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What is APPLE planning?

It looks like if you want a call from Chris Wilson of ScienceOfSpeed, you may need the new Apple iWatch. (kidding.)
Way to go Chris..
I just saw this on the Apple release site: funny.
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So I used iTunes on my ipad 2 air, first time in a long time. ioS 8.4.

I wanted "Album view" and it wasn't anywhere obvious. Pressing "My Music" at the bottom seemed like the place to start, but nope. Looked for a minute and found nothing....tried sliding/swiping the icons at the bottom thinking "Album view" was hidden off to the side of the screen but no. I accidentally pressed "Songs" on top of the screen (with no cues that pressing there would do anything) and finally found the option for Album view. Ugh, used to be in plain sight, and required one not two presses.

Later I needed to change the volume and wanted to use one hand because it's impossible now to access the volume rocker buttons without stopping what you're doing and lifting the ultra-thin ipad 2 air to access the volume buttons on the underside of the beveled edge. But there was no slider anywhere on the screen (???). After various guesses and swipes and screen touches and growing frustration, I see you have to touch the song title area at the bottom of the screen where there's no intuitive indication that pressing there does anything, resulting in a new screen showing song artwork wastefully taking up most of the entire screen and having a volume slider underneath the album cover. This seemed really clunky because now in order to go back to selecting tracks, you have to swipe back down again to hide the artwork and repeat back & forth if song volumes vary. More presses & actions to do what used to take one press.

Then I wanted to scrub to a different section of a song but couldn't find the song length/status prompts anywhere (???????????). The "My Music" screen doesn't even show song length status or song time info.......after more swipes & hunting, I pressed the bottom of the screen again to access the cover artwork & volume slider screen. It was well hidden but there's a small vertical marker line under the album artwork that lets you slide to get to other sections of a song. The marker is barely visible underneath the artwork and the song length/time indicator values are there, even if really small and hard to see unless you stop what you're doing and look closely at the screen.

Then if you want to go back to the track view and select something else, you're swiping back & forth which is a real PITA instead of having volume & scrub/length status conveniently on top, with song lists on the bottom like it used to be.

WHAT IN THE HELL is going on with Apple and their horribly unintuitive and cumbersome UI redesigns every 6 months, each getting worse, just like Tapatalk's descent into an app that's no longer fun but actually painful to use and only good for uploading photos to a thread easily. Who is running the asylum there? Am I alone in feeling like Apple products no longer "just work" like they used to but they are actually ass-backwards and much more difficult and cumbersome than before????????????????

Or do some feel like they work better now than ever before? It's ok if you do, I'm just wondering if I'm alone with all the wonderment and dissatisfaction the last 2 years over Apple's design changes and bland white/grey/greyish/greyer flat appearance makeovers because I only hear gripes about it from friends and nothing really ever online.
 
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Am I alone in feeling like Apple products no longer "just work" like they used to but they are actually ass-backwards and much more difficult and cumbersome than before????????????????

To me Apple seems in a weird spot now where they're not innovating anymore.
Instead they're simply copying others, and doing it in a rushed manner.
From a rushed smart watch, a half baked map service, a half baked siri, more recently a Spotify clone.
All bad copies of better services or products.
And now I see they're going to try to copy Google's self driving cars? Wow. Shark. Jumped.

I think Apple knows their iPhone can't be relied on for the existence of the company.
Too many eggs are in a basket that's honestly not very impressive anymore.
I think they know this and are getting desperate to find more revenue streams to diversify.
With the chart below, it's not just 50% of their money from their iPhone, you have to add in iTunes, because no one uses iTunes outside of iPhone owners. So really 65% of their profit is based on a single cell phone.
The desperation to diversify quickly is what comes across as poor quality IMO.


piechart2.png
 
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I agree. The new 12" macbook that requires you carry multiple dongles for basic USB/other interfacing is just nuts. Trying to invent new must-haves but instead are just jumping the shark.

Thanks for the chart, I sold my aapl stock a while ago after losing faith and haven't kept up with info like that. I lost a lot of gains over the last year but I figured I'd stay ahead of the inevitable slowdown. Wish I were smart enough to look past that and have held on. :)

No doubt it's hard to maintain growth after plucking up all the low hanging fruit from 2001 to 2010 (iPod, iphone, iPad) and hitting homeruns each time, but I'm just shocked that they are doing things so bad that they once were PHENONEMENAL at, like their UI. It's one thing to keep doing new things well, but it's another thing to start doing things poorly that you already knew how to do well. Even if you copy, just do it well and especially don't change just to change, because guess what, what you change now will be old in a few years. Easier said than done I guess, even for a company the unreal size of apple.
 
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...but I'm just shocked that they are doing things so bad that they once were PHENONEMENAL at, like their UI.

Normally I wouldn't quote myself since it can look egotistical, but since I'm about to talk about Steve Jobs, it might be ironically appropriate. :) Recorded this over New Year's.

http://variety.com/2016/tv/news/ratings-cnn-steve-jobs-man-in-the-machine-1201672452/

It's confirming my fear that the magic Apple had with Steve Jobs will never ever be repeated, and that the fun ride of surprise and delights and "it just works" that I enjoyed from 2005-2011 is truly over. When talking about the Macintosh and Steve's approach to things before computers became personal computers, somebody who worked with him says he didn't create something for you, he created "you." Sounded kind of like super hyperbole at first but the show has you realizing how he over-obsessed into ensuring everything about the products and UI experience was as much about creating relatable emotion inside the user as it was about the technology itself. Now the UI experience and mechanical experience is only about what a super-minimalist thinks the experience should be. Jobs may have been a real asshole, but there's no doubt his tyrannical genius vision produced better products than any friendly committee ever will.

I'm not a super Apple or Jobs fan, I also own a PC at home and am contemplating trying an android phone next since I don't like the current iOS UI, but I love documentaries on people who really knew what they were doing. :) Not sure how to watch it if you haven't recorded it, but definitely look for and DVR it while it still may be out there.

http://www.cnn.com/specials/tech/steve-jobs-the-man-in-the-machine
 
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I am just happy that it looks like the next iPhone releases will include a smaller version again.
 
Normally I wouldn't quote myself since it can look egotistical, but since I'm about to talk about Steve Jobs, it might be ironically appropriate. :) Recorded this over New Year's.

http://variety.com/2016/tv/news/ratings-cnn-steve-jobs-man-in-the-machine-1201672452/

It's confirming my fear that the magic Apple had with Steve Jobs will never ever be repeated, and that the fun ride of surprise and delights and "it just works" that I enjoyed from 2005-2011 is truly over. When talking about the Macintosh and Steve's approach to things before computers became personal computers, somebody who worked with him says he didn't create something for you, he created "you." Sounded kind of like super hyperbole at first but the show has you realizing how he over-obsessed into ensuring everything about the products and UI experience was as much about creating relatable emotion inside the user as it was about the technology itself. Now the UI experience and mechanical experience is only about what a super-minimalist thinks the experience should be. Jobs may have been a real asshole, but there's no doubt his tyrannical genius vision produced better products than any friendly committee ever will.

I'm not a super Apple or Jobs fan, I also own a PC at home and am contemplating trying an android phone next since I don't like the current iOS UI, but I love documentaries on people who really knew what they were doing. :) Not sure how to watch it if you haven't recorded it, but definitely look for and DVR it while it still may be out there.

http://www.cnn.com/specials/tech/steve-jobs-the-man-in-the-machine

The above is very accurate. Couple that with the company has grown to the point it's become too large to turn quickly and you now have something that resembles IBM. The stock will continue to grow but never again will the gains be so dramatic as they once were. With that said I too certainly sold the shares I had way too soon. Don't get me wrong, I made good money, bought in the high 70's. Had I held them till now it would have been 10x good money... aka asinine money.

I don't see Apple coming out with another earth shattering device. I believe the next "big thing" that'll make the world change (yes not change the world) is in the transportation industry. After that 3D printers should be making their way into everyday life. Maybe Apple will make an affordable 3D printer and can get a boost there. Even so, that won't double the stock price. If anything Apple is now a target for fines and lawsuits with so much money on hand and a lot of that being offshore.
 
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