Apple is shooting itself in the foot
I finally got a chance to look at the Apple presentation (October 2013). In spite of the fact that Apple's stocks have been surging during the entire month, Apple is actually digging its own grave. Don't get me wrong. I have been an Apple fan for many years, but the continued elitism of its products is only serving to drive the company into an overly specialized niche, instead of continuing to expand into a much broader market share. Ultimately, this will lead to a reduced income for the company.
Here are my reasons for this conclusion:
1) Cannibalizing its developers
Although it was revealed that Apple pays out $13 billion to its developers, hidden in the presentation was the fact that Apple has the nasty tendency to cannibalize the best software products in the market for its computers. (In spite of the software numbers, never confuse bloatware with 'goodware'.) This occurred in 2004 when it cannibalized 'Konfabulator' (widgets), and later in 2007 when it introduced Time Machine, which must have affected developers as Prosoft who makes "DataBackup". This cannibalization actually goes as far back to the origins of iTunes, but in whose instance, Apple offered to buy a couple of company's, finally purchasing the program SoundJam, which would become iTunes. In the presentation, Apple appears to again be cannibalizing 1Password and/or LastPass and related programs which generate and store passwords. (LastPass has actually led to 2 factor authentication, with is collaboration with Yubico, producers of Yubikey, hence making moot the idea of a 'fingerprint scanner').
2) The elimination of the CD/DVD
While it might appear at first sight that the elimination of the CD/DVD is something akin to Steve Job's elimination of the floppy disk, serious consideration of the issue leads to the complete opposite conclusion. The elimination of the floppy disk drive was not a 'zero-sum' equation, but simply a recognition that there was better device that could record much more data on an exterior independent media (the CD/DVD). Essentially, the CD/DVD was a substitutive replacement of the floppy disk. (Given the limited space of the first iMacs, this was a foregone conclusion.) However, the increasing elimination of the CD/DVD is NON-SUBSITUTTIVE; nothing is actually being used as an external media for it. Key problems of this can be found in the folioing point #3...
3) The elimination of an independent media containing the operating system
External media are important for the integrity of computer data simply because they cannot be modified; their data is fixed onto the medium, taking a 'snapshot' at a given moment in time of that particular software. The idea that an operating system should be simply siphoned through the internet, as if it were any other 'regular program' (Federigni's words), is a fooling approach for countless reasons. The operating system is the base on which all else runs; hence any modification and/or error in transit through the internet has the possibility of eroding the integrity of the computing experience. Given all that we know of man in the middle attacks, penny-pinching to save a few bucks by sending OSX is tantamount to using iron instead of steel in constructing a skyscraper. You can do it, but I wouldn't want to step into the building whatsoever.
4) Thunderbolt: NO
As noted by Steve Gibson of SecurityNow!, thunderbolt has the same security vulnerabilities as its 'firewire' predecessors: direct access to RAM, which could be physically targeted. Need I say more?
5) G5 MacPro form factor will eventually have to be reintroduced
The cylinder as a computer is a stupid idea: a) its hard to modify, 2) its easy to steal, and 3) it does not match my existing wardrobe. Face it: the MacPro audience is a computer savvy audience that likes to modify and alter the innards of their machines; we are tinkers by nature. Modifying this 'infra'structure not only goes against the grain of the existing computer culture--a continued push away form the open source foundation of OSX and Apple millennial computers--but it also degrades its value, given their inherently fixed nature visa-vie the flexibility of the prior form factor. Also note that Apple is betraying all of its important secondary retail ecosystem (Other World Computing, etc), which provide that market. This is tantamount to eliminating all of the companies which produce and distribute items for the automobile industry (Autozone, etc). Should Apple take too long to realize its folly, this important secondary market will collapse and undermine the entire basis of the Apple platform.
6) Inherent security vulnerabilities of Flash drives
Flash drives are fast--very fast--but they are also inherently insecure simply because when you 'erase' a flash drive, you are not actually erasing a flash drive, as you would a regular hard drive where the needle goes to that spot an magnetically changes the information in that particular block of its sector. If flash drives were to do this, they would quickly burn out as sectors would be repeatedly written onto, hence 'burning out'. In order to avoid this dilemma, the flash drive basically writes on itself until it is full, and then repeated the entire cycle from the beginning. So, erasing a flash drive simply means you reallocate new blocks to the new information--keeping the old information in the drive. What does this mean? Anyone who steals your flash drive can easily read 'erased' contents'
7) No padlock on the trashcan MacPro
The 'old' MacPros (current gray and square MacPros) are secure for many reasons, one of them being their weight and the fact that they had a lever onto which one could place an industrial grade lock on. The sheer fact of its weight means that it would be hard for someone to steal the box simply because it is so damn heavy. Unlike the 'girl machines' (iMac and MacMini), the MacPro could not be easily tampered with its internals, in order to bypass startup disks. The MacPro is a reduced 'industrial grade' server, which had 'privacy' (a la Edward Snowden) written all over it. Also, given that you could open the machine up, with its PCI-e slots meant that you could add any number of new devices and innovations into it, keeping these with the same level of protection as you would the machine itself. I still insist that the NSA had a hand in designing the trashcan MacPro.
8) Security Configuration guides no longer provided
Ever since the creation of OSX, Apple freely distributed 'Security Configuration Guide' for each of its operating systems. These 600 page pdfs contained detailed instruction on how to 'harden' you computer against hacking miscreants, from the simple tip of using a different administrator user from a standard daily user (with restricted privileges to the OS) to more complex tasks pertaining to IPSec connections, sudoers, and so forth. Yet, ever since 10.6 (Snow Leopard) was released, no configuration guides have been provided to regular users. Hence, any keep structural changes that are made to the ever-developing platform cannot be adequately safeguarded by its users. This is one more indication of the move away from the open source platform and culture that served as the core of Apple products since Steve Jobs return in the late 1990s to such a closed wall, whose entry will likely only be procured by high fees and inordinate charges. It sends a shudder down my spine, and my hand grasping for an alternate operating system. What't it called? Ah, yes. Linux.
I hate to say this, but its back to the drawing board for Apple, and a long downward turn for the company. Its shift to a walled garden--away from open source into the 'closed source creep'--is a definite mistake for the company. While the dynamics of the computing industry always tend to push for that, they have forgotten the important role of network dynamics in any system; 'fitting in' and 'standards compatibility' is what allow computers to gain their value in the very first place. As shown by France's Minitel, if every computer had its own distinctive language and could not communicate with one another, they would simply lose all value. Similarly, the elimination of privacy that has been inherent into the Steve Jobs operating system experience is a 'no-no', particularly so in light of the Snowden affair--which is casting a huge shadow into the company's designs and activities.
The noble spirits of Edwards Snowden and Aaron Schwartz look upon us all.