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Jony Ive Leaves Apple, Mac Pro Will Be Made in China


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End of an era. Ive will still be involved on some level, but he's pretty much the last rugged individualist visionary at Apple.

 

It was Phil Schiller who said "Can't innovate any more, my ass" about the ill-fated trashcan Mac. If he'd left out the "my ass" part, then he would have been a visionary. :)

 

I'm sure Apple will do just fine financially going forward, but the brash, paradigm-breaking, elegant company that changed the world may be no more.

 

 

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They made a big deal of the trash can being made in America, but it actually turned out to be problematic. Seems they get better results in China. Hmm....

 

I guess this also means that if this trade war thing continues, the cost will increase due to tariffs.

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End of an era. Ive will still be involved on some level, but he's pretty much the last rugged individualist visionary at Apple.

 

Innovated away the headphone jack?

 

The official explanation is that it was necessary to have thinner, all-screen designs, as well as make the phone more water-resistant. But I think it makes more sense to follow the money. Apple gets a license fee from everyone who makes something that plugs into a Lightning port (which is stupid port in its own right, but that's a separate topic of discussion). And if you don't want to use a Lightning port, fine, get Bluetooth headphones...of which Apple is the #1 manufacturer, thanks to Beats headphones (which sell at high prices, have high margins, and represent about 25% of all Bluetooth headphones sold). You could make a case that wireless is the wave of the future, and once again, Apple is ahead of the pack - just like it was when it removed the CD drive from laptops. But you could also make the case that removing the jack was purely a way to improve the bottom line.

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You could make a case that wireless is the wave of the future, and once again, Apple is ahead of the pack - just like it was when it removed the CD drive from laptops. But you could also make the case that removing the jack was purely a way to improve the bottom line.

 

. . . and that they made a thinner and more water resistant phone. There are some who I believe would find both of those features desirable, and being Apple sheep, will quickly adapt to an alternate headphone connection. And perhaps it encouraged people with $500+ earphones (not Beats) to take the next step up with a $500+ outboard DAC/headphone amp. And then, they have an even thicker phone, but now it's a phone system. ;)

 

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It also occurred to me that going to an all-digital system makes DRM a lot easier. You can put DRM on the content, but not on the delivery system with analog. You can with digital, and even though there has been a lot of press about Apple ditching iTunes, they're still going to be selling downloadable music.
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Just read an article that said Jony Ive left in large part because he felt the company had been turned over to operations people instead of designers. In other words, going forward, Apple's priority will be about doing what they do better and more cost-effectively, rather than innovating. Hmmm....
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I think this is a really good article about that. It gives a better perspective than "operations vs. designers" IMNSHO. He argues that it has gotten to the point that one person simply can't dictate throughout the entire company anymore.

 

clonk

"I'm so crazy, I don't know this is impossible! Hoo hoo!" - Daffy Duck

 

"The good news is that once you start piano you never have to worry about getting laid again. More time to practice!" - MOI

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He argues that it has gotten to the point that one person simply can't dictate throughout the entire company anymore.

 

clonk

 

So many times, it's the one person who can dictate throughout an entire company that makes a difference. Sometimes the projects that go through endless trial by committee and focus groups end up being so diluted that no one's interested.

 

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I know what you're saying, but maybe Apple has it figured out. If it's true that no one person has dictated there for a while, they might be on to something. I guess we will see.

"I'm so crazy, I don't know this is impossible! Hoo hoo!" - Daffy Duck

 

"The good news is that once you start piano you never have to worry about getting laid again. More time to practice!" - MOI

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I know what you're saying, but maybe Apple has it figured out. If it's true that no one person has dictated there for a while, they might be on to something. I guess we will see.

 

Well, something like 2/3 of the company is about iPhones, and they're having a hard time making a dent in the emerging countries. That's where the growth is. The plan seems to go more along the "services" line, like Microsoft has done so successfully.

 

The parallels with IBM are striking. It was one individual, Thomas Watson Sr., who created the concept of a corporate culture, bound together by the slogan "think." And Thomas Watson Jr carried the torch...as he said in 1962, We believe an organization will stand out only if it is willing to take on seemingly impossible tasks...Those who set out to do what others say cannot be done are the ones who make the discoveries, produce the inventions, and move the world ahead. I don't see anyone at Apple carrying Jobs's torch.

 

It's fine if Apple wants to just keep the world humming along, with "Excellence in Stasis." But I miss the kind of excitement that surrounded Apple product introductions, where you never knew what mind-boggling thing they were going to come up with next.

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But I miss the kind of excitement that surrounded Apple product introductions, where you never knew what mind-boggling thing they were going to come up with next.

I get what you're saying, but to keep that up is really hard. Part of the issue now is the bar is set so high that we expect too much. For instance, that new Mac Pro is killer. The feature set is amazing. Even the Apple people presenting it could hardly believe what they themselves were saying. Yet, in today's day and age there is so much complaining and nit-picking about it, because that's what people do, especially online.

 

I think what people might really miss is Steve Jobs and his amazing presentation skills. No one has ever matched the way he could make you believe in what he was talking about. That's not to say some of the Apple are poor presenters, they're not, but Steve had something special.

"I'm so crazy, I don't know this is impossible! Hoo hoo!" - Daffy Duck

 

"The good news is that once you start piano you never have to worry about getting laid again. More time to practice!" - MOI

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The clever fellow at Apple who engineered out the headphone jack?

 

But... But... They needed to remove the headphone jack to save space because iPhones are getting smaller and smaller. Oh, wait. My iPhone keeps getting bigger with each upgrade. Something is wrong here. :P

This post edited for speling.

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But I miss the kind of excitement that surrounded Apple product introductions, where you never knew what mind-boggling thing they were going to come up with next.

I get what you're saying, but to keep that up is really hard. Part of the issue now is the bar is set so high that we expect too much. For instance, that new Mac Pro is killer. The feature set is amazing. Even the Apple people presenting it could hardly believe what they themselves were saying. Yet, in today's day and age there is so much complaining and nit-picking about it, because that's what people do, especially online.

 

I just wrote a piece about the Mac Pro for Pro Sound News. I agree, it is a killer computer, especially for video. I like that Apple has brought expandability back, and that you can upgrade it to insane levels of performance with an additional five-figure investment. It will be great for anyone doing hi-res video and animation; no complaints there.

 

But is it innovative? Throw enough technology into a box, and you can end up with a killer computer. There's nothing magic about horsepower. The trash can was innovative; it's just unfortunate that they got the thermal engineering wrong, and also, that you couldn't do much to the box to upgrade it. I know one musician who bought it and experienced so many problems, it drove him to Windows. I don't mind that the Mac Pro is a retreat, given that it's a very powerful one.

 

In terms of something innovative, I've done networked rendering with Vegas by hooking up an older computer to the main computer. Now, I don't know if this is a smart idea or not (or even possible!), but maybe a cooler approach would have been for Apple to make the Mac Pro the center of a system that also included small, stripped, CPU-intensive boxes for networked rendering. They wouldn't need a lot of what a "full" computer has. If that idea did work, then you truly could have a modular system in the fullest sense of the word, not just changing cards around. Need faster rendering? Buy another cube. Or given that Apple wants to get more into services, then have a box that communicated with the cloud, where Apple would have lightning-fast servers dedicated to rendering. So while you were rendering something locally, you could also be uploading data to the cloud for fast rendering of something else.

 

For musicians, a companion DSP box could do the same kind of thing as Universal Audio does with their cards. Because of the Logic connection, you could shift all the CPU-intensive stuff over to DSP, and never have to be concerned about running out of CPU or latency issues. Again, this is something I used to do with two computers - one had the Creamware DSP, which connected to the main computer via ADAT. It was an amazingly capable system for being around almost two decades ago.

 

And in the "stupid but useful" ideas category...how about a footswitch jack that you could assign to mouse click, ctrl, or shift?

 

I dunno, maybe those are dumb ideas, but if not, they could make the computer more than just an expensive box with lots of horsepower.

 

 

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I really like this article.

 

https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/02/apple-sans-ive/

 

The narratives, to summarize, are essentially that:

 

Jony had checked out, become incompetent or just plain lazy

Apple is doomed because he is leaving

 

If those narratives look contradictory, then you have eyes.

 

If you take the sum of the breathless (dare I say thirsty) stories tying together a bunch of anecdotes about Jonys last couple of years, they are trying to paint a picture of a legendary design figure that has abandoned the team and company he helped build, leading to a stagnation of forward progress  while at the same time trying to argue that the company is doomed without him.

 

OK.

"I'm so crazy, I don't know this is impossible! Hoo hoo!" - Daffy Duck

 

"The good news is that once you start piano you never have to worry about getting laid again. More time to practice!" - MOI

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