7 ms·

Apple's Achilles Heel

66 points by _pius 9y ago

carsongross 9y ago
> The product that helped save Apple from bankruptcy 20 years ago is now turning into a barrier that is preventing Apple from focusing on what comes next. I truly hate this attitude. If you have a shit ton of money, you focus on what's right, not what makes you more money. There isn't an obvious Next Big Thing in computing, not like an iPhone anyway. The watch shows that. Apple should make the very best computers and wifi routers, and monitors, and NAS's, and cables possible. They should be beautiful, cost a bit more and they should just work. That's what makes apple special.
- scholia 9y ago
  Now about those Apple routers, monitors and NAS's... ;-)
  - h1d 9y ago
    Without the vision, all they can look at is the balance sheet. Shame.
- h1d 9y ago
  It's a publically traded company, if you just do "what's right" and ends up losing ton, they will be liable for the losses to the stakeholders. Size doesn't matter. But Apple needs a better vision than just trying to keep the company afloat. It can be dead in 20 years.
Aloha 9y ago
The thing is, I don't think Apples focus was diverted to the iPhone - I strongly suspect it was diverted to other projects we don't even know about. When it comes down to it, there isn't a ton of innovation coming out of the desktop on any platform lately. The focus in the industry is web and mobile, not on the traditional desktop ecosystem that underpins those two things.
- r00fus 9y ago
  Really another reason for Apple to "drop the ball" on design and just re-relase the old Mac Pro shell with upgraded internals. Sometimes a half-assed effort is better than none.
  - awalton 9y ago
    As long as its the old ironsides one and not an upgraded trashcan.
- scholia 9y ago
  I'd say Microsoft Studio was an innovative desktop platform, and so is the HP Envy Curve. There's interesting stuff happening in gaming desktops, too, including VR add-ons. If you include laptops as part of the "traditional desktop ecosystem" then there are lots of innovative 2-in-1s, detachables and convertibles, including the Lenovo Book (a laptop with no physical keyboard). The "traditional desktop ecosystem" in the form of Windows has also added a lot of features from the mobile ecosystem including sandboxed apps maintained from an app store, notifications, and a voice-controlled AI (Cortana). The mobile world has reached the stage where you have to look pretty closely to tell one high-end phone from any other high-end phone, and the tablet market is in steep decline. The PC market looks quite innovative in comparison.
knolax 9y ago
Am I reading this wrong or was that article just 3 paragraphs?
pedalpete 9y ago
I'm going to suggest that the focus on one product category is the wrong approach here. It doesn't matter if it's an iPhone, iPad, Mac, or whatever else. They are all just computers. The difference is in the Jobs To Be Done, and I think it is a very minor, yet important difference. I suspect the lack of focus on Mac is because Apple has to know that it is a dying product. This is also the direction Microsoft is going with Windows. In the future, we won't differentiate between our different devices in the strict terms we do today. For the average consumer, their phone can run all the productivity apps they need. For developers and artists, this is not yet true, but it is surely coming.
- wolfgke 9y ago
  > For the average consumer, their phone can run all the productivity apps they need. For developers and artists, this is not yet true, but it is surely coming. I cannot say anything about artists, but for developers Apple is actively preventing this: - no way to write apps that allocate executable memory - hard to sideload applications (though possible with a developer account) - no way to gain root access in a legal way (necessary for example to create raw sockets; cf. https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/36230 https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/36230)
  - npunt 9y ago
    Development still isn't great on iOS devices. Nevertheless, the activities you mention are a subset of all developer use cases. Not all developers need root or raw sockets, just like not all developers need access to modify physical hardware. The landscape has shifted so that those needs which were once very important in development are now much less prevalent, and are thus not optimized for. Much of the misunderstanding that I've observed around iOS relates to overgeneralizing the failings of some specific use cases. Like, (artists won't like this) because (it can't do specific use case in art that only some in the field do, and many/most don't). Framing it this way is a bit unfair, because it limits the comparison to how much iOS can replicate the desktop experience, rather than seeing the new use cases that iOS unlocks. We don't realistically expect iOS devices to have low level hardware expansion ports like PCIe cards to supercharge its video or whatever, but somehow we have software comparisons that seem roughly equivalent. I'm not saying you were doing this, just something I've observed in comments a lot regarding iOS and its capabilities/purpose/usefulness.
desdiv 9y ago
- awestley 9y ago
  Achille's Heels are some peoples Achille's Heel.
joeguilmette 9y ago
"The iPhone hasn’t suffered because Apple is focused on the Mac. New iPhones come out like clockwork every year." The iPhone 6 was released in 2014. The same design is probably going to live on until 2018. I'm not sure what it is they are working on, but it better be good.
- runjake 9y ago
  Meanwhile, the internals inside that same casing have improved drastically, some might say stunningly, over the past few years. Here's some of the things they've worked on in the timeline you mentioned: - A10 Fusion high/low power cores with surprising levels of performance approaching desktop performance and even surpassing some low-end desktop processors. - Solid state home button - The Haptic Engine. - Touch 3D
  - TillE 9y ago
    I can take or leave the gimmicks, but Apple's progress with ARM processor design has been stunning, year after year. For the past few cycles, their phone CPU has comparable performance to a good laptop from about 3 years prior.
- Tanegashima 9y ago
  Yes, because it's the exterior that counts?
douche 9y ago
At this point, Apple could just take their cash stockpile, dump it in mutual funds, and be profitable, basically, forever.
- DigitalJack 9y ago
  You think it's locked in a safe? I'm sure it's invested in a healthy mix of funds.
  - asragab 9y ago
    Sorry, maybe I am being dense, but isn't that pretty much where it is? I mean, when articles talk about "cash reserves" don't they precisely mean immediately liquid assets, or does that include invested income as well?
    - jedberg 9y ago
      It means "readily convertible". So stocks, mutual funds, other currency reserves, bonds, etc. Things that if you needed cash right now you could quickly turn into cash.
      - Clubber 9y ago
        An example of a non-liquid asset would be real estate.
nodesocket 9y ago
Here we go again. Another blogger (while John Gruber deserves a lot more credit and weight than the average bear) telling Apple what they are doing wrong. Nevertheless, there is a disconnect between what Apple "professional" users want, and what's best for the company and shareholders. Full disclosure, I am long-time shareholder. Don't get me wrong, I love my Mac's and continue to watch for new and innovative computers. However, taking advise from developers on how to manage the most successful company in the history of the world... Not so much.
asragab 9y ago
One cynical takeaway from the story of Achilles and Thetis is that one can never do enough for one's children (or conversely) there's always an opportunity to blame someone else ;) In this case-Apple, as the proud parents of the Mac, iPhone and iPad, a possible strategy, much like Thetis dipping her son again in the River Styx, is to find ways to take advantage of the same R&D across their product line. I've always thought that a greater convergence between iOS and now macOS was in store. Maybe as a "pro" I wouldn't want that - but if it could make both better then that convergence in terms of financial and technical focus would be a win-win for Apple and its customers. As the owner of a Late 2013 MacBook Pro (the best iteration IMHO) and the user of the latest TouchBar MacBook Pro (work laptop) I am bemused by some of the decisions Apple has made. Of course this article comes out on the heels (yeah, yeah, sorry) of the announcement that Apple now has 246 billion in the bank, so what the hell do any of us know.
wand3r 9y ago
The cloud is the Achilles heal in reality. The cadence for Apple was really this: 1. The computer is the hub. Your devices link to this. 2. The Cloud is the hub. We will pivot to a distributed system so all your devices can sync with/o wires. 3. The Phone is the hub. Your phone is a private mobile cloud-- an extension really; so you can still use the watch as a wallet and the phone camera and integrated sensors in upcoming devices to relay data to the cloud. I am not going to comment on the strategy but the article says much of what I am saying in a different way. The phone is pretty damn good; but I think the heal is the cloud. It still has many issues and that costs user trust. The phone is a relay but the foundation is Shakey. Also, Apple is going to lose users because the computer provides the lock in. I was priced out of Mac a month ago. Ubuntu is pretty great. I built a hackintosh that was on par with the 1999.99 iMac offering. Sure it had no screen but included in the cost but it was $580 w/a Skylake i5. The point is; shortly after I broke my phone. I just went Android. It's wayyy worse but I didn't need the iPhone to complete the relay because I have no Mac and because of the sync on iCloud "optimizing" storage it takes literally 8 days to copy the 16gb folder. Tldr It's a foundation. The heal is iCloud.
- scholia 9y ago
  In passing, "The heal is iCloud" should be heel, if there's still time to correct it...
  - jjtheblunt 9y ago
    Maybe what you wrote makes accidental sense.
olivermarks 9y ago
Apple is a mass of DRM and private cloud, with access points via ios and osx. I'm writing this on a macbook air (an old one) which I use like a chrome book. Apple doesn't hang together as a contiguous platform at all, their world is very janky and inconsistent, extraordinary given their colossal wealth and expertise. If they are going to continue as a closed environment they have a lot of work to do on all fronts to polish up all aspects of their user experience IMO.
patrickg_zill 9y ago
The same thing has happened before, both at Apple, and at NeXT, which was the company Jobs started that resulted in the NeXT OS becoming OSX. Apple: pre-Macintosh days: has the Apple IIe (IIc also, all with 8 bit 1Mhz CPUs) etc. minting money, but Apple has no clear upgrade path to more powerful computers. Note that the basic design of the Apple II dates to 1977... They try the Apple III (with a 2Mhz CPU!) as a method of market segmentation but it doesn't take off as well as they hoped. They continue milking the 8-bit, 1Mhz Apple IIe market until 1993 when it is finally discontinued. (They sold a plug in card for certain Macs that allowed Apple II era software to run under a combined software and hardware emulation layer). So after letting the IIe linger (1977-1984, 6 or 7 years of the same basic design) they come out with the Macintosh - completely incompatible but really a new class of machine. The 68K-based Macs go through a similar period of sliding into a moribund, twilight existence - being overpriced in comparison to "Wintel", and not fixing dumb bugs like having the mouse button interrupt and stop all activity on the system, for instance. An attempt at a new OS (Copland or whatever they called it) fails miserably. The NeXT systems that Jobs designed, were often BETTER than the equivalent SPARC systems, and were proce-competitive. Why didn't NeXT sell tons of desktop workstations in competition with Sun? Well, the US Federal Government requires all systems (or at least UNIX based systems) they buy to be able to provide POSIX as a layer, to ensure interoperability. This is why Windows NT had a (probably rarely used) POSIX subsystem, to make sure they could check that checkbox on GSA procurement forms. Despite it being easily able to be added to NeXT's OS, for some reason, Jobs never made sure it got added. So no GSA contracts for NeXT... and at that time, the US Federal Govt was one of the largest buyers of Unix-based systems in the world. The only exception is the NSA and maybe CIA, who don't have to answer to GSA procurement, and love using Interface Builder and other tools to rapidly create their custom apps. See any patterns here? Apple is wholly unable as part of its DNA, to consistently create stable growth. They blaze a trail, leave others in the dust, then get lazy or lack inspiration, and others catch up to them. Their model is the "blockbuster" model and when something isn't a blockbuster (Newton PDAs, rackmounted XServes) they drop it and forget about it. iPhone and iPad are basically the Star Wars franchise in terms of longevity and profitability...
clairity 9y ago
gruber's rebuttal of the cybart article doesn't make sense. an achilles' heel is a small, obscure weakness that can bring down an otherwise invincible competitor. cybart seems to be correctly using this analogy (whether you agree with the argument or not). gruber however calls the iphone apple's achilles' heel, but the iphone is a highly visible, dominant aspect of apple's business. it's obvious that if you can successfully attack the iphone, apple would be in serious danger. in any case, cybart's analysis makes some sense. the macbook pro, mac pro and macOS products buttress the iphone and app store businesses, so they're strategically important and deserve more attention and investment than they might otherwise seem to warrant. underinvestment in the ($23 billion) mac businesses allows companies like microsoft and google to undermine the brand and goodwill that apple has developed over the past many years, so it does seem to be a potential achilles' heel.
joshmarinacci 9y ago
I don't think any particular product is Apple's "Achilles Heel". Rather, it is that Apple seems unable to focus on multiple products at once, despite their billions of dollars in the bank. Is this a result of their particular internal structure?
- tonyedgecombe 9y ago
  It's quite hard to ramp up R&D, sure you could throw money at it but if you want to make sure it's effective then it takes time.
gibbitz 9y ago
with a $246 billion surplus you can focus on more than one product at a time with at least 10 times the budget of a company that can only focus on one product. If you can't figure out how to grow profits at this scale, you are terrible at training and management and deserve to go out of business. The true Achilles heel of Apple is the cult of Steve Jobs. He was possibly the only effective micro-manager. The company can't run by filling a Steve Jobs shaped hole with anyone else. They need to learn to breed drive a vision in the heads of their divisions, give them the autonomy to push the limits the way Jobs did and then strive to reproduce these traits and abilities in all of their leadership while spreading out the responsibility. They can only spread their focus through properly pooled intellectual resources and vision.
- amazingman 9y ago
  Throwing money at problems doesn't magically solve them. In fact, much of the time it just gives you more problems.
  - mercer 9y ago
    Absolutely. I've been concerned about Apple lately, for various reasons, but the last thing I'd want them to do is 'scale up', become more like a 'normal' huge corporation. It might be better for me in the short term, but worse for Apple in the longer-term. On the timescale that I care about, I feel my concerns are premature. In the decade that I've been using Apple stuff they've surprised me often enough (iPhone, iPad, possibly Apple Watch, and the AirPods). I think a primary reason for the success is their 'weird' way of operating (similar to Nintendo, I feel).
makecheck 9y ago
The sad thing about commercial products is that when a company stops working on something, you’re screwed. Perhaps Apple’s real Achilles Heel is not wanting to give up full control. Yet Apple could still benefit significantly from even a slightly more open environment on both the software and hardware sides. Consider: for every “minor” free OS update in recent years from a bored Apple, open-source software developers could have made huge improvements in an open Mac environment. Someone might have boosted the App Store back-end to have package-manager-level robustness, completeness and convenience, for example. Similarly, with open hardware we probably would have had some really cool pro equipment and 3rd-party things like displays may not have so many issues. And heck, somebody probably would have figured out a great way to integrate iOS devices. All of that benefits Apple, which is not bad for a platform that their heart wasn’t in. Of course there is evidence that Apple still invests in the Mac but there is no doubt that they keep making one minor thing worse for every 4 things they fiddle with. This means they might be starting to lose their focus on end-to-end perfection (a Jobsian trait). And if I’m going to work day-to-day on a system that has loose ends requiring my attention to deal with, a big part of the Apple advantage is being lost.

66 points by _pius 9y ago

> The product that helped save Apple from bankruptcy 20 years ago is now turning into a barrier that is preventing Apple from focusing on what comes next. I truly hate this attitude. If you have a shit ton of money, you focus on what's right, not what makes you more money. There isn't an obvious Next Big Thing in computing, not like an iPhone anyway. The watch shows that. Apple should make the very best computers and wifi routers, and monitors, and NAS's, and cables possible. They should be beautiful, cost a bit more and they should just work. That's what makes apple special.

scholia 9y ago
Now about those Apple routers, monitors and NAS's... ;-)
- h1d 9y ago
  Without the vision, all they can look at is the balance sheet. Shame.
h1d 9y ago
It's a publically traded company, if you just do "what's right" and ends up losing ton, they will be liable for the losses to the stakeholders. Size doesn't matter. But Apple needs a better vision than just trying to keep the company afloat. It can be dead in 20 years.

Aloha 9y ago

The thing is, I don't think Apples focus was diverted to the iPhone - I strongly suspect it was diverted to other projects we don't even know about. When it comes down to it, there isn't a ton of innovation coming out of the desktop on any platform lately. The focus in the industry is web and mobile, not on the traditional desktop ecosystem that underpins those two things.

r00fus 9y ago
Really another reason for Apple to "drop the ball" on design and just re-relase the old Mac Pro shell with upgraded internals. Sometimes a half-assed effort is better than none.
- awalton 9y ago
  As long as its the old ironsides one and not an upgraded trashcan.
scholia 9y ago
I'd say Microsoft Studio was an innovative desktop platform, and so is the HP Envy Curve. There's interesting stuff happening in gaming desktops, too, including VR add-ons. If you include laptops as part of the "traditional desktop ecosystem" then there are lots of innovative 2-in-1s, detachables and convertibles, including the Lenovo Book (a laptop with no physical keyboard). The "traditional desktop ecosystem" in the form of Windows has also added a lot of features from the mobile ecosystem including sandboxed apps maintained from an app store, notifications, and a voice-controlled AI (Cortana). The mobile world has reached the stage where you have to look pretty closely to tell one high-end phone from any other high-end phone, and the tablet market is in steep decline. The PC market looks quite innovative in comparison.

knolax 9y ago

Am I reading this wrong or was that article just 3 paragraphs?

pedalpete 9y ago

I'm going to suggest that the focus on one product category is the wrong approach here. It doesn't matter if it's an iPhone, iPad, Mac, or whatever else. They are all just computers. The difference is in the Jobs To Be Done, and I think it is a very minor, yet important difference. I suspect the lack of focus on Mac is because Apple has to know that it is a dying product. This is also the direction Microsoft is going with Windows. In the future, we won't differentiate between our different devices in the strict terms we do today. For the average consumer, their phone can run all the productivity apps they need. For developers and artists, this is not yet true, but it is surely coming.

wolfgke 9y ago
> For the average consumer, their phone can run all the productivity apps they need. For developers and artists, this is not yet true, but it is surely coming. I cannot say anything about artists, but for developers Apple is actively preventing this: - no way to write apps that allocate executable memory - hard to sideload applications (though possible with a developer account) - no way to gain root access in a legal way (necessary for example to create raw sockets; cf. https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/36230 https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/36230)
- npunt 9y ago
  Development still isn't great on iOS devices. Nevertheless, the activities you mention are a subset of all developer use cases. Not all developers need root or raw sockets, just like not all developers need access to modify physical hardware. The landscape has shifted so that those needs which were once very important in development are now much less prevalent, and are thus not optimized for. Much of the misunderstanding that I've observed around iOS relates to overgeneralizing the failings of some specific use cases. Like, (artists won't like this) because (it can't do specific use case in art that only some in the field do, and many/most don't). Framing it this way is a bit unfair, because it limits the comparison to how much iOS can replicate the desktop experience, rather than seeing the new use cases that iOS unlocks. We don't realistically expect iOS devices to have low level hardware expansion ports like PCIe cards to supercharge its video or whatever, but somehow we have software comparisons that seem roughly equivalent. I'm not saying you were doing this, just something I've observed in comments a lot regarding iOS and its capabilities/purpose/usefulness.

desdiv 9y ago

awestley 9y ago
Achille's Heels are some peoples Achille's Heel.

joeguilmette 9y ago

"The iPhone hasn’t suffered because Apple is focused on the Mac. New iPhones come out like clockwork every year." The iPhone 6 was released in 2014. The same design is probably going to live on until 2018. I'm not sure what it is they are working on, but it better be good.

runjake 9y ago
Meanwhile, the internals inside that same casing have improved drastically, some might say stunningly, over the past few years. Here's some of the things they've worked on in the timeline you mentioned: - A10 Fusion high/low power cores with surprising levels of performance approaching desktop performance and even surpassing some low-end desktop processors. - Solid state home button - The Haptic Engine. - Touch 3D
- TillE 9y ago
  I can take or leave the gimmicks, but Apple's progress with ARM processor design has been stunning, year after year. For the past few cycles, their phone CPU has comparable performance to a good laptop from about 3 years prior.
Tanegashima 9y ago
Yes, because it's the exterior that counts?

douche 9y ago

At this point, Apple could just take their cash stockpile, dump it in mutual funds, and be profitable, basically, forever.

DigitalJack 9y ago
You think it's locked in a safe? I'm sure it's invested in a healthy mix of funds.
- asragab 9y ago
  Sorry, maybe I am being dense, but isn't that pretty much where it is? I mean, when articles talk about "cash reserves" don't they precisely mean immediately liquid assets, or does that include invested income as well?
  - jedberg 9y ago
    It means "readily convertible". So stocks, mutual funds, other currency reserves, bonds, etc. Things that if you needed cash right now you could quickly turn into cash.
    - Clubber 9y ago
      An example of a non-liquid asset would be real estate.

nodesocket 9y ago

Here we go again. Another blogger (while John Gruber deserves a lot more credit and weight than the average bear) telling Apple what they are doing wrong. Nevertheless, there is a disconnect between what Apple "professional" users want, and what's best for the company and shareholders. Full disclosure, I am long-time shareholder. Don't get me wrong, I love my Mac's and continue to watch for new and innovative computers. However, taking advise from developers on how to manage the most successful company in the history of the world... Not so much.

asragab 9y ago

One cynical takeaway from the story of Achilles and Thetis is that one can never do enough for one's children (or conversely) there's always an opportunity to blame someone else ;) In this case-Apple, as the proud parents of the Mac, iPhone and iPad, a possible strategy, much like Thetis dipping her son again in the River Styx, is to find ways to take advantage of the same R&D across their product line. I've always thought that a greater convergence between iOS and now macOS was in store. Maybe as a "pro" I wouldn't want that - but if it could make both better then that convergence in terms of financial and technical focus would be a win-win for Apple and its customers. As the owner of a Late 2013 MacBook Pro (the best iteration IMHO) and the user of the latest TouchBar MacBook Pro (work laptop) I am bemused by some of the decisions Apple has made. Of course this article comes out on the heels (yeah, yeah, sorry) of the announcement that Apple now has 246 billion in the bank, so what the hell do any of us know.

wand3r 9y ago

The cloud is the Achilles heal in reality. The cadence for Apple was really this: 1. The computer is the hub. Your devices link to this. 2. The Cloud is the hub. We will pivot to a distributed system so all your devices can sync with/o wires. 3. The Phone is the hub. Your phone is a private mobile cloud-- an extension really; so you can still use the watch as a wallet and the phone camera and integrated sensors in upcoming devices to relay data to the cloud. I am not going to comment on the strategy but the article says much of what I am saying in a different way. The phone is pretty damn good; but I think the heal is the cloud. It still has many issues and that costs user trust. The phone is a relay but the foundation is Shakey. Also, Apple is going to lose users because the computer provides the lock in. I was priced out of Mac a month ago. Ubuntu is pretty great. I built a hackintosh that was on par with the 1999.99 iMac offering. Sure it had no screen but included in the cost but it was $580 w/a Skylake i5. The point is; shortly after I broke my phone. I just went Android. It's wayyy worse but I didn't need the iPhone to complete the relay because I have no Mac and because of the sync on iCloud "optimizing" storage it takes literally 8 days to copy the 16gb folder. Tldr It's a foundation. The heal is iCloud.

scholia 9y ago
In passing, "The heal is iCloud" should be heel, if there's still time to correct it...
- jjtheblunt 9y ago
  Maybe what you wrote makes accidental sense.

olivermarks 9y ago

Apple is a mass of DRM and private cloud, with access points via ios and osx. I'm writing this on a macbook air (an old one) which I use like a chrome book. Apple doesn't hang together as a contiguous platform at all, their world is very janky and inconsistent, extraordinary given their colossal wealth and expertise. If they are going to continue as a closed environment they have a lot of work to do on all fronts to polish up all aspects of their user experience IMO.

patrickg_zill 9y ago

The same thing has happened before, both at Apple, and at NeXT, which was the company Jobs started that resulted in the NeXT OS becoming OSX. Apple: pre-Macintosh days: has the Apple IIe (IIc also, all with 8 bit 1Mhz CPUs) etc. minting money, but Apple has no clear upgrade path to more powerful computers. Note that the basic design of the Apple II dates to 1977... They try the Apple III (with a 2Mhz CPU!) as a method of market segmentation but it doesn't take off as well as they hoped. They continue milking the 8-bit, 1Mhz Apple IIe market until 1993 when it is finally discontinued. (They sold a plug in card for certain Macs that allowed Apple II era software to run under a combined software and hardware emulation layer). So after letting the IIe linger (1977-1984, 6 or 7 years of the same basic design) they come out with the Macintosh - completely incompatible but really a new class of machine. The 68K-based Macs go through a similar period of sliding into a moribund, twilight existence - being overpriced in comparison to "Wintel", and not fixing dumb bugs like having the mouse button interrupt and stop all activity on the system, for instance. An attempt at a new OS (Copland or whatever they called it) fails miserably. The NeXT systems that Jobs designed, were often BETTER than the equivalent SPARC systems, and were proce-competitive. Why didn't NeXT sell tons of desktop workstations in competition with Sun? Well, the US Federal Government requires all systems (or at least UNIX based systems) they buy to be able to provide POSIX as a layer, to ensure interoperability. This is why Windows NT had a (probably rarely used) POSIX subsystem, to make sure they could check that checkbox on GSA procurement forms. Despite it being easily able to be added to NeXT's OS, for some reason, Jobs never made sure it got added. So no GSA contracts for NeXT... and at that time, the US Federal Govt was one of the largest buyers of Unix-based systems in the world. The only exception is the NSA and maybe CIA, who don't have to answer to GSA procurement, and love using Interface Builder and other tools to rapidly create their custom apps. See any patterns here? Apple is wholly unable as part of its DNA, to consistently create stable growth. They blaze a trail, leave others in the dust, then get lazy or lack inspiration, and others catch up to them. Their model is the "blockbuster" model and when something isn't a blockbuster (Newton PDAs, rackmounted XServes) they drop it and forget about it. iPhone and iPad are basically the Star Wars franchise in terms of longevity and profitability...

clairity 9y ago

gruber's rebuttal of the cybart article doesn't make sense. an achilles' heel is a small, obscure weakness that can bring down an otherwise invincible competitor. cybart seems to be correctly using this analogy (whether you agree with the argument or not). gruber however calls the iphone apple's achilles' heel, but the iphone is a highly visible, dominant aspect of apple's business. it's obvious that if you can successfully attack the iphone, apple would be in serious danger. in any case, cybart's analysis makes some sense. the macbook pro, mac pro and macOS products buttress the iphone and app store businesses, so they're strategically important and deserve more attention and investment than they might otherwise seem to warrant. underinvestment in the ($23 billion) mac businesses allows companies like microsoft and google to undermine the brand and goodwill that apple has developed over the past many years, so it does seem to be a potential achilles' heel.

joshmarinacci 9y ago

I don't think any particular product is Apple's "Achilles Heel". Rather, it is that Apple seems unable to focus on multiple products at once, despite their billions of dollars in the bank. Is this a result of their particular internal structure?

tonyedgecombe 9y ago
It's quite hard to ramp up R&D, sure you could throw money at it but if you want to make sure it's effective then it takes time.

gibbitz 9y ago

with a $246 billion surplus you can focus on more than one product at a time with at least 10 times the budget of a company that can only focus on one product. If you can't figure out how to grow profits at this scale, you are terrible at training and management and deserve to go out of business. The true Achilles heel of Apple is the cult of Steve Jobs. He was possibly the only effective micro-manager. The company can't run by filling a Steve Jobs shaped hole with anyone else. They need to learn to breed drive a vision in the heads of their divisions, give them the autonomy to push the limits the way Jobs did and then strive to reproduce these traits and abilities in all of their leadership while spreading out the responsibility. They can only spread their focus through properly pooled intellectual resources and vision.

amazingman 9y ago
Throwing money at problems doesn't magically solve them. In fact, much of the time it just gives you more problems.
- mercer 9y ago
  Absolutely. I've been concerned about Apple lately, for various reasons, but the last thing I'd want them to do is 'scale up', become more like a 'normal' huge corporation. It might be better for me in the short term, but worse for Apple in the longer-term. On the timescale that I care about, I feel my concerns are premature. In the decade that I've been using Apple stuff they've surprised me often enough (iPhone, iPad, possibly Apple Watch, and the AirPods). I think a primary reason for the success is their 'weird' way of operating (similar to Nintendo, I feel).

makecheck 9y ago

The sad thing about commercial products is that when a company stops working on something, you’re screwed. Perhaps Apple’s real Achilles Heel is not wanting to give up full control. Yet Apple could still benefit significantly from even a slightly more open environment on both the software and hardware sides. Consider: for every “minor” free OS update in recent years from a bored Apple, open-source software developers could have made huge improvements in an open Mac environment. Someone might have boosted the App Store back-end to have package-manager-level robustness, completeness and convenience, for example. Similarly, with open hardware we probably would have had some really cool pro equipment and 3rd-party things like displays may not have so many issues. And heck, somebody probably would have figured out a great way to integrate iOS devices. All of that benefits Apple, which is not bad for a platform that their heart wasn’t in. Of course there is evidence that Apple still invests in the Mac but there is no doubt that they keep making one minor thing worse for every 4 things they fiddle with. This means they might be starting to lose their focus on end-to-end perfection (a Jobsian trait). And if I’m going to work day-to-day on a system that has loose ends requiring my attention to deal with, a big part of the Apple advantage is being lost.