WTimberman

tedz98 said:

Apple’s market share is minuscule. Their overall pricing is higher than PC’s. Overall Apple’s products are of a higher quality, but you pay a premium for that. In a recession price sensitivity increases and I would predict demand for all of Apple’s products, including iPhones, will decrease significantly. The PC world is still dominated by Windows. The growth of cloud services should increase the ability of Apple to sell product in the corporate world, but the price premium may ultimately hinder that.

Yes, Windows 10 is good, and Windows Azure, Office 365, etc., are ever better, ever cheaper. Yes the Windows Surface line is great if you're a Windows user. Yes, generic Windows PCs are also even better, even cheaper (relatively) than they were in the oh-so-long-ago 1990s. If you're also a Google Docs and Android user (whoopie, choices!) you're presumptively, arguably, demonstrably well integrated. On the other hand, nothing, I repeat nothing, is as well-integrated as Apple's hardware/software ecosystem. When I'm in the zone -- iPhone, iPad Pro, iMac, and Apple Watch all engaged -- it's as though the machine-human interface of the future is already here. Check out Federico Viticci's well-documented adventures with the iPad Pro if you don't believe me. Silly fanboy differences aside, the future is looking brighter than ever, closer than ever, to Richard Brautigan's "Machines of Loving Grace."

It looks as though the supposedly upcoming mini LED screen technology will offer real, if minor advantages. The U1 chip, on the other hand, seems more likely to be useful in the iPhone than the iPad, although I've generally found a symmetry of features between the two, in the brief periods when it's been available, to be a genuine pleasure. (I understand why the iPhone and iPad have to leapfrog one another in terms of the features available on each, but I've never really liked having to play those "hey, stupid, you can't do that on this" games with myself when switching between the two.) Whole number processor updates, like the A14 replacement for the A13 likely coming on the new iPhones, are always welcome, but I doubt even that could justify a second iPad release in September. Apple may have other ideas, I admit, but at this point color me skeptical.

Thanks, Daniel. Jobs's vision -- addressing the consumer market with superbly-designed tools for individual creators, rather than slave stations for the white-collar equivalent of assembly-line workers -- may have been the most essential ingredient in Apple's success, but without Jony Ive's obsessive attention to the details of quality design and manufacturing, the clarity of Phil Schiller's marketing message, the genius of Apple's software development teams past and present, and above all, Tim Cook's superb instinct for international diplomacy and his total mastery of the mysteries of operating at unprecedented scale, Apple as we know it today wouldn't exist.

Yes, Windows 10 is more or less OK, and so is an MS Surface, or an Alienware gaming PC, or a Pixel 4 or Galaxy Note 10, but there are reasons why none of their manufacturers can make an iPad Pro, a Mac Pro, or an iPhone 11 pro, much less a $249 iPad, an Apple watch series 5, or a pair of AirPods or HomePods, or get them to operate together synergistically in anything like the way Tim Cook's Apple can. Amazing to me that you seem to me to the only writer in the Apple journalism universe who truly understands just what those reasons are.

When my daughter was 4, her mother and I gave her a little portable record player shaped like a ladybug. Even with the fragile sapphire needle and eminently breakable tone arm, she played it every day, and never damaged it. She's 45 now, and she still has it. It still works, too, although, as I remember, the cartridge had to be replaced once in the late 80s. Her own 7 year-old twins, of course, view it as a museum piece. Their music comes from an iPod Touch airplaying to the paired family HomePods.

DED doesn't suffer fools gladly, which is fine by me. Most of what he writes about the history of personal computing technology rings true to me, as I was around for most of it. (I bought my first Mac in 1984, my first iPod in 2002, my first iPhone in 2007, my first iPad in 2010, and my first Apple Watch in 2018.) People who complain about his attitude, while ignoring the factual basis for it, are, in my opinion, not worth reading or listening to. In the late 80's, I fought like a hyena to be allowed by the outfit I worked for to be allowed to use a Mac. Even after I proved that it played nice with the established SMB network, it was no go. So, yes, I remember well the supposed superiorities of Windows 95 and Windows NT being trumpeted at the time, almost all of which were irrelevant to the long-suffering users of both. Interestingly, I recently returned to my old workplace for a visit after being retired for fifteen years, and discovered that the entire place now runs exclusively on a Mac and iDevice network. In fact, the head of tech support introduced me to the fresh young faces in his department as "the first Mac user and evangelist in the company," as though I were some sort of Biblical prophet. This is pretty much how I see DED -- as an uncompromising teller of inconvenient truths. It'd be nice if there were more like him around.