No One is Perfect: Ten Apple Mistakes Since the Return of Steve jobs
Since Steve Jobs return to Apple the future for the once beleaguered company has been growing steadily brighter (at this point one would be well advised to don sunglasses when looking towards Apple’s prospects). Deservedly Steve Jobs gets most of the credit. Of course with credit goes blame, so I present a list of Apple’s top ten errors since Mighty Steve returned to the fold.
10) iMac to ship with a 33.6 Kbps modem
The original iMac was kind of a make or break product for Apple, if it had flopped we might all be using Linux. In short Apple needed a big time hit and to get it they took some surprising steps: Added color in a sea of beige, reinvigorated the all in one form factor, ditched the floppy drive and marketed the machine as specifically built for the internet. They also announced the iMac would ship with a 33.6 Kbps modem. You have to wonder just what they were thinking, after all this was a computer supposedly focused squarely on the best ‘net experience possible and when it comes to the web faster is better. The howls of protest were heard and, thankfully, between the May announcement and the August ship date the original iMac ended up with a 56 Kbps modem.
9) The eMac for Education only
In 2002 Apple needed a new education model. The original iMac form factor was dropped and Sunflower iMacs were thought to be too expensive for schools with tight budgets. To fill the gap Apple introduced the eMac. A relatively speedy machine that featured a G4 chip at an affordable price. Sure it looked like an old school iMac that followed Jason Giambi’s former pharmaceutical regimen but the combination of power and speed was alluring not just to schools but to cash strapped Apple fans. Shocked that people other than educational institutions wanted a powerful and reasonably priced machine Apple relented and agreed to sell the machine to all comers a few months later.
8)i
Well the infusion of all things starting with “i” isn’t really a mistake, it just bugs me.
7) Macs currently shipping with 256MB
Apple is fond of noting that most people, the vast majority in fact, never open their computer’s case. Which is good to know, that information frees the designers up to do some amazing things. The question is: If no one is going to open the computer why ship the thing with such a paltry amount of RAM? Spend a few more bucks and give the non-openers a truly stellar computing experience right out of the box.
6) Flower Power/ Blue Dalmatian iMacs
In 2001 rumors were running hot and heavy. Would this MacWorld Expo reveal the long anticipated G5? What complete shocker would S. Jobs roll out? The people were slavering for something new, something great and what they got was speed bumped Macs with, uh, less than desirable plastics. Those that criticized Macs for being all style over function were suddenly armed with verbal weaponry of nuclear proportions.
5) iTools
The standard pitch was that if you plunked down the cash for OS 9 iTools would come along as part of the bargain. iTools, you may recall, was a collection of nifty stuff you could do over the web (mail, web page, etc.). Apple cancelled iTools citing the cost of running the program and replaced it with the $99 per year .mac. The more jaded among us wonder if iTools wasn’t just an example of “get ‘em hooked and reel them in” deal. Whatever the reason the fiasco didn’t foster a lot of consumer level trust.
In 2000 the original incarnation of Napster was the rage, peer-to-peer technology was slowing campus networks to a crawl and people were trading music faster than Wall Street traded stocks. The folks at Apple thought about this behavior and decided that while everyone seemed to be going music crazy what they really wanted was a computer that played DVDs. Not the best decision, turned out that all those people really did want to burn CDs.
The G5 iMac is a thing of beauty. In the years to come people will undoubtedly argue about which computer was really more ground breaking the iMac G4 or the G5. One thing they’ll agree on is the iMac of the summer of 2004 was positively lame. That’s because there was no iMac in the summer of 2004. Apple ran out of the sunflower model and wasn’t able to produce the G5 in a timely manner. Not exactly the deftest use of logistics.
If there is one thing that computer users agree on universally it is that digital rights management is a great thing. Heck everybody loves the DRM! Wait, that’s wrong. But what is worse than DRM in general is when the DRM is changed after you bought the song. That is precisely what has happened with iTunes. Deciding that the DRM is acceptable before you buy a song is a well thought out decision. Changing the rules on something that is, ostensibly, your property after you’ve purchased it is nearly unconscionable.
1) Waiting until 2005 to introduce a low cost/limited feature machine.
Since the second day after the original iMac was introduced people have wanted to get one without a monitor. From 1998 to 2005 people said time and time again price was preventing them from switching to a Mac. Apple turned a deaf ear, people rationalized Apple’s decision or argued that Macs were already comparably valued (those folks seem a bit foolish now). Since Apple did finally cave in ‘05 they could of, and should of, made the move earlier.
There are blatant omissions, the G4 cube for example. So, obviously, the list is not all-inclusive. it is also important to note that in the big scheme of things (well, in the big scheme of Apple computer) these were very minor errors.
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Comments
Specifically regarding the Newton since that was Jobs’ doing, the right path, as you point out, would have been to make the Newton smaller and cheaper. I’m confident that had they proceeded in that direction, they would have succeeded in leading the market instead of Palm and Windows CE. Integration with PDA’s and mobile phones would have boosted the Mac far more than the iPod is boosting the Mac today.
Phredd
A few things. It’s not up to Apple to get us a 3.0 GHz G5. If G5s aren’t getting upgraded and/or produced fast enough, that’s IBMs fault. G4s are still great, and will be even better once Freescale starts shipping/selling the e600 core G4s. Much better…
OS X’s system requirements should, by all means, say 256 MB of RAM. Really, you need 128 MB just to turn your computer on, and if you’re using more than TextEdit, say hello to the Spinning Beach Ball of Death. I have a 400 MHz G3 (iMac DVse) running 10.3.8 with 512 MB of RAM. It needs it, too. My girlfriend’s iBook only had 128 MB of RAM for the longest time and 10.3.x ran pretty sluggishly until I dropped an extra 256 MB into that little, white heating pad.
Oh, and JR, how old are you?
I think the PPC world is at a point where Apple could reconsider Mac clones. The chances of Company X being able to make something significantly better than what Apple’s doing (considering Apple’s continuing improvement of sales and extensive unused money hoard) isn’t all that great. Sure, maybe they’ll be more hasty to throw in 16x Dual Layer, Dual Format DVD burners and 300 GB SATA drives, but Apple can match that at their own pace and it wouldn’t affect anything. I doubt another company could make a PPC comp running OS X and somehow get faster G5s before Apple does.
Let’s not overlook the fact that the Umax and PowerComputing machines were really buggy. I’ve used a few and they were not only slow (for their time), but they crashed a lot.
Ha. The Newton. Personally, I don’t have a PDA, cell phone, digital camera or iPod. I’d like to have an iPod, but I can happily live without it and definitely without the rest of those little tiny devices… Ugh.
I also agree whole heartedly that clock speeds are nothing more than marketing gimicks. Sure, a 2.5GHz G5 should be faster than a 1.6GHz G5, but you’d be pretty depressed if you knew how much faster (as a percentage). And saying a Pentium4 or Athlon that runs close to 4 GHz is “way faster” than a 2.5 GHz G5 because of the clock speed is like saying that almonds are better because they’re not watermellons.
One more thing: Isn’t OS X 10.4 (Tiger) supposed to have a replacement to iSync? I thought I read that the iSync functionality would essentially be part of the OS. Maybe Palm devices and Bluetooth phones would just show up on the desktop or the devices list in Finder like CDs, hard drives and iPods…
Oh, and that rumor floating around about the next G5 updates having Blu-Ray drives? That’d be stupid, for lack of better negative words. All things Blu and Ray are quite expnesive right now, and not exactly at favorable burning speeds. No thanks. Give me faster DVD burners.
Joe D., Chris Howard - you are right to the point that clock speed is never the determining metric of what makes a computer faster than an other. That was not my point.
First, note that I never referenced Intel or AMD. So you can pull your comments about that back right there.
As for a G5 vs. a G4 - from a marketing perspective - YES clock speed is still relevant. A G5 at 3.0 will allow for faster G4’s to be introduced. The clock speed issue is ALL MARKETING. Irregardless of the fact a slower clocked G5 may outperform a faster clocked G4 (because of RAM or bus speeds) - never has Apple released a faster consumer desktop than a pro desktop.
Ther should be faster PowerBooks. Laptops (of any brand) are still dogs in performance, no one would argue with that. A 3.0 Ghz desktop would pave the way for at least a 2.0 or higher G4 or dual core G4.
I talked to someone about 64-bit laptops. I’m not exactly a proponent on the matter, but he said something I agree with. Laptops are very popular, and if 64-bit laptops were fairly common, it’d help 64-bit desktops break into homes.