I built my son's PC tower. It is a work of art. All the ugly wires are hidden, and all the cool-looking ones are lit with neon. The liquid cooler is integrated into the plexi side and looks very futuristic. It has fully functional analog heat/RPM gauges on the front.
If I remember correctly, DEC is the system my Dad bought way back in 1982....$21,000 for word processing with two stations.
He was a CEO who believed in writing 100 letters a week among many, many reports! He kept two secretaries busy both on IBM Memory Selectrex typewriters....$6000-$9000 each ( i think!)
The DEC was a small CRT with blue text and that's it!
When I showed him my original iPhone he was amazed!
The processor industry can pull only so many technological trick rabbits out of it´s innovation hat, eventually it will stop, at least for laptops.
People said that 4 years ago when dual core was coming out. Now look where we are. We clearly need more processing power, but we just need to use the power the processor consumes more efficiently. And so it continues...
This is the key. Also, that the software is intuitive and uncluttered. iTunes really is the only example I can think of that Apple has been bogging down with too much crap, but I have a feeling that will change rather soon. Safari can use some work too, but there are easy alternatives and it's not such a big deal.
While other companies can easily match the build quality of Apple's products, they cannot meet the price points because they have to buy the OS. Please don't even bring Linux into it, because it's not easy for the average consumer to use.
I built my son's PC tower. It is a work of art. All the ugly wires are hidden, and all the cool-looking ones are lit with neon. The liquid cooler is integrated into the plexi side and looks very futuristic. It has fully functional analog heat/RPM gauges on the front.
That's the difference between elegance and featuritis.
Apple realizes that elegance means designing the whole machine to work well together and not to waste energy or money on non-essentials.
Your concept of design seems to be that the more flashing lights and gauges you can add, the better. I guess if you're a teenage boy, lots of neon lights and a transparent case might be a good thing, but that's hardly what I'd call well-engineered elegance.
I think there are a few companies who have tried to match Apple's quality - at least in some of their products. There are two problems, however.
First, they find that to build quality costs money (which is why so few even try). So, when they do try to match Apple products, most of the price differential is lost.
Second, matching the quality of an Apple product is more difficult than it seems. Apple products reflect a culture of quality that extends throughout the product, encompassing hardware and software, external appearances and internal design. This is very hard to generate.
(snip)
IMHO
It's really hard for companies to set this priority. Again and again you see cases where the CEO gives nice speeches about how important customers are and we give customers top priorities and similar platitudes. Behind the scenes though all the incentives are setup for saving the company money. Factories are rewarded with bonuses for reducing inventory, not for shipping on time. Factories like to maintain a healthy backlog rather than ship quickly to the customer. If companies really believed that treating the customer was important they would incentivize factories and service for shipping on time and having things work out of the box and doing what they are advertised to do. This is a complex topic and you can find lots of books written on this topic.
It varies. An investment analysis research firm called StarMine has a proprietary measurement called RAS (Relative Accuracy Score) that rates thousands of analysts around the planet on their predictions.
The results are plotted to a bell curve so the bottom 10% get a one-star rating and the top 10% get a five-star rating. "Star analysts" are generally four-star and five-star analysts.
Shaw Wu is not an AAPL star analyst. Some other analysts quoted by AppleInsider (Gene Munster, Katy Huberty) also do not rate very highly. It is beyond me why the tech media loves quoting analysts with poor track records. You can basically bet against what some of them spout off (Enderle, Gartner).
Brian Marshall and Andy Hargreaves are a pair of AAPL star analysts, meaning they fumble the ball less often than their peers.
Ahhh, Wang. Memories... My first stock purchase. I wasn't even in high school, but I had been following the stock in the paper for a while when I inhereted $500 from a great aunt.
I've been to Columbia and Cornell's libraries over the past week and I'd ballpark that 60-70% of the students are using the new aluminum MacBooks. Apple is taking over the college campus. It won't be long before that number is 80-90%.
The new MBPs are very impressive, but I wish they offered ExpressCard on at least one of the 15" models. ExpressCard is very underrated - you can use it to add additional powered USB ports (who wants an ugly hub AND power supply dangling off their MBP?), eSATA (essential for video work), USB3, and high end audio (my field) and video expansion cards. I'm sure there are other things too. SD slots are of pretty limited value and it you really need one, you can get a USB or ExpressCard model.
I bought the last model to have ExpressCard (to use with an audio DSP card) but I'd love to have a MBP with higher RAM capacity and a quad core processor.
I've been to Columbia and Cornell's libraries over the past week and I'd ballpark that 60-70% of the students are using the new aluminum MacBooks. Apple is taking over the college campus. It won't be long before that number is 80-90%.
And here is the way for Apple to capture more and more market share in the long run. Many people settle for one brand for years. Most grown ups influence their children to look in the way or the brand they like.
They never had any real power to change/dominate the industry. Not like Palm, or Sony or IBM used to. Not like AOL used to.
And certainly not like what Apple has today.
Apple's current position is much less of a complete stranglehold over the relevant industry when compared to these others. Many of them had complete control of their niche, back in the day. Apple has it with the iPod, but that category is not growing fast, if at all.
And all of these others have fallen. It will be very interesting to see what happens over the next 10 years. Apple has a very good shot at finally being a major force in several areas all at once.
I suppose. But I do remember them being a leader, at the time in the consumer PC area where as Dell was the leader in enterprise PC. And both were leaders in 'Customer Support' in their respective areas....I'm going a long way back, BTW!
Albeit...nowhere near the world class products/service Apple has been able to achieve in the last decade!
You think it's safe to say Sony died when Morita died? 1999.
Sony was pretty dead by the late 90s. I'd say the mid 90s was the absolute tail end of their flagship TV and Discman / DAT / Walkman products. Incidentally, the same can be said for Toyota and their engineering. They are still quite well engineered. But the Toyota Way died after 1995 as was immediately apparent in their cost cut products, which in some respects are still lower quality today (not to mention less stylish) than pre-1995. The Japanese economic crisis is probably the underlying reason.
Comments
I built my son's PC tower. It is a work of art. All the ugly wires are hidden, and all the cool-looking ones are lit with neon. The liquid cooler is integrated into the plexi side and looks very futuristic. It has fully functional analog heat/RPM gauges on the front.
He's a teenager.
Well-built PCs are, well ...
It has wires? How quaint.
DEC? Wang?
If I remember correctly, DEC is the system my Dad bought way back in 1982....$21,000 for word processing with two stations.
He was a CEO who believed in writing 100 letters a week among many, many reports! He kept two secretaries busy both on IBM Memory Selectrex typewriters....$6000-$9000 each ( i think!)
The DEC was a small CRT with blue text and that's it!
When I showed him my original iPhone he was amazed!
The processor industry can pull only so many technological trick rabbits out of it´s innovation hat, eventually it will stop, at least for laptops.
People said that 4 years ago when dual core was coming out. Now look where we are. We clearly need more processing power, but we just need to use the power the processor consumes more efficiently. And so it continues...
..... encompassing hardware and software....
This is the key. Also, that the software is intuitive and uncluttered. iTunes really is the only example I can think of that Apple has been bogging down with too much crap, but I have a feeling that will change rather soon. Safari can use some work too, but there are easy alternatives and it's not such a big deal.
While other companies can easily match the build quality of Apple's products, they cannot meet the price points because they have to buy the OS. Please don't even bring Linux into it, because it's not easy for the average consumer to use.
I built my son's PC tower. It is a work of art. All the ugly wires are hidden, and all the cool-looking ones are lit with neon. The liquid cooler is integrated into the plexi side and looks very futuristic. It has fully functional analog heat/RPM gauges on the front.
That's the difference between elegance and featuritis.
Apple realizes that elegance means designing the whole machine to work well together and not to waste energy or money on non-essentials.
Your concept of design seems to be that the more flashing lights and gauges you can add, the better. I guess if you're a teenage boy, lots of neon lights and a transparent case might be a good thing, but that's hardly what I'd call well-engineered elegance.
Good observation, but I agree only in part.
I think there are a few companies who have tried to match Apple's quality - at least in some of their products. There are two problems, however.
First, they find that to build quality costs money (which is why so few even try). So, when they do try to match Apple products, most of the price differential is lost.
Second, matching the quality of an Apple product is more difficult than it seems. Apple products reflect a culture of quality that extends throughout the product, encompassing hardware and software, external appearances and internal design. This is very hard to generate.
(snip)
IMHO
It's really hard for companies to set this priority. Again and again you see cases where the CEO gives nice speeches about how important customers are and we give customers top priorities and similar platitudes. Behind the scenes though all the incentives are setup for saving the company money. Factories are rewarded with bonuses for reducing inventory, not for shipping on time. Factories like to maintain a healthy backlog rather than ship quickly to the customer. If companies really believed that treating the customer was important they would incentivize factories and service for shipping on time and having things work out of the box and doing what they are advertised to do. This is a complex topic and you can find lots of books written on this topic.
How often are the analysts correct?
It varies. An investment analysis research firm called StarMine has a proprietary measurement called RAS (Relative Accuracy Score) that rates thousands of analysts around the planet on their predictions.
The results are plotted to a bell curve so the bottom 10% get a one-star rating and the top 10% get a five-star rating. "Star analysts" are generally four-star and five-star analysts.
Shaw Wu is not an AAPL star analyst. Some other analysts quoted by AppleInsider (Gene Munster, Katy Huberty) also do not rate very highly. It is beyond me why the tech media loves quoting analysts with poor track records. You can basically bet against what some of them spout off (Enderle, Gartner).
Brian Marshall and Andy Hargreaves are a pair of AAPL star analysts, meaning they fumble the ball less often than their peers.
DEC? Wang?
Ahhh, Wang. Memories... My first stock purchase. I wasn't even in high school, but I had been following the stock in the paper for a while when I inhereted $500 from a great aunt.
If only I had bought AAPL!!!
I bought the last model to have ExpressCard (to use with an audio DSP card) but I'd love to have a MBP with higher RAM capacity and a quad core processor.
I've been to Columbia and Cornell's libraries over the past week and I'd ballpark that 60-70% of the students are using the new aluminum MacBooks. Apple is taking over the college campus. It won't be long before that number is 80-90%.
And here is the way for Apple to capture more and more market share in the long run. Many people settle for one brand for years. Most grown ups influence their children to look in the way or the brand they like.
Sony used to.
You think it's safe to say Sony died when Morita died? 1999.
They never had any real power to change/dominate the industry. Not like Palm, or Sony or IBM used to. Not like AOL used to.
And certainly not like what Apple has today.
Apple's current position is much less of a complete stranglehold over the relevant industry when compared to these others. Many of them had complete control of their niche, back in the day. Apple has it with the iPod, but that category is not growing fast, if at all.
And all of these others have fallen. It will be very interesting to see what happens over the next 10 years. Apple has a very good shot at finally being a major force in several areas all at once.
I suppose. But I do remember them being a leader, at the time in the consumer PC area where as Dell was the leader in enterprise PC. And both were leaders in 'Customer Support' in their respective areas....I'm going a long way back, BTW!
Albeit...nowhere near the world class products/service Apple has been able to achieve in the last decade!
You think it's safe to say Sony died when Morita died? 1999.
Sony was pretty dead by the late 90s. I'd say the mid 90s was the absolute tail end of their flagship TV and Discman / DAT / Walkman products. Incidentally, the same can be said for Toyota and their engineering. They are still quite well engineered. But the Toyota Way died after 1995 as was immediately apparent in their cost cut products, which in some respects are still lower quality today (not to mention less stylish) than pre-1995. The Japanese economic crisis is probably the underlying reason.
You think it's safe to say Sony died when Morita died? 1999.
Will Apple die when Jobs dies?
That's statement's ridiculous- Sony is alive and well.
Will Apple die when Jobs dies?
That's statement's ridiculous- Sony is alive and well.
You are very, ummm, "literal" aren't you?