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Apple's Middle Age

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Re: Apple's Middle Age

#61

Post by pjmlp »

pwinnski wrote: post #28
macintux wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could have easily compromised their vision by including touch ID and/or a button. Samsung does this all the time: include every option, just so no one is left unhappy.

Alternatively, "include every option so everyone is left slightly unhappy." I can't imagine ever going back to a phone with a button. Every time I pick up my daughter's iPad, I try to use gestures on it before remembering that I have to press that button, which already seems like a relic from the past. It took minutes to get used to swiping up instead of pressing a button. It now feels like the most natural thing in…

Software buttons are great until the OS freezes, then the only hope is that at least hard reboot works.

Re: Apple's Middle Age

#62

Post by Shikadi »

namelost wrote: post #23
carlmr wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capitalism hates it though if there's no reason to sell new devices. Although I think we still have a lot of headroom in terms of memory performance that will matter just as much as the previous CPU performance increases.

The future is heterogeneous computing. Intel's chips already include a GPU, the next step will be FPGAs.

I can see it now: "Facebook now offers faster news feed rendering for PCs equipped with Intel 10 series FPGAs!"

Kidding of course, but I think the FPGA/CPU combos will be more relevant to servers than end users, at least initially. FPGA high level synthesis is miles away from being useful for consumer level application acceleration, and GPUs are much more accessible

Re: Apple's Middle Age

#63

Post by cmrdporcupine »

scarface74 wrote: post #33
symlinkk wrote: post #18

The author seems to praise the vendor lock-in that Apple imposes upon its customers as being a good business move and a sign that Apple has "matured", without really offering any hard facts to back it up. I'm going to offer an opinion of my own without any facts to back it up. Vendor lock-in may be successful in the short term, but interoperability is successful in the long-term. The internet would have never took of…

How much of a "longer term" view is needed than 40+ years? Apple has used this strategy since day one.

That is not at all true. That was certainly not the philosophy on the very successful Apple II series. And it was not how Apple operated in the non-Jobs Mac years in the late 80s and early 90s.

And it's not how they operated for the early part of the 2000s when Apple went on a major open source / standards binge: adopting the standard Intel/PCI architecture, using Unix as the foundation of their OS, open sourcing their kernel, using open source WebKit, etc. etc. Hell, the first version of the iPod even did it right and was basically an external USB hard drive.

But there's been a major turn to the proprietary as the iPhone business has eaten Apple. They've locked that platform down in a big way, and they've failed to embrace the web and cloud in a functional way. There's less and less open standards embrace there, and more lock-in style in both hardware and software.

In a way Apple has always had two hearts -- a Wozniak (the open Apple II) vs Jobs (the closed Mac), long after those two have left the company.

Re: Apple's Middle Age

#64

Post by bhauer »

carlmr wrote: post #14
mjburgess wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People talk about the downsides of this. But it does mean all the tech you buy today is going to be use able in 10ys. That's quite a win.

Capitalism hates it though if there's no reason to sell new devices. Although I think we still have a lot of headroom in terms of memory performance that will matter just as much as the previous CPU performance increases.

> Capitalism hates it though if there's no reason to sell new devices.

"Capitalism" (the free market) is us. And I for one do "hate" that CPU performance is not increasing as rapidly as it did in the past. I would very much like to see a return of significant generational performance improvements. I would happily upgrade my PC more often if it resulted in the significant gains of yesteryear.

I find it a curious asceticism to cherish stagnant technology because it means my 5-year old PC is still relevant. Yeah, that's the silver lining. But let's be real: if you had a PC that was twice as fast in every performance dimension that I could afford today, I would buy it.

Re: Apple's Middle Age

#65

Post by Shikadi »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #34
arximboldi wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, when I was using Windows more than 10 years ago... formatting your computer every 2 years was a good way to maintain performance, otherwise it would just slow down due to disk fragmentation + crapware accumulation. On Linux I could also just install the OS once and use it until I upgraded the machine... like in 6 years.

When I was using Linux more than 10 years ago I didn't even format my disks when upgrading my machine, I just moved the boot drive from the old machine to the new one. OTOH, I've reformatted my 2012 Linux machine twice since I purchased it, which is twice more than I've formatted my Windows machine over the same period. Granted my Linux box is much more heavily used, but...

Sounds like you must be using Ubuntu :P

Re: Apple's Middle Age

#66

Post by venomsnake »

pi-err wrote: post #5

Tl,dr: “it makes sense to settle down”. Tells how much this is pure projection from the author (he’s open about it). Apple has amazing bricks to build on (Watch especially) so to not settle down. Even iPhone X shows they can still bet big with their flagship.

I have one X collecting dust here. It is a losing bet. S8+ and note 8 are flat out better devices even on software side.

Re: Apple's Middle Age

#67

Post by simonh »

gergles wrote: post #7
pi-err wrote: post #5

Tl,dr: “it makes sense to settle down”. Tells how much this is pure projection from the author (he’s open about it). Apple has amazing bricks to build on (Watch especially) so to not settle down. Even iPhone X shows they can still bet big with their flagship.

> Even iPhone X shows they can still bet big with their flagship. Does it? The iPhone X (which is a great phone and one that I own) is a Galaxy S8 with a Face ID scanner. They didn't "bet big" on it, it was the only logical place to take their market.

In hindsight, knowing how well Face ID works yes, but going all in on Face ID and ditching Touch ID completely early on in the design process was a real risk. I don't see how anyone can deny that.

Re: Apple's Middle Age

#68

Post by [deleted] »

jballanc wrote: post #8

Any article that speculates on Apple's future viability in the market would be remiss not to mention Apple's unprecedented cash hoard. Currently, Apple is sitting on $126B in net tangible assets. With 100,000 full-time equivalent employees, that means that Apple could pay every one of their full-time equivalent employees (which, as a reminder, includes a large number of retail employees) an average yearly salary of $…

[deleted]

Re: Apple's Middle Age

#69

Post by Cknight70 »

Seems to me that when you boil it down Apple's primary strategy now is to focus on convenience and simplicity in a purposely anti competitive way. What advantage does Apple music have over a service like Spotify besides being pre-installed? What about iMessage? What about Facetime? What about the MacBook with a single port?

Apple is not worried about competition or more importantly innovation, it instead focuses on creating a walled garden that can keep its users happy. The HomePod is not trying to be innovative it is trying to keep Apple users in their ecosystem.

Re: Apple's Middle Age

#70

Post by simonh »

pjmlp wrote: post #61
pwinnski wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively, "include every option so everyone is left slightly unhappy." I can't imagine ever going back to a phone with a button. Every time I pick up my daughter's iPad, I try to use gestures on it before remembering that I have to press that button, which already seems like a relic from the past. It took minutes to get used to swiping up instead of pressing a button. It now feels like the most natural thing in…

Software buttons are great until the OS freezes, then the only hope is that at least hard reboot works.

Which is why the iPhone X uses hardware buttons to do a forced reset. What has that got to do with home buttons?
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