<story><title>Apple tells suppliers to produce 10% fewer new iPhones</title><url>https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Exclusive-Apple-tells-suppliers-to-produce-10-fewer-new-iPhones</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>beforedawn</author><text>OT: Tim Cook&amp;#x2F;Apple is on the wrong track. The entire line-up of a product company is fundamentally flawed and heading to nowhere:&lt;p&gt;Today was the first time, I saw the new iPad Pro in action in a shopping mall nearby. It was a lazy Tuesday evening and I was in shopping mood. The first thing I did was running Sun Spider in Safari. Not an up-to-date benchmark but still a good indicator for performance. This thing reached insane 119ms. Without having any noisy fans and a battery that runs for days. Then, there is a buttersmooth 120hz screen, also the first time I saw a hi-fps screen live and it&amp;#x27;s so nice. All packed in some slick enclosure, thinner and lighter than any Surface Microsoft ever made.&lt;p&gt;I would have bought this device without thinking (this is what malls are for after all) and I really don&amp;#x27;t care if it&amp;#x27;s 1,000, 2,000 or even 3,000 bucks.&lt;p&gt;But tell me--what should I do with an iPad Pro? The OS is not just crippled but utterly useless for any real use case. You don&amp;#x27;t have to be a pro.&lt;p&gt;I could work via SSH on a remote server, nah I can&amp;#x27;t test properly without the major browser being installed or at least Safari&amp;#x27;s dev tool. Maybe some mockups with Affinity Designer? It has the most responsive digitizer, so c&amp;#x27;mon. Nope, the files are so big and exchange to my desktop goes always through a slow cloud, this feels like going back in time and juggling floppy disks. Maybe some Word? No, I prefer full-fledged Word. Contracts are too important to fiddle them together on a subpar Word, I don&amp;#x27;t open Word for fun, I make or lose money with contracts. If I used this device the entire day I would also eventually get RSI from moving my hand up and down all the time (there is no Vimium for Safari).&lt;p&gt;This is what I mean, Tim Cook does not have this obsession with details like Jobs had. Let me not start with Macbooks, non-existing Mac Pros or odd, LG-branded screens. Steve thought all features to the end. Tim doesn&amp;#x27;t and ships one half-baken product after another.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tolmasky</author><text>It’s not attention to detail, it’s vision. There’s no &lt;i&gt;purpose&lt;/i&gt; to these devices. Sometimes it seems like there’s too much attention to arbitrary details. For example, the thinness and speed of the iPad, but to what end?&lt;p&gt;The original iPhone was rather underpowered even at the time for what it tried to do, but it was so crazy focused and the vision of what it would allow you to do so exciting, that you were willing to look past it. It didn’t matter that it didn’t have 3G or the best camera. Now we’re in literally the opposite scenario, devices ridiculously overpowered that we wish we could figure out something to do with. Best chip, best camera, best number to write on the back of the box. Boring.&lt;p&gt;As an aside, I am increasingly certain that the sad truth of the iPad &lt;i&gt;today&lt;/i&gt; is that a majority of sales are probably the cheaper models used as Envoy terminals, POS devices, and conference room check-ins. If I count iPad’s I see day to day, it’s incredibly lopsided to these uses. What a waste.&lt;p&gt;With Steve, you could draw a straight line from the original Mac to the iPad. You could see one relentless mission to tame unusable hardware into a friendly machine &lt;i&gt;through&lt;/i&gt; software. You could &lt;i&gt;imagine&lt;/i&gt; Steve wanting something like an iPad even with the original Mac.&lt;p&gt;What’s the narrative of the hodge-podge of devices we have now? Vague speeches about “health” and “AR”, always troublingly highly reliant on the hope others will make use of these technologies. Apple used to lead by example, the first party software set the bar for what others should do. Nowadays there’s just the hope that Adobe bringing Photoshop to the iPad will breathe new life into it. Meanwhile, &lt;i&gt;Apple has not released a new flagship app for the iPad since its original release with iWork and Garageband&lt;/i&gt;. It’s been 8 years! Apple can’t figure out a single new app that can take our breath away? If they’ve run out of ideas of how this thing can be used, it doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence.</text></comment>
<story><title>Apple tells suppliers to produce 10% fewer new iPhones</title><url>https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Exclusive-Apple-tells-suppliers-to-produce-10-fewer-new-iPhones</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>beforedawn</author><text>OT: Tim Cook&amp;#x2F;Apple is on the wrong track. The entire line-up of a product company is fundamentally flawed and heading to nowhere:&lt;p&gt;Today was the first time, I saw the new iPad Pro in action in a shopping mall nearby. It was a lazy Tuesday evening and I was in shopping mood. The first thing I did was running Sun Spider in Safari. Not an up-to-date benchmark but still a good indicator for performance. This thing reached insane 119ms. Without having any noisy fans and a battery that runs for days. Then, there is a buttersmooth 120hz screen, also the first time I saw a hi-fps screen live and it&amp;#x27;s so nice. All packed in some slick enclosure, thinner and lighter than any Surface Microsoft ever made.&lt;p&gt;I would have bought this device without thinking (this is what malls are for after all) and I really don&amp;#x27;t care if it&amp;#x27;s 1,000, 2,000 or even 3,000 bucks.&lt;p&gt;But tell me--what should I do with an iPad Pro? The OS is not just crippled but utterly useless for any real use case. You don&amp;#x27;t have to be a pro.&lt;p&gt;I could work via SSH on a remote server, nah I can&amp;#x27;t test properly without the major browser being installed or at least Safari&amp;#x27;s dev tool. Maybe some mockups with Affinity Designer? It has the most responsive digitizer, so c&amp;#x27;mon. Nope, the files are so big and exchange to my desktop goes always through a slow cloud, this feels like going back in time and juggling floppy disks. Maybe some Word? No, I prefer full-fledged Word. Contracts are too important to fiddle them together on a subpar Word, I don&amp;#x27;t open Word for fun, I make or lose money with contracts. If I used this device the entire day I would also eventually get RSI from moving my hand up and down all the time (there is no Vimium for Safari).&lt;p&gt;This is what I mean, Tim Cook does not have this obsession with details like Jobs had. Let me not start with Macbooks, non-existing Mac Pros or odd, LG-branded screens. Steve thought all features to the end. Tim doesn&amp;#x27;t and ships one half-baken product after another.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jaabe</author><text>I think you’re on to the core of the problem. Apple is a software company that build its own hardware because it had to.&lt;p&gt;But for the past decade, they haven’t really made any interesting software. iOS is great for iPhones, it’s not great for a laptop replacement. I think OS&amp;#x2F;x would be a much better fit for the iPad Pro, but perhaps something completely new would be even better? I think the surface book shows us just why that is by the way. If I didn’t personally find windows so terrible, I would leave Apple for one of those in a heartbeat.</text></comment>