What I miss most about Apple was that Apple was the company that made reasonable decisions for you, when it came to security and all those technical details that was/is endemic in any computing. They had Opinions with a capital O - and made sure that every product you'd buy would be guaranteed to work with other products. If you had the money, you could focus on what you were trying to get DONE rather than spend forever learning about the implementation details. Abstract people from the hardware - focus on the use cases.
Now it seems they're leaving people who depended on that behind. No company offers an ecosystem that doesn't require "fiddling" to get things to work correctly. Maybe this is the way it has to be, but I really wonder what Apple's strategy is going forward, because its clear that they've slowed down or stopped development on everything other than their phones/pads and the occasional laptop. What are all their engineers doing? What is the use of having hundreds of billions in the bank if you're not investing it in growing or creating product lines?
>...made sure that every product you'd buy would be guaranteed to work with other products. If you had the money, you could focus on what you were trying to get DONE rather than spend forever learning about the implementation details. Abstract people from the hardware - focus on the use cases.
Looks down at iPhone 7 which cannot be plugged into new MacBook Pro...
That's probably a temporary glitch in the Apple matrix however ...
this is another announcement after the earlier announcement that they do not develop monitor anymore. They won't develop wifi anymore. They are definitively reducing the Mac line ( you may love or not the new MBP, but they are clearly settling down on a single line of laptop with 3.5 models, and at best a status quo with the rest )
So what does Apple still do ? They do iPhone, iPad and Watches with a limited cloud offering. Everything else is shrinking: Professional line of software and hardware, Mac line in general, hardware ecosystem, even the plain first party software are somewhat stable (I mean, yeah there is TV coming and the rest is same old same old)
What is such a gigantic company doing with its boatload of money that they can't even ship 1 pair of headphone on time ? Even their flagship laptop recently announced has a 4 weeks waiting period, after working on it for 2 years ? (yeah this is an exaggeration, of course there are technical difficulties, but again that's Apple, an enormous, ultra-rich company focused on an extremely tiny product line)
We have a very small, cheap, basic 19" black Dell monitor sitting in the kitchen at home. When a new iphone arrived recently, I stuck the sticker that comes with it onto the base of the monitor.
When an Apple loving friend came around I witnessed first hand the value of branding. She was entranced by this cool black Apple monitor and wanted to know where I had got it from. I'm pretty sure she would have paid at least $100 over the Dell price for such a cool Apple product. She was incredibly disappointed that it was a trick when she found out. The monitor no longer had any value in her eyes even though it was exactly the same as before.
Apple can charge outrageous prices for their products, and people love them despite/because of that. Can't understand why they'd stop making monitors.
On first glance thats hilarious, but then it reminds me of the power of marketing and i get sad and worried about the state of humanity. Shit like this makes me wonder how we as a species has gotten as far as we have.
Bear in mind that brand equity is often earned. I feel that Apple have genuinely earned over the years. However, they now risk losing a lot of it due to the fragmentation of their ecosystem.
Maybe. I can't help but feel that Apple would have been long dead if iPod had not gotten USB support, and thus was usable on Windows.
Before that i don't think most anyone outside of USA even knew Apple existed unless you were interested in media production in some sense.
And that in turn lead to a feedback loop because certain celebrities would show up with an iPod (mostly noticed because of those white wires) because they themselves walk the media circles.
Similarly Apple could get the labels and studios to agree to distribute via iTunes because of that inside track in the industry.
And that in turn was what bootstrapped iPhone beyond being a fancy screened featurephone (though whoever talked Jobs down from going "nuclear" on the gray market jailbreakers was perhaps the true genius there).
But that all this then produce the effect that if you slap a fruit logo on a object peoples interest and appreciation is still worrying. What comes to mind is the comedy caricature of an "art critic" that can deliver a spiel of big words that means crap all upon closer scrutiny.
To be fair you can't just call it a "fruit logo". If you try to slightly modify it people will instantly recognize that it's not the Apple logo and it goes back to being a stupid fruit logo. So (of course) the point is not the fruit but the symbol.
You mention 1 experience with 1 person in your kitchen and conclude that this is how everyone behaves...
Another interpretation might be that 'people pay outrageous prices' because Apple's products are of higher quality/last longer, which makes the long term price lower than similar products of competitors; For example, i am still using an iPhone 5 (September 2012) which runs the latest iOS version smoothly...
Thing is in the case of a dell monitor, those are incredibly well built. Over built in some areas. I believe a sudden drop in interest in a product because its not a brand you expected despite clear positive qualities indicates a malformed attachment.
you know that because (i assume) you have the technical knowledge.
Average people don't know which products of which brand may or may not be well built. But they do now that Apple products are generally of high quality.
The problem is in the case of zero-sum thinking with quality. "Oh that's not Apple, well it's crap" is ridiculous a logical fallacy.
Apple being of whatever quality has no bearing on the quality of anything else. Not only do other companies match, many of them exceed quality of apple.
A colleague of mine dropped nearly $3k on a personal MacBook Pro, then cancelled his order when he found out about the new touch bar. Then he started looking at other laptops that were good quality (we were suggesting lenovo X1s or dell XPSs) and he balked at the prices just above $2k.
"But these are considerably less than what you already had paid for a laptop!" -> "Yeah, but they're not Apple, and when people see Apple, they know you have a good laptop". That branding was literally worth almost $1k to my colleague...
I guess he was willing to pay the premium to not have to mentally sift Thinkpads from Ideapads and XPSs from Inspirons. With Apple its just one "brand", Apple. It is perhaps the greatest marketing asset they possess.
Because Apple hardware costs more. They're trying to make a point that it sorta-kinda doesn't, in the end, if you bother to sell the old stuff.
I upgrade my PC hardware by throwing away/recycling the old one and buying a new one.
I upgrade my Apple hardware by selling the old one on Craigslist and then buying a new one.
In both cases, I spend about $1000 net each time. In the PC case, that's +$0, -$1000. In the Apple case, that's +$1000, -$2000. Either way, it's -$1000 net.
If you prefer Apple products but think they're "too expensive" because they cost ~$1000 more, this is why people tend to disagree. They paid that ~$1000 once, as an "entrance fee" for their first laptop, but they don't have to pay it again.
Because I thought I saved money by buying Lenovos on paper at least as good as the Apples. Only to have a resale value of about $10 after 3 years when time came to buy a new laptop. (If the hinges etc lasted that long.) A Macbook is more expensive, but not only did it last me +3 years, I sold it for about a third of its original price, money I used to pay part of my next Macbook. That's why.
Enter my annecdata: I had to surrender my work MBP and got an XPS 15, supposedly one of the best non-Apple alternatives. Alas, here I sit, typing this on my 2008 17" MBP. Even though it has worse spec is nearly every way, it's just a much more usable notebook for me. TL;DR: The Apple premium is still [so far] worth it for me.
Anyone want to buy a barely used XPS 15 (top spec)?
Again, what I quoted from my colleague was his rationale. I don't know why people struggle to accept it (and find it amusing that my original comment attracted so much downvoting - apparently people disagree with me about the conversations I was present for...).
It wasn't about 'mental sifting', or 'flexy laptops' or any of the other excuses people will try to insert. It was about paying for the brand recognition. He'd gone 'wow' at my X1 carbon, and gone 'wow' at another colleagues XPS. But he balked on price because of brand recognition, not because "a single product line is easier to deal with than a choice, so I'm willing to pay almost 50% more".
I certainly agree that Apple's greatest asset is their brand reputation.
It's interesting to take your friend's reaction apart into two components. I don't think they were actually scared of spending $3000 for a laptop, since they were willing to buy the Apple laptop. They were scared, I think, of telling people they spent $3000 on a laptop, if it wasn't a "luxury fashion" brand laptop where that kind of price is societally acceptable to splurge on.
In other words: if you buy a $3000 gaming PC, you're a weird nerd who cares too much about computers. If you buy a $3000 MBP, you're a professional and a connoisseur. Your friend wanted a $3000 computer (probably because, to be frank, they are a "weird nerd" who can put $3000 of hardware to good use), but they didn't want to be labelled as such.
I guess people are a bit in denial about the fashion brand aspect of Apples. I've got an Air and a Lenovo X201 and partly switched to the Air because I got negative comments about the Lenovo's looks - "that thing looks really old" etc. Both laptops work fine.
>Apple can charge outrageous prices for their products, and people love them despite/because of that. Can't understand why they'd stop making monitors.
My guess is that there's just not enough profit in it. Monitors last a really long time, and while people like your friend will ooh and ahh over them, that doesn't necessarily translate into sales, and since they don't need to be replaced every year, they won't have the built-in profit that their phones have. It's probably the same with their WiFi access points.
With their WiFi access points I suspect it's because WiFi gear gets overheated and break down. (Probably fried capacitors.) I have given up on Apples' and other premium gear WiFi because of this. Now I just purchase 3 new cheap WiFi routes every 12 - 18 months and throw away the ones I have.
I have another Linksys "premium" home router ($200-300) but the WiFi died on that too, but it lives on as an OpenWRT home router but with WiFi disabled. The Apple WiFi routers also lived on for a while with WiFi disabled but acting as TimeMachine backups. Then the disks died and I couldn't be arsed to pry open the case with a hair drier to get at the disk inside and replace it. So for my home, the setup went from Apple all-in-one combo gear with routing, WiFi and backup disk, to specialized functions for WiFi (cheapest off the shelf), routing (openwrt), and backup disks (standard NAS hardware). (For TimeMachine.)
I hope my 15" Macbook lasts for a really long time, because when it's dead I don't know if Apple has any Macbook I want to have. But that's tomorrows sorrows..., no use worrying about that until the time comes. (I guess I can always fall back to Linux and some PC laptop.)
You might want to consider investing in some better gear, like some Ubiquiti APs and a proper firewall appliance (e.g. pfSense or a Ubiquiti firewall as well). For not much more than the cost of your 'premium' home router, you could buy 2-3 APs and a firewall appliance and have a much more reliable configuration (or at least, less to buy when something dies).
I did invest the time and money in a pfSense, but that's WAY more complicated to configure [correctly] than my old and retired AirPort Express. I really can't blame "normal" people for not going that route and I'll join the crowd pining for the Apple that was.
OpenWRT is a good-idea firmware running on consumer-grade hardware which almost definitely can't deal with what you're throwing at it.
Just beacuse you paid a bunch of money for it and flashed it with a better firmware doesn't make it good hardware, and custom firmwares often have poor support (and, on more than a few occasions, worse performance) than the default firmwares optimized by the manufacturer for the specific hardware they have.
The fact that you have to keep buying new hardware tells me that you have lousy hardware and should step up to proper hardware rather than expensive consumer-grade stuff.
Yes. Or you know, keep replacing the parts that break, the things with WiFi i them. These run stock firmware. The one with openwrt is now for routing and firewall only and works fine. (Wifi disabled, Ethernet only.) A benefit to replacing wifi gear so far has been to keep one step ahead of the neighbours in the wifi spectrum. Gets crowded signal wise downtown.
What you call "premium" is in reality just overpriced consumer gear. Ciscos enterprise access points happily sustain 5 years of thorough use without an issue, but they cost more than 300$.
(I typed a reply to this but it doesn't seem to have been saved....)
What the heck are you doing with your WiFi gear to have these problems? I've used all kinds of cheap-o routers over the years, and never had problems with them overheating. Are you living in the desert without A/C or something? My current router is just a cheap TP-Link dual-band I got used on Ebay; it runs DD-WRT and has been working fine for 1.5 years hiding behind my sofa. Before that, I had a cheap Cisco/Linksys e1000 I got used and ran DD-WRT on for probably 3 years. I gave it away to someone, and last I heard it still works just fine. Before that I had some D-Link I think, which I replaced because a firmware update prevented my network print jobs from going through (obviously not a hardware problem). I've also had (about 4 years ago, for work) a Cisco/Linksys dual-band which worked great, and a Cisco enterprise AP which was very reliable though the IOS UI was the worst thing I've ever seen in my life. Honestly, your post is the first time I've heard anyone complain about WiFi routers having overheating problems.
Maybe I'm luckier because I usually run DD-WRT and set the transmit strength a bit lower, but I've only done that with the last couple of routers.
I don't know really. I live in the same country you do. Maybe you could class my closet with a PC and a Mac Mini for remote compilation as a local desert of sorts. It gets pretty warm in there.
> That's probably a temporary glitch in the Apple matrix however ...
No, it's endemic to Apple products in the past five+ years, starting with Thunderbolt so people needed to carry converters to connect DVI and VGA monitors and beamers, wired networks, etc - which are common in most workplaces still. Apple could've alleviated that by providing a universal converter with the MBP, but they decided against that.
They're repeating that step with the new Macbooks using only USB-C, although this time it's a bit more standardized.
They screwed up with the iPhone, again making their own proprietary connector instead of USB-C (which probably wasn't around at the time), and by removing the 3.5mm jack making it incompatible with all existing headphones / earplugs.
Apple could've fixed it with the iphone 7, but they didn't, sticking to their connector in which they probably invested a lot of monies. They could've fixed it with the new MBP by adding a universal converter / docking station, or even supplying an USB-C to Lightning cable, but they didn't.
It's not a glitch in the Apple matrix, because they're not making any efforts in fixing it.
Thunderbolt display was also a massive 'glitch' in the lineup. It still has the old original Magsafe power on it which hasn't shipped on Macs for years! To mitigate this they've been shipping an adapter in the box since then. Crazy! http://www.macrumors.com/2012/06/13/apple-including-free-mag...
They're also moving towards everything wireless. I can't remember the last time I plugged my iPhone into my MBP. It syncs to iCloud and updates are all OTA.
> Never mind that wires will always be better ... than wireless.
For some values of "better". For me, not plugging in and needing to carrying around wires is always better.
> and more private
Wireless can be secure and unencrypted wired transfers can be sniffed via the electromagnetic radiation they emit. This isn't as cut and dry as some like to pretend.
Welcome to the difference between "in a security researcher's dreams" and "occurs frequently out in the real world".
I went to a security conference once where a presenter was telling me about a previous conf, where he was demonstrating a 'free wifi' box that snooped on all connections and pulled passwords out of them. He was demoing it on stage when the wifi went out in the other auditorium behind (also part of the sec conference). His magic little box then went berserk as huge amounts of security professionals at a security hacking conference then connected to it to try and re-establish their wifi. [1]
Compare this kind of story to the kind of setup you need to have to sniff EM radiation from a cat-5 cable.
--
[1] The point of his story was that security professionals love to lecture others on correct tech use, but in reality the sec recommendations come so thick and fast that even the sec professionals don't keep up with them. How is a mere mortal to cope?
I totally agree that in general, wired will beat wireless for security. After all, you can also encrypt your wired connections. I was merely pointing out that it's not a guarantee that wireless is worse. It can be secure.
The "better" argument was my bigger disagreement. Wired isn't "better" in any absolute terms. I'll happily use wireless rather than wired for the convenience of walking across my house with my laptop. Or, you know, actually using my cell phone.
> For some values of "better". For me, not plugging in and needing to carrying around wires is always better.
Ha! I don't believe it for a second. The other day my iPhone went from 100% to dead in less than an hour - in airplane mode using only the music app and strava.
This anecdote seems lacking value. I don't know why your phone died in an hour, but given that you claim to have been in airplane mode, I don't see how "wireless" is relevant.
Given that you were using Strava, I'd guess you killed your battery running GPS, but that doesn't mix with airplane mode.
My MacBook doesn't have its own data plan, so when I'm out and can't sponge off someone's free WiFi (or don't trust it), I tether my phone. It's a great thing to be able to do.
And if I'm in that situation (often: in a library, a school parking lot waiting for my kid's basketball practice to end, etc.) I'm stingy about battery power. I turn off the Mac's Wifi (which makes a big difference), and wire tether my phone.
If this is so true, they should have erred in the other direction. Made the cable plug into usb-c by default, and make the wall connector usb-c as well. Then people like you can just keep it plugged into the wall and sync by iCloud, and I can plug my phone into my damn laptop without buying a new cable.
It's worth pointing out that when iPhone 7 came out the only Mac product with USB C was the small little MacBook. It wouldn't make much sense overall to ship iPhone with a USB-C lightning cable.
I would not be surprised if the next iPhone came with a USB-C cable.
You're doing it wrong. Apple wants you to just sync with iCloud; if you want to do things differently than how Apple wants you to do things, then you're not a very good Apple customer. You need to stop trying to think different.
Like the wireless keyboard, mouse and trackpad which you pair by connecting them to your computer with an USB-A to lightning cable, which is not possible with the current lineup of notebooks?
Sure, having to purchase an extra cable (after buying your $2000 laptop) might be fairly user-hostile, but the claim made was incorrect - there's not much arguing that.
This is all kind of mitigated by the fact that users's just don't plug iOS devices in computers anymore to transfer stuff - Spotify (and iCloud) has eliminated most need for that. If people are plugging them in, its to charge them (which is pretty important), but you can just use the power adapter IF you have one around.
No money is needed to get the devices to communicate, because the devices are no longer expected to communicate. iOS has been fully independent of macOS (to end-users) for half its life.
I'm sorry, but that's simply not true. Millions of iPhone users have been migrating their phones from 4, to 4s, to 5 or 5s up to the iPhone 7. They have all their photos since 2010 stored in there and have inherited all the crap from every single unexpected reboot, failure and app residues, building up gb's of 'other files' as shown in iTunes. Most of iPhone users have a 5Gb iCloud account where not even a whatsapp backup fits, and they still need a computer to migrate all the data. Tell me again how are you going to migrate a 64 or 128 gb of data from one phone to another without using USB. That, and the fact that you're still unable to put music inside an iPhone if you don't a) buy it from the app store or b) using iTunes
ahh haha come on. I mean, I never transfer data between iPhone and computer any more, but iTunes WiFi Sync just does not work nearly as reliably as it should.
It fails so frequently that it's just not able to be used.
They have all their photos since 2010 stored in there and have inherited all the crap from every single unexpected reboot, failure and app residues, building up gb's of 'other files' as shown in iTunes
Meh. They should just copy their photos off their idevice using USB PTP mode. That's USB config 1 when an idevice plugs into a PC. No macOS required. No iTunes required. Done. Solved. As for the crap, isn't that an argument to NOT migrate via iTunes?
Most of iPhone users have a 5Gb iCloud account where not even a whatsapp backup fits, and they still need a computer to migrate all the data
ICloud storage is super cheap, especially compared to the price of a smartphone every 2 years. If you're not using this, you're cheating yourself out of one of the biggest advantages that iOS has over other computing platforms. iCould backup is the one thing in iCloud that really just works.
Plus there's dropbox. Solved.
But it still isn't strictly necessary.
That, and the fact that you're still unable to put music inside an iPhone if you don't a) buy it from the app store or b) using iTunes
> - can be plugged into a computer you're statistically more likely to have than a new MBP with only USB-C ports
With regard to the Apple ecosystem, I think it's valid to complain that the cable included with the new iphone does not connect to the new macbook, when they were announced at the same time. Even if it's only supposed to be used in an emergency, does that mean in an emergency you should be punished for staying within the Apple ecosystem?
I think Apple has been pretty clear that they are moving their ecosystem to wireless connectivity. The iPhone connects to the new MBP over wifi quite well.
And yet after the iOS10 update a lot of people had to plug the iphone in to restore it. I was also affected and was glad that I had a computer ready. I know about others who just didn't have a device close by they could use (iPad/iPhone only) and had to go to an Apple store.
Next time there will be people who had a laptop but not the adapter, because you are never supposed to need it.
That's of course just an edge case, but the fact that it just happened shows that it can be important. And Apple used to be known to always deliver a great user experience, not just in 95% of the cases.
So you're saying that it was even less statistically likely (before the release of the new MBPs) that an iPhone owner would have a computer with USB-C exclusively.
Android and Linux is (shockingly) also automatic. I plugged my phone into my laptop because I didn't want to run down the phone battery while using it as a mobile wifi hotspot. I was shocked to notice that I had Internet access on the laptop before I even enabled the mobile hotspot functionality.
It turns out that when I plugged the phone into the laptop USB, it showed up as a USB ethernet device, which NetworkManager then happily auto-configured.
Instant Hotspot fails more than half the time between my 6s+ and 2013 rMBP (Sierra). And to get the WiFi hotspot to work you have to have the setting app open to the hotspot page.
This may seem stupid, but do you use it when both devices haven't been connected to the internet recently? Seems like it works better if the laptop was recently able to access your iCloud account.
How often do you plug your iphone into your mac? Honestly? Once I setup wifi-syncing I've maybe plugged in the usb cable to the computer to the iphone 3 times this year.
Pretty often when I'm in a coffeeshop or using tether mode, in order to keep the phone battery charged from the much beefier laptop battery.
That can be solved with an external battery, but using a short USB-Lightning cable has been easy and great. Now we'll just need to make sure we buy yet a different cable if we use a new-new laptop, which isn't that upsetting.
Also amusing to me, this is the same thing people were talking about when Apple moved from the 30 pin connector to lightning.
And Firewire to USB, and VGA to DVI to Displayport to HDMI, and...
I'm just surprised that apple did the thing everyone wanted: switch to a standard. And now bam, nope this is horrible. Its time for usb c, sucks now but it'll pass. Be more worried about usb c incompatibility more than usb c.
I can live with my phone not being able to be connected with my computer with a cable. The new keyboard, mouse and trackpad however pair by being connected through their lightning port.
So when you buy a new macbook and the new external keyboard and mouse by apple you need an adapter additionally to be able to connect them with each other.
FWIW, having played around with Google's routers, they work pretty well, even from iOS. Chromecasts "just work" in the old Apple sense of the term: you plug it in, you find the thing you want to watch online that you want on your TV, press the button in Chrome and hey presto, you got your cat video on your OLED.
If you're OK with having Google store data on you[1], I'd say the Google hardware division has a lot of what you talk about here.
[1] Before the flood of angry HN replies come in, I get that is not everyone, but knowing what I know about Google's privacy practices, I am perfectly happy with that.
I spent about an hour last weekend getting a Chromecast working again but I agree that they're mostly pretty simple to setup and "just work."
I also really love the idea. TVs should mostly just be big monitors and decoupled from the source of content. Especially in conjunction with both tablets and web browsers on a laptop/Chromebook, this is precisely what Chromecast enables. I don't think I've used any of my "smart TV" features since I got a Chromecast. It was always painful to enter things like passwords anyway.
I use Google services where there’s clear value in them storing my data, but I’m yet to see an explanation for the value proposition in Google’s routers so I can make a choice as to whether it’s worth it to me. How will they use that data to make a better experience for me?
Unfortunately I've had a lot of trouble with the quality of the first and second gen Chromecasts (haven't tried the newest 4k ones). Whether audio cutting out or endless buffering over wireless its always felt a bit janky and unreliable, even after I got the wired ethernet adapter plug. The Chromecast Audio however has worked very well.
Last I checked, the google router thing didn't support IPv6. Has that changed? I've been using IPv6 at home with a previous-generation Airport Extreme for over four years.
> Chromecasts "just work" in the old Apple sense of the term: you plug it in, you find the thing you want to watch online that you want on your TV, press the button in Chrome and hey presto, you got your cat video on your OLED
I wish. Chromecast could not mirror or could not stream audio. Eventually, I was fed up and I bought an Apple TV.
On iOS, chromecast support is up to the app. This means no streaming movies you got from Amazon or Apple. This kind of behavior might make sense from a service, but not from an appliance.
That said, chromecast has probably my favorite interface for interacting with the set-top box. I mourned moving on to the apple tv.
> What is the use of having hundreds of billions in the bank if you're not investing it in growing or creating product lines?
Is this an accurate characterization of Apple's strategy over the last 12-24 months? A lot of stuff has happened:
- Expansion of their cloud services. Apple Music, iCloud, HomeKit, Health are all vertically-integrated services that (in theory) just work across your Apple devices. Siri improves little-by-little every day; Maps is low-key excellent in major US cities.
- Release of the Apple Watch and (soon) Airpods. Note that the Airpods (and new Beats) include the W1 chip, which qualifies as the "no-fiddle" type of innovation you mentioned before.
- Their vision of personal computing in the iPad Pro. iOS is stale on these devices (and I suspect we'll see an overhaul this year), but Tim Cook sells these as "computers" for a reason.
- Continued growth along their main product lines. The iPhone is still the best smartphone for most people, the iPad is the best tablet available for anyone, the MBP was redesigned. These are boring points that produce crazy $$$ for Apple.
- Many rumored projects: AR, self-driving cars, a redesign of the iPhone, the ongoing play for streaming TV, a near-certain redesign of their desktops.
It's difficult to judge Apple at this point because computing has changed. Capital-O Opinions mattered more when the alternative was a muddled computing ecosystem. Since then, other companies have copied the Apple playbook, and we see
well-designed, vertically-integrated products everywhere. Apple is the tide that raised the fleet of "tech product" ships, for better or worse.
Agreed. The entire reason I got my parents to get an iMac and an AirPort Extreme was because I knew they'd never have to worry about them (meaning I'd never have to worry about them).
I buy airport extremes for the exact same reason.
Between this, the refusal to make another 17 inch laptop, making those laptops unupgradeable via soldering storage in and the assortment of other decisions that are out there like this one I'm getting much closer to full abandon ship mode.
I was already planning a Linux laptop but this might accelerate things.
I do the same for my parents, but I stopped buying Airport routers a while ago. The reason I did has nothing to do with Apple or a deficiency in the product and everything to do with my parent's broadband provider. The broadband modems they rent out suck. And because my parents have pets, the modems die regularly. And when they do, they can't just send a replacement unit, they have to send a technician out.
I handle all the phone support and leave my mom a script for when the repair person comes and in both I'm making sure that the replacement unit is a simple modem and not a combination modem/router that they like to give out. And yet each and every time, if I'm not personally present when the technician visits, I find that the technician set up the combo router and the nice, expensive Airport is sitting idly by, useless until I can figure out how to make their PoS combo router operate as a bridge, which isn't easy considering how poor the web UIs are on those boxes. After repeating this process many times, I gave up on buying stand-alone routers...it's just too frustrating.
So if my mom, who has a techie son who knows the difference between a modem and a router, can't reliably get her broadband provider to give her a simple modem without router functionality, what are the chances that other people with her level of acumen who don't have a son like me can get them to do it? I never like to generalize my own experience to explain larger trends, but I think in this case it might be apt. I imagine Apple has trouble with Airports from the broadband companies pushing their own inferior solution to people who don't understand enough to push back. Apple probably has a lot of angry feedback from people who don't realize that the Airport they paid a bunch of money for is sitting unused next to a crappy, inferior box that has been setup and connected to their internet, which is actually the box causing the problems.
> No company offers an ecosystem that doesn't require "fiddling" to get things to work correctly.
In modern times you rarely have to fiddle with wireless routers or displays to make them work correctly with different devices. There's not much left there for Apple to add any unique value to and if there's no benefit to consumers they won't pay a premium for the products.
I think their strategy going forward is to sell overpriced phones and watches to people who don't know any better.
Their computing platform has effectively been left behind: from five-year-old chips in laptops which haven't received a substantial update in almost as long, to their flagship prosumer "desktop" PC which is as unremarkable as it is unexpandable, nothing seems competitive anymore, let alone the bleeding edge upon which a lot of their products used to be positioned. The fact that the UE from their phones and tablets is being lifted and shoehorned into OS X (whoops, "MacOS") at the expense of usability and stability is more than a little off-putting, too.
It seems like all they care about these days are their mobile phones and tablets, and the iTunes universe that goes with them. I couldn't care less about any of that.
Their computers were never quite "bleeding edge", but there was a few years where they hit a really great sweet spot:
1. Top quality industrial design and components (trackpads, screens, etc.).
2. Reasonably competitive specs (never as cheap as building an equivalent PC from parts, but close enough that you didn't feel totally ripped off)
3. An OS that provided Unix compatibility with a nice GUI that Just Worked.
Now, in all three areas, they've either fallen back, or their competitors have caught up.
1. The design and build quality of the best ultrabooks matches that of the Mac, and individual components like screens are often better. Meanwhile, Apple refuse to introduce real touch-screens on their laptop, presumably due to internal pressure from the iPad division, so they settle on the touchbar as a compromise. Or they want better sound, but can't make it work internally, so they just add fake speaker grilles instead.
2. The specs have stagnated, while the prices have increased dramatically.
3. The OS has gradually been locked down, and its Unix roots eroded. Meanwhile, Desktop Linux has improved, and Microsoft has added Linux compatibility to Windows.
>but I really wonder what Apple's strategy is going forward, because its clear that they've slowed down or stopped development on everything other than their phones/pads and the occasional laptop.
Their strategy is simple and obvious, and straight out of a modern American business school textbook: reduce or eliminate product lines that aren't making big profits, and continue milking the product lines that are making big profits. This means bigger profits company-wide.
>What is the use of having hundreds of billions in the bank if you're not investing it in growing or creating product lines?
Why bother doing that when you can just continue milking your cash cow product lines when you have hordes of cultish buyers happy to give you all their money for your overpriced products? Obviously, they've found that this works great with some products (phones, tablets), and not too well with other products (WiFi APs), so it's perfectly sensible for them to drop the latter.
Will this bite them in the ass later? Looking at Apple customers, I seriously doubt it.
Now it seems they're leaving people who depended on that behind. No company offers an ecosystem that doesn't require "fiddling" to get things to work correctly. Maybe this is the way it has to be, but I really wonder what Apple's strategy is going forward, because its clear that they've slowed down or stopped development on everything other than their phones/pads and the occasional laptop. What are all their engineers doing? What is the use of having hundreds of billions in the bank if you're not investing it in growing or creating product lines?