Sorry for the Business Insider link but this was the best I could google at the moment; Mercury Reader can get around the adwall: https://www.businessinsider.com/how-elon-musk-learned-rocket...
Of course that team of dedicated experts is also there, and Cantrell points that out too. I'm just pointing out that Musk really does do engineering.
Edit: Here's a Quora post by Cantrell. https://www.quora.com/How-did-Elon-Musk-learn-enough-about-r...
I hope to God the auto industry doesn't lose the competition which scares them into changing themselves more rapidly than the coming fires and floods. The whitehouse is no friend to the renewable energy industry, advocating for the reduction of the price of oil.
Elon Musk is not an engineer and does not do any engineering at Tesla.
At least for Tesla, I have the impression that this is, indeed, becoming a liability at the moment.
When the very top has a measurable impact on low level discisions it is a) eating up attention from the top level b) delaying even small decisions waiting for top level involvement and c) carrying the risk of bad decisions as the top level is, by definition, missing the detailed knowledge necessary for the majority of low level decisions. Not even to speak what that does to innovation and the flow of ideas and corporate culture in the long run.
Other famous examples of where this can end are VW and, at a smaller seriousness level, Bezo's deep involvement with the Fire phone.
Automotive mass production is, from a certain perspective, more complex than launching stuff to space. It is also a very well understood domain, first and foremost from established car manufacturers. So it would have made sense to also memorize some books covering that topic and than getting experts onboard. It doesn't help that an EV is less complex to build compared to traditional cars, so in that regard traditional manufacturers actually do have an advantage. I don't remember when he said it exactly (I think around the time Tesla bought this German manufacturing equipment supplier), but Musk stating that he also wants to revolutionize the way cars are manufactured. Why would you do that when your primary goal, one you are on very good track to accomplish, is revolutionizing mobility?
(Yes, $20 is hyperbole, now read the rest)
The real issue will be the 2019 bondholder covenants. Tesla won't have the cash to pay them, Tesla won't have the buying interest to absorb dilution, and Tesla will still need money.
Basically with a lower and lower share price Tesla has fewer and fewer ways to service its debt and do further fundraising. They can, it just won't be good for shareholders. This is called a death spiral.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/deathspiral.asp
For a healthy company, a low share price has nothing to do with anything. For example, Tesla without debt and positive revenues would be a healthy company at $20 per share, it would even be undervalued and hurray you are the only person that noticed! But thats not the case for Tesla. Tesla is not a healthy company. And its going to become toxic.
If these numbers are right, once Tesla proved to be able to produce Model 3s, it became financially stable. It will easily be able to roll-over bonds.
I was with you on every part but this. It is better to use the company's SEC filings than the Munro report for estimating cash flow per vehicle.
It's a different number because it includes cost of the sale infrastructure. Unfortunately, it's for the quarter ending in June, so the volume of model 3 is still not very relevant against the other models.
Perhaps I'm a little more generous in my interpretation of the interview, but to me, he just seemed like an awkward guy, who wanted to work on engineering cool stuff.
He says it all-the-time. And sometimes without any prompt.
[1]https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-reveals-email-thre...
That took all of 1 minute on Google...
Prove me wrong. Who else was doing this stuff before SpaceX and Tesla? On space launch you had nothing serious except the SLS which is 70s tech. On EVs you had a few boutique and niche vehicles but nothing pushing to break into any mass market. I doubt conventional car companies would ever have done it without a law to force them or monster incentives since most of that industry is full of ICE heads who hate EVs. They are now, but that's because of Tesla. I'm worried that if Tesla fails all these other EV projects will be scaled back since the ICE and oil crowd will leap on it to push an EVs have failed narrative.
Elon seems to have fucked up with this one, but I dont think it diminishes what he has accomplished.
Normally the only way to smash a mediocre Nash equilibrium is with the power of government-- either big government spending or legislation (regulation, anti trust, etc). It's normally the only hammer big enough. I have a lot of respect for anyone in the private sector who is able to pull it off. Musk and the teams he assembled broke two. That's just insane. Hell maybe it is literally insane. Maybe he's nuts.
SpaceX is an incredible achievement. The reusable rockets are a point I really need to dig deeper into, especially the financial aspects of it. Because there a pretty convincing argument is that peivate SpaceX launches are subsidized by government launches. I really have to go hunting for some numbers there more I think about it. And even then, building competitive rockets, not just one, in a private endevour is incredible.
I'm just wondering if Musk is not getting to much credit and hype. Not that he would need it, even the smallest common ground regarding Musk's achievements is more than enough for a lifetime. Unless he throwing all of it away over some paranoid obsession about short sellers and a loose Twitter finger...
Gwynne Shotwell deserves a lot of credit for leading SpaceX in its day-to-day operations. Without her I doubt it would be working as well. Everyone else on these teams also deserves a great deal of credit. They are teams, of course.
On SpaceX being government funded -- yes, that's true to an extent, though they have made a lot of money off private satellite launches too. The fact is that the entire aerospace industry has been deeply embedded with the military and other government agencies since its inception. It's a very heavily subsidized and regulated industry.
But team building and capital raising is a skill, and Musk seems good at it -- at least at the beginning. He's great at getting things off the ground (pun intended?) and breaking through barriers of technological learned helplessness. I do get the sense though that he's less of an effective leader as things get more established. Tesla's problems are too boring for him at this point.
Nissan Leaf 2010
Tesla Model S 2012
Renault Zoe 2013
Walter C. Bersey's Hummingbird - 1897
Which background is that? He has an undergraduate degree in economics and a bachelor's degree in physics.
I respect the guy but he clearly puts a lot into managing his image. As a relevant example, he used to claim to have been in the Ph.D. program at Stanford, but had to retract that (I leave it as an exercise to the reader to find that on Google).
I'm in the UK my understanding is a bachelor's is a synonym for an undergraduate degree; so why did you use the different terms here?
Ah, I think I see it: you copied from Wikipedia; wherein it says he did a bachelors degree in Economics (BA?) and a further bachelors in physics (BS/BSc) whilst he was a graduate. Two undergraduate degrees.
Other sources suggest he did the degrees coterminously:
>"Musk graduated from UPenn in 1994, with double bachelor degrees in Physics (from the College of Arts and Sciences) and Economics (from the Wharton School)." (http://studyadvantage.co/elon-musk-education-study/)
That sources says he had 2 days in a PhD program.
https://www.wharton.upenn.edu/academic-programs/ suggests he did what they call a "dual degree". Making Wikipedia wrong, he didn't "stay" for his second degree he did the two together.
I tried my hand at googling this but found nothing but re-hashes of the same story of how he left after two days.
Watch the video of Sal Khan(fron Khan Academy) interviewing Elon musk.
I second the recommendation of watching the interview. There is way too much misinformation surrounding Tesla and Elon Musk.
My guess would be that you aren't technically in the PhD program until you've passed your qualifying exam. Until that point, you're a graduate student but not a PhD student. After you pass your preliminary exam, you're a PhD/Doctoral candidate.
Also, it's a moot point. There are no bragging rights to be found in simply being admitted to a PhD program. Plenty of very intelligent people fail to complete a PhD program (usually, IME, because of personality issues/conflict with the advisor (sadly extremely common), inflexibility of the advisor and/or department, or personal reasons (economic, social, health)).
(to be clear, Musk didn't brag that he was admitted to Stanford - he suggested that he felt dropping out was more useful than continuing. His fans often hold up being admitted to a PhD program as evidence of his engineering background)
The better question would be, would Apple products be what they are today, without Jobs.
>It’s really— it’s quite a trip, working for Elon. It’s different every day [laughter] because it all depends on what mood he’s in [laughter] — they think he’s joking> You know, he’s been in a great mood lately; we’ve been very successful, and Tesla’s been doing quite well. So it’s been good recently. Um, he still; he’s still extremely demanding. One thing I tell people often is that— I’ve seen this happen quite a few times in the fifteen years I’ve worked for him. We’ll have, you know, a group of people sitting in a room, making a key decision. And everybody in that room will say, you know, basically, “We need to turn left,” and Elon will say “No, we’re gonna turn right.” You know, to put it in a metaphor. And that’s how he thinks. He’s like, “You guys are taking the easy way out; we need to take the hard way.”
>And, uh, I’ve seen that hurt us before, I’ve seen that fail, but I’ve also seen— where nobody thought it would work— it was the right decision. It was the harder way to do it, but in the end, it was the right thing. One of the things that we did with the Merlin 1D was; he kept complaining— I talked earlier about how expensive the engine was. [inaudible] [I said,] “[the] only way is to get rid of all these valves. Because that’s what’s really driving the complexity and cost.” And how can you do that? And I said, “Well, on smaller engines, we’d go face-shutoff, but nobody’s done it on a really large engine. It’ll be really difficult.” And he said, “We need to do face-shutoff. Explain how that works?” So I drew it up, did some, you know, sketches, and said “here’s what we’d do,” and he said “That’s what we need to do.” And I advised him against it; I said it’s going to be too hard to do, and it’s not going to save that much. But he made the decision that we were going to do face-shutoff.
>So we went and developed that engine; and it was hard. We blew up a lot of hardware. And we tried probably tried a hundred different combinations to make it work; but we made it work. I still have the original sketch I did; I think it was— what was it, Christmas 2011, when I did that sketch? And it’s changed quite a bit from that original sketch, but it was pretty scary for me, knowing how that hardware worked, but by going face-shutoff, we got rid of the main valves, we got rid of the sequencing computer; basically, you spin the pumps and pressure comes up, the pressure opens the main injector, lets the oxygen go first, and then the fuel comes in. So all you gotta time is the ignitor fluid. So if you have the ignitor fluid going, it’ll light, and it’s not going to hard start. That got rid of the problem we had where you have two valves; the oxygen valve and the fuel valve. The oxygen valve is very cold and very stiff; it doesn’t want to move. And it’s the one you want open first. If you relieve the fuel, it’s what’s called a hard start. In fact, we have an old saying that says, “[inaudible][When you start a rocket engine, a thousand things could happen, and only one of those is good]“, and by having sequencing correctly, you can get rid of about 900 of those bad things, we made these engine very reliable, got rid of a lot of mass, and got rid of a lot of costs. And it was the right thing to do.
>And now we have the lowest-cost, most reliable engines in the world. And it was basically because of that decision, to go to do that. So that’s one of the examples of Elon just really pushing— he always says we need to push to the limits of physics.
Which is amusing in the case of Musk. As I've said over and over, his approach is to find an industry where most or all of the hard, expensive fundamental R&D has already been done (and paid for) by someone else, and then start a company to incrementally improve it and promise vast cost reductions from economies of scale.
That's what SpaceX is. That's what Tesla is. There's not really staggering heart-breaking Copernican-revolution work being done at either company. They're just applying incremental improvement and economies of scale to problems where the hard fundamental work was already done. The idea that it requires some special sort of unbelievable genius to come up with that plan, or that it's impossible to do without this specific (alleged) genius, is baffling to me.
To some degree, you could say the same criticisms about Linus Torvalds (or, say, Rob Pike).
That being said I dont mean to minimize what Musk or the teams he has assembled have done. The first 90% of the work toward a new innovation is 90% of the work, then the last 10% is 90% of the work.
SpaceX basically finished the Delta Clipper project.
That's why Elon sleeps under the desk and works 18 hours a day because it's all very very easy.
I almost forgot how easy it was to sit on the sideline and critique someone else's work :) It's cute.
"This is not the revolutionary act of genius people portray it as"
and
"This is so trivially easy anyone could do it"
Tesla and SpaceX are trying to do things that have potential utility. Things which will advance the state of their respective arts even if they fail. There is no shame in "merely" doing that! There's also no need to inflate it into something it isn't.
Maybe you don't like him, maybe you don't like how much attention and praise he gets. But to be so dismissive of what those companies have accomplished with him at the helm, to me is just unwarranted bitter negativity.
In your mind, what companies are doing staggering heart-breaking Copernican-revolution work? What bar must be reached to not be "just applying incremental improvement and economies of scale?" Pretty bleak outlook if pushing the bleeding edge of rocket technology forward is humdrum small potatoes.
I suppose if you read literally anything other than absolutely fawning worship of Elon Musk as history's most titanic genius as a "tear down", I could see that.
But... it is absolutely true that his business model is incremental improvements + economies of scale. Tesla and SpaceX aren't in the business of inventing fundamentally new things. They're in the business of making improvements to already-invented things, and mass-producing them to try to bring costs down. This is only a troubling thing to read if you're deeply invested in his cult of personality.
"Absolutely fawning worship" is unnecessary hyperbole, there is a vast amount of middle ground between that and your position. But I suppose if you can't make a reasoned argument, you have to resort to that (and we're off to the ad hominem races!).
"Most titanic genius" is more telling hyperbole, reiterated from your first post apropos of nothing. I didn't say anything about him or his genius, but you continue to mock and, yes, tear down.
When you say "Tesla is just [this]. SpaceX is just [that]," that's a tear down. You're reducing and diminishing companies that have undoubtedly made real impact, but why? Forget about Elon the Magnificent for a second, I would guess that you have similar things to say about Google, Apple, and the rest.
So I ask again, what company is doing things worthy of your respect? You're very good at reducing big things to nothing, but can you prop anything up? Can you support something? Maybe you're afraid to, because you know I can reduce and diminish it. That's easy, anyone can do it. But there's nothing interesting about it, there's no value, all it does is reveal insecurity.
One can say "this is not a revolutionary thing" without simultaneously saying "this is utterly worthless". Avoiding the hero worship and the personality cult does not require throwing out any idea of useful things coming from SpaceX or Tesla.
Yes, the world's outlook is pretty bleak.
You still need to understand all the details. You just didn’t necessarily need to do the grinding on iterations, schematics, math, etc.
I think Elon's active perpetuation of the myth is kind of a red herring.
Promoting Elon Musk as a grand visionary is how Tesla will maximize its brand value, and contribute to a self-sustaining lore around their founder 50 years from now. It's the same story for Apple and Steve Jobs, and thousands of other companies (tech and otherwise).
People aren't capable of idolizing 200 mechanical engineers. They are very capable of idolizing a single visionary. A story with 200 protagonists would be far less compelling, which is why most stories only have 1. If you want to be as competitive as possible, and you have a leader capable of exploiting that aspect of human nature, then that's what your company should do.
Permitting and perpetuating this kind of myth-making is practically part of Elon's fiduciary duty to his shareholders at this point. You can't fault him for doing it, because he has to.
I think what's really at issue is the aspect of human nature that it's exploiting.
I think it's closely tied to hierarchy and pecking order instincts observed in all mammals. We always need to be identifying and reacting to an alpha, and using that to inform our choices and behaviors so we can stay competitive on a biological level. The same instinct might also be what causes people to immediately perceive this as an issue of Elon's individual behavior, and makes them feel so strongly about it.
That said, and being an entrepreneur and having spent time in negotiations with entrepreneurs, when people start talking about money, everyone hears what they want to hear regardless of what is said. Which is why lawyers can charge what they do. And why - in this - Musk looked a bit inexperienced IMHO.
Practically the entire value of Musk projects is based on the myth that Elon is a mystical being bringing advanced technology to humanity. Going on Rogan and doing something to harm that belief, like diverting all credit to his "amazing team of engineers", would be far more damaging than anything else he's done.
Plus he clearly lives for it, and when anyone makes even reasonable points against him, he loses his mind on a Twitter. That is after all what happened with “pedo guy” re the Thai cave rescue. Musk made an ass of himself by trying to inject himself into a potential tragedy for some PR and a man who actually helped to save the day called him on it.
I’m also not sure that it would be hard to idolize a group, people manage it for sports teams. Maybe if Musk put the effort he spends into grooming his ego into promoting his team he wouldn’t need to be the center of a cult of e-sychophants.
A lot of people despise Musk.
Its because the society in general hates these kind of successful non-conformist. No one likes to see a hugely successful anti-pattern to their whole life.
This is just wrong. There are plenty of reasons to dislike Musk that have nothing to do with him being a "successful noncomforist", whatever that means.
I would expect there to be dozens of Jesuses. Rocket Jesus. Pizza Jesus. Star Wars Jesus. Etc.
https://www.fastcompany.com/3053406/how-apple-is-giving-desi...
We underdogs hate to be not credited for the hard work we do, but his positive impact on mankind as a whole is quite substantial, and as time goes by it will be only magnified. Hard to argue with this. SpaceX and Tesla are really a bit more than just a sum of all the engineers (and other folks) involved.
If you like to pick negative things on people, then there are no heroes, there are no ideals to look up to. Every single great person in history had a dark side, like it or not. I guess that's part of what makes us humans.
Personally, I like him. With all the warts, emotions and whatnot. Results matter, rest are details for pub discussion after 5th beer. World generally thinks similarly on this topic.
I mean, I did the thought experiment, and I honestly don't see many things that would be different?
Are you arguing that without Musk, we wouldn't have commercial space companies, or electric cars? If so, I find that a bit difficult to believe.
The part of your comment about no one being a hero is correct. None of us are any better than anyone else, that's for sure. (It's the main reason I try never to point fingers in life actually.) But the idea that we would be worse off without Musk is just a bridge too far.
Even a world absent Steve Jobs, would have created PCs and smart phones. And, with respect to impact, Musk is no Steve Jobs.
There is a causal link between Elon Musk putting all his money into SpaceX and Tesla and their successes. This is true from the obvious way (they were literally close to death with his last infusion), but its a truth that is more than superficial.
SpaceX significantly lowered launch costs even before achieving reusability, and with reusability is changing the game completely. However, Jeff Bezos isn't that far behind with Blue Origin, and probably wasn't inspired by SpaceX; he started a long time ago and was a space nut from an early age. Still, it's better to have two great companies with cheap reusable rockets, rather than just one, and the two companies have somewhat different long-term goals.
I'm a huge SpaceX fan and until recently I kinda scoffed at Blue Origin, but after seeing more about it I was more impressed. (On the other hand, the New Glenn is only first-stage reusable, so they might need to get that flying well before the BFR is ready.)
Fuel is only a couple percent of the cost of a rocket launch. Rockets are expensive, and on the Falcon 9 the first stage is 80% of the cost of the rocket.
In the early days of SpaceX I saw claims that expendables were more economical because you could build them cheaper, but then SpaceX went and build reusable rockets that are also cheap; their rockets cost less than competitors even without reuse.
They're getting government business because they charge the government less than their competitors charge. The subsidy argument doesn't make sense unless it's only the commercial launches that are cheap.
There are a lot of vested interests in this industry that are strongly incentivized to say reusable rockets are no big deal. I think they'll continue to say that until the BFR flies and SpaceX drops their rates to levels far below what disposables could ever achieve.
SpaceX does still use the Falcon 9 as a disposable for extra-heavy payloads. That doesn't mean you have to throw your rocket away for all payloads, and the capacity difference isn't dramatic. And there won't be that many payloads too big for the BFR in reusable mode.
It's true that the rocket wears out eventually. SpaceX is aiming for about ten reuses initially, thus lowering hardware costs by 90%. They hope to do much better than that later.
Just looking at the hardware side without opportunity cost aonewhat misses the point. A really thorough cost analysis would need to factor in the impact on reliability, the risk of failed launches due to reused rocket stages. I assume these numbers are impossible to come by.
One other data point would be, if that's the case, how much premium SpaceX is asking for the use of virgin rockets as compared to reused ones. This would allow a rough estimation of the increase risk for failure and other costs. Again, I don't expect these numbers to be available.
The first part is obviously true. The latter, I’m not so sure —- Blue’s budget has increased dramatically over the past few years, but New Glenn flights remain rare, and New Shepard remains well in the future.
It’s interesting to ponder where Blue would have gone if SpaceX (which was founded later) hadn’t happened. I think there’s a very real chance they’d still be thrashing, talking up bits and pieces of technology but without any complete vehicles (even of New Glenn size).
Mankind needs people like him - with all ecological doom and gloom slowly unfolding, next mandatory frontier is clearly space. Also, disrupting entrenched monopolies/oligopolies that got just too comfortable milking people of their money for very minor improvements of their products.
But if Mush hadn't been born, they would have never come together to create Tesla.
They already did, since Tesla predates Mr Musk's involvement
What I recall is that Jobs tasked Apple to create a phone and had a bake-off between the iPod guy (Tony something) and Federighi, and the iPod side of the firm created a device with a click wheel, Federighi's team created a device with a touch screen and Jobs made the call to go with the touch screen. It'd be weird if it went from that to Jobs having to be begged to launch it, especially as it was clearly awesome and Jobs himself had been so deeply involved in the design.
Air pods.
Yes. Jobs as local despot acted as a curb to bad decisions. Jobs had a vision which acted as a countervailing force to keep Apple from being completely sucked into being a money grubbing luxury goods company.
the core people that make and design all their overpriced, planned obsolescence devices are still there, often uncredited, while everyone else likes to focus on the captain of a ship.
We know from the historical record that Jobs had quite good judgement, even in technical fields, and we know that he countermanded and convinced executives and managers to steer them in the right direction. I suspect that the Apple of today is descending into being just a money-grubbing luxury goods company.
Steve Jobs pretty much set Apple on the premium goods track when he returned. The iMac, iPod, iPad, iPhone were all developed under his watch and all were premium priced.
Apple has pushed the margins higher but that's only because the market can absorb it. Computing is more central to people's lives and they are willing to pay a premium for a good experience.
Steve Jobs pretty much set Apple on the premium goods track when he returned
You are revising what I actually said, and about that you are completely wrong. I never denied that Jobs set Apple on the premium goods track. However, he was one of the major forces keeping it from devolving into being only a peddler of luxury goods.
Tech innovation does better with good margins, and good margins come easier for more upscale products. But doing that is better as an adjunct which increases your margins, and winds up empty as an end to itself.
Of course, if you never use premium features, then it's a luxury good.
It sounds like you're the one who needs to get over something.
For the record, I've been an iPhone user since the 2nd iPhone. I'm typing this on a Macbook Pro, and I bought the 1st unibody Macbook. I've developed iPhone apps and I've been an Apple user since 1980.
Yes, Apple produces better products for now. However, as the years pass, those products might remain recognizably luxury, but become increasingly irrelevant, like a watch fob. Apple now is to Apple in the several years before Steve Jobs died as Pixar now is to Pixar in the days when they came out with Toy Story and Up.
The market decided. Here's the thing. It never stops deciding.
Every time I've priced out a laptop with similar configuration to my MBP (including a good-quality display, NvME SSD, good battery life), it always ends up costing about the same as an MBP. And then Apple's customer service definitely tips in their favor (I've been spoiled by fast, convenient, competent repair service at the Apple store).
So either everyone is making big margins on well-configured laptops, or the perception of over-priced MBP's is misplaced.
I have both a Mac and a PC laptop of that vintage and they're both still perfectly suitable for anything short of current gaming or other extreme tasks.
My daily work computer is a 2012 Macbook Air which I dropped from a standing height 4 years ago. It has one bent corner but still runs great.
That is just amazing hardware, but on the other hand, I have a pair of AirPods that just can't autoconnect to my MacBook unless I fiddle with the Bluetooth and speaker icons in the toolbar every time. And AirPods were fucking expensive and both are produced by Apple. What gives? How can they be so incompetent in making a wireless device connect to another wireless device?
That said, my Sennheiser HD1 headphones are absolutely amazing, and I don't miss being physically tethered to my laptop.
runs perfect
just saying...
I did buy a few upgrades since then (16GB RAM, bigger SSD, new battery) but given that I don't do any gaming, there is very little that a new purschase would get me.
So this is definitely not a Mac-specific thing.
The years being 2012, 2014, 2015, and 2017.
The only two working still are the 2012 and the 2017 but I had a warranty swap on the 2017 in early 2018.
That 2012 model is incredible.
When I bought a Cinema Display I figured out that a display with the same response time and color gamut would run about $75 cheaper and have a plastic case.
$75 for aluminum, more ports and being able to pick it up that day was more than fair.
That didn't always used to be the case. Previously at launch an MBP was often quite keenly priced for the specs. But the last couple of generations have been badly overpriced.
Which ties back into the earlier comment on this thread that after Jobs died, the company has gradually devolved into a 'premium cost for not quite as premium hardware' tech company. Previously MacBooks were well priced for what you got (Australian here also), nowadays they are more expensive that equivalent laptops which have more connectivity, touch screen etc.
Which one is that? Until this past July, they were consistently a CPU generation behind every other brand on the market.
I paid $800 (I think it was $899 retail) for my current 13" Dell Inspiron 7000 laptop. It has an i7/DDR4 RAM vs the i5/DDR3 in the MBP, but given the slower hard drive, let's call it even.
The comparable MBP is $600 more at $1,499.00. The display is no doubt better, but I don't know that it justifies that much more money.
If you want something with a similar form factor (light and thin) then anything with similar hardware specs from another company has always been around the same price, or more expensive.
I think the perception of over priced laptops is misplaced because people look at base specs, but ignore form factor. And, yes you could argue that you don't need something so thin and light, and maybe that's true for some people, but if it's a feature you want then apple laptops are competitively priced.
But the new Pro series is just not pro enough for me. Why the hell should I buy a dongle for everything? It's supposed to be pro - you shouldn't have to basically carry a whole bunch of dongles to get stuff done. I don't know, maybe I am technophobe, but sometimes taking away the stuff which works and useful to shave a mm in height is just stupid from my perspective. If I want a super light laptop without the need for ports etc. I would go for an Air.
Dunno what's going to happen but will stick to my 2013 till it literally won't work anymore.
/end of rant
A shame they got rid of the SD card slot though, and I will be very upset if they get rid of the 3.5mm as well.
Thing is, if you drop a few upgrades, such as dropping the CPU speed by a few percent, dropping the dGPU, going to a 1080P screen, and using a SATA instead of NVME drive, you're down to $1400 for largely minor decreases in performance and capability (none of those things would affect my use cases appreciably, you might be different). Apple doesn't give you those options in a MBP, and the standard MacBook is pretty outdated, topping out at an old dual core i7.
Also, the difference between a SATA SSD and NVMe is night and day.
A similar model to the base MBP is ~$300 (~12%) cheaper, but by also dropping some other features they didn't feel were important for their use case, they could get the price close to $1400 (40% cheaper), but Apple doesn't even offer those options.
The point is not to say that a $1400 laptop is equivalent to the base MBP, but that a $2100 laptop is, and a cheaper MBP might be possible if apple was willing to offer some lower end/dated features. But they aren't.
It's basically "après moi, le déluge" as self-fulfilling prophecy. Real leaders create something that lasts beyond their deaths. Contrast this to George Washington, who could have ended up king but worked hard to make America about institutions, not men. Or, in business we can look at places like Toyota, which have remarkable cultural consistency and continuing innovation across the decades.
Here is what would have happened under Jobs:
> If you head over to Xiaomi China’s official store (via XDA-Developers) you’ll see three new bundles unsubtly named the XS, XS Max, and XR sets. Included in each bundle is a new Xiaomi phone — either the Mi Mix 2S, Mi 8, or Mi 8 SE, respectively — a Xiaomi Notebook, a Mi Band 3, and a Bluetooth earpiece/earphones, all for the same price as their namesake iPhones.
Current Apple products are meticulously, exactingly designed and built, but they’re losing the excitement and expectation of something truly new and original that Jobs brought. That’s the big difference I think a visionary leader can make.
Musk is doing the same thing with electric cars and space. Tesla and SpaceX could survive without him for a time, and since they’re very different industries than consumer electronics, maybe even thrive under a Tim Cook-like operator par excellence. But no guarantee.
I disagree. Look at the MBP keyboard issues, or the declining quality of OS X.
Under Jobs that shit wouldn't fly. Other roles aside, one of Jobs' most important functions was that of acting as a sanity check to ensure that the constiuent parts of any given product came together as a cohesive whole.
Did you ever use the first 3 versions of OSX ? Because I did. And the quality was pretty unacceptable compared to OS9 or Windows. On the hardware side how long did Apple stick with the coffee puck mouse. Or how about the iPhone 1 never even having 3G or MMS or how about all of the issues with the GPU.
But yet Steve Jobs still shipped it all. Why ? Because his slogan was always "real artists ship".
But it’s getting easier and easier to skip a generation of laptop these days. My old machine is just starting to get slow enough that I notice. That’s a big problem for manufacturers.
Or: what is the difference between jumping from an iPhone to an iPad (considered as genius by Jobs) and jumping from a fingerprint ID to a 3D face recognition.
Pebble.
Oh wait, while Malda was technically right, it turned music files mainstream, and the iPhone turned touchscreen phones mainstream
It's just the technology which has matured. The innovation slows and becomes more incremental so certainly the excitement goes down. Jobs wouldn't have been able to change that. Maybe the quality of new Macs would be better or maybe he would have pushed his engineers more to make more elegant way to solve the notch problem, but that's it. Don't make a mistake, he was insightful executive, not the miraculous engineer inventing new technologies. At this stage of the company he would probably just pushed more to the services and content deals.
While you say that Jobs curbed "bad" decisions, and that now the company is "money grubbing," and that he alone kept Apple going in the "right" direction, you don't explain why you think so.
Someone could say the opposite (I don't have an opinion).
For example, far more people choose to purchase iPhones for far more money than they did during Steve Jobs' tenure, so there is some evidence that "bad" product decisions from your perspective are actually good product decisions in the eyes of Apple's customers.
Likewise, Apple's efforts to emphasize ethics and responsibility with respect to the environment, diversity and privacy are mostly new to the post-Jobs era. It may prove hard to argue that spending so much money on those priorities amounts to "money-grubbing," but I can't say for sure because you haven't really tried to argue anything at all.
https://m.facebook.com/JamesHBlack/posts/10156560054277932
so there is some evidence that "bad" product decisions from your perspective are actually good product decisions in the eyes of Apple's customers.
Where did I ever say that being luxury was a bad product decision? I never did. It raises margins. That's a very good thing for a company. However, it's empty and hollow as a driver of new product innovation.
What ensued was the only time I can recall seeing Tim Cook angry, and he categorically rejected the worldview behind the NCPPR's advocacy. He said that there are many things Apple does because they are right and just, and that a return on investment (ROI) was not the primary consideration on such issues.[1]
Apple leads in recycling, renewable energy use and privacy as well.
So, no, your thesis is flat out wrong.
[1] https://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/tim-cook-soundly-rej...
Like do they not know how important that lower case "i" is for their award winning and trend setting formula!
And I am being serious right now. My ocd is going nuts just thinking about the lost uniformity of the branding. Especially when they still insist on us calling their other products "my iphone, my ipod, my imac, and now we also have to say "my apple watch"?
How do you even tell somebody to pass you your phone, tablet, and watch all at the same time. "Hey man, can you pass me my iphone and ipad. Oh and my APPLE watch. Like do you not realize how much of my life you are wasting when you force me to say one more syllable.
Android is terrible, I mean, it’s looking more and more like iOS, but it’s still not iOS and it has no privacy if you want to use the official play store (which you want, because all the apps that actually make your phone smart, only live there). Android phones still die after a few years, my iPhone 5s is still a beast.
Laptops, well the surface book is arguably a great device, but it’s also more expensive than a MacBook Pro and doesn’t come with a thunderbolt port. The XPS is decent, but it’s build quality is Dell terrible. Lenovo might make good laptops, but working for the government, I’m not allowed to own one.
Apple has the only working Bluetooth devices on the planet. The magic keyboard and especially the AirPods always work, I can’t say that about anything else.
Plug and play egpu, who else has one?
I think the only place Apple isn’t actually best at what they do is in competition on software services like AI. Siri is terrible, Apple maps are terrible (why aren’t they just using OSM at this point? I’m sure OSM and Apple could find a way to benefit from each other, and OSM is currently better than google maps).
I may sound like an Apple fanboy, and I am, but I’ve become that way because their shit always works right out the damn box. And I’ve never had a piece quit on me by it’s own. I bought a MacBook Pro 2018 edition to work with the egpu, but my old 2013 macbook still runs perfectly fine. I can’t say I’ve ever tried any thing similar, except for thinkpads, and I’m not allowed to own one of those. Meanwhile my 1 year old work laptop from Dell is literally falling apart. The keyboard rattles, the battery lock is breaking and the screen can’t keep itself up. It cost almost as much as my MacBook, and it’s just complete shit. You may wonder why I care about cost of my work machine, but I’m a manager, I still pay for it.
As far as OSes go, Linux is still Linux, if you don’t mind spending half your life configuring it to your needs and then doing it every time it breaks then Linux is still awesome. Windows, the only plug and play option, however, has become atrociously bad. I like Microsoft, we use Azure a lot and stuff like AD and ADFS is heaven sent when you operate 500 different IT systems from as many suppliers, but windows 10 is one of the worst OSes I’ve ever operated. So again, Apple has managed to be great at OSes, mainly because their competitors suck.
I do think not having an iPhone SE is a mistake, but I also thought losing the headphone jack was a mistake, and sales have since proved it wasn’t, so who knows.
I hate having to go to Google for everything as much as the next guy, but I just can't bring myself to use OSM over Google Maps. GMpas are just.. better in every case.
If you look at the recent BFR video on the SpaceX channel, early on he gives an update on the technology, and there's a part where he takes much longer than the audience cares for to praise the job SpaceX' propulsion engineering team did on the new engine. And you can very easily tell it's genuine respect and gratitude (probably because he had to be more hands-off due to time constraints), not marketing fluff. He's certainly not above crediting people at his company.
BUT I also thought it was weird that, in the podcast, he didn't mention and never has mentioned (of all the appearances I've seen) the entire team of people helping him to the success. Specially in the podcast, because one question that was repeated several times by Joe was like "how do you manage to do all the stuff you do?". I do not like this way of portraying one guy as some sort of alien that does all this when in reality he does very little if you compare it to the work that is done by his employees.
Leadership that goes in the direction that Musk does is really good and very valuable but it's not what creates actual worth.
Engineers are a dime a dozen. They are responsible for the success of these companies in the same way cells are responsible for the formation of a human being.
Why couldn't all those engineers build a cost effective reusable rocket system before Musk came along? Or how about an electric car that could go 400 miles on a battery charge?
So... entirely responsible?
But let's answer a question you posed in your comment: Why couldn't all those engineers build a cost effective reusable rocket system before Musk came along? Or how about an electric car that could go 400 miles on a battery charge?
They could have, because obviously, they did. Their collective expertise is what made that possible. Elon Musk didn't just draw up all the plans and send it to them to make happen. Elon Musk, however, could never in a million years have done it alone.
So I didn't miss your point, I disregarded it. Those dime a dozen engineers are far more important than Elon.
> Nobody walks around thanking their skin cells for existing.
Well, skin cells are not human beings, so comparing human beings to skin cells is... disturbing at best.
I listened to a bit of his Joe Regan interview and when Regan asked him how he has the time to do all of the things he does, there are smoke jokes about him being an alien, but not once did he say, "Well I have an amazing team of engineers" and credit all the thousands of people in his organizations that actually do the work.
He made it sound like he just constantly engineers things, but I find it hard to believe that at any point he's sitting down with CAD and fluid dynamic applications and mapping out experiments for rocket prototypes. I don't doubt he's capable of doing that with his background (or learning how to do it) but it's much more likely there is a whole team of really dedicated experts that he just leaves uncredited.
Are Apple products different now that Jobs are gone? One could argue that, but the core people that make and design all their overpriced, planned obsolescence devices are still there, often uncredited, while everyone else likes to focus on the captain of a ship.