Chas-m:
This is what I would do. IF you would do differently, so be it. I didn't think this was something that was a matter of right or wrong, just a fun, what is your opinion/idea of what is going on.
Yes, I understood that apart from your final point. I'm sorry if it came across as challenging. A lighter tone (like "how do you know they're not already doing this
" was generally intended.
In terms of what Apple is doing online, I don't know, you don't either.
I'm not sure you what you mean by "doing online," but actually I do have a reasonable idea of what goes on at Apple. I used to work for them myself and still have friends there. I have (in my opinion) a good handle on the corporate culture of Apple.
If they actually did have a full, see what the online customers are saying department, we'd already have a small Macintosh with at least one, possibly two, PCI-E slots in the model line up.
I will refer you back to my earlier comment about just because YOU think something is true doesn't make it true. Just as with the Linux community, members of <name of special interest group> always think their numbers are
hugely higher-- quantum orders of magnitude higher -- than polling actually reveals. Small groups tend to make big noise, but that doesn't make them viable or valuable. Mini-towers are well within the realm of the "home tinkerer" fringe market, which has never been a target demographic for Apple. Real professionals tend to want the biggest baddest thing Apple can whip together and don't care how much it costs because they generally make it back within days (or hours in some cases).
The response time to the current Autofill security gap was disappointing. While it appears that Apple responded about a week after the security gap was revealed, they knew a month before publication that the gap was there. This should not have ever been in the tech press, as Apple should have had it fixed weeks ago.
So a security issue that Apple found out about five weeks ago should have been fixed "weeks ago"? Apple's pretty innovative, but I don't think their time travel initiative has gotten its full funding lately ...
I don't know if you've ever done any home repairs, but very often you start out intended to fix one problem and in that process discover several others that you might as well tackle now while you're at it. I don't know if that was the case in this particular instance, but any programmer will tell you that often happens. Perhaps that introduced a delay, or perhaps just thorough testing took time. Five weeks doesn't sound like a lot of time to me to fix a serious problem like that (having worked on several large software projects myself in my time).
AT&T is still having a lot of coverage issues in places like San Francisco and New York.
I didn't say they didn't. I reported the polling of most users, who disagree with you to the tune of 73%, and added my own experience. I didn't say that people who are not getting good reception are imagining it. I said that every carrier has weak spots. Again see the maxim "just because you believe something to be true doesn't make it so."
Even if they had the best coverage, doesn't change the fact that it is a good idea to not rely on only one company to get your product out into the marketplace.
I believe I went out of my way in my post to agree with this.
I look forward to seeing what you would do. I have stated my objectives, what would you do?
Probably not a whole lot different. Having worked with Apple, I think most people have a rather distorted view of how the company actually works. The people who actually RUN Apple on a day-to-day basis, like Papermaster and Forstall and Mansfield and Cook (et al), do a
fantastic job. Looking at their growth rate, market acceptance, product innovation, market influence, balance sheet, stock price etc since Steve took over, I don't see a whole lot of room for improvement quite frankly.
In my view, spending money and energy catering to tiny, impossible-to-please special interest groups (like the people who want FLAC built into iTunes, or people who wish every Mac was less than $500) is a waste of resources for a multi-billion $ company -- mainly because analysis of those groups always shows that they'd never really be happy with you anyway, and you'd never make enough profit to make it worth the effort.
A perfect example would be your mini-tower idea. Apple could never build one that had enough stuff (or the "right" ingredients) and was cheap enough to make you happy. There would always be SOMETHING you wished they had done differently. Apple is not in the business of building custom computers for Kostas (or anyone else) and never will be. They are a mass-market enterprise that strives to bring innovation to mainstream electronic products. All the available evidence would indicate that this approach is working *extremely* well for them.
If I'm wrong, you should gather the proof that there's a huge untapped market for your mini-tower out there, and present it to Apple -- you even have the email address of the CEO for heaven's sake. A "feeling" that there's a market for (x) is not enough -- you need some proof.
"If wishes were horses, everyone would ride!"
