“Paul Deneve is leaving his job as head of high-end fashion house Saint Laurent to return home to Apple, where he worked in the 1990s,” Mark Rogowsky reports for Forbes.
“Chief exec of company formerly known as YSL takes lesser job at former company to work on ‘special projects’ and report directly to CEO Tim Cook,” Rogowsky reports. “All very exciting and doubtless will produce some intriguing initiatives for Apple. But while news of Deneve’s hire splashes around on the surface, lurking beneath the water are much bigger happenings in Cupertino around the iPhone and Apple TV. They may seem rather prosaic, but they suggest major strategic shifts are underway.”
Rogowsky reports, “While Apple has spent the last several product cycles demoting the last two iPhones into lower-priced categories, what it hasn’t done yet is explicitly targeted lower price points for its smartphone… If the low-cost phone is too good and too available globally, it can and will cannibalize sales of the higher-margin iPhone 5S… The solution here seems obvious, even though Apple has been reluctant to take it… Apple can differentiate here simply by moving the premium product up in size — perhaps not to the 5-inch screens of some Android models, but somewhere above the 4-inch size of iPhone 5 — while keeping the low-cost model on the 4-inch screen.”
Read more in the full article – recommended – here.