What do you think Apple should do to be better and still set itself apart from competitors?

[Inversion]

I'm speaking as someone who has used Windows since they were 4, and Android since they were 12. I don't really see myself switching to an iPhone or a Mac anytime soon but there are some things they could do to make things more appealing.

• Stop prioritising design over performance and practicality
  • By this I mean have decent thermal solutions in "pro" devices, remove features from your devices that people don't need or are being superceded by something just as good. For example, when TouchID was removed they added FaceID which works well too. But there's no denying that removing the headphone jack and the only way to use wired headphones is to use a lightning connector adapter is idiotic. Plenty people need to use wired headphones or aux cables and given how breakable lightning connectors seem to be (they are always breaking), it is annoying to see. And even more annoying that android manufacturers seemed to follow them.
• Make things easier to upgrade
  • I'm not saying that you should be able to swap out the CPU on a Macbook, but even my £500 HP laptop lets me open it up and add more RAM or swap out an SSD without too much hard work. When I spend £1000+ on a laptop, I want to be able to add more RAM or storage.
• Stop branding everything as Pro
  • I don't disagree with branding the Mac Pro as "Pro". It's clearly for professional workers. And I guess you could argue that the Macbook Pro is aimed at professionals on the go. But the iPhone 11 Pro and Pro Max. Come on. No. That is BS. If you want to call it something else do something like what Samsung did with the S10 and have the cut down S10e, the standard S10 and the larger S10+. That makes sense and doesn't try to pass of a phone as something for professionals which it just isn't.
• Adopt universal standards
  • And I really do mean UNIVERSAL! Ever heard of USB-C Apple? Maybe you should try it. It's just like Lightning, but more durable and compatible with everything. You even have it on your Macbooks. So maybe put it on your phones too!!!

I could go on but it's 1.30am and my copious amounts of hot chocolate is wearing off and I still need to finish looking over some maths notes so yeah, just a few thoughts

[dalekphalm]

13 hours ago, Inversion said:

 

•  Ever heard of USB-C Apple? Maybe you should try it. It's just like Lightning, but more durable and compatible with everything.

Source on USB Type-C being more durable than Lightning?

[scotartt]

Make the iPhone/IPad run both iOS and macOS -- and make them automatically switch between the two when you drop it on a wireless docking station connected to a monitor, mouse, and keyboard. Maybe the docking station could have an extra A* series processor in it and a graphics card for extra desktop points as well as wirelessly charge the phone battery.

 

Basically, make the "laptop" redundant. All you carry with you is your storage, a display, and a processor. enough to get portable work done, and then have the "desktop" experience when you're at a desk.

 

 

[Trik'Stari]

For starters? Make their products using components actually rated for what they are being used for.

 

Secondly, bring back the headphone jack, thirdly, make designs that aren't weak as fuck.

 

After that, maybe maker thicker phones with longer battery life and less fragility, maybe finally adopt expandable storage in their phones, something that other phone manufacturers have had for YEARS.

[Nine Tailed Fox]

Actually innovate like they used to

[Sauron]

Drop the prices, allow users to upgrade their stuff, open source their firmware.

[Inversion]

On 10/11/2019 at 3:03 PM, dalekphalm said:

Source on USB Type-C being more durable than Lightning?

More from personal experience than anything else. Lightning cables break more often than type C cables. Normally either the cable connections at the lightning end breaks or the entire metal part of the connector breaks off. No one I've ever spoken to has had that happen to a type C cable

[dalekphalm]

1 hour ago, Inversion said:

More from personal experience than anything else. Lightning cables break more often than type C cables. Normally either the cable connections at the lightning end breaks or the entire metal part of the connector breaks off. No one I've ever spoken to has had that happen to a type C cable

Ah I see. I’ve literally never had a lightning cable nor a lightning port break. 
 

Anecdotally I would say it’s difficult to come to the conclusion that USB C is more durable by any significant margin. 

[The Sloth]

40 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

Ah I see. I’ve literally never had a lightning cable nor a lightning port break. 
 

 

If we are going to use anecdote, i have never seen a lightning port last more than 6 month, my usb c that i got with my nexus 6p from 2015 is still working.

 

Quote

Anecdotally I would say it’s difficult to come to the conclusion that USB C is more durable by any significant margin. 

agree, it will depend on the quality of the cable, a breaded cable will last longer.

[Kisai]

On 10/8/2019 at 9:42 AM, The_Prycer said:

PORTS.

 

Having the single port on the MacBook Air is fine and dandy, but if I buy a PRO model MacBook that thing better come equipped with an RJ-45, USB 3.2, SDXC, Thunderbolt 3, and USB C ports.

 

This actually runs counter to the Apple design aesthetic. 

 

There should be 4 usb-c/TB3 ports and nothing else on a laptop or tablet. Network is covered by wireless or a USB-C Ethernet, or docking station. Mouse and Keyboard can be covered by Bluetooth.  Less than four (eg two on each side) ports makes it difficult to address both the power supply and the connectivity. Ideally, with a laptop you should be USING A USB-C DOCKING STATION or USB-C/TB MONITOR which has the fixed connections on it.

 

On a desktop (including the iMac), there should be 8 USB ports located on the 'screen', Two on the top (for a camera/microphone), One on the left and right (for speakers or headphones) and then four on the bottom for the mouse and keyboard, mobile phone charger and gamepad/joystick. If the screen is separate from the desktop (as in an Mac Pro or MacMini) then the desktop should have an additional 4 USB-C/TB3 ports, no full size USB-A ports.

 

There is no need to have HDMI, full-size DP, or any other type of port on the computer itself. The ideal situation is for Monitor manufacturers to integrate a few of these USB 3.x devices themselves. So you put the built in Depth camera into the monitor so you get "Windows Hello"/"FaceID" capability, You put in some 4w speakers so that you don't need analog speakers (or can override them with digital USB headphones/external sound card), you put one mini-SDXC card slot on the monitor, and put a NFC+Smart card reader (for chip credit cards) in the monitor so you can use your Apple-pay/google-pay NFC or the physical chip card. You put a finger print sensor for "touch id" on the "menu enter" button of the monitor. So this makes the monitor cover all the small feature sets that most enterprise laptops have and extend it to the desktop.

 

USB-A ports should only be provided by USB 3.x hubs or docking stations. The reason, is pretty obvious, but USB 1.1 and 2.0 ports are "slow", and thus you want to ensure that slow devices aren't what hobbles the USB 3.x bandwidth, therefor you put all the slow devices on a separate hub, rather than taking up all your USB 3.x ports. 

 

Now I personally hate wireless devices. So I would rather have a wired keyboard, mouse, and network, so in order to do that with Apple's current design asthetic, means putting these on a hub, or only buying the Mac Mini/Mac Pro. This is why there are still USB-A ports and Ethernet on the Macmini and Mac Pro.

 

The sad part is that the Mac Mini is nearly a perfect device, except that it has no PCIe Video card. If Apple had only thought about releasing it's own "eGPU" box in the same form factor that can be directly connected to the 16-lane PCIe bus, and USB-C monitors that would have solved the gap between the MacMini and the MacPro.

[Kisai]

3 hours ago, Inversion said:

More from personal experience than anything else. Lightning cables break more often than type C cables. Normally either the cable connections at the lightning end breaks or the entire metal part of the connector breaks off. No one I've ever spoken to has had that happen to a type C cable

 

From experience, thus far.

 

Lightning's problem is that it has too much horizontal wiggle room. So if your lighting cable gets slightly tugged on, suddenly the device believes you've unplugged it.

 

USB-C, the problem is less the connector, more the cable itself. All the Dell WD15 USB-C docks are shipped in these too-small boxes that partially kink the cable, thus the cable stops working after a few weeks. I've had dell replace 4 of them. That is however 4 out of maybe 30 so that's a 13% failure rate. The Eport II docks? 50% failure rate, entirely due to user's forgetting to push the eject button. Nearly all of those have the pins on either edge of the dock bent. The Dell USB-C WD19 docks are better in this case as they're shipped in larger boxes.

 

However USB-C's other problem is that not all USB-C devices are created equal. So it's entirely possible to have USB-C devices like cheap mobile phones that only have the USB port soldered down, no epoxy or glue holding the port in place. I've seen this a lot with external drives where the USB port is just expected to be held in place by the flimsy plastic holding the PCB, when all the force is from inserting the cable.

[RoseLuck462]

They need to load up their ‘Pro’ series desktops and laptops with I/O, make it useful for Pros...

 

Make the iPhone Pro twice as thick with a huge battery and even include an expansion slot, make it ‘Pro’ for developers.

[DrMacintosh]

11 minutes ago, RoseLuck462 said:

They need to load up their ‘Pro’ series desktops and laptops with I/O, make it useful for Pros...

I don't really think we will see the MacBooks move away from TB3 only, as for the Mac Pro, those are loaded to the max with TB3 ports and since there are actually PCIe slots, users can add in their own I/O expansion cards if they want. 

[DrMacintosh]

On 10/10/2019 at 5:26 PM, Inversion said:

Come on. No. That is BS. If you want to call it something else do something like what Samsung did with the S10 and have the cut down S10e, the standard S10 and the larger S10+.

That's literally what they were doing and people still complained about the naming. 

 

The fact of the matter is that whenever the average consumer hears "Pro," they think they are getting the top of the line model. If they really are or not does not matter. All that matters is that the customer has a good impression of the product and that they want to buy it. The Pro name is genius for appealing to the masses. 

[TempestCatto]

23 minutes ago, DrMacintosh said:

I don't really think we will see the MacBooks move away from TB3 only, as for the Mac Pro, those are loaded to the max with TB3 ports and since there are actually PCIe slots, users can add in their own I/O expansion cards if they want. 

From what I know, in the "pro" world, you don't want things like dongles as they are an extra point of failure. So having a machine with the proper ports is huge. Though, there will always be something very niche and specific that no one will have a native port for.

 

21 minutes ago, DrMacintosh said:

The fact of the matter is that whenever the average consumer hears "Pro," they think they are getting the top of the line model. If they really are or not does not matter

I must disagree with this. If I'm buying a product labeled "professional" it better be the top end. Otherwise, I would consider that a marketing scam. Yes, anyone and everyone wants the best so they buy the "pro" version. But that just soils what professional really means in the market.  

[DrMacintosh]

13 minutes ago, TempestCatto said:

you don't want things like dongles as they are an extra point of failure. So having a machine with the proper ports is huge.

Ironically, having dedicated ports offers up more points of failure with little to no fallback or redundancy. On a MacBook Pro, even if an entire TB controller blows up, you still have another controller to operate the machine as normal with. 

 

13 minutes ago, TempestCatto said:

I must disagree with this. If I'm buying a product labeled "professional" it better be the top end. Otherwise, I would consider that a marketing scam. Yes, anyone and everyone wants the best so they buy the "pro" version. But that just soils what professional really means in the market.  

You are on a tech forum, you are not the average consumer. You are not the market. 

[RoseLuck462]

Dongles suck 

[SenKa]

On 10/10/2019 at 7:59 PM, dalekphalm said:

I challenge this extremely strongly.

iPhone 6 was only EOL for support 20 days ago. They got all the way up to iOS 12 - that's 5 years of support. Damn - that's way better support than basically any other smartphone manufacturer.

How have they crapped out? My fiancee is using my old 6s (we just replaced the battery, but otherwise still works). Same goes for her iPhone SE (bought around the same time as the 6s) - we replaced the battery and sold it - still working.

I can do you one better! The 4s is the longest running supported apple device, it got its final update July 23rd 2019. Launch date was October 14th 2011!

 

Also, using a 6s as a spare phone as we speak, original battery is at 97% health per iOS. Runs nearly as smooth as it does on my XS Max (which is being replaced tomorrow free of charge due to an internal rattle and Apple Pay not working), though is clearly RAM limited, as it does lag for a little bit opening apps while streaming music. But hey, iOS 13.1 supported on a device that came out almost 5 years ago? I have never seen an android phone do that. Hell, my old Note 8 hardly got updates by the time my 2 year contract was up.

[Kisai]

8 hours ago, TempestCatto said:

From what I know, in the "pro" world, you don't want things like dongles as they are an extra point of failure. So having a machine with the proper ports is huge. Though, there will always be something very niche and specific that no one will have a native port for.

 

I must disagree with this. If I'm buying a product labeled "professional" it better be the top end. Otherwise, I would consider that a marketing scam. Yes, anyone and everyone wants the best so they buy the "pro" version. But that just soils what professional really means in the market.  

It... depends.

 

Dongles for certain things can either be a single point of failure, or it can be a very versatile way of addressing connectivity without having to replace a much more expensive part.

 

1) The Enterprise ethernet routers use transceivers that on one end have GigE/10GigE/550nm Fiber/etc, same device, same port. So it's not possible to know in advance if you need fiber or not, or if you need 10GigE ports, so you buy the router with those ports empty and then populate them as you need them.

2) USB-A/B/C/Firewire/etc ports have generally always been on some kind of riser card or dedicated PCI/PCIe card in desktops, with only the front panel and rear panel being the "onboard" ports. If those onboard ports get damaged, they are SOL. If the front panel gets damaged, you chuck the entire chasis, or you put electrical tape over the broken port and use another. The ones on the riser however you can just unplug and swap, assuming they haven't been electrically damaged. If they're on a PCIe card, you can swap the entire card.

3) Dongles that sit on ports (such as DP to HDMI, DP to DVI, DVI to HDMI, DVI to VGA, DP to VGA , HDMI to VGA , etc) tend to fail frequently because they are attached to devices with no retention clip. VGA and DVI connectors have the thumb screws, and can be held in place, but the DP*, HDMI, mini-DP, and USB-C connectors have no retention clip, so they are held in place by friction. When they fail, they don't fail 100%, and tend to crash the computer.

 

*Some DP cables have clips, but mostly I see them on the dongles.

 

 Firewire was a better example of the versatile port, as the port tended to be very solid, and you could connect two Firewire devices to each other and not need an ethernet cable between them. Try doing that with USB-c, as most PC's do not seem to support DRD. Though I'd expect Mac's to since that was a function of Firewire that TB replaced.

 

Anyhow, moving on.

 

A "Pro" device, should be the top-tier device. It doesn't have to be the most outfitted (eg some options should be just that, options, that can be selected at purchase time and upgraded later if needs change) So a "Pro" iPhone or iPad, is just not a thing. What does the "Pro" model have? Oh the stylus. The Stylus that Steve Jobs was against. 

 

Now to make a point regarding the stylus. The reason why Steve was against stuff like this was because he saw Apple making too many "non-core" products, and if he was still around, he likely would have nixed all these variant models of iPhone and iPad, and iMac. There would only be one model to buy, it would be outfitted with the maximum amount of camera sensor, cell radio, storage, ram, cpu and battery that was available at the time to fit within a design spec. If the parts were not ready, they simply wouldn't go into it. So that's why a "5G" modem isn't in the current models, and why 4G stuff only started showing up in 2012. It took two extra years to get modems down to a power level that was acceptable without having to double the thickness of the phone to have the same battery life. Was Steve always right? No, not really. Some decisions are best made at certain points in time by non-engineers, because when you leave a product in the hands of the engineers too long, it starts having feature-creep.

 

Which is why we come back to the "Pro" or not to "Pro" discussion.

 

A Pro device is any device on the right-hand side of a graph that "meets or exceeds" the requirements of professionals in that field. It is IMPOSSIBLE to make a single Pro device that works for all professionals. A device meant for AutoCAD is not the same device for Pro Tools. This is why Adobe products are on Windows and Mac, but traditionally they were tools preferred on the Mac, because PC's never came standard with multimedia features until the late 90's. Adobe drags it's heels on actual updates, yet pushes it's own feature creep along.  

 

A non-Pro device, is every device to the left on that same graph, where "this device is suitable for all general purpose work (eg web, word processing, "Essentials" cut down versions of Photoshop, AutoCAD, etc not meant for pro work, but good enough to do homework with.) As time marches forward that graph slowly moves further to the left, and less devices are still capable of running new software. So we are at the point now where Apple has said "no more 32-bit software on the Mac OS X and no 32-bit software on the iOS" and users are being blindsided the lack of ANY updates from Adobe to keep their CS3-CS6 installations working (CS2 was PPC), and there's quite a lot of open-source software with lazy/poor development toolchains that only build 32-bit because of dependencies on 32-bit shared libraries. WHOOPS, how many people saw that coming? 

[Praesi]

Stop treating their Customers like Idiots and milk them with ridiculous products. I realy dont get why People still buy their Stuff.

[Mooshi]

Perform a ritual to bring Steve Jobs back from the dead.

[RejZoR]

21 hours ago, Praesi said:

Stop treating their Customers like Idiots and milk them with ridiculous products. I realy dont get why People still buy their Stuff.

Because "it just works"? People are prepared to pay for that instead of feature load over the top fiddly devices from other makers...

[dgsddfgdfhgs]

[RejZoR]

Just now, dgsddfgdfhgs said:

There is a setting for this, but I don't think it even works because Disconnect Privacy Pro still logs Google's Safebrowsing crap even when disabled.

[Blademaster91]

1 hour ago, dgsddfgdfhgs said:

I haven't heard of the news on that, apparently Apple is sending data to Tencent by default.