News from Apple this week
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This isn't really about lesser of evils. You don't have to bet your life on either of them.
I'm not sure it has been demonstrated that Google lied but all sorts of truth is coming out in this latest Apple Class Action where Apple willfully mislead both customers and shareholders.
Let's be honest: there's legions more oversight on Android than there ever could be in iOS.
I personally have no problem with either of them. I own stock in both although Apple is my biggest money maker. Google is sometimes second, sometimes it's Amazon. I also own Apple products and Google Android as well as prefer Chrome to Safari. I don't get all the partisan noise. Nobody is forcing me to own either.
Jony Ive is leaving Apple to form his own design company. Agreement with Apple is he will have Apple as his main client.
Jony is arguably the last vestige of Jobs era Apple. I'm betting this arms length arrangement is much better for Ive than it is for Apple.
While his successors have been identified, you have to wonder how many department underlings are considering moving on.
Tim Cook is transitioning Apple from a hardware only company to a services company. Sir Ive has not really been deeply involved with design of consumer products in a couple years. His focus has been the design of the new headquarters facility. His role will still be instrumental in what new hardware Apple will develop but that end of the business will slowly take on a lessor % of the total business as the services end expands.
The problem with Apple continuing as a hardware company is margin. It is getting more and more difficult to maintain the high margins in hardware that once made Apple so great. There are a couple of innovative ideas in development that will soon hit the market but these will be accessories to the iphone as the base CPU. One is AR display glasses and the other is health monitoring devices. These will demand upgrades to the iphone processor. But the margins on these devices will get smaller and smaller so services margins will be what keeps Apple a top tier company.
The problem with Apple continuing as a hardware company is margin. It is getting more and more difficult to maintain the high margins in hardware that once made Apple so great. There are a couple of innovative ideas in development that will soon hit the market but these will be accessories to the iphone as the base CPU. One is AR display glasses and the other is health monitoring devices. These will demand upgrades to the iphone processor. But the margins on these devices will get smaller and smaller so services margins will be what keeps Apple a top tier company.
The problem is that in doing so they are betting on things that others have been doing well (if not decisively better than Apple) for a while now and the others don't impose exclusive conditions (such as requiring Apple hardware) that Apple has placed on their services to date.
Google and Amazon carry a whole lot of weight in both services and what hardware those services might be delivered on (let's not forget that Roku is #1 in streaming hardware and they're experimenting with service offerings as well) and while iTunes has been Apple's intention for a while now, they aren't nearly as available as the offerings from Google and Amazon and dialing back their hardware is only going to make it harder to compete. Given Apple's decisive avoidance of general web-based apps, I have to wonder how they plan to compete in a cloud-based world. Surely selling subscriptions for online storage by making picture files ever bigger isn't the answer to raising funds. Neither is sticking with proprietary data and sound interfaces.
Apple faithful will demand annual hardware excitement to the end and I believe that with the departure of Jony, that's likely to falter. He may not have been contributing a lot on a daily basis, but he had final say on everything and that's not insignificant. As the hardware excitement abates, so will the ecosystem's value diminish. They've pulled a couple boners recently (various battery problems/solutions and not delivering an eagerly anticipated product -- the fast wireless charger)
I'll be looking very closely at exiting the ranks of Apple shareholders if they don't show me something in the next 6-12 months.
There's so much you refuse to understand about Apple but a couple comments you made show that-
Jony Ive did not "have final say on everything." Tim Cook had final say.
Jony Ive is not leaving Apple's design department. He is leaving the payroll and will continue to oversee all product design as an independent contractor. Tim Cook and Ive made that quite clear.
Apple stock holder's main complaint is that Tim Cook does not make bold acquisitions with the pile of cash.
The services end of Apple is at $40B and the most rapidly growing sector of the company.
The problems you listed seem to be the talking points of Samsung users who worry that they don't have the cool iphone technology. Be happy with your Samsung / Android phone. It's not that bad I've heard. Just that the iOS system tends to work better for people who don't want to worry about technology, just use it without all the trouble.
Apple is my largest stock position and when it fails to deliver I'll dump it.
Jony Ive did not "have final say on everything." Tim Cook had final say.
Jony Ive is not leaving Apple's design department. He is leaving the payroll and will continue to oversee all product design as an independent contractor. Tim Cook and Ive made that quite clear.
Apple stock holder's main complaint is that Tim Cook does not make bold acquisitions with the pile of cash.
The services end of Apple is at $40B and the most rapidly growing sector of the company.
The problems you listed seem to be the talking points of Samsung users who worry that they don't have the cool iphone technology. Be happy with your Samsung / Android phone. It's not that bad I've heard. Just that the iOS system tends to work better for people who don't want to worry about technology, just use it without all the trouble.
Apple is my largest stock position and when it fails to deliver I'll dump it.
Either way, Jony was one of two or three who would not be questioned.
Name a single independent contractor whom entire corporate divisions answer to.
Talk is cheap. Tim Cook has said a lot of things that didn't come to pass or didn't come down the way the faithful had hoped. Your personal assurances about what you believe about Apple don't bring me much solace.
You can't easily spend what you can't launder the funds for. Cook is afraid that if he isn't careful, the tax man is going to taketh away.
At the same time, it is perhaps the only product of the company that is experiencing something that could be described as significant growth. The new Apple isn't here yet and their path to get there is far from obvious.
Apple's buzz is built on their product announcements and until the last couple of years, Samsung wasn't able to attack Apple with the truth. Now the truth is hitting home. Apple offers incremental changes (many of them reversals on previous wins)
I'm not buying it. I still have to set up most of my company's iPhone users to fetch mail and every time I do a new phone, the process is different. There's still a number of users that have to e-mail pictures to themselves and that's asinine but that's kind of the whole point of the "ecosystem".
Apple without their unique hardware (including watches) is little more than an also-ran in a business dominated by another.
Unless you work for the man in question you have no idea what goes on inside the walls of Apple headquarters. Pretty much the rest of your post is more Apple hate rhetoric and I don't know what, actually, don't care to know. Your issues with Apple are personal and none of them concern me.
So many people don't like the fact that Apple holds it's products to an exclusive infrastructure they control, because they want Apple to work like every other company. But people who use Apple products do so because of the way these products work and don't care about whether non Apple users have access to Apple's services. WE users feel that if you want to have Apple's quality then buy Apple products and stop whining about it.
But I'll help the expert out on that email pictures problem you have- I allow my pictures and videos to upload to icloud. In a couple minutes, I see them on my PC in the icloud file folder. Might I suggest you take a course at your local Apple store on how to set up iphones since it's your responsibility to do that as your job. If you are too important to stoop to learning from an Apple employee, then hire an Apple trained tech who can do the job for you. Also I don't have a problem with my two email accounts here and set up my wife's system as well. No doubt Office 365 is better for managing email organization with it's rules and structure management, which I use too but the simple email app in iOS works too without all the frills. I don't claim to be an expert but I know how to do what I do and while iOS is different, once I learn how to do it in iOS, it works fine.
You're confusing documented reality with hate rhetoric. If you've read any of the stories or watched the Apple produced video with an eye on learning something rather than banging the corporate drum, you'd have learned that Jony was pretty much untouchable. His sense of style and vision was that important to upper management that it had to be that way. I question whether that same relationship can exist if he's not highly placed on the Apple organizational chart.
I learned a long time ago that my views of what would make an investment great were not as impactful as I imagined. Nitty gritty technical details don't weigh nearly as much as financial details in a company's stock performance and that frustrates me but I don't hate Apple for it. They're playing the game. At the same time, to suggest that the company or their products are awesome because they're playing the financial game well is not reasonable. Cisco and Adobe play their games well but they both substantially ignore good programming and security practices. Google has their issues too.
It isn't just my opinion that I don't need Apple holding my hand to capture photographs and transfer them off my phone. I have a distaste for any entity that would prescribe an obscure path (that can be straighted out by third party apps) on how to do such things but I don't hate them for it -- I pity their subscribers.
I believe that it is silly that I can't choose what resolution to shoot at or what format I save in without seeking out a third-party app. The "ecosystem" isn't for me if they're going to place such demands on me, but I don't hate Apple for it.
Google allows me to have a Google ID without buying an expensive dance card. I think Apple is going to have to do the same if they want to get into serving a broader audience.
I'm sure you can find others who agree with your theory, but I can also find similar cases that support the normal business practice that all under management employees get overruled if their ideas are unrealistic. I'll give you one example off the top of my head. I've created the Gold Apple watch for a whopper of cost, not in Gold but in cost of manufacturing. It was scrapped in the next generation. The other was the cast Ceramic watch. Ive was sent back to the drawing board and came up with a gold alloy design that is not as jewelry like he wanted but compromised for a gold watch that costs the same price as stainless and has the same price.
As I told you the image transfer is simple and easy. It all works behind the scenes without third party apps. I use it all the time. Take photos and video on my iphone and then when at my PC, open the download folder in icloud. And here's another- this also works for imessage or txt messaging images. When my wife takes a picture with her iphone, I can see that on my iphone and my PC too. But it's obvious you not only don't know this is possible you would rather complain about a problem that doesn't exist.
There is another feature called airdrop which I haven't used yet but my grandsons do and they are only 7 and 10 years old. They use it with their ipad and drop content to my iphone.
You really don't understand Apple and that's OK but what isn't is you would rather whine about stuff that doesn't exist rather than educate yourself as to how it works. Now if you were to tell me that Final Cut Pro isn't as capable as Adobe Premiere Pro, I would agree with you, but if you have a Mac and want to use Adobe Premiere Pro you can. It's just that you can custom build a PC that will run rings around a Mac in speed of high end video editing. That wasn't true in the mid 90's. It is true today. Apple professional video editing has low priority. PC video editing speed is up to the engineer building the system.
"Google allows me to have a Google ID without buying an expensive dance card. I think Apple is going to have to do the same if they want to get into serving a broader audience."
I don't know what a Google Dance card is but I do have my Google ID on all my stuff including gmail to my apple email app. I also use Google Chrome on the iphone. Another is Quicken. When I add an item in Quicken on the iphone it updates instantly on my PC and Vice Versa.
I didn't say that he didn't have people breathing down his neck but the number of people in that group was less than three. Have you ever worked with a hired gun that had that kind of sway?
It doesn't work for me if I want to look at pictures that relatives want to share with me. I could even handle the new format (that Apple decided transcoding was the solution for) but I can't access the files.
I'm pretty adept at doing conversions because I do that kind of stuff all the time for friends and colleagues that have Apple devices that can't figure out how to do it for themselves. You're a relative power-user when it comes to that kind of stuff but if you weren't, you might be singing a different tune.
Apple seems to be ceding many of the industries that they once arguably had a reasonable presence in and I don't see much to cheer about there. The businesses that they want to compete in can't be as captive/proprietary as those of yore and if Apple casts off their hardware, there's one less thing to keep the customers beholden.
My beef, as noted above, is that you have to buy your way into the Apple space by buying one of their hardware products. As far as I know, I can't get an Apple ID without buying a $150+ dance card in the form of an Apple device. My admonition is that they need to change that before they no longer offer any options to buy in.
I don't believe for a microsecond that Apple plans to end their hardware development. But, understand, Apple doesn't intend to be first. They take a good idea and make it better. Just think- Who was first, which was better:- iphone or ipaq? Sony smartwatch or Apple watch?
Until you decide to learn the process you will never access the graphics files you claim problems with. OK, I do know video and digital imaging. I know how to program meta data into specialized video for HMD's, But I wasn't born with that understanding. When I know something can be done, I go to those who know and learn from them. I don't want to be known as the expert. I just want to be able to do it as a good student.
Until you decide to learn the process you will never access the graphics files you claim problems with. OK, I do know video and digital imaging. I know how to program meta data into specialized video for HMD's, But I wasn't born with that understanding. When I know something can be done, I go to those who know and learn from them. I don't want to be known as the expert. I just want to be able to do it as a good student.
I submit that there shouldn't be an initiation fee and a secret handshake that must be learned to look at someone's pictures that they've shared. Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox and Google Drive don't impose conditions on the viewer other than having a free account on the respective service. Instagram, Flickr, 500px and Photobucket don't require an ID to view individual photos. Google Photos even allows others with Google IDs to post pictures to your albums (I think this is a game changer).
Amazon Prime Photos requires a Prime subscription to host pictures so that may be the one supporting actor but you don't need an ID to access it.
iCloud syncing on other-than Apple offers e-mail, calendar, contacts and memos but no file access as I understand it. There may be some way of scraping renderings of pictures from a web page but most services frown on that.
If Apple wants to become a service company, they have to do more than just declare it so.
No doubt that Apple infrastructure is intended for Apple products. But if I can access your content without ID then it is not what is intended by Apple service. What you are referring to is a broadcast service. That is not the same. I agree, I have a YouTube channel. It is the best all around service for video and free. But it is a broadcast network. However, it does have a private access too using the "unlisted" feature. Here I have to grant you permission with a private link to view the content. Apple is considering a similar program but that remains in the future. For file sharing, like EXE files and PDF files, I use Dropbox and pay them for that service. I also use Google Drive, Microsoft One Drive and Quicken's cloud service. Some private, some public capability.
Apple doesn't have to do exactly what others do to offer a service. They will try to do what their base wants. That doesn't mean it will satisfy everyone. It just has to satisfy the Apple fans who are on board with the Apple infrastructure program.
Apple doesn't have to do exactly what others do to offer a service. They will try to do what their base wants. That doesn't mean it will satisfy everyone. It just has to satisfy the Apple fans who are on board with the Apple infrastructure program.
If they want to grow their base, they're going to have to make some changes in terms of how they treat those who aren't currently among the faithful. There are just too many easy-to-use alternatives out there that don't place such dictatorial demands on their users.
It's funny how people who don't want to be bothered with programming and dealing with crashing learn the Apple system and don't go back unless they enjoy the challenges of the PC. Like I'm dealing with this weekend. I have one hard drive recovered about 80% now and the next one will be another 3 days of recovery. I have to figure out how to switch to win10 and not lose my archive drives of data. In the five years my wife has had her iMAC it has never crashed once and has been through 3 OS upgrades and it all just works before and after the upgrade. I had an android phone, a Samsung, for about 18 months and it crashed several times during that time. I only switched to iphone because I wanted the Apple Watch and was amazed how easy and reliable it was.
It is amazing how reliable something can be that isn't expected to do much. While the customer-facing side of Mac OS seems smooth, there's a lot of strangeness going on in the background in terms of vulnerabilities and stuff that is broken but Apple is very careful not to let on until after they've released a solution (something Microsoft tries to do but much less successfully).
I endure using Photoshop on an iMac (since live video titling software has never been a thing on the Mac) and after the latest OS update, Photoshop can't exit without crashing. On the other hand, the Wirecast video upload application is much more reliable with the most recent OS update and no longer locks up tight such that I have to Force Quit it.
Hardware and software is much more likely to have problems when you put it to the test.
