Apple has experienced periods of decline before. In the mid to late nineties, before Jobs returned, Apple stuck to polishing OS9, which was simply too archaic to compete with Windows 95, NT, and subsequent MS OS's of the nineties. They flip flopped on clones and ultimately maintained a losing status quo. This era also brought such blunders as the puck mouse, but towards the end Apple got a bit of a lift from the candy colored iMac. Still, had Apple not started branching out as they did, the dire predictions were probably true.
Is Apple in decline today? Their profits don't appear to be. Today's Apple also has a truly gargantuan nest-egg that could see the company through a protracted period of difficulty. It's too soon to tell if the company has become less innovative, but they are in a far superior position now than at any point in the past. The Apple brand isn't going anywhere for decades.
In the mid to late nineties, before Jobs returned, Apple stuck to polishing OS9
Correction: Apple didn't release OS 9 -- or even OS 8 -- until after Jobs returned.
Perhaps you mean System 7? Actually, Apple barely made any progress on System 7 because nearly all their OS engineers were working on the ill-fated Copland.
This era also brought such blunders as the puck mouse, but towards the end Apple got a bit of a lift from the candy colored iMac
The hockey puck mouse was also a Jobsism -- part of the iMac release.
I heard someone the other day saying that now that Jobs is gone they're bringing back the hokey colors to the product lines. I told them that it wasn't until Jobs was back that the colors were introduced and they didn't believe me.
You're right. OS8 and 9 were basically lipstick on the System 7 pig. I worked on a helpdesk part-time in University and had to support OS8 and OS9. Horrible, horrible operating systems. To make matters even more annoying, Apple hardware had a funny habit of hiding the power switch on the back of the box at the time too, so it was always fun explaining to professors how to reboot their hard-locked machines over the phone. The puck-mice were indeed post-Jobs, as were the iMacs. Despite those terrible mice, the iMacs were a big hit with people who liked pretty colors and didn't actually want to use their computers much. I suppose Jobs needed time to get into the swing of things. It wasn't until the iPod that Apple (and Jobs) really shifted into overdrive.
I've recently watched this documentary called 'Jiro Dreams of Sushi'. It is about this legendary 85-year-old sushi master in Japan and his two sons who will succeed him in the business. At some point there was an interesting quote that went along the lines: when Jiro dies, his son will need to be twice as good as him, if he is "only" just as good, people will think he is worse.
I think this is quite true in the Apple case, there was a "genius" aura around the Steve Jobs personality that helped inflate the perception of his already impressive achievements. Without that aura, Apple might be doing just as good a job as he would do, but people will think worse of them.
Personally, I think that as long as they keep putting out the excellent quality products they've been releasing lately, pushing into new areas now and then, they will be just fine for quite some time.
Apple had a few 'first' moments and make some decent hardware. The problem is that they're much too hung up on making their stuff only work with other Apple products. They cripple their protocols by tying exclusively to Apple products. Things like iMessage and FaceTime would be decent products if they opened the protocols and let others complete. We've come as far as we have because of open protocols and competition and Apple seems to be afraid to compete on a level playing field. Most 'geeks' I know recommend that people not buy Apple because of the lock-in.
> Most 'geeks' I know recommend that people not buy Apple because of the lock-in.
Most 'geeks' give horrendous advice to non-technical people when it comes to computers/smartphones/etc.
I was guilty of it for many years. You get so entrenched in the technical and philosophical underpinnings of something that you end up lacking basic understanding of the end user's problem.
The fact is that when you take someone who has very little technical understanding, and _no desire_ to _ever_ have a technical understanding of a computer, and put them in front of a Mac or an iPad or an iPhone, they are generally actually able to use the damn thing with very little hand holding.
As someone who has been one of those geeks, every time I see another tech head recommending Linux for their granny, I believe that a small kitten dies somewhere.
> We've come as far as we have because of open protocols and competition and Apple seems to be afraid to compete on a level playing field.
What important protocols and standards do you believe that Apple is shying away from? They made a decision in 1997 to drop all of their proprietary networking standards and put their weight onto TCP/IP. They've adopted standards in every field in which there is an obvious need. They contribute well back to the community for products that aren't a core business driver: clang, LLVM, WebKit, back ports to FreeBSD, etc.
One messaging app and one video chatting app being closed because they are profit drivers does not make the company evil, despite what Stallman and co would have us think.
If Apple were pushing their own standards for web content (and not HTML (incidentally they've been on the W3C for a long time now)), or their own standards for email, networking stacks, etc., then you might have an argument, but otherwise it seems to me that you're looking for an excuse.
I believe Apple do a good job in many ways. They also show more responsibility than Microsoft did 15 years ago.
But...
Apple do fail in a number of key ways, and despite your attack on most geeks, I will defend them.
1. Compatibility. Apple really drop the ball here. As one example, they don't support FLAC .. why? No reason at all, except maybe it threatens ALAC. For people with FLAC collections, moving to Apple is a pain in the ass. The same can be said for many other audio and video formats. Apple's support is lousy and is locked in for no good reason. In fact, it forces you to limit the choices you can make ... again, for no reason. If anyone wanted to share my content and they were Apple users, I'd say "sorry, go for an open platform and then we'll talk".
2. Apple excel at the basics, but fail with more complex activities. Some simple examples: iTunes went a little funny at one stage. It was impossible to get any music onto my iPhone because iTunes wouldn't allow it. I used 3rd party tools - which would put the music on, but as soon as I started iTunes, it corrupted those newly copied songs... Now, if I were using Android, i'd just copy the files to my phone - just like i'd copy files from one folder to another ... This is an example of something fundamentally basic being made very, very, VERY hard because ... of ... no good reason. note: since fixed.
3. Apple provides minimal settings. In many ways, this is great, but... at one stage, my iPhone 4s lost the plot with the audio volume for music and videos via the inbuilt speaker. I could not get the audio volume to work using the "physical" switch, nor by adjusting the volume up or down ... it took me M-O-N-T-H-S to solve this ... others reported the same problem, and Apple said "factory reset" or "return the phone, it's a hardware fault". It turned out to be two things... (1) a software bug in IOS, and (2) it was caused when you plugged audio devices into the interface port, but switched the external device off while music was playing. note: since fixed.
The reality is that I have been burnt by 1. 2. and 3. - and I would not have had those problems on Android. I also believe these problems impact geeks and non-geeks alike.
The good news, problems 2. and 3. have been solved. Apple introduced a "reset all settings" option which takes care of "magic settings" ... it fixed my broken keyboard when I updated to IOS7 (as an example).
> Things like iMessage and FaceTime would be decent products if they opened the protocols and let others complete.
This is just dogma uncritically repeated by the FOSS crowd. Is it true? No. Unified chat on all Apple devices (via iMessage) is a huge competitive advantage for them. It's already far better than decent, and I really fail to see why opening it up would make it any better. FaceTime also works better than Skype, which is amazing considering how much of a lead Skype had at the outset. In short, I struggle to come up with a single fact which supports your assertion.
I think keeping some things tied to Apple devices makes sense but Facetime and iMessage are two that I think should be open. I want to use iMessage with all of my friends. I can only use it with people who also have iPhone's. This doesn't make them consider getting iPhone's. We just use Viber instead. Facetime is better than Skype - but I can only chat to other iOS/Mac users. This means I talk to most people on Skype as they are on Windows or Android.
I love iMessage and Facetime. But neither is tying my to Apple or convincing my friends to switch to Apple. If they were open I as an Apple customer would use them more and be happier.
FaceTime has convinced pretty much everyone in our globally distributed family to buy iPads (for the most part). These are all people familiar with Skype but the FaceTime experience is a huge win. More recently some of us have tried hangout but in the end it was back to FaceTime.
I would like to see both open, but I can also see why Apple, who do make money on the devices, want to sell more devices.
My friends and I used Kik for a while when they used Blackberry and Anroid phones. I was the only iPhone user at first, but once another friend got an iPhone it became much easier to convince the rest of them how much better it was for all of us to use iPhones. Apple is better off holding out and letting their product sell themselves, and iMessage and Facetime will keep them locked in once they're users.
Rewarding Apple for that kind of behaviour is not good for anyone in the long run. When you're tied to Apple they can charge anything they want, and cripple or remove any features they want. I'd say people are bringing it upon themselves, but at a certain market saturation they're forcing it on everyone.
All corporations do this in one way or another, so this is a generic anti-corporate argument. In the case of Apple, it is clearly irrelevant since they have such a tiny market share.
People are reading this because despite a small market share, Apple is more successful than any other PC, Tablet, or Phone maker.
It's easy to point to rising market share less than one month after an annual product release. If it wasn't rising at that point they'd be in Blackberry territory. Typically, Apple is presented as having a losing strategy, and the current market share in the US is regarded as a anomaly that will quickly be corrected as 'Good Enough' Android phones such as the Nexus series or Galaxy S4 are recognized as being equivalent.
>Things like iMessage and FaceTime would be decent products if they opened the protocols and let others complete.
Why? AFAIK, there are already open standards for messaging and for a long time they were supported out of the box for OS X. I'm not trying to excuse Apple's action here, but is it better for Apple to open their implementation, or is it better for the open source community? In other words, are there specific use cases that would benefit many users (not just joe who wants to run iMessage on X) or, does the open source community just want a messaging protocol that is backed by a corporation with a lot of presence?
Is user-to-user messaging such a complex service that the need for Apple to open their implementation that great? When you say "competition" who would Apple be competing against? G Talk? WhatsApp? Kik? and what would they be competing for? Users? if the implementation is really open, the number of users doesn't really matter. Money? Apple already provides the service for free.
In short, I don't really understand the benefits of having Apple open their protocol, but there are already downsides for the user, the strongest being, Apple is no longer a central authority for messages meaning things like simply syncing messages across devices becomes a harder.
> Things like iMessage and FaceTime would be decent products if they opened the protocols and let others complete [sic]
And because they do not, they are excellent products.
I met a fellow once who thought I was a fool for using a Macbook Pro. He had an excellent list of reasons why, complete with multiple hyperlinked references for each. But I never got to see it; when he woke up his Thinkpad to show me, all it said was
kernel panic - not syncing: for safety
and by the time he got it all sorted out, I'd had to leave for a client meeting. I'm sure he was right, though.
Meanwhile my Macbook Pro freezes on me regularly (a "hard" freeze requiring a power cycle). Neither my linux laptop nor my windows (7, home premium) desktop freeze on me often enough for it to be remarkable (but they both do crash occasionally). It happens.
Apple's product isn't technology. It's culture. Technology is a marketing tool they invest heavily in and use to sell their real product. That's one of the more brilliant things Jobs ever did (and it is remarkably brilliant; the man can't be admired enough for it, in my opinion, at least from a business perspective).
Apple's technology works well enough, and the appearance aesthetics are bleeding edge (usually, for a while, at least), but the zeal with which those in the culture defend the technology is simply amusing to behold. No technology is worth such zealous defense.
I'm part of that community. We aren't all trying to be High Priests of the One True Technology. I don't think users of Apple products are all part of a Hive Mind, either.
It's a pity you didn't ask him to email you a copy once he did get it working. You know, email - the open protocol that works across different systems?
Your story is basically FUD because you're describing a kernel panic, which is most likely because the guy was intentionally running unstable bleeding edge stuff. If he was running consumer-level linux stuff, it's very unlikely that would have happened.
I'll tell you a secret: that fellow was me, every one of several times over the last half-dozen years that I tried running Ubuntu or Debian, in the latest stable version then available, on various commodity laptops not more than a year or two old.
Oh, I suppose my mistake was in not choosing my hardware according to the recommendations of the assembled gurus at linux-laptop.net, or just not being awesome enough to know what incantation I needed to mumble where, or the precise angle at which to incise the throat of the sacrificial chicken, or some damned thing to which those who haven't yet got bored of sysadmin drudgery are welcome.
Of course, the Linux community being as it is the apotheosis of "blame the user", I'm sure I'll hear all sorts of detailed explanations of what I obviously must have done wrong, none of which does anything to make my Macbook any less preferable as an Emacs substrate.
Or... sometimes computers crash, whether they're linux, windows, or mac. That you saw a linux computer crash once is no more notable than the times I saw a mac crash (and believe me, I have).
Your anecdotal evidence is entirely irrelevant. I've seen kernel panics multiple times on OS X, including when I really needed to use the machine (OTOH, I've had a solid experience running Linux on various ThinkPads for years). Does that mean I should judge it based on that?
How do you quantify if something is a decent product? iMessage does more than 2 billion messages per day [1]. I couldn't find FaceTime metrics but anecdotally for years I could never get my mom to use Skype but now she FaceTime's me all the time. This speaks volumes.
That guy (who is pretty consistently wrong on ~everything) predicted Apple, Facebook, etc. would lose their CEOs in 2012; instead, Tim Cook has done an amazing job. Steve Jobs even called Cringely to tell him he was wrong on Tim Cook.
This may hurt my popularity here but our family actually just bought a Win8 touchscreen for my wife to replace her Win7 laptop.
She had kind of wanted Apple kit, but the Price was Wrong, and the Metro^W "Windows 8 Modern U/I" interface was actually more appealing to her than the checkerboard-of-apps approach.
Although I think the thing that drove her decision in the end was the educational and other Windows-only apps, which is kind of ironic... educational apps are the reason we have an iPad in the first place.
Are the educational apps ones for her to use herself, or ones she'll use for teaching kids?
Also, are they apps she already has and wants to keep running, or ones she will buy now that she has the new machine? Finally are they Metro Apps, or traditional windows apps?
There will always be pundits on both sides of these sorts of arguments. In the early 90's, there were lots of people predicting IBM's imminent break-up. In 2011, Tomi Ahonen was claiming that despite everyone claiming that Nokia was under siege, it was still the world's largest seller of Smartphones (since he considered Symbian a Smartphone OS), while others were claiming that Nokia was doomed.
Time is the only way we can tell which of the pundits were right, and which (in retrospect) sounded like idiots.
I think this is exactly the right way to put the whole debate to rest! Who knows what Apple has up its sleeves - they still got Jony Ive, they still got a ton of money to just keep going at things. That may result in greater products, or they may become like Microsoft - perpetually trying. Really, only time will tell, but I just don't think they'll fail spectacularly in the near future.
BTW, good to see you posting somewhat frequently on HN Ted!
Well IBM did end up divesting itself of the businesses people expected them to. They just did so in an orderly manner while simultaneously executing a new and very successful strategy.
As for Tomi Ahonen, by the time of that 2011 statement, Nokia's smartphone sales were visibly in precipitous decline. Not their share, but their sales. So Ahonen's statement can only be seen as a statement of faith rather than of confidence.
In these two cases, there were facts to support the predictions, where as in Apple's case all we have are just so stories.
According to the people after Jobs' death was that Apple will ride the wave, then decline. just like Dell after Michael Dell left. Larry Ellison said the same thing the other day in an interview (but not sure whether to believe him or not, Ellison being Ellison and all).
Although Apple was never perfect even with Jobs (remember Antenna gate) and other issues but he was a visionary, he saw things which a lot of people didn't. But although people always thought of him as the brains you also have to see that he has a great team behind him.
Apple might be in decline now from the $800 per share at their peak but is this how a company is measured? I believe that even though they have not produced anything revolutionary in the past few years does not mean they are in decline. One cannot simply create revolutionary ideas every year. It's all incremental.
iPod touch was the testing platform for the iPhone and in turn it was the platform for the iPad.
What's next? I think I'll sit here and wait for it. I still think that they are still capable of something great based on the current team of executives at the head of Apple. They aren't sitting on their laurels with a sales person as their CEO. When the day comes that Apple does that I might change my tune, but for now I will still be as excited for an Apple event as I used to be.
There is significant press attention given to the appearance of the Apple's products and market share stats, but Apple's real focus is on the software inside the devices, and on the developer base and applications available.
The most important weapon in the battle for the approaching mobile device world will be to get the best quality applications on your platform. Apple is winning this battle, application quantity and quality, and the press does not seem to give much attention to this most critical aspect. Something like three of every four dollars spent on mobile applications now goes to iOS apps, and head to head comparisons of the most popular mobile applications show the iOS versions are clearly of higher quality.
Apple has a monopoly on selling devices that run the huge iOS base of applications, and this should continue to allow them to sell their hardware at nice margins. They've stayed focused on building the developer community and APIs, with the goal of building a library of applications of the highest quality, and raining cash on their developer community. Apple goes for the win while most everyone is distracted by insignificant stats like market share.
>I consider him the greatest creator and editor of products this industry has ever known,
are you effing serious? Greatest creator my ass. He took already built products and refined the hell out of them. Shit, he practically built the company on top of Wozniak's back.
Founding and running a company that made highly respected computers and a highly respected OS is an extremely rare achievement that makes him highly qualified to comment on the industry. Perhaps his opinion of these reporters should be taken as an indication that they should be listened to.
The arguments for Apple's failure seem to focus on what Apple isn't doing, rather than what it is doing.
E.g.
- they aren't establishing or milking a monopoly
- they aren't making commodity hardware
- they aren't engaging in predatory pricing
What these things have in common is that they are easy to understand.
The general negative commentary seems to be of the form "We can understand what everyone else is doing, but we don't understand what Apple is doing, therefore Apple must be doing nothing."
There's nothing new about this. The only difference when Steve Jobs was alive was that they could say 'We don't understand what Apple is doing, but Steve Jobs is a genius so that explains their success."
> - they aren't establishing or milking a monopoly - they aren't making commodity hardware - they aren't engaging in predatory pricing
Huh? Yes, they are! A patent is a monopoly [1]. They did not invent this rotten system, but they sure are milking it for all it's worth. Not engaging in predatory pricing? Do you know how much Microsoft and Apple demand of Android manufacturers to let them keep their features?
Predatory pricing occurs when you sell a product at such low prices that it deters other companies from entering the market. Apple has many flaws but that isn't one of them.
You are correct that patents are considered a form of monopoly, but that is a different sense of the word than what the OP refers to, that is, holding a monopoly over a particular good or market. Apple doesn't have a monopoly in any of the markets it participates in and there are plenty of substitute goods and competitive corporations within the same markets.
> Predatory pricing occurs when you sell a product at such low prices ...
Thanks for correcting me on that. I was mistaken.
> but that is a different sense of the word than what the OP refers to ...
I am aware of that.
> Apple doesn't have a monopoly in any of the markets it participates in ...
The market is broader than just the end-users of phones. Share markets, patents, deals with collaborators (such as network operators, music companies), and bribes (mostly in less developed countries) are just as much a part of the market as end-users.
> The market is broader than just the end-users of phones. Share markets, patents, deals with collaborators (such as network operators, music companies), and bribes (mostly in less developed countries) are just as much a part of the market as end-users.
Please explain how any of this applies to Apple's business. At it stands it sounds like innuendo.
I wasn't talking specifically of Apple here. I was talking about the ways in which markets may have nothing to do with end-users.
> Apple are doing nothing different from their competitors with regard to patents.
This is absolutely wrong. Some companies are more aggressive than others when it comes to abusing patent, trade dress, and copyright laws. How many trade dress lawsuits have you seen Samsung, LG, HTC, etc. initiate against Apple? In the recent past, a handful of Apple's patents were invalidated because of prior art. How many companies filed lawsuits against Apple when iPhone implemented these features?
> Scan Philip Ellmer-DeWitt’s Apple 2.0 or John Gruber’s Daring Fireball and treat yourself to intelligent repudiations
The minute that I saw "Gruber" and "intelligent" in the same sentence was the minute I knew that this post was full of shit. If someone is so blinded by the reality distortion field that they can't see that Gruber is nothing more than a 3rd party PR person who trades insider info on Apple for pushing out propaganda on a regular basis, then I just can't take them seriously.
If you've been listening to his podcasts or actually reading his blog, you would know that gruber has no better information (and, in fact, usually less advance knowledge) than the random rumors on macrumors/apple insider. He usually trails both loopinsight and allthingsd in terms of scoops and confirmations. He is anything but an "insider."
For the last several years about the only "inside information" he's received is a week's advance use of loaner laptops/iphones so that he can write a review column. (Same thing that Pogue, Mossberg, and other prominent columnists get, and he's subject to the same embargo as they are.)
All gruber really has beyond his extensive network of colleagues in the industry are his presentation skills, his writing skills, his love of Apple, and his appreciation of things well made.
And, to refer to Jean-Louis Gassée as "someone ..so blinded.." would suggest that you have little understanding of the history of the industry, and who Gassée is.
Gruber is partisan, obviously, but it doesn't detract from the intellectual rigor of his repudiations. His latest one was spot on - the NYT columnist that Jean-Louis was referring to had stated that in the Jobs era, stock prices would routinely go up after a product announcement, and in the Cook era, things are not so bright. Gruber took the 20-30 minutes to go check that fact (something the NYT clearly didn't bother to do) - and discovered that, in fact, it was a mixed bag - and the stock dropped as often as it went up.
The minute I saw "Apple" and "reality distortion field" and "propaganda" in the same sentence was the minute that I knew this comment was full of shit.
Edit: didn't mean to sound snarky, but it's really terrible to trash an entire article based on a single sentence.
What's wrong with Dilger? He is unashamedly opinionated, but he is a far more professional reporter of facts than the vast majority of mainstream outlets.
He certainly bashes everyone but Apple, but that is his opinion. However I would be genuinely interested to be shown a deliberate wrong fact or lie he's written.
You can do more - please pick out just one lie or flawed fact from that piece.
I honestly don't see any, but that's because the piece is an unreadable screed of childish invective that doesn't involve many facts. Not because Dilger is lying.
You said that, but it is not true. If there are any lies in the post you would easily be able to identify one, and everyone would be able to see whether you were right or not.
You are the one who called Dilger a liar but you have not identified any lies he has told. The burden is on you to provide evidence for your accusation.
Merely linking to one of his pieces and saying 'he's a liar' does not prove anything.
Just because you dislike his opinions does not make him a liar.
Jean-Louis was a long time Apple exec who started a company to build an OS called BE which briefly was in vogue at Apple before they decided NeXT was a better choice. He's pretty much still an Apple guy at heart despite losing out.
Is Apple in decline today? Their profits don't appear to be. Today's Apple also has a truly gargantuan nest-egg that could see the company through a protracted period of difficulty. It's too soon to tell if the company has become less innovative, but they are in a far superior position now than at any point in the past. The Apple brand isn't going anywhere for decades.