kellie

It’s amusing seeing a super woke company like Apple getting skewered and canceled by the woke culture that has proliferated the world.  A culture Apple has helped to create and spread. Is it ironic or hypocritical of Apple - the way their product announcements are made, embracing environmentalism, DEI, LGBTQ, etc. - to produce advertising content that triggers the demographics they try to appeal to and highlight?  Just goes to show, when you get wrapped up in the politics of diversity, super sensitivity to particular groups of people and a general sense of pandering to so many sub groups of people, that you can’t succeed because you can’t please everybody, all the time.  I enjoyed the commercial.  It was very humorous.  The cinematography was top notch. It was a fun story line.  Bottom line, in the end, the Thai boxing company was able to produce the 500,000 boxes the company needed to please their very unlikeable customer Chad. Thailand you delivered the goods.  Now everyone , take a chill pill. 

The primary cause of the outage was due to Crowdstrike shipping a faulty malware template that either wasn’t tested or was accidentally shipped out unknowingly 

the secondary cause is every Crowdstrike customer who blindly allowed the update to occur without doing their own testing and validation.  Sure it would be nice to totally trust the vendor, but they don’t suffer the consequences.  

Apple’s strongest skill is compelling hardware design.  Frequently Apple’s quest for design aesthetics creates functionality problems.  The quest for thin form factors had in the past created heat management issues, resulting in slower operations.  Or keyboard keys that loose their tactile feel or longterm reliability issues. The M4 iPad on the other hand has no hardware shortcomings, even though Apple made it incredibly thin.  The performance is outstanding.  The screen images are incredible.  Unfortunately, all of this hardware superiority is hobbled by an operating system that misses the mark.  Apple is a hardware company first. And a software company second.  Their hardware design and manufacturing capabilities are significantly better than their software development abilities.  This is why they are playing catchup with AI.  I am prepared to be underwhelmed with their WWDC announcements regarding AI, operating systems and other application software.  Now that Mac, iPhone and iPad all run on the same hardware architecture, Apple should ditch iPad OS and focus on creating an iPad specific version of MacOs.  If you are going to pay a Mac price for an M4 iPad, you should have access to an OS that offers greater functionality than iPadOS. This way Apple could focus on software development for one less operating system and give customers greater performance, functionality and satisfaction. 

There’s an obsession with core performance.  Multicore performance in particular is almost pointless for most people since there are relatively few apps that are designed to execute across multiple cores. For most people single core performance , RAM and memory bandwidth are the limiting factors that determine the speed experience people will observe.  Apple is famous for focusing their product announcements on CPU performance, yet configuring systems with slow SSD’s or only 8 GB of RAM or slow memory bandwidth.  All Macs should come with at least 16 GB of RAM and dual SSD’s.  The marginal costs aren’t that much, but the performance improvements are significant.  But Apple likes to gain lots of profit from low balling a base configuration that is performance constrained, requiring an owner to pay exorbitant upgrade charges to get more RAM or storage.  

Now I hat the M4 is out, in the “lowly” iPad, Apple will be forced to accelerate M4 upgrades in its entire product line.  Sales of Macs will dramatically slow down as people await the M4 deployment.  Unless one absolutely needs a Mac now, people will defer their purchase, awaiting the M4 upgrade.  And if the M4 has some specific features to enhance Apple’s AI strategy, that will be yet another compelling reason to delay a Mac purchase.  I predict a rapid M4 rollout across all Macs.