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AbhiAchShan

macrumors member
Nov 7, 2021
87
60
The article is a very good depiction of whats going on except they avoid calling it for what it really is… After Steve, they had decided to let the dark elements within the power structure of Apple, which is primarily driven by the Wall Street parasites who have offices in both Cupertino and place like the “vampire squid headquarters“ in NYC, start running the show and influencing where the resources get devoted. And instead of where Steve would have placed the priority, these dark side people have decided to do to what they have… and that has caused a massive amount of brain drain and the creative and innovative juices that Apple has always thrived on, is quickly being depleted. I just wish the authors that write these articles would actually go out and call things for what they really are instead of trying to not offend or insult the parasites.

But in general, the author has it right… Apple can’t continue down this path... And even if they try to take advantage of the emerging consumer market coming out of China and India, their legacy won’t carry them… they have lost their way, and the only way to get their mojo back is to eject the Wall Street mindset, and banish them from any role in the running of the company… and let the real money makers come back in and run the show. This happened once before in Apple’s history… they let a sugar water sales team run Apple damn near into the ground… only saving grace back then was they had a Steve they could bring back in and turn things around… they don’t have that anymore… who can be t he next “Steve”? Would it be Jonathan Ive? Only time will tell, but we know one thing for certain… Tim Cook can’t fill the shoes Steve left to him… and frankly, I don’t think he even has tried.
Would it be Jonathan Ive?
I hope that he returns the way Steve Did, he is quite driven by Steve's Ideals, I don't know who to blame now for the 'business mindedness' at Apple, I don't know was it Tim or the Board or the teams etc. Don't know, it has really left a deep impact in Apple's image of innovation to something else
 

AbhiAchShan

macrumors member
Nov 7, 2021
87
60
The idea that one is good and should always trump the other (bad) one is just stupid. You always need a compromise and Ive getting his way all the time was what brought us laptops with limited ports and broken KBDs that would overheat in an instance.



O.k. but what "truly new" stuff did come under Steve's 2nd reign? Colorful computers existed long before, MP3 player were plentiful and smartphones with touch interface also weren't unheard of. And one could argue that the Newton (from the no-Jobs era) and other PDAs were kinda like premature iPads.

Taking existing tech and transforming into (easy) useable products has been Apple's game ever since the Apple_II and I don't think that has changed that much under Cook.

ClickBait->Trashcan
Okay, So designer must be blamed again? For thermal faults, note that the Product Management Team Ratifies a Product after testing, so if a design doesn't work they are changed, and if ratified by Product Management Team even after flaws, blame the engineers, not a designer
 

AbhiAchShan

macrumors member
Nov 7, 2021
87
60
100% on everything. We all know why Ive was upset. He seems to demand that every product release be thinner than the one before it no matter the compromises, and when Apple finally stopped doing that the products got significantly better and more reliable. Apple isn't about one person's perfect company. I happened to re-watch the iPhone 5S/5C launch earlier, and I was amazed that every product announcement was the Jony Ive show. A super dramatic video where he uses eccentric language to introduce every fragile and beautiful element of design. At a certain point it's like.. we get it.. you're fancy and Apple. I'm glad they've changed direction in the ways they have. Apple is still high quality but they're not trying to make elitist devices like solid gold watches, they're making real computers again. All of that said, I was sad to see Jony stop working with Apple. I think his designs are quite iconic and good, and I do worry that without his involvement we could lose some touch he's had for decades.
Actually Thinner well not an issue, everyone wants a successor product to be more compact and better, pretty sure you too don't want a Thicker MacBook Pro, until it throttles, so if it throttles, put the blame on the PM Team, which ratifies those products after intense testing, if they didn't find flaws and ratify, we need to blame engineers, secondly, real computers, now? It isn't because Jony left, that is because we have got a innovative semiconductor ideas, that have changed the game
 

AbhiAchShan

macrumors member
Nov 7, 2021
87
60
Whoever it was, it is over. There is no going back now. This is the end stage of every company.
I hope Apple survives and those 'business mindedness' is reduced, Innovation in every aspect increased, that would essentially bring better results than the current one, I nowadays see a large amount of those who liked Apple, leaving their brand loyalty, just due to the reason that Apple is nowadays quite going boring over iPhones, or iPads, or iMacs (Like Nothing new in the iMac over an year), and making multiple classification for products (which Steve absolutely hated I guess), like take Mac for that matter:
  1. MacBook Pro 13 Inch
  2. MacBook Air M1
  3. MacBook Air M2
  4. MacBook Pro 14
  5. MacBook Pro 16
  6. Mac Studio
  7. Mac Pro
  8. iMac
  9. Mac Mini
I guess the lineup was never as confusing as this, just like Dell making Vostro, Inspiron, XPS, Alienware, XYZ ABC etc. Some random names just to assume making a new standard in the industry for a line up, Professional Workflows in Studio use Mac Pro (may be a mid tier to base model), but just because they wanted to release a product as soon as possible and not release a Mac Pro, they just made another set of Macs
I absolutely hate this, and just the first 5 Products, literally almost the similar name, have a lot of difference, their chips, size etc.
 

XboxEvolved

macrumors 6502a
Aug 22, 2004
808
1,003
Apple Silicon products simply wouldn't work, none of them would, without ARM's proprietary architecture. How is that innovative? But feel free to disagree.
There are rumours that indicate that Apple are trying to move away from ARM, in order to cut costs. So we shall see.
Well, considering Apple was a majority stake owner of ARM at one point, helped make the instruction set in the 80s and 90s, and the majority of the people that made the instruction set worked at or are working at Apple today, it's more than likely the other way around. At this point the more likely reason Apple even uses the ARM instruction set is more of a cost issue than actually needing to rely on it.
 
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Bug-Creator

macrumors 68000
May 30, 2011
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Germany
Okay, So designer must be blamed again? For thermal faults, note that the Product Management Team Ratifies a Product after testing, so if a design doesn't work they are changed, and if ratified by Product Management Team even after flaws, blame the engineers, not a designer

2 versions of this:

1: Jonny designed the stuff that way and noone ever told him how much of a stupid idea it was to restrain !PRO! devices that much.

2: He was told but insisted on doing it his way and had the power to get his way.


So yeah it was a failure on multiple levels and a designer who can't be a#### to check on the real world implications of his design may be a great artist but for sure is a lousy product designer.

I guess the lineup was never as confusing as this,

The lineup was for sure more confusing in the late beige-box era (aka Steve's absentia) got super small in the G4 era (more due to limited resources than anything else) and got quite confusing again in the Intel days even before Steve had to step down.
 

DaveP

macrumors 6502a
Mar 18, 2005
506
433
These types of discussions have occurred many times over the last 10 years. I always have the same few thoughts:

- Steve Jobs was one of the greatest visionaries of our time. No one will be able fully replace him.

- It is easy to accentuate the positives and forget about the negatives when viewing the past. While he certainly make many brilliant choices, Jobs also made plenty of poor decisions as the head of Apple. In my mind perhaps the largest was not wanting to allow any third party apps on to the iPhone. For the first year Apple didn't have any App Store until Jobs relented to lots of external and internal pressure. In retrospect it was one of the most important aspects of the iPhone.

- As Steve Jobs famously said: "Real artists ship". His hand picked successor was Tim Cook, someone who excels in getting quality products into the hands of customers in a timely manner. Ultimately a company needs to do this to have any chance of success. I'm sure Jobs was very intentional in his choice. For those complaining about a "bean counter" in charge. Steve Jobs clearly wanted a bean counter in charge. Thankfully Jony Ive was not chosen to be in charge or every three years we would get something like a perfectly spherical alu-minium toaster oven that costs $10,000 and burns the edges of the bread while leaving the middle cold. But it looks awesome on your counter.
 

LeeW

macrumors 601
Feb 5, 2017
4,246
9,238
Over here
If there is anything in the article which I do think is going to be a real issue for Apple and we are starting to see it already.

"Apple will soon have a hard time justifying its price tag to frequent, repeat customers, which has been the lifeblood of the company since its birth."
 
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Siliconguy

macrumors 6502
Jan 1, 2022
269
405
with the M1 and soldering/locking down the traditional user replaceable/upgradeable parts is another thing that pushes people away… perhaps only a small segment, but an important segment…
That is a potential problem, and I agree with it to a point. Lack of upgradability and IO ports is why I have a Linux box on the desk. But I also have an M1 MacBook Air because those things matter much less on a laptop, and battery life and weight matter more.

If you need mobility above all else Apple is on the right track. Their uncompetitive desktops are their weak spot, and the Studio is a good step toward closing that gap. It actually has just enough USB ports to get by given it has no place for a Time-Machine drive internally. It's still overpriced though, and you have to guess what you will need in 5 years since it's not upgradable. With the Linux box I can rack in a couple more DIMMs if I need them, or upgrade the graphics, put in bigger backup drive, etc.

I expect a desktop to be good for a decade, Apple's support does not allow for this (unless you have an Intel Mac, then it's supported for much longer with Linux, Mint 20 runs fine on the 2009 Mini that used to be my main desktop.)

Laptops I don't expect to last that long, it's a tougher life.
 

AbhiAchShan

macrumors member
Nov 7, 2021
87
60
2 versions of this:

1: Jonny designed the stuff that way and noone ever told him how much of a stupid idea it was to restrain !PRO! devices that much.

2: He was told but insisted on doing it his way and had the power to get his way.


So yeah it was a failure on multiple levels and a designer who can't be a#### to check on the real world implications of his design may be a great artist but for sure is a lousy product designer.



The lineup was for sure more confusing in the late beige-box era (aka Steve's absentia) got super small in the G4 era (more due to limited resources than anything else) and got quite confusing again in the Intel days even before Steve had to step down.
Just search from Internet or some book about Apple, how Design at Apple is processed you are just unnecessarily blaming a designer
 

ahurst

macrumors 6502
Oct 12, 2021
410
815
Apple Silicon products simply wouldn't work, none of them would, without ARM's proprietary architecture. How is that innovative?
An instruction set (like ARM64 or x86) is basically a set of rules for what kinds of low-level commands a CPU needs to accept and what exact results those commands should have (e.g. adding two numbers together). It doesn’t specify *how* the CPU is supposed to handle those inputs and outputs, just that it needs to be able to do all the ones defined in the instruction set.

Apple’s major innovations here (in addition to having a hand in designing the ARM64 set and also being the first company to bring it to market) have been consistently creating CPUs that handle that set of inputs and outputs really fast with low power consumption, staying consistently ~2-3 years ahead of the competition and ultimately putting a lot of the desktop CPU market to shame in the process. It’s personally been one of the most impressive things Apple’s pulled off over the last decade.
 

jeremysteele

Cancelled
Jul 13, 2011
485
395
They have lost their mojo - with the M1 and soldering/locking down the traditional user replaceable/upgradeable parts is another thing that pushes people away… perhaps only a small segment, but an important segment… those are the most loyal of loyal Apple fans… lose them, you quickly become unraveled… cause the next batch of consumers are very transitory… and could care less if their phone or whatever it is has an Apple logo on it….

Where is your evidence that soldering parts is pushing their core users away?

I grew up on macs. My first one was a Performa 550, followed by a clone, and several powermacs after that up until an iBook G4. I mostly left during the Intel era (only personally bought a 2012 Mac Mini for some light iOS dev work and had a work MBP) - the computer offers simply did not compare in any way to what you could get on the Windows side. I'll just say it - Intel macs were terrible for their prices. I was given a fully loaded 2017 Macbook Pro for one of my jobs. It ran slower than my 2012 low-end gaming PC I built for $1k. It ran slower than a Dell notebook my mother purchased in 2015 for $600. That is sad.

The thermal throttling on the intel macs was just obscene and absolutely killed their performance... including the desktops. The fact their CPUs were underclocked and still ran hot really turned me off to them.

I came back for silicon, and I don't regret it one bit. I personally know of a few dozen other people that are in the same boat - they were original users, left, but came back for their current lineup. The current machines fly. Nothing comes close on the windows side, especially with notebooks.

Personally I could care less if things are soldered. If I want to build/upgrade a computer I would build a windows PC. Since their inception Macs have always been notoriously limited when it comes to upgrades. Maybe you could upgrade a CPU with some after market sonnet-tech CPU daughter card, or upgrade RAM or the hard drive, but even then they were often unsupported changes.

Especially with CPUs. Those sonnet upgrades back in the 90s/00s were unstable as heck under load, but I digress.

People don't buy macs to upgrade the parts, they buy them so they don't have to. It is true now, and was true at the beginning.
 
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ian87w

macrumors G3
Feb 22, 2020
8,704
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Indonesia
Okay, So designer must be blamed again? For thermal faults, note that the Product Management Team Ratifies a Product after testing, so if a design doesn't work they are changed, and if ratified by Product Management Team even after flaws, blame the engineers, not a designer
Nope. With Jobs and soon after he's gone, Ive and the design team has ultimate final decision power. Even if engineering team pointed out the issue, if Ive wanted it, it will be greenlighted. So the buck stopped at the design team. They are to blame since they are the one that made the decision.

Take antennagate, the issue was pointed out by the engineering team, but Ive insisted on that specific design with the antennas set up that way, and Jobs sided with Ive. The rest is history, with Apple/Jobs never actually admitted the issue. Ive compromised with the engineering team by redesigning the antennas on the 4S.
 
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Expos of 1969

Contributor
Aug 25, 2013
4,741
9,257
Nope. With Jobs and soon after he's gone, Ive and the design team has ultimate final decision power. Even if engineering team pointed out the issue, if Ive wanted it, it will be greenlighted. So the buck stopped at the design team. They are to blame since they are the one that made the decision.
I must disagree. The CEO is to blame. The buck stops with him. His he in charge of Apple or not?
 

AlixSPQR

macrumors 65816
Nov 16, 2020
1,018
5,365
Sweden
An instruction set (like ARM64 or x86) is basically a set of rules for what kinds of low-level commands a CPU needs to accept and what exact results those commands should have (e.g. adding two numbers together). It doesn’t specify *how* the CPU is supposed to handle those inputs and outputs, just that it needs to be able to do all the ones defined in the instruction set.

Apple’s major innovations here (in addition to having a hand in designing the ARM64 set and also being the first company to bring it to market) have been consistently creating CPUs that handle that set of inputs and outputs really fast with low power consumption, staying consistently ~2-3 years ahead of the competition and ultimately putting a lot of the desktop CPU market to shame in the process. It’s personally been one of the most impressive things Apple’s pulled off over the last decade.
I agree, but not about the innovation part. They are huge enhancements based on ARM.
 

quatermass

macrumors 6502
Sep 19, 2009
332
531
Not this old chestnut again.... I recall someone maintained a web page, cataloguing all the very serious and worthy pundits that have been predicting "Apple is doomed because..." since the year dot. They all have one thing in common - they were 100% wrong, and there's no reason to think this latest version is any different.
Things have changed. Apple has changed. The market has changed. Everything has changed and will continue to change. You might not like it, understand it, approve of it, but it'll always be that way. As far as Apple is concerned, the best may be yet to come.

NB: I worked for a management consultancy back in the 90's. The were an all Mac office, and it worked really well. However, the boss of the company, a seriously intelligent and well educated man, decided that as Apple was obviously doomed, it was time to switch over to PC's before Apple went bust, because they obviously would. Imagine if instead of doing that, he'd bought Apple stock instead. BTW - the PC route turned out to be a complete disaster and he went through three different systems and suppliers, each of which cost a fortune and didn't work. Well done!
 
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Bug-Creator

macrumors 68000
May 30, 2011
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I must disagree. The CEO is to blame. The buck stops with him. His he in charge of Apple or not?

Sure, but there were plenty people (Ive among them) who could have and should have made sure that such flawed designs get killed of before reaching Steve's or Tim's desk.
 

AbhiAchShan

macrumors member
Nov 7, 2021
87
60
Nope. With Jobs and soon after he's gone, Ive and the design team has ultimate final decision power. Even if engineering team pointed out the issue, if Ive wanted it, it will be greenlighted. So the buck stopped at the design team. They are to blame since they are the one that made the decision.

Take antennagate, the issue was pointed out by the engineering team, but Ive insisted on that specific design with the antennas set up that way, and Jobs sided with Ive. The rest is history, with Apple/Jobs never actually admitted the issue. Ive compromised with the engineering team by redesigning the antennas on the 4S.
Any source? Well for what I said Just Google what I said or Just read the book 'After Steve', but just provide me the source where Ive was to be blamed for Antennagate Issues
 
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ian87w

macrumors G3
Feb 22, 2020
8,704
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Any source? Well for what I said Just Google what I said or Just read the book 'After Steve', but just provide me the source where Ive was to be blamed for Antennagate Issues
You sure you read that book? Also check Jobs' biography. During Jobs era, the design team is basically given the ultimate power. With antennagate, Ive was insistent despite the engineering team telling him about the issue, and Jobs sided with Ive. The rest is history.
 

AbhiAchShan

macrumors member
Nov 7, 2021
87
60
You have read the Consumer Report Article which blames Jony Ive for the Antennagate Scandal, no one knows why, but let us assume it was correct, then iPhone 4s with similar chassis didn't have those issues, same design, only directions of Antennas were changed, so do you really believe Jony would resist this? I don't blame anyone for the Antennagate Scandal, it was just a technical mistake, not necessarily a Design Mistake, also if you blame the those Antenna Related Team, Mistakes happen; Scott Forstall, too was blamed blatantly for Apple Maps issues, and he was forced to apologise or accept the mistake, but we all realise now, what was the mistake and who was to be blamed
Design Team was given immense power during Steve Era, which led us to wonderful products, let's not forget that
 
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