I'm sure lots of people at IBM have EE degrees throughout it's existence. That hasn't caused the company to behave any differently. When approached by IBM to help my company build out our cloud infrastructure, we had salient measured targets and the reps (and subsequent "technical people to answer our questions") who presented were woefully inept. I was the Director of Engineering, what did they think they were doing pitching me butterflies and rainbows? What IBM has done for decades, like all the other parasitic remnants of industry (Oracle, Yahoo, arguably Apple, etc), and no CEO is changing that culture.
They are indeed incompetent, since a large chunk of competent people won't go there any more. But what kind of financial voodoo is keeping them afloat? Is it another Sears in waiting?
Present day IBM is not very different from GE. It is a financial company trying to survive from profits in areas it monopolizes. Without anything else to do, GE is going down hard and now is being investigated by the SEC for "accounting practices", i.e., financial manipulation to keep the company alive.
They're effective as an Oracle-like consulting company that buys third-party products, integrates them into their platform, and then cross-sells them hard.
I don't know what they meant, but I think the case is reasonably easy, if the accusation is "financial engineering." Apple's overall range of products have shrunk over the years. I'm old enough to remember when they had 20 different kinds of desktop computers, updated every year. They now have 1 desktop, updated every few years, one laptop, updated every few years.
There is a sense they've given up on everything but the iPhone. Arguably, Apple keeps producing Mac computers only because iPhone devs need to run XCode somewhere.
The iPhone was introduced in 2007. It was very innovative at the time, though now it has dozens of Android clones. Total sales of iPhones seems to have peaked -- increases in Apple's profits have come from raising prices and managing margins.
This last bit would be the heart of the case that Apple is now increasingly financial in nature and therefore parasitic. They don't seem to be rolling out much in the way of new products, and certainly nothing as "change the world" as the iPhone was in 2007.
I think it is well known that Apple does not have the "division per product group" structure that almost all other large companies have. But Apple has an unusually narrow range of products for such a large company.
Even projects that Apple seemed excited about 6 or 7 years ago, such as home entertainment, no longer seems to be priority for them. I can tell you from personal experience, their Apple TV has been absolutely stagnant for years, and many of the problems, which I assumed they would eventually fix, have not been fixed.
> They now have 1 desktop, updated every few years, one laptop, updated every few years.
Not true. They have three desktop form factors — Mac Mini, iMac and Mac Pro — and three laptop form factors — MacBook Air, 13" MacBook Pro and 16" MacBook pro. And each can be variously customised by CPU, memory, storage, etc. Most of these are updated with 1-2 year cadence.
Of course, it's much easier to make any case if you disregard the most basic facts within the first paragraph.
I think that a case for having a very lean product line-up can be made from an engineering perspective as well. Having few SKUs and changing them rarely allows to focus on quality. It allows for very efficient manufacturing, since production is all about economies of scale. For already established product types, it enables iterative refinement. But perhaps most importantly it allows to put innovation focus on new kinds of products. The PC, laptop and tablet have all been invented and standardized.
With the AirPods, Apple has again managed to establish themselves as a leading player (in affluent market/segments). They did the same with smartwatches a while back. Their track record is strong. Probably will do the same with... $FutureProductCategory. Of course this is only partly due to engineering and product design - brand building and marketing also vital components.
And I think it is fair to say, that while a strong engineering organization, Apple is not engineering-driven. They consider engineering as a means to deliver good product, not an end in itself.
You are missing the iPad and their smartwatch. It is very important for a premium company to have lesser variety, but higher quality. I cannot respond to quality of their Macs, however the tablets, watches and phones are pretty well made compared to their counterparts. The only exception was old Nokia windows phones, but they do not exist anymore.
Hmm. At first I disagreed with you, but when I think about it over time, I think I'm forced to agree.
Their newer MacBooks are going to be ARM based, which, I think, is mostly so that they have more people to develop apps for their phones and iPads. The rest of their customers will be buying them simply for day-to-day stuff wrapped in a pretty package.
I'm trying to think of a major Android phone manufacturer that does the same as Apple, but am coming up blank. Samsung, Sony, Oppo, etc, are all companies that have a multitude of products.
Maybe the only other comparison would be Google, but they were primarily a software company that is now making Pixel devices.So, not quite the same thing.
> Their newer MacBooks are going to be ARM based, which, I think, is mostly so that they have more people to develop apps for their phones and iPads.
I think it's oversimplifying the situation to say "Apple wants ARM just for mobile", though. While that's certainly a benefit of having a single architecture to support in their product ecosystem, there have been plenty of threads on HN about how Intel's rate of chip improvements have been stagnating. The much-touted scaleup of their 10-nm chips ended up being delayed by 2 years, and their 7-nm chips aren't arriving until 2023, by their own (likely optimistic) estimate[1]. The more likely narrative is that relying on Intel became untenable both cost- and performance-wise.
I feel it has been a shift of focus from building new and innovative products to building supremely profitable products. It doesn't sound that big of a difference but in terms of how it affects the end user it is a noticeable change. You feel more like cattle that is being herded to buy this and that, very expensive stuff, knowing that something is off and it shouldn't be this expensive.
When trying to surpass their last year's profit margins they shouldn't do it mainly by increasing the prices. Even though the frog doesn't leap when you increase the temperature slowly, shouldn't mean you should do it.
