Apple in 2021

https://sixcolors.com/post/2022/02/apple-in-2021-the-six-colors-report-card/

by Doubleguitars • 4 years ago

101 100 4 years ago

I’d appreciate if Apple keeps the UI/UX as is. It’s already degraded so much, but changing UI for the sake of fashion might be good for business (average users), it sucks for developers and people that need a stable OS. You know, “Pros”. They’ve fucked with the UI for every generation and instead of refining it, they keep chasing trends. These designers are the antithesis of everything good design should stand for. Function, clarity, robustness, reduction of ambiguity and mainly getting out of the way. I don’t consider them designers, they’re marketers in the disguise of designers. I think the term “design” itself has degraded in my view. Apple is one leading this movement. It’s a strange and powerful company with tech x luxury fashion combined to reap cash. It does so well. But, I wish it didn’t influence designers outside of Apple so much. No one has conviction anymore.

deergomoo2• 4 years ago

It didn’t used to be this way. Apple software used to be functional, intuitive, and fun in a lot of cases.

Things went downhill rapidly when Jony Ive’s team took over software design. I wasn’t a huge fan of the gaudy extreme skeuomorphism of the late Forstall era, but at least you could tell what was a button. What you could do with a piece of software was much clearer.

The current team are insistent that simplicity is when controls are hidden behind hover and tap states, or inside overflow menus in a toolbar only 5% full.

jhickok8• 4 years ago

I just want their native apps to work, and a lot of times I find they are busted. No excuse for that.

dont__panic3• 4 years ago

The "new folder" workflow in Finder is one of the most infuriating things I've ever seen in macOS. I swear, they used to just have a "new folder" button in the olden days.

dont__panic3• 4 years ago

Agreed. When I think of good (Apple) design, I think of the 2012-2015 first generation retina MacBook Pros -- a slight refinement of the previous era, thinning the chassis when possible, upgrading ports, improving the screen, but largely preserving the best elements of the old design. There were some losses -- the sleep indicator light, the battery LEDs, ethernet, maybe some of the reliability of the Magsafe 1 connection -- but I would say that they largely improved on an existing design. Similar with OS X releases in that time period, Apple largely iterated on the existing Snow Leopard-ish design instead of blowing things up with fancy new designs.

Funnily enough, I remember many, many tech reviewers in 2014, 2015 criticizing the MacBook Pro for that "ancient" design. And Apple eventually gave in and redesigned both the laptops (yuck) and OS X (maybe even more yuck). UI/UX is tricky, I think, because in an industry where folks move around every couple of years to maximize their salaries, people aren't rewarded for being good, iterative stewards of an existing system. Instead, they change jobs, someone new comes in, and they try to make a name for themselves by redesigning everything through a big bang redesign. And then they move on a couple years later, and then someone else comes in and redesigns... etc. etc.

Sidenote: Holy cow, this also explains why the government sucks so much.

mgh2• 4 years ago

Was hoping for a more quantitative approach, not qualitative opinions. The sample size of the 1st graph (56) lost my interest.

I guess these comments somehow paint the overall media sentiment on the brand and consequently the stock. Nonetheless, meaningful discussions can result still.

jhickok8• 4 years ago

I love the new Apple Silicon Macs, and the transition for me has been pretty easy.

I can't imagine anything interesting happening to the watch that doesn't include a big increase to battery life. I don't want any other feature except a battery that can make it a full day.

Apple software has seemingly regressed every year recently. Native apps like Music and Podcasts, the only two I would regularly use, have become so bugged that I had to move to other options. Every time I take a look and see if they are working again, they are buggy messes that I have to constantly wrestle with.

gnicholas2• 4 years ago

I don't want any other feature except a battery that can make it a full day.

I thought the Series 7 could make it a full day? My wife has a S6 and makes it about 36 hours with her normal usage (which is admittedly quite light).

For me, it's not a watch if it has to be charged every day or two. I need 4+ days of battery life so that I don't have to bring another charger on every overnight/weekend trip.

bladegash2• 4 years ago

My series 7 easily makes it a full day, closer to two days. It also charges really quickly. I put it on the charger for about 30 mins to an hour in the morning while reading emails and it’s done.

jhickok8• 4 years ago

I have not had that experience with the Series 7, but my S6 would not make it thru a full day ever if I used it for less than an hour of Apple Fitness (paired with an iPad or standalone on a run).

wwarek2• 4 years ago

My Mi Band 6 from Xiaomi easily lives ~30 days on one charge if used less (eg. no constant heart tracking, no PAI) and ~7 days with all tracking enabled (sleep, oxygen, heart rate, 1-2 workouts a day). With a third party app instead of Xiaomi "Mi Fit", I belive also all the data stays with me.

That makes me wonder - what does Apple Watch do that Mi Band doesn't that makes the time on battery so much different? I guess screen size and GPS during workout (Mi Band uses phone GPS), but other than that? (I'm not sure what other features it has, might be comparing apples to oranges, no pun intended)

dilap• 4 years ago

I don't think it'll ever happen, but it would be amazing if the opened up 3rd-party watch faces. For a watch, the watch-face is really the analog of the app, and it's a shame we're just limited to the built-in stuff.

jhickok8• 4 years ago

Agreed, and given that I would be fine paying a few books for a watch face that seems like easy money Apple.

PragmaticPulp• 4 years ago

I can't imagine anything interesting happening to the watch that doesn't include a big increase to battery life. I don't want any other feature except a battery that can make it a full day.

I have to ask: What are you doing with your Apple Watch that drains the battery so fast?

I've never been able to drain my Watch battery anywhere near that fast, even with the always-on screen still enabled.

kccqzy• 4 years ago

I work out every day using the Workouts app. I often bike or run outdoors so during a workout GPS, Bluetooth and the heart monitor are all active. At night I use the AutoSleep app to track sleep. I charge the watch just before sleep.

I get the 10% low battery notification a few times a week.

TillE• 4 years ago

The new Watch health features that have been rumored for the coming years (blood pressure, etc) would be genuinely life-changing for a ton of people.

I don't have any particular interest in a smart watch - even if you gave me one for free, I doubt I'd bother wearing it. But if it's also a fully-featured health monitor? Yeah, absolutely.

NoPicklez2• 4 years ago

Currently Garmin, Fitbit and Whoop have much more advanced health features than the Apple watch. I agree, its a big downfall of the Apple watch IMO.

benrapscallion• 4 years ago

A camera would be nice.

mandeepj2• 4 years ago

I don't want any other feature except a battery that can make it a full day.

I'm waiting for them to add glucose monitoring into it

hanche• 4 years ago

That would be very useful to many, but as far as I know, the technical hurdles are formidable. I don’t know if anyone has developed a non-invasive technique yet that is sufficiently reliable. And it’s not for the lack of trying.

comprev• 4 years ago

Terrible battery life on the Apple watches is the only thing preventing me from getting one (and I'm already fully invested in the Apple ecosystem - iphone, ipad, macbook air, hackintosh desktop).

By comparison my Polar V800, which has been in constant use since 2017, can last over a month on a single charge! It tracks my movement during day and detects sleep through lack of movement.

Under heavy use - GPS, heart rate, pedal cadence and wheel speed sensors all at the same time - it can last 5-6hrs.

Outstanding piece of kit :-)

Tagbert• 4 years ago

“ except a battery that can make it a full day.”

I’m curious what use case you have where the battery doesn’t last a full day. I generally charge my 40mm S7 once a day but there is always at least a 25-30% charge remaining. I suppose if I did a multi mile bike ride while playing a podcast from the phone that might change. But otherwise it’s ok. I would love a two day charge because since days I miss the morning charge and don’t realize until I’m out of the house but that’s by not common these days.

Edit: I also do sleep tracking each night and walks most days. Battery life was similar on my older S4 up until the last six months where it started running low.

jhickok8• 4 years ago

I essentially use it for health-things. I listen to podcasts/music off of it when I run or row so I don't have to carry a phone around. Today, for example, I was at 40%-ish at around noon after putting in on around 6am and exercising for roughly 90 minutes.

parkingrift• 4 years ago

Switched to a Garmin Fenix because of the battery life. Total game changer charging once every couple of weeks.

NoPicklez2• 4 years ago

This might be small, but the Apple watch needs to implement a body battery/stress/recovery score like Garmin, Fitbit and Whoop has.

Apple loves to show off its bloody oxygen sensor and its ECG capability. But they do not take key metrics that the watch measures all day and tell me what they mean. Heck the watch even measures heart rate variability but only logs it into the Health app.

But they need to be taking the resting HR, heart rate variability, HR, respiratory rate and develop a model for determining a stress and recovery score which ties into sleep etc. Showing these metrics on their own is great but they need to take the key metrics and show us what they mean.

Garmin, Whoop and Fitbit all do this and it's a key differentiator. I think the largest differentiator between it and its competitors.

hellomyguys4• 4 years ago

This seems a bit bizarre to me. Rate products on a scale of 1-5? What is that actually measuring? Perception?

pohl3• 4 years ago

It's a common practice in survey design.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Likert_scale

hellomyguys4• 4 years ago

I think a Likert scale is actually different than how they're surveying respondents in the article linked by the OP.

From Wikipedia: "A Likert item is simply a statement that the respondent is asked to evaluate by giving it a quantitative value on any kind of subjective or objective dimension, with level of agreement/disagreement being the dimension most commonly used...

The format of a typical five-level Likert item, for example, could be:

Strongly disagree Disagree Neither agree nor disagree Agree Strongly agree"

This is much different than "Give a number 1-5 to iPhone."

barkerja2• 4 years ago

I have to believe that HomeKit has fallen so far to the wayside due to their work on Matter. And we can expect something big in the near future. Right? Please?

bitdestroyer• 4 years ago

Here's hoping. In the meantime, I've had a ton of fun making small ESP devices that integrate with Homebridge. It's really opened up so many possibilities, even beyond the things that Homebridge is typically praised for.

berberous• 4 years ago

Switch to Home Assistant. It takes a bit to learn and setup, but I’m much happier with it.

rodgerd• 4 years ago

HomeKit's biggest challenge is that so much of the home automation market balks at Apple's requirement to be able to operate without a cloud service. Can't do surveillance capitalism or extort monthly fees or end-of-life product arbitrarily if you've got HomeKit branding, so of course that's first overboard.

The second problem is that Apple themselves are missing a number of functions that are baffling, such as not having history for metrics. I can't understand how it's impossible to have e.g. a history of temperatures in HomeKit.

barkerja2• 4 years ago

Yes! This is one of my biggest desires in HomeKit, and the native Home app. Having access to historical data. This is one of the main reasons I have Home Assistant running. I don't use it for any automations, but I do often use it to reference historical data.

I'm not sure how Apple would approach this though. Would it be part of your iCloud data and require a minimum plan (similar to how HKSV operates). I don't ever see them allowing the option to control /where/ that data is stored exactly.

carlycue• 4 years ago

What is Apple doing with the iPad division? The Mac spanked the iPad in 2021 and the recent earnings showed that.

PrancingPony• 4 years ago

I just don't think too many people buy tablets. It has its niche, but sales aren't as high as I guess they could be?

hnaccount141• 4 years ago

I think that has more to do with 2020/2021 being unusually good years for the Mac in particular. Computers in general have been selling well due to the pandemic, and the hype surrounding the move to ARM generated a lot of sales. Anecdotally I know a number of people who upgraded laptops earlier than they otherwise would have due to rave reviews of the M1.

perardi• 4 years ago

There are apologists who will insist you can do real work on an iPad—if you get the iPad Pro, and the keyboard case.

Which ends up being about as expensive and about the same size as a MacBook Air. And for any work that requires any sort of interface density, or complete access to the file system, or fast I/O, or…I’d way rather have a Mac.

jessriedel• 4 years ago

To be clear, you can absolutely do real work if your work is natively done with a stylus, e.g., illustrating or pen-and-paper math. These are of course uncommon.

leviathant3• 4 years ago

I was a pretty staunch opponent of the iPad for a very long time. Tablets were clearly a consumption device, and I've always disliked Apple's penchant for proprietary connectors.

However, things have shifted enough that on the artistic/creative front, the iPad is actually a really nice thing to have. When the iPad Air 4 (I think? The iPad ecosystem has terrible nomenclature) came out, it not only had a USB-C connector, but worked with the Apple Pencil 2. I did something I thought I'd never do - I bought an iPad.

There are music & synthesizer apps that only make sense on a tablet, and they can talk with other music apps on the iPad pretty seamlessly too these days. And with the Apple Pencil 2, it's like a magic art pad. I've been sketching and drawing and 'painting' like I haven't done in 20 years.

And I can charge it with the same cable that charges my Pixel 6, my work-issued Macbook pro, or my wife's Thinkpad's power supply.

It certainly took long enough, but I no longer think that iPads are pure consumption devices.

Now... would I try to use it the way I use a laptop? Oh, hell no.

salamandersauce• 4 years ago

I like iOS better than macOS. Has pen input. The Pro has TB3, granted 1 port but better than the 2015 MacBook. Most of it's problems are completely artificial limitations placed there by Apple. If they just loosened those I'd pick the iPad every time. It's a more flexible form factor held back by software to avoid cutting into Mac and App Store revenue.

emptyparadise• 4 years ago

I really wish I could get an Apple-flavor Surface. I don't want to buy two devices that are basically identical inside when I just want a laptop with the occasional ability to use it as a tablet to read an article or write some notes.

arvinsim2• 4 years ago

Agreed. Apple sort of tanked the value proposition of the iPad as a laptop replacement when they introduced the M1 Macbook Air

hnaccount_rng• 4 years ago

That seems to be a conscious decision on the part of Apple. They also live in the real world, where getting parts is getting harder. So in order to not having to squeeze iPhone and Mac sales they squeezed the iPad ones. We bought our Mum an iPad. Was supposed to be for Christmas but delivery was mid January >4 weeks. Try buying one now: 5-6 weeks.

iPhones you'll get tomorrow. Macs in two weeks. That's an intentional decision.

baby-yoda3• 4 years ago

just my humble opinion - i believe aapl has crossed the threshold into the territory which steve jobs famously described as the hallmark of the Scully era[0] - their endless pursuit for revenue has pushed sales and marketing people to the front of the line and product people operate in their shadows.

of course in a company as big and wide ranging as aapl, there are so many competing priorities and things to focus on but, IMO, tim cook is a real life paperclip maximizer. early on in his tenure there was some criticism that he was a "bean counter" and would ruin things cause he wasn't Steve, but rather than cutting costs as a traditional beancounter type would, he has been ruthless in pursuing what works to continue the endless revenue climb.

there are certainly many things they could work on but choose not to, or could do better, but when you're in Cook's position and you are the preeminent Elephant (far larger and less capable of dance than Gerstner could have ever imagined), you have no choice but for changes in direction to be slow but large in magnitude.

and at such a massive scale, while aapl could stumble out a new product/service and vacuum up tens of $millions, there are fewer and fewer opportunities which will clear their IRR. Taking some liberties interpreting here, but hence why they feel the need to extract value from App Store payments, turn a blind eye to scam apps, Google as default $earch, etc; their gravitational pull is so powerful that, as a proper paperclip maximizer, they would be derelict of responsibility by not simply sticking their hand out the window and siphoning incremental revenue. I imagine Cook in Ballmer's sweaty Oxford shirt yelling "Services! Services! Services!".

back to the OP, all that is to say i see aapl's future as rocky, since there will be less and less of a cohesive product vision going forward as emphasis skews back and forth across revenue categories. Not to mention navigating the regulatory waters.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4

joconde• 4 years ago

On the other hand, if pre-iPhone Apple could invest into inventing the iPhone, I don't see why today's Apple could balk at a new effort of this kind, since today's Apple is vastly richer.

How much did the original iPhone and iPad cost to create? I imagine it would be an easy effort for 2022 Apple, and even a total failure would not dent their revenue by much. I can't imagine Cook being unable to do it.

gumby2• 4 years ago

I can't imagine Cook being unable to do it.

…and he has: AirPods, M1, Apple Watch, cleaning cloth…

Also some failures that made it out the door, like HomePod…

I’d like a little more focus on quality and consistency but that would mean stepping off the annual treadmill. Which they could do everyone a service by being the first to do so.

baby-yoda3• 4 years ago

id attribute it to the maximizer mindset - take Meta for example. reports are metaverse development cost $10 billion so far. development came from zuckerberg himself so no one is getting fired, but say an apple VP sponsors a project that creates a $10 billion loss. very likely they hit none of their targets, have no bonus and are on their way out the door. reading between the lines, is this the cause for the constant turnover in the rumored apple car project?

maybe this is an over simplification but, who has license to consume large amounts of resources across the company, potentially all of it being a loss, and not be fired?

culturestate• 4 years ago

their endless pursuit for revenue has pushed sales and marketing people to the front of the line and product people operate in their shadows

It may surprise you to learn that for a very long time, Apple’s de facto head of product (aside from Steve, obviously) was Phil Schiller. The “marketing people” have always been near the top of the food chain.

baby-yoda3• 4 years ago

i'm no expert in the inner workings of apple but i would have considered Ive head of product. just curious as to why you put Schiller ahead?

of course Marketing is an integral part of any large business and of course apple has been well above average in how their campaigns and messaging would rank in that regard.

i added the commentary from Steve about the Scully era to the original post for context. from his explanation the nuance is, IMO, that when a company gets into this endless revenue cycle, a sales/marketing effort can demonstrate growth - hard numbers - far easier than a new product could. the new product could take years to become positive in NPV while a marketing campaign can "show up" by next quarter's earnings release.

musicale• 4 years ago

he has been ruthless in pursuing what works to continue the endless revenue climb

This seems like an accurate assessment. Fortunately much of it has resulted in great products like the Apple Watch and M1 Macs, but service marketing leaking into the UI leaves a bad taste.

As a shareholder I'd be happy with the revenue and dividends, but as a customer I want the focus to be on building great new products and improving reliability and usability rather than trying to convince me to buy more service subscriptions.

We've already seen what happens to mobile games when they prioritize monetization over gameplay: they turn into slot machines. Sadly Apple Arcade is a sort of response to a problem that Apple grew in its own walled garden.

synthmeat• 4 years ago

Would batteries in the bands be A Really Bad Idea?™

GekkePrutser• 4 years ago

For me the keyboards on the MBP still aren't nearly as good as the ones up to 2015. I will still pick my Lenovo if I have a lot to type. They need more travel.

Other than that, the new MBP reverted many mistakes they made before. And yeah I love the iMac design with the colours. They really need to bring back target display mode before I'll actually buy one though.

Apple in 2021

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