Jobs' bi-monthly iPhone software meeting, in which he would go through
every planned features [sic] of the company's flagship product, is
gone.
Judging by the current iOS development version, this is a regrettable change that will come to haunt them. Things like the new color schemes would probably not have gone through if there was any executive interest in the look of the new software.
Tim Cook's greatest strength is his realization of, and comfort with, the fact that he is not Steve Jobs. Why doesn't he have bi-monthly feature reviews? Because he wouldn't have as much to contribute as Jobs. He doesn't have the product intuition and he knows it.
What was unique about Steve Jobs was that he could perform so many different roles within the company. He could convince anyone he needed to join the company, he could ascertain just what kinds of products were likely to be successful, and he could get on stage and sell the living daylights out of the products his company had built. These roles are necessarily going to be performed worse when separated into different executives, just like a basketball player who can play great offense and defense is worth a lot more to a team than ten great offensive players and ten great defensive players.
As Bill Gates said, the (old) Apple model only works if you have a Steve Jobs. The new Apple can't function like the old Apple any more than a car can function without a steering wheel. The best thing Cook can do is transition the company to a more traditional management structure. Will the company be worse off than before? Of course, but it's the best they can do under the circumstances.
Bill Gates's comment makes sense to me. Apple already achieved the improbable. It seems like a natural time to refocus. They could take steps to make the mobile platforms easier to develop for. They've built an empire, and holding it for the long term requires building relationships and long-term thinking.
The rapid rise of Android strikes me as a significant long-term threat. Apple created a new product category and then allowed a competitor to sweep up the majority of the market, at least in terms of volume. Android is still probably an inferior product, but there are a lot of companies behind it. Android also makes life somewhat easier for developers. I think Apple ought to take this very seriously.
The threat from Android to iPhone probably looks bigger than it actually is. Per study that just came out [1], iPhone users are much more loyal than Android users: 24% of Android users plan to switch vs. 9% of iPhone users. If this persists, Android users will over time "leak over" to iPhone.
I, personally, am not that pleased with my Android phone. The present trend might be in Apple's favor, but, presumably, Apple will have to keep executing well to maintain that momentum.
> Will the company be worse off than before? Of course, but it's the best they can do under the circumstances.
Exactly--but that doesn't mean "Apple is doomed" either, which is the angle a lot of people seem to take.
Apple with Steve Jobs (2nd time around) was the most innovative, profitable, and successful company in the entire world. Apple without Steve Jobs is likely to be one of the most innovative, profitable, and successful companies. (Still pretty darn good.)
Ehh, I think the whole iOS7 UI thing is overblown.
Anecdotally we've been installing it on non-dev (tester) devices internally to help thrash our app pre-iOS7. The results have been very positive - people love the new design in general.
Even those of us on the dev team who've had it for a while have mostly gotten over the annoying bits that bothered us at first.
I really like the automatic updates, yesterday I went to look at a picture and out of no where the "photos" app was radically different, but in a good way.
I think you answered your own question. Dev builds change to fix oversights in design and logic. Not that much has changed with the over all design theme of iOS 7. Over all most of the design implemented is here to say.
The comment I was replying to (IIRC; seeing as how it's now-deleted) explicitly claimed they weren't just disagreeing with the stylistic choices in iOS, but were taking issue with specific broken sorts of things (yellow text on white backgrounds) and then asserted that Apple seemingly didn't even recognize these things as broken.
My question was how could that poster assert such a thing when Apple was indeed fixing exactly those sorts of things.
So, yes, I answered it myself, because it was rhetorical. But, no, it had nothing to do with whatever you seem to think it had to do with.
Who's to say there isn't "interest"? Some people like the new look, maybe Cook does too.
Don't confuse process with results. Jobs' Apple produced great products because Jobs had great taste that aligned well with the market (and, to be honest, because he was the vortex of a feedback loop of praise), not because he had a "bi-monthly iPhone software meeting".
I'm not even talking about subjective things like tastes in icon styles. I'm talking about absolutely quantifiable missteps, such as bright-yellow symbols on a white paper background.
"If Steve were still around..." has been said so many times that it's a cliche. Steve shipped lots of crap [quantifiable crap, even]; I'm sure Apple will continue to ship lots of crap in the future. Doesn't mean they're doomed or even that quality has gone down.
Yeah; I very much admire Steve's drive and vision, but he was still responsible for brushed metal, corinthian leather, and all the rest. Not to mention (arguable) design missteps like that awful aspect ratio iPod Nano. So let's keep things in perspective here...
I didn't mean to sound like that. From where I'm standing (and it's OK if this opinion isn't common), iOS and to a lesser degree OS X show outward signs of the internal struggles at Apple. There are some things that should have been caught, or that at least would have been more likely to be vetoed. It's a very feature/product-driven company, high-level oversight is expected but seems to be missing in places.
To use another example, with the new iCloud apps (especially iOS backports like Notes and its ilk) on OS X, because there is no save button there is no way to tell if the document has actually been committed to storage or not. If you close the app, the document might be on the cloud somewhere, but it's just as likely to be trapped on a Mac's harddrive that has just been put to sleep. Not a good experience.
Erm, that's not what I meant and I suspect you know that. I didn't assert it was "a magical [something]" or anything, just bad UI. Open Notes, edit a document, close it, go away, expect it to be synced on your iPad: fail. And no normal user will do CMD-S, that was the whole point of them abolishing explicit document saving.
Notes are synced without you needing to do anything. If you close the application before a sync is polled (within 5sec after you stop editing as far as I can tell) why would you expect it to sync? That's like sending an email and closing the browser while it's posting the data and then being mad it didn't send.
"Sending an email" is something the user initiates. "Syncing to iCloud" is something the OS initiates.
Also, I would hope that "sending an email and closing the browser window", one day, will work like "sending an email and quitting the mail app" works today.
Power Nap is meant to do this - keep stuff syncing, backing up, etc regardless of lid state. Now, whether it's smart enough to flush any synchronizations that are still in progress when the lid is closed or you have to wait a few minutes until it half-wakes-up and does its thing, I'm not sure. Also, I believe by default it's off when a power supply isn't attached.
Pulling out one example of what may be a poor user experience and then generalizing that the sum of these subjective things is "sign of the internal struggles at Apple" is reaching a bit.
Apple is a hot topic these days, and many want to be a critic about the smallest things, followed by generalizing these thoughts into an "Apple is circling the drain" type of argument. Apple has never been perfect.
