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Apple Used to Be an Inventor. Now It’s Mainly a Landlord

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Re: Apple Used to Be an Inventor. Now It’s Mainly a Landlord

#341

Post by bsder »

scarface74 wrote: post #145
wlesieutre wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% agreed. People are complaining online about how the new Mac Mini is priced, but they're not just selling a computer. It's a whole ecosystem of things of mostly reliable stuff that works well with each other. They can put a price premium for the quality of their software ecosystem, which keeps getting better. Being able to use your phone as a camera to take a photo directly into a document in Pages on your comput…

100% agreed. People are complaining online about how the new Mac Mini is priced, but they're not just selling a computer. It's a whole ecosystem of things of mostly reliable stuff that works well with each other. The old Mac Mini started at $499 with a slow processor even when it was new, a slow hard drive and 4GB of RAM. That was a configuration that no one should have bought. The cheapest previous Mac Mini that any…

A lot of people buy the Mac Mini because it is the cheapest way to do iPhone development.

Re: Apple Used to Be an Inventor. Now It’s Mainly a Landlord

#342

Post by scarface74 »

wlesieutre wrote: post #336
2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4Gb is good for a media server and not much else.

Between memory compression and very fast SSDs, I bet you could do it. Especially if you aren’t running a bunch of Chrome/Electron stuff like developers tend to. Of course a lot of the target market for Macs like that would be better served by iPads now.

The 4GB Macs in question were using slow 5400 rpm hard drives.

But, until two months ago, I was using a circa 2009 Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz laptop with 4GB of RAM with an external USB drive running Windows 10 as a Plex Server. It could do one or two streams depending on the bit rate. It could not do a 4K stream.

Re: Apple Used to Be an Inventor. Now It’s Mainly a Landlord

#343

Post by scarface74 »

bsder wrote: post #341
scarface74 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% agreed. People are complaining online about how the new Mac Mini is priced, but they're not just selling a computer. It's a whole ecosystem of things of mostly reliable stuff that works well with each other. The old Mac Mini started at $499 with a slow processor even when it was new, a slow hard drive and 4GB of RAM. That was a configuration that no one should have bought. The cheapest previous Mac Mini that any…

A lot of people buy the Mac Mini because it is the cheapest way to do iPhone development.

You really don’t want to run XCode with 4GB of RAM

Re: Apple Used to Be an Inventor. Now It’s Mainly a Landlord

#344

Post by Skunkleton »

southerndrift wrote: post #254
Skunkleton wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It _always_ depends on your threat model. Most people need protection from snooping family members, or people who find your phone if you lose it. For these use cases Face/Touch ID both work great. If you are trying to secure your data from the NSA, well you have probably already lost, but by all means, turn off Face ID.

How do you protect against family members who have enough pictures of you to create a 3D printed model of your head [1]? [1]: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/hackers-trick-apple-iphone-x...

> How do you protect against family members who have enough pictures of you to create a 3D printed model of your head [1]?

With therapy.

Re: Apple Used to Be an Inventor. Now It’s Mainly a Landlord

#345

Post by cm2187 »

wtallis wrote: post #267
lewisinc wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It feels like Apple hate is becoming a meme. Hasn't it always been, though? This probably comes off as conspiracy-theoretic, but I feel like there's a real financial incentive to keep their stock prices as in-flux as possible to allow for proper buy-in/cash-out gains.

I can certainly believe that there are plenty of people that try to manipulate the stock price, but most Apple haters aren't playing the stock market. By far the most common cause of Apple hate I see is what appears to be consumers who are essentially disgruntled that none of Apple's products are targeted at their own use case: eg. gamers who always decried the Mac Pro because they wanted a cheap traditional desktop,…

Or people who don't like having to deal with dongles.

Re: Apple Used to Be an Inventor. Now It’s Mainly a Landlord

#346

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

askafriend wrote: post #221
asdff wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't think the iPad is enough even for most consumers. The competition for the iPad pro is the surface, which has more I/O that people would actually use (see that nice USB-A port and headphone jack?) but importantly comes with a full featured OS that everyone has been using for decades. I could see people moving to a surface type device over a laptop because it has a full featured OS, but iOS is just too li…

I think Surface is part of the future too. I think Surface and iPad will dominate traditional laptop sales in the next decade. They each represent 2 different opinionated views of productivity/creative-focused computing (just like the 2 different opinions of Android vs iOS in mobile computing). I think you're right that today the Surface does far better in the IO department and IO is a dealbreaker for a lot of people…

I think the Surface turned out to be a better product.

I used to think phones and tablets would be defined by lower performance but extremely energy efficient. And any learning from these low power designs would leak to desktops and laptops, but with more power to play with, they would be faster.

But now we’ve got these very powerful iPads and iPhones, but they exist in a limited ecosystem.

The Surface may not have the fancy A12 SoC but the entire line up seems to have intel cpus and run Windows. And their product lineup seems to be a single platform with increasing capabilities. Tablet, better tablet, laptop, better laptop. But you can run all the same stuff.

I’d love Mac OS in an iPad right now that can use the same binaries.

Re: Apple Used to Be an Inventor. Now It’s Mainly a Landlord

#347

Post by aibrahem »

Apple always seemed to have had four things going for them; Product Innovation, Developing extremely high-quality HW and SW with attention to both details and user experience, a world-class supply chain and finally a technological edge.

I would argue that under Steve Jobs both the supply chain and the technological edge had some focus but there wasn't a huge gap with the competition, This could be either because it required time to achieve this gap and Steve simply wasn't at the helm for that long or it wasn't his main focus and is currently the focus of Tim Cook considering his background, either way, I think Apple is currently and going to continue to blow everyone out of the water with technologies like their SOC's and will continue having the most efficient supply chain and manufacturing capacity in the world churning out products that beat the industry margins by a mile.

Regarding the quality, design and user experience it mostly stagnated, don't get me wrong they're still way higher than the industry average and I can see Johnny Ives touch in most of their products, but I don’t see the kind of passion that went into designing the interface of a device like the iPhone with ideas like pinch to zoom and the spring effect. Apple seems to have a design team that is world class but uninspired and just doing their job.

Now the most important point and this is what I honestly believe is the problem with Apple is the Product Innovation, this appears to have completely stopped after Steve, I try not to believe that Steve Jobs was THE product manager at Apple and avoid the cult of personality, but it's very hard to shake this idea when during his tenure they've released multiple industry-changing products, and they've failed to release a single one after he left.

I think Apple is going to continue to release high-quality, well designed, cutting edge and high margin products, but I highly doubt with the current leadership they'll be able to release a single new product that changes the status quo like Steve used to.

Re: Apple Used to Be an Inventor. Now It’s Mainly a Landlord

#348

Post by Wowfunhappy »

sangnoir wrote: post #213
elsonrodriguez wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Steve once said netbooks were dead, then released a laptop in exactly that form factor (11 in MBA). Clearly there was market demand for it, and I assume their must be demand for both sizes here as well. Just a point of clarification on netbooks. Netbooks were a flop because they were bulky, slow, hard to type on, had terrible screens, and came with minuscule trackpads. The air was none of those things, and was the…

Another example was when Steve said 7-inch tablets were "too small" and you'd need to file-down your fingers to use them (not sure what you'd need to operate 3.5-inch iPhones then). He said this while Apple had the 8-inch iPad mini in development. SJ was a salesman - he'd say untrue things to make his product look good, like trash-talking 5.5-inch phones(!) and saying "no-one wants 'Hummer' phones" while - you guesse…

Do you think Apple already had larger phones in the pipeline at the time of Steve Jobs’s death? I think the slightly larger iPhone 5 probably was, but not the iPhone 6 or 6+.

Re: Apple Used to Be an Inventor. Now It’s Mainly a Landlord

#349

Post by notmyaccount »

bepotts wrote: post #144
izzydata wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that people think there is no better / equivalent alternative is an issue. Why people are willing to begrudgingly spend thousands on something without doing research doesn't make a lot of sense.

Because people want it? I don't understand why tech people can't understand the most obvious of actions. Apple is popular because people love their products. Apple may not always have the specs or work best with non-Apple services, but Apple products are consistently high quality, integrate nicely into Apple's ecosystem, and are brand that shows its owners are a certain type of class. Signifying you're of a certain t…

Apple processors always blow away the competitors by miles and it takes them the competitors up to a year to catch up. They have amazing cameras, music quality, build, looks, display, security, etc. If they aren't the best, they are in the top 3. And that is all in 1 phone.

I do not personally prefer Apple cause it is not my cup of tea (and I need headphone jack) but they have been coming up with amazing phones year after year, and you can easily skip a year without it affecting your usage.

They cannot reinvent the wheel every time.

Re: Apple Used to Be an Inventor. Now It’s Mainly a Landlord

#350

Post by Wowfunhappy »

philwelch wrote: post #326
eisa01 wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The iPad Mini has 4:3 screen ratio, so quite a bit larger and more useful screen than the 7" 16:9 Android tablets Same with the netbooks, weren't those often 9" 16:9 with terrible Atom CPU and slow HD?

It's kind of shitty and deceptive to measure screen size by the diagonal. You could have literally a single row of pixels 15 inches wide; does that mean you have a 15 inch display?

How would you recommend we measure screen size? Length x Width I assume is the obvious one, but that’s harder to compare. I suppose you could argue comparing diagonals isn’t a good benchmark either, but it works well enough when screens tend to have similar aspect ratios, as they mostly do.
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