Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi Discuss Maps and 'Learning From Apple's Failures' In New Interview

[Rogifan]

Specs and pricing are driven more by hardware and finance. Dunno who owns naming, might depend on whether it's a hardware product or a software feature.

Ah so finance is responsible for 16GB phones?

 

[Chupa Chupa]

If not in February, I'm fairly sure that the 'learning from failures' line was trotted out elsewhere a few months ago.

Right but those were regarding different failures for different products. Apple learns from its failures, but only applies that learning to the product that failed.

But nothing reaks of arrogance more than as you put it "trotting out" a line every so often for PR sake, not really meaning it., thinking you are really the Bees Knees and all the criticism are just from cranks. Honestly, they should just **** and push out some great products. Then people would quiet down.

 

[Tech198]

"isolated team might have "underestimated the complexity of the product."

That seems to be a regular issue. Lock 'em in a room, till its finished, and no one else talks to ya frm outside.

Apple can say they learn, but not if they keep repeating it over and over... That's not learning. One solution can apply to other, regardless the path to get there.

Maybe not perfect, but at least u'r not wasting time by following the same path again from scratch.

 

[Bubba Satori]

Ah so finance is responsible for 16GB phones?

And 5,400rpm HDs, $50 dongles, $100 Pencils and $150 keyboards.
Tim is a logistics/finance genius.

 

[ShadovvMoon]

The 'Apple Maps fiasco' was just an excuse to fire Forstall.
Where is the public apology for Apple Music? Siri? the lack of Mac updates...

 

[grahamperrin]

… Honestly, they should just **** and push out some great products. Then people would quiet down.

I do see greatness, but not in all Apple products. Luckily for me I don't get wildly excited anticipating future products, which makes it easier to appreciate current and past products.

A week ago I made my first purchase of an Apple product: £383 for a Mac with 8 GB memory and a 256 MB solid state drive. I booted it once to check its goodness and apply updates, then back in its box – not for me, it'll be a late wedding gift. From that one session with the Mac, I can tell that it'll be great – I doubt that my friends will require more, but if they do: the 2012 model that I chose can receive upgrades, which adds to the greatness.

 

[weup togo]

And 5,400rpm HDs, $50 dongles, $100 Pencils and $150 keyboards.
Tim is a logistics/finance genius.

Yep. Add 4 and 8GB RAM configs to that list too. The DRAM spot price that the average OEM will pay for for 8GB DRAM like Apple uses is below $4. Apple is probably paying $2-2.50 for 8GB. Every single Mac could ship with 16GB for less than Apple spends on the box it comes in.

Tim is a cheapskate with no taste. If SJ had shipped the new MacBook, Apple would have immediately stopped seling the MacBook Air, its clear predecessor. But all that expensive tooling for the Air was already paid for, and people were still buying it. So instead of putting the new vision of what a thin, light laptop should be in front of every customer, Tim keeps milking the four year old Air that has only seen trivial, low-effort speedbumps.

These compromises cripple engineering's ability to innovate. They can't ship features that require 16GB of RAM, or would use more than 16GB of NAND in an iOS device. And the lowest common denomiator lasts well beyond the year it ships. Engineering is saddled with these awful decisions for as long as that product is ever supported. Mac OS and iOS are worse products today than they would be if Tim weren't so irresponsible with the stupidly high margins.

 

[IJ Reilly]

Ha. Ha. This is rich. Apple ought to stop selling products that people still want to buy, entirely for religious reasons, apparently.

This is your advice for running Apple, Tim Cook. Take it or eat dirt.

 

[Four oF NINE]

Tell that to the recently successful "New MacBook" and extremely talented marketing team at Apple who knows ********s more about what people want than you and me combined.

The 12" MacBook is an amazing new product. shaving a tenth of a millimeter out of the thickness of an already thin iPhone doesn't impress me.

 

[grahamperrin]

The 12" MacBook is an amazing new product. …

I can't sway a person's point of view but it may be fair to say that not all aspects are amazing. I recognise amazing aspects but those aspects are not compelling. In the words of a colleague, earlier this week:

… I worry a little about the smaller screen and the lack of connectivity … The pro has a bigger screen, all the connection hardware built in, and a keyboard I am familiar with …. The key benefit of the new macbook over the older pro, as far as I can see, is the size and weight, which, is not a deal breaker for me …

 

[/V\acpower]

Maybe they're going to let users do what they should have allowed the month Maps shipped and let people uninstall the entire junk framework and let people replace it with far superior alternatives.

And yes, there are a lot of people who should apologise for pushing misinformation about it that using it helped the product get better. It didn't. Apple had no plan to do that. It was just a rubbish product. Apple claim this is why they have public betas, but there were more than enough people who told them during the developer betas of iOS 6 that Maps was junk. Apple just ignored them.

It's odd that this completely contradicts the other part of the interview -



Maps was entirely an ownership play, and the integration of it into the OS rather than providing a suitable API for third party map programmes was exactly Apple spreading itself too think to try and create those experiences itself.

Maps continues to be a disaster. It makes the entire iOS platform fundamentally worse by virtue of it's mere existence. Apple expends huge resource on it for little practical effect and at the expense of other projects that would be better. And for what? At this point surely only internal stubbornness that the Apple senior management should have scrapped the entire thing before it shipped and are too embarrassed to admit as such.

But no, instead we're about to repeat the process of a hugely unpopular functionality reduction with the removal of the headphone port.

Peoples forget that Google was holding back key features of Google Maps to give a competitive advantage to Android. Turn by turn was the big example of that. Apple Maps wasn't an "ownership play", it was a necessity for the platform to move further.

Because of the existence of Apple Maps, you now have Turn by turn directions in the default App and in the official Google Maps app.

 

[one more]

Mail gets delivered; UPS has all the addresses. The mail arrives. FedEx arrives. You know, how hard is this?

Indeed, which makes me wonder what navigation services UPS, FedEx, etc. are using and if Apple could tap into them too to improve their Maps?