
Apple is regressing to their 1990s identity - jasoneckert
https://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/blog/Entries/2019/8/1_Apple_is_reverting_to_their_1990s_disposition.html
======
orev
From the headline I thought this was going to be about them having too many
SKUs, but after reading I see it’s just the standard techie tropes about
overpriced and closed systems.

The thing is that consumers (clearly) don’t care about that stuff. There is no
such thing as “overpriced” as long as the item is selling. Consumers determine
the price of something based on the single factor of “what they are willing to
pay”. If Apple can sell devices at that price, and consumers are willing to
pay it, then it is by definition not overpriced.

Opennes is also overvalued for techies. While I am on the side of openness
myself, the vast majority of consumers don’t care about it. They only care
about the value they are getting from the product. There might be a few people
who really want to crack open the case, but they do not have any significant
presence in the market.

What consumers _do_ care about is feeling good about their purchase, and the
Apple of the 1990s had so many products and was so unfocused that none of the
products were good, and consumers felt bad when they bought them.

The SKU problem is the same as today. Now you have half a dozen iPads to
choose from, and a number of laptops that all seem to be the same except for
half an inch between models. No matter what you pick, you leave the store with
a sense of FOMO, not knowing if you really picked the right model. That is
really what Steve did — you went in and bought the only option they gave you,
and you felt confident you got the right one.

~~~
onlyrealcuzzo
Apple could sell the iPhone for a million dollars, and I'm sure at least one
person would buy it.

Similarly, they could sell the iPhone for $10k and maybe sell a million of
them.

I guess "overpriced" is a subjective term. But if Apple sold the iPhone at
cost, Apple could certainly sell a lot more of them. If Apple sold it for a
margin more in line with other manufacturers, Apple could still probably sell
a lot more...

Apple doesn't care that much about total shipments, though. They care more
about total revenue & profits.

I think it's fair for people to call something overpriced even if tons of
people are buying it -- especially if there's an argument to be made that a
substantial portion of consumers are buying an alternative based mostly on
price, and that the comparison product has a much higher margin than the
alternative.

Again, this doesn't make it a bad business decision. If there's one thing I
guarantee Apple knows more than anyone on Hacker News, it's what the optimal
price is for their product to meet their business objectives.

~~~
bradknowles
Apple could not sell the phone at a price more in line with other
manufacturers, because they spend a shit ton of money on R&D and other costs
that the other manufacturers don’t bother to do — because they know Apple will
do it, and they can leach off the work Apple has done.

There will always be lower priced competitors who are happy to be in a race to
the bottom. Apple is smart to recognize that they cannot do this, for it would
spell the doom of the company.

Luxury brands don’t do races to the bottom. To do so would violate their
entire reason for existence.

Sure, you might want that Ferrari or Lamborghini to be given to you on a
silver platter, or sold to you for just $10.00 each, but do you really
honestly expect them to be that stupid?

~~~
calciphus
A minor point, Apple's R&D spend is significantly lower as a percent of budget
compared to most of the market. I found this article really interesting:

[https://www.ped30.com/2019/03/10/defense-
apples-14-billion-r...](https://www.ped30.com/2019/03/10/defense-
apples-14-billion-rd-budget/)

Edit for context: in 2018, 11.6bn or 5.1% of revenue. Compare to Amazon it's
half as many dollars and 1/3 the percent.

~~~
scarface74
What is it compared to other phone manufacturers? Percentages don’t really
matter as much as raw numbers. You can only throw so much money at any
technology without having a diminishing rate of return.

~~~
Junk_Collector
It's difficult to say what they spend on Phone R&D, but Samsung spends about
11-12% on R&D in general. Huawei and Google clock in around 15% by public
numbers and Intel for comparison sits about 20%. Microsoft is somewhere around
12-13%.

Apple's total R&D spending is well below their contemporaries as a % of
revenue.

~~~
scarface74
Samsung has a lot more products and verticals as does Google.

Looking at all of the money that Google spends on research - they still make
90% of their revenue on ad sales and have had a string of failures and also
rans.

No one can seriously argue that Apple’s ARM processor designs aren’t top
notch, they just took over Intel’s modem division and they still depend on
Intel for much of their computer hardware - except for the T2 chips that are
part of their ARM designs

What else do you propose that Apple spend money on?

Horace Deidu just posted a graph on twitter showing that just their services
revenue is larger than all of Apple’s revenue a decade ago.

~~~
Junk_Collector
I'm not suggesting anything about Apple's quality of engineers or what they
should spend money on. I am only observing that their R&D spending is below
other companies that are considered in the same class or industry as a percent
of revenue.

Their spending (as percent) is approximately 1/3 of other phone makers, 1/3 of
software developers, or 1/4 of other chipset manufacturers.

These numbers are all very rough of course because, as you point out, all of
these companies work in multiple sectors and R&D spending is not disclosed in
that much detail.

------
askafriend
No they're not. They're a different company serving a different, and now
global audience. Consider that Apple is more than 5% of America's entire GDP,
and 1% of the world's entire GDP. There are ~1 billion people in the Apple
ecosystem and that number is an under-estimate. When Apple chooses to add
Sapphire as a material to the Apple Watch or iPhone, they affect global prices
for the raw material.

People still don't get it. It's not a game of pattern matching with their
past. Not only have they and their customers changed, but the world has
changed. Computing has changed.

These articles always fail to consider context in favor of the easy,
selective, myopic pattern matching.

Don't take this to mean that Apple is above criticism. They're not. But
articles like this are lazy.

~~~
tbabb
I think the criticism that a closed ecosystem is myopic and a competitive
disadvantage is a fair one, though. Apple used to have a monopolistic
stronghold on smartphones, but that is no longer the case. As in the nineties,
a walled garden is going to look less appealing if there are cheaper, more
open competitors offering as-good or better hardware.

Outside of phones, their MacBooks are teetering on the edge of no longer being
competitive. The _sole_ reason I most recently bought a MacBook instead of a
different PowerBook with a tablet screen is that Linux support for tablet
screens is still lacking, and my desire for POSIX overrode my desire for a
touch screen. The next time I buy, I doubt that will be true of Linux. Either
Apple will come late to the game with touch screen laptops (rather
exemplifying the article's point that their hardware lags the competition), or
they won't, and it will make far more sense to get a faster third party tablet
book and put a free OS on it. And I doubt the average customer will care as
much about POSIX as I do, but again, as in the nineties, serious developers
aren't going to take Apple seriously forever if this keeps up.

~~~
bradknowles
Apple still owns most of the profit in smartphones, and they don’t really care
about so-called market share that really just applies to the loss leaders.

------
garren
_...the release of the Mac OS X operating system, which was essentially a
rebranded version of NeXTSTEP UNIX. Because Mac OS X was UNIX, it was
fundamentally open..._

I truly appreciate the UNIX foundation and heritage of OSX, but "fundamentally
open" is not a phrase I have ever associated with either or with UNIX.

OSX is UNIX the way AIX, Irix, Solaris, HPUX, etc. are (were) UNIX. None of
these are open in any meaningful sense (Solaris being an exception, but that's
relatively recent.) The author seems to under the impression that because OSX
is UNIX, it's suddenly in the same category of openness as the BSDs and Linux.

 _To tech-minded people in the 2000s, Apple was no longer this closed,
proprietary, expensive tinker toy. They were a decent UNIX workstation
manufacturer that fostered openness._

UNIX workstation? Yes. Fostering openness? No. The Apple of the 00's was
essentially, and arguable remains, a closed, proprietary, expensive, consumer
oriented UNIX workstation.

 _But since then, it seems as if Apple has continually made decisions to move
back in time to the 1990s. Rather than adopting open standards in their
operating systems, they started focusing on developing their own, intended to
work within their own ecosystem only._

Maybe I'm missing the point. There certainly are Apple hardware changes and
trends that I've not been happy about. I also recognize that there are
software changes and standards deviations that are unfortunate. However, the
idea that Apple was somehow a bastion of openness, and that their OS was open
and now isn't seems inaccurate.

~~~
icedchai
The Darwin kernel and many other macOS components are open. Just take a look
at [https://opensource.apple.com/](https://opensource.apple.com/) Are they
perfect? No... but a lot further along than the Unix of old.

------
43920
I think this article accurately identifies Apple's moves towards a more closed
ecosystem, but I don't think there's any particular reason to believe that
"the future is open". Unlike in the past, Apple has a much broader ecosystem,
to the point where you can use only Apple-approved products and services for
almost everything you would want to do, so interoperability doesn't matter as
much. Additionally, as computers have become more widespread, the demand for
customization has declined significantly. Sure, there are still people that
want to repair their computer, or install Linux, or customize it in some other
way, but as a share of the overall market, it's a really tiny percentage.

As long as smartphones remain most people's primary form of computing, I don't
really see Apple beig hurt in any significant way. They've effectively created
a monopoly on iOS software, so that developers have to put up with the
experience, no matter how bad it gets, if they want to make any money. And
until some major new technology comes along that Apple doesn't have, it
doesn't seem like there's any reason for consumers to abandon Apple's
ecosystem in favor of something else.

~~~
fouc
Right. Apple became "open" as a competitive move. Catered to the tech folks
with the UNIX-based OS.

Then when they developed a new competitive moat in iPhones, they were able to
move back to closed.

~~~
pjmlp
And that was just an accident, if Jobs were at Be instead, not sure if they
would have bothered with anything UNIX related.

Even NeXT wasn't that open to UNIX, for them that was just a way to have a
foot on the young workstation market, NeXTSTEP hardly leveraged POSIX for the
framework APIs.

------
DevKoala
I actually like that Apple moves at its own pace and doesn’t wait for
standards to evolve. If you are willing to adopt the Apple ecosystem, it’s a
bliss. If you can’t then just ignore them. I’ve been on both sides of the
fence during the last decade.

~~~
techntoke
Apple waits till a company does something then copies it. Even their Window
system features have been copied from Linux. Their hardware is overpriced and
you are essentially just paying for an Apple logo and aesthetic pushed by a
marketing company. It is like the Nike of computers.

~~~
IOT_Apprentice
NeXTStep (September 18, 1989) predates Linux (September 17, 1991)and it's
window managers. I'd suggest you also look at Apple's work on ARM processors.
They were first to 64 bit in that space.

~~~
Polyisoprene
Apple was one the companies that created ARM as well.

”The company was founded in November 1990 as Advanced RISC Machines Ltd and
structured as a joint venture between Acorn Computers, Apple Computer (now
Apple Inc.) and VLSI Technology.”

------
vinayan3
Major difference between the 90s and now is the market dominance that Apple
has with their iOS platform. As a company having a closed ecosystem which they
can push in their own direction. The most important piece is that it drives
their revenue either from app purchases, in-app purchases, subscriptions, and
Apple services.

I'm speaking mostly about their mobile platform... Mac laptops / desktops are
another thing... Specifically, I think the lack of a reasonably affordable
desktop solution for developers is kind of a bumper. We need upgradability and
openness for drivers to make it viable. There are use cases for a less
expensive desktop that developers would buy.

~~~
dvdbloc
Does the Mac Mini not satisfy this need? At least for the desktop requirement,
I’m aware it may not satisfy your driver requirements.

~~~
mort96
The Mac Mini is sort of limited by the lack of any graphics horsepower and the
lack of stand-alone displays from Apple. You also can't get one with a really
powerful CPU.

It's a cool machine, but the tiny form factor is fairly limiting.

~~~
askafriend
Mac Mini supports Thunderbolt 3 which has enough throughput to run a powerful
external GPU with minimal (~10%) efficiency loss.

~~~
mort96
That's fair. From what I hear, thunderbolt GPUs are a fair bit more finicky
than internal PCIe ones, so for a desktop I'd still say having an internal GPU
is better, but it should at least be a reasonably good workaround.

It's a bit sad to trade reliability, GPU performance, tidiness (since the
external enclosure adds more boxes and wires and power supplies), price, and
CPU power just for a smaller core computer though.

It gets even worse when you want a couple of big HDDs which would have just
gone in drive bays with a traditional computer. With the mac mini, you'd have
to add even more expensive external enclosures to your desk, which is
expensive and messy. Suddenly, instead of a nice self-contained smallish
desktop, you have an impressively small core machine box, with a wire to your
GPU box (which has to be on top of the desk due to the short length of
thunderbolt cables), a wire to your HDD box, and you still have the slower
CPU.

I don't really mean to say the Mac mini is a poor choice, it probably fits a
bunch of desktop use cases reasonably well. It's just not as optimal as it
could be.

To illustrate how a real small and powerful desktop from Apple could've been:
I'm using a really small (though not as small as the mac mini) Fractal Design
Node 304 [0], with a 2.5 slot width, full length GPU, a 3.5" drive, two 2.5"
drives, an m.2, and a standard ITX card with regular RAM and CPU slots. I have
a 1080Ti and an i7 6700k in it with no thermal issues. Apple could've made a
similarly expandable machine in a smaller form factor with better thermals and
looks, but they... don't.

[0]: [https://www.fractal-design.com/home/product/cases/node-
serie...](https://www.fractal-design.com/home/product/cases/node-
series/node-304-black)

~~~
bradknowles
If Apple could do it, then so can other companies. So, where are the other
companies that manufacture the Not-Apple Super Mac Mini that you’re talking
about?

EDIT: More importantly, where are the other companies that are selling
billions of dollars worth of this kind of hardware?

~~~
mort96
I don't see how other companies are relevant? There's a lot of people selling
bigger computers with a lot of power and expand ability, so there's clearly a
market for that. I showed that it's not that hard to make a computer with that
expandability, while not making a big tower computer; that it's not a binary
choice between a powerful big tower and a really limited tiny mac mini-style
computer. It also wasn't my comment's main point.

------
sk5t
Well, it’s a perspective from tech outsiders looking down their noses on
Apple, I guess. Macs had a role to play in the 90s, albeit the most
interesting platforms were Unix and Linux.

~~~
pjmlp
The most interesting platforms were Atari ST, Amiga, PC, Macs and BeOS.

UNIX were interesting camouflaged as Irix and NeXTSTEP.

Linux interesting bit was trying not to toast the monitor while attempting to
get X working at all.

------
analognoise
"And in today’s age of open source, it’s clear that the future is open"

Apple's is the third most valuable company in the world. You'd have to be
delusional to think the future is open.

Pack it in, fellow tech-priests, we lost this one.

~~~
tracker1
Not sure I agree on this one... a significant portion of the internet, and
other devices (that aren't thought of as computers) are running Linux
underneath. Android being the most popular user facing variant (custom UI/UX).

There's a lot to be said for open platforms. I'd also be surprised if given a
few years that WebAssembly doesn't bring more open application options, even
to closed ecosystems like Apple's iThings.

------
allthecybers
I have to agree with this article. I’ve been a Mac User since the iBook G3
running both OS9 and OSX. Working as a video editor at the time Final Cut Pro
was revolutionary and you could open up your G4/G5 and add RAM and hard
drives.

But recently I have to shell out $3000 USD for something with limited ports, a
touchbar without a clear use case, poorly designed keyboards, and constant
upcharging for docks, dongles and services.

I get where they are going... appeal to pros who don’t care how much stuff
costs and consumers who will pay anything for apple devices.

------
auslander
From article: "Rather than adopting open standards in their operating systems,
they started focusing on developing their own, intended to work within their
own ecosystem only."

I'm glad they did. MacOS is more clean and secure than Windows and Linux, and
is a primary driver for Apple hardware sales. You can make Linux _almost_ as
secure, with enough tinkering, but it is not out of the box experience. Think
Gatekeeper code signing.

~~~
moring
Are there even good examples of "intended to work within their own ecosystem
only"? I'm constantly surprised to the extent Apple embraces openness and
interoperability (compared to my personal expectation of what they would do).
It seems to me that they just totally ignore it in favor of building a
"perfect" (by their own definition) product.

If anything, I would describe that behavior as "extreme NIH syndrome".

~~~
auslander
You lost me here. What behaviour?

~~~
lowdose
Not Invented Here.

------
cavok
Apple today is not the company it was 10 years ago, let alone 20 years ago.
Comparison is not useful. People buy equipment for different reasons from
different levels of expertise. Some people like to hack their hardware, some
don't. I've grown out of hacking hardware and software and prefer high
availability. Like cars, I guess, buy a Ford or a Merc. Customer's choice.

------
EGreg
I disagree with one part.

The 1990s was when Apple didn’t have Jobs for many years. Then Jobs came back
and saved the company. Now Apple is without Jobs again for many years.

But saying Apple chose closed solutions? That’s classic Jobs. He ended the
open clones program and OpenDoc etc. and brought it all in-house. The only
thing Apple ever did that was really open under Jobs was probably bringing
NextStep UNIX onboard!

~~~
saagarjha
> The only thing Apple ever did that was really open under Jobs was probably
> bringing NextStep UNIX onboard!

Nit: Jobs did not make this decision as he was not part of the company when it
was made.

~~~
icedchai
Late 1990's Apple was basically mired in technical debt. The original classic
Mac OS was over a decade old and on very shaky foundations. No memory
protection, cooperative multitasking (until OS 8, I think?), etc. Their own
internal OS projects (Copeland, Taligent) were never completed.

NextStep was like night and day. It breathed new life into Apple.

------
jonny_eh
> … Apple stores told customers that small repair issues would cost thousands
> of dollars to fix (to encourage them to buy a new Mac).

Reference? That seems to be attributing malice when bad design (or design
trade-offs) are more likely.

~~~
pnw_hazor
[https://www.cbc.ca/news/thenational/complete-control-
apple-a...](https://www.cbc.ca/news/thenational/complete-control-apple-
accused-of-overpricing-restricting-device-repairs-1.4859099)

------
bitwize
Apple is regressing to a Prada or Fendi identity. Now that they've become a
"lifestyle brand" whose revenues come largely from Veblen goods they have much
less incentive to foster technical excellence, engage with the technical
community, or market products for use by professionals.

At least 1990s Apple users were computer fans in an era when that was a rare
thing. Today, strippers and drug dealers carry iPhones (and are proud of it).

------
w0de
My job is deploying and configuring Macbooks at reasonable scale (2000-5000).
This article is nonsense.

------
NikkiA
And this time Jobs can't come back to save them... Well, unless he truly was
techno jesus.

~~~
tracker1
Steve at GamersNexus is Tech Jesus...

------
throw03172019
I wish this site support reader mode! Hard to read on my iPhone.

~~~
ngngngng
Reader is working in Firefox nightly mobile for me, is it different for
iPhone?

------
labrador
Does Apple even matter anymore?

