Apple is in a very unique position in the tech industry in that expectations of the company are much higher than those of its competitors. Let’s be honest, when was the last time you heard someone talk about Dell or HP product releases with the exuberance that we talk about Apple. That also puts Apple in a tough position of meeting, what are sometimes, inflated expectations from Wall St. and consumers.
To be clear, some of those lofty expectations are Apple’s own doing, but there is a big difference between them and other companies. Every company wants to be the best—they talk about how innovative they are and how their products are the best. For the most part, we can see that for what it is—marketing talk.
When Phil Schiller, Eddy Cue, Craig Federighi, or Tim Cook say they want to make a better product or a better experience, I believe them. I think what they’ve done over the years with iPhone, iPod, iPad, and Mac shows they believe it too.
With the exception of Craig Federighi, I’ve interviewed the other Apple execs over my 20 years of reporting on Apple. I’ve also interviewed a lot of other tech executives and can see the difference in not only what they say, but how they say it. There is genuine belief from Apple that they are doing the best thing for its customers, whether that’s building a better product, or standing up for privacy.
### Our Responsibility and Reasonable Expectations
Despite their belief, sometimes Apple products aren’t what we expect them to be. I do believe that we have a responsibility to let them know in the strongest possible way that they have fallen short of our expectations and their promises to us.
I have been a very harsh critic of Apple Music since it was released just over a year. For me, music is a very personal thing—it permeates every aspect of my life. I wanted Apple Music to be exactly what they promised when it was introduced. Sadly, they fell short of what they promised, and way short of what I expected.
Apple is a company that typically under-promises and over-delivers, but sometimes that doesn’t happen.
Having said that, the music team has made incredible strides over the past year to fix all of the problems with Apple Music. They deserve a lot of credit for that, and I’ve been just as vocal with my praise as I have been with my criticism.
I think that’s fair.
You can take my stance with Apple Music and put it to any other product that Apple makes that you are happy with or dissatisfied with. We should be critical, but fair.
Holding Apple to a standard that they set for themselves is more than a fair and reasonable measurement of how they met our expectations. I would argue that Apple Music (insert your favorite product here) did not meet those reasonable expectations.
### Our Unreasonable Expectations
While there are many reasonable expectations for Apple, we also have a lot of unreasonable expectations. Let’s look at MacBook Pro.
We all want a new MacBook Pro. However, expecting Apple to release a new product when it’s not ready is unreasonable.
Apple could have released a new MacBook Pro in June at WWDC. It probably would have had the same processor and maybe a couple of upgraded chips. Would that have been enough to satisfy our expectations? Absolutely not. People would have lost their collective minds over a minor upgrade.
I don’t see using Intel’s Skylake as an alternative for Apple. There were shortages in the chips, which would have made for MacBook Pro shortages. Worse still, the Skylake chips had a major flaw that affected processing.
It would have been a disaster for Apple to release a MacBook Pro based on those chips, but people still kicked up a fuss. That’s not reasonable.
### Fairness
We expect Apple to make some decisions for us. We expect that when a MacBook, iPhone, iPad or any other product is released, it will work flawlessly. For the most part, Apple has not let us down with that, especially with hardware.
While it is completely reasonable to hold Apple’s feet to the fire when they disappoint us with a product, it is not fair to expect the company to release products that are not ready for the public. Whether it’s their technology or the technology from another company like Intel.
Many people continue to wonder about Apple’s ability to release another blockbuster product. To be clear, most companies have one blockbuster product in their entire history—Apple has had several.
Mac, iPhone, iPad, iPod, and Apple Watch cover just the hardware. You can argue what rises to the level of blockbuster, but all of those products have sold well and are widely considered to be the best in their category.
No company can release a revolutionary product every year or two—it’s just not possible.
The only way you can lose faith in Apple is to think that the executives are not pushing the company forward and trying to innovate with every product they release.
I don’t believe that for one second.
Our expectations of Apple are higher than any other company in the market. For the most part, they have met—and exceeded—those expectations time and again.
You can bet against Apple if you like, but I believe there are a lot of great things still to come out of Cupertino.
More than a sentence out of Jim. Finally!
Thanks Jim, well said!
…So, Apple should quit claiming to do just that. Interesting post, but the root of our unreasonable expectations fall squarely on Apple, both because of the products they’ve released and the hype they create around them.
Yep
Does this mean next weeks announcements are going to stink? : O
Apple is not in the same industry as Dell or HP. Apple is in consumer electronics. Dell and HP are in corporate I-T. Neither of them even makes a phone, which has been Apple’s main product for 10 years.
The fact that you can mix up Apple with Dell and HP for even a moment at this point in Apple’s history is just more evidence that Apple is off-track today. Apple+IBM is more like HP than it is the old Apple. Our expectation that Apple would be a consumer electronics company rather than just another dreck corporate I-T vendor is not unrealistic. Our expectation that the software we run would not be some unreliable committee-driven crap is not unrealistic.
The reason it is hard for tech bloggers to deal with Apple’s tragic loss of product quality is because most tech bloggers just continued to rah-rah-rah the whole time and lost all credibility. For the first 6 months of iOS 7, M.G. Seigler could not stop talking about how great it was. And then he admitted that his iPhone had been crashing daily for 6 months. Well, thanks for recommending iOS 7 to everybody! You see the same dynamic with Apple Watch. It was so great for the first 6 months, but now it is universally derided as being way too slow and not even close to ready for prime time.
The thing is, it is not just Apple tech bloggers who have lost all credibility. It is also Apple. Nobody I know thinks of Apple as a quality product anymore. They used to be Rolls Royce and now they are a Volkswagon bug with a Rolls Royce front end stuck on.
If you are watching a movie at 30 fps it looks like magic. It can take you anywhere. But if the movie player glitches and the frame rate falls to 20 fps and stutters, now the movie looks like malfunctioning technology. That is a totally different experience because you lost only 33% of the frame rate. The same kind of thing goes for software. At a high level of reliability, software is magic. But let that level of reliability fall off just a bit, and now the user is just looking at malfunctioning technology.
So I find it really offensive to see so many tech bloggers — who should be the front line of defense for the user against poor product quality — instead defending Apple like “it’s only a 33% drop in frame rate, stop complaining and watch your stuttery movie!” Results matter. If I go see a Pixar movie and the movie cuts out halfway because of technical difficulties then I am not going to be talking about Pixar Magic™ afterwards.
In 1985 Steve Jobs left Apple and Apple stopped making products for consumers and started making them for gigantic corporations. They could not get on their knees for corporate buyers fast enough. Tragically, Steve Jobs left Apple again in 2011 and Apple once again stopped making products for consumers and started making them for gigantic corporations. The resulting giant drop in product quality and the committee-driven product decisions are a feature of that switch, not some mysterious phenomenon that nobody can explain. Recognize it. Accept it. GET OVER IT.
And most of all, please don’t blame consumer users because we are unhappy that Apple has abandoned us for corporate buyers who buy in lots of 10,000.
The most interesting thing in this post is that it is clear that Jim has given up on Apple improving their product quality. If Jim believed, for example, that iOS 10 is the most reliable iOS ever then there would be nothing to say.
I agree on the whole.
I’m not as interested in ‘blockbuster’ innovation as I am in the tools I use daily. I want those to make evolutionary progress, not revolutionary.
Jobs put us on a path that was difficult to maintain. Yet my expectations in iterative improvement still remain, despite Apple shifting priorities to mobile/iOS. Large swaths of core products are dying on the vine. Its now evident that those were Jobs pet projects that he alone coddled. I’d like for Apple to once again give them the attention they deserve. Does this mean we have to sacrifice mobile/iOS improvement for this to happen?
I really hope Eddie and Jimmy can dig deep and embrace the values, vision, and motivation Jobs once had. Apple Music deserves their attention, passion, focus, love, and admiration.
Cook is a great operations guy, not a motivational leader. He’s great at perpetuating what’s been done before. It’s unreasonable to expect him to ignite and motivate his team the way Steve once did.
I can’t Wait for an updated nMac Pro TB 3 Update along with Mac book Pro TB3 update. Sometimes I think apple is waiting for Intel to include USB 3.1 on the chip before Apple releases this Macs updates!
The place this bugs me the most is software. Apple discontinues Thing X.0. Look, here comes Simpler 1.0. It doesn’t contain my favourite feature! Oh, won’t someone think of the children?
Keep using Thing X.0. Make what you want known. Check again in Simple 1.1, 2.0, 2.1, etc. Yeah, it sucks, but it’s not like Apple killed your dog.
Yep.
There’s a lot in this post I don’t agree with, at least not strongly, and a lot in this post I don’t disagree with, at least not strongly. But I would like to point out that though it’s a fair point to say that Apple shouldn’t be compared to HP or Dell because they are more consumer-focused, that I believe that portion of Mr. Dalrymple’s point would be the same if you compared Apple to Sony or Nintendo or some such (or Samsung, for that matter).
In a broad perspective, I think this is a reasonable post. The personal computer industry and the smartphone industry seem very mature. I don’t rely on computing horsepower for my job (I rely on a computer, but not a lot of horsepower), so take it with a grain of salt, but I think that at this point I’m not ill-served by any mainstream make of computer out there, or any mainstream make of smartphone. I feel like the pluses and minuses are on the margins.
There are those that would say that that’s a poor perspective, that we HAVE to harp on the bleeding edge and whether Apple is there or not. I don’t agree. I was recently looking for a new laptop for my daughter, and though I realize (how could I not, reading tech blogs?) that none of the Apple computer lines has had a major refresh in some time, I found myself looking at the current Macbook Air and the non-Retina Macbook Pro (from 2012!!) and feeling very confident her needs were more than fulfilled.
I don’t need a revolution every couple of years. It’s nice when it happens, that some big paradigm-shifting product comes out. The Mac, or the iPhone (btw I don’t consider the iPad paradigm-shifting. I consider it a big iPod Touch or a big iPhone…and I think that’s awesome!). It’s exciting. But in between, for a decade or so, it’s nice to see it iterated, steadily, into a mature product that does as much as these products do.
I’m pretty well invested in the Apple ecosystem now, and that does make me a little unsettled, that I feel that I’m incentivized by something other than the quality of an individual piece of the puzzle. If I thought that, say, a Samsung Galaxy S7 were the better phone, I do have all the other Apple products that incentivize me to use an iPhone instead. It feels like I’ve given up a little bit of product freedom there. But, thankfully, Apple’s record of making products I enjoy with no or little reservation is very strong. So, so far, I haven’t felt ill-served.
All that being said, I consider two negatives with Apple as it currently is:
(1) The recent state of affairs with its software’s reliability. I’m happy with a slow incremental increase in its capabilities, but I don’t want to pay for that with unreliability in the stuff that already works. I’ve had enough problems with various iCloud services, which problems I didn’t have before iOS 9 and OS X El Capitan, to feel concern.
(2) It rubs me the wrong way any time Apple says something is revolutionary. That feels like pure marketing. We’ll know revolutionary when we see it, and the tech press will be ready to label something revolutionary when it sees it. It sounds like marketing. It sounds uncomfortably like lying. Or at least overpromising. I cringe a little inside whenever they say that.
My (un)reasonable expectation from Apple is to either not do something, or do it perfectly and with minimum flaws!
I don’t care about the hardware. It’s good.
But the software is a mess and just keeps getting worse!
Apple changed Music app exactly a year ago and then introduced a completely new app this year. It is not like Apple at all!
I heard Tim Cook say the products that were released in the Steve Jobs era were good because they spent a lot of time on them. So what? Do they make things in a week now? Has that changed at all? If they worked really long on iOS 9 Music, then why did it need change?
Take Siri. They introduced it in 2011 for iPhone. Ther were rumours of a Mac version. 5 years later it arrives on Mac, with no particular advantage compared to the 2011 version! It doesn’t have the newly introduced Siri app integration (which is exactly something shouldn’t have been done because it’s far far from perfect with only 6 types of commands?!?!)
Just stop. Saying Siri is the same as it was in 2011 betrays your ignorance.
Yes – if you’ve set your expectations too high.
Siri on Mac is pretty much like 2011 Siri. Maybe just showing game results and searching in finder. That’s it!
Again, you’re just being stupid. Stop.
Exactly!
I’m pretty sure Jim had to write this because Apple gave him his iPhone 7 few days ago.
In exchange for that, they asked him to write this to lower people’s expectations.
You’re going to see this pop up in Daring Fireball (and some other sites) too, if it hasn’t already!
There’s no need for name calling or insults. Stick to the discussion and leave the personal attacks out of it. Thank you.
“I’m pretty sure…” You’d be wrong…
Maybe not this time but you know they do this right?
I don’t know who “they” are but, when you call someone’s integrity and credibility into question, you better have facts to back it up. “Pretty sure” isn’t good enough for such serious accusations.
in other words, Malt Wossberg is an idiot.
where do they claim they’re doing that every year?
utterly ignorant of reality. Apple doesn’t ask or tell Jim or Gruber to write PR for them. saying they do is idiotic and foolish. no, these guys write about what interests them, and they’ve built up large audiences for the way they write. they are press. press can write good things, bad things, and analytical things, which these guys do very well and often.
If there’s one person that should be trusted when it comes to Apple news, it’s Mark Gurman. I don’t think anyone would doubt that since he has always been right on all and first on most rumours.
https://9to5mac.com/2014/08/29/seeing-through-the-illusion-understanding-apples-mastery-of-the-media/
TLDR past first couple paragraphs, but see it’s the same old hater FUD nonsense. you’re flat out wrong, Apple sells to corporate every day and HP and Dell sell consumer PCs every day, thus they’re in the same industry as Apple…they just suck at it.
Obviously they means Apple. Specifically people who work as PR in Apple.
unless you’ve worked for Cook, I fail to see how you could possibly know whether he’s motivational or not. In interviews his reports say that while he doesn’t scream and yell like Jobs did, they still hate disappointing him.
if he was just at ops guy (a role he doesn’t do anymore, btw, since he’s, you know running the whole company now), he wouldn’t be able to continue with such amazing success. Apple doesn’t run itself and its not easy, despite what all the armchair execs like you apparently believe.
I often wonder how much can be attributed to Steve Jobs, and how much can’t. By the stories I hear, of course he had a definitive style, and a definitive vision, and those worked in conjunction to create some very defining products. But I wonder now if things would have been different now if he were still with us (for better or worse)?
Something Mr. Cook and other Apple execs have to deal with now is competing in a world where the leadership of other tech companies grew up under Steve Jobs. In a sense, Mr. Jobs “won:” design is a major battleground now, and all companies pursue it as a part of their offerings, well or poorly. That wasn’t the case 15 years ago, and thus when Apple Computer shifted into a market that was purely consumerist (MP3 players) where design could really make a huge difference, it was probably like shooting fish in a barrel. But that’s not the world we live in now.
Jobs himself was quick to say he didn’t singlehandedly do everything awesome — that they worked together as a team and there were times when he was wrong and others were right.
a visionary, sure, and a great product manager, but at the end of the day one guy with lots of good people who shared in his vision. I don’t see that as having changed.
Well said. High expectations are good for Apple, they want to exceed them, and most often do. And let’s remember too that the disappointments are outnumbered by the delights 50 to 1. That’s my ratio, choose yours…
hyperbolic nonsense. troll bait.
stupid is as stupid does. claiming Siri is no better than in 2011 is idiotic. there’s no other word for it.
you have trolls on your site.
That sounds about right. But it’s still a vision that was significantly different in an important way than that of all the other competitors. That is no longer the case, so I will be interested to see what happens from here. Will Apple change its vision somehow? Will it continue to pursue a more refined or reliable expression of that vision than other companies’?
I wouldn’t presume to know what the most fruitful answer to that question…just that it will be interesting to see how things develop.
To a certain extent I understand the vitriol, though I don’t approve of it and hope I’m not doing it myself on a level I’m not aware of.
This column wasn’t about Apple, it was about us, the consumers and tech enthusiasts. Depending on your emotional tendencies, that can feel like an attack, and I very much understand lashing back.
They dont claim to do this. Do they trumpet and promote new products? Sure. Claim they’re better than competitor products? Yep. Claim they’re revolutionary? No.
Go re-read the article.
I think there are times when keynote presenters (Phil Schiller, mostly, I think) will use the term “magical” too often. Feels too much like marketing, like a validation of the sort of expectations Mr. Dalrymple was referencing in the article.
Most of this is generalized ranting with silly examples (the frame rate thing). Go outside
He also had something that is not transferrable… Founder power. Not just power in the sense of ‘do this or else’ but the aura that comes from having been one of the 3 people who created Apple in the first place.
Interesting! That makes Mr. Cook the “unworthy” inheritor. That he is “old money.”
“But the software is a mess and just keeps getting worse!
Apple changed Music app exactly a year ago and then introduced a completely new app this year. It is not like Apple at all!”
So if something doesn’t work the first time they shouldn’t fix it? They should always be perfect all of the time? What color is the sky in your world?
Examples? And… do you really expect execs to not hype their products and be proud of them if they think they’ve delivered something really good?
Of course, where we should set expectations is the question. So far the iPhone 7 is looking lackluster in many ways… an evolution of the 6/6S vs a fresh new design. On the other hand, smartphones have hit that maturity plateau and we’re likely in for incremental improvements vs radically better stuff. That makes the September events much less exciting and we’ve kind of gotten hooked on big new things over the years.
Put up or shut up with the accusations that JIm, Gruber et al are shilling for Apple.
I don’t feel like going and looking up transcripts. You’ll have to just accept that my memory is OK and I’m in touch with the feelings I had at the time.
Of course I expect the executives to brag about their products. And, as with anything else, I would expect my reactions to the brag to be flavored by whether I think the things they’re bragging about warrant the language. Clearing the “magical” or “revolutionary” bar was easier when the playing field was less level.
I don’t come here for longform! LOL. Good work, Jim.
lol, guilty as charged. 🙂
LOL No, not at all. I proved that years ago with a web site that tracked every rumour. Gurman was right about half the time (not bad but not perfect). Thing is, you don’t remember when rumours are wrong – only when they are right.
So you’re saying Apple pays Tech Bloggers to write nice things about the company?
No, I don’t have to accept your memory is accurate at all. You’re the one making the claim about them using specific words and insinuating that it’s unwarranted. FWIW, Jobs used the word Magical about the iPad and it’s perfectly reasonable for Schiller to hearken back to the when he talks about some of the recent improvements (the Pencil and how well it works when drawing, etc). for that product.
I dont really care if you cite or not, but this kind of thing is always trotted out in this discussions… the vague assertion that Apple’s doing something wrong but without any concrete examples referenced. If it happend, you can find it. You can google “schiller” and “Magical”. Or not.
uh… no. Not at all. the point, since you seem to need it spelled out, is that founders have a special place in a company since it’s literally their creation.
Nice troll though.
Moot point. You’ve been asked on several occasions to stop the personal attacks and insults.
On the other hand, the MBP is more than just a bit behind. More than a year ago, it had a minor refresh but kept the old processor (Haswell). There have been 2 architectures since then, none of which made it into the MBP. And now there’s this third, and you’re telling us that we’re unreasonable if we don’t sit quietly and accept the wait. There wasn’t anything preventing Apple from innovating on the design front. They just had more important things to do. And that’s their choice. But… for some of us, the most important thing was the MBP. And I honestly don’t think people are being unreasonable complaining about this delay. The MBP has been in near stasis for a very long time. And now… yeah… another wait. As I say, there’s nothing that prevents Apple from innovating just because they can’t incorporate new CPUs.
I don’t think it’s necessarily the average consumer who has high expectations of Apple. It’s mainly those crazy tech-head critics and Wall Street. I’m sure Apple products meet or exceed the expectations of the average consumer. Most of my Apple products over the years have exceeded my expectations in function and longevity.
It’s just damn ridiculous to expect any company to come out with some ground-breaking new product every few years. If Apple has to do it then every company should be expected to do it if they’re all investing lots of money in R&D. I hate listening to some of these analysts talking about how Apple has lost its touch based on not coming out with some miraculous new product which everyone must have. Seriously, the odds of that happening are astronomical. What company in history has done that feat every few years? Maybe Thomas A. Edison’s laboratory.
I’m not expecting magical or miraculous products from Apple or any other consumer-tech company. I simply want decent, high-quality products I can enjoy using over an extended period of time. I honestly don’t see how a company can be valued based on putting out ground-breaking new products every few years. What’s the precedence for that especially after Steve Jobs death? I swear, Apple shareholders have the worst sort of luck. I can’t even imagine what the next ground-breaking product would be. It seems like every hardware platform has already been covered.
My statement still stands, I’m afraid. It’s not a vague assertion. I’ve been watching Apple keynotes since the late ’90’s, and the terms “magical” and “revolutionary” and “fantastic” and similar pepper all of their talks, and their press releases. They are tiring phrases to hear over and over, even over a span of years. A problem is that they are subjective terms, and a piece of one’s mind is, either consciously or subconsciously, set aside to evaluate them. What is “revolutionary?” What is “magical?” What is “fantastic” or “beautiful” or “super” or any of it? They’re not concrete terms.
Eventually you stop evaluating, it’s tedious, you roll your eyes and you just accept it as marketing. As just words Apple uses over and over again.
Here’s a (somewhat dated) article:
http://www.zdnet.com/article/at-apple-everything-is-revolutionary/
And here’s a (tongue-in-cheek) video from the poster child of all of this, the 2013 keynote):
I think those are reasonable examples.
At some keynotes, say a very famous one in January of 2007 with which we’re all familiar, what is on display is so mind-boggling that I was overwhelmed by what I was seeing anyway. But even then one of the “money quotes” was Steve Jobs quoting an unnamed Apple colleague: “You had me at scrolling.” This stands in opposition to the generic terms. A concrete quote (I’m giving the benefit of the doubt that, though the speaker was unspecified, that it really happened), by someone saying something more than “it’s revolutionary.”
It’s just tiring, and undercuts the value of the products.
I’ve yet to see any hype created by Apple. Any hype is from sources outside of Apple.
so to recap — because you think Schiller says “magical” too often, that means Apple is claiming to herald annual revolutions?
yeah words don’t work that way. you’ve failed to back up your assertion.
Oh, not intended as a troll at all! Since the day he took over as CEO, it seems that in some press and in many user comments, Mr. Cook has been labelled as “not Steve Jobs.” I take that to mean, “Tim Cook could not have done the things Steve Jobs did!”
I hadn’t connected that to your concept of “founder power” but it feels like something very connected! The most basic, primal thing that Mr. Jobs did at Apple was to be a part of creating Apple Computer. And of course he presided over the “rebirth” of the company as well. Isn’t that what people mean when they say that “Tim Cook isn’t Steve Jobs?” That he couldn’t have created the Apple, Inc. that Mr. Jobs did? But, there he is, at the top of the food chain, enjoying the visibility and reaping the rewards (both financial and fame) of being the CEO of the richest company on earth…which he didn’t create!
At least, that’s the narrative at its simplest, and easiest to state, though it skips over a lot of detail. That paints Mr. Cook as undeserving. Reaping the rewards he didn’t earn. It’s an easily-digestible narrative.
Actually, though I don’t feel this was the point of the article, I suggest a corollary: that because Steve Jobs-led Apple created a revolution in the design of consumer electronics, and enjoyed a massive lead in that space, it created this expectation that Apple would in perpetuity enjoy this huge lead. So Tim Cook inherited not only the rewards of the groundwork laid by the Jobs-led Apple…but also the burdens.
I don’t see where you proved that Apple lost the vision and is now operating just like their competitors. not seeing it at all. not in my experience, and not in the numbers — they don’t lie.
you’ve never asked me anything, and I think you’re confusing me with the person you were replying to.
saying something is idiotic is not the same as saying someone is an idiot.
your board tho. if you let random trolls dig in and chase off your regulars, that’s your audience you’re losing. since Jim no longer has Yep/Nope controlled leaks, the main thing left for your audience are these comments.
sanity. thank you.
Gosh, lighten up. Yes, I believe that the impression I’m meant to get from every Apple keynote (I’d guess from every keynote from every company), is that their product is in some basic way better than the products of all the competitors. In Apple’s language, the terms “revolutionary” and “magical” are part of that language. Particularly the first word, which is in every single press release.
The challenge from Apple is that they HAVE done revolutionary things! We’ve all seen it! I daresay anyone reading this blog has possession of one either in their hands right at this moment or within arm’s reach! What made the iPhone revolutionary was evident in the seeing and the using, to everyone who had any interaction with one. It didn’t have to be labelled as such: it was clearly such, from the moment it was revealed.
Few things have that immediate, visceral reaction. The iPad…we’d seen this interaction before. The iPad is really really really cool and wonderful. But we’d already spent three years interacting with our phones in a similar way. The Apple Watch is a marvel of engineering…it’s absolutely amazing how Apple’s engineers have packed so much power and so much functionality into such a little and attractive package. But it’s not something we’ve fundamentally never seen.
The same feelings really can’t be attributed to those latter two devices the way they could to the iPhone, thus the same words can’t really be, either.
Darn it, now I want to watch that January, 2007 keynote again, to listen carefully to the words. This will be an interesting exercise and comparison!
Oh, no, I didn’t mean that Apple lost the vision! I mean that the vision was singular in 2001, rare in 2007, unusual in 2010…but it was also a roadmap for others to follow. You can call it “stealing” if you like, and I wouldn’t tell you you’re wrong. I just mean that a decade ago it was only Apple following that map, and so it was really head and shoulders well above everyone else. Now its competitors also follow it.
As such, it’s EASY for casual onlookers to say that “Apple has lost its way” because it no longer enjoys this unique vision. It blazed a trail, and others followed. My question is, if you look at this from a tactical or strategic angle, as a competition, where does Apple go from here? Do they blaze a trail in a different direction, repeat the seismic changes of 2007? Or continue to try to offer the best experience on the current trail?
Of course in reality they’re trying to do both, and really looking at it this way is only an exercise in looking backwards and not forwards. I suppose it’s really only a question of not what’s going to happen, but how we’ll look back at what’s going to happen after it’s happened. Which is what lesser minds like mine do, leaving the forward-thinking to the minds at Apple.
Hey, I don’t have to watch it, there’s a transcript! Woo-hoo! So, in the January 2007 original iPhone keynote, here’s a breakdown:
REVOLUTIONARY
This one is a tough one to evaluate. He uses the word 12 times, but some of them are direct callbacks to earlier times he used them. So he would reference a “revolutionary user interface,” and then later reference it like, “why do we need a revolutionary user interface?” That really is one use, but called back once.
Counting that way, I’d say there are somewhere between 6 and 8 unique uses of “Revolutionary.”
FANTASTIC
He used that word twice, once to describe Pirates of the Caribbean (though I’m looking at that out of context, I don’t know if he’s referencing the movie, or the experience of watching the movie on the phone). So, maximum of twice.
MAGIC
Once. “Magical” not at all.
AWESOME
That appears 11 times in the transcript, but several are applied to other devices. The iTV in particular. The rest are about experience, not the product, inasmuch as those are not the same thing. “Isn’t this awesome?” The word is used six times in the iPhone preso, but four times in “isn’t this awesome?” context. So, as little as twice, if you’re inclined to count it that way.
TREMENDOUS
Three times
SUPER
Twice, and both times in compound words: “super-easy” and “super-smart”
WONDERFUL
Four times, but once was in reference to an iPod ad, once was in reference to their experience with a business partner, and once was repeated. “Wonderful, just wonderful.” I’m counting that as one.
BEAUTIFUL
Seven times, twice for the iTV and five times for the iPhone (three of those times for the earbuds).
Now I’ve got to find transcripts of other keynotes and compare! I’m really interested to see if this is a real phenomenon, or if it’s context-sensitive. That would be really interesting.
Also worth noting, in the breakdown I just did, that context is very important. When Steve Jobs gave a keynote, it was very often just him. Other speakers would speak, but with not as much stage time as they get now.
I can’t tell if, psychologically, that makes a difference. If one person gets up and says something’s great, that’s one opinion you’re hearing. When four people (say, Tim Cook, Phil Schiller, Eddie Cue and Craig Federighi) each get up and each use a similar word (“fantastic,” “revolutionary,” “awesome,” whatever) it begins to sound like groupthink…like it’s a message they’ve each been asked to hammer home, and it gets more repetitive. “Yeah, the last guy said it was great too.”
Finally, comparing any speaker to Mr. Jobs is a trifle unfair. He was an engaging speaker, with the ability to really draw you in. Call it a “reality distortion field” if you must…but he was better than any of the current presenters at making me believe his absolute sincerity in the context of salesmanship. It’s not that I don’t believe the others are being sincere…just that it feels forced. It feels like “marketing” in a way that it never did with Mr. Jobs. So there’s that, too.
I don’t know if you’ve tried iOS 10 beta and the new music app. If not then you’ll see in a week or two. It’s not at all fixed!
If I choose to repeat songs, I can’t change the order in Up Next. Up-Next history is gone.
Now playing in iPad is just wrong. It fills half the screen, and disables interactions with the other half. Also it looks like a slide over app, which makes me want to slide it right to close it, but I should slide down.
Moving the knob to fast forward a song, no longer gets accurate by sliding down/up.
The only feature added is Lyrics which always requires internet even for downloaded songs. They could have easily added Smart Playlists creation. They already work, so why not create them on iOS too?
And the funny thing is they’ve had the perfect design for music app for at least 3 years. The Remote app. Everything in that app is right and implemented perfectly. Try it! Library, Up-Next, Search, Now Playing, Playlists, …
I’m not saying it should be perfect, I’m saying it shouldn’t get worse!
Have you seen the new control center? How many places do we need to see the AirPlay icon? Just because the next iPhone is going to use Bluetooth headsets, all other devices shouldn’t suffer!
I don’t need to see revolutionary products on a regular schedule. I just want good iteration on existing ones. And a firm hand on the slippage in existing software that accretes too much functionality to remain Apple-like.
IBM rode its perfected supply chain and best-in-the-known-universe R&D lab right down to oblivion.
But in 2007, the iPhone was revolutionary and Magical!
If you’re referring to Aperture and the unbelievably clunky combination of Photo and iCloud, well, I have to seriously question whether there is a single person in that product line or senior management who has a non-technical family member with a DSLR or other non-iPhone photography device. But we’re not allowed to say that…
Calm down, its just my opinion.
“I don’t see using Intel’s Skylake as an alternative for Apple. There were shortages in the chips, which would have made for MacBook Pro shortages. Worse still, the Skylake chips had a major flaw that affected processing.
It would have been a disaster for Apple to release a MacBook Pro based on those chips, but people still kicked up a fuss. That’s not reasonable.”
But… I think the common expectation is that the new 15″ MacBook Pros are waiting for the Skylake i7 6770/6870/6970HQ’s with Iris Pro 580. That’s what all the articles said in January when they were announced. So far, the only product shipping with those chips is Intel’s own Skull Canyon NUC which just came out this past month — no other laptops have them yet. Whether they’re significantly delayed from when they were “supposed” to come out is probably something only known internally for sure at Intel and Apple. This is completely lost on all the threads full of whiners complaining that Skylake is a year old or whatever now, and the low power Kaby Lake chips are going to begin to ship. Intel’s chip families release in several iterations over a long period of time (for example, Xeons for the Mac Pro usually come out the following year when the next gen family has begun delivering mobile/desktop chips). Likewise, Kaby Lake chips for the MBP won’t be seen until sometime next year.
That, and the newly released AMD Polaris GPUs are two solid reasons to bet on as to why MBPs are not out yet.
There’s a definite lack of followup from the usual Mac blogs who reported back in January when Intel announced them, that these were likely the chips destined for the MBP, and a LOT of misinformation out there amongst the complainers.
Despite your protestations to the contrary it is not unreasonable to expect a company that can post $10 billion in profit consistently to at least update their products on a yearly basis. It is not unreasonable to expect a company with 30% or greater margins to choose the best of what is available.
There hasn’t been a Macbook Pro update yet this year, thats fine, Skylake isn’t ready, neither are the Polaris mobile parts, nor are NVIDIAs mobile parts shipping in quantity. But last years Macbook Pro update to the 15″ was lacking, featuring a 1 year old CPU and a 2 year old GPU architecture (the m370x is GCN 1.0). I know AMD had nothing else to offer since they are so behind in so many areas but last year Apple could have shipped a NVIDIA 950m at the same power consumption as the 750m with almost twice the performance and (most importantly) a modern architecture (even if Apple refuses to update their OpenGL implementation or bring Metal up to the feature levels required to use the new GPU architectures). They could also have waited till August last year and released the 15″ MBP with a Broadwell CPU (instead of simply reusing Haswell) Or they could have done two 15″ updates last year, one early with Haswell, one late with Broadwell (though to my mind a single broadwell update would have been best).
The problem with the decisions Apple makes is that when they choose old, outdated, parts it strands their products (even if updated a little over a year ago) with hardware that is much older than that. Apple is criticized, rightly, because the Mac line is not maintained, and it looks bad for a company that sells a premium product that they cannot maintain a their very small Mac product line.
Consider also the Mac Mini, it used to be available with discrete GPUs (even if mobile) and quad core CPUs, these are missing now from the lineup. These products are obviously still quite desirable considering how quickly they disappear from the online store when refurbished models become available. It gets worse though, Apple didn’t just neglect the Mac Mini they actively made it worse. I don’t believe that apple, with its legendary supply chain, cannot support the option of a quad core. Consider Gigabyte, they make dozens of motherboards and are a small fraction the size of Apple.
The common excuse on Apple blogs these days is that the CPUs or GPUs aren’t ready, but when products start to age beyond a year that excuse doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Apple doesn’t need a press conference for every product update, every update doesn’t need to be earth shattering, silent small updates that just make sure their products are not years behind would be fine, and would let those of us who use our Macs for work actually trust that the Mac line was being cared for and not neglected.
I love my Mac, and I hate the very thought of building a Hackintosh or switching to Windows but that doesn’t mean I have to accept that they don’t have a problem in Mac hardware and your defence of the Mac line, looks bad when it is so obviously out of date. Computers take time to get ready but they should have contingency plans so that they can update the lines at least once a year even if one supplier falls behind. Remember the first G4s shipped with PCI graphics cards because the AGP ones weren’t ready in time.
It isn’t enough for them to release great things this fall because trust has been lost. How am I to know that it won’t be 2+ years between hardware updates again?
I won’t even get into the issues I have with the Mac Pro or iMac, those would take too long.
The Broadwell chips for the 15″ MBP were a paper launch only, they didn’t actually ship. Apple didn’t have a choice but to reuse Haswell. And they stick with AMD because of OpenCL, which Nvidia cards suck at.
lol, I’m not sure if you’re being tongue-in-cheek or serious, based on your phrasing…but I’m going to answer sincerely. I think you’re right!
In hindsight, I think there have been two Apple products that felt “revolutionary” and “magical”…or, just paradigm-changing…at the time. One was the Mac, and one was the iPhone. Both seemed to turn the industry on its head, and both were relentlessly copied. You could say the same thing about the iPod, I guess, but I don’t think that was copied until after it was a success. With the Mac and with the iPhone…you just knew immediately that everything had changed.
Hmm, there were at least these:
https://www.scan.co.uk/products/156-msi-pe60-2qe-laptop-intel-core-i7-5700hq-27ghz-8gb-ram-1tb-hdd-2gb-nvidia-geforce-gtx-960m
and
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834233094
I will admit they didn’t launch in quantity, and I suppose the MacBook Pro probably has only a few possible updates.
OpenCL is a good reason to stick with AMD, though I’ve always gotten good performance out of my GeForce cards in the Adobe suite though aftermarket support for CUDA.
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I for one will be pumped up by whatever they announce… a way better camera is enough to get me excited. I just have never ready anything like this before by Jim but I totally get that it could be the genuine thought process leading up to a major Apple event : )
About features, sure. And things like Continuity might as well be magic.
Most Mac blogs are meant to be read for entertainment only, and possibly wondering exactly where they got the really good drugs from.
Yeah, because the original iPhone had no revolutionary, magical, etc features at all.
No, the point is incomplete. I meant to show that though the original iPhone was a mind-blowing, revolutionary thing…that Steve Jobs’ presentation actually used FEWER instances of those words than get used these days in Apple presentations. The truly world-changing products don’t need those labels affixed. What I’ve listed above seems almost under-selling, maybe? Because the iPhone spoke for itself.
It strikes me, too, that several instances I’ve listed above really talk about experience, rather than the object. How it makes you feel. When Mr. Jobs said, “Isn’t this awesome?” I feel more like he’s asking us if we feel awesome in the doing, rather than the phone being awesome itself. I’m probably over-thinking that.
Anyway the point will remain incomplete, of course, until I can compare to other keynotes, which is going to be a long and tedious task to which I’m not up now. So I’ll have to acknowledge the point is incomplete and dangling there.
Fair enough. But be careful with raw counts. Even if Apple’s newer iPhones haven’t been as revolutionary as the original, some of the features have been. I really don’t think it’s hyperbole to call handoff magical, including the ability to shoot yourself in the foot with it if you don’t understand it. (A friend of mine used handoff to transfer a long draft email from Mac to iPhone, then deleted it.)
Likewise, even compared to the experience of using touch cards or an iPhone, using Apple Pay on the watch is a revolutionary experience.
I think what I’m saying is that devices aren’t “magical” unless they redefine a market, but features certainly can be. 🙂
We can’t know if Tim could have been a founder. What I’m saying is that being a founder confers a certain mystique on the founder him/herself. It’s not about the title they have but about the fact that founders literally created something out of nothing. It’s not a huge benefit when a company is tiny, but when it’s grown, you look at the person and think “they started this entire thing.” When the thing they started is Apple, which created and popularized one of the first personal computers with the Apple II and then radically changed how personal computers worked with the Mac, being one of the people who started that adds a power that’s simply not transferrable.
It doesn’t matter if their successors are better, worse or different than the founder… they’re not the founder. In Tim’s case, he’s also has different skills than Steve did. He’s not a genius level product manager, he has other skills. That leads to unfair comparisons. It also DRASTICALLY overlooks the fact that Steve didn’t invent, design and code everything. He hired great people, led them, demanded the best from them and had the power (both by being founder and by being CEO) to say “No, Not good enough.” And sometimes, he was wrong. We forget that, now.
Which all brings us back to the subject of this article. I don’t have any disagreement with anything you just posted, at all. But it’s not the “simple narrative.” It’s fair, but it’s more complicated than ascribing all wonderful and megaprofitable things at Apple (iPod, iPhone, iPad, Mac sorta) to Steve Jobs and Apple under Tim Cook having no such big hits.
That simple, easily digestible narrative is easily fed with heightened expectations. And what’s fun is that this narrative can lead to different (again, simple) storylines depending on where you want to go with it:
One (upbeat) has Steve Jobs as the forefather, Tim Cook as the unproven farmhand that has to live up (unfairly) to his mighty ancestor, an impossible task! The end begs to be that our hero (Cook) does in fact “win” by showing you can achieve in a different (kinder, gentler?) way than his predecessor.
Another (downbeat) has Steve Jobs as the hero, who put together a company that never lost its core values even as it rose from scrappy garage beginnings into a mighty and benevolent titan. Then Tim Cook is the villain, who takes all this goodness and goes astray, who loses sight of what made Apple special, and loses everything.
The longer, more complex truth, as you’ve laid it out (the truth is always longer and more complex than it is in the movies, which in turn is longer and more complex than it is in the trailer) is less easily prone to easy labels and clear villains and heroes.
Such is the way of life, no?
“But it’s not the “simple narrative.” “
Too bad. Life’s not simple. I don’t care about (and don’t respect) people who reduce reality to clickbait headlines and posts. Those people aren’t worth the time it takes to read their drivel.
The entire point of Jim’s post is that some things are clearly reasonable, some are clearly UNreasonable. Yes, there’s a grey area, but that does not excuse nor empower the whiny, unreasonable and almost always less sophisticated and less informed people who expect Apple to always be perfect and to deliver radical breakthroughs every year.
You’re allowed to say whatever you want. Nobody’s there to stop you from looking like an ass except yourself. 🙂
Plug camera or card in. Import. Delete. Done.
Not fair to write something like that without warning us to swallow the cola we’ve got in our mouths, Shawn. 🙂