Very well said. Tim Cook definitely lost the "Why". The "Why" in PR, ever since Kattie Cotton retired. The "Why" in marketing, how many agency did they try and now they are doing it in house. The "Why" in product range. The "Why" in Apple Store Retail. Or literally every single "Why" that Apple had but are lost as executive leaves.
And you can tell even if you dont know much about supply chain. Their whole product market segmentation and how every iteration is a price / component reuse for maximum profits.
It isn't about new product or magic as many claims. It is having the gut feeling, or taste, to say this feature will be in the new mid range, and this will be flagship only. At the expense of maximising profits. Right now the whole Apple just feels it is all about operating efficiency.
In the old days it was the exact opposite, as long as Steve Jobs thinks it is not Apple's core competency or others could do it better he is very much willing to pay for it. Keeping everything as slim and as tight as possible. Even when he knew it could save some money.
And a lot of designs and user experience just feels much more complex. It feels more Android or Windows with every update. The urge to ship features after features.
It is unfortunate. Apple used to be the The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. Now they feels very much the same as Google or Microsoft. With slightly better taste, fits and finish in their products.
Yeah, that's definitely the problem with Apple today. The products aren't bad at all but for the price asked they feel way too much like a better copy/version of whatever cheaper model exists in the same category.
Sure, the fit and finish is extremely good but they now have competitors that do just as well (or so close that it doesn't matter) but at a much better price.
I think the only thing still worthwhile at Apple is macOS but they have been on a killing spree trying to completely annihilate everything that made it good in the first place. In some ways it's still somewhat nicer to use than Windows but it matters much less now that their hardware prices have skyrocketed and the lineup only makes sense in a profit maximization strategy.
Their desktops do not make sense at the price they are sold at: what I would consider a minimum viable (16GB of RAM, 512GB of SSD) Mac Mini starts at 1200€ (but what you really want is the "Pro" 10 cores version at 1500€). The problem is that you can literally get a laptop that will perform similarly for the same price or even less money.
You could say that the laptop has a bad screen (the one I checked had a recent OLED so that's doubtful) or won't last on battery or whatever but in comparison you basically get it for free.
Their laptop could be good but the design is not great and the pricing is just insane when you consider the market. The minimum viable pricing for a MacBook Air would be 1760€ and a MacBook Pro 2230€. At those prices you get very underwhelming CPU/GPU performance considering.
For all the hype Apple Silicon gets, base versions of their chips are good for efficiency but when you consider overall performance it's not really a good deal. Again, what you really want is the "Pro" version, but it starts at 2.5K€ and at this point you realize that you could buy a more performant PC plus a decent laptop to carry around with about the same budget.
Now macOS is nice, but at what price?
And you can tell even if you dont know much about supply chain. Their whole product market segmentation and how every iteration is a price / component reuse for maximum profits.
It isn't about new product or magic as many claims. It is having the gut feeling, or taste, to say this feature will be in the new mid range, and this will be flagship only. At the expense of maximising profits. Right now the whole Apple just feels it is all about operating efficiency.
In the old days it was the exact opposite, as long as Steve Jobs thinks it is not Apple's core competency or others could do it better he is very much willing to pay for it. Keeping everything as slim and as tight as possible. Even when he knew it could save some money.
And a lot of designs and user experience just feels much more complex. It feels more Android or Windows with every update. The urge to ship features after features.
It is unfortunate. Apple used to be the The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. Now they feels very much the same as Google or Microsoft. With slightly better taste, fits and finish in their products.