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Apple lacks strategic vision

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Re: Apple lacks strategic vision

#81

Post by k310 »

When you're that big, you're allowed to make mistakes without major damage. Microsoft did it for ages. Remember Zune?

But it also means that any strategic maneuver is market-changing. Steve Jobs had the intuition and deep read of what people really wanted rather than what they said they want. There is no Steve Jobs any more. People are trend-following and mania-following. The problem is that the people moving tech also have no vision. They have a solution desperately seeking a problem.

And in doing so, the early winners are sociopaths and scam artists who destroy jobs and rewrite code overnight with no guardrails for the product/reputation damage or who just spam and spearphish. Move fast and break things. "We'll patch that later"

As for Apple, along with there are many alternative paths. One that worked is revitalizing the dead tablet market by "doing it a lot better" and making it part of their ecosystem. We'll see how glasses and autos work out, or don't work out. AI is immature for a company that prides itself on "doing things right". Some situations have no room for gaffes. Your guess is as good as mine.

"Now, for something completely different?" That's the 64 billion dollar question.

Re: Apple lacks strategic vision

#82

Post by benoau »

nine_k wrote: post #66
benoau wrote: post #13

> While he has achieved growth, innovation has tanked. The iPhone’s design has barely changed since 2019 The rules for iPhone software are almost unchanged since 2009 !

Should it have changed? Does an iPhone have known pain points not fixed for years and years? Something that makes users migrate to Android in anger? Safety razor blades did not change a lot either since the time they were invented; the seem to be in a deep local optimum. Maybe the iPhone is in a somehow similar situation.

Yes it should have changed, but I disagree with your metric on measuring how change is required.

By very-rarely revisiting these ~17 year old policies they avoided naturally-increasing their specs to foster and keep-up with more demanding software, and subsequently in the last two generations had to play catch-up and rush to upgrade their entire product line to a higher baseline of memory to support AI and increase their thermal capacities to support their foray into AAA games, leaving billions of active iOS devices as unsupported.

Re: Apple lacks strategic vision

#83

Post by ben_w »

cr125rider wrote: post #63
kllrnohj wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple Silicon either followed Microsoft's direction (who pushed for ARM laptops a solid 8 years before M1) or just did a better iteration than Intel at the same time Intel was struggling. 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…

Rosetta 2 was the big innovation there. Not ARM in a mobile device.

Was that even innovative? I mean, this is the third time they've changed chip architecture, they've had some practice here.

The first time I wrote anything for Mac OS, it was with Metrowerks' Code Warrior whatever-the-student-edition-was-called, where the compiler only targeted the 68k series chips.

Re: Apple lacks strategic vision

#84

Post by no_op »

Apple's "strategic vision" for AI is to add a computer use agent (AI assistant) to the OS to perform tasks on behalf of the user, plus contextually surface AI capabilities in many specific contexts they've got utility (copy editing, image generation, photo organization, translation, coding).

What's missing here? What else should they be doing? What are their competitors doing, in any space relevant to their markets, that's much different? None of these critiques ever seem to say.

If AI ends up being another 'normal' technology, Apple's advantages in distribution (~2B active devices, with a user base that installs updates pretty reliably), ability to give their AI tools access to your existing data and apps, and general facility with packaging tech so consumers actually understand what it's good for, put them in an extremely strong position to capture value from it.

If AI ends up being something other than a 'normal' technology, if we really are a few years from building the sand god, well, all bets are off, and it's a little silly to evaluate the strategic planning of an individual company against that backdrop.

Re: Apple lacks strategic vision

#85

Post by the_snooze »

no_op wrote: post #84

Apple's "strategic vision" for AI is to add a computer use agent (AI assistant) to the OS to perform tasks on behalf of the user, plus contextually surface AI capabilities in many specific contexts they've got utility (copy editing, image generation, photo organization, translation, coding). What's missing here? What else should they be doing? What are their competitors doing, in any space relevant to their markets,…

I feel that any vision needs to have some actual execution behind it, otherwise it's just a twinkle in someone's eye. "Built for Apple Intelligence" is literally the slogan for Apple's 2024 lineup. The vision is there front and center. But everything they layed out in their vision (and explicitly advertised!) has been a joke so far, falling somewhere between half-baked, trivial, or nonexistent. They've had to pull that ad showing contextually-aware interactions because that's nowhere near ready. https://www.techradar.com/computing/artificial-intelligence/...

After a certain point, it becomes a "put up or shut up" situation for those making wild claims. That's where all the criticism is coming from, and rightfully so. Sure, set a course for the future, but until there's something real to show in the present, it's all empty hype until proven otherwise.

Re: Apple lacks strategic vision

#86

Post by kllrnohj »

cr125rider wrote: post #63
kllrnohj wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple Silicon either followed Microsoft's direction (who pushed for ARM laptops a solid 8 years before M1) or just did a better iteration than Intel at the same time Intel was struggling. 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…

Rosetta 2 was the big innovation there. Not ARM in a mobile device.

Surely you realized the "2" in Rosetta 2 isn't just quirky branding but because it's the second time they did that very thing? How was it a "big innovation"?

Re: Apple lacks strategic vision

#87

Post by objektif »

drewbeck wrote: post #77
objektif wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let us say it is rather concise. It is just that you do not like the idea.

It is concise and it is not substantive.

It is very very substantive. I am sure just looking at my post you realized that my proposal had significance and was meaningful. May be you are unhappy I did not list down the reasons why. But you already know that if you have slightest clue in this topic.

Re: Apple lacks strategic vision

#88

Post by kllrnohj »

nine_k wrote: post #69
kllrnohj wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple Silicon either followed Microsoft's direction (who pushed for ARM laptops a solid 8 years before M1) or just did a better iteration than Intel at the same time Intel was struggling. 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…

It's a bit like saying that an iPhone was not a big deal, phones were becoming smarter by the day, Apple just did a better iteration in 2007 than Nokia and Blackberry. Making an iteration so much better is not something I'd ascribe to luck.

iPhone was a new UI focused around capacitive touchscreens which at the time was itself an entirely new category.

What, exactly, did M1 change about anything about using a laptop? Longer battery life? Faster? Okay, same improvements as had been featured for the last 20 years. And it wasn't any thinner, depending on the model line it was substantially thicker even.

So what exactly was new about M1 that wasn't just a bog standard iteration we'd seen dozens of times by that point?

Even just considering Apple's product line surely you'd have to rank things like Intel's Core 2 as more significant, as it enabled the creation of the MacBook Air and was Apple's return to subcompact laptops. Or Intel's thunderbolt which radically changed the entire I/O story and capabilities for Apple, who fully embraced it.

Re: Apple lacks strategic vision

#90

Post by beAbU »

ryanobjc wrote: post #39
ZeroConcerns wrote: post #5

Well, as we speak, Apple is still one of the most valuable companies in the world, shareholder-value-wise and (most importantly) consumer-preference-wise. So, being an absolute Apple-skeptic, I don't blame them for not having a crystal-clear future direction right now. VR/AR? Nah, probably not happening. AI? Probably huge, but in which direction? Who knows? And they've got products in all these markets, just not obvi…

As a long time Mac and iPhone user, I just don't get all the complaints about innovation. Macs are as innovative as they ever have been, maybe more. Apple silicon has been an absolute powerhouse and godsend for battery life. iPhones are great, and continue to be awesome. Airpods are so good they make bluetooth headphones look like the garbage they are. When you look at the grand scope of thing, the primary thing the…

Apple is a fantastic iterator and polisher. They are not innovators. What was the last apple product that was truly innovative, i.e. something no-one else has done before?
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