I am sorry to say but that’s what happens when you don’t have a proper product management org. Unbelievable in a large company like Apple but they do not have a Head of Product / CPO and are basically still a Sales and Marketing company with attached Engineering departments.

There has been something very very wrong with products not getting out the door at Apple over the last few years. How does it take years to update a MacPro, a MacMini, an iPhone SE, Airpower never made it out the door, Airpods delayed by half a year, the iPhone - it’s biggest seller is on a 3year refreshment cycle now instead of 2 years, other peripherals like Airport Wifi cancelled and please let’s not even get started about software which was either cancelled (Aperture) or is being outpaced due to slow release cycles. Apple needs to get a ship / get out the door mentality again!

Steve Jobs was their Head of Product :(.

I've heard product managers described as "mini-CEOs" before. I don't think it's a comprehensive description, but it speaks to ownership mentality I think.

Product Managers should never be mini-CEOs. That is a model naive, ego-driven junior PMs adopt.

Good PMs should be servant leaders, doing whatever it takes to ensure their team can have maximum impact and ownership. A big part of that is identifying new opportunities, both within the org and outside of it, and empowering engineers and designers to own what they are working on.

You just described a good CEO. Considering you limited it to engineers and designers, maybe a miniature CEO.

The concept of a servant leader is a contradiction, isn't it. 'empowering to own' is a pretty weird construction too.

Tech companies need people with very clear product visions that inspire their troops to build something excellent, even when those same troops are having their own opinions overridden by those of the visionary. Those people are usually CEOs and often but not always former engineers themselves. It's very hard to create a coherent, interestingly new product when you can't impose your will on a team because invariably to be new or innovative you must be controversial, and it's hard for non-CEOs to manage that internal controversy.

That is exactly right

The vast amount of vendor management makes the scal of PMing apple products rather unwieldy...

> How does it take years to update a MacPro, a MacMini, an iPhone SE

Creating market hunger - these are all lower volume products for Apple, with no real competition, so I guess they are on a slow updates.

Well they will never become high volume if they get updated every five years or more - that’s for sure.

This is exactly what happened. I was super surprised they didn’t realize AirPods 2 before Christmas, but I guess they figured people would buy gen 1 anyway. Then they release the new airpods in combination with their other launches of the iPads etc when they realized that AirPower wasn’t going to happen. Then they dump AirPower after the release so as to not taint sales of AirPods 2 on launch day.

My completely uneducated guess is a behind-the-scenes patent dispute or something along those lines...

IFixit has a good article on it. Basically they couldn't get it to pass wireless emissions standards the way they wanted to do it (put your phone anywhere on the pad to charge not, not directly on the circle, etc).

Link: https://ifixit.org/blog/14883/what-finally-killed-airpower/

Would be quite rare for a patent dispute to go on behind the scenes. There were a lot of leaks suggesting mass production was due to start. I would bet production did not start, and that early production runs had low yields due to the complexity of the product.

> Would be quite rare for a patent dispute to go on behind the scenes.

Actually the opposite. Most patent disputes are resolved behind the scenes, long before anyone sues each other.

To my definition that makes it not a dispute! It's a commercial discussion with an agreement at the end of it.

>> Most patent disputes are resolved behind the scenes, long before anyone sues each other

> To my definition that makes it not a dispute! It's a commercial discussion with an agreement at the end of it.

Patent trolls send thousands of companies demands to pay royalties on a technology they never directly used. Fighting the troll costs hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of dollars, but they are only asking for $50k. Most companies begrudgingly pay. To me, that's still a dispute.

If it breaks down to the point a product gets cancelled, that would be a dispute. However yes, usually in such circumstances it tends to go public.