I'm convinced that Tim Cook's biggest mistake was not creating an EV. Just look at how Chinese manufacturers like Xiaomi and BYD have moved into the EV space and have created amazing experiences for their customers. CarPlay paired with American cars is simply few generations behind from what the Chinese companies have done. Yet Apple was early enough and had an EV team but Cook killed it. Even if the 1st gen was crap…
Apple lacks strategic vision
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Re: Apple lacks strategic vision
#42I don’t see a compelling reason for Apple to jump into the AI game. The MacBook Pro M4 is a dream to work with, and it works great with Claude Code. Creating quality products is a niche market, but that strategy still has merit.
I think it's a combination of three things: 1) AI threatens to take-over how you use your phone, it threatens to reduce apps to an API that it will use on your behalf so you don't use the apps yourself 2) By doing that it commoditizes the hardware because the software experience is virtually identical across platforms, you say make a dinner reservation and it doesn't matter what calendar you use, what restaurant app…
It threatens to do that, sure. But the reality will likely be significantly less dramatic. The most likely outcome is AI (like every other hyped technology) finds a niche and that everything else carries on as it was.
Re: Apple lacks strategic vision
#43There are a few hiccups, but everyone'e acting like Apple Silicon wasn't one of the most wildly successful overnight improvements in laptops in the last 50 years and that airpods aren't so popular that even Android phone users buy them.
Yeah everyone complains about how Apple don’t “innovate” but currently they are just focussing on making the best consumer hardware of all time. Don’t get me wrong I dislike them for other reasons but those reasons are mainly things Jobs pushed for decades ago. An Apple fan should love the current Apple
Yeah I guess it’s been a while since their last iPhone moment but that entire decade was just one revolution after another for every segment of tech, and Apple came out on top
With their in-house chips they’re going to do fine for AI, even if they need to partner with someone else on it
Re: Apple lacks strategic vision
#44Re: Apple lacks strategic vision
#45There are a few hiccups, but everyone'e acting like Apple Silicon wasn't one of the most wildly successful overnight improvements in laptops in the last 50 years and that airpods aren't so popular that even Android phone users buy them.
Both of these products could be expected from any well run company. They are both very polished versions of something that already existed. The direction to optimize in was already clear. No one wants to compare Apple to a generic well run company, they want to compare Apple to itself a decade or two ago. Others have said that if Jobs were still alive, AR would be ubiquitous by now, and everyone would have a stylish…
Re: Apple lacks strategic vision
#46There are a few hiccups, but everyone'e acting like Apple Silicon wasn't one of the most wildly successful overnight improvements in laptops in the last 50 years and that airpods aren't so popular that even Android phone users buy them.
Regardless of how you want to frame it, there clearly wasn't any grand innovative strategic vision in play there from Apple. It was just an incremental improvement to long established products with no shortage of equally significant and impressive increments improvements from others along the way.
Re: Apple lacks strategic vision
#47Apple is a hardware company. Its primary products are smartphones, laptops, desktop computers, and tablets. That's always been true, since they were "Apple Computer". On the other hand, Alphabet and Meta are advertising companies. Their primary products are ads. Does the author suggest that Apple become an advertising company? How would that even fit with Apple's hardware portfolio? Tesla sells automobiles; Apple could try to sell automobiles too, but... why? Apple has no experience in automobiles. Nvidia is kind of a one trick pony: it sells GPUs, which are currently in massive demand. But is anyone saying, well, Tim Cook has no vision, because Apple didn't make GPUs? Surely Steve Jobs wasn't going to make GPUs either. That's not what Jobs was all about.
Apple is the most successful and profitable consumer computing hardware vendor in the world. They kick their direct competitors asses. Perhaps that market is somewhat saturated and doesn't have as much room for growth as other markets. But so what? It seems like critics just want "growth" without any purpose behind the growth. Steve Jobs always had a purpose and wasn't just looking for money, money, money. The innovation was oriented toward consumer computing hardware.
Meta tried to pivot to the so-called "metaverse", and that got them nowhere. They're still throwing billions at it every year with hardly any return. Nonetheless, Meta is still kicking ass at its core business: selling ads on social media. Now Meta is trying to pivot to AI, throwing a ton of money at it, but who knows how that will pan out for them. Nothing yet. We're supposed to be impressed by 9-figure pay packages for individual engineers, and that is impressive in a way, but it's not impressive in the sense of, look how that paid off for Meta.
It's not clear that even Apple and Microsoft are direct competitors. There's still macOS vs. Windows, which is more or less at a stalemate, but that's not the biggest piece of either company's revenue anymore. And again, nobody is out there saying that Tim Cook lacks vision because Apple is not winning desktop OS market share. None of the critics in the media even care about desktop OS market share.
Re: Apple lacks strategic vision
#48There are a few hiccups, but everyone'e acting like Apple Silicon wasn't one of the most wildly successful overnight improvements in laptops in the last 50 years and that airpods aren't so popular that even Android phone users buy them.
Both of these products could be expected from any well run company. They are both very polished versions of something that already existed. The direction to optimize in was already clear. No one wants to compare Apple to a generic well run company, they want to compare Apple to itself a decade or two ago. Others have said that if Jobs were still alive, AR would be ubiquitous by now, and everyone would have a stylish…
I think Apple is hitting a wall that most tech companies are hitting. New gadgets aren't really improving our lives.
We have the internet on our phones, Now the internet is a wasteland.
Probably the biggest cultural innovation of the last 5 years has been podcasts and that's just gussied up radio.
Re: Apple lacks strategic vision
#49There are a few hiccups, but everyone'e acting like Apple Silicon wasn't one of the most wildly successful overnight improvements in laptops in the last 50 years and that airpods aren't so popular that even Android phone users buy them.
That was 5 years ago and the chips themselves are much older than that. They can't skate on that forever, especially since the competition caught up.
Since you say the competition has caught up, I assume it’ll be easy to send an Amazon link to the evidence.
Re: Apple lacks strategic vision
#50Maybe they've just calcified - the youngest person on their board is 63. At the end of the day they haven't had a credible threat in over a decade.