“In 1995, two years before his return to the company, Steve Jobs gave a characteristically blunt answer when asked why Apple found itself struggling in the early to mid 1990s,” Ben Lovejoy writes for 9to5Mac. “The issue, he said, was that Apple had gotten greedy.”
What ruined Apple wasn’t growth… They got very greedy. Instead of following the original trajectory of the original vision, which was to make the thing an appliance and get this out there to as many people as possible, they went for profits. They made outlandish profits for about four years… What that cost them was their future. What they should have been doing is making rational profits and going for market share. — Steve Jobs, 1995
“Many of us have expressed dismay at the fact that Apple still, in 2015, sells an iPhone with just 16GB of storage,” Lovejoy writes. “The simple reality is that most of us need local storage, and trying to palm people off with 16GB is simply unreasonable. Apple is offering an iPhone which pretty much guarantees frustration down the line, and there’s absolutely no reason to do so when it could offer a 64GB starting point at the cost of a few bucks less profit.”
“I’m merely suggesting that if Apple were a little less penny-pinching with its specs, were willing to sacrifice maybe $10-20 of profit on an iPhone, perhaps slightly more on a Mac, that would help it retain its premium positioning,” Lovejoy writes. “Even non-techy Apple customers do care that the company’s products Just Work. And nickel-and-diming customers on specs that impact the degree to which products Just Work is, in my view, not a sensible path for Apple to take.”
For the relevant section of the comments by Steve Jobs, skip to the 38:00 mark:
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Much more, including discussion of the SSD component of Apple’s latest iMac Fusion Drives, in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote back on July 4th:
Obviously, 16GB is for a certain target market, one that can live in the iCloud. The problem with that model, however, is that inexperienced buyers and inattentive resellers foist 16GB iPhones on people who really cannot manage to live in the iCloud and therefore could end up hating their iPhone (it won’t update, it’s perpetually packed full and therefore runs poorly, can’t take any photos, can’t download day more apps, etcetera).
Apple needs to ask themselves if the benefits of having a 16GB iPhone (“low” entry price and upselling platform for higher capacity iPhones) are worth the risk of disappointing those who are likely buying their first iPhone. For Apple, the quality of the user experience should always come first.
SEE ALSO:
The true magic of Apple’s 16GB iPhone 6s/Plus – October 12, 2015
Apple, please kill the 16GB iPhone! – July 13, 2015