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Apple and the relentless pursuit of excellence …
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The video hits the nail right on the head, which to be honest is all glaringly obvious to anyone not enamored with, in love with or otherwise is not looking to worship their hardware but just wants it to work. Apple makes luxury goods the way Louis Vuitton makes luxury luggage, or Rolex makes watches. Pretty, high maintenance status symbols that require “special” handling and care. As an animation and video professional I’ve learned to build and repair any number of machines over the years, some brand-made, some some custom. Hands-down Apples are always the most time consuming and difficult to fix or upgrade.
It’s like each step of the way they had an evil engineer that deliberately tried to think of the most obscure way to put the thing together! Owners will almost always cop the company line about it being more “elegant” because no screws are visible or some other corporate kool-aid. Don’t make me laugh! It’s got nothing to do with it, and besides that is just letting the tail wag the dog. Sure, on the lower end Dell and HP also make machines difficult to fix or upgrade too, but not with their production oriented workstations or higher end laptops. There’s nothing to say you can’t have a well designed and elegant machine that is also convenient and easy to service. Oh, right! That would have been the old Mac Pro machines!
And please, enough with the fantasy arguments that they’ve got a lock on beautiful or ergonomic products. First it’s pretty obviously untrue at this point, and second that’s not an excuse for bad design overall. As a trained industrial designer I find their products diverged from anything like “form follows function” a long time ago. Each new laptop or computer they come out with gets less easy to use, takes away obviously useful (if not vital) features like USB, HDMI, SD card slots and ethernet ports. All of which my sleek Lenovo laptop has built in, which has a better graphics chip, more RAM and cost half of what my wife’s Macbook Pro did. I can run animation programs and anything Adobe can throw at it and I had it set up with a 2nd monitor in less than 5 minutes, no adapters needed. And BTW how does have a tangle of adapters and dongles hanging off that Macbook look appealing?
Let’s put this in the context of an automobile: How about taking away all the exterior door knob/handles so that it looks “sleeker?” Good idea? As long as you have the special remote key you’ll have no problem right?
Oh, and how about remove the radio and have it Bluetooth only access via a smartphone? “Oh, look how elegant it looks inside!”
And then let’s make access to the engine have no visible seams! Let’s require mechanics have have a whole new set of proprietary tools, making it impossible for the owner to even add windshield washer fluid or oil. Nope, they need to bring their car to the Smart-Guy Bar! Any of that sound even remotely appealing or at all defendable? I didn’t think so.Apple was a company that truly cared about real design innovation 20 years ago. They had incredible engineering teams, hired brilliant industrial designers and pushed the envelope in terms of making tools for artists and designers. Nothing will ever take that away. The first few generations of iPhones were a revelation for me! I couldn’t believe all the thoughtful features and details they’d put into them.
But then about 8-10 years ago everything changed. It was all about the money, period. Artists and designers were not where the big money was at. Spoiled teenagers were never going to lust after the next video editing machine, and even then couldn’t be induced to buy a new one every two years. What they used to spend on real engineering now went into marketing to the point where you could actually make lesser products and have people pay more for them, and defend it more than paid corporate communications managers. Now that’s genius. Evil genius maybe, but that’s OK, right?
Doug Bowker
3D Animation Motion Graphics, and Video for the Medical and Technical World
http://www.douglasbowker-motiongraphics.com
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Oop. Sorry, I forgot. There is no point in debating anything Apple with Bill. Apple does no wrong. And if they do, it’s quickly remedied… or so minor that you are insane for even bringing it up.
Let’s not even get into their accounting practices used to not pay their fair share of taxes…you know, since they dwarf the economies of many countries.
Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
[Bill Davis] ” When the modular MacPro arrives – wait a year and see what happens in overall computer design.
“Just like how every one copied the trash can…oh wait ☺
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[Bill Davis] “Apples COMPUTERS are still informing the overall design of the class.”
Nope. You’re just plain wrong about this due to your overwhelming bias.
Apple in 2018 is predominantly a phone company and only in a very small niche way a computer company.
Windows 10 Pro
i7-5820k CPU
Nvidia GeForce GTX 970
Blackmagic Decklink 4k Mini Monitor
Adobe CC 2018
Renders/cache: Samsung SSD 950 Pro x2 in Raid 0
Media: Samsung SSD 960 PRO PCIe NVMe M.2 2280
Media: OWC Thunderbay 4 x 2 Raid 0 mirrored with FreeFileSync -
[Bill Davis] “But unless you can show me stats that Macs fail at a rate higher than the similarly priced competition – I don’t think “shoddy” is a fair shot. “
Really?
https://www.ifixit.com/laptop-repairability
https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/laptop-brand-ratings
https://www.statisticbrain.com/laptop-malfunction-rates/
– Oliver
Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com
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First of all Im a total apple guy, I have basically everything they make except a watch and the homepod and I dont plan on buying a PC for my home anytime soon because an I mac is all ill ever need at home.
but..I’m not a fanboi by any means. The Apple design for computers have gotten old and stale. All you have to do is look at the product line since the first silver macbook pro’s became available . Nothings changed since, except its gotten skinnier and lost a lot of ports – the same design is still there at the core.
Same with I macs – in the last 10 or so years they’ve only gotten skinnier as far as design.
People buy them (including myself) because of i phone/ ipad integration and because Apple has/had marketing aimed at youth and pop cultures and because people think they are cool. Its a status symbol as others pointed out, but I can admit – ill pay a premium for it but in no way am I blindly thinking I have a superior product than most of the competition.
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[Bill Davis] “But Simon, the mechamism to address this is already firmly In place.
If Apple isn’t serving their customers in a way that meets those customers needs, another vendor will inevitably come along and out-compete them.
There’s no lack of competing brands, after all.
In this era Computers aren’t magical obscure devices, they’re standard retail products.
If another company steps up to design better, manufacturer better, market better, or simply out hustle Apple, they presumably should start to sell better as well.
Last time I looked, nobody was standing outside Apple Stores forcing customers inside.”
Except Apple has been creating an ecosystem with higher and higher walls for the last fifteen years or so with the explicit purpose of making it increasingly painful for customers to move away from the platform. Whether it’s HomePod stiff-arming 3rd party music streaming services or Shake for Windows being killed, Apple keeps burning bridges to non-Apple options.
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Okay, got the message. From your view, Apple is officially all crap and a barely 2 percent worse “repair score” from a global manufacturer is reason enough to JUST SAY NO.
Got the message.
I guess I should take a moment to say goodbye to all of you who feel Apple is too old and too slow now to be relevant.
Clearly you will all be migrating to the Cows other PC, Adobe and BlackMagic boards in search of others who have seen the light where you can start your migration towards those superior solutions.
(Maybe the mods can warn the other branded groups about the big influx of participants they will be getting as Apple collapses as a computer company.)
I’ll miss you all.
Drop me a note from where you end up and I’ll turn the lights off here when the last of you are gone.
????
/s
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
Sorry, I could only get to about :55 before I had to stop.
I stopped listening after the author called Apple “luxury”. That is BS. In my opinion, Apple is egalitarian.
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The author mentioned he has been working on Apples since 2008, I’ve been designing/building/repairing stuff since the 70’s. (One thing that still puzzles me, back in the 70’s I had a spreadsheet program on a 64K SWTP computer with a preference to work in degrees not radians, still no modern spreadsheet has that option.) I really don’t find Apple computers that hard to work on, and I’ve replaced just about every component there is to replace over the years. One post here summarized the problems mentioned in the video. I’ve had many of the models mentioned and have only have had a GPU problem on an original Intel MBP as a broken/burnt out part (this may seem contrary to the earlier sentence, but there is replace to upgrade vs. replace to fix due to mishandling, vs. replace to fix due to defective/burnt out part). Maybe people are pretty rough on their stuff, rougher than really designed for (like the problem with iPhones bending/breaking when put in back pockets and sitting down on them). Maybe Apple hardware now is not the best for the price, but I really don’t like the alternative OSs for one reason or the other. But I do like the Apple ecosystem intergration, like being able answer my cell phone left in another room on my desktop or laptop. And although the Apple hardware failure rate looks to be middle of the pack, having an Apple Store in town beats most other manufactures. I’ve had Dells repaired by independant ‘professionals’ that were poorly done. As far as cost, Apple has to pay for those ‘free’ genius bars somehow. And that GPU (above) was fixed by Apple at a lower price than I could find the motherboard anywhere on the internet.
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