The end of Apple as we know it?

They do lack a driven visionary, which was instrumental to all their revival and recent success.

I bought the 17-inch Macbook Pro just a week before the retina came out (on purpose). It is worth every damn penny.

One thing that Apple does is clearly telegraph where they are planning to go. They drop support for old devices quickly and lavish support onto the product vectors they want to go all out on. As a consumer it makes the decision to buy a slightly cheaper but soon to be unsupported device vs. a more expensive but should have good support for the next 3 or 4 years easy.

But once you end up dropping off of the support curve, it gets frustrating rather quickly. I have a 6 year old Dell laptop and a slightly newer MBP.

The Dell is still finding lots of life even these days, doing time as a file server/NAS device and now a Chromecast laptop for my living room (for Chrome tab broadcast). I recently installed Windows 7 on it and it runs pretty much what I need like a champ -- full driver support and everything.

Now my MBP, I can't really find much use it for other than a little web surfing, and even that is hopelessly crippled due to OS requirements for flash upgrades -- even though the hardware is powerful enough to do what I need, the version of OS X I need to get the latest flash updates (so I can watch Hulu on it for example) doesn't support the device. Hell my virtually unsupported netbook from the same era is more useful at this point.

The low-price iPhone is precisely targeted at markets whose price-structure is setup differently than the United States (read Asia). In the United States, carries subsidize the device price in exchange for a multi-year contract with the consumer. In many other countries, this isn't the model. Consumers buy the phone up-front. There is no subsidy. In order to sell a product in that market, and make your pricing attractive, it can't be a $600 device - it needs to be more-affordable. That's why they're releasing a less-expensive device, and it's no coincidence that it's happening around the time they're striking a deal with China's largest carrier.

I agree the doom and gloom is tiresome and poorly substantiated. That being said, the phone market is not the same as the music player market.

The iPods segregated themselves among different use cases and different needs. The Shuffle was always pitched as the "active" iPod (see: the clip on the back), the Nano the everyday iPod, and the iPod Classic the one for the serious enthusiast who needs enormous storage above all else.

The smartphone market lacks such segmentation. Everybody wants a phone that makes phone calls, receives texts, and runs apps. There's not really any room to segment price-wise except to simply make the same thing but cheaper.

Article Text:

With news leaking out that Apple will soon introduce a lower-priced iPhone, many investors, managers, competitors and observers are focused on how this will boost Apple’s market share, especially in emerging markets.

Perhaps of even greater interest to me, however, is what this means for Apple as a company, and more generally, whether corporate cultures are fluid enough to accommodate abrupt shifts in strategy.

My conclusion: Leaders should be careful what they wish for. Apple has been a modern marvel. Starting with the revolutionary iPod, the company’s former chief executive officer Steve Jobs spearheaded an attack on the established order in consumer electronic devices. And this was an industry ripe for disruption. When the state of the art is the Sony Walkman, you know there’s real opportunity to change the game.

Of course, Apple moved on from iPod to iPhone and iPad, using iTunes to shake up the music, book, and software businesses in the process. The one commonality among all these innovations is not just that they were new, but that they were radically new.

Ironically, and unusually for a technology company, Apple was not really competing on the basis of technology. The MP3 player that they called iPod was, and is, considerably inferior to other MP3 players in terms of sound quality. The iPod was a sub-standard technological product competing in a technological arena, yet, it won.

Why? Because Apple differentiated on three key elements that resonated with customers: design, access to content via iTunes and brand prestige.  The real innovation was embodied in these first two elements, which, when coupled with the iconic leadership of Jobs, collectively captured cool.

That strategy continued with the iPhone, whose brand cache was so strong that customers lined up for hours to buy each new version the company introduced. The early Samsung commercials mocking the herd behaviour of iPhone fans (yes, I was one), waiting to buy a product for features the Galaxy also boasted (and often with superior qualities), were so memorable precisely because they revealed just what was behind Apple’s kimono. 

The iPad was also a revolutionary product. It even started a new product category that customers didn’t know existed. A company that breaks the rules, changes the world, and does it all with panache and coolness is a tough act to beat.

That is, until it starts cutting prices. Companies that compete on the basis of price become commodity sellers. That the company Jobs ran could be in a commodity business is almost unfathomable. The next thing you know, they’ll be offering coupons in newspaper supplements for phones that are “new and improved.” Now, there’s nothing wrong, per se, with a strategy that is all about market segmentation, using price as a competitive weapon and targeting promotions to specific customer groups. After all, that’s the bread and butter of the world’s best consumer packaged goods companies, from Procter & Gamble to General Mills. For companies like these, category management and brand management have been elevated to an art form.

Culture shift But that’s not what Apple is, which means if the company wants to shift strategy in this way, its leaders need to retool the culture in as radical a manner as earlier product offerings changed how people worked and lived. We should expect many employees to leave, unhappy to work in a company that is no longer changing the world. We should also expect Apple to bring in new talent with backgrounds from the P&G’s and Unilever’s of the world. Apple stores will need to keep their true believer sales staff energised to sell ten versions of the iPhone to customers who will no longer feel fortunate to even be in the store. They’ll be more demanding customers who will want to know why the iPhone lite sells for $10 more than the latest Galaxy. Maybe Apple will need to bring back its former guru Ron Johnson, who built out the stores, to apply what he learned from his short and unsuccessful stint as CEO of clothing discounter J.C. Penney.

It’s not that a company cannot operate with two opposing modes — radical innovation and category management. Pharmaceutical companies like Novartis have been excellent at developing new drugs while simultaneously managing a variety of consumer brands. But it’s not easy. Novartis, for example, has completely separate divisions in pharma and consumer, with little interaction between them. It’s unlikely the mobile device industry can be similarly segregated into independent camps.

One more thing: When we add in the latest effort from activist investor Carl Icahn to tap Apple’s vast cash on hand to enrich shareholders, the winds of change become even more ominous — at least for those who admire the company’s track record of radical innovation.

The stars are being aligned toward a vision that is the antithesis of what Jobs dedicated his career towards. Rather than making great products that change how people work and play, Apple is on a path toward the mundane, a virtual John Sculley redux where consumer packaged goods are dressed up as high-tech and nobody really cares anymore. The last time this battle was fought, Jobs lost his job to the forces of conformity and short-term profit maximisation. The spiral of ordinariness took more than a decade to overcome — and not until the prodigal son returned to the helm of the company he co-founded. That can’t happen this time. If Apple does choose to embark on the “new and improved” competitive train, many card-carrying acolytes — employees and customers alike – will step off, some to start new ventures that promise grandeur once again, and others to sit home waiting for the new new thing to once again come calling.

And what a loss that would be.

Well, it's probably true when "other" is used to designate very specific high-sound-quality models (e.g. Cowon a few years ago, not sure where they stand now), you can always find better and ipods are of average sound quality at best, they've never been an audiophile's PMP (or a PMP for driving high-impedance cans).

It's a completely pointless statement though.

I think it's more accurate to say the iPod (which one?) was not superior in all aspects of an MP3 player (especially in price). But IMO it had a very healthy balance of well done properties and good design. It was a device easy to love because unlike most other devices, it had way fewer glaring flaws and frustrating UI decisions.

TL;DR: It's better to be great overall than excelling at just some features while also having crappy downfalls.

As someone who used to be in to audiophilia, debates on sound quality of equipment and the supposed night and day differences are an incredible exercise in futility and purchase justification. Smoke some cannabis and $5 earbuds fed by a no-name MP3 player will deliver more detail than the custom modded Sennheisers fed by an amp and DAC stack imported from a boutique in Belgium would have gotten you otherwise.

I have one that never used, besides the first days as it was a gift and I already had a mp3 player.

I always found the menu wheel too fragile.

One advantage to growing older is that since you can no longer hear the difference between lo-fi and hi-fi, audio equipment gets a lot less expensive!

The DACs are pretty much the same as you could find in any other mp3 player. The cowon ones and so on were somewhat better, but not massively so. You can see a battery of tests performed on various ipods as well as professional DACs costing thousands of $ here: http://www.daefeatures.co.uk/rmaa.php

They don't kick out a lot of power, so they don't cope well with fancy headphones.

The bad reputation of the ipod's sound stems largely from those white earbuds that came in the box, which are genuinely abominable. That and confirmation bias/placebo/etc.

It's a complete crock. Most MP3 players today, and iPods for their entire history, offer pretty much perfect audio reproduction (modulo lossiness in MP3). Plenty of folks don't like the earbuds and, to be sure, the iPod was not technically superior to its rivals on first release -- the thing that made the iPod successful was end-to-end near seamless experience including purchasing of music, redownloading lost content, ripping music, managing library, syncing to devices, and so forth, which Apple's rivals repeatedly and ineptly failed to reproduce (Microsoft came close, with Zune, but it was too little too late). And yes, iTunes on Windows is a slug, etc., but rival products were always in some crucial respect worse.

I feel bad for the folks that designed the Rio, they must feel like the folks at GO Corp. when tablets are discussed.