Summer Flame Day: Semantic Nonsense: The core of the matter

This year was a good year for thinking up flames.

Why, in the past week alone, I could have written screeds about the dangers of runaway media consolidation now that the doors are again wide open for merger mania after paring an unprepared DoJ with an unlikely activist judge.

I could use GameStop’s doom and gloom sale as reason enough to write a roundup of its many abuses over the years… but honestly, I’m just happy that it might just finally die.

So I’m instead going to use this Flame Day post in a more traditional matter (for me, anyway): The idea that me liking anything dooms me to eventually hate it (see also: every article that uses “Shut up and take my rupees” as its cover image).

As you may already be aware, I grew up an Apple fanboy. And I stayed one long enough to become an Apple fanman (Airman?).

But the honeymoon is long in the past now, as you might have gleaned from the pragmatically written Hackintosh Project series or irritatingly written in a Semantic Nonsense. I’ll be expanding on the latter, not the former, today.

As things stand now, Apple is the BMW of computers. They’re pretty, have all sorts of interesting technological things going on under the hood, require very expensive specialty parts and labor to fix… and are routinely outperformed by cars ⅓ the price.

There doesn’t seem to be any “big picture” focus anymore. Apple is so hard up for ideas that it keeps on iterating on the “30% lighter and thinner!” announcements from Steve Jobs’ old keynote speeches.

”Can’t innovate anymore, my ass.”
—Phil Schiller, unironically introducing the still newest Mac Pro form factor in 2013 that was impossible for Apple to update

Honestly, I think the issue is Steve Jobs’ death. But don’t jump to the conclusion that his vision is the missing piece (though Apple sure could use some more of that, too). No, what’s missing from the formula his the other thing he’s legendary for: Ruthless and manicial task mastering.

While Jobs was certainly happy to boast about the steady miniaturization of Apple’s products, I don’t think he would have accepted miniaturization as the sole innovation. He wouldn’t spend endless R&D on shrinking keyboards by 2 mm unless it was to enable some grander innovation.

Steve wasn’t afraid to kill products that weren’t working. His return to Apple in the late 90s saw an end to many projects and products that really weren’t going anywhere. Licensed apple clones? Gone. The Newton? Gone. The Pippin? Gone. Printers? Gone. Even the computers and laptops were culled down.

For those of you less familiar with the product lines, let me tell you a little more: When 1996 started, Apple released a grand total of 32 desktop product lines (not counting sub-configurations) under the Power Macintosh, Performa, Apple Network Server, and Workgroup Server names. In 1998, Apple released 3: Power Mac G3 All-in-One, Macintosh Server G3, and the first iMac. In corporate terms, it save the company a kilo-fuckton in overhead costs and nothing of value was lost.

Not to say that Apple under Jobs didn’t occasionally dabble in design curiosities. The Power Mac G4 Cube is directly analogous to the functionless form of the “trash can” Mac Pro. But the Cube was not intended to replace the Power Mac G4 towers (and it sure as heck didn’t sell like it would). Like the 20th Anniversary Mac before it, Apple’s leadership had the discipline to treat it as a fun indulgence rather than the wave of the future.

Had Steve even allowed it to market, there would also have been new hardware in the old design. And once Mac Cube^2 flopped, he would have immediately taken it out to the backyard and killed it, not left it in the store unchanged for another 4 years. The design engineers would also be pulling triple-shifts until they came up with something better.

That discipline is now gone. Apple runs an indulgence-only shop, and all its customers better be along for the ride. And I think the primary driver of that indulgence is none other than the designer of the aforementioned first iMac way back when, Jony Ive. he has become a man spoiled by his own success.

I suspect Steve Jobs was also a necessary limiter on Jony Ive. I further suspect it was a mistake to restructure the company to elevate Ive to Chief Design Officer, a point at which he didn’t have a boss anymore.

Without Steve to go through, Apple is now a breeding ground for Ive’s design pretensions. A tendency that was nakadlly admitted in his voice over for an Apple Watch sizzle reel. Specifically, he describes a watch band using only the lucidiously inside-baseball phrase, “references traditional watch vocabulary.” I mean, VP Shiller probably knew better that to put such drivel in a marketing video, but CDO Ive outranks him now.

Prose so purple it’s downright ultraviolet aside, we’re also seeing more and more of Ive’s latent body-image issues with each new phone and laptop from Apple. Like the House Freedom Caucus and taxes, no amount of cutting size will ever be enough to satisfy Ive, a man in an neverending thinness war not with an industry, but with himself.

”You disgusting fat slob. How could ANYBODY love a bloated, 7 mm thick phone? Just looking at you makes me want to puke. Headphone jack’s gotta go!”
—Jony Ive, probably

I guess there’s even a dark undercurrent of self-mutilation, too.

I was cautiously optimistic that the new Mac Pro — which might come next year — wouldn’t be a mess. But as time goes by I’m realizing that there is no way it’s going to hit without most of the R&D time spent on making non-cutting edge parts fit in some kind of oddly-shaped or -sized chassis.

When it was first announced, I was excited for a “modular” Mac Pro. But now I realize that “modular” isn’t just going to mean “user upgradeable” like I wanted it to be. Apple’s probably going to design the desktop computer equivalent to Google’s abandoned Project Ara phone.

And wouldn’t that be great? No generic parts allowed! Significant upcharges for the glorified lego bricks that contain basic parts that only Apple can sell you. Sounds about right.

Maybe it’s not that idea specifically, but they HAVE to be doing some kind of unnecessary gimmick with the project. It they were just making a new tower that just worked, it wouldn’t be taking them them 2+ years to get it off the launch pad. They could have added expansion slots to the iMac Pro motherboard, designed a tidy-looking case for it to live in and have it all to manufacturing in a matter of months. Whatever it is they’re trying to make work, it’s going to suck for power-users.

A lot of people get crap for judging a product that hasn’t even been revealed yet. But when this happens, they aren’t judging the product; they’re judging the company. And Apple lost the benefit of the doubt years ago.

The situation isn’t hopeless. Apple could, at any moment, decide to put to better use all that research and development spent on miniaturization and efficiency of batteries and cooling systems and create a real monster of a laptop by letting the seems back out a few millimeters.

Imagine, if you will, a no-compromise MacBook Pro with twice the battery, twice the number crunching power, discrete graphics, no power management or design compromises, and all whisper quiet and cold to the touch. Now THAT would be something to get excited over rather than the usual 3% performance increase and 1mm and 1 oz. shaved off that nobody can even notice anymore because its thigh gap has been visible for the past three versions already.

So yes, it’s not hopeless, but it sure does seem helpless. Nevertheless, I try.

Hey, @tim_cook , Apple used to make desktop-class laptops. Now they just make ultra-thin ones. What happened?

My Pizmo was as powerful as a tower. My PowerBook Core2Duo was, too. Please, make new laptops like them. I've been waiting for years.

— Soulless wit (@DrewidicLore) June 17, 2018

Written on a MacBook Pro (13-inch, mid-2012)… the last one with an optical drive.

(And maybe this thing is finally off my chest now)