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I see a lot of parallels of Tim Cook's Apple to John Sculley's Apple. Tim Cook's, like John Sculley's, is focused on immediate short-term bottom line improvemen
by jasonjei 10y ago
I see a lot of parallels of Tim Cook's Apple to John Sculley's Apple. Tim Cook's, like John Sculley's, is focused on immediate short-term bottom line improvements rather than long-term investments. John Sculley kept staying the course, and Tim Cook is doing much of the same. If anything, the most recent iteration of MBP is sidelining serious developers and content producers.
So yes, Apple's bottom line is growing. Lots of revenue are being made from iCloud subscriptions to Apple Music. Steve Ballmer was very good at improving Microsoft's bottom line too. But they lost search, music, and cloud at the expense of chasing revenue.
- zepto 10y agoI keep seeing people say things about how the Mac is sidelining serious developers and content producers, but I haven't seen any actual argument as to why this is so. Can you explain?
- trurl 10y agoBecause serious developers require computers with more horsepower (CPU, GPU, memory, etc.) than Apple is providing? 16GB is nowhere near enough for my work. And I can't seriously justify buying a iMac or MacPro at this point when their hardware is so out of date.
- eknkc 10y agoNot arguing, just curious. What type of work are you in?
- trurl 10y agoI am building a next generation database system.
- grzm 10y agoSounds interesting! What system are you currently using? What limitations are you running into? What do you envision the system running on in production?
- trurl 10y agoIf you mean my development computer, I use a 2012 rMBP with 16GB RAM. For production we generally run on EC2 or GCE. The biggest limitation is RAM, but in the near future we may start using the GPU too. Between the database, middleware above the database, an IDB, a web browser, etc. macOS decides to start compressing pages rather aggressively when I run unit tests. If the IDE gets compressed, pretty much the only solution is to restart. I could switch to Linux development, but aside from Linux laptop support generally being poor, macOS just works so I can spend more time working instead of fighting with my computer's configuration. Still, I am very seriously considering getting a Linux desktop in the near future, because I'm just tired of waiting for Apple.
- grzm 10y agoThanks. My development machine is a 2015 13" MBA/8GB. I'm pretty satisfied with it as a development box. (Though I do need to figure out some performance issues in my integration test suite). Of course, it sounds like your development needs are quite different than mine :) I wonder what the next round of iMacs will look like. If you're looking at a desktop system anyway, perhaps they'll be available with larger memory options. As I understand it, the memory limitation on the new MBP is due to the chip choice, which in turn was chosen with energy efficiency in mind. That shouldn't be a driving factor in the iMac. But then again, when will the next rev of iMacs come out? I hope you're able to find a system that suits your needs!
- jasonjei 10y agoTouchBar killed the tactile ESC key. People using vim or BootCamp and/or Linux, Windows, VMware, or Photoshop are in for a more difficult ride. So instead of having access to ESC/Func keys, we can type emoji or use Apple Pay. The hardware on all Macs are updated on a very infrequent basis as mentioned in the article. GPUs sold with machines today are often the same as ones sold years ago. Apple killed their external monitor option.
- trurl 10y agoI really think too many people are making a big deal of the TouchBar. I'm a vim user, and when the first rumors of it surfaced earlier this year I switched ESC to capslock and after a day or so adapted just fine. I don't know that I really need any of the things TouchBar offers, but it seems to be unreasonably vilified without no one actually using it. For me the key issue is the performance, which no amount of key remapping can solve.
- jasonjei 10y agoI'm just wondering how one will install certain OSes if the Func keys aren't usable during OS install in Boot Camp. I don't remember being able to remap an installer hotkeys easily. Maybe Apple doesn't want that demographic, or perhaps we'll have to connect a USB-C keyboard. Boot Camp drivers are also terribly out of date.
- threeseed 10y agoBoot Camp has already been addressed though. The function keys will be shown and since Touch Bar is running WatchOS it should be easily possible to show them without drivers.
- jasonjei 10y agoI read that there is an independent ARM processor controlling TouchBar. Is there solid proof the TouchBar reverts to Func keys when no OS has initialized/rendered keys to the TouchBar?
- danjoc 10y agoI'll sum up the points I've seen for the 2016 Macbook Pro. 1) No esc key or fkeys. These are pretty important for vim, and vim is the defacto editor on most Linux systems. If you want these keys, you have to accept the lower end dual core CPU and no discrete GPU. 2) 16GB of RAM, not really enough for running multiple VMs. 32GB has been common for years from other manufacturers. Phil Schiller responded that this was to conserve battery life. 3) Skylake. This CPU is old. Kaby Lake has been shipping since late August. It's a bit of a stretch to call a laptop "premium" or "pro" when it ships with the last generation hardware. 4) GPU. Same gripe. NVidia is the undisputed leader in GPUs. Shipping a Radeon which is half the speed of a comparable NVidia offering is really disappointing. 5) Magsafe. They removed Magsafe in favor of USB-C charging. Great for Apple repair and replacement sales, not so great for end users. 6) Price. Everyone expects to pay some premium for an Apple, but this round is really excessive. They've made it worse by axing the lower priced Macbook Air line, so the least expensive model available now is a $1299 Macbook, and that's an even older 5th generation Broadwell CPU model they've been selling for nearly two years now.
- majewsky 10y ago> 1) No esc key or fkeys. These are pretty important for vim, and vim is the defacto editor on most Linux systems. Ooohhh, I can already see the angry complaints from Emacs users. More seriously though, vim doesn't rely on F keys at all. (The only default function mapped to an F key is F1 for help, which is only there to assist newbies AFAICT.) The F keys are useful as a blank slate for one's own mappings, though, so a lot of individual vim users (me included) might be upset about their favorite functions gone. The F keys are of much bigger importance in Xcode, where F6/F7/F8 are the default bindings for stepping during debugging. (I cannot comment on this myself as I'm from the printf-debugging camp, but a lot of people pointed to this concrete function in HN commentary in the past few days.)
- thatswrong0 10y ago> 4) GPU. Same gripe. NVidia is the undisputed leader in GPUs. Shipping a Radeon which is half the speed of a comparable NVidia offering is really disappointing. This one is understandable - the AMD 450/455/460 all fit within a 50W TDP. The Nvidia 1060M is at 80W... way too high. The 1050M should be 50W, but it won't be out until early 2017. The timing of all of this seems weird to me. Since Apple already waited so long to release this update to begin with, would it have killed them to wait just a bit longer to be able to integrate Kaby Lake and the mobile Nvidia cards?
- stock_toaster 10y agoI don't know. R&D has seen big increases[1] (from around $3B under Jobs to now around $12B) in spend under Cook. I don't know that doing that lines up with a "focus on immediate short-term bottom line improvements rather than long-term investments". [1]: http://www.aboveavalon.com/notes/2016/5/11/apple-rd-reveals-a-pivot-is-coming http://www.aboveavalon.com/notes/2016/5/11/apple-rd-reveals-... (linked for the graphs, not the article's hypothesis)
- jasonjei 10y agoMicrosoft, I'm sure, also threw a lot of R&D money at things. I just think the money under Jobs's Apple was directed more wisely.
- stock_toaster 10y agoLooks[1] like from it went from $7B in 2004, to $11B in 2014 when ballmer left. So a 2x increase in 10 years vs over a 5x increase in 4 years. Regardless, I still don't think that jives with the claim that Cook is focusing solely on short term returns. The "concern" about increased R&D outlay, by some big shareholders during earnings calls, has even been interesting to hear. The responses by Cook et al. have seemed pretty consistent too -- we are focusing on lots of long term projects. [1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/267806/expenditure-on-research-and-development-by-the-microsoft-corporation/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/267806/expenditure-on-re...
- IBM 10y agoAs an outsider you can only tell if the R&D money was spent wisely in retrospect.
- jasonjei 10y agoI would say the same of insiders. Outsiders can judge this better than insiders due to independence (tunnel vision and company pride sometimes get in the way).
- 10y ago
- grzm 10y agoOff the top of my head, I remember Apple under Sculley/Amelio* as - proliferation and fragmentation of Apple hardware - licensing of the OS to other hardware makers Under Cook, - Apple processors - improvements in manufacturing (materials, component integration, energy efficiency) These seem to be much longer-term projects than what was happening under Sculley. What are you thinking of in particular in terms of "immediate short-term bottom line improvements" under Cook? In terms of revenue, there have been increases in revenue from services (which includes iCloud and Apple Music)[0], increasing from 3.4 to 5.8 billion USD from 2013 Q1 to 2016 Q3. That's about 20% (eyeballing from "Apple Revenue by Category" chart) of iPhone revenue. I'm not sure how this necessarily ties in to the Sculley/Cook parallel though. At first blush, it doesn't look like services is increasing at the expense of other categories. [0]: https://sixcolors.com/post/2016/10/apple-financial-results-live-coverage/ https://sixcolors.com/post/2016/10/apple-financial-results-l... Yeah, we're going from Jobs to another CEO, so there are changes. I don't see a lot of other parallels, though. * Edited: After reading linguae's comment, I realized I was misremembering Sculley for Amelio, lumping it all into a "post-Jobs" era.
- jasonjei 10y agoApple processors and improvements in industrial engineering happened before Cook took the helm. You could argue those were under Jobs's watch... And yes the increase of revenue in services is safe, stable bet. But offering music and email and image storage doesn't seem to be be groundbreaking services to me.
- grzm 10y agoAgreed that there's overlap with the hardware improvements under Jobs and Cook. Also agreed that Apple's services aren't groundbreaking. I mentioned them only in response to "Lots of revenue are being made from iCloud subscriptions to Apple Music." I generally don't think much of iCloud other than being frustrated with contact syncing, and don't use Apple's email and image storage at all. I find Apple Music annoying and iTunes software horribly frustrating.
- threeseed 10y agoThis makes no sense. The Apple Watch is absolutely a long term play. Right now it's a fraction of what they want it to be ie. the saviour of the health care industry. And given the regulatory requirements of playing in this space you need to play the long game.
- paulddraper 10y agoHow will a watch "save" health care?
- apetresc 10y agoPresumably by constantly monitoring whatever biometrics you can gather from the wrist, thus detecting anomalies sooner than annual checkups would.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- linguae 10y agoI have a different view regarding the John Sculley era. It was under Sculley where the Mac transformed from a sealed box to an expandable machine when the Mac II was released in 1987. Under the Sculley era there were many impressive Macs, such as the Macintosh SE/30, the Mac Color Classic, the Mac IIfx, the Macintosh Portable, the Macintosh Quadra, and the original PowerBook. In my opinion, the hardware was wonderful during the Sculley era. What dogged Apple from the latter half of the Sculley era until the purchase of NeXT during the Gil Amelio era was the inability of Apple to buckle down and ship a successor to the classic Mac OS (look up the history of Pink/Taligent and Copland). Apple's hardware didn't start suffering until 1995 when Apple had a disastrous year (the infamous PowerBook 5300 exploding battery scandal, the much maligned Performa 5200/6200 series, Apple's inability to release an OS that successfully competed against Windows 95, and the rise of Mac clones that ended up hurting Apple's marketshare). The John Sculley era was largely one of investment in the Mac, although the unfortunate thing was the failure of the Pink/Taligent project, which could have given Apple an advanced operating system as early as, say, 1993 or 1994 had development gone better. Unfortunately I can't say the same about the Tim Cook era, where the Mac has transformed from a platform dedicated to creative professionals, power users and developers to a platform that caters solely to casual users and doesn't provide the performance, upgradeability, and expandability that long-time Mac users need. Also, under Tim Cook the Mac has increasingly deviated from the longstanding Apple Human Interface Guidelines that made the Mac such a pleasure to use all these years. While the Mac experience is still miles ahead of Windows and many Linux desktops, it's increasingly not the same as it used to be.