Apple does not (and never did) have a golden touch.
I'm sick and tired of this. And nothing has really spurned this on, other than perhaps retrospection and recent events.
Apple announced Apple Music not long ago, and yet again, industry "experts" suspected that just because the guys at Apple were doing it, that this time around it would be magical and would shake up the industry or that it is somehow revolutionary.
It isn't. And they screwed it up. AGAIN. They have some nice touches going for them. The $15/month family plan being the biggest, though apparently getting it working has some undesired caveats in granting access to certain things to those family members. Beyond that, it isn't really any better than Spotify, Pandora or Xbox Music Pass depending on your specific needs. The service has apparently broken the shit out of many people's music collections, the UI is reportedly terrible and there is nothing revolutionary or magical about it. It is actually struggling to be even be an iterative improvement on existing services. But then, that is no surprise. Apple IS pretty damn late to the game and there are no obvious paths for vast improvement left.
If that were the only such incidence of Apple not delivering something magical it would be easy for me to take this sitting down. But it isn't. By a long shot.
Apple Maps nearly got tourists killed! Enough said there.
Siri was revolutionary for the time, but it was a solution looking for a problem, and they didn't find legitimate problems for it to solve ahead of their competitors catching up to them.
Apple Pay STILL doesn't have wide spread adoption, and unless it breaks its reliance on Apple products it never will. How far are we since the launch of that? They still haven't truly gotten rid of all of the hurdles with retailers. And that is in the US where they have the most clout and presence. Sure, the merchant companies are giant ass-hats BUT, Apple knew THAT long before they dumped their heap of garbage solution on the market. And they also knew that resistance could significantly impact their success, which it did. The problem was that they believed in their own hype. People within the company MUST have been under the delusion that things would be different, that they would work out, simply because it was them doing it.
Apple Watch is an even bigger train wreck. Making INSANE boasts about the number of units they planned to sell in the first year alone (which they have already cut their predictions on by the way). And things just keep getting worse. Of course, I predicted this rather early on. This ISN'T a new market segment. The only thing new is Apple's entry into it. And their product is inferior in a number of VERY important ways. Namely battery life and reliance on an iPhone 6. So, what we see is more or less what we expected. The Apple fans flooded the market early creating the illusion of a strong demand. But, as fans got their precious iDevice, the demand abruptly dropped off.
It is worth noting that predictions for Apple's sales were something mad like being in the vicinity of 10-20 times the total number of smart watches ever sold, by every competitor since the inception of the category within their first year alone. Or, put another way, there was absolutely no basis in reality for the size of sales being predicted. There was no indication that the total size of the market for such a device was even as large as their first year predictions alone. I still to this day have a hard time understanding how supposed market analysts and professionals could have EVER believed that.
Apple products which sold well were those which were in some tangible way substantially better than what was on the market. iPods had industry leading capacity for MP3's, best in class battery life with built-in rechargeable batteries and a music ecosystem which was second to none. The iPhone had the biggest and nicest looking display on a smartphone and had a centralized app store which allowed 3rd party developers to contribute without forcing users to side load. The iPad had battery life which shamed laptops, a better form factor for media consumption and simpler interface than their competitors. And that is really the end of the list. MacBooks sell, but not comparatively well. Neither do Mac Desktops. They don't do anything "special". They aren't arguably better than a Windows PC. And as such they are still one of the smaller slices of that markets pie. They sell well enough, but they are also just "good enough" devices.
Just about everything else Apple has produced has been a total failure, at least at launch, were it not for the legions of Apple fans to supply a buffer. And even after those products or services recovered they never took the world by storm.
Anyone who failed to see that long before the Apple Watch is blind. The bottom line is that people (generally) are willing to pay more for Apple products than others. And Apple fans can be easily convinced into buying just anything out of Cupertino. But those are finite sources of revenue. If the product isn't actually superior in some way, it won't consistently sell enough units at Apple's prices to drive it into the history books as a massive success.
Apple has only been wildly successful where they have released superior products. And, they have admittedly done that successfully more times than most others. But they have also botched even more products and services than they got right. So anyone assuming that as a new product or category of product is going to be any more or less successful simply because Apple entered the market doesn't have their head screwed on properly.
Apple announced Apple Music not long ago, and yet again, industry "experts" suspected that just because the guys at Apple were doing it, that this time around it would be magical and would shake up the industry or that it is somehow revolutionary.
It isn't. And they screwed it up. AGAIN. They have some nice touches going for them. The $15/month family plan being the biggest, though apparently getting it working has some undesired caveats in granting access to certain things to those family members. Beyond that, it isn't really any better than Spotify, Pandora or Xbox Music Pass depending on your specific needs. The service has apparently broken the shit out of many people's music collections, the UI is reportedly terrible and there is nothing revolutionary or magical about it. It is actually struggling to be even be an iterative improvement on existing services. But then, that is no surprise. Apple IS pretty damn late to the game and there are no obvious paths for vast improvement left.
If that were the only such incidence of Apple not delivering something magical it would be easy for me to take this sitting down. But it isn't. By a long shot.
Apple Maps nearly got tourists killed! Enough said there.
Siri was revolutionary for the time, but it was a solution looking for a problem, and they didn't find legitimate problems for it to solve ahead of their competitors catching up to them.
Apple Pay STILL doesn't have wide spread adoption, and unless it breaks its reliance on Apple products it never will. How far are we since the launch of that? They still haven't truly gotten rid of all of the hurdles with retailers. And that is in the US where they have the most clout and presence. Sure, the merchant companies are giant ass-hats BUT, Apple knew THAT long before they dumped their heap of garbage solution on the market. And they also knew that resistance could significantly impact their success, which it did. The problem was that they believed in their own hype. People within the company MUST have been under the delusion that things would be different, that they would work out, simply because it was them doing it.
Apple Watch is an even bigger train wreck. Making INSANE boasts about the number of units they planned to sell in the first year alone (which they have already cut their predictions on by the way). And things just keep getting worse. Of course, I predicted this rather early on. This ISN'T a new market segment. The only thing new is Apple's entry into it. And their product is inferior in a number of VERY important ways. Namely battery life and reliance on an iPhone 6. So, what we see is more or less what we expected. The Apple fans flooded the market early creating the illusion of a strong demand. But, as fans got their precious iDevice, the demand abruptly dropped off.
It is worth noting that predictions for Apple's sales were something mad like being in the vicinity of 10-20 times the total number of smart watches ever sold, by every competitor since the inception of the category within their first year alone. Or, put another way, there was absolutely no basis in reality for the size of sales being predicted. There was no indication that the total size of the market for such a device was even as large as their first year predictions alone. I still to this day have a hard time understanding how supposed market analysts and professionals could have EVER believed that.
Apple products which sold well were those which were in some tangible way substantially better than what was on the market. iPods had industry leading capacity for MP3's, best in class battery life with built-in rechargeable batteries and a music ecosystem which was second to none. The iPhone had the biggest and nicest looking display on a smartphone and had a centralized app store which allowed 3rd party developers to contribute without forcing users to side load. The iPad had battery life which shamed laptops, a better form factor for media consumption and simpler interface than their competitors. And that is really the end of the list. MacBooks sell, but not comparatively well. Neither do Mac Desktops. They don't do anything "special". They aren't arguably better than a Windows PC. And as such they are still one of the smaller slices of that markets pie. They sell well enough, but they are also just "good enough" devices.
Just about everything else Apple has produced has been a total failure, at least at launch, were it not for the legions of Apple fans to supply a buffer. And even after those products or services recovered they never took the world by storm.
Anyone who failed to see that long before the Apple Watch is blind. The bottom line is that people (generally) are willing to pay more for Apple products than others. And Apple fans can be easily convinced into buying just anything out of Cupertino. But those are finite sources of revenue. If the product isn't actually superior in some way, it won't consistently sell enough units at Apple's prices to drive it into the history books as a massive success.
Apple has only been wildly successful where they have released superior products. And, they have admittedly done that successfully more times than most others. But they have also botched even more products and services than they got right. So anyone assuming that as a new product or category of product is going to be any more or less successful simply because Apple entered the market doesn't have their head screwed on properly.
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