lmac

The biggest deal is the high price of ram and storage upgrades. It kind of defeats the purpose of making it smaller if i have to hang a bunch of peripherals off of it. How can the entry price be reasonable and the upgrades cost so much more than market? Only thing i can think of is that this is intentional, and greedy.

Today's Apple still swings big, but Tim Cook doesn't use the products the way Jobs did. Jobs was a perfectionist who had no problem calling out problems with Apple products that weren't good enough for him, by either demanding a re-design or killing the bad ones outright. Project Titan (Apple Car) is a great example. It needed to be killed sooner, or better focused so that something resulted from that massive investment. It's not like there isn't room for innovation in the automobile industry. Since DED referenced it early in the article, HomeKit is a great example. Why is it so darned bad? The interface is very un-Apple. Non-standard, glitchy and non-intuitive. Products like the HomePod sound good if you can get them to work, but connecting them is a pain. Even the AppleTV interface is still really clunky and frustrating. Steve would be so pissed that this stuff, which has potential but isn't ready for prime time, has the Apple name on it. It's now looking like Tim's big gamble on turning Apple into a movie studio is being scaled back. In this case, the content is often very good, but I don't think Tim realized how brutally expensive it can be, especially when a big investment is a flop (See and Foundation are two good examples). So, to get back to the thesis DED proposes, yes, it is easy to get complacent when the cash is rolling in. That's why it took Apple so long to react to the emergence of streaming when they were focused on iTunes downloads. Having billions means you can sometimes buy your way out of a mistake, but I still shake my head at the cost of buying Beats and paying off Dr Dre and Jimmy Iovine. Apple is still a distant second to Spotify and may never catch them. The Vision Pro is another example of a product that should not have been released. So yes, keep innovating, but let the ideas come from your talented teams, not the top. Tim's a great manager, not not a vision guy. I will give Apple props on the M-series chips. Who could have imagined that Apple could make better chips than Intel? But the products aren't exciting the way they once were, and the design of things like the new macOS system preferences pane is a great example of how mediocrity is tolerated. I'm sure there are more Tony Fadels and Scott Forstalls in the lower ranks at Apple. Let them do the innovating. Not the top brass. Tim needs a deputy who will demand perfection and promote innovation while he sees to the business side.

Impressive hardware is not enough. The Vision Pro needs a killer app, a purpose for existing, that justifies the price, which creates a user base and drives further development. That in turn drives the price down. Apple needs to find a partner or develop that killer app themselves. Remember the early Mac? It wasn't until the Laserwriter and Aldus Pagemaker came out that Mac sales took off. Desktop publishing was the killer app for the early Mac. What will it be for the Vision Pro?

As to the argument that doing manufacturing in China would positively influence the behavior of the PRC government, that hasn't really worked out as well as America had hoped. Could be worse I suppose, but they aren't great. It also makes it very easy for them to steal our intellectual property when we actually build our products in their country with their labor force. On the bright side, the PRC is unlikely to ban Apple products in China for fear of a full Apple manufacturing pullout.

As labor gets more expensive, and exploited labor looks bad for a company like Apple that cares about its corporate image, shifting more manufacturing to robotic assembly  (why not even back home?) is inevitable and a good plan where practical. Diversifying manufacturing to other low cost labor countries like India also makes sense in the short term, but I'm sure we will inherit another set of political problems in most of those places.

Apple should run each division like its own company. Then they might be more interested in some of their projects that aren't as high profile.