Apple is Changing...

in most companies um if you're new and you ask you know why is it done this way the answer is because that's the way we do it here or because that's the way it's always been done where there is a theory behind why we do them there is a description of what we do and most importantly there is an opportunity to always question what we do and this is a radically different approach to business processes than the traditional one because it's always done this way something is going on inside of apple a change in not only how they're making their products but the relationship of these products once they actually reach consumers hands because for the first time in a long time perhaps even ever it feels like apple is actually listening to you and me and i don't mean eavesdropping on our conversations i mean they are listening to customer feedback on their products which in turn shapes the features we want in them to understand why this feels like such a shift in apple's strategy well you have to go back and look at the company's history especially during the steve jobs era where the philosophy of apple making products sounded quite different than what we may have seen over the past year it started with what incredible benefits can we give to the customer where can we take the customer not not starting with let's sit down with the engineers and and figure out what awesome technology we have and then how we're going to market that and i think that's the right path to take in fact a quote that we can use from that steve jobs era to sum this up perfectly goes like this people don't know what they want until you show it to them that's why i never rely on market research our task is to read things that are not yet on the page now to say that apple never listened to customer feedback i think would be wrong because there are things in the past that apple has changed its mind on things like antennagate and providing bumpers and admitting they were wrong there or eventually making an ipod that could play video which steve jobs initially dismissed that no one would want to watch a video on a small screen and i think it's pretty fair to say he was wrong about that one but still there is something going on now with modern apple that i dare say has been absent especially for the past five years and customers have had their fair share of complaints about apple's product decisions for i would say about the past eight years and i think the two biggest words that i can think of with customer criticism with apple is thin and light so the new macbook pro 0.95 inches this is our thinnest macbook pro ever and you can get a feel for how thin it is it's amazingly thin thin and light and small from it's about as thin as a macbook air 24 thinner it is unbelievable can you even see it i can't even feel it there it goes because there was this public perception out there that apple for a long time was only focused on making products thinner and lighter above all else sacrificing usability features and even reliability in the process customers saw this firsthand with the original iphone 6 and the bengate controversies that swirled around at that phone's launch granted i think those bending issues were overblown with the iphone 6 being one of the most successful iphones in terms of overall sales but that was a product where people could physically see some of the negative side effects by switching to a thinner and lighter design even if they never folded an iphone in their hands or never suffered any of these bending issues the image of that bent iphone was just burned into the heads of those consumers and they all took a step back to think does apple have the right priorities here in fact the iphone 6 was the thinnest iphone ever and shortly after that controversy we not only saw iphones that never bent again but we also saw a gradual increase in thickness and weight over almost every single iphone model out there and if you map that out you can see the iphone 6 was 6.9 millimeters thin and the modern day iphone 13 is 7.65 millimeters in thickness even in weight the iphone 6 sounds absolutely feather light when you compare it to other phones it weighed 129 grams and even the plus size model weighed 172 grams for reference the mini-sized iphone 13 is 141 grams that's heavier than the iphone 6 while the normal iphone 13 weighs 174 grams that's 2 grams heavier than the iphone 6 plus and the iphone 13 pro max comes in at a whopping 240 grams so not only has apple moved away from making their products thinner and lighter they have been gradually increasing the weight and thickness of their most popular product but these come with remarked benefits for the consumer a bigger phone means more room for the components inside of it letting apple fit in even more cameras better camera optics and even bigger camera sensors letting the iphone take remarkable photos and video it also means room for bigger batteries one of the biggest drawbacks with a thin and light design and one of the easiest consumer facing features to preach the benefits of everyone wants longer battery life out of their devices and everyone benefits with longer battery life out of their devices not only from making sure that your phone lasts the entire day once you take it off the charger but also for overall general battery health as well to ensure that you can keep your phone even longer and we saw criticism pretty recently when apple made the iphone 12 thinner than the previous iphone 11 and that design actually shrunk the batteries inside of them and we saw immediate praise when the iphone 13 did a quick reversal and became thicker to accommodate the bigger battery with many smartphone reviewers proclaiming it's the best battery life ever on an iphone and quite frankly most other smartphones for that matter even apple touted on stage the increase in battery life that they crammed into these new phones it was a flagship feature and this line of change goes beyond the iphone perhaps we even saw our first glimpse of this with apple's approach to redesigning the 2013 trashcan mac pro now the mac pro back then was another device that was made impossibly small when you compared it against their older desktop pro machine this machine was so loudly proclaimed as an innovation that apple's phil schiller said the quotable can't innovate anymore my ass but the 2013 mac pro was kind of left untouched and unaltered for years with many pro customers wondering if apple was abandoning the pro market altogether i don't know if you remember that there was a lot of talk back then that if apple even cared about the mac or if they were just going to focus on selling ipads and iphones like there was a lot of people thinking that apple was just going to give up on the mac and just let it die but eventually apple called in a bunch of journalists to their headquarters to explain what had went wrong with the mac pro and i think that's one of the few times that they've admitted publicly that they made a mistake with their product with one of apple's executives saying i think we designed ourselves into a bit of a thermal corner if you will it's probably one of the biggest admissions we have from apple today that the design philosophy they were focused on on making things thinner and lighter above all else was a mistake they even designed the 2019 mac pro based on the feedback and complaints that customers had with the 2013 mac pro and hiring a pro workflows team so they could better understand the needs of their pro customers so much so in fact that the 2019 mac pro was a complete departure from the unexpandable 2013 mac pro and apple made a desktop tower that was easy to lift the lid off of and upgrade and that again isn't the only instance we can point to look at the butterfly keyboard in 2015 a keyboard designed to be thinner to make the 12-inch macbook as thin as possible not only is the 12-inch macbook now discontinued and basically replaced by a thicker macbook air but so is the butterfly keyboard apple listened to the customer base there hearing the complaints not only about reliability which they tried to fix with four different revisions of the butterfly keyboard and even launched a replacement program which i believe still goes on till today but also just the overall typing experience of the butterfly keyboard short travel where a large majority of their customer base did not like the way those keyboards felt and apple listened here too apple brought back the magic keyboard in 2019 to the macbook pro and even brought that line of popular scissor switch mechanisms over to other products like the ipad pro where we weren't even expecting it we can even look at the touch bar another apple innovation from that era that most customers just couldn't seem to get their head around and many apple customers were vocal that apple should just get rid of the touch bar altogether and bring back the physical function key row and here again apple listened we can see that apple made this change with the 2021 macbook pros and apple is now proudly proclaiming the return of full size function keys the physical keys replace the touch bar bringing back the familiar tactile feel of mechanical keys that pro users love in fact the 2021 macbook pro is perhaps the best singular product that we can look at today in terms of apple listening to their customers and i even did an entire video focused on how apple fixed their mistake with this product but we can look at this device as the way that apple re-engage with their customer base and actually took their feedback earnestly and honestly it's a product where apple listened and addressed almost every single complaint customers had with older models they removed the touch bar they brought back ports like magsafe hdmi and the sd card slot they made the macbooks thicker and heavier to incorporate a better thermal design and fit in even bigger batteries and this product was a complete 180 from the 2016 to 2020 macbook pros and in one fell swoop apple basically addressed almost every single issue that people had with that model and it is being universally praised for those decisions and apple's recommitment to the entire mac platform by making this product and making their own custom apple mac silicon perhaps the most recent sign that we have that apple is listening to their customer base again is with their new self-service repair program for years customers have been complaining about what seemed like apple's stance on right to repair where it actually felt like apple was actively going out of its way to make sure you didn't open up your device and repair it yourself and so many of their products like the macbook pros we talked about were designed to basically not only be not upgradable but even worse unserviceable so many of the parts that were on your computer couldn't be readily repaired and you would have to take it into apple and even at apple for like that butterfly keyboard problem they would usually have to replace the entire bottom of the computer not just one component like the keyboard which was even costly for apple however with the recent macbook pros apple made them even easier to fix this year by making commonly replaced parts like the batteries easy to pull out with pull tabs for easier replacement and not like permanently glued into the macbook and this new self-service repair program is promising to provide customers with access to apple genuine parts tools and schematics for apple's recently designed products like the iphone 12 and iphone 13 and of course the new m1 max the program is starting off small but it is promising to give users parts to commonly replaced items like the display the battery and the camera and apple is even promising to bring additional repair parts as this program continues and people were really taken aback by this announcement from apple it was one of the last things i was ever expecting them to do in fact i feel like most of the examples i provided in this video might have seemed a little unthinkable a few years back apple not only listening to customers but reversing decisions it had previously made on its products now does this mean an end to thin and light products from apple no i don't think so we still have products out from apple like the recent m1 imac that is thinner and lighter than ever before but in a product like that it makes sense and the decisions they made around that product were built around the m1 chip so there weren't a bunch of trade-offs and there's rumors that they are continuing to chase thin and light designs with follow-ups to other products perhaps like a revised version of a thinner and lighter macbook air but i think apple has taken their mistakes to heart and has learned that these products need the technology in them to achieve this goal and that's sacrificing things like performance battery life or build quality to chase these designs above all else might not be the right goal for its entire customer base still as much as i love apple's recent products and i really feel like they have addressed a lot of the complaints from the past eight years i do also agree that you can't make a product based on customer feedback alone to create a new product one that is truly revolutionary and innovative you need to give the customer something they didn't know they needed something that the customer didn't want until you showed it to them [Music]

Channel: GregsGadgets

Views: 277,785

Keywords: apple, apple history, apple is changing, apple products, MacBook Pro, iPhone 13, iPhone 13 pro, iPhone 13 pro max, MacBook Pro 2021, Mac Pro 2013 history, MacBook 2015 history, Tim Cook apple, Steve Jobs history, Steve Jobs apple, MacBook Pro 14, MacBook Pro 2021 ports, MacBook Pro M1 pro, m1 pro, m1 max, apple products 2022, MacBook Air m2, MacBook Air 2022, Mac Pro 2022, iPhone 13 batteries, iPhone 13 battery life, apple was wrong, Steve Jobs vs tim cook

Id: i9qGNIbo5-0

Length: 15min 11sec (911 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 05 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/ADeweyan]

I have been delighted with my M1 MacBook Pro. To have the ports back, to have physical function keys, to reclaim what had been sacrificed to being thin and light. What's next, a replaceable battery (ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha…).

I’ve said for years that since the initail iOS-ification of the MacOS (which fortunately has also been reversed) Apple was confusing minimalism with simplicity. They kept taking things away to whittle down functionality to what they saw as the core function of their products while trying to make the product as simple as possible. But sometimes the simplest solution isn’t something that requires a USB dock to get the ports you need. Sometimes it’s putting an HDMI port and card reader right on the device.