by Dan Moren
Apple is quietly paying attention before it acts
Marco Arment writes about the latest Mac announcements and how they demonstrate a swing in terms of Apple’s listening to feedback. But I think he particularly nails it in this last paragraph:
It’s hard to tell when Apple is listening. They speak concisely, infrequently, and only when they’re ready, saying absolutely nothing in the meantime, even when we’re all screaming about a product line as if it’s on fire. They make great progress, but often with courageous losses that never get reversed, so an extended silence because we’re stuck with a change forever is indistinguishable from an extended silence because the fix isn’t ready yet.
Developing hardware is a lengthy process and Apple isn’t one to trot out half-baked promises—they’d rather underpromise and overdeliver than the opposite.
There’s a popular perception of the company as arrogant and know-it-all, and while it certainly does tend to operate in a top-down fashion, Apple has no interest in developing hardware that people aren’t going to buy. At the end of the day it’s a business, and when the trash-can Mac Pro did poorly, the company would have been foolish to double down on the design.
So, yes, Apple may not communicate its future plans, but that doesn’t mean it’s not paying attention to what’s being said. Or, as much smarter minds than mine have put it, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.