Comment by doodpants | Hacker News Reader

Comment by doodpants | Hacker News Reader

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> I don't think it's fair to expect them to reinvent and innovate the heck out of everything all the time

I think the problem is that Apple themselves want to reinvent and innovate the heck out of everything all the time, so they're making it harder than it needs to be. New Mac Mini? Easy: spec bump the current form factor. New Mac Pro? Easy: put the latest and greatest CPU/GPU in the old cheese-grater enclosure. But no, Apple needs to contantly make everything smaller/thinner/lighter/quieter, so they redesign the enclosure and reengineer the internals from scratch. While they're busy doing this, they continue to sell the old unimproved products for years.

Yes, Apple, we know you can innovate. But you say that for every "yes" there are a thousand "nos". Have you considered saying "no" to a complete reinvention of your hardware when your current offerings are so out-of-date? Your customers would be happy with a spec bump of the current form factors.

> I think the problem is that Apple themselves want to reinvent and innovate the heck out of everything all the time, so they're making it harder than it needs to be.

This right here is what I believe to be the central problem with the Mac's strategy since about 2013. Somehow, “can’t innovate” became this thorn in the side for Apple management, this black eye that they felt they had to come back from, to prove everyone wrong. No moment better expresses this than Phil Schiller's infamous “can’t innovate, my ass” ad-lib on the 2013 Mac Pro unveiling.

And so what we have now is a pendulum that has swung entirely in the opposite direction, arguably further than it ever was on the supposed “can’t innovate” side: Every Mac launch must be “innovative.” Every new Mac must showcase new design and technologies or break new ground, and products that can’t support this level of engineering investment (like the Mac Mini) get left behind.

In other words, the entire Mac business unit has transformed into a vanity project. My dream would be for “vanity project” to become the new “can’t innovate” - a challenge that spurs Apple to action in correcting course on its oldest product line.

And perhaps some day, Schiller will take the stage to announce a boring, but pragmatic new line of workhorse Macs, and mutter “vanity project, my ass.”

It’s unacceptable to me. Their resources provide them more than enough to at least keep their specs up to date. Everyone else in the industry at least does that. So what’s holding them up? The best hypothesis I’ve heard is their desire to move to their own chips.

They’ve effectively left the laptop/desktop market. And there’s no strong indication or rumor mill about them doing anything other than a run at their own chips.

That's a great explanation that I want to believe but the series of meh iPhones doesn't support. I think it's that Apple has the same priduct org structure when Jobs was directing and whoever is the bottleneck now doesn't scale as well.

> New Mac Mini? Easy: spec bump the current form factor.

Except using the 2012 modular, upgradeable approach. It's sad that we all know that has a snowball's chance.

The disease that's infected Apple is addiction to services revenue. Everything is a revenue stream. Their stores and "Geniuses" won't be profitable if everyone can repair and upgrade their own devices.

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