Maybe there’s nothing left to invent...
I am an Apple fan, but cannot agree more. Each IOS and OS-X update has produced more frustrations than appreciations for both the wife and I.
I’m thankfully into Linux at work (where we need a reliable OS) and therefore am building up expertise just in case Apple keeps (dis)improving.
Of course, I’ll continue to avoid Microsoft (the Yugo of operating systems) like the plague.
Well ... we’ll just have to see ... :-) ...
The mention of current leadership stomping on anyone that fails/disappoints... Yeah, that kills creativity so thoroughly, so insidiously, so subtly that you don't even know you've done it until you realize you've gone months or years without anyone doing anything significantly interesting. I have been "in the trenches" as an engineer in several organizations and you can just tell. You can tell when people are excited and doing fun stuff, and when they are just doing their job, keeping their head down.
Apple need to return to America.
That is their problem.
Eh, give them time. If Tim isn’t the guy, maybe they will find someone else. They are working on the watch thingy and tv thingy.
I read yesterday they’ve now sold 500 million phones...
Apples best days are behind them, it’s all downhill from here.
I have started the switch from Apple products to android and am very satisfied.
For the shareholder’s part, I hope that they are working on innovations. I still think that wearable tech is the next big leap; then again, Facebook just paid 2 billion for a tech company which doesn’t actually have a product or customers yet, so it would appear they’d agree with me.
But what form will it take? Seems like every ‘smart watch’ has been a design failure; Google Glass still appears to be stirring up excitement. But the wearable tech that seems to have the strongest sales are activity trackers and GPS run trackers. Only problem is Apple has ceded a lot of that territory to partners already in the field and likely contractually forbidden from entering it themselves.
I certainly don’t count Apple out.
I am finding more and more stupid things in Apple products, these days.
I recently had to update the OS on my iPhone, and the new system has useless battery sucking features that do not add to the utility of the phone. It has dynamic graphics that are visually interesting the first time you see them, but get to be annoying the hundreth time you see them. The default font for things like the clock and calendar is very elegant and thin, but it is nearly impossible to see.
I find the same annoying things on my iPad and on the Mac I use from time to time at work. A few years ago, I had confidence that I could use any Apple product and I would not find anything in the design or function that was glaringly stupid. Not is not the case anymore. Not by a long shot.
It appears that one of the functions of Steve Jobs was to look at things and ask “Is this stupid?”. That gatekeeper function is no longer being met. So the GPS guys can slip in a function that appends your location to each text message, but nobody pays attention to the fact that they just decreased battery life by 10%. Get three or four things that do that, and your phone dies at 5:30 PM every day.
Once my phone starts dying every day, it is worse than useless to me. I have announced to the World that I can be reached by any means at any time, and half the time I am carrying around a dead brick, and pissing off everybody who tries to contact me. I have disabled as much as I can, but the battery suck continues. It is almost as if the competing feature architects have insulated their little contributions to the battery suck and leave it to some other department to invent the Magic Battery Fairy to make it all work.
I could get a Mophie. I could upgrade my phone to an iPhone 5. I could install a charger on my work desk, my car, my home desk and my nightstand. Or I could just buy an Android phone.
Since I don’t see things getting better any time soon at Apple, Samsung is looking better and better. And I loved my iPhone. You know how Nixon never said “If I have lost Walter Cronkite, I have lost America”. Well if Apple has lost me, they really have lost America. Time to get out.
I read that after the transition to Tim Cook that Apple started hiring many more people with MBA backgrounds. Under Steve Jobs they didn’t have that many MBAs outside of finance. Now, from what I read, they have a lot of them. The article suggested that it might indicate a shift from a creative company to a managed one.
Steve Jobs was a visionary product guy. Tim Cook is a manager. Not to say anything against Cook — there’s nothing wrong with that — but it is a personality difference.
Must be a wonderful guy to work for....
His management style, says Kane, is to delegate responsibility but then bring the hammer down on those who fail him.
Everybody knows the future, nobody remembers the past.
You mean a company that has revolutionized four product categories on a scale that 99.99% of companies never do to one hasn’t done it again in FOUR YEARS? That the world’s largest company by market cap grew only 9.6%? DOOMED!
The problem with routinely exceeding expectations is that eventually folks come up with completely unreasonable expectations.