[david-cako]

Apple has a talent for putting themselves right at the center of important technologies. I wonder if this strategy plays out as integrated medical devices and a full-blown healthcare platform. Their reputation for top-notch hardware, good UX, and their shift towards in-house SoCs gives them a serious edge there. Everything about their brand feels well suited for healthcare, and IMO they still don't have a killer enterprise app. This could be what Watson was promising to be.

[dariosalvi78]

Top notch hardware, like their top notch keyboards?

[the_other]

No, not like their recent keyboards. But exactly like almost every model of their laptops, most of their desktops, their servers, their phones, tablets, watches, NAS/routers and set-top boxes. Every year, for >30 years.

[FireBeyond]

Which laptops? The ones that could be made to repeatedly kernel panic due to GPU issues, that Apple denied was an issue until shown otherwise? Or the ones with the logic board issues? Or the ones with battery issues that caused burns? Or the SSD failures? Or the T2 issues that cause repeated kernel panics?

> their servers

As novel as the Xserver might have been, let's not pretend it was anything more than an unimaginably small surface area for a product

Apple makes well-designed products, mostly. But let's pump the brakes on the idea that everything that comes out of Cupertino is flawless, as you seem to imply.

[david-cako]

Apple's got a lot of surface area, and a pretty damn good track record.

Who else is doing what they're doing? No other consumer hardware company goes top-to-bottom from the software to the chip, and no other company has such a cohesive ecosystem. Google EOLs a product once a week, Microsoft is making some nice stuff these days, but is nowhere near the same experience ("Windows is like a bundle of drivers", as in the article).

There is value to being prescriptive over their platform. It gives them skin in the game to make things good; they are much less willing to just blame a vendor.

[dariosalvi78]

I've owned 4 of their laptops in the past 5 years (not my choice) and all of them ended in the trash for different reasons that did not depend on me. Maybe the phones are better, I have never owned one. Ok most companies make some bad products and most companies have some top notch products. Is Apple any different?

[reidjs]

How?? I'm on a macbook air from 2011 and an iphone SE from 2012. Do you just pour soda all over them? Or has their laptop quality dipped in the last four years? I know that the butterfly keyboards were having all kinds of issues, but I wouldn't trash a computer over that, they would probably replace the keyboard.

[dariosalvi78]

One failed motherboard or smth like that, one because of display issues + keyboard, 2 because of keyboard become unusable. All MacBook Pros. A couple could not be serviced (>2 years old), one could not be fixed, one I changed job (to be fair, I don't know what happened with that one, they may have fixed it). In comparison, the cheapest laptop I have ever owned (EEEPC) lasted more than 10 years.

[VLM]

The reputation for enforced obsolescence and extremely high prices will be an issue for all but the richest hospitals.

The biggest area of improvement in health care is at the cheaper end. Many people die annually from being unable to afford the $2.50 it costs for malaria treatment, or life saving vaccines.

The side dish problem is vaccines are insanely profitable; every dollar spent in the US on vaccines supposedly saves fifteen bucks of health care expense. I've seen numbers as low as $10 and as high as $15000. The problem is some very populous political and economic regimes worldwide are so unstable that even 1500% rate of return investments, which would seem a no brainer to fund in the west, are impossible without massive external western involvement. In a system that dysfunctional, malaria might not be the biggest problem, nor incredibly expensive and short lived apple iHealth devices. We've tried allowing infinite immigration from failed states into western states; that didn't help either. Just brain drain's the failed states while exploding welfare expenses in the western states.

[david-cako]

or... as with many other technologies, Apple leading the way will subsidize the proof of concept for everyone else. The iPhone didn’t stop people in poorer countries from getting mobile service and smartphones for pennies on the dollar. In fact, it did the exact opposite. 3rd world countries went and built better mobile networks than we had in the US at the time.

Moreover, if the existing medical industry is evidence of anything, prices are jacked up in developed countries to foot the bill of R&D, and the same medications are sold elsewhere for next to nothing.

Apple giving away health technology to disadvantaged communities seems like a good next step. Perhaps existing medical companies aren’t as incentivized to do that because they don’t have the shiny brand to advertise.