“I met with Jobs on the second day he was back at Apple, during a very dark time in its history,” Tim Bajarin writes for TIME Magazine.
“He said he would start focusing on industrial design. I remember scratching my head at his statement — I just couldn’t imagine how industrial design could save Apple,” Bajarin writes. “Of course, just a year later, Jobs introduced the candy-colored iMacs, forever changing what a personal computer could look like. Jobs then went on to make design a core tenet of Apple’s future, making the iPod, iPhone and iPad into sleek works of art, undoubtedly helping turn Apple into the behemoth it is today.”
“If Apple’s top leadership has fully embraced industrial design, Apple could be free to create not only cars and watches, but anything that could be tied into Apple’s app and services ecosystem,” Bajarin writes. “After more than three decades of understanding Apple by following its history, I have to admit that we could be witnessing the birth of a new Apple.”
Read more in the full article – recommended as usual – here.
I want an Apple designed motor home…. electric of course, with all the Apple tech inside. Including the glass controls that Steve put on his yacht. It could charge the batteries with solar cells while it is sitting idle. And of course, you would need an apple watch to get in the door.
Those of us fortunate enough to be around – AND PAYING ATTENTION – got to experience a renaissance of sorts with Steve and the team he organized.
It could easily be confused or dismissed as worship or sheep-ery – and it’s certainly not – but what Steve ‘pulled off’ was ‘something else…’. Memorable is an understatement of understatements.
They were days to behold…
Today is a fun day, full of anticipation, but not like days of yore.
BIRTH of a new Apple? I think Apple already has been reborn and is in it’s pre-teen years. The best is yet to come. And Apple will remain forever young in it’s thinking and execution.
What don’t analysts get Apple is not like other company’s? How many more success stories will it take? How much more money in the vault? How much more valuation as a company? How much more adulation & happy user experiences?
Exactly! To stay young means keeping only your character intact and shedding old products as the factors upon which they drew their success fade away. Apple continuously does that (iPod anyone?) and so they stay young. Those who cling to the past products that were successful in past times die (RIM anyone?). So the analysts who look only at the continuing profit potential of this Apple product or that Apple product will never get it right: Panicking when a product starts to fade and underestimating the fad/trend power of the new products. So they see Apple for the products, not the character, and undervalue the company that kills off its own products “too early.”
Yeah think of how afraid Microsoft is to move beyond Windows and restart and rebuild that old tired OS into creating their own OS X as Apple did. Apple is all about fresh beginnings as others are happy with slightly updated retreads and not rocking the boat too much. You don’t get far in the modern world by being too conservative but on the other hand you don’t want to be foolish either. These other guys stay with what they know with, suggesting maybe a change of regimes and fresh ideas.
Its.
Nah, two month from now it’ll be WWDC and all the talk will be about iOS and OS X and this whole Apple is becoming a fashion company talk will be long gone.
Or a new awareness of Apple. It’s not just the products, it’s the process of the company. If others would stop trying to poach and copy the products and copy the process that would certainly be the birth of something new.
I’d heard in some interview that Jonathan Ive had designed the iMac case about two years before it’s release (~1996). Apple just never used it until Steve came back. This is probably one of the things Steve was thinking about when he said that Apple was full of smart people but had a failure to execute.
It’s probably a good thing that case was shelved, rather than becoming the Performa 8995, 8995CD, 8995CD+, 8995CDx, etc.
Ben. This is not a new Apple. This is Apple doing what it can with the currently available technology.
If Steve could have had a flat screen Bondi Blue iMac with SSD and Thunderbolt in 1998 you can bet your bottom dollar he would.