Posts tagged “Apple”
I thought it could best be summed up with these two articles. Read both full articles but for the lazy:
Daring Fireball: The Just-Buy-Our-Devices Model
I see Apple “monetizing” Siri simply as a way to sell more devices — more iPhones now, more iPads (and who knows, maybe Macs?) in the future. Siri could be the interface to future products, like tiny little Nano-sized devices, or home entertainment systems. Google’s ad-driven model disrupted Microsoft’s pay-for-software-licenses model. Apple’s just-buy-our-devices-and-look-at-all-the-cool-shit-you-get-with-them model could disrupt Google’s ad-driven model.
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Siri doesn’t need to lead to advertising in order to add to Apple’s bottom line. Consider iCloud — Apple now offers free-of-charge online services ad-free. It’s a sunk cost in the name of the overall experience for Apple device buyers.
TidBITS Opinion: Will Siri Change the Rules of the Search Game?
Siri and search companies both compete to control your contact point with the Internet. Search does this through deep integration with Web browsers; even to the point (with Google) of producing entire operating systems whose primary goal is to serve as your conduit to the Internet and drive you towards Google services. The value to Google in producing Chrome OS and Android is in increasing usage of Google for the purpose of gaining access to your activities and delivering more targeted advertising.
Siri is a new user interface designed to increase the usefulness of the iPhone, and it’s hard to imagine it won’t eventually come to other products. The Internet is only one of its potential components, which also include on-device data and apps like calendars and reminders. Siri tracks your activity to improve its accuracy, not to deliver advertising. The value to Apple is in selling more devices.
These are completely different financial models, even though both systems track and analyze your activities. One is funded by advertising, the other with device sales. (And both, perhaps, with licensing to drive users to particular partners.)
Now argue that Apple cares about advertising at all. I wouldn’t say Apple is gunning for Google, Apple just doesn’t need Google in order to make Siri work.
“Again, it’s important to stress that Amazon’s gadget model is the opposite of Apple’s: Tim Cook sells media so he can sell iPads and iPhones; Bezos sells Kindles so he can sell books and videos and music and even advertising. Apple has already established that its model works. Now we get to see Amazon’s theory really put to the test.”
I’ve obsessively followed Apple since I first got to play with the Macintosh LC II at Old Trail with Mac OS 7 in 1992. I was 9 years old.
Since then, I’ve had 16 iPhones (some broke, not my fault), Dells, built my own PCs, bought the iBook, 12” Powerbook, the Mac G4 Cube and now I’m writing this on the MacBook 11” Air which I would argue to be the single greatest portable laptop ever. And throughout all this time, the single thing I’ve enjoyed most about obsessively following Apple is being at the forefront of the leap forward.
I remember kicking around in terminal with OS X 10.0, remarking at the then beauty of Aqua & the UNIX kernel and 10 years later 10.0 has evolved into the rock that is now OS X Lion. This leap forward that is available by being the earliest of early adopters has given me an obsession for not just speculating on what’s next but be part of something to help move things forward. I don’t mean this by just throwing down an AMEX to own something but use OS X to code things, iPhones to develop mobile marketing programs and use an iPad to design new interfaces.
It is unimaginable for me to think I could be the person I am today without my obsession with Apple and certainly my career would have gone nowhere. I think this is the impact Steve Jobs has had on my little world.
“Nintendo and Apple stand alone at the top in finding new ways for consumer technology to entertain and inform. And that is because both companies actually put technology second in their design process. What comes first is the consumer experience; for these companies technology is useful only as it allows everyday people to have new experiences.”
“Jobs’s immersion in Zen and passion for design almost certainly exposed him to the concept of ma, a central pillar of traditional Japanese aesthetics. Like many idioms relating to the intimate aspects of how a culture sees the world, it’s nearly impossible to accurately explain — it’s variously translated as “void,” “space” or “interval” — but it essentially describes how emptiness interacts with form, and how absence shapes substance. If someone were to ask you what makes a ring a meaningful object — the circle of metal it consists of, or the emptiness that that metal encompasses? — and you were to respond “both,” you’ve gotten as close to ma as the clumsy instrument of English allows.”
“I work at an advertising agency. As you probably know, there is a great deal of copy-catting in advertising and marketing. But here’s the thing: when we present case studies of great marketing, we don’t use Apple anymore because it is viewed as an outlier of such magnitude that many of us in the industry regard it as inimitable.”
From an anonymous advertising exec.
This is entirely true. You’d be an idiot to directly cite Apple in a presentation, no one would believe you could do an ‘Apple Product Rollout.’ Ironically, everyone I know in advertising unabashedly admires the ‘Apple Product Rollout’ as the best ad around.
Apple And Our Culture, Ctd - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan
It takes Apple 7 years to get from a stunning ultra-small laptop to another:
1997: PowerBook 2400c 10.4”
2003: Powerbook G4 12”
2010: MacBook Air 11.8”
“What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.”
“The best design explicitly acknowledges that you cannot disconnect the form from the material—the material informs the form, It is the polar opposite of working virtually in CAD to create an arbitrary form that you then render as a particular material, annotating a part and saying ‘that’s wood’ and so on. Because when an object’s materials, the materials’ processes and the form are all perfectly aligned, that object has a very real resonance on lots of levels. People recognize that object as authentic and real in a very particular way.”
— Jonathan Ive, SVP of Design at Apple.
Core77 speaks with Jonathan Ive on the design of the iPhone 4
Say what you will about Apple but they may have the best massmarket Design+Engineering+Manufacturing team on the planet. The tolerance on the SIM card enclosure is flat out breathtaking for a mass marketing consumer electronics device.
