
What People Who Demand Innovations from Apple Don't Get - stokanic
http://paweltkaczyk.com/en/apple-innovations/
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joshuata
A couple lines really bother me in this piece:

"... it matters to you whether your phone has 64 or 128 GB of RAM"

Holy Cow! I want that phone! I've only got 8 GB of RAM on my desktop.

"The first iPhone had apps..."

The only apps the original iPhone had were the kind you could get on any
feature phone: weather, stocks, etc... It wasn't until later that the app
store opened and really changed things.

As a whole, the article seems incredibly uninformed about technology. I would
give the author a pass, but their conclusion doesn't seem to agree with
history either. When the iPhone and iPad were released they were incredibly
expensive and dismissed as toys for geeks. Less than a decade later those two
devices have revolutionized technology and given Apple a dominant position.
Apple has already crossed the chasm. Not with MacBooks, but with iPhones.

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coldtea
> _Holy Cow! I want that phone! I 've only got 8 GB of RAM on my desktop._

They probably had in mind smartphone disk storage options.

That said, technically speaking, they are correct in a pedantic way: a phone's
SSD is also RAM, as there's a constant time of accessing any random address on
the drive.

~~~
paweltkaczyk
That's exactly what I meant :) RAM as in random access memory, as opposed to
read-only memory. As you mentioned, I'm not uber-geek :)

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nodesocket
As a shareholder, I have to admit I've lost a little confidence in Tim Cook.
He's a fantastic operations guy, but lacks a founder's vision, drive and risk-
taking mentality. I also think companies, unlike governments, are best run by
dictators. With Tim, it seems like decisions are community (in terms of
employee) driven instead of coming from his vision.

With that said, I'm still a huge Apple fan boy. The stock's fundamentals are
off the charts, look at P/E, solid dividend, and huge piles of cash on hand.
Not sold on the 1 billion investment in Chinese ride-sharing service Didi
Chuxing (I can't connect the dots right now).

~~~
drzaiusapelord
>He's a fantastic operations guy, but lacks a founder's vision, drive and
risk-taking mentality.

If there's one thing I've learned in my corporate serfdom is that primadonnas
can't handle other primadonnas. Do you think Steve Jobs would be able to work
with another Steve Jobs? Jobs picked Cook because Cook wasn't Jobs, so Jobs
was able to tolerate him. The problem is a company like Apple probably needs a
Jobs-like character.

I see this all the time in the workplace. The difficult higher-ups always hire
fairly milquetoast personalities they can easily control but when they leave,
we now have a department of largely unmotivated 'yes men,' unable to do
anything but take orders.

~~~
cstross
> The problem is a company like Apple probably needs a Jobs-like character.

I have been, idly, placing bets with myself on an Apple buy-out of Tesla,
shades of Apple's buy-out of NeXT -- not merely to get a lead on the auto
industry, but to get a new visionary leader on board in the shape of Musk.

(But I don't think Musk wants to lead a company he didn't build for himself:
he doesn't want to just eat his cake, he wants to bake it from scratch.)

~~~
drzaiusapelord
I suspect Musk is too busy with sexy technology like rockets and electric and
self-driving cars to be bothered with agonizing over what Walmart moms think
is a good phone. Apple isn't this hot sexy thing anymore, its the standard
bearer of the mobile revolution which has become a fairly boring part of
everyone's lives. I can't imagine a personality like Musk doing that job. It
would seem like a caretaker job I imagine.

~~~
rmc
Couldn't you have said that Apple pre-Jobs, or pre-iPhone?

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zaro
What people demanding innovation from Apple don't get is that as a corporation
Apple cares only about profit. If the profit happens to require innovation
then there will be innovation , but besides this it's pointless thing. Usually
the innovations in marketing are enough to keep the sales.

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sickbeard
I'm really finding it difficult to follow the author's logic here.

He starts off with the title

"What Tim Cook's Apple has in common with Porsche's Cayenne?",

but then the only comment he makes regarding porche is ..

"Just think what Porsche’s hardcore users said when they first saw Porsche
Cayenne. “Betrayal!”, “It’s not a Porsche!”. And yet it made a killing when it
comes to sales. Think Mercedes A Class, BMW 1…"

The rest of the article goes on in the same vein with quotes here and there,
peace time/wartime something or other but essentially what he's saying is..

What people who demand innovations from Apple don't get is they are resting on
their laurels? Taking it easy and raking profits? Riding on the coattails of
their previous innovations. We get that. It's obvious and it's a deadend. It
happened to Cannon, Sony, Nintendo, Intel etc etc. That's why people who get
it want Apple to innovate.

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PeterisP
The author's point is that the proper and profitable way to run a company -
once it's crossed the chasm - _is_ the way Cook is running now.

You needed Jobs (or someone like him) to get Apple to where it is now by doing
things that fit the early adopter market. But once you have done it, it
becomes the wrong thing to do - because doing what the early adopters
want/need will hurt the much larger, much more profitable part of the business
and customers that actually do prefer the stability.

It's not a dead end - it's harvesting the field you've planted instead of
neglecting it to try other fields/crops; it's what the shareholders would
likely prefer and unsurprisingly they have done so.

~~~
paweltkaczyk
Thanks for clarifying that. It's exactly what I meant :)

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mentos
Putting the PC in your pocket was a huge leap, what is left?

~~~
coldtea
Healthcare, cars, NLP, AI and eventually space exploration and tons of other
things besides...

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TheOtherHobbes
And IoT - _good, secure_ IoT.

There's no lack of opportunities. But I'm seeing Apple struggling with keeping
its current technology working as well as it has in the past - never mind
building incredible cool new stuff.

~~~
coldtea
> _But I 'm seeing Apple struggling with keeping its current technology
> working as well as it has in the past_

I find that mostly a myth. The original OS X (10.0.1 or something) was a
terrible release. It took until 10.2 to be usable. The G3 iBooks had thousands
upon thousands of broken logic boards. The G5 leaked green cooling goo. The
Cube was overheating. Don't get me started on the quality of their mice until
the Magic Mouse. And most OS X releases, with 1-2 exceptions (Snow Leopard for
one) were met with complaints and tales of horror (In fact El Capitan has been
a big success in this regard -- hardly many complaints as with previous
versions). XCode has been especially crappy before 6 (and doubly so before 4).

There will always be problems when you make tens of millions of devices and
100+ software titles, including 2 full OSes, a programming language, browser,
down to NLEs and DAWs...

There might be more complaints today, but there are also 20x more Apple users
than in 2005, and 10x more advanced ecosystem. Back then we discussed rumors
for months and we cheered if the newly released iPod had cutting-edge features
like a "color screen" (awe) or "video playback" (gasp).

Now we expect a fully working phone, a top notch compact camera, 4k video,
retina display, 1.000.000+ apps in the app store, 4-5 different sensors, quick
3D graphics, fingerprint sensors, wi-fi, light on battery bluetooth 4, and
tons more besides, which we take for granted, merely 9 years after then.

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aksdj
DON'T F*CKING HIJACK SCROLLING.

