5 ms·

The jury has been out on Tim Cook's performance as Apple CEO since he took over about 7 years ago. I think this new line of Macs is evidence that he's just too

The jury has been out on Tim Cook's performance as Apple CEO since he took over about 7 years ago. I think this new line of Macs is evidence that he's just too focussed on operations to the point where it's ruining their products. I'm guessing the move to consolidate the ports and kill the audio jack may make total sense internally at Apple when it comes to their 10-year manufacturing operations plan and really maximizing their profitability, but to the outside world it's just bad product development.

m_mueller 10y ago
IMO the big mistake was to give Jony Ive that much power. Should have put Scott Forstall there instead, the man who made their most important product work, but they got rid of him for being too opinionated and against the grain. Well, that's probably exactly what you need in a product developer. (S)He doesn't need to be a good designer, just recognize good design. Ive is just way out of touch with their customer base.
- wmeredith 10y ago
  > Ive is just way out of touch with their customer base. The guy who is chauffeured to work in a car that is twice as expensive than my three bedroom house? Say it isn't so! Ive knows exactly what people want. A $200 watch in a $10,000 gold case so the boys down at the country club won't make fun of me from behind their Omegas and Rolexes, amiright? Sigh... As a long time die hard fan of the Apple that made really interesting transformative tech, watching their decline makes me sad.
ageitgey 10y ago
> The jury has been out on Tim Cook's performance as Apple CEO since he took over about 7 years ago Not to nitpick too much, but Tim Cook only took over as Apple's CEO a little over 5 years ago.
- redwall_hp 10y ago
  It lines up perfectly with the decline of the MBP line. I have a 2011 model, and it's truly pathetic how little of substance has changed since then. * Better processors (a given, under the continuous march of Intel) * Minor GPU improvements, with a multi-year draught where you basically couldn't get a dedicated GPU unless you bought the absolutely most expensive unit. * Higher resolution displays. Meanwhile: * They keep making the damn things thinner, at the expense of functionality. * They ship with half the storage compared to five years ago. Yes, it's NAND. But you shouldn't have to spend $600 extra on a machine that already costs $2000 just to get to the point where you were five years ago. And with the $/GB cost of NAND as comparatively low as it is in recent years... * All the ports are gone. First they killed the ethernet, and now they're down to four USB-C ports. All of your DisplayPort-based stuff you've accumulated is now useless, and you need an adapter to plug in a USB flash drive. I get that they think it's going to drive the market down that path, but would it have killed them to go 50/50? * Hey, let's replace a perfectly useful row of keys that can be bound to things, and the all important escape key, with a shiny touch screen. Fuck touch typists, right? * CPUs still throttle aggressively under load (especially in warmer climates). Thermal management is hard on laptops, but Apple generally opts to sacrifice performance for cosmetics. * RAM has been consistently lacking for such an expensive machine. Considering the OS will make full use of it for caches when extra space is available, and that we live in an era of bloated web pages/browsers and garbage Electron software, the consistent lowballing of RAM is annoying.

m_mueller 10y ago

IMO the big mistake was to give Jony Ive that much power. Should have put Scott Forstall there instead, the man who made their most important product work, but they got rid of him for being too opinionated and against the grain. Well, that's probably exactly what you need in a product developer. (S)He doesn't need to be a good designer, just recognize good design. Ive is just way out of touch with their customer base.

wmeredith 10y ago
> Ive is just way out of touch with their customer base. The guy who is chauffeured to work in a car that is twice as expensive than my three bedroom house? Say it isn't so! Ive knows exactly what people want. A $200 watch in a $10,000 gold case so the boys down at the country club won't make fun of me from behind their Omegas and Rolexes, amiright? Sigh... As a long time die hard fan of the Apple that made really interesting transformative tech, watching their decline makes me sad.

ageitgey 10y ago

> The jury has been out on Tim Cook's performance as Apple CEO since he took over about 7 years ago Not to nitpick too much, but Tim Cook only took over as Apple's CEO a little over 5 years ago.

redwall_hp 10y ago
It lines up perfectly with the decline of the MBP line. I have a 2011 model, and it's truly pathetic how little of substance has changed since then. * Better processors (a given, under the continuous march of Intel) * Minor GPU improvements, with a multi-year draught where you basically couldn't get a dedicated GPU unless you bought the absolutely most expensive unit. * Higher resolution displays. Meanwhile: * They keep making the damn things thinner, at the expense of functionality. * They ship with half the storage compared to five years ago. Yes, it's NAND. But you shouldn't have to spend $600 extra on a machine that already costs $2000 just to get to the point where you were five years ago. And with the $/GB cost of NAND as comparatively low as it is in recent years... * All the ports are gone. First they killed the ethernet, and now they're down to four USB-C ports. All of your DisplayPort-based stuff you've accumulated is now useless, and you need an adapter to plug in a USB flash drive. I get that they think it's going to drive the market down that path, but would it have killed them to go 50/50? * Hey, let's replace a perfectly useful row of keys that can be bound to things, and the all important escape key, with a shiny touch screen. Fuck touch typists, right? * CPUs still throttle aggressively under load (especially in warmer climates). Thermal management is hard on laptops, but Apple generally opts to sacrifice performance for cosmetics. * RAM has been consistently lacking for such an expensive machine. Considering the OS will make full use of it for caches when extra space is available, and that we live in an era of bloated web pages/browsers and garbage Electron software, the consistent lowballing of RAM is annoying.