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Apple has stopped being product driven. Sadly. It's all about maximising short term profits (see iPhones of the last years) or things top down from the CEO tha

by ulfw 2y ago

Apple has stopped being product driven. Sadly. It's all about maximising short term profits (see iPhones of the last years) or things top down from the CEO that make little sense (Vision Pro)

BenFranklin100 2y ago
Apple seems ecosystem driven. At the product level, there’s not a big difference between an iPhone and Android phone, except the iPhone integrates well with the Apple Watch, iPad, AirPods, Apple TV, and MacOS. The resulting user experience is good, as is being able to drop into an Apple Store in case of a problem. I see Apple pursuing a long term vision where product integration and privacy are pillars in a seamless, trusted ecosystem.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  The problem is that the shareholders in these kind of companies want exponential growth not matter what, being profitable isn't enough. Since there is a limited amount of people on the planet that can afford Apple at Apple's prices, this eventually hits a ceiling. You don't see Ferrari, Lamborghini, Bang & Olufsen, and similar brands, expecting an exponential growth in sales, year after year.
  - lotsofpulp 2y ago
    AirPod Pros are $160 on sale, regularly, and $200 otherwise. M3 Air 16GB/512GB is $1,100 at Costco, and $800 for an M2 (which is probably good enough for at least 50% of laptop users). iPhones might be a few hundreds more than a Galaxy competitor phone, but the amortize the extra cost over the number of hours people use their phone and it is negligible. Apple TV is a $120 or so, Apple Watch is a few hundreds, HomePods are maybe a couple hundred. I don’t see how anyone can put Apple in a pricing league with > Ferrari, Lamborghini, Bang & Olufsen Very large portions of the population can afford Apple products.
    - pjmlp 2y ago
      Indeed, those lucky to live in tier 1 countries. Many folks across the globe don't even reach $200 a month!
      - GuB-42 2y ago
        I think that GP meant it relative to the other mentioned luxury products. But honestly, I think many people buy Apple products they can't reasonably afford and end up in trouble because of that. A new iPhone is luxury. You can't really live without a smartphone these days (not just in "tier 1" countries!), but a $200 device covers your basics just as well as a $1000 iPhone. And before someone tells me they can live without a smartphone. I guess you can, but that may actually be the ultimate luxury, that is, it is more expensive to live without a smartphone than to live with one. It is telling that most of the homeless have smartphones, usually Android.
      - jazzyjackson 2y ago
        You can walk into a mobile phone store anywhere in the world and buy an iPhone SE for ~ hundred bucks
        pjmlp 2y ago
        Which is about one month salary in many places.
  - bzzzt 2y ago
    Those 3 companies are having a hard time financially right now.
    - pjmlp 2y ago
      Yes, because in hard economical times, even not targeting exponential growth doesn't help much when people are unemployed.
- aleph_minus_one 2y ago
  > I see Apple pursuing a long term vision where product integration and privacy are pillars in a seamless, trusted ecosystem. Privacy is clearly not what Apple is doing: simply read the 90s texts from the cypherpunk scene to get an idea what privacy really means. Also consider that a lot of features that make life a lot more comfortable ("seamless") are very privacy-invading. Thus going for privacy would make the (in this case Apple) product quite uncomfortable to use.
  - nudgeee 2y ago
    Why not both? It is possible to achieve comfort with privacy.
    - skydhash 2y ago
      Not how Apple and others are doing. Internet access and cloud accounts are not a requirement to integration. You need standards and conventions. Now, eveyone is doing its own thing and company wants to control your devices to the point they can brick them within a few years.
    - aleph_minus_one 2y ago
      Explaining this in sufficient detail would make a really long text, so I'll just give one very isolated point: Bascially, the internet is a dark forest. A lot of things "ordinary" people do all the time is insanely privacy-violating (just to give one example: if you send a message to a person who is not insanely privacy-conscious and capable (meaning very knowledable about technology) of preserving your privacy, malicious entities can spy on you). So, for the product/OS to be capable of keeping your privacy, it will have to prevent you from doing an insane amount of things against your reflexes, comfort and what you learned about politeness.
ksec 2y ago
So true. Especially those who watched Apple from near bankruptcy then Steve Jobs came back, iMac, iPod and then iPhone. Apple used to leave money on the table, just saying no to a lot of good ideas. Now it is clear everything is measured in profits making. The hardware quality is still there, but the company is not as coherence as before. Execution speed has also slowed down despite having 5 - 10 times of people. I continue to think how Steve Jobs managed to squeeze out so much productivity with so little resources is honestly extraordinary.
mattbrewsbytes 2y ago
Apple is a hardware product driven company that pulls customers into their ecosystem. There has not been revolutionary products introduced (like iPhone) in a long while. They mostly riffed off of concepts that came out of PARC and there aren't many more things to do from there - e.g. tablets were conceptualized there are now are common place consumer items. AI could be revolutionary but its not a product by itself, its more like internet search back in the day. Now every web product has a search bar, but search is not the actual consumer product. The features Apple has advertised as leveraging AI are not groundbreaking or life changing. Apple's AI features are things that would save me literally seconds. I think their UX designs (which are good) make it hard for consumers to need AI to help them.

by ulfw 2y ago

Apple has stopped being product driven. Sadly. It's all about maximising short term profits (see iPhones of the last years) or things top down from the CEO that make little sense (Vision Pro)

BenFranklin100 2y ago

Apple seems ecosystem driven. At the product level, there’s not a big difference between an iPhone and Android phone, except the iPhone integrates well with the Apple Watch, iPad, AirPods, Apple TV, and MacOS. The resulting user experience is good, as is being able to drop into an Apple Store in case of a problem. I see Apple pursuing a long term vision where product integration and privacy are pillars in a seamless, trusted ecosystem.

pjmlp 2y ago
The problem is that the shareholders in these kind of companies want exponential growth not matter what, being profitable isn't enough. Since there is a limited amount of people on the planet that can afford Apple at Apple's prices, this eventually hits a ceiling. You don't see Ferrari, Lamborghini, Bang & Olufsen, and similar brands, expecting an exponential growth in sales, year after year.
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  AirPod Pros are $160 on sale, regularly, and $200 otherwise. M3 Air 16GB/512GB is $1,100 at Costco, and $800 for an M2 (which is probably good enough for at least 50% of laptop users). iPhones might be a few hundreds more than a Galaxy competitor phone, but the amortize the extra cost over the number of hours people use their phone and it is negligible. Apple TV is a $120 or so, Apple Watch is a few hundreds, HomePods are maybe a couple hundred. I don’t see how anyone can put Apple in a pricing league with > Ferrari, Lamborghini, Bang & Olufsen Very large portions of the population can afford Apple products.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    Indeed, those lucky to live in tier 1 countries. Many folks across the globe don't even reach $200 a month!
    - GuB-42 2y ago
      I think that GP meant it relative to the other mentioned luxury products. But honestly, I think many people buy Apple products they can't reasonably afford and end up in trouble because of that. A new iPhone is luxury. You can't really live without a smartphone these days (not just in "tier 1" countries!), but a $200 device covers your basics just as well as a $1000 iPhone. And before someone tells me they can live without a smartphone. I guess you can, but that may actually be the ultimate luxury, that is, it is more expensive to live without a smartphone than to live with one. It is telling that most of the homeless have smartphones, usually Android.
    - jazzyjackson 2y ago
      You can walk into a mobile phone store anywhere in the world and buy an iPhone SE for ~ hundred bucks
      - pjmlp 2y ago
        Which is about one month salary in many places.
- bzzzt 2y ago
  Those 3 companies are having a hard time financially right now.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    Yes, because in hard economical times, even not targeting exponential growth doesn't help much when people are unemployed.
aleph_minus_one 2y ago
> I see Apple pursuing a long term vision where product integration and privacy are pillars in a seamless, trusted ecosystem. Privacy is clearly not what Apple is doing: simply read the 90s texts from the cypherpunk scene to get an idea what privacy really means. Also consider that a lot of features that make life a lot more comfortable ("seamless") are very privacy-invading. Thus going for privacy would make the (in this case Apple) product quite uncomfortable to use.
- nudgeee 2y ago
  Why not both? It is possible to achieve comfort with privacy.
  - skydhash 2y ago
    Not how Apple and others are doing. Internet access and cloud accounts are not a requirement to integration. You need standards and conventions. Now, eveyone is doing its own thing and company wants to control your devices to the point they can brick them within a few years.
  - aleph_minus_one 2y ago
    Explaining this in sufficient detail would make a really long text, so I'll just give one very isolated point: Bascially, the internet is a dark forest. A lot of things "ordinary" people do all the time is insanely privacy-violating (just to give one example: if you send a message to a person who is not insanely privacy-conscious and capable (meaning very knowledable about technology) of preserving your privacy, malicious entities can spy on you). So, for the product/OS to be capable of keeping your privacy, it will have to prevent you from doing an insane amount of things against your reflexes, comfort and what you learned about politeness.

ksec 2y ago

So true. Especially those who watched Apple from near bankruptcy then Steve Jobs came back, iMac, iPod and then iPhone. Apple used to leave money on the table, just saying no to a lot of good ideas. Now it is clear everything is measured in profits making. The hardware quality is still there, but the company is not as coherence as before. Execution speed has also slowed down despite having 5 - 10 times of people. I continue to think how Steve Jobs managed to squeeze out so much productivity with so little resources is honestly extraordinary.

mattbrewsbytes 2y ago

Apple is a hardware product driven company that pulls customers into their ecosystem. There has not been revolutionary products introduced (like iPhone) in a long while. They mostly riffed off of concepts that came out of PARC and there aren't many more things to do from there - e.g. tablets were conceptualized there are now are common place consumer items. AI could be revolutionary but its not a product by itself, its more like internet search back in the day. Now every web product has a search bar, but search is not the actual consumer product. The features Apple has advertised as leveraging AI are not groundbreaking or life changing. Apple's AI features are things that would save me literally seconds. I think their UX designs (which are good) make it hard for consumers to need AI to help them.