Apple needs a reboot. Of course, I'm not the only one that says this - the press has been all over a somewhat stagnant Apple in recent months. But what tipped me over was the desire for Apple to enter the content business. On some level, I understand the rationale behind this step, namely that you can control the whole value chain and become not only the supplier for fancy gadgets but also content, in short they are copying Amazon!
This made me think and ultimately led me to write this piece. I have two problems with Apple today: firstly, Apple’s management has shifted in favor of sales and marketing and b) the ever more tightening Apple ecosystem.
Let me talk about a) first. And I let Steve Jobs answer this - in his "the lost interview" (you can watch it on Netflix) he clearly states that Xerox had become a sales & marketing machine and that they were sitting on great innovations but were unable to bring these to market (because the management consisted of sales people). He further pointed out, that the difference between product cycles from one photocopier to the next generation were minuscule. Now, take a look at Apple products over the last 5 years. If anything, their products took a step back (with dongles). The only really new thing that Apple has done in the last 5 years is the Apple Watch. And this leads me to my 2nd point, the ecosystem:
How come the Apple Watch doesn't work with anything non-Apple? It's been three years and at this point I would have figured that they would use the same tactics as with the iPod, namely to open it up - in this case to Android users. However, this may not be feasible given of how this was architected. In short, the Watch may have never been intended to be open or be part of another ecosystem like the iPod was. Thus, it was created with the idea that you must be an Apple ecosystem participant and have an iOS device - always.
And this is what bugs me the most: Apple, in its pursuit of the perfect user experience, decided that openness would be detrimental to the user experience they wanted. In other words, they traded openness for control over what the user can do all in the name of user experience.
You can see this development over the last 10 years but it really started with iOS and the AppStore. For example: side-loading apps or gaining access to the file system. For the average user this may never be an issue but I would think in terms of work flows and data exchange between iOS and other devices, it can be painful to get any data out of an iOS device. I remember vividly that often I had to fallback to emailing me something from my iPhone because it was the easiest way to get to the data. In Android I have full access to the underlying file system and I can run non-google approved applications. Or basically what I still can do on macOS. However, seeing iOS encroaches more and more on macOS, I have to wonder how long until Apple tells us what we can and can't do on our macs?
Let's also compare this with Apple's future where it would appear that Apple is planning to change their chip-architecture in favor of ARM chips and move away from Intel. Again, I can understand why they would have a desire to do that, it has more to do with control and being able to create your own chip roadmap and not be dependent on a third party - but it also means the Apple ecosystem will get even tighter. It's conceivable that when they start rolling out macs with Arm chips, they would incorporate even more from iOS (given that iOS was essentially forked for ARM) and even maybe force you onto their development environment and into their app store.
This is dangerous for Apple - it is currently losing market share (compared with Android globally) and these steps will not help increase market share, nor will a focus on sales or margin (iPhone X anyone?). All the while, what made Apple great is slowly dying. It is most evident in the absence of a real professional platform. The last Mac Pro was launched in 2013 - five years ago. In 5 years no new Desktop Pro computer made it out of Apple. The fact that there is now an iMac Pro tells you that they simply have no clear vision of where the Pro line should be headed an instead they took what they knew and beefed it up. In short, this is what Steve Jobs warned us about when he talked about Xerox and their product lifecycle.
In all fairness, Apple has announced a new group that is now dedicated to the Pro user and they intend to launch a new pro platform in 2019. I will certainly look at this in a year or so but in the meantime, I have completely given up on Apple products because of their lock on the ecosystem and lack of interesting products and I entice you to do the same until the company can right itself.
It is somewhat ironic that I (a NeXT programmer/ex-objective-c developer, lifelong believer in Apple and having met Steve Jobs on several occasions) am now using a Surface pro 2-in-1 device, a Chinese made Android handset while checking my time on a Korean Smart watch and using Gmail.
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