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When Steve Jobs passed in 2011 I was certain that Apple would lose its way and start diluting their products/brand. To the contrary the last 10 years where an a

• justicezyx 5y ago
  What is "the spirit of Apple"?
  • amelius 5y ago
    Think different.
  • slt2021 5y ago
    extracting as much of "Apple premium" out of brand-loyal customers as possible and keeping that "Apple premium" perception in consumers' minds
  • halotrope 5y ago
    Focus, products instilled with culture, starting with the user experience, attention to detail, cohesive ecosystem, good design, delivering high quality products at the lowest price possible, not shipping things that are not ready.
    • loloquwowndueo 5y ago
      “Quality products at Lowest price possible” you’re probably being sarcastic. Just look at wired AirPods, among the most maligned earbud headphones and quite expensive within their category.
      • NationalPark 5y ago
        The $19 EarPods?
        • loloquwowndueo 5y ago
          Yes those! Sorry :)
      • FredPret 5y ago
        Airpods are expensive but amazing
    • haunter 5y ago
      > lowest price possible You got me until this point ngl
      • Spartan-S63 5y ago
        When you take into account total cost of ownership and the intangible of pain or frustration from other products, Apple typically comes in with the lowest cost. You pay more upfront to pay less (literally and emotionally) later.
      • halotrope 5y ago
        This is what I mean: https://youtu.be/gnU9Vgt8Hmg https://youtu.be/gnU9Vgt8Hmg Sure, the accessoires and e.g ram are steeply overpriced
        • dmitriid 5y ago
          "We don't offer stripped down lousy products" 14 years later: base iMac has two ports (three more + ethernet will cost you $200). Not that it's lousy, but it's definitely stripped down.
  • shoto_io 5y ago
    Oh that’s easy. Focus and take hard decisions that are unpopular in the short term but mostly right in the long term. Examples - first iPhone doesn’t support MMS - cut the headphone plug in new iPhones - stop supporting Adobe Flash - load apps through the App Store only in iOS
    • slivanes 5y ago
      We must have a different perspective, all of the above are to the detriment of the consumer (flash, not so much).
      • shoto_io 5y ago
        I don't think they are. They are deliberate choices to not please everyone. It’s product management at its best.
    • mlindner 5y ago
      You can go back further: Abandonment of the floppy drive. Abandonment of the CD drive. Abandonment of Firewire.
    • the_local_host 5y ago
      It's not easy. Apple does have a consistent "spirit", but it's such a strange combination of idealism and ruthlessness that it's hard to know which aspect(s) anyone is invoking when they mention it. I don't know why that question is getting so many downvotes.
      • shoto_io 5y ago
        Yes you’re right. I should have said: “that’s easy for me” or something like that
  • justicezyx 5y ago
    I think this little thread has shown that the so-called culture and spirit of a organization is largely a myth, or more precisely, a form of brand marketing instead of actual inherent nature of an organization.
• flowerlad 5y ago
  > When Steve Jobs passed in 2011 I was certain that Apple would loose its way and start diluting their products/brand. They are doing well in hardware and services. Software, not so much. Design they have gone downhill.
  • tomp 5y ago
    > Software, not so much. Design they have gone downhill. I mean, maybe compared to Apple 2011. But compared to Microsoft 2021, Google 2021, Linux 2021, Android 2021, HP 2021, Lenovo 2021, Dell 2021? They're definitely on top.
    • bch 5y ago
      Isn’t Lenovo (at least Thinkpad series) being a good steward of that legacy and doing well with it?
      • perardi 5y ago
        I’d argue…well I was going to argue Dell did well with their legacy, but they haven’t. They went private, pivoted (sorry) to strong enterprise sales, and de-emphasized the cutthroat race-to-the-bottom consumer computers. Which ain’t exciting, but, the rotting corpse of Compaq over there in the corner stands as warning of what could have been.
  • halotrope 5y ago
    Really? I think we are a bit hungover from 5 years of pro/hacker neglect. Which operating system would you recommend to friends and family?
  • adampk 5y ago
    I think that is a fair assessment but what about compared to their peers? Could you say the level of excellence from 2011 to 2021 Apple has deteriorated at a higher rate than Facebook, Microsoft, or Google?
  • kergonath 5y ago
• satysin 5y ago
  I think most people thought the same. As you said there have been a few blips but I suspect those would have happened under Jobs also. Seems Jobs was bang on with wanting Tim Cook as his successor.
  • halotrope 5y ago
    Yes. It is easy to forget over some bad keyboard or software choices that rub HN crowd the wrong way what they have done. It could have been very, very different.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • kergonath 5y ago
    > As you said there have been a few blips but I suspect those would have happened under Jobs also. Oh yes. Jobs could be stubborn and did make mistakes every now and then. The first iMac mouse was another ergonomic and reliability disaster.
• perardi 5y ago
  Have they been perfect? No. Keyboards, App Store, still not entirely sure what the iPad Pro does, etc. But you know what Tim Cook didn’t do? He didn’t screw it all up. Which sounds like faint praise, but I really think it’s inarguable that Jobs remade Apple, stem to stern, blood to bone, software to hardware. And to step in and take over a company that had been reborn like that, and not nickel-and-dime it into mediocrity? Remarkable. I don’t think anyone is really arguing Cook is a product visionary—I certainly don’t think Cook is himself. But just navigating the political landscape alone is truly impressive.
  • intergalplan 5y ago
    > iPad Pro does, etc I get that. But. Having used many iPads, my favorite sizes are the 12.9" (Pro) and the Mini. Why (for the pro—I trust my love of the mini needs little explanation)? The 12.9" is so big that it's about the size of an 8.5x11" sheet of paper, which turns out to be a really convenient size for reading anything based on... paper. It's outstanding for reading PDFs of, say, textbooks, as it's large enough you might be able to get away with reading it in landscape, and is the best device I'm aware of for reading comics (ditto on the landscape mode, it works great, it's just a little smaller than a real two-page comic book spread). Yet it's light enough not to be a giant pain to hold. It's amazing for art (with a Pencil). Nice and big, very responsive. The larger screen makes almost anything you'd do on a normal iPad a little better. Movies, browsing, games. Low-distraction writing device with an external keyboard. It's a great companion for music where, again, the larger size is really nice for displaying sheet music or... well, almost anything else music-related you want to do. Last I checked the cameras & mics beat the hell out of most laptops, including Apple ones, for video calls. Know what it's very close in size to? A 13" MBP or Air. Know what it can do? Become a portable external monitor for same. Damn nice. 2-player board games. Again, the size helps a ton. My personal uses barely call for all the extra horsepower of the "pro" line, actually, aside from maybe drawing (which, AFAIK, has more to do with specialized hardware on the screen than with CPU power or memory) but holy crap, the screen size. It's glorious. If I could have only one computing device in my house I'd seriously consider making it the 12.9" iPad Pro (assuming I could keep my mechanical bluetooth keyboard, too). I can always SSH/Mosh to a unixy command line somewhere else, but none of my unixy machines are much good for most of what I use the iPad Pro for.
• tolmasky 5y ago
  I'm not sure if 5 years of stagnation in the Mac lineup is a blip. Perhaps as a percentage of revenue? In terms of customer satisfaction, it was rough. Those keyboards were really bad, and not everyone has the ability to just swap them out with the new fancy computers coming out now, so many will be feeling them for some time to come. Same thing with the Mac Pros. But yes, things are now looking pretty amazing in the hardware department. Unfortunately, the concern is now with the software. macOS has been going downhill for a while, and Big Sur doesn't give me a ton of confidence. Of course, the Mac is some insignificant portion of the Apple's footprint these days, but I have to say their mobile offerings have been kind of a yawn too. Don't get me wrong, perfectly competent, no need to switch or anything, but iPod to iPhone happened in 6 years (!), and I don't think the Apple Watch is anywhere near that level of consistent culture defining technology that kind of defined "the spirit of Apple" from the original iMac to the iPhone (I'd like to say "to the iPad", but unfortunately the product has been kind relegated to a side purchase vs. the Mac-replacement I think it honestly had the opportunity to be -- and I guess could still be, its not like any "window" has been missed, just hasn't really done much in the last 10 years either, in terms of definitive changes in workflow like the iPhone did). As a customer, the subscription stuff is honestly just somewhere between boring and annoying. "Apple One" with its 3 different plans and still tremendously confusing options (if I let my parents have access to the movies I've purchased, they can no longer buy their own movies -- what? why? It's strictly more profitable for Apple to let them ALSO use their credit card instead of locking them out of being able to make their own purchases just because I shared my content). Honestly, I have to strain really hard to remember what "Apple One" includes aside from Apple TV+. Oh right, News or something? The ability to not get annoying iCloud space errors that users remain not fully comprehending? Now, flip that around, and investor-wise, you are spot on! I am LONG $AAPL, just short Apple products (software specifically). Which is unfortunate, because they are still probably the best, just no longer... "good". It used to feel like a premium experience, for a premium price, now just the latter.
  • jen20 5y ago
    This again. > Those keyboards were really bad, and not everyone has the ability to just swap them out with the new fancy computers coming out now, so many will be feeling them for some time to come. The butterfly keyboards are the only laptop keyboards made to date that I can type on for a full day. So speak for yourself: long may I be “stuck” with mine.
• dmitriid 5y ago
  > I was certain that Apple would lose its way and start diluting their products/brand. In a sense, they are diluting their products. Remember the apocryphal story that when Jobs came back to Apple, he split a whiteboard into four quadrants and listed just one product in each? Now Apple has several dozen products. And each category is anywhere from 1 to 4 different products often with differences so minor as to not make any sense (iPhone 12 Pro vs iPhone 12 Pro Max, the difference is slight size increase and cameras, that's it; or iPhone 12 Pro vs iPhone 12; there are four different iPads; etc.) Apple looks like it's trying to cover every niche, and often does that semi-satisfactorily. Slightly tangential: they've completely dropped the ball on MacOS software side: there hasn't been a good software release from them literally for years. The only exception is the new Messages in BigSur, and they spent untold hours in close collaboration with the Catalyst team to make it work. Almost every other new first-party app from Apple on MacOS for years has been an unmitigated disaster that has never seen a designer in a vicinity and that breaks any version of Apple's own HIG guidelines. That said, it could've been much much much worse. So, count our blessings :)
  • kergonath 5y ago
    > Remember the apocryphal story that when Jobs came back to Apple, he split a whiteboard into four quadrants and listed just one product in each? He showed that during keynotes (I remember he used that to unveil the first iBook). The situation then was a bit different, though. Apple needed to be much more focused and had fewer resources to throw at new devices. They also needed a clean break from the past and could not start from scratch 10 different product lines. But Jobs himself did away with the 2x2 matrix, for example with the eMac and the Cube. The 12’’, 15’’, and 17’’ PowerBooks used the same name, but the differences were more significant than between the various iPhones 12.
  • scarface74 5y ago
    Jobs also cane back to a dying company that needed to focus.
• slg 5y ago
  It is also interesting in that they are doing it in a seemingly un-Jobs-like manner. For example, take a look at the current models they offer for the iPhone[1]. Wikipedia lists 7 distinct models in production, that grows to 20 when factoring in storage size, and it likely balloons to over a hundred when considering different carriers and colors. Their approach is now basically "whatever your budget is, we have an iPhone for you". That seems antithetical to Jobs' traditional approach. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone#Models https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone#Models
  • snowwrestler 5y ago
    Jobs put that strategy in place. He did not want to leave price points unfilled with hit products. You saw it with the profusion of iPod models, colors, and storage. Jobs was also still the CEO when Apple decided to keep the iPhone 3Gs in production after launching the iPhone 4, in order to meet a lower price point.
  • read_if_gay_ 5y ago
    3 out of those aren’t the most recent though. Of the 4 that are, the fact that they have several screen sizes is indeed unlike Jobs, but Jobs wasn’t infallible - he was insistent that people want small phones, however given the 12 Mini’s mediocre sales that doesn’t seem to be true save for a vocal minority here on HN.
    • chongli 5y ago
      I love my 12 Mini and I’m really sad about the mediocre sales. I hope Apple keeps the product around for us nerds who love small phones. They’ve done the work to design the thing and build out the tooling for it so they might as well keep making them as long as they keep selling, even if it’s not their most popular version.
• anonymouse008 5y ago
  Take the iPod maturation under Jobs - each iPod embodiment had a 'purpose' to fill the music / video need in your life. (One could say the iPod Touch was a 'gateway drug' because of vendor lock-in with Cingular/ATT than actually diluting a lower cost product.) Can we say the same of the iPhone line up? or is it excellently amortizing last years A{#} processor downstream at lower prices? I think if we peeled back the facade, we can begin to see that it's been an operations play since Jobs died, and though the M1 is pretty dang amazing, what probably brought it over the line is the insane profit margins and 'upcylcing' Mac sales for folks having a M1 vs M3, etc... But as everyone here has said - it could have been worse.
• wolverine876 5y ago
  > When Steve Jobs passed in 2011 I was certain that Apple would lose its way and start diluting their products/brand. To the contrary the last 10 years where an absolute tour the force in expansion of the spirit of Apple. Under Jobs, they would regularly create whole new categories and concepts of technology and revolutionize others. I don't recall it happening since; they capitalize on everything that was created under Jobs (and do it well).
  • pjanoman 5y ago
    I think apple watch was post jobs. Additionally, while this is more abstract, I think Apple has continued to revolutionize consumer's privacy.