7 ms·

Invest in R&D you fools! Make a laptop to appease power users, many of whom work for you! Capture our imagination instead of kowtowing to mainstream desire for

Invest in R&D you fools! Make a laptop to appease power users, many of whom work for you! Capture our imagination instead of kowtowing to mainstream desire for each product design!

mikhailt 10y ago
Yea, that's why they're still selling more MBP than before and their R&D are increasing by billions every year. Sorry, power users are very small # of users. Making a laptop to appease power users will do very little to the bottom line.
NotSammyHagar 10y ago
Yeah, they sure look like they can't decide what to do with their riches. It's sad. Put money toward self driving car tech if you wish, you have so much to waste. But where are your awesome next gen laptops, why nothing like a chromebook, why their disasterous desktop machines (the coffee warmer form factor, what where they thinking). The apple watch. The majority of professional devs use apple laptops because they are a great selection of tools and nice ui with unix tools. They can't build off that?
- valuearb 10y ago
  Somehow despite their "disastrous desktop machines" and disappointing laptops, they are the highest revenue PC manufacturer in the world and make more profits making PCs than the rest of the market combined. And somehow they only sold $6B in Apple Watches it's first year, not only making it the most successful watch launch in history but the best selling watch in the world by revenues. Imagine if they'd only invest more!
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    But that money is not made on PCs, it is mostly made on phones and tablets. Q1/17: 80M iphones, 10M+ ipads, 5M Macs. And margins on phones and pads are higher than on PCs too.
    - valuearb 10y ago
      Which is one excuse given for the slow updates on the Mac side (one I don't buy). But again, Apple's Mac sales are over $25B a year,and it's profit margins on those sales are far higher (15% vs. 2-3%) than the other PC makers. It will never be as big as iPhone or iPad, but it's still one of the largest businesses in the entire world (it would just miss the Fortune 100 list on its own). It's sad they aren't doing a better job of updating the hardware, but so far it hasn't shown up in their sales.
      - pokemongoaway 10y ago
        Is this an argument for the status quo? That is, if "it doesn't show up in sales," then a tech company should feel comfortable doing which of the following? 1) Allowing software update issues 2) Alienating userbase who develops their software 3) Alienating pro audio users who want flexibility 4) ... Overlook any issue some user group has if they are winning in the market
  - EpicEng 10y ago
    >Somehow despite their "disastrous desktop machines" and disappointing laptops, they are the highest revenue PC manufacturer in the world No they're not; they're the most profitable mobile phone manufacturer who also happens to make PC's.
- jimmaswell 10y ago
  It sounded ludicrous to me but apparently it's true that a lot of developers use Apple laptops. I don't get it, I've used an Apple computer for a week at a time a few times and it was thoroughly less convenient and more frustrating than on Windows, not even including having no Visual Studio and such.
  - akvadrako 10y ago
    It's a lot about what you are used to. Most developers are creating websites or backends that run in unix-like environments and since OS X is a unix, it's a lot easier to transition or share between your workstation and production systems.
    - majewsky 10y ago
      But the same problem is between Linux and Mac. So many times did my bash scripts break on the ancient userland that comes with Mac OS. I do all my development in a Linux VM, and it's definitely a wide decision, seeing how many hours my colleagues waste setting up Postgres or Docker or even just Golang on their Macs. (Before you ask, I cannot boot into Linux directly because company policy.)
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    I wouldn't know how to develop on either, Linux is so much more geared towards developers than Macs or windows computers. Even so, a Mac is closer to Linux than windows is, it's a full unix under the hood after all. Having the same environment on my workstation as on my servers always appealed to me (since my SGI days, when I would develop stuff on an indy and deploy on a challenge, basically a headless indy). But I can't imagine using OS/X as a server environment and windows seems just wrong as a server. So that leaves me with Linux, but I don't mind and I like the whole concept of open-source software.
    - OJFord 10y ago
      MacOS can be used like Linux for all but a tiling window manager (or changing DE/WM at all).
- username223 10y ago
  Devs are a tiny population compared to general smartphone/gadget users. As someone who pays the Apple premium for a reliable laptop that runs a Unix with good desktop applications, I wish they would put more work into developer-focused products, but there's too little money in it for a company of Apple's size. Back in the day, a company with a money-printing machine like the iPhone, e.g. Ma Bell with telephone service, would create a world-class R&D division inventing all sorts of stuff with no regard for short-term profit. Google X may have aspired to this at some point, but they seem to have backed off. Sadly, the modern company has eliminated this drag on quarterly profits.
  - anindha 10y ago
    The iPhone is popular partly because of the apps that developers created. You could make an argument that making better developer laptops might lead to better iPhone sales.
    - lsadam0 10y ago
      There's no "could make..." to it. This is absolutely the case.
      - pokemongoaway 10y ago
        Haha... I feel like people very often hedge and undermine their own correct argumentation when they differ from something mainstream or powerful.
  - lsadam0 10y ago
    Machines targeted solely at devs just seems like a no-brainer to me. Sure, you make no money on them. The value comes from enticing development for your ecosystem. The stagnation of the Mac Pro, and the disappointing MacBook Pro update really confuse me. I'm starting to perceive 1998 Microsoft levels of arrogance.
    - pokemongoaway 10y ago
- pokemongoaway 10y ago
  Exactly, and I just don't get why the average Joe is so motivated to defend large corporate decisions these days. Maybe it's a way to demonstrate that they know something about business and identify as "intelligent people?" I.e. "Well they wouldn't make as much then, you idiot - and why people who think like you aren't intelligent enough to work for them!" Anyone who has worked for a company the size of Apple should realize these all-or-nothing arguments aren't realistic. We have a lot of history of companies in tech rising and falling now, and anyone educated in that history has the ability to interpret Apple's recent choices as statements for what kind of legacy they want to create going forward...
carsongross 10y ago
Maybe they could start looking at low margin but high ecosystem value products again, like wireless routers, monitors (they say they are), etc. Apple was great because they had a unified vision for computing and they did the entire tech stack "correctly". Time machines were never going to be more than a round off error on the balance sheet, but they did it because it was the correct thing to do. An apple laptop connected to an LG or Dell monitor looks and feels wrong, regardless of how technically impressive the monitor is, because LG and Dell don't have the design sensibilities that apple has. I hope Apple rediscovers and recovers that lebensphilosophie.
- pokemongoaway 10y ago
  Do you think this is due to a different type of people working for Apple than who used to - in general? That is, the representation of Apple Engineer from the pool of engineering talent in the world is skewed away from the type who has a tendency for the logic you present above.
  - carsongross 10y ago
    I wish I knew, but I have no special insight into the internal dynamics.
Razengan 10y ago
> Make a laptop to appease power users Oh, for fuck's sake. Have you even used the 2016 MBPs, at all? What's your current machine, and what do you run on it?
- pokemongoaway 10y ago
  I don't get this attitude at all... Have you ever worked for a tech company with inspired people who liked to build things? I have a mid 2014 fully loaded MBP. Don't feel like listing everything I run on my laptop here. I realize the latest MBP is a great piece of technology, but that isn't the point here...
  - Razengan 10y ago
    I don't get people who just parrot second-hand opinions about something they haven't tried, but I'll apologize if I mistakenly pegged you as one. Ever since the launch of the new MBPs, it has become sort of a meme to rag on them, and it's almost always by people who haven't even used one. Nobody seems to be able to really come up with a reason WHY they're not good. When pressed, those people just resort to inane hyperboles and grasp at flimsy straws, like "emoji keyboard" and "over 9000 dongles!" When offered the fact that the new MBPs have outsold everything else out there [0], they pooh-pooh it with "That's only because of the long delay between releases!" pff. Other than the fact that you may need at most 1-2 extra pieces of equipment to plug in your legacy devices, the 2016 MBP can do everything your 2014 can. I'm a power user and consider myself an inspired person who likes to build things; I have the 2016 15" MBP, and it appeases me. So your point in the original comment is invalid, unless you want to play the "I'm more of a power user than you!" game. [0] http://www.forbes.com/sites/brookecrothers/2016/11/08/new-2016-macbook-pro-sales-defy-criticism-initial-revenue-strong-says-market-researcher/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/brookecrothers/2016/11/08/new-20...
    - pokemongoaway 10y ago
      There are other ways to argue my point without doing something as ad hominem as claiming to be a better power user than you. And, by the way, do you think boiling it down to this at the end of your comment qualifies as, "dismissive argumentation?" For example, I could say that many of us perpetuate these memes because we see a trend away from what we like - and toward something we're trying to prevent. The trend toward increasingly proprietary hardware, and the trend away from interoperability. The trend for OSX and iOS to become more similar. A trend toward Apple-dependency, and a trend away from self-reliance. A trend toward more uniformity, more control in fewer hands, and about the future of HCI, design, and software engineering practices. So while most of us criticizing are more than happy to use and purchase a 2016 MBP - I won't speak for anyone else - but I hesitate to invest further in a product I will use daily for many years, and that has such a potential influence.
jonknee 10y ago
Allowing a very generous $100,000,000 for R&D to make a laptop and then what with the other $245,900,000,000? They have an almost unimaginable amount of money.
Corrado 10y ago
Agreed! They should also refocus on the Education market which was, in the past, a prime Apple mover. They are currently losing, with increasing frequency, the elementary education market to Google. Chromebooks are simultaneously easier to manage and massively cheaper to purchase. They also encourage development and experimentation. Recently I taught a group of 8th graders how to build an iOS app, and while it was easy to build a simple app it required way too many resources. XCode barely runs on the Mac Mini, requires too many weird permissions (developer account, etc.) and you can't even push it to an iPad without jumping through multiple, complex, hoops. We are moving to Chromebooks next year and I fully expect to teach every student how to build a simple app, on the device, and shared with their friends in the first 30 minutes. You simply cannot do that on iOS.

Invest in R&D you fools! Make a laptop to appease power users, many of whom work for you! Capture our imagination instead of kowtowing to mainstream desire for each product design!

mikhailt 10y ago

Yea, that's why they're still selling more MBP than before and their R&D are increasing by billions every year. Sorry, power users are very small # of users. Making a laptop to appease power users will do very little to the bottom line.

NotSammyHagar 10y ago

Yeah, they sure look like they can't decide what to do with their riches. It's sad. Put money toward self driving car tech if you wish, you have so much to waste. But where are your awesome next gen laptops, why nothing like a chromebook, why their disasterous desktop machines (the coffee warmer form factor, what where they thinking). The apple watch. The majority of professional devs use apple laptops because they are a great selection of tools and nice ui with unix tools. They can't build off that?

valuearb 10y ago
Somehow despite their "disastrous desktop machines" and disappointing laptops, they are the highest revenue PC manufacturer in the world and make more profits making PCs than the rest of the market combined. And somehow they only sold $6B in Apple Watches it's first year, not only making it the most successful watch launch in history but the best selling watch in the world by revenues. Imagine if they'd only invest more!
- jacquesm 10y ago
  But that money is not made on PCs, it is mostly made on phones and tablets. Q1/17: 80M iphones, 10M+ ipads, 5M Macs. And margins on phones and pads are higher than on PCs too.
  - valuearb 10y ago
    Which is one excuse given for the slow updates on the Mac side (one I don't buy). But again, Apple's Mac sales are over $25B a year,and it's profit margins on those sales are far higher (15% vs. 2-3%) than the other PC makers. It will never be as big as iPhone or iPad, but it's still one of the largest businesses in the entire world (it would just miss the Fortune 100 list on its own). It's sad they aren't doing a better job of updating the hardware, but so far it hasn't shown up in their sales.
    - pokemongoaway 10y ago
      Is this an argument for the status quo? That is, if "it doesn't show up in sales," then a tech company should feel comfortable doing which of the following? 1) Allowing software update issues 2) Alienating userbase who develops their software 3) Alienating pro audio users who want flexibility 4) ... Overlook any issue some user group has if they are winning in the market
- EpicEng 10y ago
  >Somehow despite their "disastrous desktop machines" and disappointing laptops, they are the highest revenue PC manufacturer in the world No they're not; they're the most profitable mobile phone manufacturer who also happens to make PC's.
jimmaswell 10y ago
It sounded ludicrous to me but apparently it's true that a lot of developers use Apple laptops. I don't get it, I've used an Apple computer for a week at a time a few times and it was thoroughly less convenient and more frustrating than on Windows, not even including having no Visual Studio and such.
- akvadrako 10y ago
  It's a lot about what you are used to. Most developers are creating websites or backends that run in unix-like environments and since OS X is a unix, it's a lot easier to transition or share between your workstation and production systems.
  - majewsky 10y ago
    But the same problem is between Linux and Mac. So many times did my bash scripts break on the ancient userland that comes with Mac OS. I do all my development in a Linux VM, and it's definitely a wide decision, seeing how many hours my colleagues waste setting up Postgres or Docker or even just Golang on their Macs. (Before you ask, I cannot boot into Linux directly because company policy.)
- jacquesm 10y ago
  I wouldn't know how to develop on either, Linux is so much more geared towards developers than Macs or windows computers. Even so, a Mac is closer to Linux than windows is, it's a full unix under the hood after all. Having the same environment on my workstation as on my servers always appealed to me (since my SGI days, when I would develop stuff on an indy and deploy on a challenge, basically a headless indy). But I can't imagine using OS/X as a server environment and windows seems just wrong as a server. So that leaves me with Linux, but I don't mind and I like the whole concept of open-source software.
  - OJFord 10y ago
    MacOS can be used like Linux for all but a tiling window manager (or changing DE/WM at all).
username223 10y ago
Devs are a tiny population compared to general smartphone/gadget users. As someone who pays the Apple premium for a reliable laptop that runs a Unix with good desktop applications, I wish they would put more work into developer-focused products, but there's too little money in it for a company of Apple's size. Back in the day, a company with a money-printing machine like the iPhone, e.g. Ma Bell with telephone service, would create a world-class R&D division inventing all sorts of stuff with no regard for short-term profit. Google X may have aspired to this at some point, but they seem to have backed off. Sadly, the modern company has eliminated this drag on quarterly profits.
- anindha 10y ago
  The iPhone is popular partly because of the apps that developers created. You could make an argument that making better developer laptops might lead to better iPhone sales.
  - lsadam0 10y ago
    There's no "could make..." to it. This is absolutely the case.
    - pokemongoaway 10y ago
      Haha... I feel like people very often hedge and undermine their own correct argumentation when they differ from something mainstream or powerful.
- lsadam0 10y ago
  Machines targeted solely at devs just seems like a no-brainer to me. Sure, you make no money on them. The value comes from enticing development for your ecosystem. The stagnation of the Mac Pro, and the disappointing MacBook Pro update really confuse me. I'm starting to perceive 1998 Microsoft levels of arrogance.
  - pokemongoaway 10y ago
pokemongoaway 10y ago
Exactly, and I just don't get why the average Joe is so motivated to defend large corporate decisions these days. Maybe it's a way to demonstrate that they know something about business and identify as "intelligent people?" I.e. "Well they wouldn't make as much then, you idiot - and why people who think like you aren't intelligent enough to work for them!" Anyone who has worked for a company the size of Apple should realize these all-or-nothing arguments aren't realistic. We have a lot of history of companies in tech rising and falling now, and anyone educated in that history has the ability to interpret Apple's recent choices as statements for what kind of legacy they want to create going forward...

carsongross 10y ago

Maybe they could start looking at low margin but high ecosystem value products again, like wireless routers, monitors (they say they are), etc. Apple was great because they had a unified vision for computing and they did the entire tech stack "correctly". Time machines were never going to be more than a round off error on the balance sheet, but they did it because it was the correct thing to do. An apple laptop connected to an LG or Dell monitor looks and feels wrong, regardless of how technically impressive the monitor is, because LG and Dell don't have the design sensibilities that apple has. I hope Apple rediscovers and recovers that lebensphilosophie.

pokemongoaway 10y ago
Do you think this is due to a different type of people working for Apple than who used to - in general? That is, the representation of Apple Engineer from the pool of engineering talent in the world is skewed away from the type who has a tendency for the logic you present above.
- carsongross 10y ago
  I wish I knew, but I have no special insight into the internal dynamics.

Razengan 10y ago

> Make a laptop to appease power users Oh, for fuck's sake. Have you even used the 2016 MBPs, at all? What's your current machine, and what do you run on it?

pokemongoaway 10y ago
I don't get this attitude at all... Have you ever worked for a tech company with inspired people who liked to build things? I have a mid 2014 fully loaded MBP. Don't feel like listing everything I run on my laptop here. I realize the latest MBP is a great piece of technology, but that isn't the point here...
- Razengan 10y ago
  I don't get people who just parrot second-hand opinions about something they haven't tried, but I'll apologize if I mistakenly pegged you as one. Ever since the launch of the new MBPs, it has become sort of a meme to rag on them, and it's almost always by people who haven't even used one. Nobody seems to be able to really come up with a reason WHY they're not good. When pressed, those people just resort to inane hyperboles and grasp at flimsy straws, like "emoji keyboard" and "over 9000 dongles!" When offered the fact that the new MBPs have outsold everything else out there [0], they pooh-pooh it with "That's only because of the long delay between releases!" pff. Other than the fact that you may need at most 1-2 extra pieces of equipment to plug in your legacy devices, the 2016 MBP can do everything your 2014 can. I'm a power user and consider myself an inspired person who likes to build things; I have the 2016 15" MBP, and it appeases me. So your point in the original comment is invalid, unless you want to play the "I'm more of a power user than you!" game. [0] http://www.forbes.com/sites/brookecrothers/2016/11/08/new-2016-macbook-pro-sales-defy-criticism-initial-revenue-strong-says-market-researcher/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/brookecrothers/2016/11/08/new-20...
  - pokemongoaway 10y ago
    There are other ways to argue my point without doing something as ad hominem as claiming to be a better power user than you. And, by the way, do you think boiling it down to this at the end of your comment qualifies as, "dismissive argumentation?" For example, I could say that many of us perpetuate these memes because we see a trend away from what we like - and toward something we're trying to prevent. The trend toward increasingly proprietary hardware, and the trend away from interoperability. The trend for OSX and iOS to become more similar. A trend toward Apple-dependency, and a trend away from self-reliance. A trend toward more uniformity, more control in fewer hands, and about the future of HCI, design, and software engineering practices. So while most of us criticizing are more than happy to use and purchase a 2016 MBP - I won't speak for anyone else - but I hesitate to invest further in a product I will use daily for many years, and that has such a potential influence.

jonknee 10y ago

Allowing a very generous $100,000,000 for R&D to make a laptop and then what with the other $245,900,000,000? They have an almost unimaginable amount of money.

Corrado 10y ago

Agreed! They should also refocus on the Education market which was, in the past, a prime Apple mover. They are currently losing, with increasing frequency, the elementary education market to Google. Chromebooks are simultaneously easier to manage and massively cheaper to purchase. They also encourage development and experimentation. Recently I taught a group of 8th graders how to build an iOS app, and while it was easy to build a simple app it required way too many resources. XCode barely runs on the Mac Mini, requires too many weird permissions (developer account, etc.) and you can't even push it to an iPad without jumping through multiple, complex, hoops. We are moving to Chromebooks next year and I fully expect to teach every student how to build a simple app, on the device, and shared with their friends in the first 30 minutes. You simply cannot do that on iOS.