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.
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.