Music was simplicity and ecosystem integration. Big fan of the social features in Spotify though, like the Wrapped "year in review" feature.
Transferring songs and playlist is actually very easy (unless you are listening to very niche stuff). Songshift (no affiliation) worked very well for my needs and moved most of my playlists and songs over. Not sure about discover weekly though
I switched awhile ago, and have now gotten the bundle as well. I bought an app on iOS called SongShift that has handled migrating my playlists very well. It’ll even keep them in sync both ways.
My musical preferences did not lend themselves well to Spotify’s discovery, I don’t think, and Apples has been a similar experience. Both have been ok, but neither stellar.
Apple has a few personalized playlists that get updated weekly, I really enjoy them. Seems like in general, Spotify fans think Spotify is superior, AM fans think it's superior. I've tried to use Spotify recently for a couple's subscription and I find the UX worse, but maybe it's just different more than anything.
I started on Apple music and found the app ok but not great and found the webui to be completely broken. Like you would click play and it would play a different song in the list.
Switched to spotify and it has all worked better and the recommendations are better.
I've used both extensively. The libraries are fairly similar or maybe even the same these days but Spotify is miles ahead on recommendations and automatically generated playlists, radio, things of that nature. Apple was better for mixing your local library in with theirs (you can kinda do this on Spotify but it is extremely clunky). Otherwise they're about the same.
I've converted at least 5 people from AM to Spotify once they realized things like the social features like collaborative playlists, artists created playlists, following your friends to see their playlists and what they're listening to and they all tend to say the discovery/radio is much better although I think Pandoras blows it away. The UX is constantly in flux and it's different between OS's (only the desktop has 90% of the social features) and they keep nixing good features (mostly social, I guess due to EU regulations) which is frustrating.
Last year they updated it and removed the Android widget completely - we absolutely revolted blasting them with 1 star reviews, etc. They timed it with the launch of their India service so I have this theory that they knew they'd lose a bit of customers (they had no idea how many Android use widgets apparently) and negative reviews would come in but replace them with revenue/reviews from India which knocked their stars right back up.
Literally same day. I don't like the company because of things like that but it's still IMO the best music service. I'm using Tidal as well for its hifi/masters now.
I've had terrible terrible experiences with Apple Music, and there are far better options out there.
But the alternative for Maps is Google, and the last thing I want to do is give them a bead on my current location and all the places I want to go and explore. With Google's ownership of so much information, I think anybody avoiding Google Maps is very well justified.
The point is to be navigated to the correct location. Just as recently as December in Los Angeles, an address on the beach sent a skin starved date to an alleyway 10 minutes inland that she was totally cool with being in, and I had to tell her to Apple Maps likely did that, whereas Google Maps matched my much more romantic location. Could the opposite happen? I guess. Does it though?
Thats never been my experience, but I really only have my own to go on.
However, in the early days of Google Maps, when MapQuest was still around and before cars had in-dash navigation, Google Maps did give me bad directions for driving, that I had printed out, and made me late. I still ended up using Google Maps, and they got better.
I will still use Google Maps to discover biking routes in unfamiliar areas, so I do give up my location to them occasionally, but in my experience that's the only edge that Google Maps has these days.
Apple Maps bookmarking is vastly superior to Google Maps (subtle ui, better list support). Apple Maps on CarPlay is pleasant, Google Maps is garish. Apple Maps biggest down for me is reliance on Yelp for business reviews.
M1 is meaningless. To 99% of their market it is just a new vague number to justify an upgrade (like ram sizes, 3/4/5G, etc).
What is masterful is how they redirected the desirable-number-du-jour to be something that is both 1) proprietary and 2) not cutting into their service revenue (e.g. larger storage = less people shelling out for cloud storage)
The M1 is far from meaningless. Apple's new MacBook Air is by far the best laptop I've ever used. It has fantastic battery life, stays cool without a fan, and competes with the Intel i9 in terms of performance.
You are literally repeating the same marketing/self-justification that everyone said for every new Air model.
Don't take my word, look it up.
Around launch date, everyone in the universe will post "new MacBook Air is by far the best laptop I've ever used. It has fantastic battery life". Then the same model 6-12mo later "I loved the thinness, but now it's being too slow for X so I might get a macbook"
I find it very interesting that due to the existence of the Emoji Bar, and the lower performance and worse battery life due to Apple Silicon, the MacBook Air is now a far more Pro machine than the 15 inch MacBook Pro.
In the late 80s and early 90s, every computer that Apple made was better than all their other machines. Even if they were making a smaller budget device like the SE or SE/30, performance increased so quickly that it would beat all the previous machines.
For one short year, in 2020, due to the ARM transition, Apple repeated that feat. It could keep on going, if for example, the refresh of the Macbook Air comes out in 2022 and beats the Pro machines that came out in 2021.
Yep, going from a Mac Plus to an SE-30 is probably the closest experientially to my MacBook Pro 15/Intel Mac Mini-> M1 Mac Mini in my memory.
Form factor basically same, screen the same, OS the same, yet somehow the qualitative feel changes with the new responsiveness. I don't switch to any Mac other than the M1 now except of necessity because of the instant ability to feel the downgrade.
As someone who has been a laptop upgrader for 17 years with Apple, and about 7 with Dell, I can affirm what others are saying that the M1 upgrade is a quantum leap forward. It's a pretty big deal in terms of integrated (Battery + CPU + Latency + Responsiveness - every time my Monitor adjusts without blinking I smile) experience.
Not just marketing speak. If they can keep up this momentum with M2, etc... they'll be creating some defensive moats around their laptop/desktop business.
I doubt very much the M1 will make people abandon Windows or ChromeOS in droves. Windows+Office or Windows+Steam, or plain price point, is what keeps people from moving to Apple, and having better CPU isn't radically gonna change that.
When Steve Jobs passed in 2011 I was certain that Apple would lose its way and start diluting their products/brand. To the contrary the last 10 years where an absolute tour the force in expansion of the spirit of Apple. Sure there where some issues. There always are. But in general it is incredible how they scaled to such epic proportions while maintaining this high level of discipline and excellence. I am amazed. Congratulations to the people who made it possible.
Focus, products instilled with culture, starting with the user experience, attention to detail, cohesive ecosystem, good design, delivering high quality products at the lowest price possible, not shipping things that are not ready.
“Quality products at Lowest price possible” you’re probably being sarcastic. Just look at wired AirPods, among the most maligned earbud headphones and quite expensive within their category.
When you take into account total cost of ownership and the intangible of pain or frustration from other products, Apple typically comes in with the lowest cost. You pay more upfront to pay less (literally and emotionally) later.
It's not easy. Apple does have a consistent "spirit", but it's such a strange combination of idealism and ruthlessness that it's hard to know which aspect(s) anyone is invoking when they mention it. I don't know why that question is getting so many downvotes.
I think this little thread has shown that the so-called culture and spirit of a organization is largely a myth, or more precisely, a form of brand marketing instead of actual inherent nature of an organization.
> Software, not so much. Design they have gone downhill.
I mean, maybe compared to Apple 2011. But compared to Microsoft 2021, Google 2021, Linux 2021, Android 2021, HP 2021, Lenovo 2021, Dell 2021? They're definitely on top.
I’d argue…well I was going to argue Dell did well with their legacy, but they haven’t. They went private, pivoted (sorry) to strong enterprise sales, and de-emphasized the cutthroat race-to-the-bottom consumer computers.
Which ain’t exciting, but, the rotting corpse of Compaq over there in the corner stands as warning of what could have been.
I think that is a fair assessment but what about compared to their peers? Could you say the level of excellence from 2011 to 2021 Apple has deteriorated at a higher rate than Facebook, Microsoft, or Google?
Yes. It is easy to forget over some bad keyboard or software choices that rub HN crowd the wrong way what they have done. It could have been very, very different.
Have they been perfect? No. Keyboards, App Store, still not entirely sure what the iPad Pro does, etc.
But you know what Tim Cook didn’t do? He didn’t screw it all up. Which sounds like faint praise, but I really think it’s inarguable that Jobs remade Apple, stem to stern, blood to bone, software to hardware. And to step in and take over a company that had been reborn like that, and not nickel-and-dime it into mediocrity? Remarkable.
I don’t think anyone is really arguing Cook is a product visionary—I certainly don’t think Cook is himself. But just navigating the political landscape alone is truly impressive.
Ballmer didn't do much to harm Microsoft, he sales-managed the company - Microsoft increased in size considerably during his tenure. Sales went from $23 billion to $86 billion during the Ballmer years, a radical increase for an already large company. One can certainly give credit to Gates instead, perhaps, however Ballmer still didn't botch it. Azure and cloud Office were born during the Ballmer years as well, those were initiatives during his years that have been perfected under Nadella (who is a dramatically better product CEO). I consider Nadella's willingness to abandon the Windows religion as the single greatest contribution any CEO has made to Microsoft since the peak Gates years. The worst you can say about Ballmer is that during his reign Microsoft didn't take over the world by grabbing search and mobile. Which was a near impossible task, no company can or should own everything in such a way. I do believe if Ballmer had kept control for a longer period of time (another ten years or so), the risk would have increased of Microsoft getting permanently Oracle'd culturally. It wasn't entirely a bad thing to have a strong insider as a hand in the post Gates years (maybe a good question is: was there anybody else in 1999-2000, in the upper tiers of management, that would have been better fit for the task).
I think different eras require different types of leaders that sit on the explore/extract axis. Product leaders (the 'explore' end) are there to define product categories, while Sales leaders (the 'extract' end) are there to win in product categories.
In the 70s, components were expensive and thus the market was mainframes and big company sales, so required a sales leader to extract the most, and the product could be average (like IBM, HP).
In the early 80s, components were getting cheap enough to be affordable by regular people, so a product leader was needed to define the personal computing sector, as the product could not be average (not Commodore, TI, or IBM PC).
In the late 80s - 90s, commoditization meant it was about capturing the value of the personal computing sector, so it required a sales leader to extract the most, and the product could just be average (like Windows, beige PCs).
In the late 90s - 00s, it became cheap enough to start internet companies at scale and opened up an entire market, so it required product leaders to define the core internet offerings of cloud, social media, search, and ecommerce, and the product couldn't be average (not Yahoo, Myspace, or co-lo ISPs).
In the mid 00s, components were getting small & powerful enough, so it required a product leader to define the mobile computing sector, and the product couldn't be average (not Nokia, Blackberry, Win Phone).
In the 10s - now, with mobile and internet now defined, it required sales leaders to extract the most and the product could be average (like Android).
Jobs was a success when product vision was necessary (early 80s, late 90s-00s), and a failure when it was not (late 80s-90s).
Ballmer was a success when sales/extraction was necessary (90s) but a failure when it was not (the 00s), as I consider not leveraging a leading market position into multiple adjacent trillion dollar business sectors a failure.
Cook has been a success for the past decade because the market really needed someone to execute well on the things that were just defined (mobile devices). According to the above theory, it should have been the decade of Android, but Apple's execution has been so much more competent than Google's that they ran away with it.
> I don’t think anyone is really arguing Cook is a product visionary—I certainly don’t think Cook is himself. But just navigating the political landscape alone is truly impressive.
I agree. However, he is a master at providing the infrastructure and logistics to make other people realise their vision. And he does have a long-term plan.
The scale and efficiency of Apple’s operations, as well as their continued success is mind boggling. There have been a couple of hiccups every now and then (and some tours de force as well); overall it is quite impressive.
I can’t answer for those other issues but I’m an iPad Pro owner and I’ll say the 120Hz screen with the pencil feels absolutely magical. I think any Pro user who uses it for drawing and painting will not want to use anything else. It’s a legit professional tool. Looks like the new M1 version pushed even harder in that direction with its display and colour support.
It reminds me of Macs back in the 90’s. Very few used Windows for creative work. The MacOS had ColorSync and professionals in photography and print, publishing, etc refused to use anything but a Mac due to the need for colour accuracy in their workflows. To an outsider it may have seemed baffling as to why these computers were considered professional tools when everyone else in business was using Windows.
I fully admit I am a crusty old Mac user, who in fact started on the Mac back in those days.
I perhaps don’t see the Pro in iPad Pro because I am wanting it to basically be a Mac, but tablet. Maybe it is truly an orthogonal product that does pro work differently. But the software story just still feels incomplete. Just feels so limiting in terms of file system and such.
I am also a crusty old Mac user from back then. I really miss MacOS 8 and its simplicity and spatial Finder.
The iPad Pro is a pro device for creative professionals in visual arts only, to my knowledge. It’s definitely not a pro software development tool or anything else of the sort we’d use a Mac for. In some sense you can think of the iPad Pro as an attack on Wacom’s market.
I’m not a creative pro by any stretch of the imagination. I use my iPad Pro for tutoring people remotely in mathematics, a task it excels at. I also play some games on it and use it for FaceTime calls because its front-facing camera is nicer than the one on my M1 MBA.
I’m really happy with my iPad Pro even though I was hesitant about buying one for over a year. I was expecting buyers’ remorse to set in but it thankfully hasn’t. I keep finding new things to do with it. Scrolling through PDFs on the device is way smoother than the MBA, for example, so I’ve used it as a second screen for reading documentation while working.
I’m a creative pro who works on math software, so, synergy. I just feel like I am slogging through mud to work with versions of mockups, quickly bouncing stuff to git or onto our damned fileserver, all that administrative jazz.
(I will note my college illustration professor loves her iPad Pro with a passion that would fill an Apple keynote—she ditched her Wacom instantly.)
But though I’m iffy on the Pro in iPad, I am pro iPad, if only because my somewhat elderly parents love the thing. They are like some Platonic ideal of iPad users—they have totally and completely ditched their Mac, and do all their banking and medical records and weather (old people love weather) on their iPad, with a fluency they never, ever came close to achieving with a mouse.
It's basically "pro" for a bunch of uses that take advantage of the sensors, input methods, and form factor, a tolerable-to-good replacement for a few other use cases with the addition of a keyboard, and useless for a few cases where you either need a no-bullshit very powerful local workstation or a very open operating system (or both).
Folks on HN have a strong tendency to label any computer-thing not serving that last use case, for which the iPad Pro is it no help at all, as a toy or "just a consumption device" (not saying you are, but it's a common sentiment on here). It's a kind of occupation-induced blindness, I think.
(not saying you are, but it's a common sentiment on here). It's a kind of occupation-induced blindness, I think.
Oh I am 100% guilty of that, and I admit that. I have been using Photoshop in some capacity since 1994, and I am 37 years old. So that “teeny tiny click targets and lots of keyboard chording” is just baked into the interaction homunculus in my head. It is admittedly difficult to for me to think of an iPad as a “Pro” tool.
A blind spot I am working on, but once you get to be my age, you get set in your ways. You kids and your TikTok…
Oh, you didn't do it like some do, you just expressed that you didn't understand something, which is something everyone should probably do more often. Almost every time iPads come up on here there are several much more angry-seeming "LOL they're just toys for stupid consumer couch-potatoes to watch Netflix while conspicuously consuming Apple products, it's impossible to create things using a computer if you don't have root access" posts, which isn't at all the kind of thing you posted.
Can't say I see it the same way about the file system, although I get where you're coming from about other limitations of the iPadOS way of doing things.
I pay $2.99 a month for 200GB of iCloud, and what I get in return is a folder on my desktop which is shared between phone, tablet, and laptop. It "just works", I have no complaints. I'd be paying that money anyway just to back up my photos.
The other way of doing things is the 'share' button, and when it works, it's really great. Sometimes it doesn't, because the app I want to use next hasn't registered itself properly or something, so I have to use Save to Files as a fallback. Which is fine and has never failed me.
Jobs became Apple CEO in 1997. Tim Cook joined Apple in 1998. It’s easy to forget, but Cook was a huge part of remaking Apple almost from the beginning with Jobs. His role has obviously expanded but he’s essentially running a company that he helped create.
Having used many iPads, my favorite sizes are the 12.9" (Pro) and the Mini.
Why (for the pro—I trust my love of the mini needs little explanation)?
The 12.9" is so big that it's about the size of an 8.5x11" sheet of paper, which turns out to be a really convenient size for reading anything based on... paper. It's outstanding for reading PDFs of, say, textbooks, as it's large enough you might be able to get away with reading it in landscape, and is the best device I'm aware of for reading comics (ditto on the landscape mode, it works great, it's just a little smaller than a real two-page comic book spread). Yet it's light enough not to be a giant pain to hold.
It's amazing for art (with a Pencil). Nice and big, very responsive. The larger screen makes almost anything you'd do on a normal iPad a little better. Movies, browsing, games. Low-distraction writing device with an external keyboard. It's a great companion for music where, again, the larger size is really nice for displaying sheet music or... well, almost anything else music-related you want to do. Last I checked the cameras & mics beat the hell out of most laptops, including Apple ones, for video calls.
Know what it's very close in size to? A 13" MBP or Air. Know what it can do? Become a portable external monitor for same. Damn nice.
2-player board games. Again, the size helps a ton.
My personal uses barely call for all the extra horsepower of the "pro" line, actually, aside from maybe drawing (which, AFAIK, has more to do with specialized hardware on the screen than with CPU power or memory) but holy crap, the screen size. It's glorious. If I could have only one computing device in my house I'd seriously consider making it the 12.9" iPad Pro (assuming I could keep my mechanical bluetooth keyboard, too). I can always SSH/Mosh to a unixy command line somewhere else, but none of my unixy machines are much good for most of what I use the iPad Pro for.
I'm not sure if 5 years of stagnation in the Mac lineup is a blip. Perhaps as a percentage of revenue? In terms of customer satisfaction, it was rough. Those keyboards were really bad, and not everyone has the ability to just swap them out with the new fancy computers coming out now, so many will be feeling them for some time to come. Same thing with the Mac Pros. But yes, things are now looking pretty amazing in the hardware department. Unfortunately, the concern is now with the software. macOS has been going downhill for a while, and Big Sur doesn't give me a ton of confidence.
Of course, the Mac is some insignificant portion of the Apple's footprint these days, but I have to say their mobile offerings have been kind of a yawn too. Don't get me wrong, perfectly competent, no need to switch or anything, but iPod to iPhone happened in 6 years (!), and I don't think the Apple Watch is anywhere near that level of consistent culture defining technology that kind of defined "the spirit of Apple" from the original iMac to the iPhone (I'd like to say "to the iPad", but unfortunately the product has been kind relegated to a side purchase vs. the Mac-replacement I think it honestly had the opportunity to be -- and I guess could still be, its not like any "window" has been missed, just hasn't really done much in the last 10 years either, in terms of definitive changes in workflow like the iPhone did).
As a customer, the subscription stuff is honestly just somewhere between boring and annoying. "Apple One" with its 3 different plans and still tremendously confusing options (if I let my parents have access to the movies I've purchased, they can no longer buy their own movies -- what? why? It's strictly more profitable for Apple to let them ALSO use their credit card instead of locking them out of being able to make their own purchases just because I shared my content). Honestly, I have to strain really hard to remember what "Apple One" includes aside from Apple TV+. Oh right, News or something? The ability to not get annoying iCloud space errors that users remain not fully comprehending?
Now, flip that around, and investor-wise, you are spot on! I am LONG $AAPL, just short Apple products (software specifically). Which is unfortunate, because they are still probably the best, just no longer... "good". It used to feel like a premium experience, for a premium price, now just the latter.
Apple can be seen as an excellent MBA course in operations, as probably to be expected. I'm not going to say Steve was a all knowing genius, but it's a pretty dang smart move to put someone in place who will put the company on such firm economical footing while you wait for your next big thing (person) to emerge from the organization.
> Those keyboards were really bad, and not everyone has the ability to just swap them out with the new fancy computers coming out now, so many will be feeling them for some time to come.
The butterfly keyboards are the only laptop keyboards made to date that I can type on for a full day. So speak for yourself: long may I be “stuck” with mine.
That is great, but they literally break. This isn't about ergonomics, but the fact that the keys literally stop working. I had no issue with the "feel" of the keyboard, I had an issue with my "T" key no longer doing anything, while my "E" key registered twice, sometimes three times, when I tapped it. The exact same keyboard without these issues would have been totally fine in my book (well, I suppose the TouchBar is a different story, but I digress). This is not a vilification of the "design" per se, but a well documented quality problem. Apple has had to extend replacement policies, etc. This was not some shared delusion we all had. They changed them for a reason.
> I was certain that Apple would lose its way and start diluting their products/brand.
In a sense, they are diluting their products.
Remember the apocryphal story that when Jobs came back to Apple, he split a whiteboard into four quadrants and listed just one product in each?
Now Apple has several dozen products. And each category is anywhere from 1 to 4 different products often with differences so minor as to not make any sense (iPhone 12 Pro vs iPhone 12 Pro Max, the difference is slight size increase and cameras, that's it; or iPhone 12 Pro vs iPhone 12; there are four different iPads; etc.)
Apple looks like it's trying to cover every niche, and often does that semi-satisfactorily.
Slightly tangential: they've completely dropped the ball on MacOS software side: there hasn't been a good software release from them literally for years. The only exception is the new Messages in BigSur, and they spent untold hours in close collaboration with the Catalyst team to make it work. Almost every other new first-party app from Apple on MacOS for years has been an unmitigated disaster that has never seen a designer in a vicinity and that breaks any version of Apple's own HIG guidelines.
That said, it could've been much much much worse. So, count our blessings :)
> Remember the apocryphal story that when Jobs came back to Apple, he split a whiteboard into four quadrants and listed just one product in each?
He showed that during keynotes (I remember he used that to unveil the first iBook).
The situation then was a bit different, though. Apple needed to be much more focused and had fewer resources to throw at new devices. They also needed a clean break from the past and could not start from scratch 10 different product lines. But Jobs himself did away with the 2x2 matrix, for example with the eMac and the Cube. The 12’’, 15’’, and 17’’ PowerBooks used the same name, but the differences were more significant than between the various iPhones 12.
It is also interesting in that they are doing it in a seemingly un-Jobs-like manner. For example, take a look at the current models they offer for the iPhone[1]. Wikipedia lists 7 distinct models in production, that grows to 20 when factoring in storage size, and it likely balloons to over a hundred when considering different carriers and colors. Their approach is now basically "whatever your budget is, we have an iPhone for you". That seems antithetical to Jobs' traditional approach.
3 out of those aren’t the most recent though. Of the 4 that are, the fact that they have several screen sizes is indeed unlike Jobs, but Jobs wasn’t infallible - he was insistent that people want small phones, however given the 12 Mini’s mediocre sales that doesn’t seem to be true save for a vocal minority here on HN.
I love my 12 Mini and I’m really sad about the mediocre sales. I hope Apple keeps the product around for us nerds who love small phones. They’ve done the work to design the thing and build out the tooling for it so they might as well keep making them as long as they keep selling, even if it’s not their most popular version.
Jobs put that strategy in place. He did not want to leave price points unfilled with hit products. You saw it with the profusion of iPod models, colors, and storage. Jobs was also still the CEO when Apple decided to keep the iPhone 3Gs in production after launching the iPhone 4, in order to meet a lower price point.
Take the iPod maturation under Jobs - each iPod embodiment had a 'purpose' to fill the music / video need in your life. (One could say the iPod Touch was a 'gateway drug' because of vendor lock-in with Cingular/ATT than actually diluting a lower cost product.) Can we say the same of the iPhone line up? or is it excellently amortizing last years A{#} processor downstream at lower prices?
I think if we peeled back the facade, we can begin to see that it's been an operations play since Jobs died, and though the M1 is pretty dang amazing, what probably brought it over the line is the insane profit margins and 'upcylcing' Mac sales for folks having a M1 vs M3, etc...
But as everyone here has said - it could have been worse.
> When Steve Jobs passed in 2011 I was certain that Apple would lose its way and start diluting their products/brand. To the contrary the last 10 years where an absolute tour the force in expansion of the spirit of Apple.
Under Jobs, they would regularly create whole new categories and concepts of technology and revolutionize others. I don't recall it happening since; they capitalize on everything that was created under Jobs (and do it well).
Most people don’t understand that bank analysts (the people whose estimates get averaged for every “Apple beats estimates” headline) are complete jokes. Research departments are there to support the sale of bank services, and making management look amazing by having lowball estimates creates good relationship with the IB desks.
The markets trade on whisper numbers, which are what people with skin in the game are expecting. This is why you often see a name that beats estimates and drops...it’s because they missed the whisper numbers.
I doubt that this played a role here. Apple traded more or less flat over the quarter. If there were whisper numbers of even better results than what turned out to be a massively successful quarter, one should have seen the stock price go up significantly over the quarter.
It's common for many if not most companies. The guiding principle of buy on the rumor, sell on the news often means that a lot of investors realize gains after a big positive news event driving the price down. There were drops like that, iirc, when Apple announced the change to Intel and I think also the iPhone announcement. The drop is generally short-lived as the long-term investors buy in.
How much is due to Covid, and how much is due to Jony Ive's departure?
The designs seem to make a bit more sense now, I was always perplexed at Ive's 'thinness at the expense of everything else' mindset (butterfly switch keyboard, ugh)
Yes, Ive was a bit of a farce. Under Jobs he flourished. Without guidance from Jobs he proved to be comically bad. It will take years for Apple to recover from the damage he did. For example, copying Flat-UI from Windows Phone. Apple hasn't recovered yet.
> Without guidance from Jobs he proved to be comically bad.
I mean, he did basically design the Apple Watch which has been an absolute runaway success, the most successful new entire product category since the iPhone.
Runaway success is exaggerated - those watches were not the coolest thing in the world when they came out (and they looked the same as the current models). They gained more traction as the health features got buffed up and Apple stopped marketing the watch as primarily a notification device.
I don't think that any of this is due to the design either.
There are a million ways to eff up design. The Apple Watch and its OS are elegant and do a great job. It's basically a masterclass in design. Remember, the best design is largely invisible, when things just feel obvious and intuitive. Which describes the Apple Watch to a T.
Finding product-market fit for health is a separate issue -- that's not the design department's job.
Ive's job was to design a brand-new smartwatch from scratch and he and his team knocked it out of the park.
I'm sure I read somewhere that Ive actually really wanted to push the Watch as a high ticket device for rich people, and it was him being ousted that lead to Apple taking the more health-focused direction they're taking now.
You've just described the Apple business model, perfectly.
I noticed in the early 2000s, and it has held true ever since: don't bother getting the first three iterations of a new Apple product unless you're well and truly enthusiastic about it. They always iterate, it always gets better, and the fourth go around is generally when I'll be happy with it.
One which I thought was too cool to pass up was AirPods, and yeah the first generation were really special and I'm glad I got them. The wireless case in the second generation was a nice bump, and the AirPods Pro (gen 3) are a clear improvement in every way. I did get a pair from the bad batch which started having problems with noice cancellation, but the replacement process was pretty smooth: so I conclude that if I wasn't in a hurry, the next generation, the fourth, would be "insanely great" and the right time to buy.
I was impressed by how Apple-y the Apple Watch was, especially before the first software update. I am convinced this is due to Steve Jobs' influence [1]. As soon as the first software update was released I noticed a marked decline, much like the decline we saw in iOS 7.
It's not helpful to point to revenue when a scenario in business like this plays out and says, "Look, clearly they know better than you."
If you notice people complaining about something in numbers, there's a reason for it.
There were people who held out for years because MacBook Pro designs were anti-consumer and people held out for compromise. I know I did. Everyone I know did. It wasn't some niche. There's an entire professional class that relies on good tooling.
Sorry Apple != MacBook Pro Keyboard however bad that latter may be and upset you may be about it.
The idea that Ive has somehow fundamentally damaged Apple's business in a way that they've yet to recover from when they've just had an almost $90bn quarter is .... just wrong.
(And anyway they've fixed the keyboard and Mac sales are up hugely).
You're focused on the horrendous MacBookPro Keyboard, and forgetting the trashcan MacPro. That thing was so bad, they had to make a Pro version of the iMac!
The trash can Mac Pro was a bet on the power of Thunderbolt, which for the first time was a peripheral bus fast enough to connect things like SSDs and GPUs without loss of performance. The idea was to make upgrading even easier than the previous Mac Pro... as easy as plugging in a Thunderbolt cable.
It didn’t work out that way. High performance Thunderbolt peripherals like eGPUs were slow to develop, for reasons outside of Apple’s control. They thought you’d soon be able to buy the latest GPUs in external enclosures as well as internal cards, the way you can hard drives. Didn’t happen.
It’s a good example of a big bet from Apple that didn’t move the whole computer industry. Eventually Apple threw in the towel and went back to the traditional big box case for a pro machine.
Apple has recovered. It made me buy my first MacBook Pro in my life, M1 was just too good to pass on even with the disadvantages that I was used to Windows and I'm still not sure about the differences between control, option and command keys.
Command is (mostly) control under Window (CMD+C/V/X for copy/paste/cut, CMD+P for printing, CMD+Z for undo, and so on). It's also used for alt-tab.
Option is Alt. Used to modify some keyboard shortcuts like the above, sometimes on its own, and often used to type in alternate characters than standard on your keyboard (Option+e e gives you an accented e).
Control is honestly something I use often outside the terminal on macOS. I think Control+<left/right arrow key> gets you linear navigation with multiple full screen windows or multiple desktops. It probably does more, I don't know.
I wish Apple opted for an Apple key that does window management (similar to Windows), so that those shortcuts are separated from application shortcuts, but I love at least how configurable they are.
I have good/bad news: the command key thing, and most related macOS shortcuts, are so good that once you get used to them you'll be really annoyed when you use anything else, and left wondering how it's been this long and no-one's copied their exact physical keyboard arrangement, en-us keyboard layout, and shortcuts.
Windows and Linux (desktop and server) user for ~15 years before getting my first Mac (at work) around 2011 (DOS user even earlier). Other keyboard+OS combos are so frustrating now. Not in the "this is unfamiliar" way macOS was initially, but in a "I know this and the Apple way now, and this is worse, why the hell do you keep doing this, and not either just copy Apple or come up with something even better?" way.
Point is: you'll get used to it, and probably like it. But you might permanently be slightly irritated when using anything else, afterward.
(Try Spectacle, or something similar, if you want somewhat better window layout management from the keyboard. It's in Homebrew. It's pretty much the only OS-behavior-modifying thing I install on Mac—my other tweaks are just in the settings GUI, mostly just making CAPS lock an extra ctrl. The default spectacle shortcuts are a bit wild, but 95% of what I use is just split-half-screen left, split-half-screen right, and fullscreen, and it'd be worth using if you never used any others)
After two years of working on Macs, I realised working on Linux gave me pinky fatigue from having to press control too much. Now I rebind ctrl to super wherever possible.
That's definitely one part of it: thumb-scrunching-to-cmd requires less wrist movement, for me at least, than ctrl+[anything]. Re-mapping caps lock as an extra ctrl helps a ton, but cmd is a much better default than the ordinary ctrl, for very common system-wide keyboard shortcuts.
In fact, I just checked out of curiosity, and I move 2 fingers very slightly to cmd+c, while doing (standard) ctrl+c I move every joint up my arm, including my shoulder, and all my fingers (as I reposition my whole hand, so the fingers all flex, flattening so my pinky can hit the ctrl)
Again, caps-as-control makes it much better, but I can still feel more strain than the very natural almost-pinching motion of cmd+c. I don't know how much of this was intentional when the Apple keyboard was designed and shortcuts chosen, but it's a real effect regardless.
The point of the original skeuomorphic UI was to make the phone look small, like an iPod, and not like a computer, because they didn't think people wanted to look like they were carrying a tablet around.
It turns out everyone did want to do that, and in fact iPhones weren't big enough, so the flat UI was designed to take the same device and make it look bigger and brighter.
Let me offer a rephrasing: your claim that the original iPhone's skeuomorphic design was "to make the phone look small" and that the later, flatter UI design was "to make the same device look bigger" requires more of an explanation than your implicit "this is clearly obvious to even the most casual of observers." I don't recall anyone at Apple ever explaining that their original UI choices were about "making the phone look small," nor have I ever learned in UI design -- which I have studied -- that smallness is some inherent property of skeuomorphism.
So maybe you could enlighten us without being, you know, a jerk about it.
As the grantparent said, noone at Apple ever claimed so.
The device was small anyway in actual life (no need to "make it look small"), skeuomorphic vs flat has nothing to do with making a device appear smaller or bigger, iPad and even OS X also used skeuomorphism (so it wasn't a size concern), and Ive never said anything to that effect. The whole idea doesn't even make sense.
As for what Ive actually said, citing real-life metaphors and familiarity as the reasons (for the skeuomorphic design):
“When we sat down last November (to work on iOS 7), we understood that people had already become comfortable with touching glass, they didn’t need physical buttons, they understood the benefits,” says Ive. “So there was an incredible liberty in not having to reference the physical world so literally. We were trying to create an environment that was less specific. It got design out of the way.”
And Scott Forstall said the same:
"If you look at the designs we did at Apple, we talked about photo illustrative designs, metaphorical designs. And those were infused into the design sense of Apple by Steve Jobs since the original Mac if not earlier. The original Mac had a desktop and folders that looked very much like the desktop on which that Mac sat. And so we used these design philosophies".
Lighter and thinner products also increase total addressable market by allowing products to be sold to parents and their kids. See Apple Watch Family Setup; iPad Mini, the various iPods...
They're also better for the environment: less materials to assemble, less packaging, less fuel to ship, less waste. At Apple's scale, that really adds up.
Of course there's tradeoffs here if it requires custom external hardware (dongle proliferation etc.)
In general I think this is less of an issue today, since usb-C is both generally great and very small, so you can just use it. But, if thinness came at the sacrifice of common connectors like USB-A (or like HDMI), the opportunity cost of standard connectors might be lost.
I'm ignoring that like many of apple's ports are just better than USB-A to focus only on the waste argument here though.
I think that's a fair assessment in general. As an open question I wonder how much your average customer would take advantage of a reparability option if available, and if the additional material required to make it reparable wouldn't offset the gains? I'm just thinking out loud.
As someone who helped repair and re-home old computers you might be surprised. Normies may rarely upgrade or repair themselves, but IME they do get help doing so in many cases.
Schools and businesses cycling their computers often handed them off. We used to replace the internal drive and send them to people in the community that could still get some use out of them. Apple products are no longer a machine that lives long enough to pass off.
As I never tire of pointing out, as an empirical matter, this is wrong when you apply it to Apple specifically.
Apple's software support for all their devices lasts much longer than the competition, and their hardware tends to last many years out of warranty. Not always of course, but this is a numbers game, and there is a robust secondary market in everything Apple makes.
Objectively, a laptop, phone, or tablet, will have a longer service life if manufactured by Apple, than anyone else, with the possible exception of ThinkPads.
Sure, if you want more RAM or what have you, you have to buy a new computer and sell the old one. That's expensive, but all that matters with respect to the environment is total service life of a given machine, and again, as an objective matter, Apple is peerless there.
It's tempting to compare this record against imaginary competition which doesn't exist, but I don't see the point.
>Apple's software support for all their devices lasts much longer than the competition, and their hardware tends to last many years out of warranty. Not always of course, but this is a numbers game, and there is a robust secondary market in everything Apple makes.
An apple device with upgradeable parts would be even better for the environment. Apple's software support has no effect on the environmental impact of non upgradeable computers compared to upgradeable computers.
I’d argue that the vast majority of users don’t upgrade their products. Everybody I know who isn’t already tech savvy just buys a new laptop when their old one feels slow or the battery doesn’t last as long. They don’t care about upgrading it.
I used a MacBook Air in early 2020, and I thought the keyboard was broken/damaged due to the lack of give in the keys, is that what you are describing?
Yes, but it's not really the feel/travel that was the major problem with those keyboards. It's that they were highly prone to keys getting gummed up and/or failing due to dust and debris ingress.
To be fair, Apple acknowledged the problem and provides free out-of-warranty repair/replacement for keyboard issues on the affected models. But it took them years to come out with a better keyboard.
That appears to be a product of merging iPad technology with the Mac ecosystem. The display is basically a giant iPad Pro, isn’t it? They borrowed some thin from one product and applied it to another. The M1 allows it, they just needed to add a larger screen, remove some sensors, and flash a different OS.
Obviously dramatic over simplification but it doesn’t seem to be the usual kind of thin for the sake of thin design - this iMac seems objectively better than its predecessors and its thickness (or lack thereof) doesn’t seem like a problem or unnecessary constraint.
If it were designed like the ipad, the components would live behind the screen in a similar way. I think this is what a lot of people were expecting. They could have done that, but they chose to make it just a little bit thinner and put all the components into a big chin below the screen.
They made a trade-off to make it look uglier/bulkier/worse from the front when actually using the machine, just so that if you happen to glimpse it from the side it's a little thinner. There's not even the argument of portability to support the pursuit of thinness here as with most of their other devices. So I would argue the opposite, this new iMac is just about the pinnacle of thinness for the sake of thin design.
(You could of course argue that it's not ugly, that's totally subjective, but they clearly went out of their way to make it as thin as possible).
No, assuming the same volume of internal components, a thicker design would have less surface area hence less material overall. Could fit in a smaller box, too.
Designers design for usability. The idea that design is about "making things pretty" is on par with the idea that software development is about making computers crunch numbers.
Not sure I agree with that. The trashcan MacPro was definitely not useable as far as what Pro Mac users wanted/needed. That was definitely designed for the designer's sake totally misunderstanding the user's needs.
It wasn't usable for the majority of the market. Even in the infamous mea culpa Apple made about it, they admitted they designed themselves into a corner. It was designed so poorly, they had to take years to undo it after admitting it needed to be done.
Covid had a lot more to do with it. Mac is at an all time high yes but the last iteration of Intel MBPs was only slightly different from what we had while Ive was still around, and Mac is still a relative small % of overall revenue which has increased a lot.
I don’t really get the Jony Ive hate. The only particularly bad thing I can think of him being involved in was the butterfly keyboard, and the fact that the Apple Watch is the only real success among smart watches more than makes up for that.
I've had my series 3 a little over seven months, it gets a day and a half easily - if I fully charge before bed, it's good two overnights and usually at around 20% the second morning. No comment as yet on longer-term battery degradation though.
I get a nearly identical charge profile to the one OP described for his 3 on my six: I charge before bed, and if I skip a charge one night, I still have battery (in the red of course) when I wake up.
Offer not valid if I do an hour of exercise during the day, or game heavily (I've been known to zone out on 2048 pretty hardcore), but for normal use, sure.
Apple Watch isn't trying to be anything other than a charge-daily device, it's honestly kind of incredible that something that small can be a full-fledged cell phone and still last a full day.
A little tangential information on Garmin battery life for anyone in the market. I see that the upper end of Apple Watch is 800 dollars.
That’s around what I paid for my Garmin fenix 6 pro solar which I’m very happy with. I get about 15 days of battery and dropping to around 10 days if I record around 1.5 hours of activities per day.
Never owned an Apple Watch so can’t compare but I really like my Garmin. It is a little large though so not everyone’s cup of tea. Smaller versions probably last a bit shorter.
The top-of-the-line Apple Watch is $529. You can go higher than that, but that is purely for aesthetics (upgrade to titanium shell, stainless steel clasp, etc.).
I throw it on the charger for 30 minutes while I work in the evening. Works great, and as others have noted, that’s usually enough to get through 2 nights.
It charges pretty quickly; quickly enough in my experience that even if I forget to charge it one day and I find it dead at an inconvenient time, I can usually throw it in a charger for long enough to get through the rest of the day without much inconvenience. I’ve had my series 5 for about 18 months and in that time, only once have I had it die on me when I was trying to use it.
If I ever go back to working in an office, my use pattern might change, but for the most part I think the inconvenience of charging daily is overstated.
Edit: It also will notify you 1 hour before your configured bedtime if it doesn’t have enough juice to get through the night. I thought this was silly when they announced it but in practice it is great.
I also miss my Pebble classic in many ways, including the vibration alarm!
As of right now I usually don't use an alarm to wake up. I just wake up. Or I use a standard audio alarm on the phone. But I guess that's kind of a cop-out answer?
The vibration alarm was nice, not a must-have considering I had to wear something around my wrist when I slept: not as comfortable as not doing that.
I disagree with you about the concept of smartwatches that should be "thin terminals." The things I don't miss about my Pebble classic involve how basic it was.
I can totally understand someone wanting much more of a basic device with time, fitness tracking, basic notifications, long battery life, and that's about it. However, I think that in the scope of what is marketable to the general public, it's a more of a niche.
I think that most people:
1. Don't actually want to sleep with any jewelry (watches) on.
2. Aren't deep into fitness tracking beyond the basics, i.e. they wouldn't sleep with jewelry on just to get sleep tracking. For most people fitness tracking means a few graphs and figures that make them feel good about themselves for getting on a treadmill for 20 minutes.
3. Choose their watch based on the fact that it's a piece of jewelry. In my mind, Apple gained a lot of early traction (and high-margin revenue) by focusing on the fashion part of it with the way the bands are easily changeable.
Pebble wouldn't have folded if they had considered how high-margin the jewelry business usually is. The original Pebble should have been designed with replaceable bands like the Apple Watch. They shouldn't have said "oh hey these are standard sized bands, just buy your own!" They just surrendered revenue right out the gate!
4. Want something that's more of a general purpose extension of their smartphone.
In the long term, I don't see a huge amount of reason why smartwatches can't entirely replace the smartphone, at least for the people who aren't interested in content consumption, or to give people flexibility to leave their phone at home for evenings out or other situations.
Apple Watch does do sleep tracking. I've heard reports from people of success with just charging the Apple Watch while they're in the shower or getting ready every day. If you take something like 30 minutes to get ready you'll never need to charge the watch at night.
> I disagree with you about the concept of smartwatches that should be "thin terminals." The things I don't miss about my Pebble classic involve how basic it was.
Let me restate this. Unless the watch is a phone replacement (including just part of the time), I think it is a waste making them more expensive and more power hungry. I can agree that the use-case of not carrying my phone around would make the "fat" smartwatch reasonable (or if it tied to a 3d headset or something for better consumption - stream netflix on wifi).
> The things I don't miss about my Pebble classic involve how basic it was.
I think the Pebble classic is not a good example of what a modern low power smart watch could do -- something that could offload everything to the phone and acts just like a display and input device.
For a thin-watch, I love that even my ancient pebble classic can answer phone calls (with BT earbuds in), display text messages, and control music playing (volume/skip/pause). I get so many spam calls now, i can instantly check on my wrist if it is someone i know and silence it otherwise.
With Ive it's not the specifics, it's the trend — always thinner, always shaving away functionality, always looking to subtract something without appearing to have consulted users. Compare this to the work of the designer Ive has taken many cues from — Rams went for simplicity, but always with an eye to functionality and a user-orientation. It's the latter that's missing from Ive's designs.
It's not the specifics, it's the trend. The iMacs got thinner, sure, but the aggregate shows it is no longer their priority. The iPad Pro got thicker in the same event that unveiled the thinner iMacs. The iPhones have gotten thicker in recent years. My 2020 Macbook Air is still 2.8 pounds when ultralight PCs weigh only 2 pounds.
Yeah it's pretty baffling. Is there any designer even close to Ive? Is there any company making computers or phones that are even close in terms of aesthetic? I know that wishy-washy ideals like beauty, elegance and feel aren't that appealing to a lot of HN users but Ive's emphasis on them is a significant part of Apple's success
I don’t think critique of Ive is bashing. Design isn’t engineering, sometimes you hit an artistic wall or do it too long.
IMO the guy got bored and focused on building the museum-like HQ building and took eyes off the ball of actual products, while maintaining total control. Even for an elite, top of his field individual, you need to focus to win.
In terms of laptops, HP built some very nice high end business laptops that were more like evolutions of the 2014 MacBook Pro than the garbage Apple pumped out and wasted many millions of dollars on for warranty claims.
Design is “engineering”. Engineers design, by definition[0]. Design, contrary to popular belief is about solving problems. Industrial design in particular focuses on how things work, not just the aesthetics of an object.
[0] from the OED: a) To make drawings for the construction or creation of (something, as a building, object, garment, etc.) according to certain aesthetic criteria; (b) to make plans for the production of (a device, product, etc.) according to structural or functional criteria (sometimes without the implication of aesthetic requirements); (c) (in extended use) to conceive, devise, plan (something immaterial, as a scheme, system, programme, etc.).
Like anything, you balance the the aesthetic with the function.
When function follows form to the point where you ship say a laptop with an unserviceable keyboard that is rendered inoperable by a speck of dust, or make a smartphone surface friction similar to a stick of butter, you got a problem.
You say that like it’s a bad thing. The iMac gets an Ethernet port, and there’s one fewer cable to run up to the machine. That seems like a win all around.
Well good luck booting that iMac without that whole, you know, power cord thing.
Honestly I think that’s an inspired bit of design. It solves for Apple’s desire to keep clean lines, and, in many offices I’ve been in, the Ethernet is wired in close to the power, so it’s very functional. Win-win.
1. Lot of use cases for SD cards besides cameras. Audio recorders, notably.
2. A fair number of high-end cameras are no longer using SD cards, or at least, not exclusively; lot of CFexpress for the big boy cameras out there now. (I mean, they used to use CompactFlash cards, but it’s not like they’re gonna jam a CF card reader in there.)
you'd want an SD card reader in the brick, on the floor? that seems inconvenient. people were complaining when it moved from the side to the back of the imac.
which, honestly seems fine to me. it's likely to be running from the floor anyway, probably from a nearby place to the power outlet. one cord on the desk.
some have also mentioned potential synergy with future MacBooks, which might also adopt this port on the power brick. that could bring a magnetic connector back to laptops _and_ ethernet without a $30 dongle
Wild and unfounded speculation: I feel that the thinness of the new iMac was not an explicit design exercise, but rather a consequence of bringing the M1 over to the desktop. Because of how powerful the M1 is, they were just able to recycle the already thin laptop designs, putting them in a desktop enclosure. They couldn't do this before, because Intel mobile CPUs didn't match the performance of their desktop equivalents. And since those desktop CPUs had more demanding thermals, they couldn't make a thin iMac.
While that seems to be the case, I bet Cook, with his supply-chain focus, was very excited to save a few grams of material here and there, knowing how it adds up.
The old iMacs were also pretty thin, relatively speaking. And they did emphasize that a lot in marketing.
But they did choose to make the new iMacs thin rather than small, they could have tucked the computer part behind the display and done away with the chin, but they didn't.
So Apple appears to have been asleep at the wheel with the Mac (which is perhaps why Ive's had so much leeway with clearly unpopular decisions like the keyboard, missing escape key, etc...) resulting in its worst years ever. The laptop keyboard is one example, but the iOS-ification of the Mac is another (i.e., moving towards the iOS security model), as is the stagnate Mac Pro.
Now things are back to normal, see the M1, the new Mac Pro, the new iMac, etc...
The M1 transition going so smoothly, and with such an emphasis on backwards compatibility (they ported OpenCL! they helped with Blender!) is my favorite example of this, contrasted with the complete &$@^*% you! treatment that developers got with things like notarization, new security features, and pretty much everything recent going all the way back to Mac App Store Sandboxing, which I'd personally consider the start of the dark years (and I'd also consider that the single worst decision in all of this, worse than the keyboard, that's the one that fundamentally broke the Mac ecosystem, maybe forever).
While I don't think your analysis is wrong, I think it's highly developer and power user focused, representing a very small percentage of Mac owners.
iOS-ification of macOS in particular is incredibly overblown, power users have been playing up a few security design changes and modernized APIs (e.g. kext > system extensions) as if they're huge negatives that will "ruin" macOS. I just don't think those issues matter.
If the Mac itself improving was part of the Q2 results, you wouldn't have seen the similar levels of iPad revenue spike. There has been no significant change to the iPad lineup that would convince someone to buy or not buy in the last couple of years.
That's why I think this is 100% Covid or whatever you call this current spike in demand.
I don't think the iOS-ification is overblown at all. The fact that unsigned apps are met with increased hostility, and increased hoops to jump through to run them, demonstrates this. It's not hard to imagine in the next couple of macos releases that homebrew stops working, or requires grotesque hacks like local building/linking to escape the signing requirements.
Do we honestly think apple is going to reverse course on this? I highly doubt it. Open platforms are not their m.o. for many years. They've let the walled garden around macos have too many cracks and holes, and they're going to recapture those users that have taken advantage.
Signed apps is not iOS-ification. That's just normal, sane security practices.
Apple is not deaf to their users, they know how important Homebrew is. Apple themselves gifted hardware to the Homebrew team:
"Particular thanks on Homebrew 3.0.0 go to MacStadium and Apple for providing us with a lot of Apple Silicon hardware and Cassidy from Apple for helping us in many ways with this migration. Enjoy using Homebrew!"
- Final Cut X was a major re-write that didn't support importing old project formats for something like two years and didn't support all required video formats for the same period
- Mac Pro was abandoned, twice. Once for years before the trashcan design. Once for years after the trashcan design.
My personal theory is that Apple got better after Ive’s departure. Ive got worse after Steve Jobs died because he no longer had someone pushing back on his crazy ideas, making them practical.
The 12” MacBook was the poster child for the search for ultimate thinness. As was the disastrous butterfly keyboard (it was suggested this only shaved off 0.5mm).
Look at the iPad Pro refresh just announced. It’s actually slightly thicker because that’s needed for a better display. This would never have happened with Ive at the helm of design.
I think the difference is actually because Tim Cook doesn't care about design.
I can't find the link, but I heard when they launched the new Mac Pro, Ives tried to show Tim Cook what it looked like, but Tim responded with "I get it... its a computer", and didn't see the design until the public launch event.
Oh Force Touch, this was one of the biggest UX fails of the modern Apple era. It all goes back to one of Apple's Macintosh era fails: the one button mouse. This was one thing that can be reasonably argued (as I do) that Jobs was wrong about.
Right-clicking became so ubiquitous and even consistent on Windows. You needed the same behaviour on Macs but had no second mouse button so got that by using modifier keys. Some apps it was Option, others control and so on.
The problem was that those modified clicks had no discoverability and less consistency than right-clicking. Windows users on the other hand learned that nothing bad could happen with a right click.
Force Touch as a similar kind of UX fail with no discoverability. There was (and is) no consistency with what a Force Touch means or should mean or even if it's an option at all.
But yes, Force Touch did make the iPhone thicker and heavier.
I had a 12" Macbook, wrote code on it, it's a great computer. I had some issues with dust in the keyboard but they replaced it for free and it was fine after that. Biggest downside is that it got very hot during video calls, which wasn't as big of an issue in 2016 as it is now. That being said, during the time I had it, I spent half of my workday on calls and it wasn't a big deal.
The thinness and smallness of the computer was genuinely a very nice thing about it. You could hold it open in one hand easily, fit into any bag, didn't add any weight. Computers don't have all that much differentiating them anyway, so these things are actually a very good goal to shoot for. I'm guessing that they will probably end up bringing the form factor back with the M1 at some point.
> I had some issues with dust in the keyboard but they replaced it for free
So dust kills a keyboard that is an expensive replacement and was such a fail Apple had to replace who knows how many keyboards for free. Epic fail. That's kind of my point.
> Biggest downside is that it got very hot during video calls
Exactly. It was too underpowered. Compare that to the Macbook Air (2010 onwards, not the earlier 2008 model). This was such an awesome machine. Relatively cheap and a good compromise of power and portability. It was actually amazing how good this machine was. For years no Windows hardware could compete with that price and set of features.
But it languished for years when all it needed was more memory and a retina display and instead we got the one-port 12" Macbook abomination. All for the holy grail of thinness.
Design is the art of compromise. The 12" Macbook shows you exactly what happens when you don't compromise.
> I'm guessing that they will probably end up bringing the form factor back with the M1 at some point.
While waiting for a Macbook Air refresh my heart sank as soon as they announced the 12" Macbook. Why? Because I knew there was no room for the (then) 11" and 13" Airs with a 12" SKU. And I was right. That mistake was corrected so I don't see the 12" model coming back anytime soon with the 13" Air here and on M1.
if anything, I think that niche has been filled with the iPad (poorly). I mean there's lots of things I like my iPad for but it's no laptop replacement.
I still use mine and must say, despite being a die hard Linux person, it's one of my favorite computers ever. Silent and tiny, yet fully featured. It's great for the couch, the bed, planes, traveling, etc.
The thinness trade offs with the butterfly keyboard and USB C actually make sense for an ultraportable (as opposed to a desktop replacement like the pro).
> I had some issues with dust in the keyboard
I use a keyboard cover to get around this.
> Biggest downside is that it got very hot during video calls, which wasn't as big of an issue in 2016 as it is now.
Agreed, it's not great for video, esp. since the camera also kind of sucks.
Something to keep in mind regarding the 12" MacBook: In 2012 Intel was telling partners that 10nm would be ready by 2015. In 2014 they pushed this back to 2016. It took until mid-2016 for Intel to admit that it wouldn't be ready by the end of the year. Ice Lake wouldn't end up shipping until late 2019.
It's crazy to think about, Intel 10nm was supposed to be available for the entire butterfly/touchbar era.
I hated the butterfly keyboard, because mine failed, and a keyboard failure on my work machine is completely unacceptable. I vowed to stop buying Apple completely if they didn't fix it, and sure enough, typing this on the 16" 2020 MBP, with its classic scissor-switch keyboard, showing every sign of being just as durable as every other Apple scissor keyboard I've ever had (a considerable number).
But I don't think it's entirely fair to just call that failed experiment the pursuit of thinness at all costs. Scissors are a bit mushy, you can move your fingers around on a keypad and feel them wobble. The sound is kind of dull, the action lacks a clean tactile break.
The butterfly keyboard felt great, to me at least. Crisp, clicky action, rock-solid pads: to my taste, the tactile experience is superior. If they had found a way to make them absolutely reliable, I'd have called it a win. Although the square arrow keys and lack of a physical escape key were ergonomic disasters, that's orthogonal to keyboard action, they could have fixed both of those things while sticking with the butterfly switches.
These are ultimately aesthetic considerations. Someone else certainly prefers the sound and feel of the scissor switches, I respect that, I just disagree is all.
So I don't think shaving a half millimeter was the be-all and end-all of the decision to iterate on the ultimately unworkable butterfly keyboard design. I imagine Jony Ive thought it was a nicer keyboard and just spent more time trying to make it work than was really justified, especially since it proved to be impossible.
I agree with you here. When it worked, the butterfly keyboard was great to type on.
Was it the best on the market? Well, no, obviously not, one of the worst considering the reliability.
Is Apple's current scissor keyboard the best on the market? No, it was clearly shoehorned back in from older designs with minimal changes.
I would have loved the butterfly keyboard to have just a hair longer travel...and there was something about the key shape/spacing/size that made me slightly less accurate finding the correct keys.
It really was "almost there" but they had to throw it out because it was a PR disaster.
It seems the fixation on 'thinness' has continued with the new iMac release. They chose to keep a big chin on the iMac in order to make the all-in-one desktop computer extremely thin. I don't see any value in extreme thinness as a potential iMac consumer. I would be more interested in a cleaner design when looking directly at the computer. :)
I will add that I have no real idea about Ive's design leanings. I guess it is possible to conclude that either he wasn't the driving force behind "extreme thinness" or he managed to convert people inside of Apple to this way of thinking and they still remain influential.
A lot if not all is due to Covid. All the big techs have had stellar quarters. Google, FB or AMD also reported massive results this week. The world is stuck at home and has been starved for hardware and content.
This is very common for companies with holiday-linked or time-linked sales. It's much easier to make your big chunk of sales in Q1 (October-December for Apple), then have the rest of your fiscal year to spend that money. Getting all your revenue in Q4 is much harder to budget around.
A number of people have already pointed out that a corporate fiscal quarter doesn't necessarily align with the calendar year. There are assorted benefits to this, usually around the seasonality of income. Some companies with multiple sub-corporations may choose to have differing fiscal years for all the corporations which can somehow create a tax advantage (although beats me how that works). It's interesting to note also that there's a (smallish) tax disadvantage to not aligning with the calendar year in that typically tax brackets adjust upward from year to year and having a non-calendar fiscal year means that income might be taxed at a slightly higher rate since the tax rate is based on the year the fiscal calendar begins. At large corporation scale, this difference amounts to a rounding error.
In addition to what others have said, a ton of companies don't even align their fiscal quarters with calendar quarters. This is especially widespread in the SaaS sector, where companies normally go Feb 1 - April 30, May 1 - July 31 and so on.
M1 is a very impressive chip, but it can't compete with the Threadripper/Xeon club. It really has trouble with the high-end laptop club too.
You can say "16gb is enough if you swap efficiently", but I run models that need 100+GB on the regular. I'd love to see what a super high-end Apple core can do to that workload!
But we haven’t seen what they can really do yet. The M1 sure “feels” like an iPad SoC, what with the weirdness with some of the ports and bus limitations. (External displays: little off-kilter right now in terms of limitations.)
I’m optimistic they are preparing some real firepower for a 30-inch iMac and 16-inch MacBook Pro. Or at least, I sure hope so, as I type here, looking at this damned useless OLED strip above my keyboard as my leg hairs are slowly burned away.
Well, that’s why I’m curious where it goes from here. I don’t think Apple is under the impression that 16 GiB of RAM is enough to phase out their entire line-up of Intel-based computers, which is apparently the goal. All eyes are definitely going towards what the higher end machines will look like. It’s easy to doubt them, but it was also pretty easy to doubt their claims regarding the M1, too.
All in all, I think it’s impossible to draw any hard conclusions from here. We all have to wait and see.
"I am in the 0.0001% of the people that need 100+Gb ram", so it seems this massive hit of a cpu/laptop, where everyone is raving about it, is not so good when I compare it to what I need that are thousands of a percent of what regular people use.
I'm a developer, I bought the M1 mbp with 8 (yes eight) gb of ram, for testing and was supposed to then be my gf's machine. You know what, almost 6 months in, she still hasn't touched it. I would maybe go for 16gb in the next one, but she will pry it from my cold dead hands before I get a newer model and she can keep this one.
I'm a dev that loathes that work always gets me a macbook.
I bought an M1 for my partner and they aren't using it. I am. The battery life is incredible and it feels snappier than the macbook pro I have for work.
> M1 is a very impressive chip, but it can't compete with the Threadripper/Xeon club.
Looks at fanless M1 MacBook Air, with 14+ damn hours of battery life in my real-world use
I mean... OK? My minivan isn't an aircraft carrier, either.
> It really has trouble with the high-end laptop club too.
If you're memory-constrained or doing something with GPU, that might be true. Otherwise, benchmarks plz. And again, high-end laptop... looks at big desktop-replacement laptops, then back over at tiny little fanless MacBook Air
I was looking to buy a m1 Mac mini but went with Intel only because I need 32gb ram and apple for some reason only offers up to 16gb on Mac mini.
I bought the Intel one with 8gb and manually upgraded it to 32gb. The m1 can’t be upgraded manually which is a bummer (but makes sense as that’s what makes it even faster).
I wish running multiple iOS and Android simulators didn’t need so much memory.
I'm interested in the same question but from the opposite point of view: with the M1 a resounding success, is there a need for M2 through 5 to be a huge improvement? Asides from marketing.
My daily driver is a 2015 Macbook Pro. My iPhone is a 2016(?) 6S. My iPad is the original Air. I'd be happy to upgrade but for someone who lives in Books, Safari and Excel all day, they all work fine. I just can't justify it.
The M1 equivalents are leaps and bounds faster and there are plenty of people who need that power and more but... will 99.995% of Apple users notice further upgrades? Where do we go from here? What's the future of personal computing?
(Fingers crossed for lightweight fully immersive no wires VR in five years)
Apple is generally about two things: incremental improvement and the complete package. This lets them diversify the yearly 'wow' upgrades across many components: cpu, graphics, camera, display, IO, battery, chassis, etc, based on whichever step changes reach maturity that year.
For instance, this year is not only the year of the M1 but also the Mini-LED ('XDR') displays we see on the new iPad Pro. 1000nits (peak 1600) is a massive improvement as is the improved contrast.
Meanwhile users are on their own personal replacement cycle (say 2-4 years for phone, 3-6 years for iPad and Mac). So by the time the user is thinking about replacing their device, there's several years of accrued changes across many/most components that make the latest device really compelling.
You're right that at this point all the Apple devices have at least a good 5-6 years of 'works fine' in them. But this fall when you go to look at a new MacBook Pro and it's got an XDR screen and an M2 chip that together have you 3-5x screen brightness (vs your 2015's 300nits), 3-5x graphics, 2-3x cpu, 2-3x battery life, better webcam, etc, all compared to your slowly wearing out macbook... that'd look pretty darn enticing to anyone.
As for the future? At some point component capabilities (like cpu/gpu perf per watt) reaches a point when entire new categories are unlocked, like AR/VR or computational photography effects, but those have to be incremented to as the pace of component progress allows.
I think you're generally right but bizarrely I'm dreading the day when I have to replace my stuff. I love my phone's TouchID, size and headphone jack. And my Macbook was peak touchpad/keyboard (I actually bought a 2019 and resold it within days). Here's to hoping good stuff lasts 10 years.
Apple will keep innovating; for a long period there their A-series chips were more than an iteration ahead of the comparable Snapdragon, but they never slowed down.
I'm sure they'll increase the graphics performance and make NVIDIA-level GPUs at some point, probably to drive VR/AR. Maybe they'll try to take the premium server market too (e.g. Graviton for non-cloud offerings).
I’m assuming Intel processors even at the scale Apple buy them go for $50-100 of the retail price, maybe more? I’m guessing whatever they’re paying Intel it’s fractions on the dollar producing them through TSMC.
“This quarter reflects both the enduring ways our products have helped our users meet this moment in their own lives, as well as the optimism consumers seem to feel about better days ahead for all of us,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO.
What a skilfully crafted piece of rhetoric that is. For a moment, I forgot I was in the gutter and imagined we were all united, looking at the stars.
Looking at this makes me wish companies lie like Apple didn’t get into services. They will do it because there is a lot of money to be made but it creates a lot of incentive to force their services deeply into the OS and reduce openness. It would be much better for innovation if Apple produced good hardware and OS as a platform for others to deliver services and application software.
"Services" doesn't solely mean "subscription services." Apple's cut of app-store app sales is "services" revenue; as are individual songs/TV shows/movies sold through iTunes. Nothing inherently wrong with those lines of business, IMHO.
Agreed. The fact that there is a little banner in my settings app that says "Apple Arcade 3 months available free" annoys me. In fact, it creeps me out. Obviously that little banner is easy to ignore and on its own it's no big deal, but it feels like a yellow flag like if a friend jokingly hints that they really need a glass of wine in the morning, and you know that their social circle is full of alcoholics.
You have ads in your settings screen? Can you please share a screenshot? I've never seen anything similar and I can't find examples online. If this is coming, I am very disappointed.
This has been my major concern since 2018. When it was clear their vision of "Service" Revenue is something different to what I had in mind.
In 2014 I thought the Services Revenue Growth will be coming from bundling of iPhone + iCloud + AppleCare+ in subscription like services. Sort of like the current iPhone upgrade programme, with upsell of other things like Apple Music, Netflix or HBO where they get some sort of commissions. ( Similar to current App Store sign up commission ). Using something like Apple Credit Card ( that was long rumoured and somehow only launched in 2019 ) where Apple could afford to have revenue spread over a much longer period of time all while increases iPhone affordability. Think 36 Months instead of the usual 24 months. Apple has too much cash on hand and this delayed account receivable is something that could be used to Apple's advantage.
Instead they went with AppleTV+, Apple News+ Apple Fitness+, Apple PodCast+, Apple Arcade, and bundling them into ONE all to dilute their $10+Billion Annual raw profits from having Google as default search engine. I mean what's next? "Apple Bank" because their Hardware features and customer data which Apple do collect so they can provide better Banking services? "Apple Insurance" because Apple Watch provides Data to Apple and Apple cant share to other for privacy reason? Apple Cars with special design U1 integration of whatever that only works with Apple Find My Network? And "Apple Taxi" once Apple figure out how to do LV5 AV?
This is not Steves-Apple. This is very Tim Cook's Apple.
The most interesting graph there is quarterly revenue for iPhone. This quarter and the last are nearly equal, which is the first time that's ever happened. Every other year they had one great quarter (Release/Christmas) and the rest were just really good. But this year they had two great iPhone quarters in a row.
The Pro line was very popular and didn't ship as quickly as the regular iPhone. That had to defer at least a portion of that demand to the next quarter.
I think schools probably bought a bunch. They handed them out to all of the elementary students in the districts around here, and I'd be surprised if they regularly kept enough iPads around for every student plus spares.
China was going all in with 5G ( due to population density and all sort of other reason ). So 5G iPhone as an upgrade was extremely popular. If I remember correctly China currently has 60% of WorldWide 5G Cell Site installation. They are basically upgrading as fast as they could.
Good grief, Q2 profit higher than all previous quarters through 2020!
That company is a money-making operation that doesn't even seem to slow down. This worries me, as that seems like it inevitably leads to pursuit of profit over all else, to the detriment of everybody but shareholders.
I'd argue its the opposite: If you do something really really well then the money follows. Apple products come at a premium, but you can't deny the fact they also offer substantially more in many ways than their counterparts.
There is no basis for this assumption. Under your model there is no way for a company to overachieve and continue doing right by their customers. A bit pessimistic.
332 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 270 ms ] threadIt's remarkable to see the success that AMD and Apple are having without Intel.
Does Apple have equivalents of those features? Discover Weekly is incredible.
I have a suspicion that if I'd actually paid for Spotify and stuck with it for a few years, though, the reverse would be true. My gut feeling is that these two services just aren't different enough in practice to make switching between them worth it for most users, unless they want a feature in the larger ecosystem (e.g., AirPlay 2 or Spotify Connect).
My musical preferences did not lend themselves well to Spotify’s discovery, I don’t think, and Apples has been a similar experience. Both have been ok, but neither stellar.
Switched to spotify and it has all worked better and the recommendations are better.
Last year they updated it and removed the Android widget completely - we absolutely revolted blasting them with 1 star reviews, etc. They timed it with the launch of their India service so I have this theory that they knew they'd lose a bit of customers (they had no idea how many Android use widgets apparently) and negative reviews would come in but replace them with revenue/reviews from India which knocked their stars right back up.
Literally same day. I don't like the company because of things like that but it's still IMO the best music service. I'm using Tidal as well for its hifi/masters now.
I'm not the only one
But the alternative for Maps is Google, and the last thing I want to do is give them a bead on my current location and all the places I want to go and explore. With Google's ownership of so much information, I think anybody avoiding Google Maps is very well justified.
However, in the early days of Google Maps, when MapQuest was still around and before cars had in-dash navigation, Google Maps did give me bad directions for driving, that I had printed out, and made me late. I still ended up using Google Maps, and they got better.
I will still use Google Maps to discover biking routes in unfamiliar areas, so I do give up my location to them occasionally, but in my experience that's the only edge that Google Maps has these days.
What is masterful is how they redirected the desirable-number-du-jour to be something that is both 1) proprietary and 2) not cutting into their service revenue (e.g. larger storage = less people shelling out for cloud storage)
Don't take my word, look it up.
Around launch date, everyone in the universe will post "new MacBook Air is by far the best laptop I've ever used. It has fantastic battery life". Then the same model 6-12mo later "I loved the thinness, but now it's being too slow for X so I might get a macbook"
The air has had great battery for a while that's true, but now it has great battery and great performance.
For one short year, in 2020, due to the ARM transition, Apple repeated that feat. It could keep on going, if for example, the refresh of the Macbook Air comes out in 2022 and beats the Pro machines that came out in 2021.
Form factor basically same, screen the same, OS the same, yet somehow the qualitative feel changes with the new responsiveness. I don't switch to any Mac other than the M1 now except of necessity because of the instant ability to feel the downgrade.
Not just marketing speak. If they can keep up this momentum with M2, etc... they'll be creating some defensive moats around their laptop/desktop business.
Edit: typo
You got me until this point ngl
Sure, the accessoires and e.g ram are steeply overpriced
14 years later: base iMac has two ports (three more + ethernet will cost you $200).
Not that it's lousy, but it's definitely stripped down.
Examples
- first iPhone doesn’t support MMS
- cut the headphone plug in new iPhones
- stop supporting Adobe Flash
- load apps through the App Store only in iOS
Abandonment of the floppy drive.
Abandonment of the CD drive.
Abandonment of Firewire.
They are doing well in hardware and services. Software, not so much. Design they have gone downhill.
I mean, maybe compared to Apple 2011. But compared to Microsoft 2021, Google 2021, Linux 2021, Android 2021, HP 2021, Lenovo 2021, Dell 2021? They're definitely on top.
Which ain’t exciting, but, the rotting corpse of Compaq over there in the corner stands as warning of what could have been.
Ups and downs. The M1 iMac is very interesting. I am not sure I love it but it is encouraging to see some more playful design and new approaches.
Seems Jobs was bang on with wanting Tim Cook as his successor.
Oh yes. Jobs could be stubborn and did make mistakes every now and then. The first iMac mouse was another ergonomic and reliability disaster.
But you know what Tim Cook didn’t do? He didn’t screw it all up. Which sounds like faint praise, but I really think it’s inarguable that Jobs remade Apple, stem to stern, blood to bone, software to hardware. And to step in and take over a company that had been reborn like that, and not nickel-and-dime it into mediocrity? Remarkable.
I don’t think anyone is really arguing Cook is a product visionary—I certainly don’t think Cook is himself. But just navigating the political landscape alone is truly impressive.
In the 70s, components were expensive and thus the market was mainframes and big company sales, so required a sales leader to extract the most, and the product could be average (like IBM, HP).
In the early 80s, components were getting cheap enough to be affordable by regular people, so a product leader was needed to define the personal computing sector, as the product could not be average (not Commodore, TI, or IBM PC).
In the late 80s - 90s, commoditization meant it was about capturing the value of the personal computing sector, so it required a sales leader to extract the most, and the product could just be average (like Windows, beige PCs).
In the late 90s - 00s, it became cheap enough to start internet companies at scale and opened up an entire market, so it required product leaders to define the core internet offerings of cloud, social media, search, and ecommerce, and the product couldn't be average (not Yahoo, Myspace, or co-lo ISPs).
In the mid 00s, components were getting small & powerful enough, so it required a product leader to define the mobile computing sector, and the product couldn't be average (not Nokia, Blackberry, Win Phone).
In the 10s - now, with mobile and internet now defined, it required sales leaders to extract the most and the product could be average (like Android).
Jobs was a success when product vision was necessary (early 80s, late 90s-00s), and a failure when it was not (late 80s-90s).
Ballmer was a success when sales/extraction was necessary (90s) but a failure when it was not (the 00s), as I consider not leveraging a leading market position into multiple adjacent trillion dollar business sectors a failure.
Cook has been a success for the past decade because the market really needed someone to execute well on the things that were just defined (mobile devices). According to the above theory, it should have been the decade of Android, but Apple's execution has been so much more competent than Google's that they ran away with it.
I agree. However, he is a master at providing the infrastructure and logistics to make other people realise their vision. And he does have a long-term plan.
The scale and efficiency of Apple’s operations, as well as their continued success is mind boggling. There have been a couple of hiccups every now and then (and some tours de force as well); overall it is quite impressive.
It reminds me of Macs back in the 90’s. Very few used Windows for creative work. The MacOS had ColorSync and professionals in photography and print, publishing, etc refused to use anything but a Mac due to the need for colour accuracy in their workflows. To an outsider it may have seemed baffling as to why these computers were considered professional tools when everyone else in business was using Windows.
I perhaps don’t see the Pro in iPad Pro because I am wanting it to basically be a Mac, but tablet. Maybe it is truly an orthogonal product that does pro work differently. But the software story just still feels incomplete. Just feels so limiting in terms of file system and such.
The iPad Pro is a pro device for creative professionals in visual arts only, to my knowledge. It’s definitely not a pro software development tool or anything else of the sort we’d use a Mac for. In some sense you can think of the iPad Pro as an attack on Wacom’s market.
I’m not a creative pro by any stretch of the imagination. I use my iPad Pro for tutoring people remotely in mathematics, a task it excels at. I also play some games on it and use it for FaceTime calls because its front-facing camera is nicer than the one on my M1 MBA.
I’m really happy with my iPad Pro even though I was hesitant about buying one for over a year. I was expecting buyers’ remorse to set in but it thankfully hasn’t. I keep finding new things to do with it. Scrolling through PDFs on the device is way smoother than the MBA, for example, so I’ve used it as a second screen for reading documentation while working.
(I will note my college illustration professor loves her iPad Pro with a passion that would fill an Apple keynote—she ditched her Wacom instantly.)
But though I’m iffy on the Pro in iPad, I am pro iPad, if only because my somewhat elderly parents love the thing. They are like some Platonic ideal of iPad users—they have totally and completely ditched their Mac, and do all their banking and medical records and weather (old people love weather) on their iPad, with a fluency they never, ever came close to achieving with a mouse.
Folks on HN have a strong tendency to label any computer-thing not serving that last use case, for which the iPad Pro is it no help at all, as a toy or "just a consumption device" (not saying you are, but it's a common sentiment on here). It's a kind of occupation-induced blindness, I think.
Oh I am 100% guilty of that, and I admit that. I have been using Photoshop in some capacity since 1994, and I am 37 years old. So that “teeny tiny click targets and lots of keyboard chording” is just baked into the interaction homunculus in my head. It is admittedly difficult to for me to think of an iPad as a “Pro” tool.
A blind spot I am working on, but once you get to be my age, you get set in your ways. You kids and your TikTok…
I pay $2.99 a month for 200GB of iCloud, and what I get in return is a folder on my desktop which is shared between phone, tablet, and laptop. It "just works", I have no complaints. I'd be paying that money anyway just to back up my photos.
The other way of doing things is the 'share' button, and when it works, it's really great. Sometimes it doesn't, because the app I want to use next hasn't registered itself properly or something, so I have to use Save to Files as a fallback. Which is fine and has never failed me.
I get that.
But.
Having used many iPads, my favorite sizes are the 12.9" (Pro) and the Mini.
Why (for the pro—I trust my love of the mini needs little explanation)?
The 12.9" is so big that it's about the size of an 8.5x11" sheet of paper, which turns out to be a really convenient size for reading anything based on... paper. It's outstanding for reading PDFs of, say, textbooks, as it's large enough you might be able to get away with reading it in landscape, and is the best device I'm aware of for reading comics (ditto on the landscape mode, it works great, it's just a little smaller than a real two-page comic book spread). Yet it's light enough not to be a giant pain to hold.
It's amazing for art (with a Pencil). Nice and big, very responsive. The larger screen makes almost anything you'd do on a normal iPad a little better. Movies, browsing, games. Low-distraction writing device with an external keyboard. It's a great companion for music where, again, the larger size is really nice for displaying sheet music or... well, almost anything else music-related you want to do. Last I checked the cameras & mics beat the hell out of most laptops, including Apple ones, for video calls.
Know what it's very close in size to? A 13" MBP or Air. Know what it can do? Become a portable external monitor for same. Damn nice.
2-player board games. Again, the size helps a ton.
My personal uses barely call for all the extra horsepower of the "pro" line, actually, aside from maybe drawing (which, AFAIK, has more to do with specialized hardware on the screen than with CPU power or memory) but holy crap, the screen size. It's glorious. If I could have only one computing device in my house I'd seriously consider making it the 12.9" iPad Pro (assuming I could keep my mechanical bluetooth keyboard, too). I can always SSH/Mosh to a unixy command line somewhere else, but none of my unixy machines are much good for most of what I use the iPad Pro for.
Of course, the Mac is some insignificant portion of the Apple's footprint these days, but I have to say their mobile offerings have been kind of a yawn too. Don't get me wrong, perfectly competent, no need to switch or anything, but iPod to iPhone happened in 6 years (!), and I don't think the Apple Watch is anywhere near that level of consistent culture defining technology that kind of defined "the spirit of Apple" from the original iMac to the iPhone (I'd like to say "to the iPad", but unfortunately the product has been kind relegated to a side purchase vs. the Mac-replacement I think it honestly had the opportunity to be -- and I guess could still be, its not like any "window" has been missed, just hasn't really done much in the last 10 years either, in terms of definitive changes in workflow like the iPhone did).
As a customer, the subscription stuff is honestly just somewhere between boring and annoying. "Apple One" with its 3 different plans and still tremendously confusing options (if I let my parents have access to the movies I've purchased, they can no longer buy their own movies -- what? why? It's strictly more profitable for Apple to let them ALSO use their credit card instead of locking them out of being able to make their own purchases just because I shared my content). Honestly, I have to strain really hard to remember what "Apple One" includes aside from Apple TV+. Oh right, News or something? The ability to not get annoying iCloud space errors that users remain not fully comprehending?
Now, flip that around, and investor-wise, you are spot on! I am LONG $AAPL, just short Apple products (software specifically). Which is unfortunate, because they are still probably the best, just no longer... "good". It used to feel like a premium experience, for a premium price, now just the latter.
Apple can be seen as an excellent MBA course in operations, as probably to be expected. I'm not going to say Steve was a all knowing genius, but it's a pretty dang smart move to put someone in place who will put the company on such firm economical footing while you wait for your next big thing (person) to emerge from the organization.
> Those keyboards were really bad, and not everyone has the ability to just swap them out with the new fancy computers coming out now, so many will be feeling them for some time to come.
The butterfly keyboards are the only laptop keyboards made to date that I can type on for a full day. So speak for yourself: long may I be “stuck” with mine.
In a sense, they are diluting their products.
Remember the apocryphal story that when Jobs came back to Apple, he split a whiteboard into four quadrants and listed just one product in each?
Now Apple has several dozen products. And each category is anywhere from 1 to 4 different products often with differences so minor as to not make any sense (iPhone 12 Pro vs iPhone 12 Pro Max, the difference is slight size increase and cameras, that's it; or iPhone 12 Pro vs iPhone 12; there are four different iPads; etc.)
Apple looks like it's trying to cover every niche, and often does that semi-satisfactorily.
Slightly tangential: they've completely dropped the ball on MacOS software side: there hasn't been a good software release from them literally for years. The only exception is the new Messages in BigSur, and they spent untold hours in close collaboration with the Catalyst team to make it work. Almost every other new first-party app from Apple on MacOS for years has been an unmitigated disaster that has never seen a designer in a vicinity and that breaks any version of Apple's own HIG guidelines.
That said, it could've been much much much worse. So, count our blessings :)
He showed that during keynotes (I remember he used that to unveil the first iBook).
The situation then was a bit different, though. Apple needed to be much more focused and had fewer resources to throw at new devices. They also needed a clean break from the past and could not start from scratch 10 different product lines. But Jobs himself did away with the 2x2 matrix, for example with the eMac and the Cube. The 12’’, 15’’, and 17’’ PowerBooks used the same name, but the differences were more significant than between the various iPhones 12.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone#Models
I think if we peeled back the facade, we can begin to see that it's been an operations play since Jobs died, and though the M1 is pretty dang amazing, what probably brought it over the line is the insane profit margins and 'upcylcing' Mac sales for folks having a M1 vs M3, etc...
But as everyone here has said - it could have been worse.
Under Jobs, they would regularly create whole new categories and concepts of technology and revolutionize others. I don't recall it happening since; they capitalize on everything that was created under Jobs (and do it well).
AAPL is up 3% after hours (so $60bn or so)
The markets trade on whisper numbers, which are what people with skin in the game are expecting. This is why you often see a name that beats estimates and drops...it’s because they missed the whisper numbers.
The designs seem to make a bit more sense now, I was always perplexed at Ive's 'thinness at the expense of everything else' mindset (butterfly switch keyboard, ugh)
Yes, Ive was a bit of a farce. Under Jobs he flourished. Without guidance from Jobs he proved to be comically bad. It will take years for Apple to recover from the damage he did. For example, copying Flat-UI from Windows Phone. Apple hasn't recovered yet.
I mean, he did basically design the Apple Watch which has been an absolute runaway success, the most successful new entire product category since the iPhone.
So not exactly sure how that's comically bad.
I don't think that any of this is due to the design either.
Finding product-market fit for health is a separate issue -- that's not the design department's job.
Ive's job was to design a brand-new smartwatch from scratch and he and his team knocked it out of the park.
I noticed in the early 2000s, and it has held true ever since: don't bother getting the first three iterations of a new Apple product unless you're well and truly enthusiastic about it. They always iterate, it always gets better, and the fourth go around is generally when I'll be happy with it.
One which I thought was too cool to pass up was AirPods, and yeah the first generation were really special and I'm glad I got them. The wireless case in the second generation was a nice bump, and the AirPods Pro (gen 3) are a clear improvement in every way. I did get a pair from the bad batch which started having problems with noice cancellation, but the replacement process was pretty smooth: so I conclude that if I wasn't in a hurry, the next generation, the fourth, would be "insanely great" and the right time to buy.
Not sure about that.
I was impressed by how Apple-y the Apple Watch was, especially before the first software update. I am convinced this is due to Steve Jobs' influence [1]. As soon as the first software update was released I noticed a marked decline, much like the decline we saw in iOS 7.
[1] https://www.cultofmac.com/427636/steve-jobs-may-have-influen...
If you notice people complaining about something in numbers, there's a reason for it.
There were people who held out for years because MacBook Pro designs were anti-consumer and people held out for compromise. I know I did. Everyone I know did. It wasn't some niche. There's an entire professional class that relies on good tooling.
The idea that Ive has somehow fundamentally damaged Apple's business in a way that they've yet to recover from when they've just had an almost $90bn quarter is .... just wrong.
(And anyway they've fixed the keyboard and Mac sales are up hugely).
MacBook Pro keyboard.
It didn’t work out that way. High performance Thunderbolt peripherals like eGPUs were slow to develop, for reasons outside of Apple’s control. They thought you’d soon be able to buy the latest GPUs in external enclosures as well as internal cards, the way you can hard drives. Didn’t happen.
It’s a good example of a big bet from Apple that didn’t move the whole computer industry. Eventually Apple threw in the towel and went back to the traditional big box case for a pro machine.
Option is Alt. Used to modify some keyboard shortcuts like the above, sometimes on its own, and often used to type in alternate characters than standard on your keyboard (Option+e e gives you an accented e).
Control is honestly something I use often outside the terminal on macOS. I think Control+<left/right arrow key> gets you linear navigation with multiple full screen windows or multiple desktops. It probably does more, I don't know.
Windows and Linux (desktop and server) user for ~15 years before getting my first Mac (at work) around 2011 (DOS user even earlier). Other keyboard+OS combos are so frustrating now. Not in the "this is unfamiliar" way macOS was initially, but in a "I know this and the Apple way now, and this is worse, why the hell do you keep doing this, and not either just copy Apple or come up with something even better?" way.
Point is: you'll get used to it, and probably like it. But you might permanently be slightly irritated when using anything else, afterward.
(Try Spectacle, or something similar, if you want somewhat better window layout management from the keyboard. It's in Homebrew. It's pretty much the only OS-behavior-modifying thing I install on Mac—my other tweaks are just in the settings GUI, mostly just making CAPS lock an extra ctrl. The default spectacle shortcuts are a bit wild, but 95% of what I use is just split-half-screen left, split-half-screen right, and fullscreen, and it'd be worth using if you never used any others)
In fact, I just checked out of curiosity, and I move 2 fingers very slightly to cmd+c, while doing (standard) ctrl+c I move every joint up my arm, including my shoulder, and all my fingers (as I reposition my whole hand, so the fingers all flex, flattening so my pinky can hit the ctrl)
Again, caps-as-control makes it much better, but I can still feel more strain than the very natural almost-pinching motion of cmd+c. I don't know how much of this was intentional when the Apple keyboard was designed and shortcuts chosen, but it's a real effect regardless.
Huh? If anything, everybody and their dog were yelling at Apple against the non-flat "skeuomorphic" UI at the time they made the switch.
And while the first version was undercooked, the current (and 2-3 years) iteration of the flat UI is just fine...
It turns out everyone did want to do that, and in fact iPhones weren't big enough, so the flat UI was designed to take the same device and make it look bigger and brighter.
Huh?
So maybe you could enlighten us without being, you know, a jerk about it.
As the grantparent said, noone at Apple ever claimed so.
The device was small anyway in actual life (no need to "make it look small"), skeuomorphic vs flat has nothing to do with making a device appear smaller or bigger, iPad and even OS X also used skeuomorphism (so it wasn't a size concern), and Ive never said anything to that effect. The whole idea doesn't even make sense.
As for what Ive actually said, citing real-life metaphors and familiarity as the reasons (for the skeuomorphic design):
“When we sat down last November (to work on iOS 7), we understood that people had already become comfortable with touching glass, they didn’t need physical buttons, they understood the benefits,” says Ive. “So there was an incredible liberty in not having to reference the physical world so literally. We were trying to create an environment that was less specific. It got design out of the way.”
And Scott Forstall said the same:
"If you look at the designs we did at Apple, we talked about photo illustrative designs, metaphorical designs. And those were infused into the design sense of Apple by Steve Jobs since the original Mac if not earlier. The original Mac had a desktop and folders that looked very much like the desktop on which that Mac sat. And so we used these design philosophies".
- for the first x years of apple, everything was legitimately thick
- so each generation Ive wanted to make things thinner
- it entered the culture (of the design division perhaps) that you had to make each generation thinner than the last to please Ive
- Then when things got to a comfortable thickness for users, people kept making each generation thinner to please Ive
- Ive never told them to stop making things thinner so they didn't stop.
- snowball effect and we got those horrible products
- he had to leave to stop the cycle
In general I think this is less of an issue today, since usb-C is both generally great and very small, so you can just use it. But, if thinness came at the sacrifice of common connectors like USB-A (or like HDMI), the opportunity cost of standard connectors might be lost.
I'm ignoring that like many of apple's ports are just better than USB-A to focus only on the waste argument here though.
Apple's software support for all their devices lasts much longer than the competition, and their hardware tends to last many years out of warranty. Not always of course, but this is a numbers game, and there is a robust secondary market in everything Apple makes.
Objectively, a laptop, phone, or tablet, will have a longer service life if manufactured by Apple, than anyone else, with the possible exception of ThinkPads.
Sure, if you want more RAM or what have you, you have to buy a new computer and sell the old one. That's expensive, but all that matters with respect to the environment is total service life of a given machine, and again, as an objective matter, Apple is peerless there.
It's tempting to compare this record against imaginary competition which doesn't exist, but I don't see the point.
An apple device with upgradeable parts would be even better for the environment. Apple's software support has no effect on the environmental impact of non upgradeable computers compared to upgradeable computers.
That's true for mobile products.
On desktop no one beats Microsoft's support time spans. Apple cares significantly less for desktop longevity.
> - he had to leave to stop the cycle
Or, you know, correct people on their misinterpretation of his desires, if indeed there was any.
I'm trying real hard to not see this comment as some sort of Apple logic distortion field showing itself in an overt manner, but not having much luck.
To be fair, Apple acknowledged the problem and provides free out-of-warranty repair/replacement for keyboard issues on the affected models. But it took them years to come out with a better keyboard.
Obviously dramatic over simplification but it doesn’t seem to be the usual kind of thin for the sake of thin design - this iMac seems objectively better than its predecessors and its thickness (or lack thereof) doesn’t seem like a problem or unnecessary constraint.
Again, they don’t have to solve the mobile/tablet issues on this product, it’s never going to be a portable device.
They made a trade-off to make it look uglier/bulkier/worse from the front when actually using the machine, just so that if you happen to glimpse it from the side it's a little thinner. There's not even the argument of portability to support the pursuit of thinness here as with most of their other devices. So I would argue the opposite, this new iMac is just about the pinnacle of thinness for the sake of thin design.
(You could of course argue that it's not ugly, that's totally subjective, but they clearly went out of their way to make it as thin as possible).
They will always be two different use cases, desktop/mobile.
You need some balance. The key is to produce the best looking product without compromising functionality or usability.
Not sure how that has anything to do with the parent's argument.
It wasn't usable for the majority of the market. Even in the infamous mea culpa Apple made about it, they admitted they designed themselves into a corner. It was designed so poorly, they had to take years to undo it after admitting it needed to be done.
GP was complaining about the common and incorrect trope that design is limited to aesthetics.
In theory.
In practice, designers design for two things: market demand, and personal predilection.
I don’t really get the Jony Ive hate. The only particularly bad thing I can think of him being involved in was the butterfly keyboard, and the fact that the Apple Watch is the only real success among smart watches more than makes up for that.
Offer not valid if I do an hour of exercise during the day, or game heavily (I've been known to zone out on 2048 pretty hardcore), but for normal use, sure.
Apple Watch isn't trying to be anything other than a charge-daily device, it's honestly kind of incredible that something that small can be a full-fledged cell phone and still last a full day.
Never owned an Apple Watch so can’t compare but I really like my Garmin. It is a little large though so not everyone’s cup of tea. Smaller versions probably last a bit shorter.
It should be noted that Garmin's battery life drops to 36 hours (fenix 6) once GPS mode is on, which is comparable to the Apple Watch.
Long battery life is a lot less important in this category than you'd think. You throw your watch on your night stand every night and forget about it.
How do you wake up then? One of the biggest advantages of my pebble classic is that i can wear it to bed and have vibrate mode wake me up silently.
For exercise, i already have my phone on me, so it tracks everything for me and the pebble shows stats on the watchface.
I think we've lost something by not treating the "smart watches" as thin terminals.
It charges pretty quickly; quickly enough in my experience that even if I forget to charge it one day and I find it dead at an inconvenient time, I can usually throw it in a charger for long enough to get through the rest of the day without much inconvenience. I’ve had my series 5 for about 18 months and in that time, only once have I had it die on me when I was trying to use it.
If I ever go back to working in an office, my use pattern might change, but for the most part I think the inconvenience of charging daily is overstated.
Edit: It also will notify you 1 hour before your configured bedtime if it doesn’t have enough juice to get through the night. I thought this was silly when they announced it but in practice it is great.
As of right now I usually don't use an alarm to wake up. I just wake up. Or I use a standard audio alarm on the phone. But I guess that's kind of a cop-out answer?
The vibration alarm was nice, not a must-have considering I had to wear something around my wrist when I slept: not as comfortable as not doing that.
I disagree with you about the concept of smartwatches that should be "thin terminals." The things I don't miss about my Pebble classic involve how basic it was.
I can totally understand someone wanting much more of a basic device with time, fitness tracking, basic notifications, long battery life, and that's about it. However, I think that in the scope of what is marketable to the general public, it's a more of a niche.
I think that most people:
1. Don't actually want to sleep with any jewelry (watches) on.
2. Aren't deep into fitness tracking beyond the basics, i.e. they wouldn't sleep with jewelry on just to get sleep tracking. For most people fitness tracking means a few graphs and figures that make them feel good about themselves for getting on a treadmill for 20 minutes.
3. Choose their watch based on the fact that it's a piece of jewelry. In my mind, Apple gained a lot of early traction (and high-margin revenue) by focusing on the fashion part of it with the way the bands are easily changeable.
Pebble wouldn't have folded if they had considered how high-margin the jewelry business usually is. The original Pebble should have been designed with replaceable bands like the Apple Watch. They shouldn't have said "oh hey these are standard sized bands, just buy your own!" They just surrendered revenue right out the gate!
4. Want something that's more of a general purpose extension of their smartphone.
In the long term, I don't see a huge amount of reason why smartwatches can't entirely replace the smartphone, at least for the people who aren't interested in content consumption, or to give people flexibility to leave their phone at home for evenings out or other situations.
Apple Watch does do sleep tracking. I've heard reports from people of success with just charging the Apple Watch while they're in the shower or getting ready every day. If you take something like 30 minutes to get ready you'll never need to charge the watch at night.
> I disagree with you about the concept of smartwatches that should be "thin terminals." The things I don't miss about my Pebble classic involve how basic it was.
Let me restate this. Unless the watch is a phone replacement (including just part of the time), I think it is a waste making them more expensive and more power hungry. I can agree that the use-case of not carrying my phone around would make the "fat" smartwatch reasonable (or if it tied to a 3d headset or something for better consumption - stream netflix on wifi).
> The things I don't miss about my Pebble classic involve how basic it was.
I think the Pebble classic is not a good example of what a modern low power smart watch could do -- something that could offload everything to the phone and acts just like a display and input device.
For a thin-watch, I love that even my ancient pebble classic can answer phone calls (with BT earbuds in), display text messages, and control music playing (volume/skip/pause). I get so many spam calls now, i can instantly check on my wrist if it is someone i know and silence it otherwise.
They just reached a useful minimum, I don't think it has anything to do with Ive.
IMO the guy got bored and focused on building the museum-like HQ building and took eyes off the ball of actual products, while maintaining total control. Even for an elite, top of his field individual, you need to focus to win.
In terms of laptops, HP built some very nice high end business laptops that were more like evolutions of the 2014 MacBook Pro than the garbage Apple pumped out and wasted many millions of dollars on for warranty claims.
[0] from the OED: a) To make drawings for the construction or creation of (something, as a building, object, garment, etc.) according to certain aesthetic criteria; (b) to make plans for the production of (a device, product, etc.) according to structural or functional criteria (sometimes without the implication of aesthetic requirements); (c) (in extended use) to conceive, devise, plan (something immaterial, as a scheme, system, programme, etc.).
When function follows form to the point where you ship say a laptop with an unserviceable keyboard that is rendered inoperable by a speck of dust, or make a smartphone surface friction similar to a stick of butter, you got a problem.
And yet now we have the new iMac, the "thinnest iMac ever" at just 11.5mm. So it seems like Ive wasn't the only one at Apple obsessed with being thin.
Really moving into the lifestyle product market.
Sure, but it was removed from the main device.
You say that like it’s a bad thing. The iMac gets an Ethernet port, and there’s one fewer cable to run up to the machine. That seems like a win all around.
Honestly I think that’s an inspired bit of design. It solves for Apple’s desire to keep clean lines, and, in many offices I’ve been in, the Ethernet is wired in close to the power, so it’s very functional. Win-win.
1. Lot of use cases for SD cards besides cameras. Audio recorders, notably.
2. A fair number of high-end cameras are no longer using SD cards, or at least, not exclusively; lot of CFexpress for the big boy cameras out there now. (I mean, they used to use CompactFlash cards, but it’s not like they’re gonna jam a CF card reader in there.)
some have also mentioned potential synergy with future MacBooks, which might also adopt this port on the power brick. that could bring a magnetic connector back to laptops _and_ ethernet without a $30 dongle
But they did choose to make the new iMacs thin rather than small, they could have tucked the computer part behind the display and done away with the chin, but they didn't.
So Apple appears to have been asleep at the wheel with the Mac (which is perhaps why Ive's had so much leeway with clearly unpopular decisions like the keyboard, missing escape key, etc...) resulting in its worst years ever. The laptop keyboard is one example, but the iOS-ification of the Mac is another (i.e., moving towards the iOS security model), as is the stagnate Mac Pro.
Now things are back to normal, see the M1, the new Mac Pro, the new iMac, etc...
The M1 transition going so smoothly, and with such an emphasis on backwards compatibility (they ported OpenCL! they helped with Blender!) is my favorite example of this, contrasted with the complete &$@^*% you! treatment that developers got with things like notarization, new security features, and pretty much everything recent going all the way back to Mac App Store Sandboxing, which I'd personally consider the start of the dark years (and I'd also consider that the single worst decision in all of this, worse than the keyboard, that's the one that fundamentally broke the Mac ecosystem, maybe forever).
iOS-ification of macOS in particular is incredibly overblown, power users have been playing up a few security design changes and modernized APIs (e.g. kext > system extensions) as if they're huge negatives that will "ruin" macOS. I just don't think those issues matter.
If the Mac itself improving was part of the Q2 results, you wouldn't have seen the similar levels of iPad revenue spike. There has been no significant change to the iPad lineup that would convince someone to buy or not buy in the last couple of years.
That's why I think this is 100% Covid or whatever you call this current spike in demand.
Do we honestly think apple is going to reverse course on this? I highly doubt it. Open platforms are not their m.o. for many years. They've let the walled garden around macos have too many cracks and holes, and they're going to recapture those users that have taken advantage.
Apple is not deaf to their users, they know how important Homebrew is. Apple themselves gifted hardware to the Homebrew team:
"Particular thanks on Homebrew 3.0.0 go to MacStadium and Apple for providing us with a lot of Apple Silicon hardware and Cassidy from Apple for helping us in many ways with this migration. Enjoy using Homebrew!"
https://brew.sh/2021/02/05/homebrew-3.0.0/
A very important percentage. E.g. Final Cut used to have a 60% market share. Now it's may be 25%?
There's most likely a dip among every other category of professional users.
We don't know because Apple doesn't report it, but I would surmise that Final Cut has had a consistently growing user base.
- Final Cut X was a major re-write that didn't support importing old project formats for something like two years and didn't support all required video formats for the same period
- Mac Pro was abandoned, twice. Once for years before the trashcan design. Once for years after the trashcan design.
The 12” MacBook was the poster child for the search for ultimate thinness. As was the disastrous butterfly keyboard (it was suggested this only shaved off 0.5mm).
Look at the iPad Pro refresh just announced. It’s actually slightly thicker because that’s needed for a better display. This would never have happened with Ive at the helm of design.
This is verifiable nonsense, given the iPhone increased in thickness between generations several times with Ive at the helm.
I can't find the link, but I heard when they launched the new Mac Pro, Ives tried to show Tim Cook what it looked like, but Tim responded with "I get it... its a computer", and didn't see the design until the public launch event.
Right-clicking became so ubiquitous and even consistent on Windows. You needed the same behaviour on Macs but had no second mouse button so got that by using modifier keys. Some apps it was Option, others control and so on.
The problem was that those modified clicks had no discoverability and less consistency than right-clicking. Windows users on the other hand learned that nothing bad could happen with a right click.
Force Touch as a similar kind of UX fail with no discoverability. There was (and is) no consistency with what a Force Touch means or should mean or even if it's an option at all.
But yes, Force Touch did make the iPhone thicker and heavier.
The thinness and smallness of the computer was genuinely a very nice thing about it. You could hold it open in one hand easily, fit into any bag, didn't add any weight. Computers don't have all that much differentiating them anyway, so these things are actually a very good goal to shoot for. I'm guessing that they will probably end up bringing the form factor back with the M1 at some point.
So dust kills a keyboard that is an expensive replacement and was such a fail Apple had to replace who knows how many keyboards for free. Epic fail. That's kind of my point.
> Biggest downside is that it got very hot during video calls
Exactly. It was too underpowered. Compare that to the Macbook Air (2010 onwards, not the earlier 2008 model). This was such an awesome machine. Relatively cheap and a good compromise of power and portability. It was actually amazing how good this machine was. For years no Windows hardware could compete with that price and set of features.
But it languished for years when all it needed was more memory and a retina display and instead we got the one-port 12" Macbook abomination. All for the holy grail of thinness.
Design is the art of compromise. The 12" Macbook shows you exactly what happens when you don't compromise.
> I'm guessing that they will probably end up bringing the form factor back with the M1 at some point.
While waiting for a Macbook Air refresh my heart sank as soon as they announced the 12" Macbook. Why? Because I knew there was no room for the (then) 11" and 13" Airs with a 12" SKU. And I was right. That mistake was corrected so I don't see the 12" model coming back anytime soon with the 13" Air here and on M1.
if anything, I think that niche has been filled with the iPad (poorly). I mean there's lots of things I like my iPad for but it's no laptop replacement.
The thinness trade offs with the butterfly keyboard and USB C actually make sense for an ultraportable (as opposed to a desktop replacement like the pro).
> I had some issues with dust in the keyboard I use a keyboard cover to get around this.
> Biggest downside is that it got very hot during video calls, which wasn't as big of an issue in 2016 as it is now. Agreed, it's not great for video, esp. since the camera also kind of sucks.
I'd totally buy an updated version.
It's crazy to think about, Intel 10nm was supposed to be available for the entire butterfly/touchbar era.
But I don't think it's entirely fair to just call that failed experiment the pursuit of thinness at all costs. Scissors are a bit mushy, you can move your fingers around on a keypad and feel them wobble. The sound is kind of dull, the action lacks a clean tactile break.
The butterfly keyboard felt great, to me at least. Crisp, clicky action, rock-solid pads: to my taste, the tactile experience is superior. If they had found a way to make them absolutely reliable, I'd have called it a win. Although the square arrow keys and lack of a physical escape key were ergonomic disasters, that's orthogonal to keyboard action, they could have fixed both of those things while sticking with the butterfly switches.
These are ultimately aesthetic considerations. Someone else certainly prefers the sound and feel of the scissor switches, I respect that, I just disagree is all.
So I don't think shaving a half millimeter was the be-all and end-all of the decision to iterate on the ultimately unworkable butterfly keyboard design. I imagine Jony Ive thought it was a nicer keyboard and just spent more time trying to make it work than was really justified, especially since it proved to be impossible.
Was it the best on the market? Well, no, obviously not, one of the worst considering the reliability.
Is Apple's current scissor keyboard the best on the market? No, it was clearly shoehorned back in from older designs with minimal changes.
I would have loved the butterfly keyboard to have just a hair longer travel...and there was something about the key shape/spacing/size that made me slightly less accurate finding the correct keys.
It really was "almost there" but they had to throw it out because it was a PR disaster.
I will add that I have no real idea about Ive's design leanings. I guess it is possible to conclude that either he wasn't the driving force behind "extreme thinness" or he managed to convert people inside of Apple to this way of thinking and they still remain influential.
Apple is clearly selling to the masses here.
Most people don't know or care who Jony Ive is, and the MacBook Pros and iPads don't look meaningfully different in any way.
I'm shocked anyone thinks Ive's departure is relevant at this scale.
I’m pretty impressed with the M1 Mac Mini and look forward to follow ups and the Linux porting efforts, too.
With other companies announcing their own custom CPU designs, I wonder if we are entering into a new era of some kind.
You can say "16gb is enough if you swap efficiently", but I run models that need 100+GB on the regular. I'd love to see what a super high-end Apple core can do to that workload!
But we haven’t seen what they can really do yet. The M1 sure “feels” like an iPad SoC, what with the weirdness with some of the ports and bus limitations. (External displays: little off-kilter right now in terms of limitations.)
I’m optimistic they are preparing some real firepower for a 30-inch iMac and 16-inch MacBook Pro. Or at least, I sure hope so, as I type here, looking at this damned useless OLED strip above my keyboard as my leg hairs are slowly burned away.
All in all, I think it’s impossible to draw any hard conclusions from here. We all have to wait and see.
"I am in the 0.0001% of the people that need 100+Gb ram", so it seems this massive hit of a cpu/laptop, where everyone is raving about it, is not so good when I compare it to what I need that are thousands of a percent of what regular people use.
I'm a developer, I bought the M1 mbp with 8 (yes eight) gb of ram, for testing and was supposed to then be my gf's machine. You know what, almost 6 months in, she still hasn't touched it. I would maybe go for 16gb in the next one, but she will pry it from my cold dead hands before I get a newer model and she can keep this one.
I bought an M1 for my partner and they aren't using it. I am. The battery life is incredible and it feels snappier than the macbook pro I have for work.
I bought APPL after trying this out
Looks at fanless M1 MacBook Air, with 14+ damn hours of battery life in my real-world use
I mean... OK? My minivan isn't an aircraft carrier, either.
> It really has trouble with the high-end laptop club too.
If you're memory-constrained or doing something with GPU, that might be true. Otherwise, benchmarks plz. And again, high-end laptop... looks at big desktop-replacement laptops, then back over at tiny little fanless MacBook Air
I wish running multiple iOS and Android simulators didn’t need so much memory.
My daily driver is a 2015 Macbook Pro. My iPhone is a 2016(?) 6S. My iPad is the original Air. I'd be happy to upgrade but for someone who lives in Books, Safari and Excel all day, they all work fine. I just can't justify it.
The M1 equivalents are leaps and bounds faster and there are plenty of people who need that power and more but... will 99.995% of Apple users notice further upgrades? Where do we go from here? What's the future of personal computing?
(Fingers crossed for lightweight fully immersive no wires VR in five years)
For instance, this year is not only the year of the M1 but also the Mini-LED ('XDR') displays we see on the new iPad Pro. 1000nits (peak 1600) is a massive improvement as is the improved contrast.
Meanwhile users are on their own personal replacement cycle (say 2-4 years for phone, 3-6 years for iPad and Mac). So by the time the user is thinking about replacing their device, there's several years of accrued changes across many/most components that make the latest device really compelling.
You're right that at this point all the Apple devices have at least a good 5-6 years of 'works fine' in them. But this fall when you go to look at a new MacBook Pro and it's got an XDR screen and an M2 chip that together have you 3-5x screen brightness (vs your 2015's 300nits), 3-5x graphics, 2-3x cpu, 2-3x battery life, better webcam, etc, all compared to your slowly wearing out macbook... that'd look pretty darn enticing to anyone.
As for the future? At some point component capabilities (like cpu/gpu perf per watt) reaches a point when entire new categories are unlocked, like AR/VR or computational photography effects, but those have to be incremented to as the pace of component progress allows.
I'm sure they'll increase the graphics performance and make NVIDIA-level GPUs at some point, probably to drive VR/AR. Maybe they'll try to take the premium server market too (e.g. Graviton for non-cloud offerings).
70% up.
What a skilfully crafted piece of rhetoric that is. For a moment, I forgot I was in the gutter and imagined we were all united, looking at the stars.
Edit: It appeared after I purchased a new MacBook. Seems like an Apple Arcade voucher was included with the purchase and it nags me to activate it.
In 2014 I thought the Services Revenue Growth will be coming from bundling of iPhone + iCloud + AppleCare+ in subscription like services. Sort of like the current iPhone upgrade programme, with upsell of other things like Apple Music, Netflix or HBO where they get some sort of commissions. ( Similar to current App Store sign up commission ). Using something like Apple Credit Card ( that was long rumoured and somehow only launched in 2019 ) where Apple could afford to have revenue spread over a much longer period of time all while increases iPhone affordability. Think 36 Months instead of the usual 24 months. Apple has too much cash on hand and this delayed account receivable is something that could be used to Apple's advantage.
Instead they went with AppleTV+, Apple News+ Apple Fitness+, Apple PodCast+, Apple Arcade, and bundling them into ONE all to dilute their $10+Billion Annual raw profits from having Google as default search engine. I mean what's next? "Apple Bank" because their Hardware features and customer data which Apple do collect so they can provide better Banking services? "Apple Insurance" because Apple Watch provides Data to Apple and Apple cant share to other for privacy reason? Apple Cars with special design U1 integration of whatever that only works with Apple Find My Network? And "Apple Taxi" once Apple figure out how to do LV5 AV?
This is not Steves-Apple. This is very Tim Cook's Apple.
I wonder why?
https://i2.wp.com/sixcolors.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/f...
That company is a money-making operation that doesn't even seem to slow down. This worries me, as that seems like it inevitably leads to pursuit of profit over all else, to the detriment of everybody but shareholders.