Learned helplessness runs wild at Apple. If you listen to them, they say that with the trashcan they had "designed themselves into a corner", and that's why it took them six years to design a new enclosure. As if it is beyond the capabilities of one of the world's richest and most powerful corporations to design a new enclosure every year.
The trashcan Mac Pro was OK. The design was perhaps uninspired but it did provide adequate cooling for the 2013 Xeons that they were using. It so transpired that the design did not provide ample cooling for Intel's recent CPUs. But so what? Just change it.
The actual problem with the 2013 Mac Pro was operational. They decided to build it in the US. They made a big, high-tech factory with a large degree of automation. That's a great way to build a high volume product. It's a terrible way to build a $3000 niche computer.
>The actual problem with the 2013 Mac Pro was operational. They decided to build it in the US. They made a big, high-tech factory with a large degree of automation. That's a great way to build a high volume product. It's a terrible way to build a $3000 niche computer.
Which is why I think the recent Apple has Tim Cook's operational focus all over it. They couldn't close it down but they had to sell it as long as they could trying to amortised the cost. Same with MacBook Pro Keyboard, they were stubborn and cost focus to try and itch out another generation. Just because of the cost involved.
You could see Steve Jobs doing it differently, bring an MBP home to use it, ( As he used to call himself low cost Beta Tester ) saw the problem himself, demand it be fixed within 4 weeks, or get a new team to design a new Keyboard.
I think he cares about product quality way more than numbers on balance sheet. He might publicly dismiss it, ( very likely ), but quietly he would have the team working on a new keyboard and ship it, only to sliently provide extended warranty to MBP at a later date.
This cost minimization seems quite strange when every year people were anxious for a new Pro. How hard it is to make the trashcan bigger and put in more airflow? (Bigger fans with the same RPM.)
And sure, it might cost some, but Tim should count lost profit (opportunity costs) too.
>How hard it is to make the trashcan bigger and put in more airflow? (Bigger fans with the same RPM.)
My guess is that because they tried to manufacture and assemble in US, so they had very high automation for the TrashCan, which also meant these automation are likely not flexible enough to change the design. I don't think the Mac Pro was about cost though. Because Mac Pro unit shipment would not have made up for that investment anyway. I think it was merely an exercise for Apple's operational supply chain. And Apple's design team had lack of time and had to focus on many other more important issues. That was why it took so long. Basically the design department in Apple were not scaleable.
Design bandwidth limitation is pretty plausible. (I have no idea how hard it is to change automation, but my guess is not that hard/expensive. After all assembly robots are not custom built, they are probably programmed like the simpler CNC machines.)
Plus on top of that probably in Apple's hivemind the cost of coming out with something bad is more than the opportunity cost of missed profit.
> They made a big, high-tech factory with a large degree of automation. That's a great way to build a high volume product. It's a terrible way to build a $3000 niche computer.
The hidden cost of high wages: automation induced product inflexibility.
It's not even limited to low-volume products: if you had 100x the demand and the production capacity to match, you'd still want to run your expensive automation pipeline mostly unchanged for almost as many years as with a low-volume product. Only some of the up-front cost of automation is fixed per product change, another part is fixed per throughput * product change and this part will hit you at 100/day as hard as at 10000/day.
Your use of the term learned helplessness matches no definition I'm aware of. Can you elaborate on what you mean by this, and also point to what evidence you have that it runs wild at Apple?
and that's why it took them six years to design a new enclosure
It didn't take them six years though. All the evidence points to the iMac Pro being the intended successor to the trashcan Mac Pro. The iMac Pro was released ~4.5 years after the trashcan Mac Pro. And even the iMac Pro represents a departure from original plan A, which had to have been simply updating the trashcan Mac Pro. IOW, to start development of the iMac Pro, Apple first had to come to terms with the 2013 Mac Pro being a failure. If we assume that took them 1-2 years, it puts the lead time for developing a pro machine at 2.5-3.5 years. The new Mac Pro was announced in April 2017, and most analysts seem to agree that at that point the project had only just started which confirms a lead time of 2.5-3.5 years.
The trashcan Mac Pro was OK. […] It so transpired that the design did not provide ample cooling for Intel's recent CPUs.
Obviously the 2013 Mac Pro was fine in 2013. That's not the argument we're having.
But so what? Just change it.
Which is what they did. But first they had to recognize there was a problem. As I argued above, that had to have taken at least one year, but more likely two.
The actual problem with the 2013 Mac Pro was operational.
Hindsight is always 20/20 as they say. If it had been possible to provide steady incremental updates to the Mac Pro, like Apple did with its predecessor, building it in the US probably wouldn't have been much a problem. But even disregarding that, I don't think it's fair to argue that the actual problem was operational. Sure, it must have been a complicating factory, but if the Mac Pro was a high priority for Apple, they could have easily decided to just write off their US factory and all its robots, and move production to China. The problem if any, was that the Mac Pro was simply not a high priority for Apple.
> As if it is beyond the capabilities of one of the world's richest and most powerful corporations to design a new enclosure every year.
Other companies may churn out new enclosures every year, but I don't think this is how Apple rolls. Apple products are developed over the course of years, not months. I think typical Apple hardware has a lead time of two years.
That's why Apple products are built with more sophistication than any other companies product. They have enough time to get every detail right.
It's also why they are somewhat slow to respond to trends. Two years ago, they realised that they needed a new Mac Pro, and that the trash can was a failure. Now, two years later, they have an answer.
When the iPhone 5 was released, it was too small. The market was moving towards much bigger phones. Apple missed the trend, and it took them two years to fix the problem with iPhone 6.
Some things have even more lead time. The keyboards from the 2016 Macbook Pros were a failure. They need a new keyboard. They are obviously working on a better keyboard, but it's not ready yet. While they are working on a better keyboard, they are trying everything they can to reduce problems with the current keyboard (silicone cover, different alloy for the switches, etc).
I hope that the new keyboard will be in the rumored 16" Macbook, but right now no-one outside of Apple knows when it'll be released.
What you're describing sounds like learned helplessness.
yes they plan products and then expect them to be in the market for 3 years before a redesign but the keyboard bandaid fixes don't mean that it was impossible for them to backtrack and release a different keyboard the next year it just means they were unwilling to hit the stop button and move out of their learned cadence to fix an issue that every single person who buys that product will encounter.
So they screwed up and instead of saying "oh, we screwed up, ok we're going to have to fix this to minimize the number of customers who will buy $2000 faulty devices" they instead decided to just carry on as normal, fix the design in 3 years when they'd be doing the redesign anyway and just try a few minimal bandaids on the solution which we know don't work because every bandaided keyboard is in the replacement program by default.
This could have been fixed, they could have shipped another design in a year the only two possible reasons why are money or just unwillingness to change cadence.
>That's why Apple products are built with more sophistication than any other companies product. They have enough time to get every detail right.
Wouldn't go that far, I get the feeling you haven't even really looked at what competitors are making these days the gap has well and truly been closed and in a good number of cases Apple is actually behind.
The trashcan Mac Pro was OK. The design was perhaps uninspired but it did provide adequate cooling for the 2013 Xeons that they were using. It so transpired that the design did not provide ample cooling for Intel's recent CPUs. But so what? Just change it.
The actual problem with the 2013 Mac Pro was operational. They decided to build it in the US. They made a big, high-tech factory with a large degree of automation. That's a great way to build a high volume product. It's a terrible way to build a $3000 niche computer.