“What makes a great product? How can one product change an entire industry?” Neil Cybart asks for Above Avalon.
“One of Apple’s most significant accomplishments has been a dedication to design that borders on the line of obsessiveness. As people decipher the driving factors behind what makes a product like the iPod, iPhone, and iPad so successful, it is crucial to recognize how a product’s design has the potential not just to alter industries, but go so far as to marginalize them,” Cybart writes. “The iPhone relegated the mobile phone to a single app. Apple Watch is being positioned to turn the modern Watch industry on its head. Apple’s ambitions with the automobile will be nothing short of a transformational shift in how we think and use automobiles. When a company places only a few big design bets every few years, the resulting bets need to be huge, and Apple positions good design as the guiding light with all of its bets.”
“The one recurring theme found with all of Apple’s products unveiled over the past 15 years is they were all high-risk. The iPod, iPhone, and iPad were all bets that the consumer would place value in doing something in a different way. The Apple Watch is a bet that people want additional utility on the wrist. Project Titan will be positioned as nothing short of a bet-the-company play in the automobile industry. Failure would be measured not only in billions of dollars, but more importantly, in time,” Cybart writes. “Good design contains risk, the same risk that legacy companies did not want to take to move their industries forward.”
Tons more in the full article – highly recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: Yes, there’s a reason why Steve Jobs left design chief Jonathan Ive more operational power than anyone else at Apple.
Good design ..no doubt….
But sometime the cost is ergonomoics and productivity.
I wish that compromise was not there… Both in hardware and software.
PS…..
Ok .. I. Ready for the firing squad .
Project Titan will be positioned as nothing short of a bet-the-company play…
No. Apple has better things to do than bet-the-company rubbish. But whatever the project, Apple does the R&D until the product shines. That’s rare in the tech industry. Obviously, that’s almost unheard of in the auto industry, where stagnation and doing things wrong is apparently the status quo.
I think you should have written the story. A more unique point of view that is also more accurate.
Right on, Brother Derek !
Apple does not gamble. Apple just does what has to be done. And it gets the job done.
As the I-Ching notes: The only constant is change.
Most companies are afraid of change. Apple is built on change. One day even the analysts might figure it out…
😀