The New Apple Advantage

http://daringfireball.net/2011/09/new_apple_advantage

by aaronbrethorst • 15 years ago

364 336 15 years ago

jballanc3• 15 years ago

There's a story that I've heard told about Tim Cook numerous times. I can't remember the original source (there's a reference here: http://www.cultofmac.com/who-is-apples-new-ceo-tim-cook-bio/...), but I think it basically sums up Tim:

> When in a meeting discussing a problem in China, Tim Cook noted that the problem was “really bad” and that someone should be in China fixing it. Thirty minutes later, Cook then famously looked over at Apple’s operations manager, Sabih Khan, and asked “Why are you still here?” Khan was on the next flight to China.

But what's most remarkable is that like Jobs, Tim has managed to infuse this attitude into the very fabric of Apple. Once, when I worked there, a friend called and asked if I had plans for lunch. I replied that I did not. "Good," he said, "Can you drive me to SFO?" So I picked him up. He had a seat on the 1:30 PM flight and we were barely going to make it. "Do you think we have time to stop by my place so I can grab a change of clothes?" he asked. I told him that we did not, and his reply was "Oh well, I guess I'll just have to find a store in Boston"...

gnok• 15 years ago

Stories like this are absolutely fascinating. I'm sure there are a ton of lessons to learn from Apple's senior leadership; lessons that would otherwise have been drowned under the attention given to Jobs and his leadership style. You can't have a successful company with one iron-willed leader; you need a team that knows what it's doing.

microarchitect• 15 years ago

I understand these things are partly symbolic, but besides that is this really useful? I mean, is there a real business benefit to Apple by making Khan take the next immediate flight to China rather than the one a few hours later. Similarly, what was your friend doing that was so important that he couldn't wait to get a change of clothes?

I personally do my best work when I'm relaxed and un-stressed. The apple environment seems to be diametrically opposite to this. I can see that some people might thrive in this environment, but I always wonder at what cost to themselves.

X-Istence7• 15 years ago

I agree with you in that I don't see the business benefit, but I can understand that a boots on the ground approach can be very beneficial and can sometimes help avert a disaster of even greater proportions.

protomyth2• 15 years ago

In operations, given the number of units they produce and sell per day, the answer is yes. For the sys admin types, the answer is the same as if the data center had a major fault and the market is opening in a couple of hours.

statictype3• 15 years ago

The next flight out probably was more than a few hours later. "Why are you still here" could have easily meant " Why aren't you at home packing to leave as soon as you can?"

sliverstorm• 15 years ago

What I take away is these people are part of something bigger than themselves, they understand that, and they care deeply about that thing.

Why does this matter? Anecdotes like this are simply the tip of the iceberg. In my experience, it's also (counter-intuitively) good for morale. You feel good about the sacrifices you make, rather than stressed or bitter.

tritchey• 15 years ago

If it is related to manufacturing, then absolutely. My neighbor works for a Honda supplier, and one day had to drop everything and fly from Indiana to a plant in Brazil with a replacement for some part of the assembly line. It is surprising how quickly a supply chain disruption can ripple through the entire manufacturing line. These organizations track things in hours and minutes.

ctdonath• 15 years ago

My wife worked for a major consulting company. I came to understand that their major selling point was the ability to put a warm willing capable body anywhere anytime for any job, and for this they commanded a high price. For this, her work demanded such rapid response as the above tales note: one morning she was informed she would be at the client location, a thousand miles away, by that afternoon - and would work there 12 hour days four days a week for months. She had hardly time to pack a small bag before the flight.

Some thrive under such pressures, where most would soon crumble.

glenra5• 15 years ago

Speaking from experience as somebody who has done this sort of trip: Yes, it's hugely useful and there is a real business benefit.

First off, we're probably talking about a time when there were only a few direct flights a day from SFO to the relevant airport so if he didn't go that afternoon he'd have to wait until the next morning so instead of flying through the night he'd be flying through the day - flying RIGHT THEN means one less day in which your product slips its schedule.

Now recall that Apple used to have trouble getting enough media attention so they would schedule product announcements around, say, MacWorld or the Superbowl. Big events that cannot be moved. Every day the schedule slips makes it that much more likely you miss the intended product launch window. For Apple, if your product isn't ready to ship, it's not ready to show which means you've wasted a lot of money - your next suitable launch window might be months later by which time the product no longer has a compelling story to tell. Missing the intended launch date can mean the difference between a successful product and a failure.

Conference calls are expensive and tend to involve both high-level people and lower-level people. If the schedule is slipping, the chinese engineers won't necessarily tell you the truth about why it's slipping in that sort of forum - there's a face-saving issue. There are also communications difficulties when people who don't speak english well just nod and say "yes, we'll do that" without really understanding what they're agreeing to. Email can clarify and puts things in writing but the time difference means most exchanges lose at least a day.

Another factor is "the squeaky wheel gets the grease". The same factory is trying to build products for you and a variety of other companies. When some other company's product totally unrelated to yours has a crisis, they might choose to rationally pull engineering resources away from your product to serve somebody else...if you're not there to nag and check up on the schedule.

The bottom line is that if you don't have at least one person there most of the time, your product stands a very very low chance of meeting your schedule or your quality targets.

jballanc3• 15 years ago

This wasn't for show, wasn't symbolic. Without going into details, there was no alternative for being there in person (remember Apple is as much, or more of, a hardware company as a software company).

As for your second point, I think you make the mistake of assuming that there are only two states one can operate in: stressed or relaxed. In fact, there is a third...let's call it "flow", for lack of a better term. That's where you're up all night, running to the airport on a moments notice, pulling out all the stops to be absolutely perfect, but you don't feel stressed in the slightest.

...Apple runs on that flow.

pnathan• 15 years ago

Rands mentions this in his blog (rands in repose) as being part of the DNA of the culture of the company. My take away is that this is Company Myth; these are the myths we tell each other over lunch, the stories that say, "This is who we are, this is what we do, these are the people to follow". These are the myths that we think about when a hard choice comes, so that we know we know what the Company would do.

I don't mean this as a bad thing. It's like the myth of Stallman coding alone to write emacs. Maybe it is 100% true. Maybe it is 50% true. But it's part of the Hacker Mythology, and hackers take their cues from that mythology.

And Apple has the Apple Mythology.

cateye• 15 years ago

I really don't understand the story. Why can't they just call someone in China, that is smart enough to understand what needs to be done? Seems like really bad management to fly around the world, hunting bugs.

cubicle672• 15 years ago

I wish HN had a way of presenting content but masking who wrote it, so we could discuss what's written here without getting dragged down into the usual (of late) bashing/defending John. I feel this is an interesting point he's raised here, and I'm interested to see peoples take on that point, not the usual meaningless back and forth that goes on

malandrew• 15 years ago

I completely agree. John raises a lot of good points, but most have a little too much fanboyism. However this post in particular is particularly insightful and raises excellent points for discussion

X-Istence7• 15 years ago

So far there is no bashing of John in this thread, just a single anecdote and story about Tim Cook and how his way of managing has started becoming part of the fabric that is Apple.

Apple has a proven formula, they have been able to make consumer products that people want without giving people a big choice.

cubicle672• 15 years ago

So far there is no bashing of John in this thread

er yeah, I noticed that :) It was more of an "Ok, let's do it right this time" thought written in reaction to previous threads

forrestthewoods• 15 years ago

++irony;

T_S_• 15 years ago

Nah. Adhominaters gonna adhominate.

Facts reduce the (net) number of things to argue about. Anonymous lets the commenter create a straw man or label the author as fanboi even more easily.

vilhelm_s• 15 years ago

In this instance you are in luck, since you can read the discussion about the article that John Gruber is summarizing:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2963698

ajg1977• 15 years ago

If they're not already, PC manufacturers should be very scared.

sunchild• 15 years ago

They were mocking Apple openly ten years ago. One of many factors leading to Apple's success is the hubris of their competition.

philwelch10• 15 years ago

And now, starting with HP, they're bailing out.

ansy• 15 years ago

I agree that Tim Cook is an advantage to Apple. I disagree that he is really "new." Tim has been at Apple since 1998 and has been in a place of power since at least 2004 when he took over for Steve Jobs as CEO the first time. Tim has been part of the winning formula for the better part of a decade.

I think the glaring omission in Gruber's article, though, is Apple's lost advantage in Steve Jobs. It could be argued in the 11 years Steve Jobs was away from Apple that Mac hardware and software more or less coasted in terms of innovation.

The simple unibody design splintered into a dozen different beige boxes stacked on top of each other shortly after Job's departure in 1985. Mac OS gained color, cooperative threading, and a few peripheral updates until Steve Jobs came back in 1996. I'm not saying it was worse. I'm just saying it was uninspired incremental refinement. The design language at Apple didn't change from the day he left in 1985 until he finally came back in 1996.

And almost immediately after Steve comes back we've got OS 8 with its first UI facelift in years. System 9 quickly led into OS X. On the hardware front we got the bondi blue iMac. Then the iPod. Then the desk lamp-esque iMac G4. Not to mention the short lived G4 cube. Apple was alive again.

Now that Steve's involvement has once again diminished, what will Apple look like over the next decade? Will iOS 9 look that much different from iOS 5? Will the MacBook Pro evolve beyond a giant sized MacBook Air? Will Apple successfully branch out beyond phones, tablets and computers?

Tim Cook will keep Apple in fine shape. Apple will at worst be like Dell in its heyday. Delivering products people want at prices nobody could compete against, disrupting the traditional manufacturing process. But will Apple continue to successfully innovate? Companies tend to change to reflect the current leadership. HP was once a company that Steve Wozniak wanted to work at forever. In less than a decade after the founders were gone the the HP Way was gone and the company was never the same.

EDIT: I want to add this is mostly a counterpoint to Gruber who is clearly trying to diminish Jobs and glorify Cook. His brief treatment of the subject is to say Jobs brings "beautiful, elegant, innovative, and fun" before seemingly dismissing Jobs as merely a designer whose designs are something that get copied by other firms anyway therefore implying he is not a real competitive advantage unlike the "can't-be-copied" Cook operational competitive advantage.

mechanical_fish2• 15 years ago

Have we forgotten the Newton? The Newton had issues, but lack of daring design innovation wasn't one of them. Now that Palm has boomed and iPads and iPhones are everywhere, it's difficult to appreciate how crazy the Newton was at the time. People didn't know that mobile book-sized computers were the future. The Newton was a bit too futuristic, too ambitious for its own hardware.

Apple also tried a bunch of things in the OS space before NeXT and Jobs rode to the rescue. They just didn't succeed.

Which brings this right back to Tim Cook, and the unsung operational heroes that really built Apple: It isn't that Apple didn't try to innovate in the Jobs-free interregnum. They just didn't succeed. It takes more than just good intentions and "vision": It takes operational skill.

felipemnoa3• 15 years ago

OK, so if a Formula 1 driver wins the race, who gets the credit? The car or the driver? I would say the car is Tim Cook and Steve jobs is the driver.

pkamb3• 15 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Ive

bluekeybox• 15 years ago

> I disagree that [Tim Cook] is really "new."

I believe Gruber's argument was not that Tim Cook has more influence than he did before, but that because Apple is much more mainstream today than it was a few years back, its operations are larger in scale and logistics become increasingly important as the company pushes millions of products. Better logistics pipeline allows Apple to compete on price, which is impressive considering that Apple has always been perceived as a premium brand.

nohat3• 15 years ago

The problem with the article he quotes is that it is wrong about the price of the x220. The x220 with default specs on everything except the bluetooth, webcam, ips screen (much nicer than an air btw), 128 GB ssd, and most expensive wifi (includes wimax) is $1290.60 . The ars article claims $1999.

fjarlq• 15 years ago

But that's a limited-time promotional discount. They are reporting the usual price.

http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2011/09/ultrabook-intel...

vacri• 15 years ago

That's not quite fair either - adding to the complexity of pc purchases is the dizzying array of weekly specials. It's entirely normal for a vendor to mark stuff down from week to week.

nohat3• 15 years ago

Ah, thanks for pointing that out. The sale price is still is an important point that the article doesn't mention, and the discount was active when the article was published. Maybe I've gotten jaded, but when I see a 'limited time major discount' I don't think of the official pre sale price as being the actual price.

ebiester• 15 years ago

I've never seen the x220 not on sale. Lenovo has these inflated prices that last for about 2 months when the system comes out. Then every week is a sale. Talk with a salesperson and you can usually even get a lower price.

I don't like the business model, but Lenovo thinks it works for them.

(FWIW: Thinkpad T420 owner, and I love it much more than my 13 inch MBP.)

eropple6• 15 years ago

Having owned an X201, test-driven an X220, and having sold the X201 in favor of the 11" Air, I have to disagree - the X220's screen isn't as nice as the Air's. The backlight on the Air can be made about as dim, but also much brighter, and color seems a decent bit more accurate (though that could be that Windows's color management sucks, while OS X's is pretty good).

nohat3• 15 years ago

Was that the ips display? IPS is used by graphic designers because it has higher contrast and better color fidelity (and viewing angle). Not sure about screen brightness though, and the response time is less.

kitsune_4• 15 years ago

True, I bought an X220 (IPS, 80GB mSata, 320GB HDD, 8GB of RAM) in Switzerland. I paid about 1100 Swiss Francs (Imported from Germany). A MacBook Air would have cost me much more.

zeteo• 15 years ago

There's nothing new about this. Apple has been doing vertical integration for decades. When things went badly, pundits criticized it. Now it's the whole new rage. There's nothing particularly enlightening in this article, nothing that would be of any use to anyone hoping to replicate some of Apple's success. Advice to have good design and a low price is just a platitude.

mechanical_fish2• 15 years ago

I'm upvoting your first three sentences: It's true, Apple has indeed been vertically integrated for decades.

My upvote does not extend to the last two sentences, however. This article is not merely about "have a good design and a low price". It's about focus: By building a smaller number of products with a much smaller variety of configurations and tightly controlled interfaces, Apple gets economies of scale that allow it to reach a previously unreachable plateau of quality-for-cost.

wavephorm• 15 years ago

Apple's vertical model didn't work for the PC industry for a variety of reasons. But now in the new mobile industry it is so successful, that literally every big company is trying to go all vertical, all the time.

Hardware, software, development tools, operating system, mobile and desktop platforms, app stores, single sign-on, cloud services, music, movies, and tv delivery, voice and video communications...

Google, Apple, and Microsoft are all trying to build an entire computing stack, back to front, and leave the other guys out. Nokia, Motorola, and HP knew they weren't going to be able to compete in the new vertical world. Samsung is trying to get into the OS game with their Bada and maybe something after that.

philwelch10• 15 years ago

Apple's vertical model is working in the PC industry now, but only because everyone else is fucking up so much. I think if any other PC manufacturer handled these issues as well as Apple does, it wouldn't matter that they don't make the operating system. Even Apple barely makes any of the actual hardware.

jsnell2• 15 years ago

It's hardly the first time logistics has been touted as the key competitive advantage of a company. Take Nokia for example. Massive economies of scale, designs taking maximum advantage of that, and incredible supply chain management[1]. All this kept them going for a while even after the wheels fell off, but by now they pretty much have no logistical advantage left.

Apple pundits seem to think that Apple's (undeniable) advantages are going to be permanent, just because they get a great deal on Flash memory or tied up the world's whole supply of 9.7" touch screens. It's a pretty ridiculous position.

[1] As an example of this, there's this great story about how in the late 90s there was a fire at a critical Philips chip factory, which they tried to cover up since it was expected to be a quick repair. Someone at Nokia noticed that there were irregularities in the shipments, investigated the matter, found out about the fire, and started talks with Philips. Nokia decided that Philips were talking bullshit about the repair schedules, and basically sucked up the whole world's supply of the alternative components to replace this lost capacity. Other phone manufacturers relying on this plant were left high and dry for months, pretty much.

X-Istence7• 15 years ago

I don't think Apple's wheels are necessarily going to fall off. The reason why they have tied up the worlds supply of touch screens and flash ram is because they realised the potential early on and made massive commitments to the manufacturers.

If Apple stops innovating then those people suggesting Apple will no longer have an advantage are correct. So long as Apple is innovating and requires newer and more modern technology that is going to cost millions of not billions to get set up and running they can continue to have an advantage mainly because they have that intense buying power required.

So long as Apple's competitors are always a step behind in seeking to make their computers smallers/faster or inventing the next new gadget that consumers want they will always have the first mover advantage.

LokiSnake• 15 years ago

This is also one of the benefits of Apple's huge cash reserve. They can easily make these commitments and investments as they see fit.

megablast• 15 years ago

I have yet to hear anyone say that Apple place at the top will be permanent, apart from you. I do have a problem with people setting up straw men to argue with.

jsnell2• 15 years ago

In the linked article Gruber says that this is Apple's most sustainable advantage, and implies it's something that'd take competitors a decade to copy. I'll grant that it's not quite the heat death of the universe, but still pretty damn permanent.

rsynnott9• 15 years ago

> Apple pundits seem to think that Apple's (undeniable) advantages are going to be permanent, just because they get a great deal on Flash memory or tied up the world's whole supply of 9.7" touch screens. It's a pretty ridiculous position.

I wouldn't say _permanent_, but there are many companies who could make a transition to the same approach, but haven't yet. Dell, for instance, could scrap 90% of its models, and it's highly unlikely anyone would even _notice_. Presumably, they have some pressing internal reason (not necessarily a sensible one, but something they can't get around) not to do so; it's not like it's any great secret that a simple product line is cheaper to manager.

pkamb3• 15 years ago

I break out this link whenever the topic of PC manufacturing comes up: http://www.lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/2009/04/display-rati...

Thinkpads are (were) well known for their 4:3 screens. People are downright fanatical about them, and continue to buy old T60s off craigslist rather than buy new from Lenovo. Tall screens are better for documents and spreadsheets. 4:3 displays instantly differentiate business-machine Thinkpads from all other laptops.

But now Thinkpads are 16:9. They lost one of their defining features because "these manufacturers make more selling TV displays than laptop displays, and the PC vendors have almost zero say in this change. We simply have to adapt. As much as I would like it to be so, 4:3 is not coming back."

Meanwhile, Apple goes and sources millions of 4:3 iPad displays simply because that's the best resolution for the iPad.

wmf• 15 years ago

Also, Apple buys a lot more of that panel than any panel that Lenovo buys. If Lenovo ordered millions of 4:3 panels, they would suddenly become available.

Steko12• 15 years ago

I guess that's the difference we're talking about here:

PC makers' diverse offerings force them to buy components that are cheap while Apple buys whatever components they want but get them even cheaper due to scale.

The kicker is that at the same time Apple makes that component it's buying even more expensive for everyone else and they know everyone else is copying them.

pkamb3• 15 years ago

Then why don't they? Why doesn't Lenovo simply their offerings and only offer 3 panels? They'd be cheaper and higher quality.

That's the entire point of this article.

barrkel• 15 years ago

"How could Dell, for example, possibly copy Apple’s operations when they currently classify “Design & Performance” and “Thin & Powerful” as separate laptop categories?"

The answer is pretty simple: the Powerful in "Thin & Powerful" is not as good as the "Performance" in "Design & Performance".

There are approximately three different categories for laptops: desktop replacements (powerful but very heavy, no battery life); netbooks (puny but very light, good battery life); and executive machines (a blend of power and weight with long battery life: Thinkpad, Portege). Before netbooks, there was another category: el-cheapo (weak and not very light, mediocre battery), but the hardware has advanced sufficiently that modern netbooks are viable web browser machines for many people who only use them for such, and it has mostly crowded out that segment. The PC laptop makers probably made most markup in the executive class segment.

Apple has similar categories, but it markets them better and even more precisely: the iPad is their netbook, the MBA their executive class, and the MBP their desktop replacement. But with the latest generations of the MBA, they've started to cut in towards the netbook market and eat into the margins PC laptop makers were getting in the executive segment.

But meanwhile, PC laptop makers were already getting burned by netbook-class machines getting more powerful. So what we're seeing is a slow disappearance of a segment of the market, and that's tripping up the marketing messages from the PC laptop manufacturers.

(FWIW, my relatively ancient Toshiba Portege is arguably a better machine than my fairly new MBA; it's considerably lighter, more fully featured, with Ethernet and DVD writer, and almost as fast. What it isn't is stylish: it compromises by being made of relatively flimsy plastic. If it were sold today, it could be made cheaply - a lot more cheaply than an MBA. But I don't think it's profitable for Toshiba to make and market it (and their later Porteges are much heavier as the market landscape shifts).

martingordon2• 15 years ago

> It’s even worse if I just browse without searching. The options I get are just… meaningless. Yes, I want “Everyday Computing,” so I want an Inspiron. But hang on, I also want “Design & Performance,” so I want an XPS. Wait a second, I want “Thin & Powerful,” too.

This is the crux of the problem with all of Apple's competitors, in the PC business and in mobile. Why choose when you can have everything? Apple's lineup is consistently decreasing the trade-offs between models, which reduces the number of reasons that exist for buyer's remorse.

Yes, us geeks may want the ability to choose between WiFi chipsets, but asking my mom to choose a WiFi chipset will just scare her away. She might want to make the best decision but she doesn't have the time to research it (or doesn't know where to look), so she closes her browser and decides not to by a Dell today. Tomorrow, she's at the mall and stops by the Apple Store, sees that the only decisions she has to make are pretty clear cut (as in, amounts of storage/RAM) and goes home with a new MacBook. She was never given the ability to make the wrong decision and any barriers keeping her from buying a computer disappeared.

timbre• 15 years ago

What's so infuriating about the options though is that they're meaningless even to geeks. Choosing a WiFi chipset at least means something to someone. Among "Everyday Computing," "Design & Performance," and "Thin & Powerful," I think the only word that gives any information about how one category is different from the others is "Thin."

Their desktops are worse. Here are the choices (http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/desktops-n-workstations.as...):

OptiPlex

    Business-class performance and control

    Scalable and durable design

    Designed specifically for networked environments

Vostro

    Power for today and scalability for tomorrow

    Easy to configure

    Budget-friendly

Dell Precision

    On-the-go or in-the office graphics & analysis powerhouse

    ISV-certified reliability

    Built on a scalable IT platform

The only information-carrying word I see here is "Budget-friendly." It's hard for me to see how Dell benefits from being unclear like this, but it's equally hard to believe that they think this copy is clear.

Apple's categories are not just few, they are clear. They are specs. I choose between the 128GB model or the 256GB model, not between the "analysis powerhouse" and the model with "business-class performance."

rayiner5• 15 years ago

I'm a geek and I couldn't care less what WiFi chipset is in my laptop.

I was shopping for a ThinkPad X220 for someone, and it had the option of the regular screen or the "premium" screen for $50 more. They don't tell you what the "premium" screen is or why you'd want it. I presume the regular screen is shitty. Can you even imagine Apple offering such an option? A $1000+ laptop with a shitty screen, with a $50 option to upgrade to a non-shitty screen?

martingordon2• 15 years ago

I don't care about WiFi chipsets either and should have added that in my comment. I was just using that as an example of the type of thing geeks might care about.

I just took at the Lenovo page for the first time ever. Of all the PC manufacturers, I've probably spent the most time on Dell's, and Lenovo's site looks like a complete rip-off of theirs.

And that display choice is horrible. Like you said, the $50 gets you a "premium" screen, where the only discernible difference on the page is that it comes with a 3x3 antenna instead of a 2x2. I've never heard of YxY as a measurement for antennas, nor is it readily apparent what 3x3 gives me over 2x2 (speed? power?). Not only that, I have to decide whether a webcam is more important to me than a 3x3 antenna because I can only get the webcam (a $30 add-on, by the way) with the 2x2 antenna.

Whatever respect I had for Lenovo (which is more than any other PC manufacturer thanks to their apparently successful continuation of the ThinkPad) just went down the drain. Average people are supposed to get this stuff? Give me a break.

jarek17• 15 years ago

FWIW, the "premium" screen is IPS. The regular is TN, which like all TNs (including those on Macbooks ;)) is indeed shitty. I do agree the "premium" description sucks.

comex• 15 years ago

MacBook Pros have the option to upgrade to a hi-res screen (+$100) or a hi-res antiglare screen (+150).

But at least Apple makes it clear what you're getting:

> The 15-inch MacBook Pro comes with a 1440-by-900-pixel LED-backlit glossy display. You can also choose a high-resolution 1680-by-1050 glossy or antiglare display that gives you 36 percent more pixels.

gergles• 15 years ago

Yeah, it's pretty crazy, isn't it? Apple would never charge for an upgrade from a shitty screen on a $1000+ laptop.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/40663/2011-09-09_2245.png

masklinn• 15 years ago

> Can you even imagine Apple offering such an option?

They do, actually. The 15" MBP has a "High-Res" option and most (all?) MBPs have a "matte" display option (~$50 on the base glossy glass screen).

mgkimsal3• 15 years ago

"I'm a geek and I couldn't care less what WiFi chipset is in my laptop."

Isn't this at the very heart of every "linux on laptop" screed out there - research your hardware before you buy! So... being able to know or choose what wifi chipset you get might appeal to many geeks. But... you have to assume what you order is what you actually get.

I got a laptop in 2003 for linux. I researched. And researched. I found the one laptop for sale at a local store had the graphics chip FOOXPJ59 in it, which worked with RH6 (or Mandrake, whatever I wanted to use). Plunk down my $1200. Get it home. No dice. Oh... they replaced it with a newer/better FOOXPJ59revC chipset, and there was a WinXP driver disk in the box. But the outside of the box indicated FOOXPJ59 as the chipset. I had to argue for about 20 minutes with 2 managers to get my money back on that after it was opened. They wanted to charge me 15% restocking fee, I was arguing it didn't contain what the box said it did - in their mind FOOXPJ59 and FOOXPJ59revC are the same thing.

rsynnott9• 15 years ago

Apple actually do do this; it's a resolution bump.

SandB0x• 15 years ago

I've ranted about this previously (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1419896).

Most manufacturers have vast and bewildering product lines. Treat yourself to the Asus line-up: http://www.asus.com/Notebooks/AllProducts/

Most manufacturers have half-hearted and short lived attempts at introducing premium lines or models (e.g. Dell's Adamo). Buying an expensive product only to have the manufacturer discontinue the line soon after destroys faith in consumers.

Most manufacturers have terribly designed products: hinges that wear out after a few months, useless trimmings that simply fall off, air vents that are blocked when the screen is open (yes, this actually was the case on my old Dell).

protomyth2• 15 years ago

The worst thing is talking to your sale rep (looking at you HP) and them having no real clue what system you should buy. I am convinced that the only reason CDW is still in business is the complications of the PC company's product lines and CDW's skill at navigating them.

mgkimsal3• 15 years ago

I ranted about this too recently here - Apple's biggest business advantage is the trust/faith people have in the brand to remain consistent, probably even moreso than innovative. People will always come up with new stuff - other pc manufacturers do it all the time. However, there's not a long term vision of consistency to the other manufacturers, possibly because they are, in fact manufacturers, not end to end designers, developers, manufacturers and retailers.

Buying something from Apple, you have a strong case that it'll be supported for at least a few years, the model likely won't go away entirely, and you'll be able to get good support from them via phone, mail or in-store. Other brands may offer some or all of those aspects, sometime, for some models, but few have a multi-year history of providing all of those consistently.

Apple's advantage is the decade of experience they have in building trust with consumers.

jseliger2• 15 years ago

Yeah. Elsewhere I posted this comment:

All three Macs I've owned were ready to use out of the box. No stickers, no crapware, no nothing. Contrast this with a recent Anandtech review of a recent Sony Vaio that, hardware-wise, is quite nice, but:

Because of that initial bloat I have a hard time recommending the VAIO S to any end user that can't fix it (including but not limited to just plain physically upgrading the hard drive) or doesn't know someone who can. This is an otherwise fantastic notebook with a lot of potential just looking for the right user, but if you're not comfortable getting elbow deep in cleaning it out (or preferably doing a clean Windows 7 installation), it's not going to be the notebook for you. For those of you who are willing and able to put in the time, though, you'll likely be very well served by the Sony VAIO S.

(http://www.anandtech.com/show/4748/sony-vaio-sb-all-day-cons...)

I read something like that and think, "Where's the MacBook Air link again..."

rsynnott9• 15 years ago

While this is becoming the case, it's fairly new. Back in the day, it was well-known that buying a first-gen Apple product was extremely risky; note the problems with the original while iBook (the G3 one), the original Macbook Air, and so forth.

kennystone• 15 years ago

"It’s the Jobs side of the equation that Apple’s rivals — phone, tablet, laptop, whatever — are able to copy. Thus the patents and the lawsuits. Design is copyable. But the Cook side of things — Apple’s economy of scale advantage — cannot be copied by any company with a complex product lineup."

OK but there is a huge lag in time between Apple's delivery and the competitor's copy. Android did a good job copying iOS but Apple had a two year head start before an Android phone was on level ground with an iPhone. iPad will probably be a year out before a decent competitor comes along. Dell came out with an (ugly) MBP-like laptop a months ago.

They can copy Apple's designs, but if they only play catch-up, Apple will stay way ahead.

sneak• 15 years ago

> iPad will probably be a year out before a decent competitor comes along.

They've been saying that for a year.

dgallagher2• 15 years ago

Another way to put this, Apple loosely abides to the "Good, Better, Best" lineup for their product offerings. They don't follow it exactly, but in general, they keep selection simple. This doesn't confuse customers, and allows them to easily compare one thing to another.

If you've ever eaten at Panera Bread, you'll usually see people staring at the menu on the wall for a few minutes. Their menu is huge and all over the place. Hot sandwiches, cold sandwiches, salads, specialty salads, bagels, breakfast items, pastries, plus much more including ingredients. What's inside a Strawberry Poppyseed & Chicken salad? Read the fine print under it. Do you want apple, chips, or bread on the side? What type of bread do you want on your sandwich? We have 20 different types. Cheese OK? Mayo OK? Fountain drink, one of the 8 different bottled drinks in front of you you've never heard of, or freshly squeezed OJ? Complex, like Dell/HP/Lenovo.

What about McDonalds? You order by number associated with a picture. At 10:30, the breakfast pictures are replaced with the lunch/dinner pictures. Cheese or no cheese? Coke, diet coke, sprite? Large, medium, small? Quick, easy decisions. You know what a Big Mac is. And if you want to know what's in it, you're out of luck! There are 10 pictures; pick one of them. Simple, like Apple.

ShirtlessRod• 15 years ago

Is that really the comparison you want to be using here? Panera versus McDonalds, where Apple is McDonalds? Seems more like an insult.

CamperBob• 15 years ago

Not if you look at their balance sheets, it isn't.

McDonalds is one hell of a highly optimized operation, and nobody in business would object to being compared to them. Meanwhile, Panera's food is probably less healthy if you actually look at the numbers.

gcb2• 15 years ago

great analogy. and just like with food, anyone who has a clue about what they are ordering, will never enter an apple store.

aashay• 15 years ago

Presumptuous. I, just like many HNers like me, have more than just a "clue" about what I'm ordering, and I love Apple products.

As a sidenote, I hear these types of statements a lot from those in the anti-Apple crowd, but I can't remember the last time I heard someone switch _away_ from Apple products say things like this.

wazoox• 15 years ago

My job is assembling special purpose, high performance storage servers with specially tuned OS. But I wouldn't buy any other laptop than an Apple at the moment.

pgroves2• 15 years ago

I know everyone likes to think Steve Jobs came up with the idea of focusing on a few very good products, but it's actually an old idea.

"Indeed, the basic problem of U.S. competitive strength in the world economy today may well be product clutter." - Peter Drucker, Managing for Business Effectiveness, 1963

Sorry I don't have a link to the original article, I had to look it up in a book

revscat• 15 years ago

"I know everyone likes to think Steve Jobs came up with the idea of focusing on a few very good products, but it's actually an old idea."

No one thinks that. I, at least, have never read anyone who has made such claim. Where did you get the impression that that is a widely-held belief?

pgroves2• 15 years ago

I got that impression from the article. I also get that impression from all the companies that still do the opposite, today, as is discussed in the article.

Perhaps I should have qualified that statement with "in terms of large american companies", which is what Drucker was talking about.... Companies whose product catalog became bloated over the years in an effort to serve every need of every customer and ended up doing nothing terribly well.

glenra5• 15 years ago

Near as I can tell, the online Apple Store was largely inspired by/based on the work of the most successful mac clone makers. Power Computing sold just a few kinds of mac, clearly differentiated in "good/better/best" configurations - both their print ads and their online store were easy to use in exactly the way the Apple Store is now.

Apple complained that Power Computing was marketing to existing mac owners, but the real problem was that Power Computing was marketing well to existing mac owners at a time when Apple was marketing badly to them.

ethank• 15 years ago

This is always my favorite page on Apple's site: http://www.apple.com/pr/products/

socratic5• 15 years ago

Gruber's argument confuses me:

1. Steve Jobs, the only CEO to ever successfully lead Apple in the company's 25-year history, has resigned.

2. Because of the current popularity of the iPad, iPhone, and MacBooks, Apple has great economies of scale. (However, Gruber primarily gives us anecdotes to support this.)

3. These economies of scale are evidence that the new CEO, an operations guy, will be able to lead the company.

4. In fact, design is copy-able.

5. Therefore, because Apple's designs are copy-able, in terms of competitive advantage, the new CEO has always been more important than Steve Jobs.

Is that correct?

ugh3• 15 years ago

You are reading way too much into it. This article is not trying to make the argument that Steve Jobs was irrelevant or less important for Apple than Tim Cook.

socratic5• 15 years ago

"But at this point, it seems clear to me that however superior Apple's design is, it's their business and operations strength — the Cook side of the equation — that is furthest ahead of their competition, and the more sustainable advantage."

code_duck• 15 years ago

There's no reason to even try to analyze it to that extent. Gruber's essay composition plan appears to be to start with the conclusion, which is invariably that Apple is the best possible at everything, will reign eternally supreme. Then he fills in whatever works in the middle to get there.

jellicle• 15 years ago

What I grasp from this is that John Gruber and Peter Bright are just too dim to understand basic online stores.

This qualifies for mockery from Gruber/Bright:

> "Everyday Computing"

But this is good understandable product description:

> "The ultimate everyday notebook"

(that second one is Apple's marketing copy for the Macbook Air).

The low-end Macbook Air is $999 in Canada. Let's compare. I just priced a Lenovo X220 with a 50% faster processor, twice the ram, twice the SSD size, larger, better screen - which are all minimum choices for this laptop, I can't choose any lower to match the Macbook - and I came out to $84 more than the Macbook. Let's see, if I look at the other versions... I'd say the Macbook has about a $200-$300 price premium compared to the Lenovo. The two laptops weigh almost exactly the same and are the same thickness at the thickest point, although the Lenovo doesn't have the pretty tapered edge.

The economy of scale advantage that he's talking about doesn't exist, or at least doesn't make it to the consumer (Apple may be keeping economy of scale profits, but that's not the point Gruber is trying to make).

Gruber is just utterly full of shit and I fail to see why his articles merit any discussion. "Apple is great because [make up bullshit reason of the week]". Isn't that boring? Even if you love Apple products, isn't it boring?

dasil0038• 15 years ago

The critique of "Everyday Computing" is as a search option next to a bunch of other abstract phrases, not marketing copy per se.

ugh3• 15 years ago

So, you really wanna claim that Apple has an equally confusing product lineup compared to other manufactures? That’s a quite daring claim (and also some impressive misleading quoting you are doing there).

Apple doesn’t ask you to decide based on non-sensical marketing blabber like that. They use it, sure, but it isn’t central in the decision process of the buyer.

Go to their store and check out how they do it: http://store.apple.com/us

If you want a laptop you are asked to make only one decision: Do you want a MacBook Pro or Air? Finding out what those two laptops are all about is easy, if only because it’s only two and not four or more. They are also clearly different from each other, in a way that’s obvious even to someone who doesn’t know anything or doesn’t want to know anything about technological details. Just looking at them is more or less enough to figure out what they are all about.

When you have made that decision, you more or less only have to decide on the screen size you would like: 11" or 13" if you want an Air, 13", 15" or 17" if you want a Pro.

I would love it if other manufacturers did the same. Shopping for PCs is just so damn frustrating. It’s no fun at all.

jseliger2• 15 years ago

Apple doesn’t ask you to decide based on non-sensical marketing blabber like that. They use it, sure, but it isn’t central in the decision process of the buyer.

One other point: all three Macs I've owned were ready to use out of the box. No stickers, no crapware, no nothing. Contrast this with a recent Anandtech review of a recent Sony Vaio that, hardware-wise, is quite nice, but:

(http://www.anandtech.com/show/4748/sony-vaio-sb-all-day-cons...)

I read something like that and think, "Where's the MacBook Air link again..."

uladzislau• 15 years ago

It's exactly the point other market players don't get: give people less choice i.e. less confusion. Save their time and they will pay premium for that. And in the end, serious and smart people care about piece of mind not specs or even price.

statictype3• 15 years ago

Until recently, Apple had a 13" Macbook Air, a 13" MacBook and a 13" MacBook Pro.

As a first-time Mac buyer last year I was certainly confused about the difference between the plastic MacBook and the MacBook Pro.

I find it hard to believe that simplicity of choice is a reason people buy Apple laptops.

If you're looking at the various MacBook models, you've pretty much already made a conscious decision to consider buying from Apple for reasons that had nothing to do with how many models were on display.

It was probably the reputation for good design, easy software, lack of shovelware, no viruses etc...

socratic5• 15 years ago

I tried to make this point below in a more subtle way, but you take on the issue more directly.

Gruber's arguments never make any sense. Historically, he changes his opinions more or less based on what Apple is currently doing. He adds little value, and it seems clear that he's making a lot of money as a pro-Apple cheerleader from his blog posts. (Which is fine, don't get me wrong, but it doesn't make him a good news source.)

However, I'm not sure how to get rid of Gruber posts. With certain types of posts, HN can feel like an Eternal September.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Certainly the first few times I read a Gruber post, I thought there was some legitimate content there. But now, his posts feel largely like regurgitated commentary on discussions had elsewhere, and his opinions feel utterly discredited by their uniformity.

Without downvotes, and without flags removing Gruber posts, I'm not sure what we can do. Could we possibly, as a community, just agree that a blacklist of Gruber posts is good for us? How would we begin such a discussion?

rumpelstiltskin• 15 years ago

Sites can definitely be blacklisted (Valleywag, for ex). There's nothing in the HN FAQ about how to go about submitting a site for blacklisting though.

For the record, I'm all for blacklisting daringfireball.

dasil0038• 15 years ago

Nobody said Gruber wasn't biased, but he forms cogent arguments. The same can not be said for Apple's consistent detractors who seem to have a real chip on their shoulder and thus end up grasping at straws.

Granted there is a lot of valid Apple criticism that you won't get from Daring Fireball, but everyone has their viewpoint. Gruber is far from the worst stuff that shows up on HN.

Anechoic2• 15 years ago

>Could we possibly, as a community, just agree that a blacklist of Gruber posts is good for us? How would we begin such a discussion?

This submittal is #1 on the front page with 110 net points. I think the community has spoken.

ugh3• 15 years ago

“Hey, I have no arguments but this fella obviously makes no sense so let’s just all agree and censor him, pretty please?”

Maybe that is a good idea. Contentless comments that only attack and are always too lazy to actually argue make submissions like these so damn frustrating. If he is so wrong it should be simple to destroy his arguments.

armandososa• 15 years ago

    Could we possibly, as a community, just agree that a blacklist of Gruber posts is good for us?

If I am to be considered to be part of that community then no, I can't agree with that. I actually like quite a lot the way he writes even if I don't agree with him most of the time.

In fact, I think the community has already agreed that they like Daring Fireball posts, otherwise it wouldn't be on the front page.

We can agree, though, to spend more time in /newest and complain less about what makes to the front page.

rickmb• 15 years ago

No, it's this kind of comment that start to make HN feel like Eternal September.

Discuss and vote on topics on individual merit is HN, the content-free Gruber/Apple hatefest some people systematically try to engage in every time the author/subject comes up is what devalues HN, not Gruber posts.

snaky• 15 years ago

On Hacker News -- a once great but now decrepit wasteland gathering point -- virtually every post by John Gruber, no matter how unnuanced, uninsightful, and predictable, makes it to the front page. It only needs to speak to that small minority who will predictably and in a concerted fashion vote it up. Any competitor (HN is long past gone. We live in a upside-down world where specialized subreddits on Reddit are insightful and interesting, while HN is populated with superficial talking points, movie references, and pun threads) would be a better site for individuals if they allowed a logged in user to flag stories for noninclusion in any personal vote counts. That if they see yet another empty Gruber post on the front page they could flag it and anyone who voted it up would be removed from any future counts and rankings as presented to them, either on comments or posts

http://blog.yafla.com/A_Curse_of_One_Thousand_Intellectual_V...

joshwa• 15 years ago

Take it to MetaTalk.

(oh how I wish HN had a Meta section)

wysiwtf• 15 years ago

Are you sure that X220 is similar enough to an Air, it doesn't look like an air and the design specs are quite bulkier:

MacBook Air 11 inch: Height: .68 Weight: 2.38

MacBook Air 13 inch: Height: .68 Weight: 2.96

X220 12 inch: Height: 1.25 Weight: 3.6

I don't think it matters that you spec'ed it out to be slightly faster, I bet many of the people who want an Air-like notebook want the thinnest, cleanest, lightest notebook that can still perform very close to a traditional fat notebook, the X220 probably isn't what they're looking for.

Steko12• 15 years ago

Apple had to send their engineers over to Intel to teach them how to build the chips they wanted for the Airs. They wanted lower Ghz.

dagar• 15 years ago

A fairer comparison might be the X220 with the 6 cell battery which is about 2.9 lbs and around 10 hours (advertised). It also has a 12.5" IPS screen.

I believe the 3.6 lbs you mentioned is with the 9 cell 15 hour battery.

For comparison the 11" and 13" Macbook Airs are rated 5 and 7 hours, respectively.

kitsune_4• 15 years ago

I have both an MBA and an X220 and in everyday use I think the two machines are comparable in feel and weight. Of course the x220 is a little bit bigger and heavier but the difference isn't really noticeable. In the end, both are very portable and light note books.

I'd rather compare things like OS preference, battery life, performance needs and / or the quality of the keyboard.

Steko12• 15 years ago

"The two laptops weigh almost exactly the same"

Rofl no.

"and are the same thickness at the thickest point"

If by the same you mean the Mac Book Air is half the thickness of the Lenovo then yes.

[edit]It's really hard to take your comment as anything more then a troll when you call other people dim but make basic factual errors like this.[/edit]

This is where "configure your own Macbook Air" arguments always end up: some ugly as shit clunker with a couple +1 features that give you wiggle room to claim a "$200 Apple premium".

jarek17• 15 years ago

Well geez that's a really strong argument in return. "Ugly as shit" is not subjective at all.

old-gregg• 15 years ago

"Ugly as shit"?

I think Lenovo machines in their matte black rubberized cases look gorgeous.

It's all about what you've been pre-conditioned to like. I will not buy a laptop with a glass-covered glossy screen. That screen would be useless to me. Also I will not own a laptop without a layout like this: http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2011/03/thinkp...

It's called attention to detail and immaculate ergonomics: you have a fully operational mouse without moving your fingers away from the FJ position. I can't imagine working on a laptop without it. Why bother suffering?

I understand that people like sparkly and shiny things. I understand clever marketing, sleek design and the adrenaline of being part of the crowd. Fine, have fun - it's very much like rooting for a football team.

But seeing Mac users trying to "cross swords" in a feature/function battle is simply ridiculous. Try this on your notebook: write a sentence, go and change the 3rd word in it. Time yourself. Divide that by 5 (to get my time) multiply the difference by 1923 (that's how much we do this while coding), add a few minutes on top to compensate for missed "Esc" and "Enter" hits and then throw your arms up, scream in pain and anger, and be enlightened. Free of charge, I do this for charity.

rayiner5• 15 years ago

The problem is not using "everyday computing" as a descriptive element in the marketing copy. It's using it as a category differentiator.

Let's go laptop shopping!

store.apple.com. Presented with pictures of things, with the name of the line under them. I can see (I don't even have to read or select a menu, I can just see!) two types of laptops: the Air and the Pro. One is little and the other is big. Do I want a little laptop or a big laptop? Little! Click on the little one, then click through "select a macbook air." Presented with two more pictures: 11" and 13", each with text underneath offering two options (more or less HDD space). At every point, the gist of what the difference is between the various selections is painfully clear to the shopper.

shop.lenovo.com. Presented with: promo for IdeaPad U300s. What if I want other laptops? Shop -> Laptops & Notebooks in the small text below the big promo. Now I'm presented with three lines of laptops. Aside from color, they look the same. How do I differentiate? One is for "basic everyday computing" the other for "dazzling multimedia experience" and the other for "tools to save time and money." Whereas I didn't even read the marketing copy on the Apple site, because I had pictures that got to the heart of the differences between the models, here I'm stuck reading marketing copy to make a decision. If I select "prices you'll love" does that mean the others will have "prices I'll hate"? Luckily Lenovo has given me a matrix to help me choose. The matrix has 38 rows... Say I blindly click on the ThinkPad. Now I'm presented with 6 series. The bold text to help me differentiate is more marketing copy: "environmentally friendly" versus "mobile freedom." Are some of these laptops not environmentally friendly? Do some lack mobile freedom? The information that is most pertinent to me as a laptop buyer (weight and screen size) is actually at the bottom of the lists in the same font size as the footnotes and legalese!

aw3c23• 15 years ago

Notebook shopping for "dummies":

If you are not sure what you want, make a list of things you want to do with your laptop and ask someone who knows about computers to tell you what you would need for it (gaming -> number of decent chip names, writing and internet -> nothing matters, storing a lot of movies/games -> more than XX Gigabytes of harddisk space, video chatting -> webcam & microphone, etc)

Make a checklist of the things you want/need.

Browse for notebooks and write down those that fit all of your criteria.

Choose the one that has the shiniest finish or cutest name.

Done.

gbog• 15 years ago

Agreed. Moreover, push Gruber et al logic to its logical conclusion and you get 1984.

alastairpat2• 15 years ago

I've been reading Gruber for a couple of years now and I really believe that it's not nearly as critical/analytical or interesting as it used to be.

While previously he would write much more in-depth articles (often of a technical nature relating to OS X or Cocoa/Obj-C) now I feel he is really just writing what his audience wants to hear and, what's more, 95% of the time simply linking with a sentence of commentary. Some of his links are interesting but for the most part they're either criticising one extreme or showering praise on the other.

I'm an Apple fan, but yes - it really is boring waking up every morning (I'm Australian) and reading the same thing day in, day out. He's just as guilty of shock-jockery as half the people he links to.

ambler0• 15 years ago

"Some of his links are interesting but for the most part they're either criticising one extreme or showering praise on the other."

I tend to agree, but I don't think this particular piece is an example of that. It frustrates me that the HN crowd has such a hard time rationally discussing Apple (let alone something written by, gasp, GRUBER)

gamble• 15 years ago

The X220 isn't remotely as thin as the Macbook Air:

http://www.engadget.com/photos/lenovo-thinkpad-x220-review/#...

versus

http://www.engadget.com/photos/macbook-air-review/#4317649

AlisdairO2• 15 years ago

That's not an entirely fair comparison - the x220 is currently substantially reduced in sales in NA, to the tune of over $400. It's not a reflection of the usual price of the machine, or its price in the rest of the world.

wpietri• 15 years ago

Reasonable, but wrong. The Lenovo site always has sales running. Bullshit, but effective bullshit.

alexmuller• 15 years ago

Trouble is, anyone can spec a machine so that their manufacturer of choice comes out smelling of roses.

For example, I'm looking at the Lenovo site now: X220, i5 2.5GHz, 12.5", 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD = £1330

(including a £175 September discount)

And Apple: MacBook Air, i5 1.7GHz, 13", 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD = £1100

Bratwurst• 15 years ago

Paying $200-$300 for OSX, a MagSafe, glass trackpad, aluminum unibody, glass screen is just fine.

Who knows, maybe OS X will have better battery life, and cooler operation?

Then again, I'm a programmer, but still the type of guy who would get one of those new, overpriced, Commodores or VICs.

NaOH• 15 years ago

I understand why it wasn't addressed in Gruber's post, but the customer-facing points he made about online sites and how they compare to the Apple site could just as well have been extended to the retail presence of the various companies. The same design aspects which take place online are also present at the retail level.

Step into an Apple Store, and the product differentiation is clear and accessible. Step into a retailer of Windows computers (in the US), and it's just rows and rows of barely distinguishable machines. Yes, Apple does include a small display card of the basic specs near each machine, but their overall setup is one that encourages visitors to use the machines and evaluate them on-site to determine if a model is a fit. These design decisions extend to other aspects of the retail experiences, from the setting, the available staff, the sales experience, etc.

It's relatively easy to see how Apple uses vertical integration in things like its product lines and manufacturing. But they've managed to combine that with vertical design in nearly every place people interact with the company. That's hard to do but always impressive to experience.

philwelch10• 15 years ago

Yes, Apple does include a small display card of the basic specs near each machine

They've replaced the cards with iPads. No joke.

rayiner5• 15 years ago

It's hilarious that Lenovo's answer to the Macbook Air is the Lenovo Air: http://www1.pcmag.com/media/images/268742-7-the-u300-s-vivid...

lr• 15 years ago

"The PC hardware market has historically focused on three factors: low prices, tech specs, and configurability."

That pretty much could have been what was said about American car companies in the late '80s and most of the '90s, and it is why they got their asses handed to them on a plate by the Japanese car companies. If you wanted a Chevrolet, you probably had about 1000 choices (not to mention that GM had at least 5 companies that all made pretty much the same cars, but with different logos (Saturn not withstanding)). If you wanted a Honda, you had about 3 choices. I don't think I have to tell you which business model was more successful.

penguinbroker• 15 years ago

While I agree that the 'Tim Cook' advantage is very important I wouldn't dismiss Steve Jobs' unique abilities so quickly. Yes there are many exceptional designers in the world but to say that was Steve Jobs' biggest influence is wrong. I would even go so far as to say that Ives is the bigger design influence. What I admired about Steve Jobs was his ability to make the right sacrifices. From ditching the floppy drive in the original iMac to refusing to support Flash in the new iOS devices. These sacrifices, while obvious in retrospect were decisions that no other hardware companies were capable of making. While everyone was trying to build what the consumer wanted, Jobs was always focused on what the consumer should want. A huge difference.

As Henry Ford once said: If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.

While everyone else tries to make faster horses, Jobs has kept Apple focused on building cars of the future. He'll be missed.

billmcneale• 15 years ago

Gruber's analysis is flawed because there is currently no competitor to the Apple products he's discussing, so necessarily, anything the competition has to offer today looks silly.

But this will change, as it always has when Apple's competition catches up. When this happens, Apple's simplistic "one size fits all" strategy will backfire again like it always has in the past.

toadkick• 15 years ago

You mean like how the competition has caught up with the iPad? Oh, wait...

edit: Also, they've been selling the iPhone 4 for a long time now, it has sold better than all of the previous models, and it's still selling incredibly well in spite of the expectations that a new model will be released soon. Doesn't really seem like the "one size fits all" approach has backfired on them at all, especially when that one size fits so well...

another edit: "there is currently no competitor to the Apple products he's discussing"...isn't that part of the point he was trying to make? That other companies are unable to compete currently because they don't control their supply chain as well or as tightly as Apple is able to, as Apple only offers a few options as opposed to the overwhelming amount of near-useless (to the average laptop buyer) options that the other guys offer?

mcantelon• 15 years ago

>This realization sort of snuck up on me. I’ve always been interested in Apple’s products because of their superior design; the business side of the company was never of as much interest.

It's news that economies of scale helps keep Apple's parts costs down?

runjake• 15 years ago

It really seems like an inferiority complex to me. Yes, Lenovo, Dell, etc all have too many choices and it's confusing (for me, at least).

But after just a little research I was able to pick the perfect Thinkpad for me. You want a Mac? Buy a Mac. You want something else? Buy something else.

Stop letting Gruber or the latest Windows pundit bait you into arguments that don't do you any good -- all you do is boost their blog page views.

Just use whatever and get over the pissing matches. There's no one true path, beware anyone who would tell you such.

yonasb• 15 years ago

Author should have linked to this article, can't believe he didn't. Probably the best I've read on Apple's supply chain, this post comes in second: http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-supply-chain-2011-7

stretchwithme• 15 years ago

The MacBook Air has that block of aluminum. Who else has that?

Yes, its stiffer and lighter, but it also makes it a more beautiful machine. And that's definitely worth something to me.

As is the fact that I can develop on unix.

And it comes with Apple Care.

And I'm able to back up over the air using Time Capsule.

All of these things make life easier and more flexible.

This "new" Apple advantage is just one of the many advantages Apple has been creating.

olalonde• 15 years ago

I have to agree with Arrington, this Gruber needs to get some help. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KNGtGLP7g0&feature=playe...

sakura_k• 15 years ago

Apple delivers better value than their competitors in part because they master the supply chain. They buy such a large quantity of parts for their focused product lines, nobody can compete on scale.

blinkingled• 15 years ago

The problem with what Apple does to its advantage is that it isnt really always in the consumer's best interest. Gruber shines light only on how it is working great for Apple but ignores the fact that people have by and large benefited from having choices.

For people who get real work done the specs matter. The fact that Peter Bright wanted anything but an Apple says something. But there is also a section of users that value form more than anything and barely do anything other than browsing/email/videos - Apple caters to them and does well. That doesnt mean every other manufacturer should start doing the same thing. That we can have cheaper, configurable and user serviceable laptops today is a good thing. That we can buy any hardware peripheral today and reasonably expect it to work with our PCs is a great thing.

Gruber should boast if Apple was able to offer more choice at competitive price because then it will be also good for the consumer. I for one dont want to see the world go to doing less with more where I cannot service my laptop by visiting manufacturers support site, where I cannot have the ports I need on my laptop reasonably spaced from each other etc. Having the ability to have USB3 port for next to no additional buck and having cheap peripherals available today is a result of choice culture and mindlessly praising some $CORP for limiting choice and maximising their profits just suppresses that.

Thats the whole issue with Gruber and company ~ They seldom think rationally from a consumer standpoint and just seek to blindly rally their followers to the corporation's cause.

bignoggins• 15 years ago

I don't follow your logic. How does Apple catering to a subset of consumers mean they are not acting in the consumer's best interest. From the standpoint of the consumers they cater to, they are. From the standpoint of those they don't cater to, I suppose they don't. Having more choice at a competitive price is not "good for the consumer", it's only good for consumers who want more choice at a competitive price. And as Apple has shown, that isn't everybody.

philwelch10• 15 years ago

How does Apple catering to a subset of consumers mean they are not acting in the consumer's best interest. From the standpoint of the consumers they cater to, they are. From the standpoint of those they don't cater to, I suppose they don't.

No, even from the standpoint of customers they don't cater to. You can't be all things to all people. You make the products that you can make best, and the products you can't make best, you let other people make. If your needs don't fit what Apple is good at making, then you shouldn't buy an Apple even if they try to make something in your category.

jrockway6• 15 years ago

I agree with this. What I like about Apple is that they don't try to be low end, and they don't try to sell low end as high end. For years, I avoided buying a Thinkpad because the screens were so shitty. "We're a Chinese manufacturer owned by the Chinese government, so we won't use Korean LCDs." Great. Now I can't see what I'm working on, making your computers completely useless. Apple doesn't pull this shit. They good components and don't try to convince you that a 1024x768 LCD with no backlight is a "high-end business laptop".

The good news is that Lenovo got their act together and my X220 has a great display (and great everything; it's much better than anything Apple can sell you). But buying is still a shitty experience. The most popular blog post I ever wrote was called "Lenovo Shipping Sucks". After navigating through their detail-less website and 100 similar product lines ("it's a Thinkpad, but it has a shitty keyboard and a non-removable battery. also, it's red, doesn't have a roll cage or keyboard drainage holes, but it does have built in Dr. Dre speakers. but we're calling it a Thinkpad, so there."), the buying experience is horrible. They have a different sale every day, so every time you look at the website, the laptop differs in cost by $400 and random options ("free hard drive upgrade!"), so you always think "today's not the right day to buy, maybe tomorrow it will be cheaper". Sometimes you're right, sometimes you're not. Fuck your fucking sales. Set a price and let me pay it. Make it cost the same at Amazon.

But the story doesn't end there. You've decided to buy the laptop. Now you have to navigate through the configuration. Do you want a screen with a 3x3 wifi antenna, or one with a 2x2 wifi antenna with camera? Do you want a "super LCD" or just a regular one (both at the same resolution)? Do you want an i7 with a USB 3.0 port, or an i5 with an always-on USB 2.0 port? It's insane. I sort of know what these options mean after googling and reading forums and asking people I know... but there's no information on their website. Just give me the goddamn 3x3 antenna. How much does an extra fucking 2.4Ghz antenna in every laptop cost? 1 cent? I'll pay it for the convenience. (Yes, I know 3x3 MIMO is. But why is the number of 802.11n streams I can run dependent on the resolution of the screen I buy?) Anyway, you get the idea. I doubt even Lenovo's engineers can confidently purchase the laptop configuration they want.

So now you have a laptop configured and you want to pay for it. Type in your credit card number or use Amazon payments. OK, I'm lazy and my wallet is over on the kitchen table and I never remember my security code, for some reason. We'll use Amazon payments. Oh sorry, we can't use your Amazon information because you have dashes in the phone number you gave Amazon. What the fuck? Fine, I'll go over to Amazon and remove your motherfucking dashes. Oh nice, now all my subscribe-and-save orders are canceled because my address has changed. And all I wanted to do is buy a laptop.

Ok, fine, I've fixed my 30 subscribe-and-save orders, and I'm back to buying my laptop. Click "pay with Amazon payments" again. Session timeout. Reconfigure (and check the wrong i5 processor among the 5 they offer), buy successfully. Get order confirmation email. Estimated ship date: 6 weeks from today.

What!?!?!?! They said it would arrive in 5-7 business days. I didn't pick any configuration options that "may delay [my] order", and they've already charged my credit card. And now I have to loan them money for two months AND not have a Laptop!?

Long story short, I did get my laptop in 4 business days. (Order Tuesday, receive next Monday.) But the process was terrible. Just god fucking awful. I felt sad, confused, unhappy, and stressed throughout the entire process.

The good news is that the laptop is absolutely phenomenal. (except that I got the i5 without AES acceleration, and use an encrypted filesystem on an SSD. wrong fucking checkbox.) Thinkpads are the nicest laptop on the market that provide the best user experience for someone like me. (One screw to swap the hard drive out. No screws to swap the battery. 8 hours battery life. 2x2 MIMO out of the box with Debian. Even the Sprint WiMAX works!) But that's the best user experience you can have buying a laptop, and it was so unbelievably shitty that my description here isn't even close to doing it justice. How can any normal person buy a laptop!?

(Now, why don't I buy a Mac instead? That's easy. They're like those cars where opening the hood to change the oil voids the warranty. I had a PowerBook in college and was taking my first computer science class ever, MCS494 "UNIX Security Holes". One day, I decided to run iTunes under GDB to see what it was doing with my private information (and to look for buffer overflows in order to receive a passing grade in the class). GDB segfaults. I run GDB under GDB. I see that it is dying because the OS is intentionally refusing to let me run the debugger on iTunes. Mac OS X is hard-coded to not let you do that. So that was the end of OS X for me. If Apple wants to run code that looks at my data and sends information back to Apple over SSL, then I should at least be able to take a look at what it's up to. But Apple says no: it's their computer and you are lucky to have it, so fuck you. That was the end of Apple for me that night. I deleted OS X, installed Debian, and never looked back. I was going to burn down the Apple Store just to teach them a lesson, but I realized that due to Apple's architecture choices, Apple Stores are actually impossible to set fire to.)

Anyway, the world sucks. Especially if all you want is a computer that fits in your backpack, can run off a battery, and has a viewable screen.

(Yup, I had a few beers. If it works for Steve Yegge it can work for me too!)

sipefree• 15 years ago

I'd say that iTunes killed itself in the debugger because the music industry didn't want you to see what their DRM does.

jrockway6• 15 years ago

No, it's an OS X "feature". PT_DENY_ATTACH:

http://landonf.bikemonkey.org/code/macosx/Leopard_PT_DENY_AT...

"UNIX with a GUI" at its best.

SamReidHughes2• 15 years ago

> "it's a Thinkpad, but it has a shitty keyboard and a ...

The "Thinkpad Edge" and the X120e and X1 actually have very nice keyboards, arguably nicer than the usual scissor switches. Except that the layout is messed up.

henrymazza• 15 years ago

It's funny, it's the most Macbook like layout I've ever seen on a PC!

pooriaazimi• 15 years ago

I really love my MacBook Pro's keyboard. It's clean, with just as much keys as I need. I hate laptops with 110 keys, most are useless keys like page up/down, home/end, print screen, ... If I need to navigate to next page (which I often do), I just hold down 'fn' and press the down arrow. End? 'cmd+right arrow'. Admittedly, Print screen is a little harder to remember for the average user ('cmd+shift+3/4'), but MacBook's page up/down and home/end are very reasonable and easy to remember even for non-technical users.

I agree that the 'return' on the British keyboard is very poorly designed (there's an screenshot the original review at ars, but apart from that, MacBook's keyboard is one of the reasons I would never buy a PC in the foreseeable future (other reasons: OS X and trackpad).

Thinkpad's keyboard is much better than that the average PC laptop keyboard, except for page up/down keys getting in the way all the time.

Oh and I absolutely hate the media keys on laptops...

YooLi• 15 years ago

The iTunes GDB brouhaha was in 2004. Before that you could run iTunes under GDB and in fact Apple had a dev doc showing you how to. It turned out that it was quite easy to get around the PT_DENY_ATTACH system call. You could still run every other Apple app under GDB. It's not hard to see why Apple would have that restriction placed on iTunes.

So if I take your word on your story, that since that day in 2004 when you supposedly discovered you couldn't run iTunes under GDB and you vehemently swore off Apple, and it now being 2011 when you've finally found a good laptop, you've used shitty laptops for 7 years? All for something that 1. was easily skirted around, 2. Anyone could see Apple's motivation for doing so.

kristianp2• 15 years ago

One thing not mentioned is how hard it is to buy a non-mac laptop with higher than 1366x768 resolution. That's just not enough vertical lines for modern UIs. When is the standard resolution going to get higher again?

aw3c23• 15 years ago

Huh? Random check on a random price comparison page gave me 2544 with <= 1366x768 and 1231 devices with a higher resolution.

jrockway6• 15 years ago

80x25 ought to be enough for anyone.

Anyway, this is not true. 12" laptops are all 1366x768, but 15" laptops can have up to 1920x1200. I know for a fact that the T-series Thinkpads have better than 1366x768 resolution, for example.

ecaradec• 15 years ago

The Apple way is to design amazing product, I do own an iphone and an ipad and I really like them. Apple does an incredible job at designing products.

But the Apple way is also to not be at conferences or shows but their own, to forbid developers to talk about the OS and to sue others companies using their patents. I really dislike Apple, if there was some other company that could do as amazing phones and tablets as they do, I would jump in their boat as quickly as possible. As a customer, I have absolutly no loyalty to Apple. Apple is like the crazy captain that is the only one that can pass the "Cap Horn". He is amazing at what he do but if he need to jettison you at anytime, he'll do it. You can't be safe near him.

I wished some PC maker should make a line of designed PC and deliver them with a raw Windows, without any crapware installed. Actually I thought about it so much that I considered doing just that. I talked about it with a friend who is an Apple fan. His opinion was that it couldn't work because PC buyier didn't care, he said they wanted blinking leds and things just like that and that they actually like crapware. I might reconsider my idea seeing comments there.

icebraining• 15 years ago

There's no such thing as the PC buyer, it's impossible to build a single profile from so many millions of people. Even if his opinion holds true for >80%, there's still a huge market of people who actually care.

technoslut2• 15 years ago

I think you're looking at it the wrong way. I'm sure that if you were in Apple's position you wouldn't take too kindly to everyone imitating your designs and technological innovations. Companies do have to make money.

You could argue that Apple is too controlling and sometimes they do go too far but that controlling nature also allows for superior products as well. I don't think the perfect solution exists out there for you.

>...forbid developers to talk about the OS...

I'm not exactly sure why you have a problem with this. Yes, devs are asked to sign an NDA but it's their choice to do so and I've yet to see Apple publicly go out after devs for violating their agreement.

> wished some PC maker should make a line of designed PC and deliver them with a raw Windows, without any crapware installed...I talked about it with a friend who is an Apple fan. His opinion was that it couldn't work because PC buyier didn't care...

They don't care. Have you ever tried teaching the average user how to use a computer? The typical response is "I don't really care. I just want to do x". Try selling them on spending a $1000+ on a computer that will only last 3-4 years. They don't see the value proposition and, for those that do, will buy an Apple product because of the brand image. The PC has lost the high end for almost a decade now and I don't think they can get it back. This, along with Apple dominating the supply chain, makes it difficult to compete.

rsynnott9• 15 years ago

> I'm not exactly sure why you have a problem with this. Yes, devs are asked to sign an NDA but it's their choice to do so and I've yet to see Apple publicly go out after devs for violating their agreement.

It's also pretty much the industry standard. When we hear about Windows 8 from the MSDN blogs, it is not because some developer decided to write it; it's because it has been approved for public dissemination. Apple does much the same thing at its developer conferences. Google, in ways, is even more secretive; by the time we hear about what's in the latest Android, the first devices with said version are often already on the shelves; Apple at least gives developers a couple of months heads up.

rafski• 15 years ago

I find it funny people don't realize Apple sells 18 kinds of iPad 2.

philwelch10• 15 years ago

Color, storage space, and 3G are the only options though. If you count all the options for Macbook Air, there's roughly 524288 combinations.

allwein• 15 years ago

Sure, there's 18 varieties, but there's only 3 vectors that a person needs to choose from. What color? What networking? How much storage?

mathattack• 15 years ago

This does capture yet another benefit of Apple's model of simplicity. Sales and operations become more streamlined when it's not management by committee. It puts a lot of pressure on the top and can make for being a difficult business partner, but the results are obvious.

padobson• 15 years ago

If you're going to attack Gruber for being an Apple apologist to the point of utter irrationality, then you don't want to attack the substance of this post, but rather its use in supporting his thesis: Apple is the best run business in the world. More specifically to this post: Apple sells laptops better than anyone else.

I refute it thus: http://m.techcrunch.com/2011/07/14/apple-continues-slow-but-...

Apple is a distant third in US laptop market share and they don't even crack the top 5 globally.

Whatever the user experience of their sales channel is, it hasn't stopped their competitors from out selling them.

What Apple diehards like Gruber seem to forget when they discuss the merit of Apple's marketplace strategy is that the product is only 1/4 of the equation. Pricing, sales channel, and hype are the other three portions, and Apple has been consistently beaten by the competition on these grounds for the entire history of personal computing - their portable gadgets excluded.

The fact of the matter is that the average PC buyer doesn't get on a computer at home and shop for a laptop. They either take the one that their workplace gives them, or they go into a store and talk to a salesman about all the nuances of buying a computer that have been covered here. They then purchase the cheapest laptop that meets their needs, and they go home that day with it.

Artagra2• 15 years ago

You need to remember that Apple decides to avoid certain markets (want a laptop less than $1000? Apple won't sell it to you). Also, sales do not equal profit.

I think Apple is hugely successful, both in terms of selling computers to individuals (Vast majority of Apple sales are above $1000, Apple has a 90% market share of retail PCs sold that are above 90% [1]) And they are hugely profitable [2].

1: http://macdailynews.com/2010/02/01/apple_mac_owns_90_market_... ) 2: http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-revenue-vs-o...

jarek17• 15 years ago

What share of the retail PC market is the over $1000 part? 90% of, say, 20% still wouldn't be much.

Artagra2• 15 years ago

I think another important factor to remember, is that Apple simply able to spend more on development for each computer they sell. No-one else makes as much profit per machine as Apple does, and no one else sells as many of each SKU as Apple does.

charlieok• 15 years ago

I'm not sure that Gruber explicitly stated this, but it also seems clear to me that a key design element -- making the device small -- is also enabled by the lack of configurability. If there's no concern for assembling interchangeable parts, the parts can be integrated into a tighter enclosure.

apinstein• 15 years ago

What Apple is doing is textbook strategy, right out of Michael Porter's playbook. If you are an entrepreneur and haven't read "What is Stragegy?" before, stop everything you're doing and go read it right now.

http://hbr.org/product/what-is-strategy/an/96608-PDF-ENG

HINT: if you google to title you'll find a link to the full PDF, though I am not sure of it's legitimacy.

comice• 15 years ago

"Design is copyable. But the Cook side of things — Apple’s economy of scale advantage — cannot be copied by any company with a complex product lineup."

What nonsense is this? If a company copied Apple's economy of scale, it would no longer have a complex product lineup.

It's like saying "Design cannot be copied by any company with ugly products".

jgh• 15 years ago

Had a similar experience about a month ago when my wife said she wanted a new laptop for school, but wanted it small and light.

So she thought Netbook. I told her she'd be pretty unhappy with a netbook's performance. So I began looking for an "ultraportable" laptop in the 11" range that was nice and light/small for her, but still fast enough to have the performance she would expect and be happy with.

I considered the Lenovo X220 or whatever it was, it was on sale from like $1400 or whatever to $900, but unavailable in any stores around here and she really wanted to see it first. There is an Acer(?) one that just came out, but it was like $1700 or so. The new MBA? $1000 and does exactly what she wants. I was pretty shocked to find that the MacBook Air was the most reasonably priced laptop in that size range.

saurabhnanda• 15 years ago

To all those who are comparing a computer/laptop with a car/television/refrigerator/wherever. There's a big difference between the two classes of machines. Cars don't deal with your personal data. Talk about not caring what your car does (or how it works) when it's connected to the internet and stores the details of each location you drove to, who you were with, and how long you stayed there.

georgieporgie• 15 years ago

I see four reasons for PC laptop makers being so weird:

1) The illusion of control that options give. "My toaster goes to 11!"

2) Building to specs. "This laptop has 20% more pixels than the Macbook. IPS? What's that mean?"

3) Backward compatibility obsession. "I have to have VGA-out because my enterprise customer has VGA projectors. They have VGA projectors because laptops all have VGA-out." Apple will happily pave away old cruft every few years (OS X, dumping 32-bit support in Lion, move to Thunderbolt) for the sake of simplicity and optimal solutions.

4) Consumer confusion. These people aren't stupid, there must be some advantage to having such horribly convoluted online stores. I suspect that it's easier to unload undesirable machines by putting them confusingly next to more desirable ones.

The New Apple Advantage

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