Quarter after quarter, Apple Inc. reports record sales. More iPhones are being sold than ever before, and Mac sales are rising while most PC makers are confronting lower sales. The PC industry may be on its last legs, but Apple has managed to carve out a growing share of the market segment that matters. That’s the higher profit segment. They are leaving the low-end, where profits are difficult to achieve, to the bottom feeders.
Now it’s true there are trouble spots for Apple, such as lagging iPad sales. While Apple CEO Tim Cook puts a positive spin on the situation, it’s fair to wonder whether it’s just a spin, and what Apple hopes to accomplish Obviously improving iPad multitasking in iOS 9 will make the device more useful for productivity, and that, along with the IBM deal, may indeed improve sales. And don’t forget the delayed upgrade cycle. Maybe this year will be the charm.
The Apple Watch is a question mark. Without actual sales figures, the rumors and widely varying industry analyst estimates dominate the news cycles. Nobody knows Apple’s internal targets, but it’s easy to take the lowest numbers and suggest it’s not doing so well. This despite Apple’s statement that sales for the first nine weeks overshot those of the iPhone and iPad during their first nine weeks on sale. Isn’t that supposed to a good thing?
But the excuse that Apple wants to keep the details out of the hands of the competition doesn’t wash. If they are skilled at targeting the sales and production channels, they already have a pretty good idea.
Now a recent story about Apple’s alleged predicament used the standard nonsense about non-existent scandals to make a point, among other things. So the so-called “bendgate” issue, where the iPhone 6 Plus was supposedly more prone to bending in your back pocket than the competition, was accepted as a fact. But Apple never admitted to a problem, and third-party tests from Consumer Reports magazine and SquareTrade, an extended warranty provider, indicated Apple’s phablet performed acceptably when subjected to severe abuse.
Still, there’s an unconfirmed report that Apple will use a stronger aluminum alloy for the next iPhone, referred to as the 6s and 6s Plus, so it will be even less susceptible to damage. Regardless of the facts, to some tech pundits and other columnists, it doesn’t matter.
Of course, when a claim is partly accurate, it’s easy to extend the claim to encompass more than it should. So there’s the somewhat ragged condition of OS X Yosemite. An irritating networking bug, which resulted in unstable Wi-Fi connections and other ills, did indeed cause trouble for some Mac users (but not me). It was finally fixed by replacing a new networking component with the old one in the recent 10.10.4 update. That appears to have cleaned things up for the most part; it appears that a 10.10.5 update is now being tested by developers and public beta testers.
However, the critical article in question also made a big deal about alleged serious bugs with OS X El Capitan. Now I’m not mentioning the source, since it doesn’t deserve the publicity. But citing problems with an operating system that’s still in beta condition simply doesn’t make sense. How anyone can take this seriously boggles the mind, but it’s an example of how facts and logic can be twisted to prove a point.
This doesn’t mean that everything is necessarily hunky dory at Apple. There are still arguments that Apple’s quality control, and the ease-of-use factor, have taken a step backwards since Tim Cook took over as CEO. That’s part of the “Cook is bad” meme that’s been perpetuated by some Apple critics.
To be sure, Apple has lots of things going on, and first releases of anything are apt to be buggy. Apple is not free of such problems, but you could go back to the early days of the Mac to find OS releases quickly replaced by maintenance updates because things went badly.
However, Apple is doing so much more these days, and getting far more attention, that any possible slip up, even if it’s nothing unusual, gets extra coverage. But what about the first release of Windows 10, which is reportedly in fairly shaky condition? The excuse is that Microsoft promised rolling updates, so things would get fixed. But is that an excuse for a release that wasn’t ready for anyone beyond power users and early adopters?
Consider an article at BetaNews entitled “Windows 10 will be a great operating system — when it’s finished.” [1] The subject matter is implicit in the title, that Microsoft let that beast out prematurely. Far too much is wrong with Windows 10 to recommend it, certainly not for business use. It’s fair to suggest that the stench of Windows 8, and the poor reception by the public, might have forced Microsoft to make moves that it might otherwise have done with more precision.
There was also the initial rollout, such as it was, for Android 5 Lollipop, which was quickly replaced with a working update to fix some serious bugs. And I haven’t even gotten to the well-known and very serious security lapses with Android that, for the most part, will never be fixed on most handsets running Google’s OS. The most recent problems have gotten some publicity, but tech coverage is still heavily dominated by the latest scuttlebutt about Apple. As usual.