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So, about that Apple event….
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[Chris Harlan] “Courage, Tim. Courage.”
Haha! Awesome!
In mentioning my dismay with Apple, I didn’t talk at ALL about how happy I am using non-Apple stuff. I see no value in pissing on Apple’s stuff — and I’m not actually pissing on Apple at all — but I never stopped using their stuff out of dismay. They never broke my workflow or discontinued something irreplaceable. I just found cooler stuff that made me far happier.
So I LOVE my tech life. I’m thrilled, using stuff that has made me the happiest in my many years as a device-o-phile…although I’m aware as I pass Steve’s final age that it’s also not that many f-ing years AT ALL.
But I still imagine a world where Apple raises everyone else’s game, even when they show up late. It’s not a fantasy. As of today, though, it is in fact history.
Next year? All I’m gonna say is that everybody who predicts Apple’s future is wrong most of the time, so I’ll just let ‘er ride.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “I wonder, and I was alluding to this in the last post, if you miss Steve Jobs. I know, it’s a well worn meme at this point, but I wonder if Tim Cook’s ‘Think Friendlier’ campaign isn’t as compelling for us battle tested cynics? Steve Jobs had some edge, you knew he was probably a pretty smart guy because he kinda told you so, Tim Cook is much the opposite and the press preys on this friendly attitude and says that Apple is somehow falling behind itself. But is that true or does it just feel true?”
You raise a number of very interesting issues that I’ve been thinking a lot about this week.
I wish he wasn’t dead, but no, I don’t miss Steve at all.
By way of disclosure, I’ve written elsewhere that he was something of a family friend. I never met him, but my father worked closely with him from 1979-1985, as Apple’s first director of sales and distribution. I think I mentioned upthread that he invented the Apple store, but he was responsible for lots of other key stuff. He was sitting next to Steve when Steve got ambushed at the famous board meeting where a new org chart got posted without Steve on it.
I got him to write a few words about Steve for the COW here. Also, my brother-in-law was a direct report to Steve for the first few years after Steve’s return (you can thank my boy for the Mac going from six slots to three), and my mother thought of Steve like a son. She loved him dearly, and spoke of him often.
Me, none of the above. LOL
I wrote here regularly while he was alive that he should have been smart enough to step aside, or the board bold enough to make him. I said that Tim Cook would make a better CEO, and I think he has.
I don’t think that “friendlier Tim Cook” is trivial. My favorite data point is that during the rash of Foxcon suicides, Steve sent Tim to China during the putting up of nets up to catch the men who were jumping. Tim went back to China after Steve passed to see what Apple and Foxcon could do together to make people working for them not want to kill themselves. Guess what? Nobody has since then. The nets are down.
THAT’S HUGE.
I could go on at length about how strongly I feel about Tim C’s accomplishments in reforming the gleefully cruel, gleefully criminal regime of the “visionary” that preceded him, while also managing to double sales and triple profit in his first couple of years on the job. It’s a better company.
So I (obviously) think that the whole “Steve = Everything Good About Apple/ Everything Not Good About Apple = Not Steve” meme is nonsense. After all, Steve was the guy who realized, correctly, that the one thing Apple was never very good at was selling Macs. Mac never achieved even half the market share of Apple II, and up until iTunes was released for Windows so that iPods could become truly universal in 2004, Apple’s stock had spent a year mired in the single digits. People had been talking about Apple on the brink of tanking since the mid-90s, and Steve had yet to turn the crank on a turnaround.
Until he did, by shifting Apple’s emphasis away from computers in the biggest way possible short of stopping making them altogether.
The current state seems a compromise. Make ’em, but instead of updating every year-ish, update every, what? You tell me. I don’t what it’s been since the trashcan shipped. Announced in June 2013, so maybe 36 months since shipping, give or take? And certainly not like plenty of folks around here aren’t preferring a computer that’s even older.
This flies in the face of everything we’d ever thought about computers and innovation, or even general progress. Nobody predicted that even a few years ago.
(I say until Robin finds 8 links to correct me.)
Anyway, I’m remembering Steve recruiting John Sculley away from Pepsi with the pitch, paraphrasing, “Do you want to keep selling sugared water, or do you want to change the world?”
You know what? In the real world, where ambition and aggression lead to criminality, and disregard for the value of human lives and livelihoods, there’s a lot to be said for not aspiring to change the world. It’s okay to settle for making cool stuff, just cool, nothing more, and being a little happier, spreading a little less cruelty and misery.
I don’t THINK it’s an either/or, but we don’t really have any way of knowing that yet. Who has managed to be nice, ethical, AND revolutionary at the same time? Maybe Bill Gates came close? Maybe? I dunno. Steve never tried to be in the ballpark of balancing all three, and while Tim Cook is obviously nice and ethical, I don’t know how highly he prioritizes revolution. If he does, I don’t think his score is all that high.
I’m following a baseball metaphor here, so there’s no clock, and it’s not implausible that Apple is only a couple of swings of the bat from taking the lead again. Or is it? What’s the recent historical data that suggests they even want to be?
In the scheme of things, this has all pretty well established that we can go about our business without as much new stuff as we’d gotten in the habit of buying. We didn’t really really get off the hamster wheel until Apple blew it up, but that’s actually a pretty big contribution right there.
I still also have to believe that, even being nice and ethical, you can do better than new ear/music interfaces and almost-but-not-quite-industry-standard water resistance as your top-line stories at your biggest annual device event.
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[Bill Davis] “it appears that none of them seem to be “waterproof” in a common colloquial sense.”
Quite so!!! NONE of them (Sammy included) use the word waterproof AT ALL. Also, none of them mention 30 minutes. It’s all about dunking or spills, and in the scheme of things, that’s all I need. Save me from dropping it in the toilet, man.
Well, and this, which I do every night before Sabbath falls because I don’t know about you, but I think this counts as work.
[Bill Davis] “at some point or pressure, the water wins”
LOL Words to live by, my friend. Words to live by.
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[Tim Wilson] ”
[Bill Davis] “it appears that none of them seem to be “waterproof” in a common colloquial sense.”
LOL – I’ve been resisting the urge to post the Lil’ Wayne videos all weekend!
[Tim Wilson] “Quite so!!! NONE of them (Sammy included) use the word waterproof AT ALL. Also, none of them mention 30 minutes. It’s all about dunking or spills, and in the scheme of things, that’s all I need. Save me from dropping it in the toilet, man.”
Kim Komando submerged an s7 for 2.5 hours to see what would happen about 6 months ago. There are a ton of videos like this on YouTube, some of them even dunking an iPhone 6 to see how it compared… pretty interesting stuff.
Shawn
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[Tim Wilson] “You know what? In the real world, where ambition and aggression lead to criminality, and disregard for the value of human lives and livelihoods, there’s a lot to be said for not aspiring to change the world. It’s okay to settle for making cool stuff, just cool, nothing more, and being a little happier, spreading a little less cruelty and misery. “
Well said.
But the aggressiveness, in all aspects of Apple, has all but disappeared by a new ethos, and a therefore a new design. I agree, it’s nice to be friendlier, and I agree that being more kind to the people and the planet is one of Apple’s biggest accomplishments. Criminality, on the other hand, is a grey area, there’s a lot of Apple money in banks somewhere and Foxconn has a lot more clients than Apple, but I will leave the politics out of this discussion.
I know you said that Apple has lead in the past. Have they? They weren’t the first mp3 player, the first smart phone, the first device integrator, but they are one of the best, at least in my view, and with each new system release the integration and services are even better. And now that I can extend the ease of use to my family with minimal extra cost, and total ease of use, where we can share our digital lives privately and personally with each other and chosen friends and family. To me, that is one Apple’s biggest strengths, and their devices, while perhaps not “first” or even the most specced, or fastest, or most cutting edge, but still top notch, makes all of that easy, from old Macs, iPhones and iPads to new ones. The entire Apple system is what you’re buying, not a PC with a faster polygon smasher, for a phone with twice the pixels.
But Apple does not sell this capability. They do not sell their device connections, they do not sell their own virtual social network, they do not sell how easy it is to connect all of your devices. They sell their manufacturing process, they sell their camera development, they sell their health tracking ability, they sell music and video, and they sell third party development.
[Tim Wilson] “I still also have to believe that, even being nice and ethical, you can do better than new ear/music interfaces and almost-but-not-quite-industry-standard water resistance as your top-line stories at your biggest annual device event.”
Maybe, but I imagine it would take a major product, like a car, or a house, or a skyscraper, or a piece of public policy that will actually change people’s daily lives. They aren’t ready for all of that yet, and perhaps the world isn’t ready for all of that yet. In the meantime, there’s a lot happening INSIDE the phone with all kinds of services and capability that is really easy to use, much easier than Android, IMHO.
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I think the biggest change is the disappearance of the RDF. Whether talking to co-workers or customers, Jobs could convince people that up was down, left was right, and that iPads are ‘magical’. He was the prefect blend of neo-hippy, ruthless capitalist, and P.T. Barnum.
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The RDF is now within Apple convincing themselves they need $17,000 watches.
I can’t let it go.
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[Tim Wilson] “Also, none of them mention 30 minutes.”
Right. I just made that part up. As I always do I guess.
https://www.samsung.com/au/pdf/IP68.pdf
But then I’m still trying to figure out how any of this even remotely qualifies as a “Final Cut Pro X Debate“… but oh well. Not my sandbox.
[Tim Wilson] “Well, and this,…”
He’s gotta do something to keep it from exploding.
[scnr]– RK
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Since among the 2 million bits of nonsense I’ve raised so far include ear-device interfaces and Apple’s formerly awesome advertising, I thought I’d throw in this bit from our friend Rob Ashe at Conan:
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Funny AND true! I wouldn’t dream of using them without one of the third party safety straps that will appear soon!
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