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Entangled

What would Steve Jobs do?

A Mac Nano for $99 to compete with the Raspberry Pi.

A Mac Mini for $199 to spread the love of OSX.

An iPhone mini for $199 to spread the love of iOS.

A 60" Apple TV (yes, with screen) with an iPod like remote.

Siri.com as a text search engine.

Apple Pay as money transfer between individuals.

If Apple wants to keep their high quality mark untouched, they should spin a second company codenamed "Orange" and deliver lower quality devices in order to spread their platforms.

It is time for Apple to leave the constrained niche they've cornered themselves into. 10% of the top market is a good position to hold forever, just like Rolex, but in the era of social virality market penetration is a must for survival, you must be everywhere and in every device.

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Apple's weakness will always be that they strive towards perfection, which biases them towards creating monolithic mass market product lines.

Things an end user might constitute a critical modification for some market, like a bottle opener super glued to the back of a phone, is a blemish in the eye of Jony Ive. Apple employees are grossed out by hacks, so they can't operate in the long tail. They can only go after the big glorious spike toward the perfect unified One True Way and therefore are destined to hold only 20% market share.

They serve that 20% damn well though. People who want designers to think things out for them.

There's another kind of designer, who designs for chaos, for modification, for play. But those people don't work at Apple.

Which is a very valid point, I applaud them for their vision for excellence. But in today's world, where market share is crucial for the adoption of new technologies, they can hardly survive with a 20% share of the marketplace in the near future.

For payment networks total penetration is crucial, for open markets, social platforms, productive software, for search engines. Again, a Rolex can survive as a timeless jewel in your wrist since it does not need interaction with the rest of the world, but good luck competing with Whatsapp, Facebook, Amazon, Google, Paypal, even Uber or MS Office if only 10% of your userbase can afford your exclusive products.

That's why I propose they create a sister business in charge of expanding their market penetration with cheaper products or face extinction by isolation. Apple for the elites, Orange for the plebes, both using their platform which in turn will allow them to capture a greater market share for their future technologies.

I can't do Facetime with my mother or brother because they don't have Apple products. We could if they had an Orange product for $99 running OSX or iOS.

You just explained exactly why FaceTime will lose to snapchat/Facebook/WebRTC/etc in the long run. Facebook profits from every platform. Apple profits from there being a hierarchy of incompatible platforms.

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