It is sad. No one knew what to do with Apple Retail. That was the most neglected part of business.
Ron Johnson left. Scott Forstall forced out. Katie Cotton retired. ( I felt both Scott and Katie had a bit of Steve Jobs in them ) Mansfield retired. It sometimes feel Apple is now largely run by Tim Cook and Eddy Cue.
Although the new MacBook Pro do seems to show there are people in Apple that still give a damn. That their voice may have been previously drown out. Quote from Steve.
>It turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies, like IBM or Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful.
>So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product.
> They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers.
Really wish Steve was still alive.
His working style and some of his personal history seem like they would not have worked in 2020s.
I could see him as a board member, occasional informal consultant. But not as head of the company. And I don’t know if he would have liked that too much.
I think if he was CEO of Apple in the current environment, certainly there would be less hero worship outside of Apple, and a lot more people would be writing pieces critical of his leadership style and effect on the world, but there wouldn't be anything serious enough to force him from the company given how well things would be going. In other words, he'd be much closer to Musk than Kalanick both in terms of the severity of the criticism and his ability to weather it.
https://www.livescience.com/16551-steve-jobs-alternative-med...
Versus other sources that say Jobs did delay treatment.
> And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers.
Developers are customers too.
In the past decade, Apple's focus is self-centered: optimising for profit. That has come at the cost of community. Will the new hardware solve that? It's a welcome improvement! I use a laptop for data storage, and am worried about being unable to quickly swap my SSD over to a spare laptop (restoring 8TB will take a long time). I'm very pleased about the return of MagSafe, though, and battery replacement. Will Apple's software improve? Will Apple listen to developers? Or will the Linux community act first to welcome more newcomers? We're going to find out this decade, and I'm excited to see what changes it brings.
Apple became the most valuable company in the US before Jobs passed.
>"Maybe it'll be a billion-dollar marketplace at some point in time. This doesn't happen very often. A whole new billion-dollar market opens up: 360 million yearly run rate in the first 30 days, I've never seen anything like this in my career for software,"
>"Music is a two and a half billion-dollar business a year for us. I'm thrilled at $360 million a year run rate. We'll be dancing on the ceiling if we cross a half a billion. Maybe someday we'll get to a billion."
He also said he doesn't believe App Store will overtake iTunes in revenue. But that was at the launch of App Store in 2008.
Forward to 2010, App Store was nearly $2B. Still not as much as iTunes, but it was growing fast. And projected to overtake iTunes in 2011. He didn't understand the App Store market. So it was uneasy for him. He spoke about it in multiple interview since 2008. But he was sick, and well aware oh his health. On his last trip to Japan in 2010, we wrote "All Good Things", the last part "must come to an end" wasn't written out. But he must have known his days may be numbered.
Remember 2010 to 2015, Apple was about, or at least perceived to repeat the same mistake of Macintosh and Windows again. Current iPhone 13 in launch quarter would have sold more iPhone than all iPhone 2G to iPhone 4 combined. iPhone revolution has barely stated despite most of nerds realise how big of a change it will be.
In 2015 the war has pretty much settled. Android will never be able to destroy iPhone. And iPhone growth projection has zero momentum lost. I wrote on AI how Apple will reach 1B iPhone user in 2020 at those projected rate in 2014. At least Phil Schiller was aware of it in 2014 and floated the idea or lower commission rate from "Strength". I am sure if Steve was alive and Scott Forstall was still on the team you would at least have some support of that idea.
The problem is right now no one has the conviction to say no this isn't a business we should be in. Certainly not from the number guys like Tim Cook or CFO. iTunes was used to sell iPod. App Store should have been used to sell iPhone. Instead it is now used to extract value from iPhone users aka Services Revenue. Scott stood up for Developers, Steve did too. As shown in email released in court. And I am pretty sure Katie Cotton would have smelled the PR disaster before it even started. But all three are gone.
After the App Store: Apple takes 30%
But let’s not pretend that most of the App Store revenue comes from poor indie developers. It comes from pay to win games, loot boxes, and other in app purchases with zero marginal costs.
But again, you’re not standing up for the poor starving Indy developer. You’re standing up for companies that are doing far more sinister things going after “whales” than anything Facebook has ever done.
There are several things wrong with that statement.
1. If these companies engaged in truly destructive business practices (and it could be proven), then Apple has a duty to remove those apps. Every developer has to pay them $99/year to be registered, so that money should be funding the removal of these supposedly exploitative and 'sinister' apps.
2. You cannot prove that the majority of these businesses are all big.
2a. Even if you could prove that, it's common knowledge that Apple is the largest company in the world, which renders that entire argument moot.
3. How do you delineate between indie developers and 'whales'?
3a. When you do differentiate the two, how is it ethical for the largest company in the world to ask for more of their profits?
4. Apple isn't standing up for the poor indie developer either, which is why it's perfectly reasonable to ask them to do better. There is not a company on this planet with more liquid cash than Apple, so there's nothing wrong with asking them to just improve their treatment of developers when consensus is that they're one of the most exploitative and destructive companies in the field of consumer electronics.
2. I said that most app revenue comes from “whales”. Those are the players who spend the most money on play to win games. https://medium.com/shopify-gaming/mobile-gaming-is-a-50b-ind...
3. Indy developers are selling a product that has value. The “whales” are the 5% of consumers buying loot boxes and candy crush coins (?).
3a Most of their profits are not from the App Store. Most of their profits come from a simple ethical business model - I give them money they give me stuff. Unlike Google and Facebook or the aforementioned games.
4. Who are all of these poor developers Apple should be standing up for? In the link above (and the numbers were confirmed during the Epic trial), most money is coming from games with in app purchases. If you look at the top selling apps on the App Store now, the last one that I can remember that came from Indy developers is WidgetSmith. How many Indy developers would be successful if Apple took a 15% cut instead of a 30% cut?
Well, there's the FlickType guy[0] who got kicked off the app store only to have his product completely cloned by Apple. Then there's the Hey! email people who went to hell-and-back just to get an inoccuous update approved. Not even a year ago there was a class-action lawsuit against Apple by developers[2], and Apple's "compromise" was to charge less for a service that was provably garbage. They know their 30% cut is illigitimate, that's why they backed off so quickly. Even still though, they charge certain people 30%, others only 15%, and then the big companies like Netflix get away with 0%[3] because of insider deals that other apps cannot benefit from.
So fixing that would be a good start. Then they need to allow for alternative payment processors (as pressure mounts from countries like South Korea and France), and hopefully get rid of their asinine sideloading requirements that do nothing for the user except make it harder to get the functionality they want. These feel like non-negotiables to me, and as a developer I have no intention of supporting their software or using their hardware until it's fixed.
[0] https://www.inputmag.com/tech/apple-blocked-the-flicktype-wa...
[1] https://www.engadget.com/apple-basecamp-hey-email-app-store-...
[2] https://www.axios.com/apple-settles-developer-class-action-c...
[3] https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1444367219509637123
Netflix hasn’t allowed in app subscriptions for years.
Every developer with in app subscriptions only pays 15% after the first year.
If Apple’s 30% is garbage, so is Google’s and every console makers.
Do you support Android? Have you bought any game consoles.
As far as not allowing side loading - that’s a feature not a bug. Are you really unaware of all of the malware that is on computers because of no sandboxing?
I’m referring to well known software companies.
- Zoom installed a web server surreptitiously on Macs so when you uninstalled the software, it reinstalled it (https://www.zdnet.com/article/researcher-says-zoom-web-serve...)
- DropBox does all sorts of evil on Macs.
- Fortnite side loading introduced a vulnerability on Android (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/08/fortnites-android-vu...)
- Google and Facebook convinced users to install VPN software using a corporate certificate that allowed them to track users in other apps.
- not on purpose. But if you had system integrity protection turned off on the Mac and installed Chrome, it made the system unbootable (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/09/no-it...)
I agree. We have to hold Apple accountable first though, because they're abusing it hardest.
> Do you support Android? Have you bought any game consoles.
I do support Android, through F-Droid, and while my app wouldn't benefit from existing on a console I've sideloaded several apps to my Xbox One without any problem. I played through Castlevania last week and it ran flawlessly, so it's mostly Sony and Nintendo who are holdouts at this point (and I say that as someone with a hacked Switch).
> Are you really unaware of all of the malware that is on computers because of no sandboxing?
I'm fully aware. I just don't think it matters when the iPhone has much more malicious attack vectors, like zero-click iMessage exploits that cut straight through BlastDoor like it didn't exist. Maybe once Apple fixes their more egregious security vulnerabilities and embraces transparency they'd have an argument: but right now it's a poorly-disguised and obvious excuse for lock-in.
But it wasn’t about court. It’s about you selectively choosing who to have moral outrage against. So Apple makes too much money as the most valuable company in the world. But Microsoft and Google are the good guys even though they are also making obscene profits and are worth a trillion+ dollars?
I think Walter Isaacson did a massive disservice by not focusing on things he was uniquely good at, but instead built a largely negative narrative around him; squandered an opportunity to show his work ethic, his approach and how he inspired people. I recommend reading "Becoming Steve Jobs" instead by Schendler and Tetzeli. One of the best moments in the book is when Steve wanted the I-beams to be absolutely perfect in the new office building.
It would be better if we pick out good things about any accomplished personalities and try to benefit from them, instead of dishing out vile hatred that is oh-so-common at discussion boards like this.
There’s also an old documentary about the founding of NeXT that does such a great job of showing what it was like to be in the room with him as a member of a small team, and this was before he fully “became” Steve Jobs. People underestimate how much meaning can be found in being pushed hard by someone with a clear and inspiring vision.
Come-on, that guy has died for 10 years. His opinion on anything one cited for is *UNKNOWABLE*. Stop saying he will approve or disapprove some ideas... That's literally meaningless statement...
That being said, I just can't believe he would have been happy about the various issues with the old MacBooks. So many things feel so wrong.
That said, pure speculation on my part, but I think the notch would not have launched on the laptops without some other benefit - e.g. Face ID - or it would have been on pause until it was small enough to match the current menu bar’s height. There was sometimes more of a push to get things “just so,” I think. Either way, I miss the old showy product introductions. I like the polish of the videos under lockdown, but it feels like the format drains the enthusiasm a bit.
And it’s hard to point to anything recent, except maybe AirPods Pro and recent software releases, where Apple really knocked it out of the park. Most Apple hardware seems like incremental improvements rather than flashy impulse buys. Maybe I’m just more impatient than I used to be.
The Apple Watch has been much more profitable and will have a longer lifespan than the iPods.
Only partly. Apple under Jobs sold a completely unusable mouse (the infamous "hockey puck") for years simply because it looked cool. And it took them ages to move away from the butt-ugly skeuomorphic design in IOS. Only after first MS went with flat design and later Google got the design language of Android right, did Apple throw that out.
>And it’s hard to point to anything recent, except maybe AirPods Pro and recent software releases, where Apple really knocked it out of the park.
Uh, IDK. Considering how first the M1 and then the derivatives rocked the world of CPUs, I'd really disagree. The ripples of that really rocked intel and might cause quite drastic changes there.
Me, personally, I was looking at buying either a Dell XPS or a Framework laptop next to run Ubuntu, but considering the latest MBPs, I will buy one of those as I really love quiet machines with great displays.
I mean… the evolution of Apple’s in house chips are absolutely park-knocker-outters, and the thing that makes me bullish about the company’s future. It alone may be enough to secure a front runner position when it comes time to transition to AR.
They would benefit again from an iconoclastic head of product, but the new laptops and stability improvements introduced in Monterrey suggest that bench is stronger than a lot of people think.
Yeah, I’m not knocking Apple’s tech - but I was hoping for “the latest specs” and what I got was an HDMI 2.0 port, UHS II SD card slot, and so on. It reminds me of when they removed Thunderbolt Display input from the iMac, so you couldn’t use an old iMac as a secondary monitor. Or when they removed the optical sound out from the headphone jack. I won’t even ask why the new Macs don’t have cellular or why Apple hasn’t thrown money at game companies to make better Mac ports or otherwise entice PC gamers consider Mac hardware instead of Windows. Speaking of gaming, the lack of a “console-like” Apple TV is also a bit of a letdown. As is the lack of an Echo Show competitor.
I don’t doubt that this will be like the iPhone all over again - Apple’s late to the party but gets it right. But I also kind of worry it will be Siri all over again - fantastic at first, but ultimately a cancelled HomePod and still a work in progress…
I ask because it is almost as if you see the bricks change shape at Apple trying to fill the missing piece... they know they need that influence, it’s just not there, and honestly, I want to be a part of an organization that operates in the post-kicked out Steve aura.
He was most definitely not empathetic to me. He could be very empathetic to an abstract construct of a person. He would act as an advocate of the "user" but I felt that the user was always him. How did this align with reality? I guess it did, to a certain cross-section of people who appreciated whatever guise of a user Steve represented. This user construct changed over time and I could see it in early Apple Steve, lost in the wilderness Steve, NeXT Steve and return to Apple Steve.
Steve had charisma. Younger Steve charisma was different to me and it left an imprint. I felt that he was attractive physically and mentally, could engage with you and make you feel like you and he were doing something that could really make a difference. We knew we weren't curing cancer, but that somehow the pursuit was noble in a similar way; enabling human potential that was being lost. I still want to feel this way about technology.
Once you got to know Steve (if one could) he was oddly two-dimensional. His lack of real personal connection or concern about you as an individual was troubling. In some ways, the more abusive he was to you, the more it showed his interest in you. It was dysfunctional. He was never mean to random people (in my observance) although you hear stories of him being abusive to people he didn't know, I never saw it. I saw him open doors for people, let people cut in line in front of him in the salad bar, normal sorts of politeness. The higher his expectation of you, the harsher the abuse you could expect to receive. You could never really become numb to it, but after awhile you just began to adjust your calibration.
As you point out, Steve did win quite a bit. Of course he lost and sometimes he lost big. I really didn't care about winning the way a lot of Silicon Valley people care and I saw some of this in how Steve lived his life. Yes, he drove a nice car and had some property. But he wore well-worn clothes, drove himself to work and generally seemed like one of us. Later in life, odd things like private jets, yachts and Central Park condos showed up.
Everyone that I worked with at Apple who is still there knows it is not the same company. It can't be. The scale, management structure, market, political climate and more is different. And there is no Steve. I left Apple when Steve finally left, but I knew that "my" Apple was gone around 2006.
Simple. Steve is undeniably one of the most influential people in the last 50 years. You don't have to agree with him to recognize this. To dismiss his impact because you don't like him personally is shallow and reductive. No one is saying he was a nice guy.
First, he and Woz brought us the Mac. Sure, Woz was the tech guy but Steve's product influence cannot be overstated. Macs really lost out to the IBM PC and then Steve was forced out of his own company by his own hire (John Sculley from Pepsi).
Apple languished for a decade while Steve started NeXT. On the brink of bankruptcy when Apple had to be rescued by a $150 million injection of funds from Microsoft.
In the next decade, Steve took the NeXT OS that because the foundation for OS X and iOS and released the iPod, iTunes and then the iPhone that ultimately turned Apple into what it is today: a trillion dollar company that literally prints money.
Steve was basically the ultimate product person and really a visionary. It was often stated that he generated a reality distortion field as he literally changed industries around him. The sea change that was the iPhone took control over code distribution on mobile phones from the wireless carriers. The price of this was several years of AT&T iPhone exclusivity in the US. The popularity of the iPhone bent carriers to his will. He unrelentingly refused to ship bloatware on the iPhone (unlike what you get on basically very Android phone other than the Pixel).
Apple developed a track record for taking terrible technologies and making them great. One of my personal favourite examples is connecting to Wifi. Many here probably aren't old enough to remember this but in the early 2000s that involved going to a settings window in Windows and entering the Wifi type (802.11b and then 11g), the encryption type (eg WEP, WPA, WPA-PSK, WPA2 or WPA2-PSK) and an encryption key, which may or may not be a password.
On OSX you simply selected a network and entered a password. Why ask the user for a bunch of stuff they don't care about, probably don't know and you, the computer, can figure out?
To me this is classic Steve influence.
Fun fact: Steve is the reason we don't have DRM on downloaded music. iTunes initially used a DRMed format to launch and all songs were $0.99. DRM was demanded by the RIAA. The RIAA didn't like the pricing model. Steve ultimately made the bargain that gave them pricing tiers but his demand was no DRM. That's how iTunes ended up distributing DRM-less MP3s instead.
Steve was by far the most user-focused of any of the tech titans of the last half-century.
Some people don't like Apple's walled gardens and that's fine but again, to dismiss the impact of the iPhone (for example) because you personally prefer the "freedom" of Android is a shallow judgement.
We stand on the shoulders of giants. And Steve was a giant. That's why he was and continues to be respected.
Not sure about Windows 2000, but connecting to wifi on Windows XP took a single double-click... and I believe OSX Tiger was released years after XP.
</OS flamewar>
Apple came back.
I can think of no other company in recent history that has come back from such a long run on death row to periodically become the company with the world's highest market valuation. And we tend to associate that (for many good reasons) with Steve Jobs. Steve's persona and the admiration that follows I think derives in large part because it has been the ultimate come back story.
This "come back story" is one of the most classic and inspiring stories that has resonated through myth and fable throughout history. It's what makes us stand up and cheer in a theater when Daniel Laruso delivers the take down kick. It is Miracle when the US beats USSR in hockey. It's why we like to interpret David and Goliath as a little guy takes down big guy story (vs the kid with the rock gun kills the big lout https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_the_unheard_story...).
It's interesting to note that with Steve gone, Elon Musk has risen to the new Crazy Successful Celebrity Leader figure. Like Steve, you can see Elon from a variety of facets, some very flattering, and some very damning, what we would love about him is that he has had some success at defeating the status quo.
That being said, I just can't believe he would
have been happy about the various issues
with the old MacBooks. So many things feel so
wrong
During his life, he certainly did champion a lot of form-over-function decisions: the "cube" G4, the hockey puck mouse on the iMacs, etc.
And then he also championed some similar decisions that most people regard as roaring successes: the removal of legacy ports on the MacBooks felt an awful lot like the decision to ditch legacy ports on the original iMacs.
Sort of, but this disregards some important product context. Having a multi-port dongle or adapters on a desktop machine is a very different experience than a portable.
I'd also add that with Jony Ive on the way out for years, there are a lot of decisions attributed to him that he likely did no more than sign off on.
― Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering
In my opinion this design was a lot more usable than the current 10 year trend toward having no borders around anything anywhere.
With this knowledge about Steve Jobs, it's fair to assume that he knew that too right ? he probably knew he was part of the glue that made Apple Apple, and took measures to avoid dilution happening too fast.
Also says a thing about leadership and human groups :)
I have been in design meetings with Jony, and Scott Forstall, and many others whose decisions were micromanaged by Steve at every step. You can argue that a lot of Steve's design decisions were questionable; rich Corinthian leather skeumorphism, lickable Aqua widgets, brushed aluminum window title bars, but he owned them.
Steve and Jony would sit for hours outside of Caffe Macs going over designs. Steve would spend even more time inside the industrial design area going over prototypes. He would spend a couple of hours every week meeting with every software team that had user facing features. He had input on almost every pixel on the screen and every button/port/display/etc on hardware.
Once he was gone, the drift began. It was inevitable that focus would shift. Scott no longer had protection by Steve. Jony fixated on the new campus and things like watch bands. No one had Steve to rein in whatever impulse they had. Sure, people would ask "What would Steve do?" but we also had Tim Cook pushing to optimize production, lower cost of goods and increase margins.
Apple still has Steve DNA, but it continues to be diluted. You may disagree with Steve's vision and opinions, but it was strongly held and enforced. I feel almost everything about the last generation of MacBook Pros went against what Steve would have wanted and I am glad I wasn't there when those decisions were made.