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Dear Tim, Please focus on Mac hardware. Please focus on giving me the hardware tools to work and play on the macOS platform. Continue improving your mobile dev
by delinka 9y ago
Dear Tim,
Please focus on Mac hardware. Please focus on giving me the hardware tools to work and play on the macOS platform. Continue improving your mobile devices. Consider adding and improving only those things that will continue to make my business and leisure tasks smoother, simpler, and more enjoyable.
I'd rather you didn't take focus from the things you've traditionally done well to do something that's never been in your wheelhouse. If you want to get involved with automobiles, work with the industry to improve my life while I'm riding along in the autonomous vehicle, but please don't try to build the autonomous vehicle. I'd prefer you wait until the market is saturated with terrible implementations so you can learn from others' mistakes and come along with a much-improved offering.
But for now, just give me and my fellows Macs we can depend on for everything, a reliable mobile experience that doesn't throw out the habits we gained on the previous iteration, and the tools to make great software for your platforms.
--d
- TeMPOraL 9y agoDear 'delinka, We regret to inform you, but you are a part of a market niche known as "power users". That niche is but a small part of our customer base, and like all other big companies in the industry, we no longer care about you. Don't be sad about gradually losing useful tools - enjoy the new, shiny toys instead. Sincerely, Apple.
- agumonkey 9y agoRest assured that you are not losing pro tools, instead you are getting new ones, we work dilligently to provide you with the best Uber like cars so you can be the best Taxi. -- Pear
- jobu 9y agoMany of the current "power users" are also "trend setters". If those users start switching away from Apple then it's going to be a big hit to Apple's brand value (and their ability to sell middling products and high prices).
- giobox 9y agoAre they though? Not saying you're wrong, but that's a giant assumption without data to back it up. That Mac sales are still up year over year suggests to me that the complaints of pro users (which lets face it, date back to 2010, when the cheesegrater Mac Pro was getting long in the tooth) have had little or no impact on sales.
- IBM 9y agoThis is a mantra that's been repeated whenever "pro users" feel like Apple is neglecting them, but there isn't actually any evidence that this is true. It may have been true at one point in the 90s, when Apple's customer base was much smaller, but today it sounds more like a jilted ex trying to guilt someone back into a relationship. I'm still waiting to see this effect in action from when Apple supposedly threw away the Final Cut Pro 7 userbase over night. That was back in 2011, 6 years should have been plenty of time to see this play out. Or perhaps the movers and shakers in Hollywood don't have as much influence as they thought.
- monkmartinez 9y agoI disagree. I naturally ask advise from people who I know to have extensive domain experience. That is, I ask my plumber buddy about the best water heater to buy. I ask my realtor buddy, where are the homes selling the most. and so on. I get asked all the time about buying laptops. I used to recommend Apple, but it has become very difficult to do so for a myriad of reasons. Lately, I have found that most people can get by with a chrome book after looking at their requirements.
- 1123581321 9y agoCan you explain a bit further? MacBooks have always been premium laptops. Are you saying low end laptops are able to serve basic needs better than a few years ago? I agree with that, and take it to be a sign of a mature market, not a failing of Apple's.
- mwfunk 9y agoI used to think this was true in the tech world, but I don't think it is, at least not in the last 10-15 years. If power users were trendsetters, there'd be a lot more people running desktop Linux these days. I think the time in which the most dedicated and enthusiastic computer users reflected the leading edge of the rest of the market is long gone, unfortunately. However, I do think turning off power users is a great way for the company to shoot itself in the foot when it comes to recruitment. They really depend on a certain degree of enthusiasm to get the kind of engineering talent they want to get, much more so than money or the work environment or perqs. If they no longer inspire that enthusiasm in as many people, it'll make it that much more difficult to bring good people together to do whatever they want to do next. Unfortunately the general trend seems to be a long, slow transition from being the BMW of the computer industry to being the Chipotle of the tech industry. I'm sure all the metrics favor being Chipotle (and gosh do they love metrics), but that doesn't do anything to help make Chipotle a desirable place to work at that draws all the best talent.
- jshevek 9y ago"all other" ? Dell does great work with Linux on some XPS laptops. Ubuntu may not be what we want, but the foundation is set for other distros.
- oddevan 9y agoAs a fellow Mac user, I get it. Especially after the (to put it lightly) dry spell that was 2016, I understand wanting Apple to focus on the Mac and on making their current devices best-of-breed. And given what we just saw at WWDC, I'm inclined to think they're moving in that direction again. But the way Tim is framing this, they're looking at it as an AI problem. He doesn't go into the feel of driving or the wonderfully bad user interfaces of current cars, he describes it as "the mother of all AI projects." So while this is "something that's never been in [their] wheelhouse", they're approaching it from the AI side. And AI, given WWDC, is something they are very much trying to make their wheelhouse. And it sounds like they're doing it in a very Apple-like way: work on the hardest problem they can, then take what they've learned and apply it. Even if they don't make a car, or even a driving platform they can sell, the AI things they'll learn will show up in Siri, iOS, and everywhere else. So yeah, I want them to focus on Mac hardware. But I also want them to learn and grow. And I think they might, might, be starting to do both.
- blktiger 9y ago+1 - AI is becoming fundamental to our computing experiences whether it's in a car, on your phone, or on your desktop. Good AI is probably the next big leap in usefulness on any device, whether it's a car or a desktop. So it makes sense for Apple to focus on it now, in order to make their devices better in the future. That said, Apple is big enough to have multiple focus areas, just because this is a focus to them doesn't mean they don't have other teams properly focusing on the Mac or iOS.
- PayForPeenus 9y agofundamental <--- not true. It's becoming an enabler, yes. Fundamental, no. Plus AI is terribly subjective, unfortunately. It's neither thought producing or augmentative to the process - but that's my OWN 2c on it. However, it _is_ important from an enabler for technology to be more "natural" to the way we interact with our technology.
- numerlo 9y agoDid we watch the same WWDC? macOS is in maintenance mode no mater how they try to mask it and still somehow I keep experiencing more bugs with every release. At least they are going to update their hardware this time around huh? Is that what passes for "being focused on macs" these days? Last year was like they completely forgot about us, this year they are throwing us breadcrumps. EDIT: Since I keep getting the same replies, I'm gonna edit it here too: 1. When you are in maintenance mode and you still manage to introduce more bugs than you are fixing then your are doing something wrong (usually that's a result of limiting the budget of a department and as a consequence hiring less experienced developers) 2. Every new feature the last few years has been ported from iOS and without much care. I still can't believe they have yet to make Siri and Spotlight one unified product (at least make Spotlight more powerful, I can't even set a timer with it). And to add to this, being in maintenance mode doesn't have immediate effects. If Apple continues like this somewhere down the line macOS is gonna end up quite behind (and a big mess due to points 1. and 2.)
- usaphp 9y ago> I'd rather you didn't take focus from the things you've traditionally done well to do something that never been in your wheelhouse like how they were a computer company and then decided to go into cellphone business?
- mikeash 9y agoExactly. As an Apple user and fan since the late 80s, 2007 was when it all went to hell.
- yequalsx 9y agoI can't tell if this is sarcasm or if you are being genuine here. I'm taking it as sarcasm. If so well done. Apple has hundreds of billions of dollars. They can focus on more than a few products. It's natural that they look into AI.
- mikeash 9y agoIt's 100% genuine. Obviously Apple has been very successful following this path, but I'm much less happy with Apple 2017 than I was with Apple 2007, and it all stems from the iPhone.
- giobox 9y agoIn an alternate universe where Apple doesn't launch the iPhone, do you think the company would still be nearly as relevant in 2017? Getting annoyed at Apple for embracing mobile in 2007 is a fools game - if they hadn't made the iPhone, one of their competitors would have gotten close enough eventually and drastically reduced Apple's stature in the industry. Complaints like these remind of the Mac OS 9 holdouts when OS X was so obviously the future.
- mikeash 9y agoThe comparison to Mac OS 9 makes no sense. Apple was dying in the late 90s. The OS was extremely obsolete and the whole company was on the verge of falling over. They needed a big change to survive, and that was OS X, which suddenly gave them a modern OS and made their computers popular in many segments which had previously completely ignored them. Apple was doing just fine in 2007. OS X was in great shape. They had recently transitioned from the faltering PowerPC CPUs to x86, which revitalized their hardware offerings and opened up a world of new possibilities for users to dual-boot or virtualize other OSes. Their market share was pretty solid, and their share of PC profits was quite high. You say "stature in the industry" as if there's a single "the industry" that encompasses both PCs and phones. If Apple hadn't done the iPhone then maybe Microsoft or Nokia would have done better, but so what? That wouldn't affect Apple in the PC market. Wikipedia says the top five PC makers are Lenovo, HP, Dell, Asus, and Apple, and as far as I know Apple is the only one with a substantial smartphone business. Of course Apple wouldn't be nearly as relevant overall in a world where they never produced the iPhone. I don't care about that. I see no reason why the Mac wouldn't be about as relevant in the personal computing space, which is what I care about. In any case, I'm not just annoyed at the existence of the iPhone, but the nature of it. If the iPhone had been a Mac-like open platform instead of this walled garden bullshit, all of my complaints would go away. I have no problem with mobile per se, I have a problem with pervasive vendor-controlled code signing, not getting root on my own devices, etc.
- IBM 9y agoReminds me of this classic comment on Macrumors when the iPod launched [1]: Sounds very revolutionary to me. :mad: hey - heres an idea Apple - rather than enter the world of gimmicks and toys, why dont you spend a little more time sorting out your pathetically expensive and crap server line up? :mad: or are you really aiming to become a glorified consumer gimmicks firm? :mad: [1] https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apples-new-thing-ipod.500/ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apples-new-thing-ipod.5...
- badsectoracula 9y agoDidn't people said the same thing about iPhone, that Apple would fail if they enter in the already oversaturated phone market and they should stick with what they do best instead?
- mort96 9y agoWell, that guy was right to be worried. Apple made extremely successful consumer products, but where are their servers? You could rightly argue that it's better for apple to focus on other stuff than servers, but it most definitely wasn't better for the people who depended on their server hardware and software.
- charlesism 9y agoTim wasn't CEO when the iPod launched.
- throwaway-1209 9y agoThe only real improvements I'd suggest is switching back to NVIDIA across their entire product line and offering 32 and 64GB in MBP. I kind of struggle to think what else they could improve. Do you have any concrete suggestions? I do agree that autonomous cars are a money pit not worth pursuing right now.
- alasdair_ 9y agoFaster processors would be nice. The current gen macbook pro is appallingly slow for the price.
- throwaway-1209 9y agoFaster processors do not exist. The current gen MBP already uses the latest Kaby Lake chips.
- codyb 9y agoHmm, I'm all for Apple's entry into the autonomous car sector. The more players the better in my opinion. Autonomous cars have the promise to reduce congestion, asthma rates, and lives lost to car crashes and they'll be a tremendous boon to major metropolitan areas when they're ready for full scale deployment. Apple's the richest company in the world and it seems like they are actually focusing a bit on the MacPro and some of the other pro offerings power users need. I'm also confident with the amount of money they have, they can certainly do both.
- vlozko 9y agoAre you insinuating that they can't do both? They're certainly working on the things that you're asking for. Maybe not at the pace and direction that you personally want but they're not stagnating, either. They've already said they'll have a new Mac Pro out next year. They've introduced a new iMac Pro. They're investing heavily into AR/VR. They're big enough to do a lot of different things. It's like asking Microsoft to focus on Windows and Surface instead of putting in effort into their Hololens. Again, why can't they do both?
- jobu 9y ago> Are you insinuating that they can't do both? Well they certainly aren't doing both at the moment. All of the Mac hardware updates have been so heavily "form over function" that they aren't very appealing to people that just need to get shit done. My 3 year old Macbook Pro is still very fast, and since I use most of the ports on a regular basis it's arguably more useful than the new Macbook Pro.
- newscracker 9y agoApple's company and team structure is very different from the more common organization model adopted by Microsoft, Google and others. It's a "functional organization", where teams and people are organized by expertise and not products as such. [1] That's why Apple, at least to the rest of us outside, seems to be struggling to make new Macs and not paying adequate attention to certain things even though it has so much cash (in other words, not being able to work on multiple things in parallel when things get tougher). It's not an easy problem to solve without making sweeping changes in how the company is organized and works. Is it frustrating for some classes of users? Of course, yes! But it cannot be wished away just by external pressure and commentary. [1]: https://stratechery.com/2016/apples-organizational-crossroads/ https://stratechery.com/2016/apples-organizational-crossroad...
- johnsmith21006 9y agoI agree and will also say the structure made more sense with Jobs versus without. Not changing the structure after Jobs did not make sense, imo.
- jshevek 9y agoI don't think this needs to be a zero sum game (they can improve macOS' many problems and also work on self driving AI), but your point stands. Apple doesn't seem to care about certain classes of users.