Apple Has Missed the Plot

Past fumbles and recoveries

Apple took a Touch Bar knife to a gun fight in the wake of Microsoft’s stunning Surface Studio announcement. This reminds me a bit of when Steve Jobs was hawking DVD drives on iMacs when everyone wanted to rip and burn CDs; he then course corrected a bit later admitting the mistake. He also told us you don’t want to watch video on your iPod, and later graciously released iPod with video (or iPod, 5th Gen).

It also reminds me of how Apple was tone deaf to users asking for larger screens on the iPhones. Instead of listening, Apple gave us only a slightly longer 4″ iPhone 5 (assuring us we didn’t know what we wanted, that one handed use is where it’s at), rather than listening to our needs. In each case, Apple eventually bought a clue, course corrected, and was rewarded with far improved sales. 

“Apple knows best,” the new “not-invented-here”

Now Apple assures us we don’t know $%*& about how we want to use our laptops and desktops. They set up idiot straw man arguments that you don’t want to touch a vertical screen because of arm fatigue (true) when they filed patents on desktop iMacs that tilt down horizontally (and Microsoft made real with the Surface Studio), and despite kids constantly reaching out to touch vertical screens from intuition. Apple once again knows better. 

They give us bullshit toaster-refrigerator analogies that you don’t want to mix touch and powerful pc technologies, that such convergence shouldn’t happen. This is much like when tech pundits told us we’d never have phone and iPod convergence. Well, until Apple found the right recipe with the iPhone and caught the entire industry with its pants down. 

They have the gall to make this analogy when iTunes is still used on your Mac to sync your photo albums on your iPhone. Well karma is a bitch, and Apple is enjoying an ass full of fresh air courtesy of Microsoft’s Surface Studio.

Fiddle me this

What’s worse is Apple has engaged in nostalgia that Steve jobs wouldn’t have tolerated in comparing its original PowerBook (not the original behemoth Mac portable–way to be selective) to the latest MacBook Pro. Way to set the bar real low Apple, ‘hey, we’re a lot faster than a 25 year old laptop!’

“If you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what’s next.” – Steve Jobs

Apple wouldn’t dare compare its 2011 MacBook Pro to the new MacBook Pro because it would be embarrassed by how similarly they perform. I say it’s worse, because these bozos running Apple actually believe an emoji Touch Bar strip—cool though it may be—is actually a revolutionary reinvention of the laptop. They don’t see this as the “B” level upgrade that it is. That’s what’s truly terrifying. These nimrods are actually pleased with themselves.

Had they just said, “Hey, here’s a nice B-level upgrade,” people would have taken it as such and moved on. That they have the gall to tout this as a revolution in light of the release of Surface Studio shows a Nero-like tone deafness, and evinces these people have lost the plot.

Let me count the ways:

• They’ve lost the plot that we don’t need thinner iPhones but more battery. 


• They’ve lost the plot that we hate large bezels (because Jonny Ive’s thin fetish has him making the lid taper in, which requires greater screen inset and bezels, and ironically results in greater dimensions and weight). 


• They’ve lost the plot by believing you can do real work on an iPad Pro and ignoring the Mac (perhaps the ‘review’ and light edit work executives do on their iPads have them believing that’s how real people work. But even the niche of artists using an iPad Pro to sketch things will eventually move that work to a desktop to create and finalize substantial work product). 


• They’ve lost the plot thinking iTunes and Apple Music is in anyway acceptable as a product by anyone with even a modicum of self respect.


• They’ve lost the plot that creative professionals don’t need powerful Mac Pros with video cards, storage and other feature expansion abilities, and have fed them a disposable trash can. 


• They’ve lost the plot believing that they are making tools for creative professionals (e.g., that a $5,000 MacBook Pro with only 16GB of memory and a Touch Bar is a reasonable creative professional offering). And that abandoning creative pro tools (Aperture, crippling Final Cut Pro, expandable Mac Pros, etc.) is a cogent strategy. 


• They’ve lost the plot by not providing a first party display, and believing that referring us to a fugly LG monitor is somehow acceptable to users used to valuing attractive, well designed and complementary products.  


• They’ve lost the plot by abandoning creative professionals and their needs when those users make Apple appear cool and are the people that dragged Apple’s rotting corpse out of bankruptcy.


• They’ve lost the plot by not recognizing that convergence into mixed-mode UIs is useful and the future (e.g. voice, touch, pen, traditional mouse/track pads; check out how useful mixed mode UIs can be in the video below or in any Star Trek episode/movie).

And by the way, in light of the Surface Studio release, Apple chose maybe the worst thing to demo the Touch Bar. DJ software.

MacBook Pro Touch Bar during the DJ demo at Apple’s “hello again” event

Anyone that watched the DJ scrubbing the Touch Bar and didn’t think it would be 100 times more natural to scratch with the on screen turn tables on a the flat Surface Studio screen wasn’t thinking too hard.

Next: Doing Less with More and Dodging a Bullet

Page 2 – Doing Less with More and Dodging a Bullet

Doing less and less with more and more

Apple in 2009 had about 34,000 employees, and spent 1.33B on R&D, about 1/4 IBM’s budget. It updated: iPods, iPhone, laptops, iMacs, Mac minis, Airports, Mac Pros, iLife, iWork, iOS, macOS, and introduced the iPad (a few months into 2010), etc.; and it updated it all annually. 

Apple today has about 4X the employees. Apple spent $10B on god knows what (about 2x IBM’s budget (pdf)). And what do we get for it? We still get iOS and macOS updates.

Chart showing Apple headcount

However, we haven’t had a meaningful update to iLife or iWork in forever; if anything Apple has been busy killing software (e.g., Aperture) and features (iWork, Final Cut Pro X).

We got a tired non-design update of the iPhone, a 9.7″ iPad Pro basically aping the specs from the 12″ iPad Pro, a spec bumped Watch 2 with GPS (and no doubt new wrist straps), a tiny spec bump on the MacBook, and a Touch Bar on the MacBook Pro. In so doing, Apple once again proved it can’t keep a secret, while Microsoft delighted and surprised with a magic-feeling Surface Studio reveal.

Further, Apple and Tim Cook proved they are totally capable of lying to us in saying they don’t talk about future products (despite endlessly allowing leaks) and yet droning on about how interesting augmented reality will be in the future. That’s about it, not much else. Apple did less and less with more and more resources. By most objective counts, Apple has utterly failed to scale. 

Apple today looks visionless, and rudderless. I don’t know what those 4x employees are doing, but regularly putting out products (much less genuinely innovative ones) and driving a future vision seems to be off the itinerary.

If Steve jobs were around, there would likely be a lot more random elevator firings. Perhaps he’d rightly grab an axe and chop off huge swaths of uselessness that seems to have metastasized within Apple, and he would provide some much needed vision and direction. 

Still time for a change in attitude

And since Apple lost Steve’s unique vision and ability to know what users want even when they don’t, perhaps it’s time it listens to its customers with a bit more humility. Apple has lost the plot. It’s not the first time. They can still catch up.

Microsoft’s Surface Studio is cool in theory and in hardware, but after playing with one, I think Apple dodged a bullet.  First, outside the apps made/updated for the 28″ touch screen, Surface Studio with Windows 10 still has the wrong interface ‘recipe.’ This is much like Microsoft’s original Tablet PC was the right idea with the wrong implementation, and which was subsequently usurped by the iPad’s right recipe. I found it cumbersome to deal with tiny widgets (e.g., checkboxes, popup menus, window grab areas, etc.) with my fingers. It was worse when trying to deal with touch UI elements using a mouse.

Surface Studio doesn’t detect and ‘get’ your context well enough, yet. For example, even within the creative paint/draw apps tailored for the 28″ touch screen, the Surface Studio would often get confused when I’m pinching/zooming/rotating. It would instead draw at my fingertips.

Also, using the Surface Dial is not intuitive in switching through its modes. For instance, it might be left in a cool time-scrub undo/redo mode, then you click out to use a mode, say, that lets you choose colors. You have to click up and out to different rings of colors in a non-intuitive clunky way to actually select a color–think Watch UI 1.0 but worse. Then the apps will lose track of the Dial completely, and the advice of the Microsoft employees is to restart the app, and if it still doesn’t find the Dial, restart the machine!  

However, what is completely clear is, Microsoft nailed the hardware. The pen is not quite as responsive as the Apple Pencil, but it gets a ‘good enough diploma‘ and feels responsive enough. The screen is fantastic, and pivoting it down into a horizontal position is totally comfy and natural, even for prolonged use. And the sheer size of the canvas is a marvel. It makes you realize this will open up completely new computing modes, not just for creatives, but for everyone (imagine desktop publishing composition on a draft table, a draft table for flow diagrams, presentation creation, multi-user collaboration, etc.). 

That said, Apple had better get this real clear in their heads. You’ve just had your ass handed to you by Microsoft. You’ve failed to produce. You’re behind and have abandoned one of your most important user bases and failed them on their needs. Time is growing shorter. Get humble and go to work. Fast. 

Multi-mode UI (e.g., voice, touch and desktop PC) convergence will occur. It’s not a question of ‘if’ but when, by whom, and with what recipe.

TLDR; Apple, get your ass in gear and add touch to your computers or suffer the consequences; for reference, see BlackBerry. 

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