Yeah engineering as a discipline tends to be pretty naïve to the consequences of what they build, and sociopaths take advantage of it. Norbert Wiener [1] observed this about the engineers working on nukes in the 1940s-1950s:
“Push-button warfare... possible for a limited group of people to threaten the absolute destruction of millions, without any immediate risk to themselves.... Behind all this I sensed the desires of the gadgeteer to see the wheels go round.”
Agree about psychological impact outpacing likely actual impact, but that’s a relatively temporary phenomena as we are all adapting to the new way things work.
Productivity wise employment is far more than code production productivity in a vacuum, and productivity gains are rarely captured by employees (see famous chart on worker productivity where that correlation changed around 1970). I wouldn’t expect to see much in the next 1-2 years besides noticing effective teams increasing velocity of features.
I think people in forums like complaining about things and aren’t representative of the broader set of people who are just using the tools, so no real paradox. For vast majority of tech jobs, $200/mo is still an absolute steal in terms of what these tools offer. Only the dullest of companies would not realize this.
Fwiw in the 80s-90s computers also didn’t really register in productivity metrics. Qualitative changes occur long before accurate measurement catches up.
No particular opinion on this change, but generally pricing is a great way to separate dabblers from serious users. There isn’t a great deal of value in dabblers or what they produce, I imagine that training data isn’t worth much relative to the pro users. Similar pricing story with $100 yearly price for Apple developer accounts that people complain a lot about. The reality is if you’re serious about making something, these costs are pretty cheap.
The folks hurt most by this are serious people in developing countries and young people starting out. Occasionally a dabbler turns into a serious user but I imagine that’s far less likely than people wish it were.
The value to companies who make these changes is they don’t have low value users or low value contributions to worry about, which has its own not insignificant overhead. In the age of AI slop everywhere we’re likely to see a lot more attempts to separate the wheat from the chaff.
The dabbler/serious user distinction isn't the only framing here.
Assuming this limitation applies to team seats in the same way, at $20/mo, businesses could afford to have everybody on the plan. Plenty of folks write only a few hours of code per day—or even per week in their job. These are still professionals, not dabblers.
Especially when ads win out over UX. Just a month ago I searched for UPS locations in Google Maps and filtered by open, and one place nearby popped up. I put the package in my car and drove over and lo and behold they were closed. When faced with a choice, Google chose to be greedy and make money on an ad unit over providing the correct user experience.
I've used Google Maps for two decades and have 1000s of saved pins. I could have been a customer for life. Haven't used it since.
You want to be careful about who your customers are, and what they will do to you as an organization. Enterprise customers create enterprise teams create enterprise culture creates enterprise rot. Apple is wise to play to their strategic position as a consumer product company that lives or dies on great product, because when the buyer is the user thats what they demand.
The real strategic risk for Apple is if it overly locks-in users and falls back into complacency. The discipline of having to continually win customers with better product is ultimately the only thing that will cause them to thrive long term.
To be fair, a PE <10 didn't even represent the ground truth of customer's relationship to Apple at the time. In hindsight we have a lot more information, but in that era there was still a lingering question of whether their iPhone advantage was durable, due to Android competitors. It only later became apparent that the stickiness factor was super high.
From a correct pricing perspective, of all the companies in tech Apple seems one of the most likely to keep customers for a lifetime. They have immense lock-in and customer affinity. I don't know if the correct number is 20 or 30 or 40 but unless the economy completely tanks (which tbf is reasonably possible these days), I can only imagine a majority of their customers today will still be their customers in 15-20 years.
This is a really good take. This is absolutely not software's stable era, we're in for a rough next decade as AI upends every well-established software practice and the very paradigms we've relied on for so long of apps, OS, and ecosystem. This is an era we have to get through and it's going to be messy as hell.
Leadership needs to make sure everything else in the business is in order so that they can contain and shape the direction of the white-hot plasma of AI and its implications. A software leader would be too hands-on in this process and get nerd sniped. Sometimes you need some distance.
Tim Cook really set John Ternus up to succeed as incoming CEO. Apple has a huge constituency that needs to be reassured about this change: customers, fans/developers, wall street, and global political leaders. These are HUGE stakes and John needs early wins with each to be seen as a legitimate successor. Check out what wins he has coming in the next year-ish:
1. Hardware: OLED touchscreen Macs, foldable iPhone (2026) & 20th anniversary iPhone (2027). The message here is about flexing his strength in hardware.
2. Software: Snow leopard-like iOS27/macOS27 fixing a lot of Liquid Glass' rough edges. The message here is he's returning Apple to form with quality software.
3. Ecosystem: Gemini-powered Siri. The message here is he's getting Apple finally on track to meet the promise of AI.
4. Political context: A clean slate. The message here is placating the president (or anyone) is in the past.
The timing is interesting because Apple needed Ternus announced before WWDC27 in June, because that's when Gemini-Siri and Snow Leopard-OS strategy are both being unveiled. But they needed to delay it as long as they could so that Tim Cook could soak up as much Trump-chaos as was necessary. Now that polls and vibes show Trump losing support across the board, politically it's the safest it's ever been to announce this change, and still enough time before WWDC to suggest that what's being announced are his initiatives.
Apple plays the 'it's the best for most people' game, not the 'technically ahead in [one or a few feature categories]' game. They make the lion's share of profit in the categories they compete in because they sell to the mass market; there's 2.5 billion active iOS devices!
Every time I see someone here dismiss this success as status symbol-oriented marketing, I just shake my head at how much that signals a deep misunderstanding of how the world works or what most of the human race wants in a product. Nobody wants the Sony WF-1000XM5 earbuds because Sony doesn't even give a shit enough to give them a name people can remember. Nobody wants Bose earbuds because nobody wants to open a buggy spyware-laden app to turn on/off noise cancelling. These products are destined to fail because they make simple things complicated, untrustworthy, bothersome.
People are whole-experience buyers, not single-feature buyers, and the experience nearly every person on earth wants is the magical 'I put it in and it works' experience. What people want is all the upside of the magic of technology and none of the cognitive overhead associated with it. The specific choices that make up a product offering - aka the product marketing - reflect the inherent desire of the customer. Any luxury / status symbol aspects come AFTER that.
You fool! The WF-1000XM5 is the worst model of the line! You should buy the WF-1010XN5, it is far superior!
Apple tends to name things in an odd way, e.g. sometimes you need to remember whether your laptop came out in "early" 2014 or "late" 2014, but they have a remarkably flat, but consistent, product line.
I mean, honestly, if somebody just tossed you a random Macbook from the Apple store, it may not be the exact model you want but you wouldn't complain. All of them are pretty good, even down to the bargain basement Neo.
Yeah tho most customers never even encounter that level of detail. Most people just know there’s a ‘new one’ and an ‘old one’. If they have an old one, they come in and get a new one. Everyone replaces on their own replacement schedule, and every year there’s a new one, so it kinda just works for everyone.
Apple at its best makes its product like so legible people only need dim awareness of what they’re buying. That’s only possible if you build a ton of trust with consumers, which is why Apple is so so focused on their brand value.
“Push-button warfare... possible for a limited group of people to threaten the absolute destruction of millions, without any immediate risk to themselves.... Behind all this I sensed the desires of the gadgeteer to see the wheels go round.”
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norbert_Wiener
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