You’re right—it’s not about you. It’s about what’s the best compromise for the vast majority of Apple customers.
Apple makes products for the 80-90%. If you’re in a 5 or 10% niche, you may not get what you want.
80%: A MBP that’s thin, light powerful laptop with great battery life. Extremely easy to move between home and office, one cable docking with 10+ ports that stay connected at all times and tons of external bandwidth.
5%: workstation/gamer class laptop with 99 W/Hr battery. 45 min battery with max CPU/GPU. Razer is awesome, but don’t forget the earplugs as it’s often likened to the sound of a jet engine taking off. (And pray you never need support.)
14%: thick enough to offer older ports, extra power connector with MagSafe.
1%: 17” MBP. Sure it’s 6 pounds, but you call that heavy?
82%: thin, light, easy to use powerful cell phone that usually ends the day at 30-40% battery. Charges in a few hours, overnight.
5%: twice the battery even if it’s quite a bit thicker and weighs 50% more.
5%: dark mode, custom icons, grouped notifications, non-aligned icons, widgets on the home screen, Forstall skeuomorphicism, etc.
5%: headphone jack, memory card, USB-C charger.
3%: X-style SE2. Sure it’ll be $799 but demand will be huge, trust us.
95%: laptop or iMac. Updated every year with very few exceptions, mostly depending on Intel’s CPU release schedule.
3%: Mac Pro. Small but important user base, yes badly neglected, with poor product management over the past 5 years. But hopefully past mistakes rectified with next year’s release.
1.5%: Mac mini. Though not the latest and greatest, the current $899 mini with 2.6/3.1GHz CPU, 8GB RAM and 256GB PCIe-based Flash is suitable for most of its target market, including developers (shocking, I know). But yes, an update is long overdue. There’s finally an H-series quad core, maybe we’ll see it in a mini. Or maybe the mini is on life support and is imminently EOL. (But not according to Cook.)
0.5%: quad-core mini, 16GB RAM, 512GB Flash drive and $799 is too much. Look at Intel’s NUCs, now that’s innovation.
95%: I really like this Apple Watch
5%: I’ll never buy a watch that isn’t round.
90%: I love my AirPods and I’ll give them up when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.
5%: AirPods are uncomfortable and fall out of my ears.
5%: These airpods sound horrible compared to my ______ (insert expensive audiophile-approved over-ear headphones or IEMs here.
80%: My HomePod sounds great and I’m glad I bought it, even though Siri leaves a lot to be desired.
10%: I don’t care how good it sounds, Siri will drive me to an early grave, I can’t take it.
9%: I need Spotify by voice, AirPlay by iPhone isn’t good enough. Give me Sonos and Alexa or give me death.
1%: My golden ears are offended by the mere existence of speakers that sell for less than $10,000/pair. I couldn’t possibly enjoy listening to a small speaker like HomePod, no matter how good it sounds.
Well I could go on but why bother, you get my point.
Apple hasn’t become the most valuable tech company by offering products people don’t want. They want greater revenue, and they continue to try to provide new products they think are something people will buy in the (tens of) millions.
Yes, sometimes they screw up and miss the mark. You can want perfection, but it’s tough to come by. Yes there should be fewer bugs. Sure, never miss a release date. Yes, they can do better, and constructive criticism is welcome. Even Apple fans have legitimate complaints.
But continually spewing tired, trolling, hate memes is predictably predictable, and nothing short of achingly, mind-numbingly boring: No innovation; notch is ugly; Tim Cook’s Apple is money grubbing, cash grabbing, iPad loving, Mac hating; Steve would never have _______; they only update watchbands and Animoji nowadays; why not work on Mac Pro and fix OS bugs instead of wasting time on more emoji; iToys/what’s a computer?; Apple users are sheep, they’ll buy whatever over-priced crap Apple sells just because of the logo; Apple products are too expensive; ad nauseum.
Legit complaints: Mac Pro/Mac mini update schedules; Mac Pro needs to be more Pro; 2016/2017 MBP keyboard failures too high; Siri needs (a lot of) work; software QA should be better, and known bugs should be fixed, not deferred; iTunes is, and has always been, a mess—especially the Windows version; Apple Music suggestions fall well short of Spotify’s. And many more, this list is hardly exhaustive.
Yes, all of the above is just my opinion; after all, I’m the one who wrote it. Don’t bother asking for market stats to back up my arbitrary percentages.
/rant
