“Unlike any other brand, Apple products have had a lure on the global consumer,” Richard Saintvilus writes for TheStreet. “The iPhone 6 won’t be any different.”
“In September 2012, after the release of the iPhone 5, Cook asked consumers for feedback. More specifically, he wanted to know what features the iPhone 5 lacked and what device buyers would change if given the chance. These answers were revealed in the patent case between Apple and Samsung,” Saintvilus writes. “According to documents presented during the trial, consumers asked Apple for longer battery life, improved mapping and a bigger screen — in that order.”
“It is said Apple plans to release two different versions of the iPhone 6. One will have a 4.7-inch screen and the other will have 5.5-inch screen. The latter version is what everyone is excited about. It is expected to carry a display size of 2272×1280,” Saintvilus writes. “The phone is also expected to sport the A8 chip with quad core processor… [which] consumes less power and offers faster multitasking. This means longer battery life. And if Tim Cook adheres to the consumer feedback, the quad core will kill two birds with one stone.”
“The third item on the consumers’ wish list was an improved mapping feature,” Saintvilus writes. “Tim Cook has listened to that demand as well. For all of the complaints about how Apple doesn’t make acquisitions, it has, in fact, acquired 23 companies over the past 16 months.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “David E.” for the heads up.]
Steve jobs NEVER asked consumers what they wanted….and that’s one of the reason he was great and irreplaceable He told people what they wanted
Steve Jobs wasn’t operating in the same market conditions that Tim Cook is. Steve Jobs wasn’t having to live up to some impossible standard set by the predecessor who hand picked him. They are very different people, Steve Jobs new this and he picked Tim Cook. If Tim Cook isn’t the right man for the job then Steve Jobs made a huge mistake – which, of course isn’t possible as he was perfect apparently.
This is the conundrum of the Tim Cook haters. Most believe Steve was God.
And yet Steve Jobs personally handpicked Tim to be CEO…
and specifically said to not think, “What would Steve do…”
If the iWatch is a hit… all this goes away…
SJ’s genius was not the result of isolating himself from the world. His genius was manifested in the ability to look at all of the possibilities and synthesize a magical whole that was better than the sum of its parts. Those products generally seemed natural and intuitive to most people – beautiful and simple, yet highly functional. That was the genius of SJ.
I doubt that Apple has ever operated in a complete vacuum from the public. Even under Steve Jobs, Apple undoubtedly knew what people wanted, even if only informally. People talk all of the time, and it is impossible to browse Mac-related tech sites without lots of people telling Apple what they would like. For instance, on several occasions over the last few years I have stated that Apple iOS devices ought to be water resistant. Samsung has picked up on that (in a typical Samsung-y rubber port seal sort of way). So far, Apple has not decided to apply internal nano coatings during the assembly process.
To go a step further, I suspect that Apple actually solicited consumer input on many occasions over the years, even during the Steve Jobs eras. Even if Apple did not hold their own “focus groups,” the company could obtain that information through their advertising firm(s) who are experienced in gathering that type of information.
So true. It’s funny how the myth of Jobs not soliciting or listening to feedback has gotten to this point. For a great example of his attitude towards what people want, try watching his keynotes. He often made statements like, “we’ve added ___ that you’ve all been asking for”.
Here was a man who read and even responded to emails sent to his simple username email account.
Also if you ever ran into him at the Palo Alto store, you could see how engaged he was with what people’s first impressions were.
This isn’t to be confused with him taking a very small and very small team of product developers and isolating themselves in a way to deconstruct what exactly a product should be and then presenting it.
Again watch the iPhone or iPad introduction. He’s talking precisely about what was wrong with existing products based on how people felt about them and were using them.
Instead of taking a tablet PC or a netbook and trying to cram all of the feedback into making a better netbook, his team deconstructed what was needed in a product and then said, “here’s what you want, and it’s an iPad”.
But make no mistake. Apple, and Steve, were very aware of what people thought of the iPad and utilized their feedback.
A thoughtful, intelligent post. What are you doing here?
“SJ’s genius was not the result of isolating himself from the world. His genius was manifested in the ability to look at all of the possibilities and synthesize a magical whole that was better than the sum of its parts. Those products generally seemed natural and intuitive to most people – beautiful and simple, yet highly functional. That was the genius of SJ.”
Well said…. well said!
Jobs was also stubborn, and proven wrong many times. He said no one would want a smaller iPad, and that no one wanted larger smartphones. His ego often alienated potential customers. The man was a genius, but he was far from perfect.
You are wrong. Apple has always market research.
True, unfortunately Steve Jobs died.
I agree that one person’s vision can be the best way to achieve great results.
But the three requests here match mine exactly – battery, maps, screen – though I can live without the latter.
Maps is especially weak compared with Google, and I don’t update my iPad specifically to keep Street View.
Steve also held back the Mac in a way that allowed windows to flourish and achieve near monopoly. He did acknowledge on many occasions the key strategic errors he made the first time around and those he didn’t make the second time around.
When you have a product like iPhone and iPad, that has moved from disruptive technology to evolving technology, certainly the voice of the customer absolutely has a place. And BTW, these are the first products that Apple has had that has such broad global acceptance.
I doubt the 5.5 is is what prople are more excited about….
My bet is 4.7 will be the most popular !
He learned well from Henry Ford that people don’t know what they want…but will want it when they see it!
I was thinking the 4.7 in screen was the sweet spot myself.
Why the fcuk do apple need quad core processor, they use more battery power, and besides its stupid android buggy software that need horse power which is why they run on quad core processor just to get buy and pay the price with poor battery life. I hope apple stays with the twin core efficient processor and a less buggy iOS so things run smoothly
There comes a point where going to quad-core makes sense and can be more efficient than cranking up the speed of dual-core. I’m not sure that’s where we’re at now with the A8, but it wouldn’t surprise me. What would surprise me is if Apple did make the switch to quad-core foolishly and sacrificed battery life as a result.
“64k ought to be enough for anyone.” – Bill Gates 1980
gates said 640K not 64k
Except in real life where they have a very reasonable battery life, much longer than an iphone. This is despite it having a has much smaller, lower resolution screen, processor and more simplistic software.
Very true… but realistic real world and objective thinking isn’t what this site is about. This is a ‘fan’ site much like sports fan dynamic where your team can do no wrong and is alway stye greatest even with a just decent or awful season.
Unfortunately your comment lacks any technical knowledge. Androids have quad core processors not because they are buggy but because the OS is designed differently than iOS; the major difference being in how it handles multitasking. iOS for all intents and purposes save for a few internal Apple only API’s is a uni-tasker. On iOS apps and services are not run simultaneously but their state is instantaneously saved and compressed into memory upon exiting the app. This changed slightly with iOS 7 in that processes can be started in the background to perform operations while the app is not open and running as long as a push notification comes in which alerts the service that the app utilizes of a request for data by the app. The service the requesting app needs wakes up grabs the data it needs to, loads it into the cache of the requesting application and then the service goes back to sleep. Android much like your computer (whether OS X or Windows) is true multitasking; apps and services are running all the time in the background and complete it’s tasks and request data while minimized without any extra hoops. There are pro’s and cons to both however Apples solution is more elegant if there is a constraint of battery life and CPU cycles are a commodity. On the contrary Android solution is more extensible and can be more powerful for certain situations where you have several apps open at the same time which require a lot of resources. In a nutshell Android is always doing more at any given time and requires more power due to this fact. iOS is like a sports care; super fast as long as all it’s carrying is the person driving it. Android is like a truck; it would get destroyed by the sports car in a straight line with just the driving riding in it but throw on some heavy load in tow and the sports car has no chance. Likewise Android is closer to how computers really operate, Apple is closer to how a net connected appliance operates. Additionally you assertions about battery life are also incorrect as there are several phones (the Samdung S5 but the latest) that have far greater battery life on average than the current iPhone do to obviously a larger battery has much to do with this as not everyone is concerned with super thin just for bragging rights and some OEM’s use the extra space afforded to them to add more battery for the end user. Apple has some catching up to do in several regards; although they are leagues ahead on the actual chip architecture itself, multicore is more than just about power. It’s about being able to maintain the speed even with multiple operations running.This is why iPhones usually destroy Android devices in single threaded benchmarks and the opposite is true with multithreaded benchmarks.
“the A8 chip with quad core processor… [which] consumes less power and offers faster multitasking.”
Whoo-hoo!!! Faster multitasking!!! 😜