TechCrunch:
At Apple, design is the driving force, with manufacturing and engineering fully dialed in to support that vision. In practice, that means that Apple’s designers make choices nobody else would be able to make.
For example, when designing the new unibody Macbook Pro, Apple’s designers had a very specific design in mind. In almost every other company, the design team would have been told by the manufacturing team that what they wanted to do wouldn’t be possible. Here’s what manufacturing would say: “The only way to accomplish what you’ve designed is to use a CNC mill. That doesn’t scale! We would need thousands of the damn things!” At Apple, with its mountain of cash, that turns out not to be a limiting factor. If the designers want something, they’ll have it, even if that means buying 10,000 CNC mills to scale manufacturing or buying the entire output of a laser-drilling manufacturer (and later buying the whole company), because Apple needed the entire world’s supply of that particular type of laser.
No other manufacturer would even think to do that — it is a ludicrously over-engineered solution to a simple problem.
It’s good to be the king. Apple makes design and engineering choices that other companies wouldn’t even imagine doing.
Well….other companies dream of doing it once Apple has done it and the foundation has already been laid. Let Apple do the tough work.
I’m also not sure we should encourage young entrepreneurs to NOT demand excellence like Apple. I’m sure Steve Jobs would have laughed at this suggestion, or fired anyone in the company suggesting that.
If anything, Apple is PROOF that excellence at scale is not unattainable. Apple didn’t start building phenomenal products/packaging/logistics etc only after they accumulated a large cash reserve. Steve simply had laser focus, and made impossible things happen through incredibly hard work and problem solving. Money wasn’t the solution.
Well said.
The other thing to remember is that design works best with constraints. Apple did plastic laptops (the white ‘book and the Pismo black ‘book, not to mention the clamshell) when they didn’t have the money for 10,000 CNC machines, they didn’t just design something that flat out couldn’t be built.
But when they DID have the resources to lift constraints like that, they took advantage.
I’m certain Samsung could do the things that Apple does but it probably wouldn’t be worth the effort in terms of profit margins. Samsung deals with mostly low- and mid-range products. Apple goes in for a lot of subtle detail on products but I wonder if it’s always worth it. Sure, Apple will spend a lot of money on a product and then not update it for years which doesn’t make a heck of a lot of sense to me. I would think consumers would prefer timely updates in terms of hardware instead of subtle details. I’m sure Apple weighs these things and has a better idea of what works and what doesn’t in terms of keeping consumers happy.
I’m only going to say that with the Mac Mini I’d rather Apple save money on a chunky block of solid aluminum for the case and give me the ability to upgrade the system memory and storage if they really want to do me a favor. I can happily live with a Mac Mini with a sheet metal case and easy upgradeability. I’m not criticizing how Apple runs its business because their business model seems to work quite well. I’m only saying I don’t clearly understand their choices. They’ll over-engineer in one respect and in other respects under-power the product (when compared to rival products). If I’m going to pay a premium price then I want as much as I can get for that higher cost.
It appears to me that other companies are building light laptops just as well as Apple is doing and the those companies are being praised for it. Apple just seems to take too long to upgrade hardware between model years. Maybe Apple buys a huge number of hardware components to save on cost and they don’t run out of those parts for years. I just don’t know. Again, I’m sure Apple runs a tight ship and takes many things into consideration that I can never imagine. It’s just that on the surface things like slow hardware updates seem baffling to me when other companies can update hardware at least every other year.
That was a fantastic read. One thing not talked about much is that all of this has evolved and gotten tighter over time as various people have influenced Apple’s business. One could say that Steve’s DNA is still driving much of it but so is Tim’s and many other people. I’m not sure there is a singular meme that’s most important but if I had to choose, it might be “the journey is the reward” or “the process is the product” which underlies Apple’s culture and it’s products.
Here’s a rule – allow the user to upgrade their desktop. But no, there’s an exception to that.
Here’s a rule – update your notebooks and not let them stagnate. But no, there’s an exception to that.
Here’s a rule – give your voice assistant some real chops and not just so she can set timers. But no, there’s an exception to that.
That pile of cash Apple has may be for some awesome CNC machines. Some users would just like to see it spent on other things. On the rules, rather than the exceptions.
We live in a fairly ugly (tech) world… so just imagine the monstrously cheap and ugly world we’d have lived in had Apple not been the example and NOT taught the copiers.
“Abort, Retry, Fail.”
The author missed the point of Apple entirely. The author’s take is that Apple does things differently because they have a massive pile of cash. Sorry, no. Apple has a massive pile of cash because they do things differently.
The design team was top dog, forcing engineering to do things they felt were impossible or too difficult, from the moment Steve Jobs returned. This was happening when they were flat broke, and has only accelerated as they’ve grown and accumulated cash. The chicken most definitely did not come before the egg.
I think history has shown, without exception, that Apple’s decision to heavily prioritize mobile development over traditional desktop machines was the right decision. It may not be what you personally wanted, but that doesn’t make it the wrong choice.
The good news for you is there are no shortage of companies doing things by the rules you prefer. You can get PCs from countless Chinese manufacturers who are banging out upgrades like clockwork, if having the latest, most up-to-date chip and graphics card in your desktop or notebook is your personal priority. Heck, Dell is still around doing exactly that.
Apple’s priority in developing MacBooks and MacBook Pros are size, weight, and battery life. They do not place the priority on raw power, even though I know some people wish they would. If you’re among them, there are better PC manufacturers out there for you. The same applies to greatly expandable and upgradable desktop machines. That’s not an area where Apple cares to play and it has zero to do with investment in CNC machines. It’s time people assessed Apple for what they are, not what they wish they were.
Yes. Here you can see what Apple’s R&D expenditures were from 1995-2013.
https://www.engadget.com/2014/02/12/a-look-at-apples-randd-expenditures-from-1995-2013
So from 2001-2007 spent ~$2bn in R&D from which ~$150M was devoted to developing the original iPhone. But the genius of Apple was converging the best of everything (technology, people talent, vision, courage, etc.) into this endeavor, not just throwing money at it. Apple had been an early pioneer of the touchscreen PDA back in 1993. Bell Labs, IBM & Sony were probably responsible for most of the heavy lifting (and cost) in developing early small touchscreens. So Apple benefitted from that R&D, but it was their corp culture and vision that made all the difference in creating the first iPhone that revolutionized the world.
EDIT: Bloomberg reported Apple spent $2.6bn on original iPhone
https://www.quora.com/How-much-did-it-cost-Apple-to-produce-the-first-iPhone
PS: Apple hardware also tends to last so another way to think of this is that instead of this cycle:
Buy PC… upgrade1… upgrade2… upgrade3… buy new PC
You do this:
Buy new Mac………Sell Mac.Buy new Mac.
That is, instead of buying a PC and spending the interim money upgrading it, then trashing it since it has zero value, you buy a Mac, use it for several years, sell it, buy a new Mac. The overall costs are pretty similar for similar systems since the used Mac will probably bring you 30-60% of the cost of a new Mac depending on how old it is.
Well put.
Very kind.
“But the genius of Apple was converging the best of everything… into this endeavor, not just throwing money at it. ”
Also, note that they used the solid aluminum case for the iPhone starting with the 4 as well as for the laptops around that time (2010). To your point, they didn’t just move that direction for one product or even one product line, they made a design decision to use that for several lines which gives them a unified design feel across lines and ensures that the investment in CNC machines is maximized.
I think for Mac users, this is the better approach.
Agreed. The case could also be made that Jobs was pressuring Apple engineers to do exceptional things before he left, too.
Competitors and critics, immersed within standard business-school thinking, have always ridiculed Apple for not following traditional commoditization and profit-first behavior. A few decades ago, that sort of thinking also swept most of the conservative business world into a self-aggrandizing concentration upon “shareholder value” over anything else. This in turn became the justification for almost any corporate behavior.
Apart from Apple’s “Performa” period (during which Apple’s placeholder CEOs attempted and failed to emulate commodity PC makers), the company has avoided this sort of toxic, race-to-the-bottom thinking. The short-sighted author omits this constant, preferring instead to imply that Apple is some sort of gargantuan miracle, wrought by forces that nobody else can understand.
Except that there are other companies that understand, and they’re creating some very high-quality goods and services. At least until they’re bought out by other gargantuas and commoditized.
I can’t find the source for this but Apple (Cook, I think) was asked about upgradability of desktops once and said that in their research they found that only about 5% of people ever did any upgrade, even as simple as adding RAM or swapping drives.
Now, at one point I was one of that 5%… but there are two issues here:
first, you tend to build around the 95%, not the 5%.
Second, desktop and laptops have progressed at a much slower rate in the last 10-15 years than in the 90s. In the 90s, skipping a CPU generation meant the new one was way faster. Now? My Skylake CPU is very close to a Kaby Lake CPU except in certain very limited areas.
Also, look at how RAM has stalled. Most people are fine with 8 or 16gig. We just don’t have software that pushes us past that unless we have very specialized needs and when we do most of those are fine with 32gig. But again, in a 5 year span in the 90s my PC went from a perfectly middle of the road 4meg to 32meg stock (yes, MEG). The 32meg Pentium BLAZED past the 386 with 4m from a few years earlier. We just aren’t seeing that level of change right now.
I personally think it’s the better approach for most people (i.e. I think that many of the people on PC could do this) but what PC folk who aren’t power users seem to do is a variation on it. They buy inexpensive, commodity hardware and replace it as if they had Macs with the difference being that they usually can’t resell the first PC so they donate it or something. But if a PC works for someone you can buy a perfectly good box for $5-700 so the ongoing investment isn’t that much. $600 every 3 years? Save less than 60¢/day and you have that covered.