I know that people are rightfully upset about RAM and storage upgrade prices, but you can’t compare current Apple with 90’s Apple. Their product lines were a mess, quality was subpar, they were ignoring the user base that came to support Apple during the “dark times”, and they had no vision.
People forget that Apple’s 2nd golden age, under Steve Jobs, also had ridiculous prices. I remember wanting a PowerBook in 2002 and it was out of control.
Apple stuff is expensive but the value proposition is still solid for them. Everything’s built to last and be supported much longer than their competitors, and the user experience is top tier. Other companies really haven’t been able to replicate that across so many products.
With that being said, it’s not perfect and there’s always room for improvement.
I don’t disagree that 90’s Pre-Steve Return Apple was worse than the Apple of today by an order of magnitude but the point of the post was that it was a long slide into this complacent greed. Apple after Steve’s ousting didn’t immediately decline, as Steve says it was extremely profitable and innovative for years until the aforementioned greed metastasized and nearly killed the company.
“How did you go bankrupt?" Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” ― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
Sounds like exactly what’s been going on at Apple the last 10+ years.
There has been zero innovation since iPhone’s release. Sure, they’re making tons of money, but they’ve just been phoning it in.
Apple has completely lost the vision.
they just innovated the most impressive personal computer chips in 20 years… not to mention the swift language, bringing hidpi displays to laptops, making smart watches fashion statements, faceid, really there’s a long list
Really? Zero innovation? Please tell us your definition of innovation. Then give us some examples of companies innovating more than Apple. Should be easy since Apple has had zero innovation over the last 16+ years according to you.
People always forget how terrible Apple was doing in the 90s, and how if it weren’t for Steve Jobs coming back, plus some help from Microsoft, Apple would have gone bankrupt in 1997. They were like 90 days away from bankruptcy
History repeats itself, this is not exclusive to Apple.
Unless a necromancy and bring Steve jobs back from the dead, nobodies gonna bail them out this time
Expensive Macs and ridiculous RAM and storage upgrade prices have been a staple of post NeXT acquisition Apple. Entry level Macs that are just not a good idea to buy, too.
During the mid 2010s the butterfly MacBooks were just not that great: too hot and slow, keyboards plagued by awful reliability issues, anemic port selection. Some of the worst post NeXT acquisition Macs Apple has ever released.
This is not to excuse any of this, it‘s just that historically speaking we are actually still in an golden age for MacBooks (and, to a lesser extent, Macs in general).
To me the M1 MacBook Pro is the best laptop Apple has ever released (judging based on the respective contemporary context, so they aren’t just the best because they are faster) and the M3 MacBook Pros build on this. (Just if anyone is curious, to me second place is the 2008 unibody MacBook, third place is the 2012 Retina MacBook Pro, fourth the 2010 MacBook Air.)
That these awesome machines could not heal the typical bullshit Apple always does with Macs (ridiculous upgrade pricing and bad entry models) sucks but isn’t exactly surprising.
This is post NeXT Apple doing their best work with portable Macs while still sucking in ways post NeXT Apple has always sucked. I vividly remember seeing exactly the same discussions about atrocious storage upgrade prices, entry models that suck and prices that are just too high from nearly every year since I have been following the stuff Apple releases (since 2001, 2002 or so).
As I said, this is not to excuse any of this, my goal ist to provide a historical perspective (and to argue for why this current behavior from Apple is no reason for doom and gloom).
“They cared more about their own glory and wealth than they did about what built Apple in the first place – which was making great computers for people to use… They didn’t care about that anymore. They cared about making a lot of money. …They got very greedy… What they should have been doing was making reasonable profits and going for market share, which was what we always tried to do.”
What they should have been doing was making reasonable profits and going for market share
The odd thing is, this isn’t how he saved Apple? When he came back, they made drastically fewer products and maximised margins on those things.
sounds like history is repeating itself by producing apple silicon and purposefully limiting its capabilities
Say what you want about apple, but this isn’t just “apple” its Late Stage Capitalism when being the biggest company on the planet, where your market value is greater than most countries and you have $162B cash on hand… you hit a point where companies can not do better. At some point it’s going to be theunited companies of America.
It’s hard for people to grasp the scale of Apple, AirPods revenue alone was $12B in 2021, compared to Adobe, AMD, NVIDIA, or Uber each at around $16B. iPhones alone were over $200B in 2022, which is about the same as Microsoft and Samsung, and if they were a standalone company would put it it in the top 30 of revenues worldwide.
Steve Jobs helped Apple grow to where it is now, but he was talking about a vastly different company than it is now. It is entirely naive to believe that the principles that made Apple successful as the underdog computer manufacturer in the late 90s would apply to the behemoth that it is now.
Agreed. A lot of people here talk about how Steve Jobs would be rolling over in his grave if he saw Apple now, how there’s so many products and that under Steve Jobs there would be just one or “one size fits all”. But Steve was managing an entirely different beast. Apple has grown, and I think it’s perfectly reasonable to introduce more product lines to appeal to more people. It’s not as “simple” as it used to be, but it’s making more money and it’s what helped them grow to where they are today. Steve’s Apple wouldn’t apply to the Apple of today and it wouldn’t work because when you’re so big you can’t just sell 1 of each product. You need to appeal to the masses and bring in more sources of revenue. I’m not even sure if Steve Jobs managing Apple and his strategy/vision would’ve grown Apple as big as the one Tim Cook has been managing.
Seems like Apple is at the same place that Sony was in the late 80s when they had their hands in any and everything.
Coming from the guy who wanted a purely closed ecosystem (to boost profits?)irony.
There’s literally no reason to charge $200 for 8GB and sell 1.8k laptops with only 8GB unless profits and planned obsolescence is all you care about.
Or to not include NVME 2280 slots on laptops weighing 2kg, when even 1kg ultraportables Windows laptops and tablets have removable and upgradable storage.
History repeats itself.
I would have been with you a few years ago. Now that they’re buying out TSMC production and designing their own CPUs I’m not so sure anymore. I can’t go back to a daily Windows device after using Silicon.
No one’s telling you to go to windows. He’s saying there’s no reason to charge those prices for ram / that weight is no excuse for Apple to not include those features.
There’s some mad cognitive dissonance going on in this subreddit. You can be in favor of Apple Silicon and still disagree about their business practices.
Oh, yeah, and the weight of the 2280 sticks themselves is like 7g. That’s 0.007kg, so it basically wouldn’t even register on a weight scale.
For memory, the excuse is LPDDR5 which has to be soldered.
But for storage, there’s no excuse, except that they started soldering before 2280 NVME became mainstream, so initially Apple’s storage was way faster than the older non-NVME sticks, but that time has long gone.
I think EU ought to create legislation to combat this digital waste and monopolistic pricing. If the computer retails at or above 1k and weighs above 1kg, it has to have removable storage support via NVME 2230, 2242 or 2280. Apple would probably be the only one that’s affected by such rules, and it’s be dubbed MacBook tax.
To be fair John Sculley was hand picked by Steve.
Apple lured Sculley away from Pepsi in order to apply his marketing skills to the personal computer market. Steve Jobs successfully sealed the deal after he made his pitch to Sculley: "Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?
Sure, Steve. The original Mac cost like $7k in today’s dollars.
So your saying their products are now cheaper in comparison to todays Macs?
How much did an equivalent PC cost at the time?
I love when people post these kinds of videos like it’s a huge “gotcha” against Apple in 2023.
Newsflash: Apple in the 90’s wasn’t producing a single product people wanted. They literally couldn’t give away their trash. And yet, they were still paying their executives like they were winners.
In 2023, Apple is producing some of the best products in the world and on the cutting edge of innovation. Profits and executive pay is commiserate with that position.
These are not the same thing.
Great insight into the talisman. It’s a shame that someone who personifies the very values he despises took over.
And now Apple is led by the one of the greediest of CEOs.
Cook profiting Steve will not last forever.