The Apple days are over.

[Doc750]

What, pray tell, is "corporate America structure"? .

When a company's focus shifts from making great products that redefine the industry and make a crap load of money in the process, to a stagnant company with large overhead, who attempts to maximize profit by cutting corners, cutting cost, not investing heavily in R&D, relying heavily on past laurels, patent litigation and advertising hype to make money. Now you have corporate America.


Apple's last redefine moments, in terms of cutting edge design/function

New MBA line - is something like 3 yrs old, with incremental updates
iPad- is in its 3rd generation and is essentially the same
iPhone - since iPhone four has been the same
iOS - has not had any grounding breaking developments in 2 years.
OS X- gets a new cat name every year, but feels and works the same, if not worse

MBP - is more like MB-joke now.
Mac Pro? .... Crickets .... Chirp ... Chirp
iMac? ... Update, what's an update?

The features they release every year are minor and mirror what has already been released in the market from other manufacturers a year in advance. Apple puts a twist on it, and calls it ground breaking.

Don't get me wrong, apple will make money for the next two to three years. But it's over the hill, and really needs new life injected into it, in order to stay sustainable.

 

[Blackberryroid]

i wonder how they can go to bed each night thinking that this is the biggest thing to happen to iPhone. I wouldn't sleep well if i were them.

Marketing. They make some amazing slogans and they make money out of it.

 

[adversus]

Marketing. They make some amazing slogans and they make money out of it.

They also make amazing products.

I've had an iPhone 3, 4, and now a 5 (I skipped the original and every S). The thing about opinions is that my definition of amazing is different than yours.

The first iPhone and iPad was "revolutionary" because Apple basically created the Blue Ocean industry. Now the tablet and especially smartphone market is starting to turn Red, and when that happens the "revolutionary" products are harder and harder to come by. Iterations are now smaller. There's only so many "big leaps" you can make with current technology.

So yes, Apple uses those kinds of words in their marketing. So what? Every company does. Microsoft has been touting Windows 8 as "reimagined and reinvented" when it's the same bloated ******** they've been bundling since Windows 3.1.

Take another example, since your name so proudly has "Blackberry" in it. RIM proudly proclaims on their webpage for the Blackberry Bold, "The power of touch". Really? They are just now claiming that touch is the new thing?

It's called marketing. If you want to paint Apple with an anti-marketing brush, paint every large company who's ever made and sold anything.

 

[jaw04005]

The only major blunder of Apple and Tim Cook in the last 12 months was hiring that moron from Dixons and laying off Apple Store employees. The rest of the company has pretty much been business as usual.

Apple can't release a groundbreaking product every year.

 

[ravenvii]

I don't get the Mountaion Lion-bashing here.

For me, the upgrade was incredible. It's so much better than Lion it's not even funny. Yes, there are some kinks they need to work out (the stupid new saving system - why the **** did they fix what's not broken?) but other than that, the performance and bug-less-ness of Mountain Lion is amazing. Really gave my 2008 iMac a new life.

 

[LizKat]

Apple is doomed! Doomed I tell you!

Right, time to bring back the Apple death-knell lists, they were always good for a laugh!

 

[Renzatic]

So yes, Apple uses those kinds of words in their marketing. So what? Every company does. Microsoft has been touting Windows 8 as "reimagined and reinvented" when it's the same bloated ******** they've been bundling since Windows 3.1.

They've got some old Win3.1 icons in there, but...uh. That's about it.

 

[Liquorpuki]

New MBA line - is something like 3 yrs old, with incremental updates
iPad- is in its 3rd generation and is essentially the same
iPhone - since iPhone four has been the same
iOS - has not had any grounding breaking developments in 2 years.
OS X- gets a new cat name every year, but feels and works the same, if not worse

SIRI is groundbreaking. Right now it's crippled by the carriers crappy 3G networks but as LTE rolls out, it should become extremely useful. I have a background in pattern classification and IMO what Apple did with SIRI is right next to Google's driverless car in terms of AI applications.

iCloud is a feature everyone vested in the Apple ecosystem adopted under the radar and now takes for granted. I don't know how most people were doing it before, but syncing used to be a pain in the ass for me.

The iPad I don't care much for. I still have my 1 and use it mostly as an E-reader. Personally I think Apple's app store business model sucks and encourages a ton of cheap crap software instead of truly useful power apps that would elevate the iPad into that post-PC role that everyone's talking about. But then again, all the other tablet OS use the same business model.

But that's my main knock on Apple - they neglect software beyond the OS on all platforms. If they fixed this, Microsoft would lose their leverage

Don't get me wrong, apple will make money for the next two to three years. But it's over the hill, and really needs new life injected into it, in order to stay sustainable.

Apple sustains profitability through market expansions every few years. They usually shakedown some industry (music) or create one out of thin air (tablets), then all the innovation talk comes back. They're due for one and everyone knows they're targeting the TV market.

 

[torana355]

I don't think Apple is doomed, but I do think they've lost their way somewhat. But in many ways the biggest problem is the consumer. The iPhone 5 is a fairly lacklustre update which has been plagued with problems, but Apple will still sell tens of millions of them. Apple are interested in profits and shares - on paper, the iPhone 5 will be a resounding success.

Only when people start to try the competition will Apple stop coasting and step-up once again.

Exactly!! Apple is coasting on its previous success atm. Its sad that isheep are that blind that they will defend under developed products to the death which only justifies Apples decision to take shortcuts. As an avid Apple fan it makes me sad that i am forced to buy products not made by Apple. Thank god Apple still make great laptops and iMacs as i couldn't go back to Windows.

 

[adversus]

They've got some old Win3.1 icons in there, but...uh. That's about it.

Weighing in at 15GB, I'd be downright shocked if Microsoft made any attempt to purge the legacy garbage from Windows 8. Given that I've seen Windows 3x apps running natively in Windows 8, I don't hold high hopes.

I'd also be shocked if Windows 8 manageability index is anything remotely close to sane.

 

[Renzatic]

Weighing in at 15GB, I'd be downright shocked if Microsoft made any attempt to purge the legacy garbage from Windows 8. Given that I've seen Windows 3x apps running natively in Windows 8, I don't hold high hopes.

I'd also be shocked if Windows 8 manageability index is anything remotely close to sane.

The default install size without the hibernation and page files is around 10GB. That's around 1GB larger than OSX, give or take.

And yeah, in theory, you can run Win3x apps on 32bit post Vista OSes. I've never seen it done myself, but there might be enough legacy code in there for you to launch simpler applications. It's a completely different story with 64bit Windows, which are incapable of launching 16bit applications. Any legacy code pertaining to it has been culled out completely.

And anyway, all this legacy stuff you claim is pulling down the whole system. It's all free floating APIs that aren't anywhere near baked into Windows itself. If MS no longer needs something around, all they have to do is not include the API in the next version of Windows. All these APIs do is take up a minuscule bit of HDD space. If you're not using any programs that make calls for legacy code, then it's not being loaded into memory, and therefore not "bloating" the OS.

Win8 is probably the start of the grand culling down, though. With Hyper-V being supported even in the home editions of 8, if someone needs to use a legacy application, all they have to do is download the proper OS virtual machine to run it with. It'll allow them to keep the core OS lean and mean, while still maintaining their always beloved backwards compatibility.

Everything about Win8 is transitional. It's not completely different than what's come before, but it's laying the framework for a huge amount of changes in the future.

 

[A Hebrew]

No company has really released something ground breaking recently, yet that means the death of Apple lol?

 

[McGiord]

I kind of agree that the Apple experience is not at its best moment right now.
Specially if you own 'old' products.
Their game of making you update every year is been kind of forced with every software update.

The things that really suck are:
iTunes Match and in iCloud works very slow most of the times.
iTunes store navigation and the requirement of cookies for it to work when buying something or authenticating.
Lion finder, folders are not properly showing their contents, and the connection to remote wireless devices is not reliable.
No quick way to enable/disable Bluetooth, Wi-FI, Location Services, DATA, etc.
About the iPhone 5 I would have preferred if they keep it the same thickness and make the battery last longer.

They good side of their failures is if they really focus the right resources on fixing all of these issues.
If they can't do it, then they are doomed to have some odd years like in the late 80s to the mid 90s.

They will be releasing the 7" iPad Mini, and will be selling a bunch of them, therefore more cash in.

If they indeed transition certain things to a corporate like environment, more resources will be assigned to fix al these issues. Their selection process for hiring their talent is quite different from the traditional corporate companies, therefore they could manage to make it work in a better way. I men having more talented people fixing all these issues.

The internal SJ hologram is still in alpha version, and it has made a couple of hiccups by approving the Maps App, and other things recently released, once they fix it and transition to 1.0 no more crappy stock Apps will be released.

Next year is going to be the real thing, without Steve's push we will see how well they can release new features and products.

Maybe the iTV with a decent on demad/a la carte iTunes Match type of service.

But what else are you expecting?

 

[SporkLover]

I disagree.

I think what people are experiencing is a maturing product line. When Apple entered the smartphone market in 2007, it was the wild west. They could afford to be radical, to be revolutionary. Now that they have a huge userbase, they are more evolutionary and they have to be so they don't alienate their Current users

From that perspective I say ios 6 and the hardware refresh on the iPhone 5 is great. They added more power, thinned it out (screen + digitizer in one!), made it larger.

I for one am enjoying that app integration like Facebook to the OS. They are finally up to par in terms of functionality that other mobile OS's already offered.

 

[AQUADock]

Cut

Some of those failures happened when Steve was around: MobileMe and ping. The iPad2 was also released when Steve was around and you're saying that it was a bad release so I don't get your logic by saying that apple are releasing bad updates to products without Steve, when it was Steve who let out the iPad that was "bad". OS X is now getting yearly updates so don't expect anything amazing to be released every year and OS X was always updated incrementally with exception to leopard from tiger. Also the earpods are better then the earphones that they replaced, I haven't tried them yet so I can't judge but what to you expect from bundled earbuds?

 

[Blackberryroid]

I found another Mac OS X complaint:

Soon after installing the (Mac OS X 10.7.5) latest upgrade, I noticed that Time Machine was working a lot slower—sometimes spending hours on a simple backup that used to take minutes. Eventually I put in a call to Apple support, which initially expressed perplexity and had me run some simple diagnostics and disk cleanup programs on my system. But they didn’t have a solution. They still don’t.

Somewhere, somehow, the Apple higher-ups let a flawed program sneak out the door — two programs, if you include maps. That could be coincidence, or it could be the beginning of a trend that leads to no good place. Over to you, Tim Cook.

 

[robertosh]

What about the new iPod line?

 

[Jb07]

There should be a filter on these threads.

 

[chrono1081]

The OP obviously never used Windows 8...

 

[generati]

These rants are becoming so common, it's like all those that call "First!" at the beginning of threads.

*YAWN*

Or is it that a lot of people are starting to notice some pretty glaring issues?

 

[neutrino23]

You should read the discussion at Asymco.com. Horace is worried that the iPhone 5 is too good.

The discussions here are like the guys in the hot rod magazines complaining about the cars that most of us drive. They wonder why we don't all drive Porsches and Ferraris.

 

[willmtaylor]

Or is it that a lot of people are starting to notice some pretty glaring issues?

Nope. It's what I said.

 

[wordoflife]

Apple is over if they stop "innovating"
ex: iPad

additionally, more so than the new features, apple needs to make sure that their current stuff works, and that it works well. Been pretty disappointed but I still have faith in Apple.

 

[Mike in Kansas]

There should be a filter on these threads.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, whichever you prefer!), that would screen out most of the threads on here, and a couple of posters continuously!

 

[Michael Goff]

iPhone 5 was more than a mere speed bump and a slight size increase. They also changed the aspect ratio to the one that the industry actually accepts as being the movie-watching one.

But, let's all take a look at two phones made by a different company. We have the Galaxy S 2 and Galaxy S 3.

-Increased screen size and resolution (.5 inches)
-Additional display support
-Better camera
-Better battery
-NFC
-Bluetooth 4.0
-Speed bump
-Lighter
-More RAM

Yep, those updates are all revolutionary. Everyone knows that the S series is going out there and innovating. As a phone, it didn't do much. Why? Because there really isn't much they can do on the hardware front anymore.