This is so typical of Apple criticism. They did do well with the iPhone and Mac that now any new innovations seem boring in comparison. It’s wrong.
The Apple Watch came out under Cook. That is more than an “accessory.” It’s a new platform, new OS variant, etc. It’s dominating smart watches.
The AirPods are pretty innovative in terms of the fine grained details that have made them super successful.
Latest OS builds included evidence of stereoscopic glasses in the pipeline.
Remember Apple isn’t always the first with stuff, even smartphones. Their innovations are more around key details and hardware/software integration that makes the whole system work like magic.
You don't get these kinds of problems when you aren't trying to mass produce cyclical consumption.
The Newton is an interesting foil.
Why wasn't the Newton the first smart phone? Early internet, barely a high-speed cellular infrastructure, silicon not quite small and efficient enough, no lithium batteries, cost....
Saying the Newton was "ahead of its time" is really a way of saying all the right bits and pieces weren't there yet.
We'll know what the next "big thing" is after it happens. You can't force it though regardless of the dollars you have for R&D.
Just MHO.
They almost did it with wireless speakers (the HomePod is an absolute engineering marvel, entirely unparalleled as a speaker), but they left out bluetooth in a platform play for AirPlay on their own phones/tablets, and it basically flopped. It would have been an airpods-level success if it were a record player that could play everybody’s records.
People keep talking about how they might do it with cars, or televisions, or glasses, or whatever. But so far, as yet, that has failed to materialize.
Edit: I left out the watch, despite it being the best selling watch. It isn’t as better than a normal watch as an iPhone was better than a blackberry; it is merely sufficient: great, but certainly not insanely so. If it could support Google Assistant instead of Siri, and had better bluetooth device support, and didn’t require an iphone, it might be. But the watch presently really just falls short of the Apple level expectation for a product. To be fair, that level is literally “insane”.
I mean they just did that with smart watches and earbuds, under Cook. They are totally dominating those categories with uncontroversially the best designed products. Not good enough for you?
I'm not familiar with the Apple Watch (nor the iPhone much to be honest). I'm kind of an old-timer that fondly remembers the Apple II and the early Macintosh.
Should have added an emphasis that, _for me_, I feel that their magic is fading. Same with Google, in their early years I was amazed - now, not so much. I guess miracles don't happen so often, and I should respect their continued growth and renewal. (And there are still elves working there.)
But that feeling is irrelevant to whether or not they are innovating or not.
The Apple Watch is literally designed to be an accessory to the iPhone - you can't use most of its features without an iPhone. I wanted one for my Android phone but tough shit for me.
If you like it as a product that's fine, but it is absolutely an accessory to an iPhone because you can barely use it without one.
Versioning wise it feels more like following up the v1 with v2 and a 1.1 revision.
If Apple doesn’t make sufficient changes and upgrades, nobody else can - and the device is back to being an appliance that has the functionality that it has right now and nothing further, and it’s not “just a software upgrade away”.
There’s still no way to get the time display off of the face of my Apple Watch. You can customize everything except turning off the clock.
As of the latest OS you can download apps directly to it.
I’m at a point where I’m surprisingly preferring Windows and Linux for my desktop work. I just wish there was a better alternative in the mobile space than Android, which I feel is in an even worse state than iOS.
That philosophy was Steve Jobs' key insight back than. Today many companies excel at magical ux design.
And sure, their control over iOS and their rich clients allow them to do stuff others cannot. And definetly, it's incremental innovation.
But that's very little innovation, considering their size or compared to their competitors - Google AI and moonshots, Amazon(where do i even begin), or Microsoft(Cloud and their research efforts).
People seem to forget that one of the first things Jobs did was get rid of Apple’s Advanced Technology Group and focused research on profitable products.
Google’s lack of focus explains why it has had five failed messaging apps.
And they have a few bets that with time and some luck could make them a lot of money.
It's very likely they would be able to cover their investments, at the very least.
And they have ackuired many new capabilities as a result.
It makes for a better financial future, a stronger company long term, and also, contributing so much value to the world is simply a good thing.
In 2001 Google probably only sold search ads.
Today they sell ads on so many digital places, some of those they own.
As for the question of "long term" - Google X was founded only 9 years ago.
That probably a reasonable time for a drug startup to show sucsess.
And they recently started testing self-driving cars with no safety driver , with real passengers. So they're close to some deployment.
That seems quite good.
Microsoft has released Azure.
Saying that a Google sells ads in more places is about as “diversified” as saying Apple sells iPhones on more carriers.
YouTube profits from selling ads, that's true.
Yes YouTube makes all of their money from selling ads. But it's fate is highly independent from Google search. That's diversification.
Same idea goes for Other Google businesses.
As for Apple - it's less diversified than it seems: the fate of the watch, for example, is highly dependent on the fate of the iPhone.
Innovation at Apple scale takes time. Let’s see what happens with AR.
Compare this chart to Google’s
https://sixcolors.com/images/content/2019/financials-2019-7-...
The iPhone was a once in a lifetime thing. Even in 2007 there were 1 billion phones a year being sold (Apple said they wanted to capture 1% of the market by selling 10 million in its first year).
By definition, what electronic market can be much larger than one that has a 80%+ penetration?
(As an illustration for this post: https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2016/10/why-apple-doesnt-care-abo...)
By 2009 Apple's iPhone business was larger than its personal computer business. By 2011 it was larger than all of Apple's other businesses put together. By 2015 it was several times larger than all of Apple's other businesses put together.
Which is why, even though I'm not the world's biggest Apple fan, it always amuses me to hear people complain that Tim Cook hasn't pulled another iPhone out of his hat. The iPhone was the kind of hit that only comes along every two or three decades. I'm struggling to think of anyone who's produced two hits on that scale.
If you look at Google’s revenue and profit mix, it looks the same as it did in 2007 - advertising.
Microsoft and Apple have been able to pivot. Even while the Mac is only 10% of Apple’s revenue, even it has grown slowly throughout the years.
Another note from your article - Apple sold $23 Billion dollars worth of Macs in 2016.
Between 2010 - 2016. Google has only made $31 billion in revenue on Android (https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/21/10810834/android-generate...).
What limits Apple to the electronics market? It's been clear for a long time that they need to grow outside of electronics. Apple's value is in its design and brand. They could be so much more than an electronics company, under different leadership.
AOL/TimeWarner
General Electric/Universal/Synchrony Bank
AT&T/DirecTV
Google/Motorola
....
It's really not healthy for a company to build a whole constellation of products and services around one product only. It creates unnecessary risk because if that product ever sours, everything will fall apart.
None of the tech giants are well diversified - with Google being the least diversified. Facebook just buys up competitors.
Amazon has retail and AWS. Microsoft has software and Cloud.
Source: I was briefly a product lead for a large tech company's anti-adblocking efforts and worked with publishers and others globally to measure these rates.
Beyond that, even though I've been out of the game for a few years, I have to be careful what I say. But I've been planning on writing something soon.
Someday soon we will put AdGuard in as the DNS provider for our parents and other relatives.
The same way Firefox and Google Chrome got adopted.
Advertising has gone from an annoyance to a potential serious threat to our well being from an increasingly surveillance oriented ecosystem.
Pi Hole blocks anywhere from 35 - 50% of all requests in my home. That's an astounding number of requests for an apartment with two residents.
Continue, not begin.
Directly to advertisers and indirectly through content creators, so they have multiple channels at least.
Not an Apple fan at all, but if I could pick an employer, Apple actually is on a track to become more favorable. Still, their locked down environments aren't really interesting if you don't care about monetizing software directly.
Apple has definitely slowed down quite a bit under Cook. But that is comparing from Apple's best to Current Apple. iOS 13 and macOS quality has definitely slipped. Along with the extremely long denial and no reaction pattern of Mac, Mac Pro and MacBook Pro Keyboard problems. But they are still Innovating like hell on iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and AirPod. Getting a decent iPhone out every year, which also happens to be the best selling Smartphone around the world is no small task. Services is also growing, although I am still not too fond of the idea of Apple TV, Arcade and News.
Those so call "bunch of accessory and services" would have been a Fortune 2000 company on its own, and likely to be Fortune 500 soon if not already.
isn't Apple+ the largest diversification Apple has had in a long time?