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Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

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Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#241

Post by cyberax »

hylaride wrote: post #203
cyberax wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had an MP3 player before the iPod. It was a CD-based player, and it was pretty good. I think, iPod was really one of the first users of 1.8" hard drives, so it was better than the competition simply because Apple had access to better hardware.

I disagree. Apple had no monopoly on 1.8" hard drives nor most of the other components in the original iPod (except maybe the scroll wheel itself?); they were merely among the first to apply it into a media player. It was the UI that was groundbreaking. You could switch from an album, to and artist, to a playlist, to a specific song all within seconds with your thumb. CD-based mp3 players were ok, but were battery ho…

The first Apple iPods only had FireWire which was exotic here, so they were not at all popular. I had a Rio (Nitrus, I think?) that was released within a year from iPod's release. When I first interacted with an iPod a couple of years later, I was not at all impressed.

I didn't have a NOMAD, but Slashdot's "no wireless, less space than a NOMAD, lame" tagline was pretty much on point. Its marketing was great, however.

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#242

Post by com2kid »

mulmen wrote: post #224
com2kid wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is the often sung master of this. Jobs waited for the right time for mobile and tablets. Apple also waited for smart watches as well. Same goes for Car Play. They seemed to have ran out of patience waiting for AR/VR.0 There was a company called Kosmo (Kosmo?) during the first .com bubble. Basically door dash / Uber eats but way too early.

Sure but “be second” doesn’t help that first mover. What incentive is there to innovate if your product is doomed to fail? What can a company do to both innovate and develop a viable product? Are the corporate structures and cultures necessary for this just that different?

First movers do sometimes win, Netflix, Uber, Amazon.

Also VCs have to invest their funds in something! :D

The key is matching innovation with timing. History is filled with great ideas done decades, or even a century, too early.

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#243

Post by wpm »

basisword wrote: post #151
pzo wrote: post #112

Sadly iPhone sales and revenue saturated like 4 years ago (and the same for Mac, Wearables and iPad [0]). They focus now a lot on growing revenue from services. Which is kind of sad because they have still much room to grow Mac and iPad: - just make iPad more useful and support MacOS - it's not gonna canibalize Mac, they sale each year 2x more iPads than Macs and 12x more iPhones than Macs. - make macbook Pro standar…

Maybe they should stop focussing on 'growing'. Isn't nearly $100bn in profit per year enough??

Timmy is too worried about the goddamn stock price for that. They could easily just transition to a company that isn’t promising stupid growth every quarter and just pays fat dividends on a portion of the profits.

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#244

Post by wpm »

conductr wrote: post #145
btown wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no doubt that the team behind Liquid Glass had the same noble motivations as the team behind Microsoft's Metro Design Language in 2010. In a crowded market, making a completely innovative visual identity is often the only option. One hopes that the result is that the words "forward-looking" and "trend-setting" and "loyalty-inspiring" and "inimitable" begin to apply. And if they pull it off, more power to them!…

> I do think that Jobs would have signed off on the motivation behind Liquid Glass. I do not think he would have signed off on Liquid Glass itself. Agree. Jobs took big swings like Liquid Glass but, perhaps the most important part that’s missing in present Apple, he was obsessive about ensuring the swings were executed to a high standard. He was hands on in this pursuit. It’s actually weird to me that a company so la…

Without a Jobs-esque foot, the bozos have nothing to fear. They flourish and spread, gain power by impressing other bozos, and push out anyone with half a brain.

MobileMe’s devs were brought into an auditorium for a dressing down that included the lines “you should all hate each other for letting each other down” and in response to “what is MobileMe supposed to do” got a “Why the fuck doesn’t it do that”

The smug dopes that are left over in the design department are probably clapping each other in the back over shipping liquid glass. Tim doesn’t give a shit about how ugly, troublesome, and problematic it is. Stock price go up, whatever!

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#245

Post by xethos »

tgma wrote: post #118
gwd wrote: post #75

> From that point on, Steve would go on to spend lavishly on things that improved the experience, and he would reject—often brutally—any idea that diluted or harmed the experience. ...I’ll go out on a limb and say that uninvited advertising is not normally equated with a better customer experience. YES!!! SOO much of the Apple user experience has degraded due to this. I can't listen to my own music that I bought on t…

Modern iPhones? iTunes/iPod sync still works just fine. However, you have to question if that’s what most people who use iPhone want. For one thing, mobile users don’t necessarily have a PC. Mobile is the main device for most users not PC which is different from 2007. Also, I bet many users prefer ad supported free music streaming services if they never pay for music over a system of organizing custom MP3 downloaded.…

Android allows changing, and disabling, the default though. Last I checked, trying to open an MP3 will demand the Music app on an iPhone, and clicking an Apple Music link will do the same instead of allowing one to open a webpage

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#247

Post by randycupertino »

strictnein wrote: post #95
gwd wrote: post #75

> From that point on, Steve would go on to spend lavishly on things that improved the experience, and he would reject—often brutally—any idea that diluted or harmed the experience. ...I’ll go out on a limb and say that uninvited advertising is not normally equated with a better customer experience. YES!!! SOO much of the Apple user experience has degraded due to this. I can't listen to my own music that I bought on t…

This is how Amazon is too with the movies and tv shows you bought. There's no way to search your owned library anymore. You just have to page through it to find what you want. And your library is hidden away behind a tiny little unlabeled icon in the upper right corner. And, to make matters worse, you have things like the Charlie Brown Halloween Special, which Apple now owns the rights to. You cannot in any way searc…

> This is how Amazon is too with the movies and tv shows you bought. There's no way to search your owned library anymore. You just have to page through it to find what you want. And your library is hidden away behind a tiny little unlabeled icon in the upper right corner.

This happened with (amazon owned) audible now too. When you try to search your own library instead it shows you books for sale. Even if you search for a book you know you already bought in your own library it will promote different versions of the book you don't own and try to see you those instead of showing you the one you own. It's incredibly frustrating and really manipulative and really sucks!

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#249

Post by eviks »

> and he would reject—often brutally—any idea that diluted or harmed the experience.

"brutally" is the only factual part, otherwise he harmed the experience plenty, often for the sake of appearances

Goggle also had a memo on how ads were bad and rejected the idea ... until they didn't, with the same founders, so you don't need much of a leadership change for the strong incentive of ad money to dilute the resolve.

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#250

Post by zahrevsky »

int_19h wrote: post #240
zahrevsky wrote: post #208

> Some time ago (1999-ish) [...] a number of ways to integrate ads were discussed. > One was to show a cool video from a respected company (such as Nike) every time the Mac starts up. [...] This sounds so weird in 2025. However, I can see that probably in those times there was no "norm", and people were trying different things. Who knows, maybe if it weren't for Steve Jobs, ads at startup might be the norm. And who k…

Kindles have been showing ads on their lock screen for the ad-supported tier for a very long time now. These days, we have moved to far more insane schemes. E.g. smart TV manufacturers are patenting detection of static frames to show you ads while TV is idle (although I don't think anyone has actually shipped that yet).

> Kindles have been showing ads on their lock screen for the ad-supported tier for a very long time now.

Wow, this is wild. I've also remembered that Viber puts ads among your chats in a chats list. It shocked me first time I've seen that.

> patenting

As I understand, big companies are making lots of patents, and most of those never come to life.

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