In 2016 Apple has become a very different kind of company – the most valuable company in the world, it so happens. Over the past 40 years, Apple has gone from a struggling upstart challenging IBM and Microsoft to being a dominant platform vendor. A company founded by two friends who bonded over a love of hacking the long-distance phone network has become a major economic gatekeeper engaged in historic policy fights with the government. It is a remarkable, improbable success story.
After forty years, Apple is doing better than ever before – yet to me, it feels like they are doing worse than ever. To me, they reached their zenith about 12-15 years ago. I don’t like companies for how popular they are, how widespread they are, how successful they are. All those things are irrelevant to me. They have no bearing on my enjoyment of products.
To me, the highpoint of Apple was the PowerPC G4 era. The iMac G4, the iBook G4, the PowerMac G4, and the Cube. I owned all four of those, and still feel remorse for getting rid of them. I liked Apple because of the soul and emotion it used to put into its machines.
I like things that aren’t perfect. I like things that are inherently broken. It takes imperfection to notice perfection. I like things that could be better – but make up for it with a sense of uniqueness, personality, charm, quirkiness. Apple doesn’t make products like that anymore. Everything they make now is cold, calculated, beancounted. Their products no longer have any soul, any emotion, any individuality. It’s an endless parade of cold, dead metal.
I wish they’d loosen up a bit.
I think you’re missing the mark by a few years. As one who’s never had an iphone, I think its kind of crazy to not highlight it as a true innovation. It took years of hardware and software work to get something that worked better than anyone could imagine. Everyone leading up to that moment said they were crazy for getting into the market and going up against nokia, microsoft, motorola, erikson,palm etc.
I think better than any product since the mac, the iphone best embodies the apple ideal: dream big, take risks, and put magic in a box.
Edited 2016-04-01 16:54 UTC
The iPhone is far less magic than good marketing. My old Blackberry was far better at multitasking than the original iPhone, and I’ve never really cared that much about the apps. The iPhone keyboard was never that good either. People who love the iPhone usually apologize for how mediocre it is because the like the idea of the iPhone that Apple has marketed.
iPhone is a total workhorse. it might not do everything perfectly but it does enough stuff better or as good as anything out there.
it does nearly everything. just because it can’t do all of them on the screen at once doesn’t diminish it, in my eyes. it’s a tiny interface, single-tasking is the key.
In my travels, 1 iPhone = 3 Androids at least. It will outlive, outrun, outspend!, and out and out save people’s azz far more than the android flavor of the month.
The thing that the standard anti-apple crowd never accepts is that apple generally builds very tough hardware, partly due to it’s minimalism. With all the free software updates year after year, you end up happy with a handset that you can get used to for years. Apple and partners are happy because you are paying more per month for that privilege.
…wait are you serious?
Seriously, is April the first, Thom.
No joke
HERE still is.
Macs are pretty tough. I’ve dropped my Air a few times and all it’s got is dents
OTOH, my old Thinkpad died a death from a similar fall. Something shorted by the IDE controller and it started cooking HDD’s
Edited 2016-04-02 10:30 UTC
But was it old at the time of death?
This is exactly the delusional nonsense that Apple marketing spreads, but has no basis in fact. A large proportion of my iPhone using pals walk around with broken screens because a single drop nearly destroyed their phone. The sofware updates are fine, but older phones just don’t get new features. The security by obscurity approach Apple has always used stopped working when their devices became popular, and now I see all kinds of iPhone users struggling because some rogue app made it into the App Store and is screwing up their phone.
iPhones are mediocre devices with great marketing. Apple’s victory was convincing peopl to pay more for less and feel like they belonged to some kind of special club.
The iPhone is a total workhorse. it might not do everything perfectly but it does enough stuff better or as good as anything out there.
it does nearly everything. just because it can’t do all of them on the screen at once doesn’t diminish it, in my eyes. it’s a tiny interface, single-tasking is the key.
In my travels, 1 iPhone = 3 Androids at least. It will outlive, outrun, outspend!, and out and out save people’s azz far more than the android flavor of the month.
The thing that the standard anti-apple crowd never accepts is that apple generally builds very tough hardware, partly due to it’s minimalism. With all the free software updates year after year, you end up happy with a handset that you can get used to for years. Apple and partners are happy because you are paying more per month for that privilege. [/q]
Well you definitely opened yourself to criticism with stating how tough the iPhone is more than apparent, is not. There are now more iPhone repair shops than Starbucks and they’re there for one thing, replacing cracked displays. Here I’m Switzerland mobile providers now only offer one replacement a year, even with the extended warranty the user still has to pay. A UK insurance company last year released figures stating that more than 25% of all Apple iPhones sold in the UK needed to have their screens replaces within the first 6 months of ownership. Apple of course threatened any site that reposted the story and forced it be taken down but you can sill find it.
Also stating that the iPhone is better than any Android phone is simply a matter of tastes. I personally couldn’t use my iPhone 5s as it was missing just to many features that I personally needed.
My Nexus 6P for instance can be used as a desktop computer while traveling by connecting it to the hotels TV via a USB C hub, as well as a keyboard with touchpad. In which the TV’s resolution and aspect ratio is fully supported, as well as using a custom desktop DPI and extending the desktop. All of which the iPhone does not support, the resolution is upscaled, the aspect ratio is locked in at 4:3 for the desktop, not to mention every app is resolution independent which means the entire experience is inconsistent to say the least.
Multitasking might not be important to you but it is definitely a must for me. During working hours I have a terminal app running in the background performing various tasks. I can stream a movie to my TV and still be able to use the phone, I can download a file that takes longer than 10 minutes, etc.
I have access to a real file-system and manager which is an absolute must for me as well. I constantly need to send zipped files, encrypted files, etc. Yes, you can do those things on an iPhone but I can do them faster, more efficiently and again, in the background. I can also actually create my reports on the phone without even touching it by running scripts using Perl or Python with automation apps also, running in the background. As I also have access to a real office suite, Office HD (OpenOffice), which had 80% more features than any other mobile office suite available, including Visual Basic, database and advance macros all of which can be used, you guesses it, in the background.
I have yet to have seen a single app someone had on their iPhone that I also didn’t already have, couldn’t get or at the very least find a viable alternative for.
All of this was moot though as we use the platform that fits our needs the most or just think we’re using the best platform because we’re either stubborn or have been tricked by marketing. One thing is for sure though, stating that another platform is the wrong one, well, that’s just plain silly. If anything my list above proves is that it’s simply impossible to determine that as our needs will always be different from someone elses.
Personally, I am forever grateful to Apple, because once the majority of my friends and family started using iPhones and iPads as their primary devices instead of PCs, my tech support calls dropped off precipitously
IMO, that’s where the magic of these products really comes into play; they took this tech and made it accessible by the masses, such that even my 65yo mother can download and install apps without too much fuss. And for the people that like to tweak their devices to jerk them off and make them breakfast, there’s always Android.
Edited 2016-04-01 21:21 UTC
You are absolutely right, Apple master mediocre devices in shiny packages that are perfect for mass consumption.
The iphone was absolutely magical compared to everything else that was out at the time. Its not really worth going point by point. Just like some might nitpick the original mac to death, others will do the same to the iphone. They were both magical in the same way. Huge bets, long development, clever software, cutting edge hardware, absurdly easy to use for novices. If you saw a mac, you understood thats what the future would look like. Same with the iphone.
As soon as you use the word magical, it’s apparent you are just repeating marketing bullshit. You forget that the Mac was the second attempt after a huge fail with the Lisa, and that Apple nearly went bankrupt and was saved by Microsoft propping them up.
iMacs were pretty nice, and the whole “Rip, Mix, Burn” era of Apple was interesting, but once they became a music / media company, the devices became a boring channel for Apple to distribute content and make money off users.
Apple marketing has been magical, the devices have always been mediocre, compromised and have forced users to accept less and feel happy about it.
I had to take out my old Apple-to-English dictionary to understand that “absolutely magical” is Applespeak for “easier to use than average”.
Now everything makes sense.
(Sent from my 15″ MBPr.)
Sorry, but “absolutely magical” wrt a smartphone is absolute BS.
Edited 2016-04-02 12:43 UTC
Yeah, no one here will understand because we’re mostly above average tech capable, anyways. But for those who were not the ease of use of a mac over a dos based clone and the iphone over the blackberry can not be overstated.
Its like cutting butter with a hot knife as opposed to cutting a redwood with a chainsaw.
That’s merely another example of Apple marketing trumping truth. My old BB was far easier to use, text messaging was a dream and the battery life was decent. The crappy browser was a real problem as the web progressed, but nothing about the iPhone was easier to use.
Apple just managed to convince you that their choices were natural and easy when in fact they are at best somewhat consistent, and Apple devices inspire users to give up quickly and decide that the things the iDevice can not do are not important things…
No, its just because you’re not a technological idiot and you can easily adapt from an easy to use system to an easier to use system.
Many people can’t. You might think that’s crazy, but its not. You might call it reality distortion but its not.
Believe me, I used to think the same as you and everyone else here did. But then I started watching non techies use tech…
To be fair, we all have our strengths and weaknesses. There are many, many tech guys that just absolutely suck at comprehending peoples social cues. The same derision that you might cast on those who couldn’t get dos or a blackberry, well they’d probably find something equally baffling about your comprehension of some other subject matter.
I am not a tech guy, I was for years a high school teacher whose job it was to lead the other high school teachers to implement tech into their courses. The Apple garbage was no easier to get users to be effective with, Apple just had better advance press and was good at lowering expectations.
You are just spouting the usual delusional nonsense, I see lots and lots of old people, kids, etc. who grab their first android device and master it in minutes. I used to show people a few simple tricks with DOS and BASIC and they would take flight in minutes. iOS is not magical, it might seem like it to someone who is slightly autistic and doesn’t know how to explain things to others…
Thanks for the insult?
Ok, to be fair anything post Apple II prior to OS X was just garbage.
The first gen. iPhone didn’t even have 3G. It wasn’t cutting edge hardware, it was obsolete at launch. The second generation was pretty much a mandatory upgrade, with all the fanbois who had declared EDGE as superior to 3G in real life (this was actually a common argument on Slashdot) lining up to buy it first day.
Second generation iPhone didn’t have 3G either. But it was the first one that was an actual smart phone, and could run apps.
Is that why they called it the iPhone 3G?
Apple for years seemed to use the fact that they were first as a justification for not making needed changes to their UI. Android phones had interchangeable keypads and multi-choice predictive text almost from the beginning; Apple first introduced those features with iOS 8 and they’re still a shadow of what you can find on Android, and aren’t consistently implemented (you get the Apple keypad back not only for passwords but also when responding to a notification). Yet their fanboys (and girls) continued to insist that the Apple keypad was genius and I just didn’t get it. I switched to an iPhone in early 2015 (had been using Nexus for four years prior) and I still find the limitations of its launcher frustrating (no speed dials, for example).
Slower hardware, no 3G a launch, no capability for running apps… are not just nitpicks. Those are major weaknesses with the platform.
Remember, the iPhone had no capability for apps at launch – the expected everything to be a web app. The idea was you’d find a favorite site and pin it to the launch screen.
No. OMG there’s a 40-year revolution in displays and LEDs, let’s put one each in and have the case flattish. Maybe they’ll make something that doesn’t fit in a 60-gallon garbage bin and put HID lamps on it and a holographic storage rack with hundreds of slots in it next week. They could do it board-driven…
Apple Pay isn’t cracking open the multiple currencies fun in a public way, iPhone beacons are a way for new invasive vulnerabilities to get to you the way I read it (maybe more Daring Fireball is called for; that didn’t come from using PCs.)
So there are sort of interfaces like the slots the IIGS had, but mostly the exact opposite. Somebody mentioned posting on their MBPr and I thought -praeseodymium cases. That’s new.- No.
Apple would come out with these, let’s call them reactionary anti-diversity graphical toolkits, and objects that gerrymander CPU tokens, and geniuses (before geniuses) would make them useful and popular and inclusive, and others would feel the love and lean in. That was neat. Is?
They’d have awesome typefaces and setting and you’d ask for a Type1 or another varietal and your mac would have a personal period of adjustment to that. It would have no memory and no way to get more or have accelerators or standards and the next week in semiconductors it would be a $1 fix but with Apple working it into $1700 of G4 PPC and heatsink modules. Just dealing with the rage made you a stronger user.
They spent forever talking to RAMBus about making memory horrible. They patented magnets.
They championed diversity and early mornings a little now and then. They paid OS X and iOS developers for shipping. Not everything is a filesystem.
It’s just appliances they make, not love
I describe Apple as not being fun or cool any more. Classic Mac was a blast to program. The first hint for me was when Apple trashed Metrowerks (still my all time favorite IDE.) Metrowerks literally saved PowerPC Macs, since Apple provided *no* development tools for the first year. Then the replacement sucked so bad (and still does!) that I just let it go.
It helps that they don’t make anything I’m remotely interested in nowadays, except possibly hardware that is an expensive and imperfect way to run Windows.
I feel the same way. Classic Mac and Apple II. Beyond that things just got stupid IMO.
I work on BeOS and the HaikuOS.
I loved working with Metrowerks which ran under the name CodeWarrior on BeOS.
I found it a joy to use, the move to GCC has resulted in faster code. But the integrated Metrowerks IDE was far more fun to use the various tools I use with GCC.
I get the programming done, but I still wish for the days that I used CodeWarrior.
My old Ducati 748 would shit all over any of those even before they could finish booting up, and produced way more soul* in the process.
*weasel-word for “unreliable-as-f–k”
Edited 2016-04-02 17:12 UTC
To me, the highpoint of Apple was the PowerPC G4 era. The iMac G4, the iBook G4, the PowerMac G4, and the Cube. I owned all four of those, and still feel remorse for getting rid of them. I liked Apple because of the soul and emotion it used to put into its machines.
I had a G4 eMac in the mid-2000s. When it first appeared it ran OS X Panther which was brilliant; it was fast, had some interesting and funky features, and wasn’t bloated. Then Tiger came out with its widgets and its desktop searching, which hung for about an hour while first booting (which made me think it had crashed) and was always slow, even when I upgraded the memory. I didn’t even bother upgrading to Leopard as I knew it would be a dog.
There was another golden era from Snow Leopard for a couple of releases after that, once 64-bit Intel became the standard and the fat binary bloat had gone. Then it got buggy and bloated again (Yosemite has been the worst, El Crap not much better sadly).
Your poetic imperfection garbage is so full of it.
Apple became a public company in the 80s, with shareholders. Apple has always been about businesses. When Steve Jobs saw what Wozniak was doing, it was all about making money from it.
Yes, Jobs passion for aesthetics and quality have always been an advantage, certainly, his vision was to never rest on your laurels. Steve Jobs influence is still on the products he left behind. What you call “cold, calculated, beancounted” doesn’t look that different from when Steve introduced it.
The MacBook Pro unibody, looks similar to the MacBook Pro Steve Jobs introduced in October of 2008, except, it doesn’t have a built in battery or optical drive. No different from the MacBook Air Steve Jobs described as the future of notebooks in January 2008.
The aluminum chassis came to market with the same PowerBook G4’s from 2003.
You are caught up in the nostalgia of a period. You are just a minority. If Steve Jobs was alive and you said it to your face, he would eat alive.
What you are caught up in really is charisma of Jobs. Jobs really was never part of the design of the products, he just had some great ideas that Ive made happen. Jobs would be launching the same 6s Plus and MacBook Retina today.
He just would sell so good you would be singing its praises on OSAlert. Honestly, when I look back on the old stuff, I probably would own the iMac G3 and G4 just for nostalgia reasons, that’s all.
I’m sorry my preference for certain machines that I have fond memories of triggers you so much.
Get some tea man, jesus.
I like that my macs are just anonymous slabs of steel, standing silently in a corner. I don’t want to be distracted by the computer; I want to get a machine that just works.
My windows machines distracts me with endless attention seeker outbursts on OS level for updates, non uniform crapware notifications, menus look like a tabloid paper, (for me) awkward os tools (shells and all that), and I have to research a few days to find a reasonably quality silent rig. Easy to get “personal” cases with neon light and other things I have no use of whatsoever.
With linux I have the same issues as with windows, minus awkward OS tools, but plus crap driver situation. Yes, I can read manuals for a month and configure away annoyance, but I don’t want too.
// Maintenance free code:
echo date(“Y”) . ‘ – year of the Linux desktop?’;
The mac just sits there; good enough hardware for non gaming, silent, non intrusive OS, etc. I become productive immediately.
My computer is a tool. I’m not interested in having a personal wrench with heart and personality. I want the one that loosens and tightens bolts with least overhead.
I don’t really think that’s the complain. It is more that a Apple computer anno 2016 is same predictable computer it was 5 years ago. They work, sure, but it certainly was more fun when Apple was doing a bit more experimentation with their product lines. Last time they did that was when they introduced the “looks like trash can” Mac Pro. Contrast that with the era Thom is referring to where we had all kinds of crazy ideas.
I might add that the Macs of that era also “just worked”(*) as much as current generation does.
*) YMMV. My Macs certainly never was so amazingly superior in productivity and stability compared to Windows/Linux as you pretend it to be. Not now and not back then. They’ve always been more beautiful though.
Central theme was a side by side of a PC and a Mainframe. Why the first fails so often? Why the latter almost never?
Conclusion was that Mainframes are the jewels of minimalism and thoughtful engineering.
On this effort to make our computers universal tools. For our insatiable cravings at first, for the OS house [and other actors] later, our computers ended on an impossible agenda, that -by the way- is not OUR agenda.
Needed is that our devices return to that philosophy.
To me, Apple represented a unique OS with a unique processor (68K and later PowerPC). But, after the switch to Intel, all they were was another PC, except running MacOS X. Do I really want to spend THAT much money, to run MacOS X on PC hardware? I don’t think so. I can deal with Windows well enough and save money in the process. I miss the days of my 6100/60 and 8500/120 and G3 B&W, and G4 Digital Audio. Those were the days!
68K processors weren’t unique to Macs; they featured in Unix workstations from Sun, SGI and NeXT and then in home gaming computers like the Amiga and Atari ST. However, these machines all had different operating systems and source-incompatible user interfaces and you couldn’t build for more than one without acquiring new compilers. Whatever the faults of DOS and Windows, Intel-based PCs were all compatible with each other, and the popularity of the machines boosted Intel as well, which is why it made sense for Apple to switch.
Point taken, but what about PowerPC? My Maclife began with the 6100/60. Never owned a Mac before then. And considering that a 68K and/or PowerPC processor WASN’T an Intel (x86) processor, the uniqueness was two-fold, not just one, like today.
According to Gordon A. Campbell (Chief marketing officer of intel during the 70’s and 80’s and manager of the CRUSH campaign) Intel had no major microprocessor design wins before the IBM deal, he claims Motorola beat them at every turn before that.
[Literally]
I agree with Thom about the G4 era, beautiful super powerful Unix machines. Best Apple computers ever.
BTW my most loved Apple product is the first iMac… It was insane, 100% ahead of it’s time, It changed the way We see computers forever, it was radically different… sadly that revolutionary attitude is completely lost like tears in the rain.
I also I have soft spot for the G4 era. Well, frankly I have soft spot for the SE era! – but yeah, the tinkering days are over. When Os X was 10.0 it was such a fun time, now it’s weird to think of Apple as being mainstream.
There were so many cool technologies along the way: Hypercard, opendoc, The Newton, the wonderful G4s .Anyway, here’s looking forward to a bit more pirate flag style development at Apple..
People are seriously crooning about the G4 “era?” Talk about colored glasses when looking at the past.
The G4, for most of its life, was hopelessly outmatched by the x86 offerings. At some point it got so bad, that apple was forced to sell machines with 2 G4s, just to match the x86 single processor performance on paper. But since their OS, at the time, was not SMP capable. So basically most users were paying a premium for an extra, useless, processor.
And lets not forget the craptastic early releases of OSX happening at that time.
If anything, it is a testament to the power of Apple marketing, that some people now remember those awful days as some kind of “golden” period.
Perhaps, but I was able to get an amazing amount of battery life out of my iBook G4 with a few tweaks. A powerhouse it was not, but a workhorse that could get me through a full day and I loved it for that. It took X86 years to be able to match it in that department.
Yeah, battery life and screen quality tended to be the main value propositions for apple G4 laptops during the P4m days. But even then, Apple had to release the G5 just to keep up with netburst, and it ended up being even more power hungry than the P4.
I think at some point Apple realized that their strength was in their product marketing, not their product engineering/performance. And given their financials, they’re quite correct. Perhaps that people remember those awful days as “great” now, is another data point towards Apple’s marketing power.
At least they had the sense not to put a G5 in a laptop, for that very reason.
This is the reason Apple switched to Intel, if I remember rightly. They could not get a G5 that was suitable for a laptop.
(Though oddly enough, they did not wait for Intel to get a 64-bit Core chip out before switching, which meant they released 32-bit Intel Macs which became abandonware once Snow Leopard was released, which was 64-bit Intel only.)
Yeah, that was at least one of the reasons they switched over. At the time, I must admit, I missed the battery life the PowerPC machines could give me once I moved to an Intel Mac. It’s not an issue now, of course, and I’d not want to go back to a G4 today, but at the time I felt like I got a slightly raw deal with the Intel switch. I even had one of those 32-bit Intel Macs you speak of, and boy oh boy was I pissed when 10.6 was 64-bit architecture only (despite having a 32-bit kernel you could invoke at boot time if necessary, I might add). I remember getting around this somehow, though it didn’t do me much good when applications began to be 64-bit binaries only along with it.