211–220 of 391 posts
> Of late, Apple CEO Tim Cook has touted his company's initiatives in health as the key to its future growth. "I believe, if you zoom out into the future, and you look back, and you ask the question, "What was Apple's greatest contribution to mankind?" it will be about health," Make sense, they'd rather concentrate on health. There's an obvious inroad there with wearables.
When you can't make a laptop with reliable screens or keyboards, or an iMac lineup that has CPU's 2 generations behind.. Maybe it's time to shut down the stupid vanity projects and focus on your core business instead?
I’ll add my pet peeve to the list: Sell me a £1k phone that can’t connect to the £3.5k laptop you sold me because the phone comes with a USB-A cable and the laptop only has USB-C sockets. This is precisely the sort of garbage Stveve was very much against yet Apple seem to now think ‘it’s ok’. It’s not ok. To the down voters, the fanaticism only emboldens Apple to become more mediocre. Think about that a moment.
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I mean, yes. If you buy a mac laptop, they should include the usb c -> lightning cable as a courtesy. It's not a cheap machine. However, it's a small thing, I think, compared to the cost of the mac laptops. If paying $20 for a cable is a big deal, then the macbook pro laptops and high end iphones are not for you.
With that kind of logic, you could justify any kind of price/attachment gauging. Like selling expensive laptop without batteries: "You already paid $3k for the laptop, why are you cheaping out on the extra $500 for the battery?". People pay that kind of money with the expectation that everything works out of the box, not that they have to get extra adapters, which is usually only noticed after the fact. That isn't ju…
Depending on what I was buying the laptop for and the variety of batteries available, that seems totally reasonable.
I mean, not for the mac model of "you pay a lot extra but it works out of box, without having to make too many decisions" of course.
But if I was buying an expensive laptop 'cause it was powerful and customizable? yeah, it would be totally reasonable and even desirable to let me buy the battery I wanted; I'm a big fan of the old thinkpads, and they often come used with the giant battery that sticks out, which I dislike, because they make the laptop bigger and heaver. My buddy who is also a fan just bought a 'low profile' battery for his, which is even smaller and lighter than the regular battery I use.
I usually buy my desktops and servers entirely as parts, because I want to choose the parts I want.
But that's not really Apple's market. (of course, I do also have a non-pro macbook and an iphone; but in a lot of ways, I have different expectations for those than I have for my old thinkpads.)
>In that context, $20 might not be "that big if a deal", but it would be even less of a deal for Apple to just include that stuff, while also making for a generally more customer-friendly experience without making them feel like being nickle&dimed every step of the way.
right my point is that it's not the $20 that is the big deal there, it's the fact that you've gotta go order another thing, when you paid apple big money for it to work out of box.
I don't think Apple has advancements in machine learning tech as much as its competitors. For example, take a look at how primitive Siri is. It struggles a lot in comparison to its competitors even for some basic commands. Or, take a look at Apple Music's recommendation system in comparison to Spotify's discover weekly. Now, take a look at Amazon and Google. They both have their own cloud infrastructure (which ironic…
Apple is far behind its competitors in pretty much every area except hardware. They are still terrible at running stable web services. There is a new critical bug or security hole in their OS every month. And all of their non-hardware offerings - Apple Maps, Apple Music, iCloud, iTunes, Siri etc. - range from very bad to average. IMO they need to be investing a LOT more on the software side of things if they intend t…
Android still has a horrible permission system after all of these years and privacy is laughable.
And as far as “iPhones sells are drying up”. They are still predicted to report the second highest revenues this quarter of any company in history - only surpassed by their previous record.
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Apple has 250 billion dollars at their disposal. They can obviously have multiple efforts running in parallel.
People fail to appreciate the fundamental differences between functional and divisional orgs and how that constrains Apple. At Microsoft, the head of Xbox marketing reports to the head of Xbox and the head of Azure marketing reports to the head of Azure. At Apple, there is no divisions, every Apple marketer is responsible for the success of every Apple product and reports to the head of Apple marketing. But the only…
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From what I read Apple are taking a different approach? Google/Amazon are harvesting massive amounts of data and training against it and Apple are taking a privacy first approach saying you shouldn’t have to harvest lots of data for intelligent AI. Currently the harvesting data for models look to be working better for Google / Amazon with current technology. The question is how will Apple progress long term and given…
> you shouldn’t have to harvest lots of data for intelligent AI. Er.... that's not how it works. As a Valve employee put it (a talk about ML recognising cheaters), machine learning is just an equation: y = f(x) where you can actually derive the FUNCTION f if you have enough x/y pairs. Without those pairs then most of the successful techniques in machine learning fail to function. Yes you can generate your own data bu…
Data is a substitute for doing engineering by hand. If you do the latter, you require less data.
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They stopped making routers and monitors not because they are non “core” products, they stopped making them because there is not much money in it. You buy routers ones every 10 years probably, and margin is limited, but supporting them throughout this period is quite expensive. As for monitors, there is so many competitors right now, that it’s hard to make it worth building your own monitor, Especially if you want to…
If Apple truly cares about the user experience they would have kept the wireless routers in their portfolio. A great opportunity missed to have a product that is more user friendly than the competition. I'd argue the wholesome user experience will prove be more important for Apple in the long run than having a big profit margin on every product.
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The other way of thinking about it is that autonomous cars are so obvious and will eventually be so commodity that Apple not sticking their logo on this market would be about as dumb as them not making the bigger phones the market demanded.
I would be scared to buy an Apple car. Let there be a design flaw: It will take a class action suit for them to acknowledge it. Until then, anyone who drives to their Apple Car Store will be told to pay out of their own pocket for fixing it, that they obviously mishandled the car, Apple is not to blame, it is not covered under warranty.
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From what I read Apple are taking a different approach? Google/Amazon are harvesting massive amounts of data and training against it and Apple are taking a privacy first approach saying you shouldn’t have to harvest lots of data for intelligent AI. Currently the harvesting data for models look to be working better for Google / Amazon with current technology. The question is how will Apple progress long term and given…
> you shouldn’t have to harvest lots of data for intelligent AI. Er.... that's not how it works. As a Valve employee put it (a talk about ML recognising cheaters), machine learning is just an equation: y = f(x) where you can actually derive the FUNCTION f if you have enough x/y pairs. Without those pairs then most of the successful techniques in machine learning fail to function. Yes you can generate your own data bu…