You will never be able to understand the success of Apple and Jobs until you get over this misapprehension that Apple users are chumps who got snowed by the greatest huckster since P.T. Barnum.
Technological products are more than the sum of their parts. Design matters.
You can make that assertion, I suppose, but the evidence available doesn’t support it. Have you ever used a pre-2007 smartphone? Or the immensely terrible copycats that came out shortly after the iPhone? It took years for other companies to ship a remotely capable competitor, and that’s with an actual functional iPhone to refer to. Did you ever use a pre-iPad tablet? Despite the fact that it’s “just a big iPod touch” and came out 3 years later, somehow the rest of the world hadn’t managed to make one that didn’t suck.
Apple has never made many products. What they’ve made is a few very good ones. Also, you seem to be ignoringseveralof them.
Most of which either doesn’t make any money or gets cancelled. Don’t get me wrong, Google is awesome, too. But they have a very different philosophy. Google does product experimentation in the open. I guarantee you that someone at Apple experimented with a wearable camera of some sort. But they never released it because it was horrible. Google released theirs.
You are wrong about this. Was the desktop computer market saturated in 1977? Was the mp3 player market saturated in 2001? Was the smartphone market saturated in 2007? Was the tablet market saturated in 2010?
In fact, for the most part, it’s the opposite of what you say- they were all burgeoning, wide-open markets with few if any dominant market leading products.
Just skimmed the topic. I don’t know that much about him, but I will say this; he didn’t deserve a calendar I saw in the store awhile ago. He’s not that cool.
I concur, the Isaacson biography is excellent. I might actually read it a second time just because it was such a good read.
Steve Jobs was:
[ul]
[li]An asshole[/li][li]An eccentric[/li][li]A workaholic[/li][li]A marketing genius and master persuader[/li][li]A technological visionary[/li][/ul]
When he came back to Apple he really and truly turned it around – it was no mere coincidence – and in the process, he helped to change the world.
I thought the early iPods (the ultraminiature HDD ones which were neither reliable nor did they have good sound quality) were a good idea that wasn’t well implemented. The doubts that you express were what I had about the iPad. My attitude could have been summed up as “WTF?” That’s because I was thinking in terms of traditional computers and laptops – like, who would want a laptop with the keyboard and mouse removed? And the answer was: no one would, but Jobs had envisioned an entirely new market where computer technology would be used by consumers in an entirely different way. That is, the iPad wasn’t a laptop with stuff removed, it was an entirely new kind of product.
I don’t know if the OP is old enough to remember Apple Computer in 1997, when it was on the verge of bankruptcy. Wired Magazine famously ran a cover story, titled “Pray” about how close Apple was to the end. Microsoft, of all companies, invested $150 million in Apple, partly to ensure a valid competitor. Shortly thereafter, Steve Jobs returned and led Apple through one of the most amazing turnarounds in history; the most valuable company in America and one with a cash hoard today of about $200 billion.
Bullshit. They had sound quality as good as the files you put on them and the headphones or speakers you hooked up to them.
“The iPod’s measured behavior is better than many CD players—ironic, considering that most of the time it will be used to play MP3 and AAC files, which will not immediately benefit from such good performance. But if you’re willing to trade off maximum playing time against the ability to play uncompressed AIFF or WAV files, the iPod will do an excellent job of decoding them. Excellent, cost-effective audio engineering from an unexpected source.—John Atkinson”
I’ve seen reviews of multiple versions of iPods and iPhones and they all had excellent measured performance. Here a review of the iPhone 6+ which has audio performance comparable to high-end audiophile DACs: Apple iPhone 6 Plus Review
(Not that it matters much, because headphones and speakers are generally the bottleneck in audio quality.)
This is getting way off the Steve Jobs topic, but I really have to respond to this kind of nonsense. I don’t know whether this is a problem of you not knowing what you’re talking about, or not understanding what I’m talking about. In any case, what I’m talking about is the 3rd gen original Ipod (circa about 2003) with the subminiature 15 GB HDD (and extremely unreliable, in my experience) which also came in models up to 40 GB.
I did a variety of careful audio tests on this thing, using a variety of sound systems but NOT the iPod earbuds which I hate and don’t fit in my ears anyway. These included the Grado SR-60, an old but wonderful pair of Sony MDR-80s, and a modest but adequate $5K home theater system, in all of which I did the following direct comparisons:
an original CD
CD ripped to MP3 in 128, 196, and 320 Kbps
rip played back on said iPod, and on three other MP3 players that I had on hand, including a cheap solid-state keyfob-type unit that I just bought for comparison, for about a tenth the price of the iPod
As suggested by this comment, the original 3gen iPod came dead last. It sounded like an AM radio compared to the other players, using any output, at any sampling rate.
Please pay attention to the bolded phrase above.
But you can quote things on teh Interwebs to contradict what I actually experienced. I know. I saw lots of those. That’s why I was persuaded to make the mistake of buying the fucking thing. Which HDD kept failing even after three replacements by Apple of the whole unit, and never sounded as good as the cheap keyfob thing I had. Which is not an indictment of the stuff that Apple produced afterwards. Just don’t tell me that I didn’t hear what I heard or that I didn’t experience what I experienced.
ETA: In case it’s not clear from the above, Apple improved their DACs and associated electronics tremendously in subsequent generations of devices – no argument about that. But what I said is true for the generation of device I was talking about.
And I can tell stories about how bad the Mac computers were at school in the late 90s. School districts probably didn’t buy anywhere near enough ram, and the Mac OS at the time was extremely slow and would thrash the disk constantly. Windows PCs were crashy but at least more responsive in that era. (this was pre-XP, when it was not uncommon for crashing software to bring down the entire system)
Point is, Apple learned from their mistakes and on average does better than their competitors at it. Their price premium is more like 30%, not 10x.
For many people, a higher quality, more usable device is worth paying 30% more. Some people can’t afford the extra 30% or have philosophical issues, so they buy cheap. Also, there are bottom of the barrel, cut rate phones now available for less than $100 - price difference isn’t 30%, but that 30% I quote is for roughly the same hardware.
Somewhere in the Isaacson book, there’s a quote attributed to Henry Ford on the marketing of the automobile to the general public. (From memory): “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would’ve said, ‘a faster horse’”.
Nitpick
It wasn’t the iPod that was a success it was iTunes. Once people got trapped in that environment they couldn’t take their music anywhere else. It was use Apple products or throw away hundreds of dollars worth of music to go somewhere else. iTunes made electronic music simple but it also made everyone who used it a slave to whatever Apple wanted from that point onward.
I saw people in Hong Kong using touchscreen phones two years before the first iPhone, I had an iPod which was very nice to use with the scrolling wheel, but hugely expensive and changing the battery was exorbitant. They were being stolen in their thousands and the technology was there to turn them off, but Apple wouldn’t allow that as it would affect their sales. Watching the fans rush in to buy the latest iteration of tech they already own is absurd, regardless of whether it’s much better than the competition (it isn’t). Apple products are emotive and have been very successfully marketed as a desirable, fashionable product within - just - the pockets of most. Jobs on a stage reflecting on how his new product would change everything was swallowed by so many, including most mainstream media, in such a way I could only stand back and wonder how they could be so taken in by the fluff.
I had one of those touchscreen phones, imported to the U.S., a couple years before the first iphone.
Guess what? It was worthless. It was a resistive touchscreen, and was unreliable in actually recognizing touches. It had terrible battery life. It had bad audio quality. It was very slow. Few of the onboard apps worked very well. It was a brick.
He was really poor at understanding tech. He didn’t get how much something would really cost or how long it would really take to develop. A lot of his decisions based on this ignorance hurt Apple.
He was a poor manager. Nasty, inflexible, etc. Again, really hurt Apple. Drove away talented people.
But he could sell, sell, sell. He’s basically Donald Trump’s half-brother.
It is important to mention that, along with that investment, Microsoft also committed to developing new versions of Mac Office for five years. Mac-only versions, with Mac-specific features and such; not just a straight-up port of Windows Office.
I know there are people that buy iPhone every year to upgrade to the latest, but are they really that numerous? For a long time (at least for us in the USA) it only made sense to upgrade every two years because that was the length of the contract with the wireless company. The upfront money was small compare to the overall cost of the phone, and the rest was baked into the cellphone plan. To me it seems that the people wanting the newest iPhone are at the end of the life cycle for their current one. Why wouldn’t you want to buy it when it came out? At least for a while there it made sense to upgrade because you were paying for the phone subsidy whether you upgraded or not. Things are changing now since subsidies are going away.
Also, Apple shoots itself in the foot by making excellent long lasting products too. My ipad2 is still going strong. No need to upgrade. iPad sales are down and a big part of the reason is the longevity of the products.
It’s probably true, per say, but the reason Apple wasn’t willing to lock out their iDevices is because it’s actually a thorny problem. What stops someone who pays for a device legitimately, from the rightful owner, from having it locked out because the owner who sold it feels spiteful? How do you guarantee communication with the devices? How do you make certain hackers can’t abuse this mechanism to lock out millions of people? How do you deal with the fact that customers know their iDevice can be locked out at any time, permanently bricking it?
None of these problems, except the last one, are unsolvable, but it’s not a no brainer, and it’s not a feature you would want to rush into production. Much better to just ship a device that works as reliably as possible, all the time, no matter who is holding it.
Also, Samsung phones and other expensive devices get stolen by the thousands as well. Apple is just particularly vulnerable because their stuff has a high resale value.
I inferred that he was talking about iPods, specifically, because it was the widespread spate of iPod thefts back when they were hugely popular that all the media outlets kept reporting on. So he’d be wrong that there was an already in-use way for Apple to brick all those stolen iPods. If he’s talking about iPhones, he explicitly made the claim that Apple wouldn’t do anything about that because it would harm their sales. That claim is bullshit, but if he can back it up with a cite, I’d like to see it.