Comment by burnt-resistor
19 hours ago
Chief Bean Counter Cook doesn't do cool, goodwill, or long term strategy. Only making the same set of products incrementally better and more expensive, and increasingly prone to expensive repair.
19 hours ago
Chief Bean Counter Cook doesn't do cool, goodwill, or long term strategy. Only making the same set of products incrementally better and more expensive, and increasingly prone to expensive repair.
Apple has a ton of problems, but your comments don't address them (primarily the perceived decline in software quality and app store developer gouging).
While cool is subjective, what new, mass-market products should they create? Which product market should they "re-invent"? I wish they'd buy Sonos and fix that shit show, but that's not a profitable market to enter.
Barring the price jump around the iPhone 7, their smartphones have stayed about the same price. [1]
Over half of all smartphone repairs are battery replacements, which implies people don't take care of their batteries or are keeping their phones long enough to wear the battery down normally. [2] Additionally, Apple ranks very well in repairability. [3] They also support their phone's software longer on older devices than the competition.
[1] https://www.androidauthority.com/iphone-price-history-322149... [2] https://www.businessresearchinsights.com/market-reports/smar... [3] https://www.ifixit.com/repairability/smartphone-repairabilit...
Apple may be greedy but they can’t be accused of bungling long term strategy.
While OpenAI sells $2 bills for $1, Tim Cook was out there increasing service revenue and profitability so that it was larger than Macs and iPads combined.
Tim Cook presided over some incredibly lucrative product launches like AirPods, TV+, Apple Music, moved chip design in house which doubled Mac market share and has made the iPhone continually dominant, they’ll even drop third party 5G models soon. These are all incredibly shrewd long term strategy moves.
Lucrative but not cool. There's no long term strategy if there's no new, category-defining, cool products. People will eventually sour on the same-old, same-old and expensive, fragile, unrepairable products.
Excessive greed obliterates goodwill.
You don't seem to understand sj placed cool first, while TC was the bean counter and continues to optimize this while jumping the shark.
Current Apple has a deep, systemic lack of cool and lack of entrepreneurial leadership with good taste that will ultimately lose the crown.
Misinformed take IMO.
M-series chips are insanely cool (literally and figuratively) and have no competition even five years in. Same with the W-series SoCs on watches.
Are there any third-party haptic vibration motors yet?
Shoot, even their trackpads, which already stood alone, have gotten _better_ over the years.
Nobody else will have their own vertically-integrated modem out in production. This will make budget iPhones (maybe all iPhones) so much cheaper once they show Qualcomm the door.
That's before the advances they've made in software, like their camera processing pipeline (which only gets better; their video stack still has no equal) and differential privacy.
Oh, yeah, and the Vision Pro, which basically everyone who has tried it has said that it is the most advanced technology they've ever used.
Almost all of this happened under Cook's tenure.
Apple is still in the business of building insanely cool shit.
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Teen iPhone ownership is up to 88% (!) in the US.
I generally agree with what you're saying, and unlike Cook I don't find it "hard to imagine" life without iPhones (an augmented reality future isn't that far out to consider), but they have a long runway. Gen Z and Gen Alpha define "cool", and they are committed to the ecosystem.
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“sj placed cool first” … in what universe?
Steve placed “Steve likes it” first. Many of the things he liked were terrible.
Cool things happen(ed) at Apple in spite of executive leadership, not because of it. The better E-team players know to stand back and not get in the way.
I'm on a M4 with nano texture display. It's IMO the pinnacle of what a computer should be. I hate apple and their anti repair practices but wanted to chime in about how good the hardware has become.
If they push forward with local AI that can be somewhat trusted, it would be a huge win.