Posted on 01/21/2016 12:24:26 AM PST by Swordmaker
“And what is Apple’s vision for the next 3 years other than milking retread phones and tablets again?
Nothing? I thought so.”
You have no idea, of course. Apple is famously secretive about upcoming products.
Apple spent $8.1 billion on R&D in 2015, up 34% year over year. It has thousands of brilliant employees. I think it has an above-average chance at many more wildly successful product lines, as well as disruptive changes to it’s existing products such as Macs.
I've never reflexively bought Apple products, but I used to buy them more frequently because they were the superior product. My last phone was an Android, cause I liked it better than the iPhone. When we cut cable, looked at Apple TV, went with Roku, cause Apple TV didn't support Amazon Prime. For a laptop, went with Macbook Pro, cause the new Macbook seems underpowered and not being able to connect to an electrical outlet and hook up a remote drive at the same time without adapters seemed ridiculous. My wife used the oldest original white Macbook we had for web surfing, watching videos, etc. When it died, went with the ASUS flipbook. It seems reasonably sturdy, is plenty fast, and costs a third of the price of an 11" Macbook Air.
Apple Watch? No way.
I still have a 27" iMac, and we have a couple of Macbook Pros, and my daughter has an iPad, but she says the new one is a lot glitchier than her original iPad2. Every iteration of iTunes is a little clunkier, and I wish I'd stuck with Yosemite. Upgrading to El Capitan has screwed up several features of Adobe Creative Cloud.
Apple hasn't driven off a cliff, and the computers are still superior to their Windows counterparts, IMHO.
They're just not getting any better, and in some instances are declining. The older Macbook Pro is superior to the newer Macbook. The Apple Watch seems like a vanity project. Nothing new out of Apple is remotely appealing to me.
Good for them that they turn awesome profits, but I don't care. I don't care about Tim Cook's supply chain genius or whether someone else finds my tech choices cool. I care about whether the product does what I need. It used to be that about 90% of the time, it was an Apple product. More and more, it's not.
It's been announced that Amazon is going to release an Amazon Prime app for the new Apple TV soon.
I have a MacBook and it is not underpowered for what it is. Nor do I find that there is a lack of connectivity. When I need to connect anything more, which is seldom, the adaptor handles it. The weight savings making the MacBook weigh less than 2 pounds is worth the sacrifice of extra ports. Printing? We use a WIFI printer. Backup? The backup drive is connected to the WIFI router. My iPhone does it's syncing via WIFI. My other devices are all connected via WIFI to the MacBook, as are my other Macs. Can you tell me what I need more ports for on this MacBook? The MacBook is surprisingly fast. I wanted a light weight portable to carry with me when I travel. This machine fulfills that specifications far better than even the MacBook Air models do. For other work, I have a far more powerful Mac.
I certainly would NOT have inflicted a Windows machine on my spouse when she was used to a Macintosh OS X system.
As for your claim that every upgrade to "iTunes" is a little clunkier and then seem to claim its latest version is called "El Capitan," and you should have stuck with "Yosemite" makes me wonder if you even own ANY Apple products at all. The operating system on Macs is OS X, not "iTunes," Richard, and someone with the familiarity with Apple Macs you claim would know that. Perhaps that is just a peculiar turn of phrase, but you put your believability in doubt.
I simply do not believe you when you say that your daughter claims her later iPad is "glitchier" than her iPad 2, especially with your implication that t is a failing of the later iPads in general. . . because that is completely counter to everyone else's experience with the later iPads which are either four to eight times faster than her iPad 2. I handed my iPad Air on to my girlfriend who had been using an iPad 2 when I upgraded to an iPad Pro, and she is blown away by how much better and smoother the experience is.
Of course the MacBook Pro is superior in some ways to the MacBook. They are designed for different purposes. In other ways, the MacBook Pro is not superior, but has an actual disadvantages. It's a lot heavier, for one thing. It's thinner. For some those are superior characteristics to the Pro. For doing things that don't require lots of horsepower, the MacBook can be an ideal notebook when a MacBook Pro or even a MacBook Air would not.
Products and vision are two distinctly different things. Vision leads development. Without a clear direction, products can and do fail.
Every other successful company knows their goals and why. Take T-Mobile. Their goal was to be the uncarrier and pass Sprint for the number #3 spot. By removing the subsidies, they changed the way everyone else was doing business, and they achieved their vision, in just 3 years.
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