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Apple's Blue Ocean

hypercritical.co

161–170 of 262 posts

Re: Apple's Blue Ocean

#161
post #47

Of all the things I've ever wanted to be different on my macbook, removable batteries have never been one of them. Now when battery life exceeds a (long) working day, why on earth would anyone want this? The very few times you will be away from a wall socket for more than 12 hours, you can just bring a power bank.

At some point Apple refuses to replace the batteries of your macbook as they stop supporting the model. At that point you could be down to a few hours of battery life, with no third party repair shop willing to work on your laptop at a reasonable price. That's where you'd be with a 2017 macbook Air for instance. Replaceable batteries gives an out to that situation, as one battery maker somewhere in the world could be…

The 2017 MacBook air has a ton of aftermarket batteries available for less than $60. It's really not that difficult to replace it yourself. The ifixit guide says it takes 15 minutes.

https://www.ifixit.com/products/macbook-air-13-late-2010-201...

"with no third party repair shop willing to work on your laptop at a reasonable price."

I am not aware of any third party repair shop who would refuse to work on a 2017 MacBook Air. Unless it is a repair shop that refuses to work on Apple products in general.

Re: Apple's Blue Ocean

#162

I really enjoyed the first half talking about how Apple and Nintendo followed a blue ocean strategy. Then the second half ranting about removable batteries felt totally out of place. I’m not sure I buy the blue ocean strategy of that, although well written.

> I really enjoyed the first half talking about how Apple and Nintendo followed a blue ocean strategy.

Let me fix that for you.

Blue ocean is roughly the idea of inventing new markets. While it might apply to Nintendo, that's really a stretch and I view it as product differentiation in a highly entrenched market where Sony and Microsoft are clear sharks in the water.

If you look at Apple's product and marketing history, blue ocean has not applied in two decades. The iPod was hardly the first MP3 player -- Diamond Rio was already in that space. There were several smartphones in the market before apple shipped iPhone, people were speculating on when for years before it was announced. Smartwatches supported android 2 years before Apple Watch Series 0 shipped. HomePod shipped 5 years after the first Amazon echo. What Apple does is wait for other people to prove out the market, and then produce an expensive high end version. This is an effective strategy that captures a lot of high margin & affluent demand, but it's very clearly a red ocean strategy.

A blue ocean strategy doesn't have to shout "Think Different," your product uniqueness is obvious and usually confusing. A red ocean strategy means focusing on margins, inventory, and balancing product differentiation versus convention. It means keeping your product secret until the big announce and suing competitors who copy you. At one point Tim Cook was calling himself the Atilla the Hun of operations, and was quoted in articles as saying "inventory is the root of all evil."

Re: Apple's Blue Ocean

#163
post #47

Of all the things I've ever wanted to be different on my macbook, removable batteries have never been one of them. Now when battery life exceeds a (long) working day, why on earth would anyone want this? The very few times you will be away from a wall socket for more than 12 hours, you can just bring a power bank.

At some point Apple refuses to replace the batteries of your macbook as they stop supporting the model. At that point you could be down to a few hours of battery life, with no third party repair shop willing to work on your laptop at a reasonable price. That's where you'd be with a 2017 macbook Air for instance. Replaceable batteries gives an out to that situation, as one battery maker somewhere in the world could be…

Are you sure about that 2017 Macbook Air?

I have a 2013 Macbook Pro and I'm getting the battery replaced next week by Apple.

My laptop is over 10 years old and they're still doing it at their standard battery replacement price.

Re: Apple's Blue Ocean

#164
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Storage is the most likely component to fail. Got any sources for that? I find that hard to believe. > MST (DisplayPort daisy chaining) in MacOS. The hardware has supported it for over a decade. The OS is the weak link here. This is indeed annoying, but with USB4/Thunderbolt support becoming more common in monitors, I believe this is going to be less of an issue going forward.

Data point of one. Last 20 years storage has not failed on me across close to a dozen laptops I’ve owned across various brands. So even I get puzzled whenever I see “storage is the most likely component to fail”. Maybe I just got lucky?

If you're replacing your laptop every 1.5 years then you're probably not likely to encounter any part failing.

Re: Apple's Blue Ocean

#165
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to go totally crazy, you can use a black hole as a power source. The laws of physics don't give you a minimum size for them either. However for black holes the smaller they are, the more power they emit in terms of hawking radiation.

Fusion is silly but at least possible. Unless you have an idea for keeping the black hole inside the phone?

Yes, I do: use a bunch of carefully controlled magnets to spin your block hole in a circle inside the phones.

Black holes can hold charge, and thus electromagnetism works on them.

(Not really useful for a phone, of course. But manipulating black holes like that is not any harder than manipulating an equally massive lump of ordinary matter.)

Re: Apple's Blue Ocean

#166

The short version is: "Wouldn't it be disruptive if Apple went back to replaceable batteries?" but the author stopped short of where that leads. One of the things that doable "now" that wasn't doable "then" is wireless charging. I love that I can put my phone on a pad next to the bed at night and it charges, pick it up and there is no trailing wire to unplug, put it down and there is no wire to find and plug in. This…

I googled pillow of doom but I still have no idea what you meant by it. I only find information about real doom themed pillows.

Did you mean a damaged, blown up battery pack? At least that's what I expected to find.

Re: Apple's Blue Ocean

#167
post #123
post #77

Two things I've been waiting on for years: • MST (DisplayPort daisy chaining) in MacOS. The hardware has supported it for over a decade. The OS is the weak link here. It's the difference between spending $75-$300 for a dock in addition to the cables and just connecting the monitors together along with a single cable to the first monitor. • Non-soldered storage. Seriously. Storage is the most likely component to fail.…

> Storage is the most likely component to fail. Got any sources for that? I find that hard to believe. > MST (DisplayPort daisy chaining) in MacOS. The hardware has supported it for over a decade. The OS is the weak link here. This is indeed annoying, but with USB4/Thunderbolt support becoming more common in monitors, I believe this is going to be less of an issue going forward.

SSDs and batteries are the only components (as far as I remember) that have a "guaranteed" cycle lifetime. Or in another words, a "very likely after this point" failure threshold.

Re: Apple's Blue Ocean

#168
post #108
post #77

Two things I've been waiting on for years: • MST (DisplayPort daisy chaining) in MacOS. The hardware has supported it for over a decade. The OS is the weak link here. It's the difference between spending $75-$300 for a dock in addition to the cables and just connecting the monitors together along with a single cable to the first monitor. • Non-soldered storage. Seriously. Storage is the most likely component to fail.…

With a large 4K screen, I'm not seeing any benefit for MST, and studies have shown it decreases productivity after 2 screens. The other problems are simply fixed with using iCloud and treating your laptop as a disposable, which many laptops have been designed as. If you use the MacBook add intended and invest in apple care it's unbeatable.

“Studies show” cannot possibly account for all workflows. The most extreme monitor users I saw were security personnel who used them to… monitor things. Their office looked very cyberpunk being utterly littered with corporate desktops and cheap TVs and LCD monitors.

Re: Apple's Blue Ocean

#169
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to go totally crazy, you can use a black hole as a power source. The laws of physics don't give you a minimum size for them either. However for black holes the smaller they are, the more power they emit in terms of hawking radiation.

The power scales to such an extent that a black hole light enough to be in a phone is just an explosion.

Yes. I tried to find the calculations, but couldn't find them. Google Bard to the rescue (and cutting out the actual calculations she gave):

> Therefore, a black hole needs to be at least 9.49 × 10^{22} kilograms in mass to emit 100 watts of Hawking radiation. This is about the mass of the Moon.

No clue whether those numbers check out.

EDIT: poking bard a bit more gives this correction:

> However, for a black hole to emit 100W in gamma rays, it would need to be very small, with a mass of only about 10^22 kilograms. This is much smaller than the Moon, which has a mass of about 10^25 kilograms.

But poking more and more makes me less and less confident, because bard seems to believe that bigger black holes emit more than smaller black holes.

Re: Apple's Blue Ocean

#170
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Data point of one. Last 20 years storage has not failed on me across close to a dozen laptops I’ve owned across various brands. So even I get puzzled whenever I see “storage is the most likely component to fail”. Maybe I just got lucky?

If you're replacing your laptop every 1.5 years then you're probably not likely to encounter any part failing.

And if a man mates with nine women he'll be holding one baby this time next month? With both electronic devices and gestating females concurrency is common.
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