Soon after the first iPhone was launched, it was fairly easy to see that it would, by its design, eventually subsume the iPod. We watched it coming and expected iPod sales to wither. But in the case of the iPad and the Mac, the progression isn’t so clear. In these uncertain times, Apple could do a lot, with marketing and product rollouts, to provide warmer fuzzies about the roadmap (without spilling any secrets). Apple Has its Eye on the Ball, but Its a Different Ball set up the discussion, and page twocataloged some cases about how Apple’s lack of messaging, via product design, is creating customer angst.
Check It Out: Lack of Products Means Absence of Product Vision by Apple
what if the future of Apple really is the iPhone. A little brick of computing that has its own screen when you are on the go, and that sends to Apple TV when you want to watch something, and that works on a smaller up close display with a keyboard when you want to write a paper?
Apple is not about more
Lots of “pros” have already moved to Windows machines already anyway. Without some serious new hardware announcements with reasonable pricing there will be massive defections later this year.
Or just no CPUs to really drive a future.
– Apple makes great machine
– Wintel OEMs copies design and adds a little more
– Apple fans complain about lack of vision
– rinse repeat until we all die
Very well assembled digest of issues. Each article is sensibly supported, balanced and correct. But they don’t touch on the question of WHY Apple now finds itself in these straits, or perhaps I should say once again finds itself.
In a number of posts over the years, I compare Apple to Porsche, owing to their similar commitments to quality experiences and very dear prices. I see Apple’s product engineering now in the same doldrums Porsche experienced from 1996 through through 2008, when they were run by accountants, not by passionate petrol-head engineers. In 2009, Porsche shook off many compromises derived from designing to a price. Porsche once again focuses on experience, as evidenced by class-leading performance at eye-watering prices. That doesn’t mean they get everything right; it means they regained VISION.
Apple started with vision, lost it, then regained it again when Steve Jobs returned to put the house back in order. And what order that turned out to be! iMacs, MacBooks, Mac Pros, PowerBooks, OSX, iPod, iPhone, iPad — every generation better, smarter, faster than the last, shedding prehensile ports and sprouting features like Darwin with a lightning rod up his keester and a Illumina NextSeq 550 in the Beagle’s hold.
That Apple was built by a committed engineer with a singular, progressive vision – a person who rallied teams of like-minded engineers and designers to the cause, despite a tyrannical refusal to compromise. But maybe that was Old Product Apple not New Accountant Apple. Maybe that’s why Apple is running out of nice things.
Did I take a wrong turn on the internet and end up in the macrumors comment section?