I know that people are rightfully upset about RAM and storage upgrade prices, but you can’t compare current Apple with 90’s Apple. Their product lines were a mess, quality was subpar, they were ignoring the user base that came to support Apple during the “dark times”, and they had no vision.
People forget that Apple’s 2nd golden age, under Steve Jobs, also had ridiculous prices. I remember wanting a PowerBook in 2002 and it was out of control.
Apple stuff is expensive but the value proposition is still solid for them. Everything’s built to last and be supported much longer than their competitors, and the user experience is top tier. Other companies really haven’t been able to replicate that across so many products.
With that being said, it’s not perfect and there’s always room for improvement.
People always get dramatic and post Steve Jobs videos after any announcement
I don’t disagree that 90’s Pre-Steve Return Apple was worse than the Apple of today by an order of magnitude but the point of the post was that it was a long slide into this complacent greed. Apple after Steve’s ousting didn’t immediately decline, as Steve says it was extremely profitable and innovative for years until the aforementioned greed metastasized and nearly killed the company.
“How did you go bankrupt?" Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” ― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
And now Apple is led by the one of the greediest of CEOs.
Oh hai Tim Apple!
I really have a sense that current Apple makes great computers and devices, but this has made them arrogant.
The Tim Cook obsession with having devices at every price point with obnoxious pricing on RAM and SSD upgrades is denigrating the customer experience.
They have a great product, but yes, I think the pricing is just a tad too greedy no matter how you look at it. I remember when Steve Jobs came back PowerBooks (and MacBooks) got more affordable year after year.
To be fair John Sculley was hand picked by Steve.
Apple lured Sculley away from Pepsi in order to apply his marketing skills to the personal computer market. Steve Jobs successfully sealed the deal after he made his pitch to Sculley: "Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?
Reminds me so much of Haliday
They’re greedier than ever now. And as Mac sales figures clearly show, they’re heading in the same direction as in the 1990s.
We have stopped purchasing Apple computers for all our users at all our branches over the last few years, due to their price and the inability to upgrade ram or storage after purchase.
They insist we further invest in only the apple ecosystem and continue to obstruct our ability to integrate with other platforms.
I see more control over our workflows, our systems, and incremental erosion on repairability with every new release.
It’s not worth the money and it’s not worth the effort.
This is true, I don’t recommend them to anyone due to Apple’s tight control, It used to be an easy recommendation between 2008- 2012.
Great insight into the talisman. It’s a shame that someone who personifies the very values he despises took over.
History repeats itself, this is not exclusive to Apple.
Expensive Macs and ridiculous RAM and storage upgrade prices have been a staple of post NeXT acquisition Apple. Entry level Macs that are just not a good idea to buy, too.
During the mid 2010s the butterfly MacBooks were just not that great: too hot and slow, keyboards plagued by awful reliability issues, anemic port selection. Some of the worst post NeXT acquisition Macs Apple has ever released.
This is not to excuse any of this, it‘s just that historically speaking we are actually still in an golden age for MacBooks (and, to a lesser extent, Macs in general).
To me the M1 MacBook Pro is the best laptop Apple has ever released (judging based on the respective contemporary context, so they aren’t just the best because they are faster) and the M3 MacBook Pros build on this. (Just if anyone is curious, to me second place is the 2008 unibody MacBook, third place is the 2012 Retina MacBook Pro, fourth the 2010 MacBook Air.)
That these awesome machines could not heal the typical bullshit Apple always does with Macs (ridiculous upgrade pricing and bad entry models) sucks but isn’t exactly surprising.
This is post NeXT Apple doing their best work with portable Macs while still sucking in ways post NeXT Apple has always sucked. I vividly remember seeing exactly the same discussions about atrocious storage upgrade prices, entry models that suck and prices that are just too high from nearly every year since I have been following the stuff Apple releases (since 2001, 2002 or so).
As I said, this is not to excuse any of this, my goal ist to provide a historical perspective (and to argue for why this current behavior from Apple is no reason for doom and gloom).
Unless a necromancy and bring Steve jobs back from the dead, nobodies gonna bail them out this time
“They cared more about their own glory and wealth than they did about what built Apple in the first place – which was making great computers for people to use… They didn’t care about that anymore. They cared about making a lot of money. …They got very greedy… What they should have been doing was making reasonable profits and going for market share, which was what we always tried to do.”
I honestly cannot for the life of me understand why anyone outside developers would buy a Mac these days. Their mobile devices are great, but the only reason I have a Mac is to develop for their mobile devices.
If Apple wants their Macs to be more than just side-attachment-tools for developers, they need to start dropping the prices.
What they should have been doing was making reasonable profits and going for market share
The odd thing is, this isn’t how he saved Apple? When he came back, they made drastically fewer products and maximised margins on those things.
Say what you want about apple, but this isn’t just “apple” its Late Stage Capitalism when being the biggest company on the planet, where your market value is greater than most countries and you have $162B cash on hand… you hit a point where companies can not do better. At some point it’s going to be theunited companies of America.
Seems like Apple is at the same place that Sony was in the late 80s when they had their hands in any and everything.
It’s hard for people to grasp the scale of Apple, AirPods revenue alone was $12B in 2021, compared to Adobe, AMD, NVIDIA, or Uber each at around $16B. iPhones alone were over $200B in 2022, which is about the same as Microsoft and Samsung, and if they were a standalone company would put it it in the top 30 of revenues worldwide.
Steve Jobs helped Apple grow to where it is now, but he was talking about a vastly different company than it is now. It is entirely naive to believe that the principles that made Apple successful as the underdog computer manufacturer in the late 90s would apply to the behemoth that it is now.
Agreed. A lot of people here talk about how Steve Jobs would be rolling over in his grave if he saw Apple now, how there’s so many products and that under Steve Jobs there would be just one or “one size fits all”. But Steve was managing an entirely different beast. Apple has grown, and I think it’s perfectly reasonable to introduce more product lines to appeal to more people. It’s not as “simple” as it used to be, but it’s making more money and it’s what helped them grow to where they are today. Steve’s Apple wouldn’t apply to the Apple of today and it wouldn’t work because when you’re so big you can’t just sell 1 of each product. You need to appeal to the masses and bring in more sources of revenue. I’m not even sure if Steve Jobs managing Apple and his strategy/vision would’ve grown Apple as big as the one Tim Cook has been managing.
People always forget how terrible Apple was doing in the 90s, and how if it weren’t for Steve Jobs coming back, plus some help from Microsoft, Apple would have gone bankrupt in 1997. They were like 90 days away from bankruptcy
sounds like history is repeating itself by producing apple silicon and purposefully limiting its capabilities
And it’s happening again.
No, it’s not. They’re operating with a much more cohesive vision now. If what you were saying were true, their market share would be plunging.
An extra $200 to bump a MacBook from 8 to 16 gb is more of the same greed.