Thank you for the article. JamesPDX, that was dead on. There is a feeling of stagnation when regular updates don't come. iWork is a walking zombie even if it is a superficially attractive one. I love their layout with the sidebar for Pages and Keynote. But iWork is underpowered. Take Pages: for anything more than basic document editing. Its spelling and grammar checkers are simply not as robust as Word's. I can't build a customized table of contents because Eddy Cue removed my bookmarking option. I can't edit on the go because there is no reflow for iOS. I switched to Word. MS Word, for crying out loud. It is a cluttered mess, but like an average man's toolbox, it may be messy, but it has what you need. Why can't it have layers of increasing complexity? We won't even talk about Numbers and I haven't built a new Keynote in a year.
As for the Mac Pro, it was a beautifully innovative product except it hamstrung the power user to its un-upgradable specs. Too greedy Apple! Too greedy! You can get away with that in a super-thin Macbook, but why did you do that your elite user-base?
From Mark Holmes
"And the thing Apple forgets, is their pro users serve as more than another group of customers. We are, or were their evangelists, the ones who spread the word about how great Apple products are. The member of the family, or the one of the group of friends who people would go to for tech advice. I increasingly have a hard time pointing people to the Apple store…"
And "Microsoft has taken the role of innovator." Yep, I've increasingly been paying attention to what they make. Personally, I believe their tablet off the keyboard is too heavy, but at least it is less inconvenient than not having the option. And there is the VR gear in the pipe (hopefully Apple is working on that). What they produce may not always been optimized, but at least it is new.
And this: "If the
iPhone 7 has the same form factor, key growth markets will start to abandon it because at this point, for many people, the iPhone is about fashion, not technology." I have purposefully held on to my iPhone 5S because I wanted to be part of iPhone 7's launch: something I expected would be special. Hey it is the big Number 7, right? We'll see. Right now, it looks more like I'll be holding out till 2017. But then today I did the unthinkable. I actually watched a Galaxy S7 commercial. Not a good sign.
That 43 second clip of Jobs saying Apple has a problem with execution. I think that is becoming increasingly relevant. As much as I like Jon Ivy, I have to say that the basic form of the Mac hasn't changed much in the last 6 years. Speaking the Macbook Pro: Beautiful yet delicate aluminum, curved on the corners with ergonomically uncomfortable edges, and a screen that is so flush with its keyboard that the keys have scratched the screen!
This isn't a rant. It is pain points that have built up over the years. Like being in a marriage where you still love the person you married, but flaws you've been ignoring are becoming increasingly harder to do so. Which wouldn't be so bad, except the number of flaws is not being balanced out by improvements you'd expect with the benefits of experience and time.
Hence the article: a failure to scale up. Or put another away: a failure to be competitive.
