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Apple lacks strategic vision

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Re: Apple lacks strategic vision

#101

Post by pllbnk »

tracerbulletx wrote: post #10

There 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.

I agree. As usual these days, the culprit for lack of innovation is AI (mostly LLMs). Apple did try to shove it to the users unsuccessfully and they had the right amount of sanity to backtrack once they realized how the users' expectations are misaligned with what LLMs have to offer, which is mostly lack of reliability; average user thinks that something walks like a duck, quacks like a duck must be a duck, but LLMs, while pretending to be human-like are not like that. On the other hand, Microsoft is still forcing it upon their users with Copilot but users are resisting. We will see which tactic will win in the long-run but I would bet on Apple.

Re: Apple lacks strategic vision

#102

Post by nine_k »

SoftTalker wrote: post #100
nine_k wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NeXT software though became the base of OS X. BTW Mac Pros did not find many customers either. I bet Silicon Graphics did not sell very many boxes; it was important who bought these boxes.

Yes but the software wasn’t selling until it was forced upon the Apple customer base. You could buy NeXTSTEP for an Intel PC in the 1990s but nobody did.

The right people bought NeXT though. Carmack and his team developed Doom on NeXT computers [1], and the result has profoundly changed the mass-market PC scene.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_(1993_video_game)#Engine

Re: Apple lacks strategic vision

#103

Post by tetrisgm »

Apple is the embodiment of Gunpei Yokoi (creator of the Game Boy and Game & Watch)’s philosophy.

“Withered technology, with lateral thinking”. Sure, they find ways to have bleeding edge tech, especially in terms of hardware design. But at the core, their products do not differentiate with bleeding edge software. They aim to surprise and delight by delivering things that are well understood, in a convenient and focused manner.

This mode of thinking is incompatible with shipping the latest trend instantly.

Re: Apple lacks strategic vision

#104

Post by nine_k »

kllrnohj wrote: post #88
nine_k wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

> What, exactly, did M1 change

For instance, the unified CPU and GPU memory, which allows to run ML models on a Mac as if you have a large dedicated GPU. (Unified memory of course harks back to the 8-bit era; the key was to make it performant.)

Re: Apple lacks strategic vision

#105

Post by lubujackson »

pllbnk wrote: post #101
tracerbulletx wrote: post #10

There 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.

I agree. As usual these days, the culprit for lack of innovation is AI (mostly LLMs). Apple did try to shove it to the users unsuccessfully and they had the right amount of sanity to backtrack once they realized how the users' expectations are misaligned with what LLMs have to offer, which is mostly lack of reliability; average user thinks that something walks like a duck, quacks like a duck must be a duck, but LLMs,…

If history is any indication, Microsoft will slowly improve until things become sort of decent, then Apple will release a neutered but polished version that is lauded as "Apple Invents AI" and immediately dominate the market.

But their version will lack one critical feature that everyone expects, such as a power button, or copy/paste, or pinch to zoom. For AI, maybe something like "remember context".

Then 3 years later they will invent "remember context," and everyone will lose their shit again.

Re: Apple lacks strategic vision

#106

Post by spacedcowboy »

kllrnohj wrote: post #46
tracerbulletx wrote: post #10

There 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.

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…

20 years ago, as a senior engineer, I was given a MacBook with an Arm processor inside it, and asked to evaluate it for Aperture. I gave it a “meh” review, and that was the last I heard about Mac on Arm for a while.

Apple might not have been publicly pushing Arm, but they very much were not following Microsoft’s direction. It just wasn’t good enough.

Re: Apple lacks strategic vision

#107

Post by kllrnohj »

nine_k wrote: post #104
kllrnohj wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

> What, exactly, did M1 change For instance, the unified CPU and GPU memory, which allows to run ML models on a Mac as if you have a large dedicated GPU. (Unified memory of course harks back to the 8-bit era; the key was to make it performant.)

> For instance, the unified CPU and GPU memory

Was already common and widespread with iGPUs in CPUs on x86, and was standard on all ARM mobile SoCs for a solid decade.

AMD in particular had already done a bunch here with their APUs including OpenCL support in 2012 and fully coherent shared address spaces with 2014's Kaveri

Re: Apple lacks strategic vision

#108

Post by devmor »

st3fan wrote: post #94
devmor wrote: post #20

I think Apple’s strategic vision bas been pretty great. What they’re lacking is quality control. They need a hard-ass that will scream at them when they try to release stuff like liquid glass. It’s been too long since Jobs death and they’ve gotten comfortable pushing out poor quality features.

This is a funny comment. I think quality control should be mostly about undisputable bugs and hardware errors. But something like liquid glass is HIGHLY subjective. Lots of people love it. Others hate it. It has nothing to do with quality. Maybe you mean taste. But that is also super subjective and nobody gets it right for everyone.

I am not referring to taste. I am referring to its function. It had to be revised almost immediately upon entering beta because if you pulled down a menu over text, both became unreadable.

Something as stupid as low opacity text UI over text should not have made it out to consumers to start with. It's the kind of thing that Jobs would have burst a blood vessel over.

Re: Apple lacks strategic vision

#109

Post by _rutinerad »

beAbU wrote: post #90
ryanobjc wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That is not what ”innovate” means, you’re mixing it up with ”invent”. You could argue that they never invented anything, but not that they haven’t had, and continue to have, plenty of innovations the past decades.

Think every product that was one way, then Apple did it differently and suddenly every product on the market looked like theirs. That’s a long list of both hardware and software.

On the other hand, when was the last time any mass market tech product was _invented_ by that definition (something no one else has done before)? Most products are incremental improvements, even innovations are rare when it comes to mass market products.

Re: Apple lacks strategic vision

#110

Post by Jaygles »

kllrnohj wrote: post #88
nine_k wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

I went from a 2016 intel MacBook Pro to an m1 and although the differences on paper looked like many other spec bumps, the actual experience felt like a paradigm shift.

It’s the first time I owned a laptop that lacked compromises. It was consistently snappy and fast at every task from a full to empty battery. And it did so without burning my lap or producing an incredibly annoying fan noise.

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