I’ve been thinking about the recent, apparently insane product releases from Apple – an iPhone that doesn’t have a headphone jack although a significant usage case for an iPhone is to play music from iTunes, a Macbook that has only one port, for both charging and data, and that port is basically incompatible with the rest of IT industry unless you use adapters, and a Macbook Pro that has only those incompatible ports, has less battery capacity, doesn’t have an SD card slot although its supposedly main target user group are the creative professionals, like photographers and videographers, who use SD cards to transfer images and video from their cameras when they are in the field and don’t have a cable with them.
To add insult to injury, all those products are more expensive than the previous, more functional generation.
I tried to think of an explanation, and I came up with several possible ones. For instance, although Apple pays formal lip service to the creative professionals, they don’t really make that much money from those. When Apple actually did make most of its money from creative professionals, somewhere in the 1990s, they were almost bankrupt and Microsoft had to rescue them by buying half a billion dollars of non-voting shares, and Steve Jobs was re-instated as iCEO (interim-CEO, which is the likely cause of him deciding to i-prefix all the product names). They then started to market to a wider audience of young hipsters, students and wealthy douchebags (as well as those who wanted to be perceived as such), and soon they started to drown in green. Yes, they continued to make products intended for the professionals, but those brought them increasingly smaller proportion of their overall earnings, and were deprioritized by the board, which is basically interested only in the bottom line. And it is only logical – if hipsters who buy iPhones bring you 99% of your money, you will try your best to make them happy and come back for more. The 1% earnings you get from the professional photographers and video editors are, essentially, a rounding error. You could lose them and not even notice. As a result, the Mac Pro got updated with ever decreasing frequency and was eventually abandoned by the professional market which is highly competitive and doesn’t have the time to waste on half a decade obsolete underperforming and overpriced products.
Keeping the hipsters happy, however, is a problem, because they want “innovation”, they want “style”, they basically want the aura of specialness they will appropriate from their gadget, since their own personality is a bland facsimile of the current trends. They are not special, they are not innovative, they are not interesting and they are not cool, but they want things that are supposed to be all that, so that they can adorn themselves with those things and live in the illusion that their existence has meaning.
So, how do you make a special smartphone, when every company out there has something that has all kinds of perfectly functional devices, within the constraint of modern technology? They have CPU and GPU that are slammed right against the wall of the thermal design, they have superfluous amounts of memory and storage, excellent screens… and there’s nothing else you can add to such a device, essentially, unless there’s a serious breakthrough in AI, and those gadgets become actually smart, in which case they will tell you what to do, instead of the other way around. So, facing the desperate need to appear innovative, and at the time facing the constraints of modern technology which defines what you can actually do, you start “inventing” gimmicky “features” such as the removal of the headphone jack and USB A sockets, and you make a second screen on the keyboard that draws a custom row of touch-sensitive icons.
And apparently, it works, as far as the corporate bottom line is concerned. The professionals noise their displeasure on YouTube, but the hipsters are apparently gobbling it all up, this stuff is selling like hot cakes. The problem is, the aura of coolness of Apple products stems from the fact that the professionals and the really cool people used them, and the hipsters wanted to emulate the cool people by appropriating their appearance, if not the essence. If the cool people migrate to something else, and it becomes a pattern for the hipsters to emulate, Apple will experience the fate of IBM. Remember PS/2? IBM decided it’s the market leader and everybody will gobble up whatever they make, so they made a PS/2 series of computers with a closed, proprietary “microchannel” bus, trying to discourage 3rd party clones. What happened is that people said “screw you”, and IBM lost all significance in the PC market, had to close huge parts of its business and eventually went out of the retail PC business altogether. And it’s not that PS/2 machines were bad. Huge parts of the PC industry standard were adopted from it – the VGA graphics, the mouse and keyboard ports, the keyboard layout, the 3.5” floppy standard, plus all kinds of stuff I probably forgot about. None of it helped it avoid the fate of the dinosaurs, because it attempted to blackmail and corner the marketplace, and the marketplace took notice and reacted accordingly.
People like standardized equipment. They like having only one standard for the power socket, so that you can plug any electrical appliance and it will work. The fact that the power socket can probably be designed as better, smaller and cooler is irrelevant. The most important thing about it is that it is standard, and you can plug everything everywhere. USB type A is the digital equivalent of a power socket. It replaced removable media, such as floppy and CD discs, with USB thumb drives, which can be plugged into any computer. Also, keyboards, mice, printers, cameras, phones, tablets, they all plug into the USB socket, and are universally recognized, so that everything works everywhere. Today, a device without a USB port is a device that cannot exchange massive amounts of data via thumb drives. It exists on an island, unable to function effectively in a modern IT environment. It doesn’t matter that the USB socket is too big, or that it’s not reversible. Nobody cares. What’s important is that you can count on the fact that everybody has it. Had Apple only replaced the Thunderbolt 2 sockets with USB C sockets, and kept the USB A sockets in place, it would be a non-issue. However, this has a very good chance of becoming their microchannel. Yes, people are saying that the USB C is the future, and it’s only a matter of time before it’s adopted by everyone, but I disagree. The same was said before about FireWire and about Thunderbolt. Neither standard was widely adopted, because it proved more easy to just make the USB faster, than to mess with another standard which basically tries to introduce yet another port that will not work anywhere else. There’s a reason why it’s so difficult for the Anglo-Saxon countries to migrate from Imperial units to the SI. Once everybody uses a certain standard, the fact that it is universally intelligible is much more important than its elegance.
Recognize those ports? Yeah, me neither.
Yes, we once used the 5.25” and 3.5” floppy drives and we no longer do. We once used the CD and DVD drives and we no longer do. We once used the Centronics and RS-323 ports for printers and mice. We once used MFM, RLL, ESDI and SCSI hard disk controllers. We once used the ISA system bus and the AGP graphics slot. What used to be a standard no longer is. However, there are standards that are genuinely different, such as the UTP Ethernet connector, or the USB connector, or the headphone jack, or the Schuko power socket. USB and Ethernet and PDF and JPEG and HTML are some of the universal standards that make it possible for a person to own a Mac, because you can plug it into the same peripherals as any other computer. It makes the operating differences unimportant, because you can exchange files, you can use the same keyboard and mouse, you can use the same printer, you can plug into the same network. By removing those standard connections and ways to exchange data with the rest of the world, a Mac becomes an isolated device, a useless curiosity, like the very old computers you can’t really use today because you can no longer connect them to anything. Imagine what would have happened if Apple removed the USB when they first introduced FireWire, or Thunderbolt – “this new port is the future, you no longer need that old one”. Yeah. Do you think an Ethernet port is used because it’s elegant? It’s crap. The plastic latch is prone to failure or breakage, the connection isn’t always solid, the dust can get in and create problems – it’s basically crap. You know why everybody still uses it? Because everybody uses it.