Zombie Apple Delusions
by Jean-Louis Gassée
The ‘Apple Is Doomed’ meme seems to be on hiatus. But let’s not despair, Apple zombie fantasies never go away, they simply go underground for a while and then reemerge to agitate the blogosphere when the opportunity arises.
I ponder what to do about my three weeks in France. How — or even if — I should write about the strange, sad, exhilarating yet (at times) comical 36-mile walk along the Camino de Santiago (a.k.a. the Compostelle way). When I’m back home in the Valley perhaps I’ll find the perspective to comment on the experience.
….
Back in the tech world, I see ideas once considered dead and buried reemerge from the crypt. We can’t put a spike through their hearts once and for all, but let’s give it a good try.
We’ll start with the Apple TV set. Not the Apple TV puck in its newest 4K iteration accompanied by its austere, forbidding remote…
…but a full-fledged 75” smart 4K TV set:
One blog post speculated that “Apple could build a TV — because of Trump”…
It’s easy to make fun of the conjectures, but let’s be fair: Existing “smart” TV sets make us yearn for a simple and elegant implementation. Yes, the Apple TV’s remote is austere, almost unfriendly, but compare it to your typical LG or Samsung remote:
Where the Apple remote is austere, the LG remote is hostile.
More important, we want a TV that lets us watch it without it watching us (here and here, just as a start). Protecting viewers’ privacy is an opportunity for Apple to do good and do well. And we’d like it to be a turnkey device — we want Gene Muster’s old friend, the Apple TV set.
Unfortunately, there are (at least) two flaws with the “Unified Apple TV Set” theory.
First, lets look at a modern TV set. There’s a “dumb” display panel that will keep doing its job year after year, and then there’s the “smart” half, the computer that listens to the remote, runs apps (Netflix, Hulu, 60 Minutes), and contains a browser that can display Web content. As the computing world has been teaching us for decades, the “smart” part will be obsolete within two years.
With its TV 4K, Apple continues to keep the Apple TV computing engine outside of the TV’s display device. As better silicon or changes in networking hardware emerge, you can upgrade your Apple TV hardware — the black puck — without throwing away your TV monitor. Roku, Amazon and Google also keep the smarts outside of the TV set. Why would Apple get into an all-in-one TV market that doesn’t exist?
The other flaw is the cable box that you rent or buy from Comcast, DirecTV, or some other content-providing philanthropist. The Apple TV set would need to connect to and read the signal that’s supplied by the box, or maybe it could simply decode the data straight from the coax cable thus, in effect absorbing the cable box. Good luck with that. Comcast, AT&T and the others would never consent to this arrangement because they would cede control to Apple.
We’d love to replace Comcast + Apple TV with an integrated device, but…no. No Apple TV set, no Apple Cable Box. Especially not with today’s bootlicking FCC.
The other Apple zombie delusion is that the Mac will finally jettison the x86 Intel line of processors; from here on out, it’s home-grown Ax CPUs. To be fair, this train of thought started when Phil Schiller, Senior VP of Apple Marketing, used the phrase “desktop-class performance” when referring to A9 and A9X processors. And now the latest iteration, the A11 “Bionic” (I can’t wait for next year’s markitecture invention), is reported to have outperformed MacBook Pro processors, although if you look closely, the use cases aren’t comparable.
Out with x86? No.
Let’s compare numbers, Macs vs iDevices. Based on Apple’s latest quarterly report, we can make a rough estimate for next year’s unit volumes (Calendar or Fiscal, it doesn’t matter for our purposes). In 2018, Apple will sell more than 250M iDevices versus approximately 25M Macs. That 10x factor tells us where the company will put its attention. Leave the x86 Macs alone, full-speed ahead with new Ax silicon for iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches, maybe even other wearables…
But the biggest obstacle, here, isn’t silicon: It’s software. Yes, Apple controls its compilers and low-level virtual machines. It could try to make the switch from x86 to Ax as seamless as possible, but Mac app developers don’t have Apple’s financial and engineering resources. As the Mac App Store stands — even in today’s better curated implementation — they have enough trouble making money. A massive conversion to Ax processors would be too much trouble.
And that’s not the end of the story. It’s rumored that Apple intends to release muscular Mac “trucks”, i.e. iMac Pros and, in 2018, a more modular Mac Pro targeted at high-end app and media developers. These products require no-holds-barred power dissipation budgets, which leads one to wonder: Since Ax designs are targeted at low power, small device heat dissipation, would they stand up to the needs of a high-end Mac?
My thought: Apple will continue to develop Ax processors and software that’s aimed at fulfilling Tim Cook’s vision of iPads as the future of personal computing. Ax for very personal devices; x86 (at least for now) for Macs and OS X app developers.
The Apple zombie delusions never die. And new ones are sure to emerge as Apple’s product line becomes richer and stokes beguiling but unrealistic speculation.
— JLG@mondaynote.com
