Apple Post Jobs, Watch and other stuff
Warning - this post is LONG. But thoughtful.
I've been a daily reader of MacRumors and the forums for close to 10 years now. As a member of the consumer electronics industry and having worked both for Apple's suppliers, competitors, and with Apple to improve their Enterprise Platform technologies while advocating and successfully initiating adoption of the iPhone as not only one of many standards in one of the largest financial & Realestate institutions in the US, I can say confidently that I believe in Apple's methodologies and the core philosophy that made them successful... under Steve Jobs.
For those that don't care for a history lesson skip down to Apple Watch ->>>
First off, Jobs was no peach. He had plenty of human flaws, but those same flaws that caused him to cut off his nose to spite his face were key distinctions from many industry leaders who were scared to taking bold moves.
ANYONE who even thinks Apple was poorly managed under Jobs should be prepared to name ONE, any single ONE company that was run better by someone else. And please have some facts to back that up.
Fact - Without Jobs, MP3 players would have been geek tech that eventually made it's hands into a handful of cronies in the RIAA that would have crippled the tech to the point where we'd all still be sourcing CDs and ripping them to share them on P2P networks with no end in sight.
Without Jobs, the iPhone would NOT exist. Does ANYONE remember what was before the iPhone? And I don't mean other phones with nothing to do with Apple. Riding on the success of the Motorola Razr (if you remember that little product) Motorola made a partnership with Apple to offer the Motorola Rockr, and it was an astounding failure. An extremely limited iPod player interface was ported to mobile Java and the result was a schizophrenic phone that would be a buggy, storage deprived and flat out malfunctioning mess of a music player to a phone that really was no better at making calls or sorting contacts. Forget about EMAIL.
You wanted Email on a phone? Go get (wait for it) a Blackberry. Oh, wait, you can't afford the Black Berry Enterprise server and licensing required? You mean you're just a regular Joe off the street? Well then get an over priced Microsoft Windows CE/Mobile/etc. etc. Device from any number of manufacturers who promise to give you ... wait they don't promise anything really. Although it's windows you can't really updated it without the core engineers at the OEM's labs recompiling code, oh and they were only contracted for initial design, so that's out. But don't worry, if there's a major bug, or ten, we promise to fix one of them in an update, at some distant point in the future. Oh and if you're lucky we won't also charge you for the Microsoft licensing fees.
Apple was and still is by definition a hardware company, but they produce some pretty damn good software as well. The challenge is they've always had a very small software Dev team and they only code for very specific hardware configurations, which before Intel platforms became standard were available to no-one but Apple and Apple customers. Now OS X is far, far more portable than it once was.
So if Apple is a hardware company, and they've got well over 50 BILLION in CASH in the BANK which they don't need to even touch. Because they still make more than enough money from..... wait, what was that? First. iPods, then iPhones, then.... iPads made a little dent, but what's next? What happened to iOS hardware?
It's important that those of you reading this far know that Apples DEFINING Philosophy under Jobs was to make VERY FEW products, but make them VERY WELL.
Cook's role as COO at Apple (up until Steve's health got seriously unmanageable) was primarily to handle supply chain management and that was it. He had the bill of materials given to him with the blessings of Jobs on nearly every product release.
Jobs was a CEO who walked through the labs, peered over the shoulders of his engineers. He beta tested their creations. In fact, he killed off quite a few very good ideas because he felt they just weren't ready for market.
Rushing poor quality products to market to drive short term sales eat away at margins over time. It's exactly why the PC industry has almost zero profitability to it and why ALL-In-One computers have become such a trend.
The last defining product release for Apple was truly the iPad. You could argue that the MacBook redesign was also quite fantastic with Retina displays, slimmer and solid state memory. You could even look at the iMacs and even the Mac Pro and marvel at how well they've incorporated the technology that has been the core of what makes an iPhone or iPad function how it does.
--->>> Back to the Apple Watch.
I am going to say it, the digital crown is utter non-sense. The Apple Watch is, for the first time in all the years I swore off PC's in favor of Macs (all due to the iPhone Gen 1, and this was just as I had moved on from working R&D at one of Apples chief competitors in the phone race.), a piece of Jewelry with some technology slapped on for show.
The watch only had true value if it was inconspicuous yet able to do all the things they had once alluded to it doing. Reminders, Health (Huge and totally missed the mark on gen-one due to obvious failures in vendor readiness.), Pay Systems (Hopefully the damn thing will do that consistently.), Beyond that, it would become part of your daily routine. It should blend so seamlessly with your life that you might as well sleep with it, to which you might even benefit as it could record your sleep patterns.
The Apple watch Gen One is a product I do not truly wish to beta test. Everything I've seen thus far makes it as useful to me as all the other Smart Watches that have failed to keep me consistently putting them on every day.
Cameras in watches may become a novelty, but truly it's going to boil down to simple ergonomics, battery life, health functions, pay systems, and cost of ownership.
The cost of ownership is FAR FAR FAR too high for a such a limited device. You can take a number of seemingly expensive Apple products, strip their innards and see that sourcing equivalent hardware for close to similar platforms will net you a loss vs buying Apple's integrated solution. And with Apple you also benefit from the Ecosystem. Something that Watch has yet to be proven on.
So here are the points of contention with this Gen One Apple Watch:
- Design does not innovate, it caters to the familiar (the crown, the familiar watch face) and seemingly makes excuses for it by incorporating luxury material that add next to no practical value.
- Even IF we were to say, that's ok, it's a nice little gizmo anyway, Apple should have made it so that left handed users can get an equally similar experience by centering the crown on the body. It's just ludicrous to say that left handed users make up such a small population, who cares if we don't make them happy. Frankly, it's not only short sighted and elitist, but it's even nearly akin to apathy for discrimination.
- Battery life and functionality. Key areas here. Yes it can do notifications, yes it does have a battery, but you'll be unnaturally tethered to it's charger and a power source if you aren't extremely conservative with it's use. Also, functionally it's missing key tech that could improve health and provide invaluable data for health researchers and medical practitioners. This is a massive missed opportunity, but thankfully only a temporary one. I have confidence they will address this with some significance by Gen 2.
- Finally execution. It's obvious everyone has complained in some way about almost every single product release from Apple since their juggernaut into the spotlight, but frankly even Antenna issues took months to surface. Not mere days from release. Further to that point, there were practical solutions, such as the Bumper Case and even if you had the patience to hold the phone as awkwardly as suggested it would indeed work.
- Clasps that don't close
- Surfaces that scratch far too easily (save for the sapphire display)
- The key input device becoming restrictive within days of use?
- A heart rate and blood oxygen monitor that will not work on people with dark tattoos?! (Honestly, does this apply to excessive tanning or genetic predisposition to dark pigmentation as well?)
I'm not going to even state the obvious references from these issues, but like another poster on here indicated, Sir Ive may indeed be living in his head a bit more than is beneficial to the success of his designs in practical application.
Og and if I may add one more grievance... in all the years of iOS releases. I have never seen such a tortured, over engineered, bug ridden experience as th move to iOS 8. It took something like 6 betas to get to release, which by no way in any sense of the word was it truly ready at the time for public consumption. Battery and speed issues plagued it until 8.3. Yes, it took them nearly quadruple the time to have a proper release of the OS of any previous to it.
You could argue that this is to be expected when moving to a new UI. I'll grant that, however, the UI design has been far too exposed during it's evolution outside of beta. If they were going to change the UI, then they should have had the new design finished, then they could have focused resources on coding to solve bugs and backend interface idiosyncrasies. Rather they did design, test, release, bug test, bug fix, design, break fixes, test, release, and so on and so on.
This is a terrible process, and believe it or not. Quite a bit of talent has left or expressed concern about Apple's current direction over the past 2 years.
Thankfully, Apple is still so magnificent at what they do that few if any other competitors could effectively threaten or displace them in the next year or two. But past that, I would say they are running out of "room for experimentation" with this over zealous product for every circumstance approach. This fragmented product line was one of the MAJOR killers of the old Apple and it took someone like Jobs to come in and sort out that mess.
Tim Cook is a good CEO, he is a kind and thoughtful man, he is good with press and generally represents himself and his institution well. And Johnny Ive is a creative genius who's truly helped change the way many of us consider technology. But Apple is still missing something. It's missing the one voice in the room who's willing to say NO!
Jobs was very good at telling people NO, and various other colorful expressions, but the point is, he was unwilling to compromise on his standards for the sake of what he believed. You want a good PR image and Cook does bring that to the company but he needs to learn to say NO as his predecessor did or the very thing that made Apple special may fade into the distance.
