Is the Magic of Apple Fading or Are We Just Chasing Nostalgia?

[AlaskaMoose]

Well yes exactly, and I hear what you're saying (on the other comments too) and well said and agree with lots of it.

Just to make my case yet one more time...

TBH I hope I'm wrong, but I think the inertia has already stopped we just haven't felt it yet. Apple is a bit like a deer shot while running, their still going, they don't know the consequences of their actions, but they will stumble soon. Microsoft was this way under Balmer. It's not a fatal shot mind you, they're too big and talented to die, they'll recover, and I don't think Tim Cook is the worst ever or a mistake by Jobs, I'm not going that far as others are saying here.

I'm just saying... he and the other current executives have made mistakes, chasing the wrong things as most big companies do (things ironically Steve Jobs warns about in several interviews talking about how Apple can out compete bigger MS and IBM) and I think they will become readily apparent in the next 5 years, hurting the stock and value over the next 10 years.

For example, the iPod as "just a walkman with a hard drive" or iphone "just a blackberry with a touch screen" seriously does not understand the technology nor common sense thinking of the time. Apple had to invent entirely new technologies, firmware, touch interactions, and more to make those things not just work, but work well.

Apple hasn't done that kind of deep work since... well visionOS and Vision Pro, and to be frank, that outcome is just not as compelling. It feels a lot more half baked, despite all the technology in it. I hope they fix Vision Pro over time, but the OG iPhone was still compelling on day one. If you could go back to 2007 and be amazed by a touch screen keyboard you will know what I mean. Its not that blackberry didn't consider a touch screen device, they felt a touch keyboard was impossible to do well. They criticized the iphone for years until the joke was on them and they went bankrupt. It was the innovation to make a really useful touch keyboard, that at least partially, saved and made the iPhone. No one else could do this, and it actually took Android several years to have a touch keyboard that didn't suck.

Anyways, so all of this comes to robotics, yes I love all these examples you mention about what AI should be and what "droids" could be! This is clearly the future, embodied, real world AI! It needs privacy, on device processing, Apple should be the leader! But are they? Not even close, and yes it's not any of those other companies you mentinoed, its Tesla. Tesla is maybe a decade ahead of everyone else in robotics, manufacturing, and AI all together. And in the next 10 years, that will matter a whole lot more than whatever rectangle one has in their pocket.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1866171391156113740

So my criticism is Apple is stumbling with their current software, stumbling with XR on the Vision Pro, and missing this next wave of AI and robotics all so they could sell a few more iPads at different price points, and thats the real shame of the current apple leadership team.

I read or maybe watched a video somewhere, about the life of Steve Jobs' founding Apple until his retirement, and the beginning of Tim Cook work with Apple. The host explains the differences between Steve Jobs being a visionary, while Trim Cook as being much a business manager. The way I interpreted it is as if Tim Cook just conducts business to grow the company, while Steve Jobs would turn his dreams for the future into a reality.

In relation to the hard drives and thing like that used in the iPod, such technologies weren't created by Apple, but Apple improved existing technologies when creating electronic devices (iPod, iPhone, and so on). The touch screen, for example:

Council Post: A Brief History Of Touchscreen Technology: From The IPhone To Multi-User Videowalls

Going forward, expect touchscreen technology to further permeate into a wide variety of businesses.

www.forbes.com

Your last two paragraphs are spot-on. Apple's intelligence and Siri, for example, are far behind compared to several others. Even Alexa, and Google are ahead in relation to AI, and now as Google has announced the creation of a Quantum Chip....well, I have no idea what to say

I read that such quantum chip can solve, in five minutes, what would take several days for some of the existing super computers to achieve. Musk is years ahead, too. His dreams to travel to the moon and Mars began its creation back in 2016, and look as how far (how much) he has already achieved in such a short time. He's certainly a visionary.

 

[Bungaree.Chubbins]

No one is going to care when Apple moves away from their flat boring OS becaues it's as ugly as #$#. Aqua was simply sublime in its elegance. Today's macOS is a shell of what Aqua used to be. Utter trash thanks to the feckless Tim Cook.

I get it, you hate the contemporary interfaces, Tim Cook, and maybe Apple itself with the fury of a thousand suns! You’ve made it very clear!

Aqua was great 20 years ago, but is cringe today. In 20 years, the current interface will look dated and kitsch.

 

[theluggage]

If you pull up a compressor (for example) and it looks just like like a real compressor in a rack then you instantly know how to use it

(For those that are interested, the links below explain what a compressor does - we're not talking MP3 here)

Interesting example of the various degrees of skeuomorphism - so Logic Pro is as skeuo as it gets, with shiny chrome knobs and twitching needles with (in some modes) orange neon illumination:

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/logicpro/lgcef1bec0a5/mac

...and as someone who *didn't* cut their teeth on real compressors, the first thing I do is hit "graph" so I can see the transfer curve being set by the various parameters which I find much easier to interpret.

...but what's even fundamentally more "skeuo" about it is that while the default mode is a "perfect" digital effect, those buttons along the top let you emulate various types of "vintage" compressors warts and all because some people want the sound made by a laggy, inefficient, distorting analogue circuit.

By comparison, Ableton, has a stylised "flat" design, with the graph more up-front - but it's still using similar controls and labels to a hardware compressor:

Live Audio Effect Reference — Ableton Reference Manual Version 12 | Ableton

www.ableton.com

...they've also left off the "vintage" emulations - but you can now tweak some extra parameters like lookahead which affect the sound & I'm sure someone out there has published presets...

Perhaps if you want a truly non-skeuomorphic design, you should re-think what a compressor does - basically allow you to apply any old transfer curve to the signal - which could be sketched on the screen without all of this obsolete "threshold, knee, make-up" terminology? ( Discuss ) - looks like Ableton does have a mode where you can just drag around the transfer curve.

In the audio production world, I believe the whole over-the-top skeuomorphism thing got started with Propellorheads Reason which introduced realistic-looking racks complete with dangling patch cables (and also kicked off a lot of nostalgia for emulating old, analogue gear). I don't know that there's any rational justification for doing more than keeping familiar terminology - but it was cool at the time.

 

[nathansz]

Logic Pro is as skeuo as it gets, with shiny chrome knobs and twitching needles with (in some modes) orange neon illumination

I would only add that the vast majority of third party pro tools plugins share this description

which always look quite striking compared to pro tools itself which still looks kinda like windows 95/98

 

[Reality4711]

I read or maybe watched a video somewhere, about the life of Steve Jobs' founding Apple until his retirement, and the beginning of Tim Cook work with Apple. The host explains the differences between Steve Jobs being a visionary, while Trim Cook as being much a business manager. The way I interpreted it is as if Tim Cook just conducts business to grow the company, while Steve Jobs would turn his dreams for the future into a reality.

In relation to the hard drives and thing like that used in the iPod, such technologies weren't created by Apple, but Apple improved existing technologies when creating electronic devices (iPod, iPhone, and so on). The touch screen, for example:

Council Post: A Brief History Of Touchscreen Technology: From The IPhone To Multi-User Videowalls

Going forward, expect touchscreen technology to further permeate into a wide variety of businesses.

www.forbes.com

Your last two paragraphs are spot-on. Apple's intelligence and Siri, for example, are far behind compared to several others. Even Alexa, and Google are ahead in relation to AI, and now as Google has announced the creation of a Quantum Chip....well, I have no idea what to say

I read that such quantum chip can solve, in five minutes, what would take several days for some of the existing super computers to achieve. Musk is years ahead, too. His dreams to travel to the moon and Mars began its creation back in 2016, and look as how far (how much) he has already achieved in such a short time. He's certainly a visionary.

One of the reasons I spend time on MacRumours is to avoid that name and any from his ilk.
Insane/sociopathic/psychotic and maniacle YUP agreed but visionary not so much. He has attained a level of disgust that I have experiences in my 72 years along with his bosom buddies so I suppose you can call that achievment compared to the rest of ----- Oh never mind.
Look what you did; it will take bottle or two (red wine) to calm me now!

 

[nathansz]

Musk is years ahead, too. His dreams to travel to the moon and Mars began its creation back in 2016, and look as how far (how much) he has already achieved in such a short time. He's certainly a visionary.

Musk is an arrogant drug addled sociopath. The only reason he's achieved anything is generational wealth.

 

[Reality4711]

Musk is an arrogant drug addled sociopath. The only reason he's achieved anything is generational wealth.

ABSOLUT!!!!

 

[bushman4]

It’s 2024 and creating a wow factor is not easy. But creating what the customer wants is a top priority
Over the years Apple has kept pace and even innovated in some cases
however; the time has come to accommodate the customers use some of the patents that they have created and sales will increase and everybody will be happy

 

[phoenix-mac-user]

It’s 2024 and creating a wow factor is not easy. But creating what the customer wants is a top priority
Over the years Apple has kept pace and even innovated in some cases
however; the time has come to accommodate the customers use some of the patents that they have created and sales will increase and everybody will be happy

Yep. And I'm going to say it. Steve Jobs had the wow factor because of the iPhone, a once in a generation world-changing device. He caught lightning in a bottle and nobody cared about those keynotes and turtlenecks very much before the iPhone.

He initially rejected making the iPhone and had to be talked into it from a VP who told him smartphones would cut into iPod sales.

In many ways he held Apple back. He refused to release larger screen iPhones when Samsung and others were taking over the market with big screens, saying "no one is going to want a big phone". The fact that they don't make a single model with that dinky little 3.5 inch screen size says otherwise.

It was one of the first things Tim Cook reversed course on after taking over and it probably saved the iPhone.

Steve Jobs was a brilliant manager and marketer who brought Apple back from the dead, but he made a lot of mistakes and the god-like reverence for him is a little over the top sometimes.

 

[AlaskaMoose]

Musk is an arrogant drug addled sociopath. The only reason he's achieved anything is generational wealth.

Well, that should be Musk's personal problem. But his achievements, including the businesses he conducts, are to the benefit of his workforce, and to all the associated businesses as well. Besides, what is wrong with generational wealth?

Do you really believe that Apple, as a company, is not doing the same? Tim Cook and all of Apple's workers become richer, not poorer, and all the associated businesses also benefit from Apple's business. There isn't anybody out there who works with the idea of not generating an income, or even not becoming richer.

 

[Reality4711]

Well, that should be Musk's personal problem. But his achievements, including the businesses he conducts, are to the benefit of his workforce, and to all the associated businesses as well. Besides, what is wrong with generational wealth?

Do you really believe that Apple, as a company, is not doing the same? Tim Cook and all of Apple's workers become richer, not poorer, and all the associated businesses also benefit from Apple's business. There isn't anybody out there who works with the idea of not generating an income, or even not becoming richer.

It is not the money making. It is the slime covered perverted group that the 'asylum' has voted in to power.
Rape/pedophilia/fraud/theft/etc etc my last post on this.
If you cannot see the problem then maybe you are part of it?

My apologies to MacRumours - just - this blind stupidity has to be called out promise to say no more.

 

[theluggage]

Yep. And I'm going to say it. Steve Jobs had the wow factor because of the iPhone, a once in a generation world-changing device. He caught lightning in a bottle and nobody cared about those keynotes and turtlenecks very much before the iPhone.

Which totally ignores:

1. The Apple 2 - not the first personal computer but one of the first usable by people who didn't own a soldering iron and an industry surplus video terminal.

2. Apple Lisa - first widely-available GUI computer. Commercial flop, but it had the "wow" factor in buckets and ultimately changed the face of personal computing.

3. The Apple Mac. You may not have heard of it, but apparently it was quite a big thing /s

4. The NeXT cube - not a huge commercial success (good luck selling anything that wasn't a PC in the 90s - even Apple-without-Jobs were going bankrupt) - but huge "wow" factor at the time, and hugely influential.

5. MacOS X nee NextStep. Apple-without-Jobs tried to make a modern version of MacOS (Copeland) which turned into an epic, infamous failure. So they bought the NeXTStep OS (and Jobs came with it).

NB: To give Apple-sans-Jobs credit where credit is due, they (a) basically defined the modern laptop form factor with the PowerBook 100 series and (b) had a creditable swing-and-miss with Newton (with the side effect of investing in an obscure British processor maker called ARM that was to turn out to be rather important later on...)

6. The original iMac. Zero actually new tech, 100% wow factor. USB already existed but nobody used those two weird square connectors on their PC motherboard. If the number of early USB peripherals with translucent blue cases is anything to go by, the iMac was instrumental in popularising it. Put Apple back on the map - the iPhone may have made Apple a trillion dollar company, but without the iMac there may not have been an Apple to make it.

7. The iPod & iTunes Store. Turned Apple into a "consumer" brand and popularised/legitimised digital music players

8. OK, so what if Jobs had to be told by an analyst that smartphones would eat the iPod's lunch? Point is, he listened.

9. iPad. Not his greatest hits but caused massive waves in the industry and created a new product category.

10. MacBook Air - again, massive "wow factor" when he pulled the Air out of that envelope. Created an industry-wide "ultrabook" form factor.

So, honestly, with that track record he can be given a few passes for the Mac Cube and hockey-puck mouse.

In many ways he held Apple back. He refused to release larger screen iPhones when Samsung and others were taking over the market with big screens, saying "no one is going to want a big phone".

That crunch came in 2012 when the iPhone 5 with extra-skinny screen launched against "phablets" like the Galaxy Note - by which time Jobs had been dead for a year and Tim Cook had been effectively running Apple for longer than that. So, at worst, that was a call Jobs made when he was very, very sick, and which Cook had time to fix if it was so obviously wrong.

 

[Bungaree.Chubbins]

Which totally ignores:

1. The Apple 2 - not the first personal computer but one of the first usable by people who didn't own a soldering iron and an industry surplus video terminal.

2. Apple Lisa - first widely-available GUI computer. Commercial flop, but it had the "wow" factor in buckets and ultimately changed the face of personal computing.

3. The Apple Mac. You may not have heard of it, but apparently it was quite a big thing /s

4. The NeXT cube - not a huge commercial success (good luck selling anything that wasn't a PC in the 90s - even Apple-without-Jobs were going bankrupt) - but huge "wow" factor at the time, and hugely influential.

5. MacOS X nee NextStep. Apple-without-Jobs tried to make a modern version of MacOS (Copeland) which turned into an epic, infamous failure. So they bought the NeXTStep OS (and Jobs came with it).

NB: To give Apple-sans-Jobs credit where credit is due, they (a) basically defined the modern laptop form factor with the PowerBook 100 series and (b) had a creditable swing-and-miss with Newton (with the side effect of investing in an obscure British processor maker called ARM that was to turn out to be rather important later on...)

6. The original iMac. Zero actually new tech, 100% wow factor. USB already existed but nobody used those two weird square connectors on their PC motherboard. If the number of early USB peripherals with translucent blue cases is anything to go by, the iMac was instrumental in popularising it. Put Apple back on the map - the iPhone may have made Apple a trillion dollar company, but without the iMac there may not have been an Apple to make it.

7. The iPod & iTunes Store. Turned Apple into a "consumer" brand and popularised/legitimised digital music players

8. OK, so what if Jobs had to be told by an analyst that smartphones would eat the iPod's lunch? Point is, he listened.

9. iPad. Not his greatest hits but caused massive waves in the industry and created a new product category.

10. MacBook Air - again, massive "wow factor" when he pulled the Air out of that envelope. Created an industry-wide "ultrabook" form factor.

So, honestly, with that track record he can be given a few passes for the Mac Cube and hockey-puck mouse.


That crunch came in 2012 when the iPhone 5 with extra-skinny screen launched against "phablets" like the Galaxy Note - by which time Jobs had been dead for a year and Tim Cook had been effectively running Apple for longer than that. So, at worst, that was a call Jobs made when he was very, very sick, and which Cook had time to fix if it was so obviously wrong.

I agree with everything you said, except the iPhone 5 was my favourite phone until I got my iPhone 14. The 5 was great!

 

[theluggage]

I agree with everything you said, except the iPhone 5 was my favourite phone until I got my iPhone 14. The 5 was great!

...the problem wasn't so much the iPhone 5 itself as the one-size-fits-all approach. I actually got a Galaxy Note 2 after deciding against the iPhone 5 and other people's reactions were fairly evenly split between love/hate - but Android offered something for both camps.

I think this one-size-fits-all approach may have been a post-Jobs issue: E.g. for desktop Macs In the 00s, if you didn't fancy an iMac or a Cube - later a Mini - then there was also a range of mini-tower Macs, with nicely designed tool-free cases. By 2017 it was an iMac or nothing (both the Mini and Trashcan were years out of date by then). It's got a bit better now (unless your mourning the 5k iMac).

 

[RSB96]

...the problem wasn't so much the iPhone 5 itself as the one-size-fits-all approach. I actually got a Galaxy Note 2 after deciding against the iPhone 5 and other people's reactions were fairly evenly split between love/hate - but Android offered something for both camps.

I think this one-size-fits-all approach may have been a post-Jobs issue: E.g. for desktop Macs In the 00s, if you didn't fancy an iMac or a Cube - later a Mini - then there was also a range of mini-tower Macs, with nicely designed tool-free cases. By 2017 it was an iMac or nothing (both the Mini and Trashcan were years out of date by then). It's got a bit better now (unless your mourning the 5k iMac).

At the time of the iPhone 5 I was flirting with the HTC One M7 and the Sony Xperia Z (which had the badst screen, pale and without any contrast) because it always seemed very small and the experience with larger phones was more satisfying. I wasn't a fan of big phones at the time (since the 12, I switched to the Pro Max, I've had the 12, 13 and 15 Pro Max), but the 4-inch iPhone 5 was insufficient for my use. The iPhone 6 for me was a fresh air solo and having a "proper" screen and the iPhone X seems to me the perfect point between size and comfort. It's a shame they're bigger now. An iPhone Pro with the top camera hardware of the Pro Max with 5.8" would be my deal breaker.

 

[phoenix-mac-user]

Which totally ignores:

1. The Apple 2 - not the first personal computer but one of the first usable by people who didn't own a soldering iron and an industry surplus video terminal.

2. Apple Lisa - first widely-available GUI computer. Commercial flop, but it had the "wow" factor in buckets and ultimately changed the face of personal computing.

3. The Apple Mac. You may not have heard of it, but apparently it was quite a big thing /s

4. The NeXT cube - not a huge commercial success (good luck selling anything that wasn't a PC in the 90s - even Apple-without-Jobs were going bankrupt) - but huge "wow" factor at the time, and hugely influential.

5. MacOS X nee NextStep. Apple-without-Jobs tried to make a modern version of MacOS (Copeland) which turned into an epic, infamous failure. So they bought the NeXTStep OS (and Jobs came with it).

NB: To give Apple-sans-Jobs credit where credit is due, they (a) basically defined the modern laptop form factor with the PowerBook 100 series and (b) had a creditable swing-and-miss with Newton (with the side effect of investing in an obscure British processor maker called ARM that was to turn out to be rather important later on...)

6. The original iMac. Zero actually new tech, 100% wow factor. USB already existed but nobody used those two weird square connectors on their PC motherboard. If the number of early USB peripherals with translucent blue cases is anything to go by, the iMac was instrumental in popularising it. Put Apple back on the map - the iPhone may have made Apple a trillion dollar company, but without the iMac there may not have been an Apple to make it.

7. The iPod & iTunes Store. Turned Apple into a "consumer" brand and popularised/legitimised digital music players

8. OK, so what if Jobs had to be told by an analyst that smartphones would eat the iPod's lunch? Point is, he listened.

9. iPad. Not his greatest hits but caused massive waves in the industry and created a new product category.

10. MacBook Air - again, massive "wow factor" when he pulled the Air out of that envelope. Created an industry-wide "ultrabook" form factor.

So, honestly, with that track record he can be given a few passes for the Mac Cube and hockey-puck mouse.


That crunch came in 2012 when the iPhone 5 with extra-skinny screen launched against "phablets" like the Galaxy Note - by which time Jobs had been dead for a year and Tim Cook had been effectively running Apple for longer than that. So, at worst, that was a call Jobs made when he was very, very sick, and which Cook had time to fix if it was so obviously wrong.

LOL. Listing out a bunch of failed products is not disproving my point. None of your list really matters except the iPod, which was huge. But when someone pitched him the iPhone his biggest concern was how it would impact the iPod and had to be sold on it, which is kind of hilarious and shows he was not a great visionary all of the time.

As far as everything else, I have used Macs for a huge chunk of my life but it has 7% of the overall OS market when Steve Jobs died. That has increased to 13% under Tim Cook. Still just a fraction of the overall market. And that encompasses all those Macs you listed. No significant amount of the population bought iMacs. They sold 8.7M from its launch in 1998 to the end of 2004. PC manufacturers were not clamoring to duplicate it to piggyback on its "success".

The same with everything else, they are all lumped into something that 7% of the market used when Jobs died.

Apple was a iPod company in the early 2000s until it became the SmartPhone company that it is today. In. Q3, they made $46.6B on iPhone sales, vs $14.6B for Macs and iPads. But if you add "Services", which is basically App Store sales, that adds another $25B and would skew their revenue even more toward the iPhone because most App Store sales are for the iPhone.

And as far as the failure of not making a bigger screen, we have his own words on multiple occasions, which are so uniquely wrong and stupid in hindsight. It was reported the last iPhone he was fully in control of was the 4S, and shocker, the first one after that had a bigger screen. And the iPhone 5, even with his limited involvement, was horribly compromised by his "vision" and had a 4 inch screen which was still incredibly small compared to what everyone else was making at the time.

It wasn't until the iPhone 6 that was completely designed after his death and he had no involvement with, that they finally abandoned his "one handed" principle and made phones in multiple sizes so someone could decide for themselves what size iPhone they wanted instead of Steve Jobs insisting he knew what they want. And 3 day sales went from 5M for the iPhone 5 to 13M for the iPhone 6.

Retconning history and pretending he was involved in creating a bigger iPhone when he said publicly up until 2010, a year before he died, that he was completely against it, is hilarious.

I switched to Android during that time because I was annoyed by his obstinance claiming he knew what I wanted better than I did. Thankfully, they abandoned Steve Jobs vision on screen size, and I loathed the Samsung experience. If they had the pure Android Pixel experience then I might have stayed on the dark side. But a lot of iPhone users did move over and never came back.

 

[eltoslightfoot]

LOL. Listing out a bunch of failed products is not disproving my point. None of your list really matters except the iPod, which was huge. But when someone pitched him the iPhone his biggest concern was how it would impact the iPod and had to be sold on it, which is kind of hilarious and shows he was not a great visionary all of the time.

As far as everything else, I have used Macs for a huge chunk of my life but it has 7% of the overall OS market when Steve Jobs died. That has increased to 13% under Tim Cook. Still just a fraction of the overall market. And that encompasses all those Macs you listed. No significant amount of the population bought iMacs. They sold 8.7M from its launch in 1998 to the end of 2004. PC manufacturers were not clamoring to duplicate it to piggyback on its "success".

The same with everything else, they are all lumped into something that 7% of the market used when Jobs died.

Apple was a iPod company in the early 2000s until it became the SmartPhone company that it is today. In. Q3, they made $46.6B on iPhone sales, vs $14.6B for Macs and iPads. But if you add "Services", which is basically App Store sales, that adds another $25B and would skew their revenue even more toward the iPhone because most App Store sales are for the iPhone.

And as far as the failure of not making a bigger screen, we have his own words on multiple occasions, which are so uniquely wrong and stupid in hindsight. It was reported the last iPhone he was fully in control of was the 4S, and shocker, the first one after that had a bigger screen. And the iPhone 5, even with his limited involvement, was horribly compromised by his "vision" and had a 4 inch screen which was still incredibly small compared to what everyone else was making at the time.

It wasn't until the iPhone 6 that was completely designed after his death and he had no involvement with, that they finally abandoned his "one handed" principle and made phones in multiple sizes so someone could decide for themselves what size iPhone they wanted instead of Steve Jobs insisting he knew what they want. And 3 day sales went from 5M for the iPhone 5 to 13M for the iPhone 6.

Retconning history and pretending he was involved in creating a bigger iPhone when he said publicly in 2010 a year before he died he was completely against it, is hilarious.

I switched to Android during that time because I was annoyed by his obstinance claiming he knew what I wanted better than I did. Thankfully, they abandoned Steve Jobs vision on screen size, and I loathed the Samsung experience. If they had the pure Android Pixel experience then I might have stayed on the dark side. But a lot of iPhone users did move over and never came back.

You think that list is failed products—except for the iPod?

Ummmmm. Okay? Really?

Are we really looking at the same list? About the only one that could be argued is Lisa. And that’s it in that list. All the rest were wildly successful.

 

[nathansz]

Listing out a bunch of failed products

apple 2
apple mac
nextcube (the box that the WORLD WIDE WEB was created on!)
macOS X
iMac
iPad
MacBook air

all failed products?!?

you certainly have a high bar for success!

 

[theluggage]

LOL. Listing out a bunch of failed products is not disproving my point.

In what bizzarro universe were the Apple 2, the Mac or MacOS X "failed products"?

...especially in a thread where were talking about "magic" or "wow factor" rather than, necessarily, raw cash. The Mac pretty much spawned the whole "desktop publishing" industry. Even the "failed" products in that list, like the Lisa or the NeXT, still made a lasting impression on the market.

As far as everything else, I have used Macs for a huge chunk of my life but it has 7% of the overall OS market when Steve Jobs died. That has increased to 13% under Tim Cook.

7% of the overall OS market was pretty good compared to the total 1-2% shared by every other system that wasn't windows (e.g. https://www.statista.com/statistics/268237/global-market-share-held-by-operating-systems-since-2009/). Mac was about the only non-Windows platform that survived the Wintel monoculture of the 90s and early 00s - without it there may not have been an Apple for Tim to take over.

How much of the rise in MacOS share is down to Cook is impossible to know: Windows is still king but it has started to slip - Mac may be part of that but its also partly down to mobile Apps for iOS and Android, web-based apps and Unix-based open source starting to compete with native Windows apps (even on Windows machines) loosening the Wintel lock-in. One - although certainly not the only - factor there was the rise of the smartphone, partly stimulated by iPhone - which was also key to dethroning the horribly proprietary and lock-in-ridden Internet Explorer and making it far easier to write platform-independent web apps.

The increasing uptake of Linux (if only in the server world and nothing directly to do with either Jobs or Cook) also helped move the industry away from proprietary Windows standards - which was good news for Mac uptake.

Then you have the legacy of Jobs switching the Mac to a Unix-based OS. A couple of consequences of that were the ability of MacOS to incorporate open-source systems like Samba (for PC-compatible file sharing) or CUPS (for printer drivers) which greatly improve Mac/PC interoperability (CUPS and Samba used to be baked into MacOS - I think Samba at least has been replaced with something proprietary now because GPL3). Even Safari has a common heritage with the linux KHTML engine.

The fact that Mac runs Unix, so most Linux/Unix tools can easily be ported, but can also run things like Adobe CS and MS Office makes it a really attractive tool for web development - maybe not directly boosting mainstream sales, but really helping dispel the notion that the Mac was somehow a toy computer.

Then we have Apple Silicon. Would not have happened if Apple didn't have a lot of experience using first ARM designs and later developing their own A-series chips for the iPhone.

Unlike other people, I'm not hating on Tim Cook here - just pointed out that the seeds of many of his successes were planted by Jobs a long time ago.

 

[phoenix-mac-user]

apple 2
apple mac
nextcube (the box that the WORLD WIDE WEB was created on!)
macOS X
iMac
iPad
MacBook air

all failed products?!?

you certainly have a high bar for success!

Failed was probably strong but none of them were huge successes, except maybe the iPad. Should have included that but it feels like that is a byproduct of the iPhone.

You mention all those Macs and all of them fell into 7% of the overall market share when he died. The Zune at it's peak achieved 10% market share of the MP3 HD player market and nobody is talking about the Zune as some amazing feat of achievement.

Apple was a middling company until it struck gold with the iPod and then exploded with the iPhone, which is when everyone really started tuning in to those keynotes and talking about "magic".

 

[phoenix-mac-user]

Unlike other people, I'm not hating on Tim Cook here - just pointed out that the seeds of many of his successes were planted by Jobs a long time ago.

Likewise I'm not hating on Steve Jobs, just some of the hero worship and he gets. The iPhone was revolutionary and even though there were Android smartphones, they didn't take off until the iPhone. He was involved with something that completely transformed the lives of almost everyone on the planet. But it wasn't something he was interested in and sort of fell into his lap and he had to be talked into it.

Had he not listened to that VP who talked him into the releasing the iPhone, The big things in his obituary would have been his first ultimately failed stint at Apple, and the creator of the iPod, which was a huge success but came and left didn't change the world the way the iPhone did.

Macs are great, I am typing this on one now, but in the grand scheme of things they are not a game changer during Jobs time at Apple, and still aren't. Even today there is a day in early September that everyone waits for and circles the on the calendar with a live presentation dedicated to the release of the new iPhone, and Macs are just some random press release.

In reality unless you are over 50 (and probably even if you are) most of the Apple products you use were developed post-Jobs.

 

[AlaskaMoose]

It is not the money making. It is the slime covered perverted group that the 'asylum' has voted in to power.
Rape/pedophilia/fraud/theft/etc etc my last post on this.
If you cannot see the problem then maybe you are part of it?

My apologies to MacRumours - just - this blind stupidity has to be called out promise to say no more.

For the sake not derailing this thread into politics, I am not going to respond to you. After all, politics is not what a couple of us have referred to, but to conducting business. Apple has been the main subject of discussed, its development, how it developed from the beginning, Tim Cook, Steve Jobs, and so on. There is not denying that all technological advancements are to the benefit of both their creators and the public, regardless of the political or religious background of who have created such things.

 

[Reality4711]

For the sake not derailing this thread into politics, I am not going to respond to you. After all, politics is not what a couple of us have referred to, but to conducting business. Apple has been the main subject of discussed, its development, how it developed from the beginning, Tim Cook, Steve Jobs, and so on. There is not denying that all technological advancements are to the benefit of both their creators and the public, regardless of the political or religious background of who have created such things.

So all is forgiven in the name of tech advances.
Welcome to the blind world of the asylum.

 

[theluggage]

Had he not listened to that VP who talked him into the releasing the iPhone

…but (assuming you’re right) history shows that he did listen. That’s the point. Plus, maybe, just maybe, there was a teensy bit more to the design and development iPhone than that…

In reality unless you are over 50 (and probably even if you are) most of the Apple products you use were developed post-Jobs.

…and if you are over 50 you might remember how the Lisa and Mac completely changed the way people used personal computers, how the ideas “inspired” Windows 2/3 and Unix GUIs, how the pre-Mac Windows 1 looked nothing like a post-Mac GUI and realise how those ideas are still part of how modern Apple products work.

 

[AlaskaMoose]

So all is forgiven in the name of tech advances.
Welcome to the blind world of the asylum.

Yes. Any technological advancements that is to the benefit of the consumer (humankind) is a good thing.