AppleInsider podcast talks earnings, iPhone ASP, and Tim Cook's HomeKit experience

This week on the AppleInsider podcast, Neil and Victor talk through Apple's earnings call, Wall Street raising price targets, and what it's (probably) like to use HomeKit at Tim Cook's house.

AppleInsider editors Neil Hughes and Victor Marks talk tabout:

Apple's best quarter ever: $78.4B revenue, 78.3M iPhones sold
Facebook as a "video-first" company
The rising ASP of iPhone
The rising AAPL share price targets
Apple vs Samsung in Q1
HomeKit in Tim Cook's house
Apple weighing legal action against the Trump administration over immigration
Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, joining in joint letter to White House on immigration
Apple increasing the role of custom ARM chips in Mac
Reader email

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4 Comments

maestro64

said about 7 years ago

Victor,

I finished listening to your podcast today, and heard your parting comment about a listens letter about the quality of Apple products. The listens comment about Apple needs to let the dreamers loose again is exact the issue we have with quality. It appears that Apple did in fact let the dreams loose with no one looking over them. Dreamer do not worry about quality, they just worry about the ideas not how well they work for everyone. When Steve was there he was the final check and balance and keep the dreamers focus on the end results, he did not allow them to get 80% there and say good enough. We all know Steve used the products and most likely if he did not like how it worked or look he was all over the dreamers to make it right.

I have been in the environment and dreamers can rack havoc getting a product out the door which works, they are always focus on what is next not necessarily make whey they have now work well.

This is why personally I do not update my Apple products for a period of time until I hear from the early adopters what works and does not work. I have even wait up to a year on OSX due to issue which would have keep me from being productive. It is not unusual for me to skip version because of this. I will say eventually apple does get it right and solves problems, I can not say the same for other companies out there I have seen problem linger for years and from one major release to another.

k2kw

said about 7 years ago

Listening to WindowsCentral Podcast even those guys said Apple has the best hardware build quality.

Unfortunately Apple could really use more programmers because in some ways they are the victim of their own success.

They now have 4 OSs (tvOS, macOS, watchOS, iOS) that besides their on development also have to interact with other apple devices via Continuity.
This seems to make it difficult for Apple to advance SIRI and iMAPS to where I feel they should be.
Hopefully that's coming along with a high end ECHO and SONOS competitor
(Apple is usually smart to go high end with the most expensive product; that's why Pebble is sold, FitBit struggling, and Android watches seemed to have disappeared.)

Apple though should devote more development to iOS on the iPAD PRO. With mouse support , the 12.9 iPP would be the perfect computer
to replace Windows Home computers. Use it with mouse and keyboard like a PC or without like a tablet.

Bobby R

said about 7 years ago

Is there no Logic X/Final Cut Pro bundle sale for Canada?

neutrino23

said about 7 years ago

The letter read at the end should be the topic for an entire podcast. This is really becoming a critical issue with Apple.

I'm not sure that it is simply a matter of attention to quality. I think Apple engineers do try really hard to make quality software. And yet, we suffer.

I wonder if part of it is a change in focus away from the pro-user/high end user. Apple used to live and die with the success of print quality on laser printers. Apple used to make a laser printer. DTP was in their soul.

Where is the soul of Apple now? Is it in the iPhone? Is it listening to music and watching videos? Over the last few years Apple has "dumbed down" several products. Aperture is gone, sort of replaced by Photos. Pages still hasn't caught up to the '09 version. Tim Cook talks about the iPad Pro replacing a PC, yet Apple apps for the iPad Pro have fewer features than the same apps on macOS.

The iPad Pro doesn't have basic features like drag-and-drop between windows, save to PDF or a scripting language like AppleScript.

Maybe some of this is on its way. Maybe we'll see a Swift_Script for iOS. It would be cool to be able to copy text from one document, clean it up with a script and paste it to another. Or why not use a script to go to a folder on iCloud Drive, grab a bunch images and text, then paste them into a premade template in Pages and export a PDF back to iCloud Drive. Or take some of that data and run it through numbers and make graphs and paste those into the report as well.

Maybe we'll see drag-and-drop and print to PDF this fall. If so that is only 7 years after the first iPad was released. Seems like a long time.

Using the iPad now to create anything is like making a Tibetan Sand Painting.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/07/mandala-of-compassion_n_5942202.html
You have to do everything by hand, file by file. This is a huge step back from macOS.

I get that Apple is focused on the iPhone and that that is where the bulk of the revenue comes from. On the other hand, if they don't focus more on the iPad and Mac then how will these ever grow? It is not like these are small businesses. The Mac business with iPad as a separate business would be in the top 100 of the Fortune 500 list. That is nothing to sneeze at. It is a real puzzle that Apple is letting this area fester.

My guess is that with Steve gone there is no one to champion this area. Jonny Ives cares about design. Tim is a good guy but he is trying to keep the whole company on an even keel. iWork is under Edy Cue but he doesn't seem to have much interest in it.

I hate to bring up Steve's name as it is a cliche by now to do so. However, Steve did have a passion for calligraphy which turned into the Mac reproducing fonts very nicely. Steve had a passion for sweating the details to get things right which gave us Keynote. I still have the box on my shelf from when Apple gave away Keynote after the Macworld Keynote. Phil Schiller is a hardware guy. Maybe there is no one left at the SVP level who really cares about pro applications?