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The New Apple Advantage

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Re: The New Apple Advantage

#231

Post by Anechoic »

lwhi wrote: post #213
swombat wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make a checklist, hire a personal shopping technical consultant (may come for free in exchange for friendship/family brownie points), learn a new vocabulary, navigate a complex product matrix and finally, hopefully, purchase. vs. Click on the picture that looks like what you want, tweak a few straightforward options (or leave them to default, knowing they're probably fine), buy.

The difference is, you either ask a knowlegable friend for advice so you can make a decision based on your needs - or you rely on a knowlegable Apple marketing / tech department to make the decision for you. Once again Apple provides simplicity at the cost of freedom of choice. EDIT: to the downvoters - your inability to acknowledge a simple truth astounds me.

>ask a knowlegable friend

As the "knowlegable friend" in my circles this just means that I get swamped with requests for assistance in selecting laptops which means I get the joys of navigating shitty PC websites for a machine that I will never use (until it breaks).

I made the decision a long time ago to tell folks asking for help "if you want a Mac, I'll give you all the assistance you want but if you want a PC, you're on your own."

Re: The New Apple Advantage

#232

Post by technoslut »

statictype wrote: post #173
ugh wrote: post #55

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. Go to their store and check out how they do it: http:/…

Until recently, Apple had a 13" Macbook Air, a 13" MacBook and a 13" MacBook Pro. As a first-time Mac buyer last year I was certainly confused about the difference between the plastic MacBook and the MacBook Pro. I find it hard to believe that simplicity of choice is a reason people buy Apple laptops. If you're looking at the various MacBook models, you've pretty much already made a conscious decision to consider buy…

In retrospect this was a transitional phase for Apple since the Macbook is no longer offered. Even at three different models it is still far less complicated than the rest of the industry.

Re: The New Apple Advantage

#233

Post by lwhi »

Anechoic wrote: post #231
lwhi wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is, you either ask a knowlegable friend for advice so you can make a decision based on your needs - or you rely on a knowlegable Apple marketing / tech department to make the decision for you. Once again Apple provides simplicity at the cost of freedom of choice. EDIT: to the downvoters - your inability to acknowledge a simple truth astounds me.

> ask a knowlegable friend As the "knowlegable friend" in my circles this just means that I get swamped with requests for assistance in selecting laptops which means I get the joys of navigating shitty PC websites for a machine that I will never use (until it breaks). I made the decision a long time ago to tell folks asking for help "if you want a Mac, I'll give you all the assistance you want but if you want a PC, y…

Do you need to give assistance if someone wants a mac? ;)

Re: The New Apple Advantage

#234

Post by lwhi »

swombat wrote: post #225
lwhi wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are missing my point. Yes, simplicity by definition is something simple. But that's not the issue. I'm talking about the way that simplicity is offered at the expense of freedom of choice. Freedom of choice by definition needs choices. If you have twenty choices vs. two; by definition, the former offers more freedom of choice.

You can have the Model T in any colour so long as it's black. More seriously, you have all the choices you want - no one is forcing you to buy a Mac. For the 0.5% of the population who want that freedom, it's there, for a price (both financial and in terms of quality, hassle, ease of purchase, etc). For the other 99.5%, who want the simplicity, it's there too.

While I agree with you, I don't think 99.5% of the population owns a mac.

There will always be a benefit to being able to choose. I'd rather have to acquire knowledge, and be able to make an informed choice - than have someone else make that decision for me. I know I'm not the only one.

EDIT: Okay - so why the down-vote? Commenting on any Apple-centric post, with any comment that can be considered even slightly disparaging towards Apple is hazardous.

When it comes to Apple, some people seem to end up exchanging their brains for shiny-hardware. Depressing.

Re: The New Apple Advantage

#235

Post by pgroves »

revscat wrote: post #111
pgroves wrote: post #38

I know everyone likes to think Steve Jobs came up with the idea of focusing on a few very good products, but it's actually an old idea. "Indeed, the basic problem of U.S. competitive strength in the world economy today may well be product clutter." - Peter Drucker, Managing for Business Effectiveness , 1963 Sorry I don't have a link to the original article, I had to look it up in a book

"I know everyone likes to think Steve Jobs came up with the idea of focusing on a few very good products, but it's actually an old idea." No one thinks that. I, at least, have never read anyone who has made such claim. Where did you get the impression that that is a widely-held belief?

I got that impression from the article. I also get that impression from all the companies that still do the opposite, today, as is discussed in the article.

Perhaps I should have qualified that statement with "in terms of large american companies", which is what Drucker was talking about.... Companies whose product catalog became bloated over the years in an effort to serve every need of every customer and ended up doing nothing terribly well.

Re: The New Apple Advantage

#236

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

dlss wrote: post #211
mgkimsal wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you even do a clean install on most Windows laptops that are purchased, unless you also purchase Windows separately? Pretty much all Windows laptops I've seen since around 2003 don't come with stock Windows, but come with a 'recovery disk' which reimages the disk back to factory default - meaning, with the original crapware.

You download the CD image from digitalriver, then put that on a USB stick See http://forums.mydigitallife.info/threads/14709-Windows-7-Dig...

That's hilarious. Is this seriously the case now?

Re: The New Apple Advantage

#237

Post by ambler0 »

alastairpat wrote: post #120
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…

I've been reading Gruber for a couple of years now and I really believe that it's not nearly as critical/analytical or interesting as it used to be. While previously he would write much more in-depth articles (often of a technical nature relating to OS X or Cocoa/Obj-C) now I feel he is really just writing what his audience wants to hear and, what's more, 95% of the time simply linking with a sentence of commentary.…

"Some of his links are interesting but for the most part they're either criticising one extreme or showering praise on the other."

I tend to agree, but I don't think this particular piece is an example of that. It frustrates me that the HN crowd has such a hard time rationally discussing Apple (let alone something written by, gasp, GRUBER)

Re: The New Apple Advantage

#238

Post by mkr-hn »

swombat wrote: post #226
mkr-hn wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have evidence that Apple's products appeal to the majority of the human population? And don't do the TC thing and extrapolate from a SV coffee shop/your office. A sentiment poll would do. I'm sure one exists, but I looked around and couldn't find one. It wont help us determine how humans overall perceive Apple products, but it'll at least cover markets where they operate.

Walk in any public place (tube, business lounge, bus, whatever) and look at what people are using... You'll see a lot of macs, iPods, iPhones and iPads. On the laptop side, it's not quite such a clear win, but about 50% of the people in a typical business lounge are using Macs. On the phone side, I'd say it's about the same. On the tablet side, I've yet to see someone actually using something other than an iPad to do…

What you're describing is anecdata. I could drive down the street and say that 100% of churches in Georgia are Baptist and it would make as much sense. And your anecdata doesn't match my own. I see Dells in most businesses and government buildings, and few people carry around laptops or spend much time displaying their smartphone preference.

Re: The New Apple Advantage

#239

Post by tl »

swombat wrote: post #192
aw3c2 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Notebook shopping for "dummies": If you are not sure what you want, make a list of things you want to do with your laptop and ask someone who knows about computers to tell you what you would need for it (gaming -> number of decent chip names, writing and internet -> nothing matters, storing a lot of movies/games -> more than XX Gigabytes of harddisk space, video chatting -> webcam & microphone, etc) Make a checklist…

Make a checklist, hire a personal shopping technical consultant (may come for free in exchange for friendship/family brownie points), learn a new vocabulary, navigate a complex product matrix and finally, hopefully, purchase. vs. Click on the picture that looks like what you want, tweak a few straightforward options (or leave them to default, knowing they're probably fine), buy.

Startup idea: Automate this process and charge a 5% markup on the laptops sold through your site.

Re: The New Apple Advantage

#240

Post by charlieok »

I'm not sure that Gruber explicitly stated this, but it also seems clear to me that a key design element -- making the device small -- is also enabled by the lack of configurability. If there's no concern for assembling interchangeable parts, the parts can be integrated into a tighter enclosure.
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