Does anyone have any insight into why Apple's QA took a turn for the worse over the past couple years?
Buggy IOS/OS releases and now the hardware issues... I always equated Apple with quality and consistency (along with price), but now I can't really see how the price is justified with the issues they have been having.
They no longer have Steve Jobs Quality Control? He was the type of person to play with something for 5 minutes and say "yeah... no" or to eagerly take something he liked and abuse the hell out of it for 24 hours then come back with a laundry list of improvements.
He was a jerk and he cared deeply about user experience.
In his absence you have what exactly? Tim Cook lacks vision, if you want your mountain moved to Pluto he'll have it there by Tuesday but he'll never stop and ask "why?" Jon Ive ascended from above to bless us with the word "chamfer" while carpenters and machinists world wide rolled their eyes in unison, his focus is purely on aesthetic.
It's more like Steve Jobs was such an uncompromising asshole that he would rather throw a substandard product in the garbage than put out something he considered lesser. He didn't have vision, nothing he "made" was revolutionary at all, and he didn't make anything after the NeXT. Steve Jobs was amazing at two things: getting in on the ground floor (the iphone came out so quickly after the first all touch screen smartphone that no one even remembers the original) and making sure that what they did put out either worked or didn't see the light of day. I remember the early android competitors (notably Motorola's droid) suffering from touchscreens that failed to track accurately (https://www.wired.com/2010/03/touchscreens-smartphones/) compared to the near perfect performance of the iPhone, its the sort of thing that Steve Jobs would have insisted on.
>and making sure that what they did put out either worked or didn't see the light of day
Regardless Job's issues, this was the best and most importand part.
Your toaster should work! If the user has to push the trigger twice (only to have it overcooked) - you should either work on your mistakes and release when you are finished, or throw a it in the garbage.
My memory of the time was seeing a bunch of cool Microsoft Surface demos, thinking "someone is gonna make a killing putting this on a phone", and the iPhone coming out a few months later. I'll go so far as to say that I think it was the first touch screen phone that was actually manufactured and sold.
The LG prada phone was 6 months earlier than the iphone demo and was all-touch with a capacitive screen. LG claimed apple ripped off their design, but I think it’s more a case of hardware evolving to the point this became possible and both companies implementing, but LG releasing a less ambitious product sooner.
I see now that we've been talking about "touch screens" in this thread, but I've been thinking of that as meaning the multi-touch screens we're all so familiar with now (and of which the Microsoft Surface was the first demo I saw). It looks like the Prada had a capacitive screen, but not multi-touch. Maybe multi-touch was the thing, which is why the Prada was forgotten? Maybe not, maybe the iPhone just won by marketing and deals with carriers. Beats me.
In any case, I'm quibbling, I didn't know about the Prada before you mentioned it, which makes your point. Thanks for the pointer!
> He didn't have vision, nothing he "made" was revolutionary at all, and he didn't make anything after the NeXT.
Maybe vision is the wrong word. You're right that he wasn't imagining the future most of the time. What he did have was a degree of objectivity and restraint. He wasn't blinded by the "wow" factor of a new technology and could objectively weight it's merits. Where as most tech companies try to cram the latest and greatest technology into their products to have an impressive bullet list to show around, he held back until he felt the technology was ready.
I had a full touch screen, color, icon grid of 3rd party apps, internet enabled, smart phone in 2001.
Samsung SPH-i300
I had multiple web browsers, email, irc client, telnet and ssh clients, and an open marketplace of thousands of 3rd party apps for every oddball purpose, like I had a resistor color decoder, netmask calculator, etc.
2001.
iphone came out in 2007, and had no 3rd party apps.
I'm with popsiclepete. I had a long string of "smart" devices before the iphone and they were, unilaterally, garbage. Even the ones with great hardware(looking at the treo 600 series here especially) had awful software and bad battery life.
I bought the very first color palm pilot and was first-in a lot of tech. All this stuff was really, really clunky to use and just generally bad. I couldn't hand it to someone else and expect them to figure out how to use it without being shown.
Also, styluses were terrible except for corner-case inputs. The fact that there's essentially only one mainstream brand making a main-line phone with them goes to show this was true.
I agree it was a flub the iphone didn't launch with apps, but i honestly think people needed a year to get used to the interface concept and a lot of complete garbage would have come out of people trying to get first mover on the market(and it DID, even a year later, absolute shovelware)
People really shouldn't be romanticizing pocketpc, or even palmOS. The first truly good mobile OS palm put out was WebOS, and it took microsoft until windows mobile 7... both after the iphone.
I also was a "power user" with some Nokia/Symbian bullshit that had "thousands of apps" and it was absolute garbage compared to my first iPhone. For a normal person.
Let's stop romanticizing the cell phone market pre-Apple/Android - there's a reason the rest of them folded and effectively died or went into obscurity within a few years.
Steve Jobs was responsible for the original Macintosh, the device that constantly over-heated and had the same repairability problems then as these Mac Book Pros.
I know Jobs is Silicon Valley Jesus, but he did not walk on water.
I am still confounded how people continue to say that Tim Cook has no vision, as if he's simply some sort of bean counter with green shades who just lucked into become the CEO of one of the world's largest companies.
Tim Cook's vision is much larger than computers if you haven't been paying attention. Look, from what I can observe, ever smaller devices, lifestyle devices, the focus on privacy, their take on the cloud; Apple is looking to position itself to exist intimately in our lives. The only way to get there is to have the same level of trust that you do with family or even a lawyer.
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And yet Apple is eroding trust by pushing buggy software and poor quality hardware. Maybe his focus is just elsewhere but Apple is who they are today because of an attention to their products that other companies lack.
Maybe he's trying to position Apple as a privacy minded trustworthy company when it comes to your data but he's ignoring or entrusting the crown jewels to someone else while he does it. If people stop buying Apple products because they're unreliable and support sucks then it won't matter.
What's the vision exactly? The focus on privacy? What exactly are they doing about that? Their "take on the cloud" is what? 'Do it badly'?
> Apple is looking to position itself to exist intimately in our lives. The only way to get there is to have the same level of trust that you do with family or even a lawyer.
Bleh. That is just awful marketing speak. Why would anyone trust them to "existing intimately" in 'their life' if they can't even reliably produce reliable computers (regularly)?
My iPhone 5 (ha) is fine, but I'm hanging onto it for as long as I can because I expect to be disappointed by upgrading.
People express that Tim Cook has no vision because he's failed to deliver like Steve Jobs did (in a way they care about).
Absolutely nothing! I just don't care for Jon Ives, he's pretentious and likes to demonstrate his superiority by using domain specific terms in casual conversation to impress the layman. When the iPhone 4<?> came out Jon Ives would talk about how exquisite the matte chamfered aluminum edges were as if it was an engineering miracle and he single-handedly invented the chamfer mill.
Don't get me wrong, I think his passion is wonderful and I enjoy listening to him talk about physical design in much the same way I enjoyed watching the movie Helvetica. But he's still a pretentious twat and my impression is that he doesn't care about design beyond it superficially meeting his immediate needs. Similar to how an artist might build an installation for an exhibition with no concern for it surviving beyond that, I don't think Jon Ives designs products with longevity in mind.
You can explain Apple’s problems with a much simpler albeit banal reason: its sheer size. It has grown massive.
They took over the old Sun campus in Sunnyvale while the UFO was under construction, and shortly thereafter the word was that those teams would be remaining there long term as the HQ was already overbooked. Apple also bought up a lot of space in San Jose a couple of years ago.
Apple pioneered small and fast teams of veterans. But it doesn’t scale well to this size. It’s a challenge to effectively coordinate hundreds (thousands?) of teams building various integrated hardware, software, and service components.
Nothing screams "Apple" as much as a perfectly designed, elegent beautiful, device (campus) that is underpowered and unsatisfactory on launch day, requiring a bunch of external attachments to make it useful outside of the demo use case.
Buggy IOS/OS releases and now the hardware issues... I always equated Apple with quality and consistency (along with price), but now I can't really see how the price is justified with the issues they have been having.