
Apple's Achilles Heel - _pius
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/04/17/cybart-achilles-heel
======
carsongross
_> The product that helped save Apple from bankruptcy 20 years ago is now
turning into a barrier that is preventing Apple from focusing on what comes
next. _

I truly hate this attitude.

If you have a shit ton of money, you focus on what's _right_ , not what makes
you more money. There isn't an obvious Next Big Thing in computing, not like
an iPhone anyway. The watch shows that. Apple should make the very best
computers and wifi routers, and monitors, and NAS's, and cables possible. They
should be beautiful, cost a bit more and they should just work. That's what
makes apple special.

~~~
scholia
Now about those Apple routers, monitors and NAS's... ;-)

~~~
h1d
Without the vision, all they can look at is the balance sheet. Shame.

------
wand3r
The cloud is the Achilles heal in reality. The cadence for Apple was really
this:

1\. The computer is the hub. Your devices link to this.

2\. The Cloud is the hub. We will pivot to a distributed system so all your
devices can sync with/o wires.

3\. The Phone is the hub. Your phone is a private mobile cloud-- an extension
really; so you can still use the watch as a wallet and the phone camera and
integrated sensors in upcoming devices to relay data to the cloud.

I am not going to comment on the strategy but the article says much of what I
am saying in a different way. The phone is pretty damn good; but I think the
heal is the cloud. It still has many issues and that costs user trust. The
phone is a relay but the foundation is Shakey.

Also, Apple is going to lose users because the computer provides the lock in.
I was priced out of Mac a month ago. Ubuntu is pretty great. I built a
hackintosh that was on par with the 1999.99 iMac offering.

Sure it had no screen but included in the cost but it was $580 w/a Skylake i5.

The point is; shortly after I broke my phone. I just went Android. It's wayyy
worse but I didn't need the iPhone to complete the relay because I have no Mac
and because of the sync on iCloud "optimizing" storage it takes literally 8
days to copy the 16gb folder.

Tldr It's a foundation. The heal is iCloud.

~~~
scholia
In passing, "The heal is iCloud" should be heel, if there's still time to
correct it...

~~~
jjtheblunt
Maybe what you wrote makes accidental sense.

------
asragab
One cynical takeaway from the story of Achilles and Thetis is that one can
never do enough for one's children (or conversely) there's always an
opportunity to blame someone else ;)

In this case-Apple, as the proud parents of the Mac, iPhone and iPad, a
possible strategy, much like Thetis dipping her son again in the River Styx,
is to find ways to take advantage of the same R&D across their product line.

I've always thought that a greater convergence between iOS and now macOS was
in store. Maybe as a "pro" I wouldn't want that - but if it could make both
better then that convergence in terms of financial and technical focus would
be a win-win for Apple and its customers.

As the owner of a Late 2013 MacBook Pro (the best iteration IMHO) and the user
of the latest TouchBar MacBook Pro (work laptop) I am bemused by some of the
decisions Apple has made. Of course this article comes out on the heels (yeah,
yeah, sorry) of the announcement that Apple now has 246 billion in the bank,
so what the hell do any of us know.

------
Aloha
The thing is, I don't think Apples focus was diverted to the iPhone - I
strongly suspect it was diverted to other projects we don't even know about.

When it comes down to it, there isn't a ton of innovation coming out of the
desktop on any platform lately. The focus in the industry is web and mobile,
not on the traditional desktop ecosystem that underpins those two things.

~~~
r00fus
Really another reason for Apple to "drop the ball" on design and just re-
relase the old Mac Pro shell with upgraded internals.

Sometimes a half-assed effort is better than none.

~~~
awalton
As long as its the old ironsides one and not an upgraded trashcan.

------
makecheck
The sad thing about commercial products is that when a company stops working
on something, you’re _screwed_.

Perhaps Apple’s real Achilles Heel is not wanting to give up full control. Yet
Apple could still benefit significantly from even a _slightly_ more open
environment on both the software and hardware sides.

Consider: for every “minor” free OS update in recent years from a bored Apple,
open-source software developers could have made _huge_ improvements in an open
Mac environment. Someone might have boosted the App Store back-end to have
package-manager-level robustness, completeness and convenience, for example.
Similarly, with open hardware we probably would have had some really cool pro
equipment and 3rd-party things like displays may not have so many issues. And
heck, somebody probably would have figured out a great way to integrate iOS
devices. All of that benefits Apple, which is not bad for a platform that
their heart wasn’t in.

Of course there is evidence that Apple still invests in the Mac but there is
no doubt that they keep making one minor thing worse for every 4 things they
fiddle with. This means they might be starting to lose their focus on end-to-
end perfection (a Jobsian trait). And if I’m going to work day-to-day on a
system that has loose ends requiring my attention to deal with, a big part of
the Apple advantage is being lost.

------
olivermarks
Apple is a mass of DRM and private cloud, with access points via ios and osx.
I'm writing this on a macbook air (an old one) which I use like a chrome book.

Apple doesn't hang together as a contiguous platform at all, their world is
very janky and inconsistent, extraordinary given their colossal wealth and
expertise.

If they are going to continue as a closed environment they have a lot of work
to do on all fronts to polish up all aspects of their user experience IMO.

------
clairity
gruber's rebuttal of the cybart article doesn't make sense. an achilles' heel
is a small, obscure weakness that can bring down an otherwise invincible
competitor.

cybart seems to be correctly using this analogy (whether you agree with the
argument or not). gruber however calls the iphone apple's achilles' heel, but
the iphone is a highly visible, dominant aspect of apple's business. it's
obvious that if you can successfully attack the iphone, apple would be in
serious danger.

in any case, cybart's analysis makes some sense. the macbook pro, mac pro and
macOS products buttress the iphone and app store businesses, so they're
strategically important and deserve more attention and investment than they
might otherwise seem to warrant.

underinvestment in the ($23 billion) mac businesses allows companies like
microsoft and google to undermine the brand and goodwill that apple has
developed over the past many years, so it does seem to be a potential
achilles' heel.

------
gibbitz
with a $246 billion surplus you can focus on more than one product at a time
with at least 10 times the budget of a company that can only focus on one
product. If you can't figure out how to grow profits at this scale, you are
terrible at training and management and deserve to go out of business.

The true Achilles heel of Apple is the cult of Steve Jobs. He was possibly the
only effective micro-manager. The company can't run by filling a Steve Jobs
shaped hole with anyone else. They need to learn to breed drive a vision in
the heads of their divisions, give them the autonomy to push the limits the
way Jobs did and then strive to reproduce these traits and abilities in all of
their leadership while spreading out the responsibility. They can only spread
their focus through properly pooled intellectual resources and vision.

~~~
amazingman
Throwing money at problems doesn't magically solve them. In fact, much of the
time it just gives you more problems.

~~~
mercer
Absolutely. I've been concerned about Apple lately, for various reasons, but
the last thing I'd want them to do is 'scale up', become more like a 'normal'
huge corporation. It might be better for me in the short term, but worse for
Apple in the longer-term.

On the timescale that I care about, I feel my concerns are premature. In the
decade that I've been using Apple stuff they've surprised me often enough
(iPhone, iPad, possibly Apple Watch, and the AirPods). I think a primary
reason for the success is their 'weird' way of operating (similar to Nintendo,
I feel).

------
patrickg_zill
The same thing has happened before, both at Apple, and at NeXT, which was the
company Jobs started that resulted in the NeXT OS becoming OSX.

Apple: pre-Macintosh days: has the Apple IIe (IIc also, all with 8 bit 1Mhz
CPUs) etc. minting money, but Apple has no clear upgrade path to more powerful
computers. Note that the basic design of the Apple II dates to 1977...

They try the Apple III (with a 2Mhz CPU!) as a method of market segmentation
but it doesn't take off as well as they hoped. They continue milking the
8-bit, 1Mhz Apple IIe market until 1993 when it is finally discontinued. (They
sold a plug in card for certain Macs that allowed Apple II era software to run
under a combined software and hardware emulation layer).

So after letting the IIe linger (1977-1984, 6 or 7 years of the same basic
design) they come out with the Macintosh - completely incompatible but really
a new class of machine.

The 68K-based Macs go through a similar period of sliding into a moribund,
twilight existence - being overpriced in comparison to "Wintel", and not
fixing dumb bugs like having the mouse button interrupt and stop all activity
on the system, for instance. An attempt at a new OS (Copland or whatever they
called it) fails miserably.

The NeXT systems that Jobs designed, were often BETTER than the equivalent
SPARC systems, and were proce-competitive. Why didn't NeXT sell tons of
desktop workstations in competition with Sun?

Well, the US Federal Government requires all systems (or at least UNIX based
systems) they buy to be able to provide POSIX as a layer, to ensure
interoperability. This is why Windows NT had a (probably rarely used) POSIX
subsystem, to make sure they could check that checkbox on GSA procurement
forms.

Despite it being easily able to be added to NeXT's OS, for some reason, Jobs
never made sure it got added. So no GSA contracts for NeXT... and at that
time, the US Federal Govt was one of the largest buyers of Unix-based systems
in the world. The only exception is the NSA and maybe CIA, who don't have to
answer to GSA procurement, and love using Interface Builder and other tools to
rapidly create their custom apps.

See any patterns here? Apple is wholly unable as part of its DNA, to
consistently create stable growth. They blaze a trail, leave others in the
dust, then get lazy or lack inspiration, and others catch up to them.

Their model is the "blockbuster" model and when something isn't a blockbuster
(Newton PDAs, rackmounted XServes) they drop it and forget about it. iPhone
and iPad are basically the Star Wars franchise in terms of longevity and
profitability...

------
joshmarinacci
I don't think any particular product is Apple's "Achilles Heel". Rather, it is
that Apple seems unable to focus on multiple products at once, despite their
billions of dollars in the bank. Is this a result of their particular internal
structure?

~~~
tonyedgecombe
It's quite hard to ramp up R&D, sure you could throw money at it but if you
want to make sure it's effective then it takes time.

------
pedalpete
I'm going to suggest that the focus on one product category is the wrong
approach here.

It doesn't matter if it's an iPhone, iPad, Mac, or whatever else. They are all
just computers. The difference is in the Jobs To Be Done, and I think it is a
very minor, yet important difference.

I suspect the lack of focus on Mac is because Apple has to know that it is a
dying product. This is also the direction Microsoft is going with Windows. In
the future, we won't differentiate between our different devices in the strict
terms we do today.

For the average consumer, their phone can run all the productivity apps they
need. For developers and artists, this is not yet true, but it is surely
coming.

~~~
srssays
Laptops won over tablets. The whole post-PC era just isn't happening. That is
Apple's problem, they're stuck in the year of 2010 and can't escape.

Nowadays, people want to have a phone and a laptop. Tablets are dumbed-down
computing devices, for kids, the elderly, or as toys for the rich.

~~~
Tanegashima
According to IDC, iOS devices sell more than the whole Windows market (all
brands).

PC sales were 60 million, taking Apple's share of 4.2 million, it's 56
million, give or take.

Last year, Apple in this period sold 51 million iPhones, 10 million iPads. And
it was a "bad" year.

You might say "but I need my desktop, my IDE, my Photoshop, my etc."

Yeah, but you are one programmer or photographer or video editor, most people
don't create anything, or just do some very light editing (like removing skin
imperfections from photos), and thus, a media consumption device is most
right.

We are in the Post-PC world, live with it.

~~~
scarface74
For Apple I think you are referring to quarterly sells

~~~
Tanegashima
Figures are for quarterly sales in both cases, of course.

Sources

Apple: investor.apple.com IDC: IDC Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing
Device Tracker, April 11, 2017

------
douche
At this point, Apple could just take their cash stockpile, dump it in mutual
funds, and be profitable, basically, forever.

~~~
DigitalJack
You think it's locked in a safe? I'm sure it's invested in a healthy mix of
funds.

~~~
asragab
Sorry, maybe I am being dense, but isn't that pretty much where it is? I mean,
when articles talk about "cash reserves" don't they precisely mean immediately
liquid assets, or does that include invested income as well?

~~~
jedberg
It means "readily convertible". So stocks, mutual funds, other currency
reserves, bonds, etc. Things that if you needed cash right now you could
quickly turn into cash.

~~~
Clubber
An example of a non-liquid asset would be real estate.

------
joeguilmette
"The iPhone hasn’t suffered because Apple is focused on the Mac. New iPhones
come out like clockwork every year."

The iPhone 6 was released in 2014. The same design is probably going to live
on until 2018.

I'm not sure what it is they are working on, but it better be good.

~~~
runjake
Meanwhile, the internals inside that same casing have improved drastically,
some might say stunningly, over the past few years.

Here's some of the things they've worked on in the timeline you mentioned:

\- A10 Fusion high/low power cores with surprising levels of performance
approaching desktop performance and even surpassing some low-end desktop
processors.

\- Solid state home button

\- The Haptic Engine.

\- Touch 3D

~~~
TillE
I can take or leave the gimmicks, but Apple's progress with ARM processor
design has been stunning, year after year. For the past few cycles, their
phone CPU has comparable performance to a good laptop from about 3 years
prior.

------
desdiv


~~~
awestley
Achille's Heels are some peoples Achille's Heel.

------
knolax
Am I reading this wrong or was that article just 3 paragraphs?

------
nodesocket
Here we go again. Another blogger (while John Gruber deserves a lot more
credit and weight than the average bear) telling Apple what they are doing
wrong. Nevertheless, there is a disconnect between what Apple "professional"
users want, and what's best for the company and shareholders. Full disclosure,
I am long-time shareholder.

Don't get me wrong, I love my Mac's and continue to watch for new and
innovative computers. However, taking advise from developers on how to manage
the most successful company in the history of the world... Not so much.

