Apple's Next R&D Center Said to Be Opening in Jakarta, Indonesia in 2017

So many ignorant comments. I'm just glad none of these armchair critics are in Apple's board of directors.

This is a strategic move that is long overdue. Indonesia is enforcing its regulation where a 4G handset sold in the country must have a certain percentage of local involvement (can be hardware or software).
Samsung already made an assembly plant in Indonesia few years ago as a respond to the regulation, assembling the S and Note series in the country. As a result, Samsung can sell their Galaxy lineup in full force. Meanwhile, Apple has not even launched the 6S/SE in Indonesia, and LTE iPads are not available either. Sure, there are gray market imports available, but the government is enforcing its high import duties in the country's ports.

Even the Chinese companies are feeling the pain. Newer Xiaomi handsets with global ROM would disable LTE when an Indonesian SIM is inserted (I believe Xiaomi managed to get an agreement to overcome this though).

Cool so now they can research new lame products in another country!

Or new watch bands......

That's not really a adding to the discussion here.

Designed by Apple in Indonesia

I am a long time Mac user and I feel that Apple has lost its focus. Apple computers were the best back then. Upgradable if you grew out of what it did when you bought it. Then Apple went for the consumer market as well. They stripped down things they thought would not be needed. Remember the first iMac? Just USB ports. The pros were screaming and yelling! But this was a consumer Mac. The Power Mac still had all its bells and whistles. Same with the iBook and Power Book. The pros got what they needed to work. The consumers got the nice looking gadgets.

Nowadays there is no pro machine. Well let me reword this. There is no machine for the pros today. The MacBook Pro is basically a MacBook Deluxe. Pros need upgradability. Pros need ports. They don't care if the machine is 50 grams lighter or 3 mm thinner.

Apple has lost its focus. This sounds like bitching but this is what is going on. Just look at the iPad lineup. Or the abandoned Mac Pros, Airport devices and monitors. Apple is run by toner heads.

The Mac has always been about the consumer market since its exception. Steve Jobs introduced the Macintosh as the computer for the rest of us. The original Macintosh 128K never included any option for expansion and was targeted at general consumers and creatives. Apple didn't start introducing expandability until after Steve Jobs had long left the company with the Macintosh SE and II.

The company has always been about the consumer and this returned with the iMac. Apple's Pro target in the late 90's and 2000's was strategic. Apple needed a bargaining chip to keep the Mac relevant. Steve Jobs went on a buying spree collecting a vast collection of professional creative apps and using those teams to create consumer oriented versions. Final Cut/iMovie, Logic/Garageband, iPhoto/Aperture, Motion, Shake. Once that bargaining chip was in place, other creative apps had to follow, Adobe, Macromedia, Quark many others.

Since Apple has established OS X/macOS as a mature platform and third party pro apps are fully established and matured on the platform; there is little need to compete there. Instead, the focus is on refining their hardware products and also go back to the core, the consumer. Not everbody needs to be a creative professional to own a Mac. You might just like the hardware and nothing else.

There have been some unjustified criticism of Apples products, especially the desktop computers and notebooks. I honestly would like to know, what users are doing so much with their Macs that would cause them to determine Apple's offerings unsatisfactory? What are you making with these computers? I think part of what has happened over the past 10 years with the transition to Intel, a lot of new users came from the WinTel platform (including myself) and came with the feeds and speed mentality.

A lot of these new generation of Mac users are partly bandwagonists. They are not actual core users of the platform. They wanted to be part of something and this was part of the Steve Jobs aurora. The sales pitch is not as convincing with a Phil Schiller or Ive. Certainly, if Steve presented the new MacBooks, many would not complaining.

The days when Apple was behind with the PowerPC chip; they never cared much for the platform. When Steve introduced the Intel transition, he focused on performance per watt. Not about having a machine with the most RAM or fastest GHz. We have fallen into this trap in 2016 of believing we must future proof the living daylights out of a system to find some imaginary value that will justify buying. We stop looking at buying to meet our "genuine" needs and not who has the biggest (you know what). I think a lot of the unboxing videos on YouTube have fed into this too.

This month I visited the states and of course I checked out the iPhone 7 Plus, which I had my eyes on as a possible upgrade from my standard 6s. After checking it out, I asked myself, do I really need this? I had the cash ready, but I said, is this going make posting to Facebook, Twitter, or improve filtered photos on IG any better? I am able to do so much already; I have not exhausted the 64 GBs of space in the phone, all my iTunes library, photos taken over the past year are on it.

The new MacBook Pro is nice, but I don't want it, because my 2015 MBP 13 Broadwell is still a great machine that does all I need. I use it for what it is, not to satisfy some imaginary need. I run a couple VMs on 8 GBs of RAM with it, play music in iTunes, surf the web in Firefox and Safari, constantly in Word, working on a slide show in PPT and its not even sweating.

I was watching Computer Chronicles this week and an Apple rep was creating professional content on a Power Mac G3 for broadcast. That proved to be a core target audience and it got the job done in 1999. I just want to know why can't a maxed out MBP 15 or entry level model in 2016 do this? Why would it not do this in 2018 too? Users were doing major motion picture post production on Macs for ages and they didn't seem held back by it.

Show me your Grammy, Emmy, Oscar and other accolades then I might be receptive to your complaint. If you are not creating motion pictures, then stop complaining. Even then, if you were, you would have use whatever that movie studio provides you, whether that's a 2013 Mac Pro or a 2016 Dell Precision with Linux and Lightworks. Don't tell me that the 2016 MacBook Pro is not enough for you to edit pictures of your children picking boogers in 4k or a member of your church eating cake.

I am a long time Mac user and I feel that Apple has lost its focus. Apple computers were the best back then. Upgradable if you grew out of what it did when you bought it. Then Apple went for the consumer market as well. They stripped down things they thought would not be needed. Remember the first iMac? Just USB ports. The pros were screaming and yelling! But this was a consumer Mac. The Power Mac still had all its bells and whistles. Same with the iBook and Power Book. The pros got what they needed to work. The consumers got the nice looking gadgets.

Nowadays there is no pro machine. Well let me reword this. There is no machine for the pros today. The MacBook Pro is basically a MacBook Deluxe. Pros need upgradability. Pros need ports. They don't care if the machine is 50 grams lighter or 3 mm thinner.

Apple has lost its focus. This sounds like bitching but this is what is going on. Just look at the iPad lineup. Or the abandoned Mac Pros, Airport devices and monitors. Apple is run by toner heads.

They'd never do that, and their recent stuff proves that. The Watch even proves they'd rather develop new products as an excuse to make even bigger profit margins than ever.

You'd almost think they are a for-profit business. It's shocking. :rolleyes:

All these R&D centers and we are still stuck with awful design; Apple Mail is like something from the nineties; Safari is skeletal; iMovie... never mind; Messages/iMessage is sad - compared to say, Snapchat; Phones are unimaginative in design... a rectangular screen with a metal backing... so East Germany 1980; iOS UI has not appreciably changed from the days of Palm Pilot in the nineties - the icons are higher resolution and color - big deal; *still* no AR products - three years late so far; security always on the verge of apocalypse; these R&D places create jobs for construction industry... what else?
The watch bands are hilarious... bondage from the stone age... upgraded to plastic - help!