Chuq Von Rospach:
This has been the winter of our discontent. 2016 was the year the tone changed. There’s always been a lot of criticism and griping about anything Apple does (and doesn’t do — it can’t win) but in 2016 I feel like the tone of the chatter about Apple changed and got a lot more negative.
This is worrisome on a number of levels and I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I’m used to watching people kvetch about the company, but this seems — different. One reason: a lot of the criticisms are correct.
Apple, for the first time in over a decade, simply isn’t firing on all cylinders. Please don’t interpret that as “Apple is doomed” because it’s not, but there are things it’s doing a lot less well than it could — and has. Apple’s out of sync with itself.
Here are a few of the things I think indicate Apple has gotten itself out of kilter and is in need of some course correction.
I don’t agree with everything Chuq says but he’s a guy who has been in the trenches at Apple so what he writes is at the very least interesting and worthy of discussion.
Yesterday one of my 4 Apple Thunderbolt Displays died. There is no Apple display replacement available for my 2015 MBP I purchased last March (2016). The LG UltraFine 4K display, apparently, does not work with the mini display port on my Mid 2015 MBP. I’m therefore tasked with trying to find a suitable replacement from LG, Samsung, Asus, or the unmentionable Dell. So far, what I’ve seen is not encouraging. Perhaps, CES will reveal a new product as elegant as the 27″ Thunderbolt Display, but I’m not holding my breath.
I truly hate that Apple has made the decision to vacate the desktop monitor business. I sincerely hope that 2017 breaths new life back into Apple.
Daaang. When Mac Bigot is criticizing Apple you know things have gone a long way down the rabbit hole.
Apple may not be firing on all cylinders…
But, man, those cylinders are thinner and lighter than ever before.
Apple has chosen to be a consumer phone company.
I’m looking for alternatives. Problem is, when I find that alternative, I won’t need an iPhone any more.
windows 10 is close enough to parity with OS X that it won’t be that difficult to switch. Only a few of my apps rely on Macs these days.
Apple can go on selling phones. But without an ecosystem, they will be commoditized in 5 years or less.
Tim cook is a terrible CEO. Hey Tim, how’s your Apple Watch doing?
I think there is a lot of historical revisionism in this analysis. Apple can clearly do much better, but the reality is it has always been able to do much better. It had more than it’s share of failure, botched launches and rough edges under Jobs.
Oh bullshit. As Chuq notes, the new MBPs are great machines if you’re in the target market for them. Aside from the people who truly need 32g+ of RAM, they’re powerful, light and plenty of horsepower to do real Pro work.
Windows? Please. Leave. But if you do, don’t continue posting here about how Apple sucks. It’s put up or shut up time for you and all of the other people who continually threaten to leave but somehow haven’t yet. What you will find is that while it’s perfectly usable, Windows and the hardware that runs it has issues too.
I find it odd that so many of the recent Apple takes treat the car project as something that never happened. I think you could tell a story where this bad idea (cars are not the future) took up a lot of executive attention, especially as it began to fail. I’m not sure that story is 100% true, but the car must have had some significant costs.
There’s a positive spin on this too, where although they shouldn’t have ever wasted time with personal cars, they did cancel the project before it got too destructive, and things will get back on track over the next couple of years.
/shrug. I bought a 4k screen from LG (not the Ultrafine) and it’s great. Displayport input, $329 at Fry’s.
I haven’t owned an Apple display since the plastic 17″ Studio display, so no big loss IMO. Other manufacturers make cheaper/better/more flexible models. 4K, 5K, those cool 21:9 ultra-wide displays, monitors that pivot, monitors with adjustable height, portable monitors – there’s lots of great choices out there. Not sure why you’re ripping Dell – their higher models have always been good in my experience.
Exactly this. The missed ship dates argument is very shortsighted. Apple did have a few years recently where they were firing on all cylinders, but there are so many products over the years whose dates slipped, over and over again.
Copland is probably the best example, but that’s pre-Jobs, so it’ll open another can of worms. There are plenty of products under the Jobs era, like the old TiBook, which IIRC took some time to fulfill and had a lot of defects. There’s the years after years waiting for the G5 to come and be integrated and being stuck with ancient G4s (especially in the Powerbooks).
And if people dismiss that as ancient history, what about the OS X team and OS X slipping, as they were being moved to iPhone OS to help 1.0 out the door? That was under Jobs. As was the massive MobileMe failure.
I feel like everyone forgets that Apple often screws up, and now they think this time around they’re “doomed!!!1”. I really wonder why.
Careful citing Copland. The “Apple is doomed” guys were oh-so-close to being right that time. 😉
I read his name as von Rorschach at first. Gives an interesting perspective on an opinion piece when that name is involved…
Apple rarely misses ship dates? Sounds like a case of amnesia.
As for rarely underestimating demand in the Jobsian days? What does he call people lining up outside Apple Stores for weeks in the hopes of getting an iPhone?
Apple does not fire on any cylinders. Their engine is made of rectangular prisms with rounded corners
Wrong. Apple is a computer company. It’s just that consumer phones are not phones anymore – they are computers that you can make calls on.
Yup. Remember when MacOS (forget which one) was delayed because developers were migrated over to the iOS team? I think that was in 2008? That’s right – in the very prime of the Jobsian era.