“We love our smartphones. Not only have they become our most used computer, but more importantly, smartphones provide an unimaginable amount of power at our fingertips. However, the smartphone form factor leaves opportunities for other devices to provide this same kind of incredible power only in even more personal ways,” Neil Cybart writes for Above Avalon. “Apple is laying the groundwork for new platforms based on wearables, the connected home, and eventually the car that will combine to form one large encompassing ecosystem that ushers in a new level of personal technology. We are entering a new Apple era.”
“Apple’s product line used to be thought of as a stool with each leg representing a different product,” Cybart writes. “Consensus was set on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac forming an ecosystem that will play a crucial role in our lives. In reality, these three product categories are much more similar than people have been thinking. New platforms are needed to help make technology more approachable and personal.”
“The iPhone, iPad, and Mac are converging into one central ‘brain’ while new platforms will be formed focused on key aspects of our lives including transportation, home, and body (wearables),” Cybart writes. “In this new era, the iPhone is positioned as the center point of our digital lives with iCloud and Apple services representing the glue connecting everything together. Earlier this year at WWDC, Apple unveiled watchOS, its first wearables platform. Last week, Apple added a new platform to the mix with tvOS. The two platforms serve as examples for how Apple will eventually embrace bigger themes like wearables and the connected home (and eventually the car).”
Muchd more in the full article – highly recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: Particularly salient is Cybart’s observation: “Looking back at Apple’s WWDC keynote, the significance of the ‘The App Effect’ video that was shown takes on a whole new meaning after seeing Apple unveil watchOS and tvOS. While the video was focused on iPhone apps, it is reasonable to one day replace ‘iPhone’ with ‘Apple Watch,’ ‘Home,’ and even ‘Car.’ Apple looks at apps as the path to accomplishing its long term goals.”
5..4..3..2..1 BOOM!
My brain just exploded. As if we need more distractions, it is already an epidemic in the car, 90% of people driving are always looking down at their phones, don’t believe me, next time somebody is behind you, watch carefully.
Isn’t it an additional distraction to be carefully watching the driver behind you?
“We are entering a new Apple era.”
No, we’re not. It only looks “new” to those with short-term thinking. Apple has been building STRATEGICALLY for many, many years. We just see more of it, each year or two.
Agreed, this is not new, it is a long term strategy.
What the author missed is your work, both small business and the enterprise. Apple tech has dominated in my work environment long before coming to dominate my personal life. Apple is showing continued strong growth in, and added focus on the Workplace, along with Personal Finance/Payments, Communications, Transportation, Home Management, Security, Web, Medical/Health, Fitness, Photography/Video/Imaging, Entertainment (Music, Video, Gaming), Information/Data Management, News/Weather Delivery, Time Management, Personal Assistance, Social Media, and on and on.
App era. Steve had to be convinced that this was the right thing to do. He+Apple almost gave up this ship. Apple is the leader, and everyone else follows (and swallows.)
If Steve said emphatically NO to native apps, where do you think we all would be today?
Is it, epiphany moments? Is it blind, dumb luck? Is it, we will say one thing, but do another, because we have a plan and this is all part of the plan?
Steve Jobs did NOT need to be convinced that apps were the right thing to do. The original iPhone didn’t have 3rd-party apps because the OS wasn’t ready for them and the phone itself was barely powerful enough to run them. Moreover, 3rd party apps needed an SDK and there was no way to deliver that with the first iterations of the OS. Also, if you actually know anything about how Apple works, it is a relatively conservative company. It learned a hard lesson from Newton – where its ambition exceeded the available technology. The first iPhone didn’t have 3G, or cut-and-paste, or 3rd party apps, or many other techs because Apple didn’t want to turn its customers into guinea pigs. Technologies at Apple are (mostly) delivered when they are ready for prime time.
My memory does not fail me, and you insult me.
http://www.cultofmac.com/125180/steve-jobs-was-originally-dead-set-against-third-party-apps-for-the-iphone/
One of those details Steve’s initial opinion on third-party apps for the iPhone. In the beginning, Steve was opposed to third-party apps, and wanted developers to create web apps that could be used through the device’s mobile Safari web browser. According to Apple board member, Art Levinson, “Jobs at first quashed the discussion” of allowing apps on the company’s debut smartphone.
Art called Steve “half a dozen times to lobby for the potential of the apps,” according to the book, but Steve was against them — “partly because he felt his team did not have the bandwidth to figure out all the complexities that would be involved in policing third-party app developers.”
It was policy, management of the process he didn’t want to have to worry about. Not the “ability” of the hardware.
It seems as if you think about my knowledge of Apple, like I am some schmuck off the street, you better have your facts straight.
Yes Apple is conservative. Yes Apple leads with hardware that is both best in class but not bleeding edge. They are not spec mongers. But they holistically produce something that has never existed before. Apps or native apps were not a part of that. Steve liked closed systems. He didn’t want to let others in, because there are always compromises.
You are mostly right about everything else, but it wasn’t because of the hardware. The iPhone 2G, as I will call it, went up to iOS 4.1.2. Plenty of room there.
Actually, Gollum, I think you mostly made my point for me. As your own quotes make clear, Jobs was not philosophically against 3rd party apps – he was opposed to them because the iPhone as a system, and Apple as a company, wasn’t ready to support them. He didn’t have to be convinced of anything – the software, the hardware and the company needed maturation in order to provide a good user experience and Jobs wasn’t going to allow 3rd party apps until then. One of the sanity checks for this view is that all the pieces of an SDK were part of the development tools that Apple itself was using to create the apps for the first phone. If Jobs truly had no intention of allowing 3rd party apps EVER on the phone, that would not have been the case.
One other note: The original (2.5G) iPhone running the original iPhone OS was skating on thin ice. The OS was many iterations from being optimized and contained a lot of scar tissue from its MacOSX origins. The iPhone team was worried that unregulated 3rd party apps – for which, at that point, there was exactly ZERO examples to test – would make the user experience slow, or worse. As Apple regularly claimed with each successive release of the OS (eventually iOS), it was improving and optimizing the code. The fact that the original iPhone ran better – and with 3rd party apps – with later versions of the OS is hardly proof that it could have done it with the first OS. Certainly neither the iPhone team or Jobs thought so.
🙂
And, actually, the app ecosystem is very powerful and has done a LOT for Apple, but there are definitely some problems. I find the App Store to be annoyingly unhelpful. I tend to only get apps when I read about them somewhere else. There is so much garbage in there that looks good in the store, but is poor quality.
I think some of the concerns Steve Jobs had about Apple’s ability to properly handle the flood of apps are legitimate concerns. With all the resources they have, I think Apple can do it, but I’d like to see Tim Cook and other executives make that a focus. That, and perhaps untangling the confusing music system (iTunes Match, Apple Music, etc., etc.), is in a similar category to the fixing-things focus of iOS9 and El Capitan. I hope they make that a priority. I love their products, but there are definitely some things that are too much of a hassle to deal with.
steve could not come up with the hardware, software, and developers kit for presentation to developers before the release of the iPhone so the app store would be ready
so the hardware and software took precedence
now we know what happened, patience, padawanda
Apple ushers in the age of the Jetsons, flying cars, and personal flux capacitors. If you can imagine it Apple will deliver it.
Your stupidity knows no bounds.
It’s obvious that you are still hurting. Have a hanky, little girl.
There’s something wrong with you.
In the head.
That’s rich. You can’t refrain from hurling insults and then accuse me of having a personality flaw. I don’t know if you are self deluded or are too stupid to acknowledge your own hypocrisy. I suppose it could be both. What do you think?
Wall Street’s general consensus shows Apple is a one-legged stool and nothing more. When the iPhone leg breaks there is no more stool. Apple’s share price basically reflects that belief, so I’m guessing that’s how it is. Anything that even slightly hinders iPhone sales instantly negatively impacts the share price. The way I see it, it would be hard to convince anyone who isn’t an Apple loyalist that Apple is more than the iPhone. Wall Street certainly doesn’t believe Apple is more than the iPhone.
It’s difficult to think that iPhone has been too successful, but Apple can discourage thinking Apple’s primary focus is iPhone by attracting consumers by improving existing products and services, and developing new products and services.
Lame comment. As usual.
That’s interesting, greig. Do you really think that Apple should not develop new products and services, and not improve existing products and services? Or, rather, are you filled with hurt and hate that anything I write sends into apoplectic rage? Please, read my comment again, slowly and carefully, then comment line by line. Can you do this? Will you try?
… and Wall Street has such an accurate track record for predicting how Apple will perform.
We must now be in at least the 10th consecutive quarter which has been declared by Wall Street analysts to be ‘Peak iPhone’, where significant YOY growth has been deemed to be unlikely, yet growth has continued, records are still being broken and the indications are that the forthcoming iPhone launch weekend will be bigger than ever.
It was less than a month ago that certain analysts were gleefully explaining that AAPL was in a ‘Death Cross’, marking the spot where a shorter-term decline graduates into a longer-term downtrend.
Wall Street has never understood Apple and shows no sign that it will ever understand Apple. It’s quite bizarre that Wall Street has been so consistently negative about the biggest company and one which continues to make truly astonishing profits, which have been rapidly increasing for many years and are still on a very healthy upward trajectory.
Ten years ago, Apple was regarded by Wall Street as a one-legged stool with that one leg consisting of the iPod. These days the iPod amounts to just a rounding error in Apple’s accounts and we are now being told that Apple’s one legged iPhone stool again makes it a company without an assured future.
In ten years, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to read that Apple is just a one-legged stool, with that leg being the Apple car.
Apple sells laptops, desktops, tablets and smartwatches in quantities that most other companies could only dream of, yet Wall Street disregards those sales because iPhones sell on such a huge scale. It’s pretty obvious that Apple doesn’t have a problem, it’s Wall Street that has a problem.
Wall Street’s general consensus is generally wrong.
I love how you seem to know what Wall Street thinks, as though it were some simple entity that spoke with one voice. Insert other entities into your belief for maximum silliness, but hey, consistency isn’t important when you’re busy hating people with more money than you have, right?