“Steve Jobs didn’t change the world every two years like clockwork, and he was incrementalism’s grand master,” Harry McCracken writes for TIME Magazine. “”Just how many times did Jobs rock the consumer electronics world with a product so innovative that it changed industries forever? In Apple’s first nine years, from 1976-1985, there were two of them: the Apple II and the Macintosh. Maybe three, if you count the LaserWriter laser printer.”
“Just about everybody, I suspect, will agree that the original iPod (2001), iPhone (2007) and iPad (2010) changed industries forever. The original iMac (1998) did, too; you could make the case that it was a triumph of packaging and marketing rather than technology, but its influence is still felt today,” McCracken writes. “Two Apple services also had impact of historic proportions: the iTunes Music Store (2003) and App Store (2008). Let’s add them to the list, too. By my standards, at least, we’ve now covered all of Apple’s seismic shifts that rattled the entire industry forever — the sort of stuff that hasn’t yet happened under Tim Cook’s stewardship.”
McCracken writes, “That’s a total of six industry-changing items, or one every 860 days on average, though the gap was sometimes substantially longer. Now, that’s a remarkable streak. But it’s not a revolution every other year. And Tim Cook has been CEO of Apple for only a little over two years, so there’s nothing deeply troubling about the fact that he hasn’t boiled any oceans yet.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: What is this, Recycle MacDailyNews Takes Day?
As we’ve been saying repeatedly since last May:
iPhone was released 5 years, 7 months, and 19 days after iPod.
iPad was released 2 years, 9 months, and 5 days after iPhone.
Tim Cook has been Apple CEO for 2 years, 1 month, and 1 day.