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Very disappointing to see the only bullet points concerning the Mac are Mac App Store, Lion and hardware. Fast forward to 2016, the Mac App Store is rotting, h

Very disappointing to see the only bullet points concerning the Mac are Mac App Store, Lion and hardware. Fast forward to 2016, the Mac App Store is rotting, hardware gets updated maybe in 1-3 years, and the os is lagging. Makes you wonder what's on their list for the next years, if anything...

nogbit 10y ago
Nothing, more of the same innovators dilemma. Sell your stock and put it elsewhere...though you should of done that end of 2015.
yourapostasy 10y ago
The emphasis in the lead on the Post PC era is telling. This confirms to me macOS platform innovation (software and hardware) is on the back burner. Jobs-Apple was not sentimental about abruptly dropping product lines, and entirely exiting markets very swiftly after a long senescence, one which high-end macOS hardware is in the midst of right now. Most recent example is the high-end display market with the Thunderbolt Display. The Apple DOS platform and MacOS (the cooperative multitasking one, not the NeXTStep-based one) more salient examples to the "whither macOS" discussion. Cook-Apple, without a strong design lead possessing a keen technical sense, might drag out the macOS senescence, making for a miserable macOS professional customer base. While a very tiny fraction of the market, they're very vocal, and can be distracting if Apple is indeed attempting to disentangle itself from the PC era as Jobs called it. Another area of concern is the strategy note explicitly set out looking for lock-in at the design stage outset, rather than opportunistically and organically monetizing lock-in where and when it happens as a side-effect of delivering a delightful customer experience. Down that path of making lock-in an explicit design goal lies mediocre design output. I wonder Apple is mulling over whether or not to exit the high-end PC market, because the executive team senses future profitability lays in the consumer segment, commoditizing the most common pieces of the PC market into the portable devices they make tomorrow. There still exists a high-end camera market for example, but Apple makes far more money than those camera companies with just a consumer-good-enough camera feature on their smartphones. The question they might be exploring right now is if they can expand the iPad Pro far enough to convert+capture the bulk of the macOS market into consumer segments, then ditch the rest (including the high-end macOS/PC market). I'm not looking forward to a future transition to a Linux-with-Windows-emulation stack for my daily driver laptop, because there are a LOT of bits of polish in laptops that Linux (and Windows for that matter) still has not nailed yet that are greatly aggravating in my daily experience. Ultra-reliable sleep and wake (especially interaction with networking) tops my list, but other UI and user experience bits, gone over exhaustively in other HN discussion threads about the latest MacBook Pros. There are a lot of sharp corners in the laptop experience that macOS rounded off over the past decades, and while I would miss them, if fundamental support for a laptop form factor personal computing platform is disappearing from Apple then move I must. This is ironic, because if fucking over Google was a key Apple strategic goal (for the record, I think that's not how a business should be aimed/run, and I see promising signs Cook is willing to truly bury the hatchet), then I thought that an Apple Home Server running macOS with services that many people tend to get from Google, decentralizing Google's key services like GMail (including calendar, contacts, etc.), Voice, etc., and portal'ing a voice-based interface to capture and refine/curate search requests (and direct them to a service like DDG instead of Google), with ultra-seamless iDevice and macOS integration and enhancement to attract customers, would have been Apple's logical direction to slice away at Google's ad revenue.
- mercer 10y ago
  I'm mostly wondering how we'll do iOS development without beefy MacBooks or Macs. If other laptop developers up their game and provide a MacBook-equivalent I'd happily jump ship. But I need to be able to create native iOS apps.
  - yourapostasy 10y ago
    If Apple actually exits the PC era years from now, then I expect an iPad Pro-like platform will host an iOS-based XCode (or whatever they call it when it is re-targeted to iOS). It can be a bumpy 3-5 year transition, about the time it took for OS X to stabilize the transition from the MacOS user experience. We won't know until it happens. Jobs-Apple never articulated what they see for their users going forward on a strategic scale, the vision is only laid out at the product introduction, and only tactically-constrained forward optics are shared. So far Cook-Apple seems to follow the same behavior in this regard. I think the tail is wagging the dog if Apple goes down that road. A lot of shareholders and customers are impatiently pushing Apple for The Next Innovation, but ironically I suspect a steady-as-she-goes Cook-style CEO is exactly what they need for the next 4-6 years because I see us in a hardware technological interregnum that takes time to mature. Apple's innovations have usually come from a confluence of the right hardware maturation cycles to capitalize upon software waiting in the wings for the hardware to catch up. The innovation and revenue has been hardware-based but it can just as easily be software- and services-based, but Apple hasn't chosen to monetize yet. At the moment, the hardware-oriented tail is wagging the entire organization, as they seek out the next innovation category in another piece of hardware, when seeking hardware might be the wrong question to ask in the first place. Battery and charging technology is an especially big obstacle right now for them. Apple Watch is the Mac 128K of Apple's smartwatch category due to that obstacle. They're making uncomfortable engineering tradeoffs in the latest MacBook Pro (if you believe Schiller's explanation, which I do) due to that obstacle.
- corv 10y ago
  Exactly. Apple should build the post-Cloud era instead of trying to beat Google on their home turf. If Tim Cook really cares about privacy, bringing user's data back into their own hands is the only way to go.
rimantas 10y ago
Feel free to switch to platform where they have a thriving app stores, update hardware with a new design twice a year and have a wonderful os.

nogbit 10y ago

Nothing, more of the same innovators dilemma. Sell your stock and put it elsewhere...though you should of done that end of 2015.

yourapostasy 10y ago

The emphasis in the lead on the Post PC era is telling. This confirms to me macOS platform innovation (software and hardware) is on the back burner. Jobs-Apple was not sentimental about abruptly dropping product lines, and entirely exiting markets very swiftly after a long senescence, one which high-end macOS hardware is in the midst of right now. Most recent example is the high-end display market with the Thunderbolt Display. The Apple DOS platform and MacOS (the cooperative multitasking one, not the NeXTStep-based one) more salient examples to the "whither macOS" discussion. Cook-Apple, without a strong design lead possessing a keen technical sense, might drag out the macOS senescence, making for a miserable macOS professional customer base. While a very tiny fraction of the market, they're very vocal, and can be distracting if Apple is indeed attempting to disentangle itself from the PC era as Jobs called it. Another area of concern is the strategy note explicitly set out looking for lock-in at the design stage outset, rather than opportunistically and organically monetizing lock-in where and when it happens as a side-effect of delivering a delightful customer experience. Down that path of making lock-in an explicit design goal lies mediocre design output. I wonder Apple is mulling over whether or not to exit the high-end PC market, because the executive team senses future profitability lays in the consumer segment, commoditizing the most common pieces of the PC market into the portable devices they make tomorrow. There still exists a high-end camera market for example, but Apple makes far more money than those camera companies with just a consumer-good-enough camera feature on their smartphones. The question they might be exploring right now is if they can expand the iPad Pro far enough to convert+capture the bulk of the macOS market into consumer segments, then ditch the rest (including the high-end macOS/PC market). I'm not looking forward to a future transition to a Linux-with-Windows-emulation stack for my daily driver laptop, because there are a LOT of bits of polish in laptops that Linux (and Windows for that matter) still has not nailed yet that are greatly aggravating in my daily experience. Ultra-reliable sleep and wake (especially interaction with networking) tops my list, but other UI and user experience bits, gone over exhaustively in other HN discussion threads about the latest MacBook Pros. There are a lot of sharp corners in the laptop experience that macOS rounded off over the past decades, and while I would miss them, if fundamental support for a laptop form factor personal computing platform is disappearing from Apple then move I must. This is ironic, because if fucking over Google was a key Apple strategic goal (for the record, I think that's not how a business should be aimed/run, and I see promising signs Cook is willing to truly bury the hatchet), then I thought that an Apple Home Server running macOS with services that many people tend to get from Google, decentralizing Google's key services like GMail (including calendar, contacts, etc.), Voice, etc., and portal'ing a voice-based interface to capture and refine/curate search requests (and direct them to a service like DDG instead of Google), with ultra-seamless iDevice and macOS integration and enhancement to attract customers, would have been Apple's logical direction to slice away at Google's ad revenue.

mercer 10y ago
I'm mostly wondering how we'll do iOS development without beefy MacBooks or Macs. If other laptop developers up their game and provide a MacBook-equivalent I'd happily jump ship. But I need to be able to create native iOS apps.
- yourapostasy 10y ago
  If Apple actually exits the PC era years from now, then I expect an iPad Pro-like platform will host an iOS-based XCode (or whatever they call it when it is re-targeted to iOS). It can be a bumpy 3-5 year transition, about the time it took for OS X to stabilize the transition from the MacOS user experience. We won't know until it happens. Jobs-Apple never articulated what they see for their users going forward on a strategic scale, the vision is only laid out at the product introduction, and only tactically-constrained forward optics are shared. So far Cook-Apple seems to follow the same behavior in this regard. I think the tail is wagging the dog if Apple goes down that road. A lot of shareholders and customers are impatiently pushing Apple for The Next Innovation, but ironically I suspect a steady-as-she-goes Cook-style CEO is exactly what they need for the next 4-6 years because I see us in a hardware technological interregnum that takes time to mature. Apple's innovations have usually come from a confluence of the right hardware maturation cycles to capitalize upon software waiting in the wings for the hardware to catch up. The innovation and revenue has been hardware-based but it can just as easily be software- and services-based, but Apple hasn't chosen to monetize yet. At the moment, the hardware-oriented tail is wagging the entire organization, as they seek out the next innovation category in another piece of hardware, when seeking hardware might be the wrong question to ask in the first place. Battery and charging technology is an especially big obstacle right now for them. Apple Watch is the Mac 128K of Apple's smartwatch category due to that obstacle. They're making uncomfortable engineering tradeoffs in the latest MacBook Pro (if you believe Schiller's explanation, which I do) due to that obstacle.
corv 10y ago
Exactly. Apple should build the post-Cloud era instead of trying to beat Google on their home turf. If Tim Cook really cares about privacy, bringing user's data back into their own hands is the only way to go.

rimantas 10y ago

Feel free to switch to platform where they have a thriving app stores, update hardware with a new design twice a year and have a wonderful os.