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Not sure why the correct answer is being downvoted...
Because it is not substantive
Apple lacks strategic vision
51–60 of 200 posts
Re: Apple lacks strategic vision
#52There 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…
Most generic well run companies would never take the risk & expense entailed in a platform transition like Intel => Apple Silicon.
You might argue that generic companies are doing that now as we see Windows ARM laptops finally, but I think they only got the courage to do that because Apple went first.
Re: Apple lacks strategic vision
#53There 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.
Where has the competition caught up? Arent Apple's chips still by far best-in-class from the laptop down to the watch?
Its an honest question, I would love an arm based laptop running NixOS that is competitive with the upcoming M5 Pro's but I dont see it anywhere.
Case in point: Google's newest Google TV box (released this year) is an absolute turd when compared with an 8 year old 4k Apple TV box.
Re: Apple lacks strategic vision
#54I'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…
I would have loved to see an Apple iCar, just to see the soulless, sterile and inoffensive result, and the resulting magical marketing circus. Do you take it to an Apple Store to refill the windshield wiper fluid? Does it use another bullshit proprietary charging port, and will it refuse to charge if I'm not using the supplied Apple cable? Is the bonnet glued shut? Do I need to hold the keyfob just so to unlock the doors? Does the car brick itself if you install 3rd party tyres? Does the horn require an in-app purchase? So many questions.
Re: Apple lacks strategic vision
#55I 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.
AI is being integrated with everything. Web, applications, cloud, mobile - everything. Any company that neglects this is going to be forced to license and dealmake.
Re: Apple lacks strategic vision
#56There 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…
> Both of these products could be expected from any well run company.
I was not expecting Apple silicon from Apple, I didn’t even realize they’d been hiring chip designers for the past decade before that.
Personal computing really sucked before the mid 2000s. You had windows computers which were cheap and fast, but had lots of bugs and were hard to use and didn’t do low energy very well, you had Linux as a powerful novelty, you had expensive well designed Mac’s that were sort of slow but with better battery life. It took Apple’s intel transition to fix all of that, and I basically thought it was finally done and personal computing all of a sudden got very boring. But today I’m running mid-sized LLM inference on a Max 3, and it’s all very exciting again.
Re: Apple lacks strategic vision
#57Well, 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…
Apple has historically been a little behind the curve in technology, but then excelling at execution and user experience. If they could (quickly) come out with a personal assistant which was really useful for people's planning and shopping and productivity, which knew how to navigate the apps and services on a person's apples phone/computer/cloud data, and do it locally and/or privately... They'd be in a good positio…
I think the reason why Apple hasnt come out with such a useful personal assistant AI is because the underlying technology just doesn't make this so easy.
Apple is the only company so far that seems to be unwilling to accept a poor user experience with generative AI, so their efforts have been "lackluster" in terms of "AI integration" - as if "maximally integrating generative LLMs" is the goal in and of itself!
Of course Nadella is critical of Apple's efforts: he selling the goods! It's like a Steel CEO complementing a new bridge but then "they should have used more steel" - well duh, but since when do we trust the purveyors of components as to what should be added?
The bottom line is "Agentic AI" is just unreliable. If you thought you hated Apple Intelligence now, then if they had gone whole hog, the unreliability would be astounding.
Re: Apple lacks strategic vision
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 the Apple Silicon transition is far from something that could be expected from 'any' company. Microsoft already tried something similar with ARM Surface machines and the whole attempt was an absolute failure. > I think that is exactly right. I think that's entirely wrong. The hardware just isn't there yet! The AVP is the closest you can get to real "AR glasses" at the moment (as distinct from the Xreal 'non-c…
It’s not even new. Apple transitioned from PowerPC chips to intel and basically did the same thing again. It’s a technical achievement to be sure. Apple users are unfortunately used to ditching software because backward compatibility isn’t something they strive for. Old Powerpc, 32 bit iOS/Mac osx software for example.
Re: Apple lacks strategic vision
#59There 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.
And the Apple Silicon chips even include specialized cores that allow LLMs to run locally on both iPhones and MacBooks. (See the "Foundation Models Framework".)
Which was a day late and a dollar short, even at release. Those ANEs are only really good at inference, and even then you get faster results using your Apple Silicon GPU. They're slow, incomplete, not integrated into the GPU architecture (like Nvidia's) therefore killing any chance of Apple Silicon seeing serious AI server usage.
If you want to brag about Apple's AI hardware prowess, talk about MLX. The ANE was a pretty obvious mistake compared to Nvidia's approach and hundreds of businesses had their own, even before Apple made theirs.
Re: Apple lacks strategic vision
#60I'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…
I'm glad they decided against it.
Apple's overall market strategy is "premium product, premium price". If you look to the 7x price ratio between AVP and Meta Quest 3 as your guide, they'd make a supercar that would cost something like USD 175k.
Sure, an Apple Car would likely have a lot of interesting and unusual but well understood design points, both positive (like liquid crystal electric tinting windows) and negative (imagine something as weird as charging a car like an Apple Magic Mouse), but hardly anyone would be able to afford them unless they were working in Big Tech.