“Apple has incensed some of its best customers with product changes that were meant to be innovative, most recently killing headphone jacks on its iPhones and ditching most of the ports on its new MacBook Pro,” Erin Fuchs writes for Yahoo Finance. “Horace Dediu, a bullish Apple observer, recently suggested the tech giant needs to incite a little hate from its best customers in order to improve its products. ‘We’re going to get to a point where there will be no more ports in any of their products because everything will be wireless charging and communication,’ Dediu said at a recent talk.”
“He added: ‘They are orphaning people. But firing their customer is essential to the brand. It’s not nice to have. It’s essential to have. You have to fire customers. You have to anger the people who are your best customers,'” Fuchs writes. “Steve Jobs acknowledged that Apple’s changes often displease its own customers. At the D8 Conference in 2010, the late Apple founder said that people called Apple ‘crazy’ for getting rid of features like the floppy disk drive. ‘We’re trying to make great products for people. We at least have the courage of our convictions to say, ‘We don’t think this is part of what makes a great product. We’re going to leave it out,” Jobs said. ‘Some people are not going to like that. They’re going to call us names… We’re going to take the heat because we want to make the best product in the world for customers.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We’ve found that those who complain the loudest about the lack of a floppy drive, a parallel port, a serial port, a 30-pin connector or a 3.5mm headphone jack are those who lack the most imagination.
We are Mac users and Mac users embrace change. Apple leads. The rest of the world follows, as usual. — MacDailyNews, March 11, 2015
As for enraging its best customers by being lazy and not updating products for years that should be up-to-date at all times (some current examples: Mac Pro, iMac, iPad Pro, Mac mini, Apple TV), that is simply unacceptable mismanagement. Apple definitely should not be enraging its best customers in that fashion. The fact of the matter is that a team of summer interns with petty cash could have done a better job with the Mac Pro than Apple’s current collection of exorbitantly paid C-Suite executives.
