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How Apple overcame its culture of secrecy to create AirPods Pro

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Re: How Apple overcame its culture of secrecy to create AirPods Pro

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except... Whilst I acknowledge that the M1 macs are pretty good, Intel power pcs on everyone else's desks that work just fine for the standard Microsoft Office workload. Intel are not miles behind, they are just not ahead. In the world of Enterprise Applications x86s compatibility with legacy code is going to be important to many large organisations. Meanwhile Apple with probably pull support for Rosetta2 in a couple…

> So whilst Intel have not innovated at the speed us techies would have liked, x86 is here to stay in the non-apple world. Not necessarily! A lot of office needs boil down to the Office 365 suite, Adobe and the SAP GUI - all of which now have native M1 variants. The only thing that's needed is someone other than Apple and Qualcomm actually putting out a desktop-worthy ARM CPU so that Microsoft can provide Windows-on-…

Office 365 for mac is not the same as office for Windows though. If you are a power user that might matter to you.

Then there are the applications not available on mac...Project, Power BI...

I know because amongst my estate is an rdp server for mac users to use some niche excel features and to use PowerBI desktop.

Re: How Apple overcame its culture of secrecy to create AirPods Pro

#152
post #148

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Zsh isn't Bash. And Bash version compatibility is important when 75% of your team develop on Linux, but the other 25% on Mac. I mean, I use Fish, but when I'm writing shell scripts for others, it's Bash, because it's a common default. But now I'm limited to Bash 3. But I'm glad that they got rid of that stupid bar, and let you get a laptop with 32G of RAM now. So kind of Apple!

Your bash scripts won't work on Windows, either. If we are here talking about bash being a "common default" maybe we shouldn't leave out the operating system that has about a 90% global marketshare. If your development team doesn't have the time and resources to support a multi-platform development environment, they shouldn't do so. Apple didn't change their business model, the GPL changed their license, and it's a l…

> Your bash scripts won't work on Windows

Well neither would the code we're developing either so, not really a problem.

> Does your employer let you integrate GPL v3 code into your products?

Oh, most definitely. But then none of our products are closed-source, so we're an outlier, admittedly.

Re: How Apple overcame its culture of secrecy to create AirPods Pro

#153
post #96

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Because a shell script is supposed to be a lowest common denominator. Run this, and it'll ensure you have Maven, it'll ensure you have Java 11+, then it'll build the thing and run the thing. And now I'm needing to sniff your OS, detect whether or not Homebrew is installed, install it if not, then install Bash >3, then run the actual meat of the script. All because of Apple's lawyers being scared of GPLv3. At this poi…

Bash is not a common denominator anywhere except Linux. Just write what you want as POSIX shell and it will work in a lot of places. You already have to deal with platform-specific differences even (nay - especially!) across Linux with things like apt vs yum vs dnf vs pacman vs Nix. One more is really a non-issue.

Yeah, fair enough, I'm just bitter after my shiny new associative array failed and I had roll back to a worse option.

Re: How Apple overcame its culture of secrecy to create AirPods Pro

#154
post #5

> Secrecy is a value it held dear, to preserve the “surprise and delight” for customers. I think the last time I felt this way about an Apple Event was the launch of the iPad. Not only are they burning out engineers, they're optimizing for a value that isn't part of their secret sauce anymore. I expect innovation, but not surprise. An N'th generation anything just won't have the same zing as it did the first few time…

Imagine the counterfactual: an Apple engineering blog that routinely publishes in depth articles describing the awesome challenges that their engineering teams are overcoming in an org as vertically integrated as Apple. That would make me more hype about their products than anything.

This is how Purism works.

Re: How Apple overcame its culture of secrecy to create AirPods Pro

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of their regular users don't even know what Arm or Intel is, let alone cares about it. A macbook is a macbook. The fact that it's faster is lost on most people as well, since their daily use consists of opening the browser or video conferencing or (if they have a PC) gaming. Computers have plateaued for their current use case. The only innovation that will make a difference in the near future is AI.

The m1 gains are more impactful than just speed, namely battery life and thermals. The fact that I can get a full workday or more depending on load, all without a loud fan screaming at me all day honestly makes this the first laptop I've owned that works as a genuinely fully portable workstation. It's basically eliminated charge anxiety. It's not a complete game changer or anything like the original iPhone, but it's…

Yeah battery life and fan noise have been so much better on the M1 16” than on the intel 16”, it’s unbelievable.

Re: How Apple overcame its culture of secrecy to create AirPods Pro

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly Most of the stuff is "officially leaked* to some places before the new releases anyway When was the last time people were surprised by what they saw? I think it was on the iphone unveiling.

> When was the last time people were surprised by what they saw? The performance per watt and rollout schedule of Apple Silicon?

No one who was paying any attention to iPhone and iPad performance was surprised by that.

Re: How Apple overcame its culture of secrecy to create AirPods Pro

#157
post #52
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much of an advantage are you really getting here? The first day they are sold samsung has the airpod torn apart and rendered on a computer screen with all specs known. There are no big secrets here, these aren't warheads. It didn't take long for the gas stations around me to start selling knock off airpods along side the knock off lightning cables. If you get it early vs not, its not going to make a big differenc…

I imagine the brand recognition of being the innovator here (whether or not they really have innovated on anything, I won't judge that here) is a bigger factor in the market than it appears at first. At the very least, that lasting, prestigious reputation of being a global innovator fits the bill for the type of "personality" that the corporation exhibits and must tickle something's fancy there, and at most it causes…

Plenty of android phones have plenty of technological leaps over iphones but the market is pretty much oblivious seemingly

Re: How Apple overcame its culture of secrecy to create AirPods Pro

#158
post #121
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I don't think I'm right haha. I haven't met these people and asked them exactly what they were thinking. But I honestly think we're very biased towards assuming our senior corporate leaders are foolish and misguided. Saying "assuming a corporation made a smart decision, why did xxx make that decision?" is usually a very fruitful line of thought.

> I honestly think we're very biased towards assuming our senior corporate leaders are foolish and misguided. I honestly think we're very biased towards assuming our senior corporate leaders are gods and not fallible mortals. All humans make mistakes. Very bad mistakes. Even very smart people. Depending on circumstances and level of power, some people suffer the consequences of their mistakes, and others don't. One c…

Everyone makes mistakes.

But when they committed to that mistake, they thought they were right at the time.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23771902/

Diagnostic errors by Doctors are probably the gold standard of being error free. My estimate is that CEO types are usually right at least 60% of the time with these big decisions as it were.

What I'm curious about is why they thought they were right when they made the decision.

Re: How Apple overcame its culture of secrecy to create AirPods Pro

#159
post #157
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine the brand recognition of being the innovator here (whether or not they really have innovated on anything, I won't judge that here) is a bigger factor in the market than it appears at first. At the very least, that lasting, prestigious reputation of being a global innovator fits the bill for the type of "personality" that the corporation exhibits and must tickle something's fancy there, and at most it causes…

Plenty of android phones have plenty of technological leaps over iphones but the market is pretty much oblivious seemingly

That’s just the issue. You can’t get all of the “innovations” in one phone and they are all hampered by janky software by hardware manufacturers who can’t do good software.

If you want an Android phone with decent software and hardware, you’re stuck with only being able to choose a Google produced phone.

Re: How Apple overcame its culture of secrecy to create AirPods Pro

#160
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep in mind this attitude makes total sense to hardware engineers. The hardware business is... Let's just say that the difficulties you face definitely exist for hardware engineers. But, difficulties involving negotiations plus recalcitrant South Korean factory owners are WORSE. In "South Korean factory owner negotiations," secrecy is paramount. Particularly if said South Korean factory owner is the biggest supplier…

> The software is only good because Mac fans join the company and slave hard enough to make it that way. The software hasn't been good for years now.

Compared to what? Android? windows? Linux?
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