Apple & Focus

If you’re a non-geek, you might have missed Apple's announcement of their new line of MacBook Pros this week. After almost two years with no updates, Apple opted for what was a marginal upgrade in most areas (minus a few notable features). 

As a pro user I was underwhelmed. The CPU speed is actually slower than my almost 3 year old machine. They removed a lot of the ports I rely on, and they bumped the price up by almost $400 of the entry level model. 

How could Apple, a company worth 495 billion dollars, not create a mind blowing next-gen MacBook Pro? 

For the same reason that most of us don’t get much done: we lack focus. 

Apple only has so many amazing engineers (there’s a lot of competition from Google and a thousand other tech companies). Those engineers can only focus on a certain number of significant products. With Apple releasing a new iPhone every year, OS updates, and a slew of other mobile devices on a semi-regular basis, traditional computers have drifted to the peripherals of the company’s priority list. 

This is really important for us to remember. You and I only have a limited amount of time. If we’re really productive, most of us might have 8 hours a day that we can do something meaningful and game changing in our career. 

We have to be very careful that we say yes to only the really great things. And then we have to let the things that the good things go without regrets.