Wednesday, December 21, 2016

The iPhone May Have Killed Apple

I'm glad to see there continues to be critical examination of Apple's foolish behavior around its Mac line...

How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

Apple has obsessed over the iOS products because of a lucky strike of success (yes, the original design had a lot to do with it, but they've since disposed of that, so...). Apple's only loyalty is to shareholders, and the iPhone and iPad has been very good for Apple's primary stock owners. So the logic seems to have been to make more of the same and cut funds spent on anything else (except for some ludicrous car project, another fad project, due to Google obsessing over the pathological technology of self-driving cars).

Some day the iPhone will no longer be the killer income generator that it has been. Things like phones and watches are fad products. Fads are irrational and unreliable. Someone comes out with something that creates a new fad, regardless of its true value and the old fad ends. Consumers move on abruptly.

It's the core users, the loyalists, the professionals and content creators, that are the consumers Apple should be serving (again, if Apple actually cared to serve customers, rather than Wall Street). If Apple disposes of the Mac in pursuit of capitalism's religious delusion of perpetual profit growth, they will discover their core user base has moved on, once they are done shitting on them and are once again requiring them to keep Apple alive.

The iPhone brought Apple to dominance, but it also seems to be Apple's eventual downfall. Hopefully, some new leadership will take over at Apple before the company suffers too much.