Thoughts and Observations Regarding This Week’s Apple Event
daringfireball.net
daringfireball.net
The bottom line as I see it: you need to have clear priorities, and Apple’s highest priority here was clearly cross-platform parity for iPhone, iPad, web, and Mac. No other office platform in the world has that — complete parity between native apps for phone, tablet, desktop, and a web app
Does anyone think this is actually the right thing to do? If feature parity really is the goal, then I'm much more concerned about the future of the Mac now than I was yesterday.
For 99% of enterprise users, there really isn't a barrier to switching to another productivity suite. It's mainly just institutional inertia from the IT departments. Their concerns will be alleviated as well when Apple keeps building out tools to make their lives easier, like the recent volume app purchasing made available. And most importantly, the total cost of ownership is going to look different now that OS upgrades and iWork upgrades will be free going forward, making iOS devices and Macs more enticing a choice.
edit: Matthew Panzarino discusses what Apple is going for with the iWork changes.
http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/26/stop-freaking-out-about-iwo...
Well, not running on Windows is a barrier. The iPad has gained some acceptance in Enterprise for salespeople but until it gets more official keyboard support and corporate controls added it won't replace office computers.
There is iWorks web apps but there you're competing with Google Docs and Google Docs is the gold standard safe bet. Pretty much every company that switches off Office goes to Docs. They want the full suite, not just a word processor and spreadsheet, what's Apple's enterprise email solution? Also Google makes a handful of utilities that make it easier to transition off of Office, like Google Apps Sync[1]. Apple's going to have to give up their "we only write software for our own platforms" stance if they want to seriously compete in the enterprise.
I'm an author. I wrote my books in Pages, loved it, and recommended it to everyone. I'm now very glad I didn't upgrade, because Pages 5 would make it impossible to format my books.
I'm the sort of guy who tells everyone he knows "buy a Mac!". I'm now hesitant, for the first time in a long while. I'm very concerned about iOS-ification. I bought this machine because I use it to do things.
This happened in 2011 with Final Cut Pro. Apple lost a lot of video editors, and my understanding is that their mindshare didn't bounce back.
You can still buy a Mac and use Office (MS Excel best spreadsheet on the planet), or Scrivener, etc...
Apple is distracted (perhaps correctly so) by the MASSIVE revenue/profit stream that is iOS. The Software revenue for the Mac is minuscule in comparison. All of their attention/energy will be pouring gasoline on the iOS platform, possibly to the exclusion of everything else.
The good news is we can ignore the Apps that Apple is churning out, and use the ones that make sense for us. I'm a 4+ year Aperture user who probably is going to have to bite the bullet and shift to Lightroom (perhaps 2 years later than I should). On the pro-side, nobody in business was using the Numbers product, so they aren't in any way impacted by the iWork news.
I do feel for those who used Pages (I actually know quite a few who preferred it to Word) - but, the old version of Pages still works, even after Upgrade, and, eventually, the Pages product will start to move forward again as the iOS platform evolves.
Overall rational and profit seeking move by Apple, even if it does screw a lot of their power users.
Pages and MS Word have never really been products for the professional author: they are consumer-class apps for the mass-market. Apple recognises this to a greater extent than Microsoft, and by cutting functionality, they can vastly improve usability for the core market. Whether they will bother to fill the void left with their own professional writing software or not is up for debate; they will, IMO, just leave that to Adobe.
I think you should still tell everyone you know to buy a Mac. Just tell those who are professional-class writers that the latest version of Pages might not fulfil their needs and point out the alternatives.
That’s a myth. Out of the 100 editors I know only 2 left for Premiere, and they would’ve gone regardless of what Apple did. Others were already only using Avid, they never switched the Final Cut. The actual users of Final Cut 7 continued to use FCP7 or waited to switch to FCP X when it had all the features they needed. Right now, in my experience, about three quarters of those people have switched to FCP X, and I hear nothing but positive stories about it.
On the online community for documentary filmmakers, The D-Word, the software most frequently mentioned is FCP. The same can be witnessed on 5dplanet, a forum for freelancers and indies who shoot with HDSLRs. Also telling: the comments on an article[1] about switching from FCP to PP; all of the commenters indicate they won’t fully switch to PP. That article is at a very popular site for indie filmmakers. Even Cinema Editor Magazine (the ACE quarterly) wrote in its latest review of PP: “Premiere Pro doesn’t seem quite ready for a multi-editor, multi-camera, scripted series or feature.”[2].
This is all circumstantial evidence, but combined with my own experiences and what I have seen and heard from colleagues, I am pretty confident that the number of people who left FCP after the release of FCP X is minimal. Now, that’s not to say those people don’t also have PP – I have PP, but that’s because it comes with Adobe Creative Cloud, not because I chose it.
In my experience, the people who switched from FCP to PP or Avid did so because they wanted to use Windows based computers. Remember that Apple has neglected its Pro line of desktops for quite some time. Xserves are gone, the Mac Pro hasn’t been updated in years – until the new Mac Pro announcement earlier this year, many professionals considered switching to Windows workstations.
[1] http://nofilmschool.com/2011/07/import-final-cut-pro-7-proje...
Is a future convergence on the horizon or perhaps a layer above that allows for common behaviour and has Apple built it already ? And what does that mean for future iOS hardware that could run OSX apps and vice versa.
2 years ago you wrote[1]:
> The iPad’s role in the tablet market much more closely resembles the iPod’s role in the digital music player market a decade ago than it does the iPhone’s role in the 2008 phone market.
Need any help moving that goalpost?
He made a prediction:
You don’t have to look hard to find many other observers with the same belief — that Android will succeed in the tablet market similarly to how it has succeeded in the phone market. Why the certainty, though? It’s certainly possible, I agree. A 20-1 unit sale lead over all Android tablets combined seems preposterous. But I don’t think it’s certain. It reminds me of the certainty that many observers had, circa 2002-2005, that the iPod could not maintain a 70 percent share of the music player market.
The fundamental difference I see between smartphones and tablets is that mobile phones were an existing and long-standing market prior to the iPhone. Apple’s stated goal in 2007 was to get 1 percent of the total mobile phone market by the end of 2008. Most people today still buy phones the same way they did in 2006: they go to their local mobile carrier store and buy whatever the sales staff there convinces them to buy. Over 100 million times, that’s been an Android phone. I see no sign, though, that phone carriers are having any more success selling tablets than they ever were selling anything other than phones. Remember carrier-subsidized netbooks?
I’m not trying to cherry-pick data. I’m simply observing, based on Apple’s sales data and Google’s activation data, that the tablet market doesn’t today look anything like the smartphone market ever did. The iPad didn’t enter the tablet market. It created the tablet market. The iPad’s role in the tablet market much more closely resembles the iPod’s role in the digital music player market a decade ago than it does the iPhone’s role in the 2008 phone market.
Or as Marco Arment wrote almost seven months ago, there still really is no “tablet” market — just an iPad market.
Is it really moving the goalposts when things have changed in two years?
In 2011 the iPad absolutely dominated the tablet market. It was the tablet market. Not the case today, reporting both of those things is not moving the goalposts.
He made a prediction:
You don’t have to look hard to find many other observers with the same belief — that Android will succeed in the tablet market similarly to how it has succeeded in the phone market. Why the certainty, though? It’s certainly possible, I agree. A 20-1 unit sale lead over all Android tablets combined seems preposterous. But I don’t think it’s certain. It reminds me of the certainty that many observers had, circa 2002-2005, that the iPod could not maintain a 70 percent share of the music player market.
The fundamental difference I see between smartphones and tablets is that mobile phones were an existing and long-standing market prior to the iPhone. Apple’s stated goal in 2007 was to get 1 percent of the total mobile phone market by the end of 2008. Most people today still buy phones the same way they did in 2006: they go to their local mobile carrier store and buy whatever the sales staff there convinces them to buy. Over 100 million times, that’s been an Android phone. I see no sign, though, that phone carriers are having any more success selling tablets than they ever were selling anything other than phones. Remember carrier-subsidized netbooks?
I’m not trying to cherry-pick data. I’m simply observing, based on Apple’s sales data and Google’s activation data, that the tablet market doesn’t today look anything like the smartphone market ever did. The iPad didn’t enter the tablet market. It created the tablet market. The iPad’s role in the tablet market much more closely resembles the iPod’s role in the digital music player market a decade ago than it does the iPhone’s role in the 2008 phone market.
Or as Marco Arment wrote almost seven months ago, there still really is no “tablet” market — just an iPad market.
Also - iPod was a music player. It's competitors were...Music Players. If Apple had only released the Touch, they would have been wiped out by competitors on the music player front - but they stepped up and released the Nano/Shuffle.
It is interesting that Apple doesn't seem to have any interest in releasing any lower end tablets (akin to the Nano/Shuffle) to compete in the TV/WebConsumption market. Their decision not to enter that market has left themselves pretty vulnerable to disruption from below.
The real measure will be if people are actually those tablets in the market that Apple is competing in. We won't know for a couple years - my guess is that Apple is going to regret leaving that opening up for competitors - Tablets can migrate upwards a lot more effectively than underpowered netbooks could impact the Laptop market...
Moving the goalposts is when you change the criteria for success during an argument. He posted two observations over two years — the first not even predicting anything with certainty. He is not "moving the goalposts."
> Apple’s not trying to milk money from those customers ineligible for the free versions of these apps (although, of course, they will happily keep the money). It’s simply the fallout from Apple’s accounting guidelines that they cannot simply offer these apps free of charge to everyone.
Can anyone who knows more about accounting than myself confirm this? I find it very hard to believe that accountants dictate your pricing strategy. Accountants are there to manage your money and keep the books straight. They might advise you that offering free updates foregoes a large source of revenue, but there is no way that the way they define your products ties your hands, and stops you from legally giving away certain products.
But, I only say this because I know nothing about accounting.
[1] http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2009/09/14/accounting-rule-chang...
[2] http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/apple-earnings-a-heads-up-on-a...
This is cool and all, but not many of us got to see these polishings. This sitcom of a presentation was, indeed, predictable in most senses. There is little delight to be had, and I don't necessarily blame Apple, but I sort of do. They know it's predictable; they read the unbelievable amount of prediction blogs that exist out there. And yet, they rely largely on video and proverbially screaming things we already know (like iPad selling better than every other tablet) to present their new products. I'd rather see them play 10 very well-made games and demo 10 very well-made everyday applications. Maybe show us more about how beautiful and powerful the Mac Pro is. I don't want to see them tout how awesome Apple is, and then introduce incremental products, even if incremental products is the right thing to do. For the record, I do think incremental is the right choice for this refresh anyway - there's a better way to present it.
This is the iPad Mini I expected to see in October 2014, not 2013.
Really? I have a hard time believing that Gruber actually believed this. This was obviously the next step for the iPad Mini. Better performance, retina screen.
Last year’s Mini was a triumph of design; this year’s update is a triumph of operational efficiency.
This is why it makes the event so boring. A great summary. This is another way of saying, "while it's not exciting or visually stunning, it's a big business win for Apple, and subsequently will sort of drive prices down for millions of consumers." This doesn't really combat against the primary criticisms. While I understand that public speaking isn't really his gig, Cook sounds a lot like he has a thesaurus for buzz words that he brushes up on while looking at pictures of Apple and big 3d pie charts of how much of a piece of shit the Microsoft tablets are.
I understand the updates - but the presentation is largely underwhelming. This could have been spun better. Oh yeah - did anyone catch that there's a new MacBook Pro? Does anyone know the differences introduced? What an understated rollout.
The big disappointment for me is that Apple did not announce 4K Cinema Displays to go along with it. Why make a machine capable of driving three 4K displays but not make the displays?
My thoughts exactly. This should have been the one more thing.
[formatting edit]
He was saying he expected an iPad mini with an A6X and retina screen (not quite up to iPad Air). Then next year was expecting an iPad mini at parity with an A8 full size iPad.
Not an unreasonable belief.
If it was a ruse, it was an elaborate one. Gruber posted his predictions about the Mini update several times. When he gets things wrong, it's kind of a standard practice of his to call himself out; vis a vis his claim chowder posts.
I suppose it's possible that Gruber intentionally underestimated the Mini update so that he could stand mouth agape, dumfounded in excitement that Apple over-delivered, but that doesn't strike me as his style.
Apple event happens, random sites write various things about the announcements, Gruber waits for the noise to settle and writes a piece mostly in favour of Apple.
And you know what? It works! (No sarcasm)
Ack, I'm being too hard. It's a decent summary piece just like the 20 or 30 others I've seen on the event, just a little more cheerleadery.
The iPad Air looks amazing for example, but compared to the OS-level features offered by tablet Windows 8.1, I think it's lacking.
a) found a way to shave $X off the cost of their average machine sold
b) figured out that they would save $Y on support costs if more users had the same OS version and work suite installed
and then found that $X + $Y is greater than the income they receive from selling Mavericks and iWork? Mavericks and iWork are not free. Apple just found a smarter way to make their customers pay for them. If you would have bought and used them all, you just won. If you would have installed Linux, you just got hosed.
Especially since Apple is pushing for developers to support the text zooming feature which should help usability for older and sight impaired users.
How I envision such an iPad Pro: 13.3" diagonal @ 3072 by 2048 pixels (1536 by 1024 ‘real’ pixels). That way, it could fit two current portrait mode iPad apps next to each other, and app developers can make new apps to take advantage of the 2x horizontal space. It would be great if, by then, iOS would support ICC profiles and accurate display of color spaces besides sRGB (Adobe RGB, CMYK, Lab, etc).