Apple the boring one
By Mike Elgan • 2:16 pm, June 8, 2013
Let’s be honest about what we really want from Apple this week. We all want to know if Apple can still blow us away, or if they’re just a boring company now.
There are two schools of thought.
Explaining Apple Boredom
The first, which I’ve described in this space before, is that Apple only appears boring between announcements. Instead of, say, the Android world where there’s big news every week, the Apple world is a news vacuum until Apple does its big reveal. If this is true, then in a few days Apple will be the ass-kicking innovative, industry-leading company that we remember and that we want them to be.
The second school of thought is that, yes, Apple makes great products but can no longer excite. Now that Apple founder Steve Jobs is no longer there to impose his unique brand of visionary totalitarianism, Apple is slouching toward normalcy — a company that’s more concerned about shareholders than changing the world. If that’s the case, then it’s the end of a thrilling era in technology.
We’re going to find out soon enough.
Boring Doesn’t Mean Bad
When I talk about Apple being a “boring” company, I don’t mean a company that makes second-rate products. Obviously they don’t. And I don’t mean an unsuccessful company. These things are unrelated.
And, to be sure, the constant excitement in the Android space — the new information, new products and new capabilities — doesn’t mean there are more-exciting products on the Android side.
The radical fragmentation of the Android world means that when you look at five killer announcements, they’re almost always one announcement per product. In order to get those five new features, you have to buy five phones.
Look at just one tiny example: smartphone photography. The Samsung Galaxy S4 has a higher-rez camera than the iPhone. The HTC One (arguably) takes better pictures in low light than the iPhone. Nikon and Samsung make actual digital cameras that run Android. Sony has a new Android phone that takes pictures and videos underwater. Japan’s NTT DoCoMo ships an app that combines panoramas with video. And, of course, the biggest and most exciting news in Android cameras is Google Glass, which both itself nominally runs Android and is enhanced by connectivity to Android apps on a nearby phone.
This constant drumbeat of exciting news about innovations and new products in the Android camera space obscures the fact that if you really want the best camera-phone pictures and videos, you should buy a boring old iPhone 5. Each of those exciting announcements affects a different product.
There’s no connection between excitement and quality. So I’m not asking whether Apple makes bad products now. I’m asking: Can they still thrill, astonish and surprise? Or are those days over?
The Banality of Tim Cook
I suspect that part of the growing boredom over Apple comes from the fact that Apple CEO Tim Cook is one of the most boring people in the industry.
Worse, Cook tends to compensate for his dull, guarded speech with frustrating promises of things to come. There’s an old joke about IBM that has a woman saying: “My husband’s an IBM salesman. He sits on the edge of the bed and tells me how good it’s going to be when I finally get it.”
And that’s the pattern Tim Cook has fallen into. He’s always alluding to exciting, amazing things in development that he can’t talk about. This is a losing strategy. Nobody is excited when you raise their expectations. And when the future arrives, nobody is excited precisely because you already raised their expectations.
Comparing Cook with Jobs on the boredom scale is easy with two AllThingsD videos showing Jobs making the point that Apple just wants to make the best products with Cook at AllThingsD making the exact same, somewhat obvious point. But Jobs is electric. He draws you in and makes you lean forward. Cook is like watching paint dry. He puts you to sleep.
There’s not much Apple can do about this dimension of its increasingly boring reputation. Jobs is literally and perfectly irreplaceable.
But what Apple can do is surprise us. It won’t be easy.
Can Apple Still Surprise Us?
Everyone is expecting Apple to announce Monday a new iRadio service, a new, “flat” iOS 7, Mac OS X 10.9 and new laptops with Haswell chips.
Without any shocking, mind-blowing features we didn’t know about, none of these announcements will lift the boredom curse. In fact, most of us are already tired of hearing the rumors about these things.
Even the exciting things have been so long-rumored that the reality threatens to disappoint. The iWatch. The TV set. These would be nice. But even they may not save Apple from the boring label because they’ve been so heavily rumored and illustrated with fan concepts that at this point they’re mere expectations.
What everyone wants to know is: Can Apple still surprise and shock and thrill us? Or are they just another company that’s constantly telling that they can’t tell us about all the exciting things they’re working on and that they’ll ship some day.
Here’s the thing: We won’t know if Apple is now a boring company until the fall announcement. The reason is that they’re more likely to announce big-ticket, category-creating consumer products like iWatches and TVs closer to the holidays, not necessarily at a developers’ conference.
So, as always, a boring WWDC does not a boring Apple make. As Tim Cook is always telling us: We’ll have to wait and see.
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Сегодня ночью в Калифорнии прошло открытие тестового тоннеля от Boring Company
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Это первый туннель стартапа, который организовал Илон Маск. Длина составила 1,835 км (1,14 миль), а стоимость строительства – чуть более 10 миллионов долларов США. При его создании проверялись возможности ускорения работы бурильных машин, а также дальнейшее использование таких туннелей автомобилями. Изначально транспортные средства должны были становиться на так называемые скейты/платформы, которые б двигали автомобили по туннелям. Сейчас же компания отказалась от такого решения, и вместо этого использовали направляющие ролики/колеса, которые фиксируются на передние колеса автомобиля. В дальнейшем их можно будет монтировать на все автомобили, а не только на Теслы. При этом услуга обойдется в 200-300 долларов США.
В демонстрационной версии эти направляющие колеса были заранее смонтированы и не могут складываться, как это показано на картинке.
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Маск сообщил, что туннелями могут пользоваться все электромобили, которые в состоянии поддерживать скорость 240 км/ч (150 миль в час) и с определенным уровнем автономии. Но, с учетом таких ограничений по скорости, по сути, только и Теслы (при чем, не все Модел 3 могут набирать такую максимальную скорость) сейчас пригодны для таких туннелей.
Если говорить о самих поездках автомобилей по туннелю, то можно увидеть, что они получаются довольно таки рваные и резкие. Потому что на высокой скорости очень хорошо чувствуется каждая неровность. Однако «Боринг компани» работает над эффективной укладкой бетонных секций, по которым «скользят» направляющие колеса автомобилей. Маск уверяет, что текущую проблему можно будет легко решить, и эти блоки вместе со стыками будут гладкие как стекло. При этом возникает хороший вопрос – почему сразу не сделали? Да, можно понять, что не успели и хотели показать… бета-версию.
На сегодня финансирование компании идет, в основном, за счет самого Маска. По его словам, в дальнейшем финансировании не будет проблем, потому что его просто «забрасывают» предложениями по инвестиции, в том числе заинтересованность есть у местных властей.
Дальнейшие планы «Боринг компани» состоят в следующем:
- снизить стоимость строительства туннелей;
- увеличить скорость бурения в 10-15 раз;
- создание новой буровой машины 3-го поколения;
- создание туннелей в Чикаго, а также на Восточном побережье США и в Лос-Анджелесе. При этом в рамках города туннели будут делаться на основе текущего прототипа, а между городами – с низким давлением в туннелях (так называемый HyperLoop) – но для таких туннелей нужен будет другой вид транспорта.
Что ж, будет на что посмотреть. Скорее всего, когда очередь дойдет до строительства туннеля для Чикаго, еще много чего может поменяться. К тому же, нужно будет еще изучить вопрос, на сколько это будет быстрее и дешевле кататься по таким туннелям, чем просто стоять в пробке. Да, использование туннелей не будет бесплатно, цена пока что не озвучена.
Next step for @BoringCompany Loop is demonstrating high throughput at high speed. Target is 4000 vehicles/hour at 155mph (250km/h).
Следующая цель компании — демонстрация пропускной способности 4000 автомобилей в час (чть более 1 автомобиля в секунду) при скорости 250 км/ч.
Не много, но 5 секунд поездки всё же запечатлены.
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When Did Apple Become The Boring One?
HardOCP News
[H] News
When did Apple become the boring one? Who knows? Maybe everyone just stopped drinking the kool-aid.
amddragonpc
[H]ard|Gawd
Extremely [H]
What’s new? Other than misinformed people who believe Apple created the PC, the GUI or MP3 players, Apple hasn’t ever really been the innovator. Apple should get credit for design and incremental feature adoption, and are regularly the earliest or one of the earliest adopters for many new technologies. If it takes Apple to help popularize some features and push adoption of those things, fine.
The only people surprised by this drank too much Flavor-Aid.
OutOfPhase
Supreme [H]ardness
Extremely [H]
Nope. It’s a gold mine. Predictable phone and tablet upgrade schedule and an almost predictable laptop and desktop update schedule. And people and the press get excited over that. :360degreeeyeroll:
Same with a «boring» Ballmer-run MS: he delivered on financial results every quarter.
Supreme [H]ardness
Stagnation. Sometimes people want to be surprised and not see «just another iPhone with the expected yearly changes.»
When Apple intentionally holds back features everyone else is already implementing (or already had implemented a long time ago) just to save them for a late release. incremental upgrades become a harder sell as time goes on. When Apple was including cameras on the iPod, you knew they were scraping the bottom for ideas.
When you go long enough and list all of the ‘new’ features of an iProduct and end up releasing something that has already been done or release something with such marginal, and expected, improvements. People get bored.
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Apple the boring one
By Lewis Wallace • 2:22 pm, October 16, 2014
- News
- Top stories
Tim Cook bores the world with even more amazing Apple products. Yawn. Photo: Apple
Was Apple’s livestreamed iPad event really such a big yawn? Search Twitter for “#AppleEvent yawn” or “Apple boring” and you’ll see tweet after tweet bemoaning the boring nature of Thursday’s press conference. It got so tedious for some, there were dozens of photos of napping dogs.
“Most boring Apple event ever,” tweeted one. “Bring back the Chinese translation.”
Maybe some of those folks are being facetious, but there’s a grain of truth in the tweets: Nothing about Thursday’s event, except for maybe Stephen Colbert’s crackup comedy bit with Craig Federighi, was super-compelling on the surface. Many of the specs had been leaked (some even by Apple itself), and the rumor mill proved pretty accurate in the run-up to the presentation.
Still, this was no Phantom Menace. I mean really, what were people expecting? Jetpacks, aliens and electric cars?
This is Apple’s big dilemma right now: How do you top yourself when you make the best products in the world?
Putting aside all the typical statistical huffing and puffing about how great iPhone 6 sales are and how amazing iOS 8 uptake is, Thursday’s announcements add up to one thing: Apple products are better and cheaper than ever, and they work together more seamlessly so we can accomplish tasks more easily.
Anywhere other than Planet Apple, this would be beyond amazing. Unfortunately, Cupertino has blown our minds so routinely that even wonderfully powerful products can start to seem commonplace.
“This is the strongest lineup of products that Apple has ever had,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook near the end of Thursday’s hour-long presentation, “and we believe that each one of these play a very important role. People need different types of technology.”
The press event was all about incremental updates to Apple’s already great gear — and the deployment of OS X Yosemite.
Most if not all of the fancy features Cook and Co. touted with regard to the Yosemite and its interoperability with iOS 8 had been revealed by Apple at this spring’s Worldwide Developers Conference. Now the Word has been made flesh, as it were, and will soon dwell among us, thanks to the OS updates and all the developers building apps to take advantage of Continuity, Handoff and Extensibility.
In a very real way, Thursday was the fulfillment of the wide-ranging prophecy of an interconnected world that Apple laid out last June.
On some level, it’s easy to understand why people might break bad on Thursday’s announcements. The product line refreshes — Retina 5K iMacs; thinner, faster iPads; cheaper, more powerful Mac minis — were basically just extensions of the ever-sweetening value proposition we’ve all come to expect, spoiled as we are by the relentless march of technology.
In Apple’s case, it’s a little like Superman doing some weightlifting so he can bench-press a few more boxcars. The best just got even better (particularly when it comes to the thinner-than-a-pencil iPad Air 2).
Naturally, anytime Cupertino commands our attention, we’re all hoping for something magical and transformative, but it’s simply ludicrous to expect that Apple would unveil some astonishing new product just a month after giving the world it’s first look at the Apple Watch.
Remember when Star Wars movies were good, and each entry in the original trilogy took us to new and exciting places? Just imagine if The Phantom Menace had been better than Return of the Jedi, and then Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith each raised the bar rather than turning into dreadful sci-fi slogs.
Star Wars fans would still be excited about J.J. Abrams’ upcoming Episode VII, but that excitement wouldn’t come from a place of such pent-up desire — we wouldn’t be hoping against hope for something that’s merely passable to wash away the stench of previous years.
Apple is like a talented director who keeps making enthralling films, each just a little bit more fantastic than the last. Despite minor missteps over the years, and the dark days when Steve Jobs was in exile from the company he loved, Apple has never truly delivered a piece of crap.
Critics have dinged Cupertino for its lack of openness, its premium pricing strategy and its occasionally haughty attitude. But if they’re truly honest with themselves, they can’t actually fault the company’s inexorable progress toward ever-greater products. That’s what we got a taste of Thursday — a confident company that’s continually moving forward and making great things even better and more useful.
Spec boosts aside, Thursday’s most exciting moment came after Cook’s reiteration of the “something for everyone” aspect of Apple’s lineup — the big new screens for when you want to work at a desk, the powerful laptops when you need that kind of computing firepower away from home, the thinner iPads for when you want to touch all that beautiful stuff, and the iPhone 6 and Apple Watch for when you want all that wondrous technology in the palm of your hand or on your wrist.
“This is our vision of personal technology,” Cook said, “and we are just getting started.”
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