To start the New Year on a positive and possibly boring note, I’ve decided to look at the Macintosh line from a favorable angle. There is much to say on that count, from a very pleasant laptop—the culmination of the MacBook Air but by another name—to an equally satisfying desktop workhorse.
Once upon a time, Apple was known for its top-tier storytelling skills and the industry’s best Supply Chain Management. But the recent MacBook Pro launch, glitchy and undersold, shows worrisome lapses and raises questions about the company’s aging culture.
Last week’s Monday Note on the Macintosh endgame generated more comments and email than usual, which prompts me to pursue the topic, this time with regard to the history and future of the Macintosh operation systems.
The Macintosh line of personal computers will soon be 32 years old. It has a venerable pas. But what kind of future does it have in a declining market?
The apparent paradox of electing a businessman who has no elective office experience and lots of liabilities can boggle one’s mind. But we can clear the confusion by looking at Donald Trump’s one and only goal from now on.
A side effect of the smartphone revolution is the emergence of a rich—but cheap—ecosystem of building block modules. Unfortunately, these modules are very insecure and, when assembled into a quick and inexpensive device, they can cause serious trouble. They already have.
Fifteen years ago, the iPod and its iTunes music distribution system were born. No one saw how they were to transform Apple, enable the Smartphone 2.0 era, and unlock hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue for the company.
By breaking so many conventions in his bid for the US presidency, Donald Trump is doing us a favor. But are we going to be wise enough to put it to good use?
Without a doubt, self-driving cars will change and save lives. Interest is high, money—and ink—pours in, and demos are everywhere. But as we’re starting to see with the Google Car, technical, philosophical, and business model questions stand between us and the third transportation revolution.
In ancient Rome, haruspices and other soothsayers never looked one another in the eye when crossing paths in the streets—they were afraid they might burst into spastic laughter. Do naysaying Apple bloggers fear the same when reading one another’s output?
When I wrote about potential trouble for Elon Musk’s car company two weeks ago (“Tesla: The Improvisation Debt“), I missed something that was right under my nose: Musk wants a new identity for his company. This move is—choose your adjective—troubling, risky, revealing, portentous…
No one would have given Elon Musk the money to start a “normal” car company. And yet, Musk went ahead, improvised, vaulted over one obstacle after another, and created an iconic electric car company. In doing so, Musk incurred a deeply rooted “improvisation debt,” one he must now pay back in order to free himself from his heroic low-volume car making past and become a truly industrial, million-cars-a-year enterprise.
In the mythical Land of Theory, where everything “just works,” we can connect all the objects in our lives. We have the sensors, the wireless networks, and the computing power, but progress is slow if not comically wrong. Why?
When we have trouble making sense of what a company says about its business, it’s a sure sign of trouble.
The iPad really is a strange animal, wanting to be both a dead-simple tablet, successfully so, and trying to replace PCs, less felicitously. From day one, Steve Jobs knew this to be an open question, one the newer iPad Pros attempt to answer as they “fork” the iPad line.
Carriers refuse to see themselves as merely providing network infrastructure. They want to “add value”—meaning charge more—by using their pipes to sell us media and services. But that content has to come from somewhere. Verizon’s acquisition of Yahoo is but the most recent marriage of incompatible cultures.
ARM is now the dominant microprocessor architecture, a feat achieved through a combination of sharp engineering, a PC market failure, and an inspired business model pivot. The reward is a puzzlingly high acquisition offer from Masa Son, the maverick SoftBank founder.
Tesla enjoys a reputation out of proportion with its 0.15% share of the US market. And Chairman Musk now says production will jump from 50,000 units in 2015 to 500,000 in 2018. This projected tenfold jump invites doubt, or worse. But a strong reaction (400,000 pre-orders) to the just-announced $35,000 Model 3 shows hope for the company to make electric cars more mainstream.
The Brexit referendum was widely predicted to be a win for the status quo, with the UK staying in the European Union. The actual result raises many more questions than the vote was supposed to answer, and may trigger a wave of copycat exit referendums in several EU countries, with all-around bad consequences.
We take a closer look at the iPhone’s declining numbers, what caused them, and what they could mean for the product’s future.
The absence of official numbers for the Apple Watch leads to speculation that the device is a flop—why else would Apple hide the numbers? But the company’s penchant for secrecy shouldn’t prevent us from looking at a few facts, and from thinking about the company’s long game.
With the opening of its new San Francisco flagship location, Apple gives us a glimpse of its future: A hybrid of technology and fashion.
Once upon a time, Apple led a simple life: one line of personal computers with a single operating system. As iPads fork into traditional and hybrid Pro models, Apple’s software life will become complicated. Count the OS variants: macOS, watchOS, tvOS, iOS for iPhone and iOS for hybrid iPads. And consider the consequences for the organization and culture.
“Just you wait,” Intel kept telling us, year after year. “Yes, our legacy x86 architecture, dominant in the PC world, hasn’t yet won a place in smartphones and tablets, but our company’s superior manufacturing technology will inevitably lead to victory…”
