Apple tried and failed to reestablish trust in the Mac

Last week Apple made a concerted push to reaffirm its commitment to the Mac platform. No less than three of its top executives gave exclusive interviews to CNET highlighting the importance of the Mac for Apple.

Apple’s Marketing Boss Phil Schiller and Software President are quoted as being: „confident Apple’s laptops will be around for at least another quarter century.“

Schiller specifically stated that: „(…) this is a big, big step forward. It is a new system architecture, and it allows us to then create many things to come, things that we can’t envision yet.”

In a separate Interview with Apples Chief Designer Johnny Ives the MacBook Pro is called a “major reboot” of Apples laptop line. Ives especially highlights their long term perspective ob the product. Despite Apple’s attempts to “continually try and refine better solutions“ they have ”not been able to do something that’s better than the current [Mac] architecture.“

Which can directly be translated into: the Mac is going to stay.

At the “Hello Again” event Apple’s CEO Tim Cook himself took the stage and repeatably reiterated the importance of the Mac and macOS to Apple.

Yet despite these strong statements about Apple’s commitment to the Mac the sentiment evident on Ars Technica, Hacker News, Twitter and echoed by many journalists indicates that Apple’s mission to reassure its customers about the Mac failed.

It comes down to three reasons: perspective, pacing and detail.

Starting with the last: detail.

Apple famously is about detail. Apple made power bricks that provide foldable clamps for rolling up the power cord, invented new processes for making invisible holes for laptop-microphones, has wonderful packaging etc. Detail makes Apple special and makes the customer feel appreciated.

Yet detail is what is lacking with the new MBP. The iPhone 7 cannot be connected since the new Macs don’t come with a lightning to USC-C cable.

At the same time the new MBP carries a headphone jack — which is a good thing but still inconsistent with Apples message about headphones.

And last not least Apple brags that the MBP can drive two 5k monitors but suggests to pair their wonderfully designed Macs with a third party monitors whose look and feel is nowhere near Apples standards. Frankly its ugly and as far as I see there is nothing on the market anybody with a sense of design would want to have on the desk.

Details matter and a design centric company like Apple priding itself of the integration of hard and software suddenly not offering a fitting monitor anymore impacts the message about the Mac: is Mac desktop computing over? Will Apple abandon this space? Does Apple care about style on the wrist but not on the desk? Are they willing to invest big to fight bad design rolling down the roads but just shrug if one has to sit in front of a plastic bomber all day?

What about developers, creative professionals or plain writers like me who work on laptops but at the same time prize and need large screen real estate? Whose desktop in many cases is part of their business card?

Not to mention “details” like sustained compute power not available in laptop form-factors? Or the lingering question if to Apple details are now dongles and cables and these details indeed are their fasted growing product-category? Did some bean-counter calculate the number of extra Lightening-to-USB-C cables Apple is going to sell?

Second: pacing

Apple always maintained its own upgrade cycles and customers are aware that Apple’s pacing is not commanded by speeds and feats oriented tech roadmaps. Their mantra was and is that they updated when they could provide a better experience.

Accordingly Apple says their pacing was dictated by the Touch Bar. To a certain extend that makes sense.

Personally I feel the Touch Bar seems to be the right way to combine touch and keyboard-mouse input. It made me think when I last used a function key — I honestly can’t remember. This real estate indeed can be put to better uses.

The introduction of TouchID has an even larger long-term impact and people underestimated what level of personalization (and DRM) this can and will bring to computing. Currently no other competitor can offer a similar near-frictionless, biometrically backed cross-device-authentication method.

With TouchID everywhere Apple is making a major landgrab in the identity-space that rivals Facebooks reach.

The difference is that Facebook’s identity is social while Apple’s identity is transactional.

This is big. Getting it right might have justified to have waited until all necessary pieces where properly in place to introduce TouchID on the Mac.

But the current update cycle was irregularly long, the iOS success overwhelming and the combination of both with Cooks comments about the iPad Pro being the future of computing eventually fostered speculation about the state and future of the Mac platform. If anything that speculation has exploded now.

After the event the Mac platform remains a weird product matrix of old and new where in some cases performance stagnated and relative prices increased. Plenty of laptops to choose from but is the Air Apple’s consumer laptop or the Macbook? Will the latter eventually gain Touch Bar and TouchID?

On top of that Apple gave no indications about the future of desktop computing — except that they apparently are getting out of the standalone monitor business.

The MacPro situation is especially baffling with the hardware not updated for 3 years and essential software components for GPU centric computing like Open CL neglected.

In short the event answered some questions but left too many open. Pacing is off.

Which brings me to the third point: perspective.

The combination of detail and pacing begets perspective. Historically Apple had mastered this and relied on the capacity of its customers to extrapolate on the basis of the select information Apple offered plus the larger picture in the market. If Apple said “we are committed to XX and feature xx is only the beginning” people would trust the company.

Apparently Apple executives believed that the statements made in the interviews plus the unveiling of their approach of bringing identity and touch-interaction to keyboard-and-pointer-devices would provide enough perspective and reaffirm trust in the Mac platform.

It did not.

What people now long for is perspective. The long delays and recent lack of attention to details have eroded trust and Apple should move to regain it. Another 6–9 months of radio-silence is to long. People need to have a sense where the puck is going because right now they are wondering if there is one after all.