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The New Apple Advantage

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Re: The New Apple Advantage

#101

Post by hamedh »

dlss wrote: post #90
jseliger wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, you really wanna claim that Apple has an equally confusing product lineup compared to other manufactures? That’s a quite daring claim (and also some impressive misleading quoting you are doing there). Apple doesn’t ask you to decide based on non-sensical marketing blabber like that. They use it, sure, but it isn’t central in the decision process of the buyer. One other point: all three Macs I've owned were ready…

What an odd way to decide which machine you'll use every day for the next year or more. A clean install is really easy -- maybe one hour if you sit and watch it, fifteen minutes if you use your old laptop while it's going... why would you let a cost of Setup time is part of the cost of a system. I'm sure that the apple machine isn't actually ready for you to use it out of the box -- if you're like most HN readers you…

i cared about doing clean installs/configuring when i was a teenager and had nothing else to do. now i just want my computer stay out of my way and make me money. os x, time machine, etc all let me do that

Re: The New Apple Advantage

#102

Post by endtwist »

dlss wrote: post #90
jseliger wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, you really wanna claim that Apple has an equally confusing product lineup compared to other manufactures? That’s a quite daring claim (and also some impressive misleading quoting you are doing there). Apple doesn’t ask you to decide based on non-sensical marketing blabber like that. They use it, sure, but it isn’t central in the decision process of the buyer. One other point: all three Macs I've owned were ready…

What an odd way to decide which machine you'll use every day for the next year or more. A clean install is really easy -- maybe one hour if you sit and watch it, fifteen minutes if you use your old laptop while it's going... why would you let a cost of Setup time is part of the cost of a system. I'm sure that the apple machine isn't actually ready for you to use it out of the box -- if you're like most HN readers you…

You do know you're not the typical laptop buyer, right? The majority of people buy a laptop, take it home, and want it to just work.

Do you buy a new refrigerator expecting to have to clean out the compressor the minute you take it home? I certainly hope not.

Re: The New Apple Advantage

#103

Post by lr »

"The PC hardware market has historically focused on three factors: low prices, tech specs, and configurability."

That pretty much could have been what was said about American car companies in the late '80s and most of the '90s, and it is why they got their asses handed to them on a plate by the Japanese car companies. If you wanted a Chevrolet, you probably had about 1000 choices (not to mention that GM had at least 5 companies that all made pretty much the same cars, but with different logos (Saturn not withstanding)). If you wanted a Honda, you had about 3 choices. I don't think I have to tell you which business model was more successful.

Re: The New Apple Advantage

#104

Post by initself »

dlss wrote: post #90
jseliger wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, you really wanna claim that Apple has an equally confusing product lineup compared to other manufactures? That’s a quite daring claim (and also some impressive misleading quoting you are doing there). Apple doesn’t ask you to decide based on non-sensical marketing blabber like that. They use it, sure, but it isn’t central in the decision process of the buyer. One other point: all three Macs I've owned were ready…

What an odd way to decide which machine you'll use every day for the next year or more. A clean install is really easy -- maybe one hour if you sit and watch it, fifteen minutes if you use your old laptop while it's going... why would you let a cost of Setup time is part of the cost of a system. I'm sure that the apple machine isn't actually ready for you to use it out of the box -- if you're like most HN readers you…

Me personally, I wouldn't let the cost of one hour drive my buying decision.

But Aunt Tillie sure would.

Re: The New Apple Advantage

#105

Post by gbog »

jellicle wrote: post #53

What I grasp from this is that John Gruber and Peter Bright are just too dim to understand basic online stores. This qualifies for mockery from Gruber/Bright: > "Everyday Computing" But this is good understandable product description: > "The ultimate everyday notebook" (that second one is Apple's marketing copy for the Macbook Air). The low-end Macbook Air is $999 in Canada. Let's compare. I just priced a Lenovo X220…

Agreed. Moreover, push Gruber et al logic to its logical conclusion and you get 1984.

Re: The New Apple Advantage

#106

Post by jarek »

Steko wrote: post #77
wysiwtf wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure that X220 is similar enough to an Air, it doesn't look like an air and the design specs are quite bulkier: MacBook Air 11 inch: Height: .68 Weight: 2.38 MacBook Air 13 inch: Height: .68 Weight: 2.96 X220 12 inch: Height: 1.25 Weight: 3.6 I don't think it matters that you spec'ed it out to be slightly faster, I bet many of the people who want an Air-like notebook want the thinnest, cleanest, lightest note…

Apple had to send their engineers over to Intel to teach them how to build the chips they wanted for the Airs. They wanted lower Ghz.

The same Intel that came up with the first Pentium M? Yeah, I'm calling bull shit on this story.

Re: The New Apple Advantage

#107

Post by felipemnoa »

dasil003 wrote: post #94
felipemnoa wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Jobs deserves a lot of credit, but there are hundreds (if not thousands) of people doing the critical design work that make Apple products great You could say the same about the car-driver relationship. "The driver deservers a lot of credit but the car has hundreds (if not thousands) of parts doing the critical work of moving the car forward" Or you could substitute parts with designers. Keep in mind that Steve Job…

Those parts are inanimate, they are not making decisions in and of themselves. Even the engineers working on the cars are operating within the unchanging constraints of physics. Also, if Apple fails people would blame Jobs, but if the car suffers a mechanical failure people don't blame the driver. The driver of a race car needs to push the machine to it's limit but not past it or he will flame out spectacularly. Such…

One can only take an analogy so far. I still think the analogy is good but lets agree to disagree.

OK, lets look at it this way. I think Steve Jobs could have been successful without Tim Cook, but Tim Cook could not have been successful without Steve Jobs (In turning Apple around). The reason I say this is because Steve Jobs use to do Tim Cook's job when he first returned to Apple. He did it himself, along with his CEO job, until he found Cook. Had it not been Cook he would have found somebody else.

Lets not take credit away from Cook though. The guy is good, otherwise Jobs would not have given him the job. But I don't think that we can say that Apple would not be as successful without Cook. However, is almost universally accepted that Apple would not be here without Steve. Hence the Car-Driver analogy >:)

Re: The New Apple Advantage

#108

Post by jarek »

Steko wrote: post #74
jellicle wrote: post #53

What I grasp from this is that John Gruber and Peter Bright are just too dim to understand basic online stores. This qualifies for mockery from Gruber/Bright: > "Everyday Computing" But this is good understandable product description: > "The ultimate everyday notebook" (that second one is Apple's marketing copy for the Macbook Air). The low-end Macbook Air is $999 in Canada. Let's compare. I just priced a Lenovo X220…

"The two laptops weigh almost exactly the same" Rofl no. "and are the same thickness at the thickest point" If by the same you mean the Mac Book Air is half the thickness of the Lenovo then yes. [edit]It's really hard to take your comment as anything more then a troll when you call other people dim but make basic factual errors like this.[/edit] This is where "configure your own Macbook Air" arguments always end up:…

Well geez that's a really strong argument in return. "Ugly as shit" is not subjective at all.

Re: The New Apple Advantage

#109

Post by penguinbroker »

While I agree that the 'Tim Cook' advantage is very important I wouldn't dismiss Steve Jobs' unique abilities so quickly. Yes there are many exceptional designers in the world but to say that was Steve Jobs' biggest influence is wrong. I would even go so far as to say that Ives is the bigger design influence. What I admired about Steve Jobs was his ability to make the right sacrifices. From ditching the floppy drive in the original iMac to refusing to support Flash in the new iOS devices. These sacrifices, while obvious in retrospect were decisions that no other hardware companies were capable of making. While everyone was trying to build what the consumer wanted, Jobs was always focused on what the consumer should want. A huge difference.

As Henry Ford once said: If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.

While everyone else tries to make faster horses, Jobs has kept Apple focused on building cars of the future. He'll be missed.

Re: The New Apple Advantage

#110

Post by nickheer »

felipemnoa wrote: post #43
mechanical_fish wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have we forgotten the Newton? The Newton had issues, but lack of daring design innovation wasn't one of them. Now that Palm has boomed and iPads and iPhones are everywhere, it's difficult to appreciate how crazy the Newton was at the time. People didn't know that mobile book-sized computers were the future. The Newton was a bit too futuristic, too ambitious for its own hardware. Apple also tried a bunch of things in…

OK, so if a Formula 1 driver wins the race, who gets the credit? The car or the driver? I would say the car is Tim Cook and Steve jobs is the driver.

In Formula 1, the winning driver gets a trophy, as does the team behind the car. The driver is whomever is CEO; the team is the company.

But, as dasil003 said, that's a pretty horrible analogy.

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