Apple today is much more a traditional ‘corporate’ than it was then — or perhaps ever. You know, systems, processes, admin, chain of command, etc. Sadly, in that world, hings become more traditional and incremental, boring even, making radical innovation difficult. Add to it the fact that sheer size becomes its own enemy for making seismic shifts (unless the company splits up).
Actually, iterative product development (incremental) is how Apple rolls, and long has been. Gruber wrote an entire column about in back in 2010:
Why do apple peeps keep thinking android manufacturers are copying the notch?
To get a phone with next to zero bezel you have to have a notch, unless you have a pop up camera, so it's a natural progression manufacturers will follow. The essential phone was the first with a notch that I remember and that released in August 17 before the iPhone X.
Also what are the iPhone X sales numbers, all I hear is it is certainly not selling as well as they had anticipated, but as the profit margin on the phone is absolutely ridiculous, apple are still making stupid profit.
If people think the phone is good value for money then fine, but I believe smartphones have become commodity devices and for the majority of the people living on the planet they would be more than happy with a device in the midrange bracket. So apples problem is how do they keep those ridiculous iPhone profits coming in, and the answer is they won't be able to for much longer, that is just simple economics. Look at what happened to the IBM PC, mega profit initially and then competition drove down prices until a point it couldn't even compete.
Why do apple peeps keep thinking android manufacturers are copying the notch?
To get a phone with next to zero bezel you have to have a notch, unless you have a pop up camera, so it's a natural progression manufacturers will follow. The essential phone was the first with a notch that I remember and that released in August 17 before the iPhone X.
Also what are the iPhone X sales numbers, all I hear is it is certainly not selling as well as they had anticipated, but as the profit margin on the phone is absolutely ridiculous, apple are still making stupid profit.
If people think the phone is good value for money then fine, but I believe smartphones have become commodity devices and for the majority of the people living on the planet they would be more than happy with a device in the midrange bracket. So apples problem is how do they keep those ridiculous iPhone profits coming in, and the answer is they won't be able to for much longer.
Why do Android jerks come on here go to you're own site stay away from here ahole......
This, in the purely comsumer space. If we throw in political/protectionist elements (the government space), the risk of major impact is real in the short term. Allowing Huawei unrestricted access to the US handset market would be a major threat to Apple.
Nah. Americans won’t be enamored with a knockoff brand they can’t even pronounce. That brand just won’t flourish here. Doing KFC-branded iphone-ripoffs just won’t cut it...
In that case let it die a natural death although I think you are very mistaken as Samsung does well enough in the US and they must be the number one 'knock off' brand in your way of thinking.
Why push retailers and carriers to not supply Huawei phones to US consumers? Let's be clear. They are not banned (the whole idea of 'national security grounds' collapses right there). The government just doesn't want you to have easy access to them.
I'd say a sizeable chunk of Americans would be very enamoured by the brand and it would flourish.
Historically, in terms of global smartphone behemoths, there have been just two contenders. Apple's golden age in mobile was built in that period. Now there are three contenders. It is not unreasonable to suggest intense competition will hamper Apple's progress.
Why do apple peeps keep thinking android manufacturers are copying the notch?
To get a phone with next to zero bezel you have to have a notch, unless you have a pop up camera, so it's a natural progression manufacturers will follow. The essential phone was the first with a notch that I remember and that released in August 17 before the iPhone X.
Also what are the iPhone X sales numbers, all I hear is it is certainly not selling as well as they had anticipated, but as the profit margin on the phone is absolutely ridiculous, apple are still making stupid profit.
If people think the phone is good value for money then fine, but I believe smartphones have become commodity devices and for the majority of the people living on the planet they would be more than happy with a device in the midrange bracket. So apples problem is how do they keep those ridiculous iPhone profits coming in, and the answer is they won't be able to for much longer, that is just simple economics. Look at what happened to the IBM PC, mega profit initially and then competition drove down prices until a point it couldn't even compete.
Because more and more phones all of a sudden have the notch, or are coming with the notch? Maybe Apple wasn't the first, but nobody else really had it until the iPhone X came out. Its really like anything else Apple releases. Everyone else plays the wait and see what Apple does game and then copies it...usually half-ass too.
Why do apple peeps keep thinking android manufacturers are copying the notch?
To get a phone with next to zero bezel you have to have a notch, unless you have a pop up camera, so it's a natural progression manufacturers will follow. The essential phone was the first with a notch that I remember and that released in August 17 before the iPhone X.
Also what are the iPhone X sales numbers, all I hear is it is certainly not selling as well as they had anticipated, but as the profit margin on the phone is absolutely ridiculous, apple are still making stupid profit.
If people think the phone is good value for money then fine, but I believe smartphones have become commodity devices and for the majority of the people living on the planet they would be more than happy with a device in the midrange bracket. So apples problem is how do they keep those ridiculous iPhone profits coming in, and the answer is they won't be able to for much longer.
Why do Android jerks come on here go to you're own site stay away from here ahole......
... Samsung does well enough in the US and they must be the number one 'knock off' brand in your way of thinking.
Samsung is not “..the number one ‘knock off’ brand in your way of thinking”?
Thanks for the laugh.
I never said it was and yes, the term 'knock off' is laughable by today's standards but some people just can't seem to get over issues long past, so, in effect, for those same people, Samsung (who Apple actually took to court - and rightly so - for knocking the iPhone off - 'stealing' its design) are part of the 'knock off' brigade.
Ridiculous by all accounts today, as is claiming anything Huawei does is also a knock off.
But does it change anything? The point was Samsung is successful in the US and there is no valid reason to think Huawei wouldn't be. Not even the pronunciation. The entire northern hemisphere (save USA) has had zero problems with the name. I doubt it would be an issue.
Why do apple peeps keep thinking android manufacturers are copying the notch?
To get a phone with next to zero bezel you have to have a notch, unless you have a pop up camera, so it's a natural progression manufacturers will follow. The essential phone was the first with a notch that I remember and that released in August 17 before the iPhone X.
Also what are the iPhone X sales numbers, all I hear is it is certainly not selling as well as they had anticipated, but as the profit margin on the phone is absolutely ridiculous, apple are still making stupid profit.
If people think the phone is good value for money then fine, but I believe smartphones have become commodity devices and for the majority of the people living on the planet they would be more than happy with a device in the midrange bracket. So apples problem is how do they keep those ridiculous iPhone profits coming in, and the answer is they won't be able to for much longer.
Why do Android jerks come on here go to you're own site stay away from here ahole......
And the current Apple leadership without any attention to detail, knowledge of good UX, or stable code is going to run Apple right back into the ground. And I say this as an avid FanGirl since switching in 2007. I loathe iOS to the point I've considered if the grass really is greener, and Mac's and macOS is stagnant except for juvenile crap and emojis and a half baked bastardisation with iOS.
I miss Steve every day I have to use my crappy iPhone / iPad / MacBook Pro / iMac.
Well get over it...Steve is gone and never coming back. You nor anyone else (including myself) knows what Apple would be doing today "if Steve were here". They could be doing the same (or very similar) things, they could be doing better things, or they could be worse off. Regardless...its time to move on and deal with it. The sun still comes up, the earth still spins.
Everyone always remembers the days when Apple was coming back so of course it looked like Apple was great. They had a totally brand new desktop OS coming out (Mac OS X) so of course it looked like Apple was innovating because it was building an OS from the ground up so every year or so there were all of the features you'd expect from an OS coming to Mac OS X and some cool new ones. macOS today is very mature from that standpoint so of course you're not going to see the amazing features. It doesn't mean Apple can't have those, but macOS today is doesn't need the feature sets it did back when it was first arriving.
Apple was doing some transitions back in the day as well so of course it looked like it was constantly releasing new Macs. It was also a time when Apple would release an update just for the sake of releasing an update with little to no actual improvements. People seem to forget this stuff. It wasn't always as great as everyone made it out to be. I've been on forums for quite some time, dating back to the early 2000's and in some ways, things haven't changed. There's always been constantly bitching about the Mac and Apple should do this or that, even when Steve was CEO. Everyone has their own ideas of what the Mac should be and 99.9% of the time its usually selfish thinking because Apple should create a Mac around their needs and the hell with the rest of the world.
If these products are so crappy, then why are you using them? Nobody is making you continue to use them.
Apple is far from doomed, but they aren't hitting it out of the park like they were in the post-Jobs return days. Cook is a production guy with no tech savvy and no vision. He only knows how to milk the profits from the pre-existing hits. CarPlay is lame. Safari is slipping. Siri is sad. Apple Maps suck. Music has been fumbled. Apple Watch and HomePod are mediocre, and they missed the mark with the Mac Pro cylinder. Sure, the iPhone is wildly successful, but Apple is becoming more and more dependent on that one big hit. Ask Blackberry and Nokia how that ends. All it takes is one stumble, or one innovator, and Apple begins to look like present-day Microsoft.
IL1 was not built by or for Apple; nor were they the first tenant.
Do you know what year Apple moved into the Four-Phase complex? Its HQ was only about half the size of today's Infinite Loop.
I’m both right and wrong. 1IL was built after previous building was damaged by Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989. New Campus opened in 1993. Should have known better than challenge DED.
Profitable companies never go out of business. Google and Microsoft may have lost some potential market share and profits to Apple, but they are not endangered like Apple was. Last I checked, they still make plenty of money.
And the current Apple leadership without any attention to detail, knowledge of good UX, or stable code is going to run Apple right back into the ground. And I say this as an avid FanGirl since switching in 2007. I loathe iOS to the point I've considered if the grass really is greener, and Mac's and macOS is stagnant except for juvenile crap and emojis and a half baked bastardisation with iOS.
I miss Steve every day I have to use my crappy iPhone / iPad / MacBook Pro / iMac.
Nonsense. Todays macs and idevices are the finest versions I’ve ever used, as an avid fan going back to the 1980s and ‘90s. Hilarious you claim they’re stagnant when it’s Apple who pioneers things that get copied by the knockoffs — macbook designs, iOS 64-bit, actually good biometrics, the notch, etc..
BTW, it’s almost as as if you actually believe Apple is wasting time inventing emoji rather than is simply implementing a character set defined by a cross-industry committee. Strange.
My take on her post was frustration over the small things that Apple misses when it ships new hardware or software.
Sure Apple would do it intermittently during Steve's tenure, but now it's like clockwork. A software bug that is annoying, but not crippling, or worse a software feature that really isn't explained well that ended up having the whole world claim Apple was caught creating planned obsolescence. An issue in a Major OS X release that causes the update to fail and most will have to erase and install the OS again due to the conversion of file system failure. Not to mention all of the quality programs that have been announced in the past 2 years, some are for newer hardware.
These are just a few examples of Apple rushing to meet deadlines and not testing long enough before they sign off on something that is ready to ship.
IMHO, everyone who posts here regularly loves and uses Apple products and for the most part gives them a lot of leeway when something unacceptable happens. That's good, but when it becomes more frequent and we either turn a blind eye or become very defensive, that's bad and we are not helping Apple. We're guilty of giving the impression that Apple can do nothing wrong and that is what makes Apple complacent in not living up to their own established standards.
Great article. Having run an imaging and design studio for a major ad agency during the mid-90s, I’ll add that another factor in Apple’s near collapse was its inability to deliver on building a major update to its OS. The biggest issue with the legacy Mac operating system was its lack of dynamic memory management. Raise your hand if you remember having to get info on an app and manually adjust its memory allocation. As a pro it was certainly frustrating to have to be constantly adjusting memory allocation on Photoshop and Quark, and closing one app to free up enough memory to run another. Apps would just crash and sometimes corrupt files because they ran out of memory. But as pros, most (some?) of us at least understood the problem and how to deal with it, but consumers were completely at a loss. I don’t know how many friends and family I had phone calls with trying to explain to them how to manage the memory on their Macs. Worse yet they would run off and take their Mac to get “repaired” because their apps were constantly crashing. What they needed to do was increase the memory allocation for the apps, but the shops would instead sell them more RAM which not only cost them hundreds of dollars, but it wouldn’t solve the problem. The problem was so bad that I stopped recommending Macs to non-professionals in my circle.
Apple had promised year after year to come out with a modern OS that could manage memory dynamically, but they failed to do so year after year and instead just kept issuing minor updates that made small improvements to the user interface (Mac OS 8 & 9). I was very close to switching my entire studio over to PCs over this one issue when the return of Jobs and the promise of OS X convinced me to stick it out. Obviously this paid off and I’m glad because OS X and now iOS are light years ahead of the competition.
Yes - and iOS employed not just NeXT/MacOS X's modern memory management but added new mobile-ready conservative memory use and liberal recycling of unused memory, something that Android is rather bad at, with a kernel coming from Linux PCs. So that's another example of Google facing an Old Apple problem. Users are left wondering how to diddle with utilities to kill apps in order to get things to run, and Android devices demand far more RAM to work well at all.
That's not a kernel problem. That's all the other things that are going on around the kernel. Linux runs on innumerable embedded devices, IoT devices, different architectures (big endian, little endian, ppc, ARM, MIPS, etc.) and even used to boot from floppies on 386 and 486 - it can certainly work in low resource settings. Linux, particularly the kernel, is very good at memory management. Android, and the userland that Google has put around the linux kernel, less so. Part of that comes from apps running in the Dalvik or ART (Android RunTime) virtual machines, and the other part comes from app developers who don't do a good job of managing the memory their applications claim or release. What you could say if you wanted to place blame is that Java and the ART VM that Android apps run within doesn't do a good job of pushing app developers to use good practices.
Placing blame on the kernel is kind of silly, there's so much more going on. Mach and BSD kernels are microkernels, with everything outside of them. Linux is a macrokernel, but a lot of things are loaded as extensions (just like Mach) rather than being compiled in. It's possible to replace the kernel and you'd still have the same issues - not because of Linux, but because of what Android is doing with all the other parts that stack on top of the kernel. All this is to say, place blame where it's due.
Profitable companies never go out of business. Google and Microsoft may have lost some potential market share and profits to Apple, but they are not endangered like Apple was. Last I checked, they still make plenty of money.
Microsoft won't be going anywhere. They have a healthy cloud business and Office 365 is doing great. They're being very smart in deciding to promote Office 365 as "THE" productivity suite and making sure it runs on more than just Windows machines. Regardless of what happens on the OS front in the coming years, people will still use Office.
Google, OTOH, is the company most at risk to slip. Google makes their money off ads, which requires mining your data. As I've said before, something as simple as a new ad blocker or a new law to limit data collection and use of information by companies would have a disastrous effect on Googles primary revenue stream. They literally have nothing else to fall back on.
Actually Mac OS Classic had a very good memory management within the limits of its capabilities. It was just not a true operating system.
Is that like the "No True Scotsman" fallacy?
It was software that initialized the hardware, handled input from the keyboard, output to a display, read and wrote to storage media, and ran software on top of that software. In every definition, it was a true operating system. It was modern for the time, even if we've since moved past it.
To get a phone with next to zero bezel you have to have a notch,
Groan. Here we go again...
Predictable. Pathetic. Peeps.
I think notches are going to be temporary. Personally, I have no preference for either option, at least today. I'm not sure how I will see it ten years from now. By then, I'm sure they'll be long gone.
I still like the idea of a notchless screen with almost no bezel except for an ever so slightly raised area of the top frame to house the necessary sensors.
Curved but similar to the curves on a Pismo. Sexy, just more subtle and blending elegantly into the phone.
Currently the sensor array is too big but it will get smaller.
Comments
C’mon... you can’t be serious...
To get a phone with next to zero bezel you have to have a notch, unless you have a pop up camera, so it's a natural progression manufacturers will follow. The essential phone was the first with a notch that I remember and that released in August 17 before the iPhone X.
Also what are the iPhone X sales numbers, all I hear is it is certainly not selling as well as they had anticipated, but as the profit margin on the phone is absolutely ridiculous, apple are still making stupid profit.
If people think the phone is good value for money then fine, but I believe smartphones have become commodity devices and for the majority of the people living on the planet they would be more than happy with a device in the midrange bracket. So apples problem is how do they keep those ridiculous iPhone profits coming in, and the answer is they won't be able to for much longer, that is just simple economics. Look at what happened to the IBM PC, mega profit initially and then competition drove down prices until a point it couldn't even compete.
Some US people don't share your opinion:
https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/huawei-p20-pro-security-scaremongering/
Why push retailers and carriers to not supply Huawei phones to US consumers? Let's be clear. They are not banned (the whole idea of 'national security grounds' collapses right there). The government just doesn't want you to have easy access to them.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/03/07/potential-us-trade-war-with-china-speculated-to-impact-apple-other-tech-companies
Apple has also been named in numerous articles as a direct target in any further escalation in the US China trade conflict. The threat is real.
Recent announcements by Huawei show massive growth of P series phones - and in traditional Apple strongholds.
https://www.androidauthority.com/huawei-p20-pro-europe-sales-859899/
I'd say a sizeable chunk of Americans would be very enamoured by the brand and it would flourish.
Historically, in terms of global smartphone behemoths, there have been just two contenders. Apple's golden age in mobile was built in that period. Now there are three contenders. It is not unreasonable to suggest intense competition will hamper Apple's progress.
Doing KFC branded phones does actually cut it. How ironic that such a company could pull this off:
.
https://www.counterpointresearch.com/huawei-surpasses-apple/
Thanks for the laugh.
Predictable. Pathetic. Peeps.
Ridiculous by all accounts today, as is claiming anything Huawei does is also a knock off.
But does it change anything? The point was Samsung is successful in the US and there is no valid reason to think Huawei wouldn't be. Not even the pronunciation. The entire northern hemisphere (save USA) has had zero problems with the name. I doubt it would be an issue.
Everyone always remembers the days when Apple was coming back so of course it looked like Apple was great. They had a totally brand new desktop OS coming out (Mac OS X) so of course it looked like Apple was innovating because it was building an OS from the ground up so every year or so there were all of the features you'd expect from an OS coming to Mac OS X and some cool new ones. macOS today is very mature from that standpoint so of course you're not going to see the amazing features. It doesn't mean Apple can't have those, but macOS today is doesn't need the feature sets it did back when it was first arriving.
Apple was doing some transitions back in the day as well so of course it looked like it was constantly releasing new Macs. It was also a time when Apple would release an update just for the sake of releasing an update with little to no actual improvements. People seem to forget this stuff. It wasn't always as great as everyone made it out to be. I've been on forums for quite some time, dating back to the early 2000's and in some ways, things haven't changed. There's always been constantly bitching about the Mac and Apple should do this or that, even when Steve was CEO. Everyone has their own ideas of what the Mac should be and 99.9% of the time its usually selfish thinking because Apple should create a Mac around their needs and the hell with the rest of the world.
If these products are so crappy, then why are you using them? Nobody is making you continue to use them.
Sure Apple would do it intermittently during Steve's tenure, but now it's like clockwork.
A software bug that is annoying, but not crippling, or worse a software feature that really isn't explained well that ended up having the whole world claim Apple was caught creating planned obsolescence.
An issue in a Major OS X release that causes the update to fail and most will have to erase and install the OS again due to the conversion of file system failure. Not to mention all of the quality programs that have been announced in the past 2 years, some are for newer hardware.
These are just a few examples of Apple rushing to meet deadlines and not testing long enough before they sign off on something that is ready to ship.
IMHO, everyone who posts here regularly loves and uses Apple products and for the most part gives them a lot of leeway when something unacceptable happens.
That's good, but when it becomes more frequent and we either turn a blind eye or become very defensive, that's bad and we are not helping Apple. We're guilty of giving the impression that Apple can do nothing wrong and that is what makes Apple complacent in not living up to their own established standards.
Placing blame on the kernel is kind of silly, there's so much more going on. Mach and BSD kernels are microkernels, with everything outside of them. Linux is a macrokernel, but a lot of things are loaded as extensions (just like Mach) rather than being compiled in. It's possible to replace the kernel and you'd still have the same issues - not because of Linux, but because of what Android is doing with all the other parts that stack on top of the kernel. All this is to say, place blame where it's due.
Microsoft won't be going anywhere. They have a healthy cloud business and Office 365 is doing great. They're being very smart in deciding to promote Office 365 as "THE" productivity suite and making sure it runs on more than just Windows machines. Regardless of what happens on the OS front in the coming years, people will still use Office.
Google, OTOH, is the company most at risk to slip. Google makes their money off ads, which requires mining your data. As I've said before, something as simple as a new ad blocker or a new law to limit data collection and use of information by companies would have a disastrous effect on Googles primary revenue stream. They literally have nothing else to fall back on.
Who is it making these payments? Where do people sign up?
I still like the idea of a notchless screen with almost no bezel except for an ever so slightly raised area of the top frame to house the necessary sensors.
Curved but similar to the curves on a Pismo. Sexy, just more subtle and blending elegantly into the phone.
Currently the sensor array is too big but it will get smaller.