“Apple is 40 years old. The leader was Steve Jobs, but he’s gone and many still don’t understand his core idea,” Dana Blankenhorn writes for The Register. “The idea was Apple’s control over “the user experience”. That control is at risk today, and the company’s future hangs in the balance as a result under the new leader.”
“How people use things was Jobs’ lifelong obsession,” Blankenhorn writes. “It took Microsoft a half-decade to match what the Macintosh could do in 1984, and that never got beyond the idea of pointing-and-clicking with a mouse.”
MacDailyNews Take: Microsoft never matched the Macintosh. They never will.
“The user experience includes how the device fits in your hand, what it looks like, and how it’s made. This is key to the iPod, arguably Jobs’ comeback product,” Blankenhorn writes. “”In 2009, I saw a man happily watch movies on one for 15 hours straight, during a flight to China, long before there were unlimited movies in seatbacks.”
“The Apple Watch is Tim Cook’s first big gamble as Apple’s leader, and the jury remains out on the device. That’s possibly why investors won’t pay much more for Apple’s earnings than those of IBM, and IBM is a company in a very difficult position – an enterprise IT giant, shedding workers, struggling with falling revenue. The two companies couldn’t be more different,” Blankenhorn writes. “Cook has just cut the Watch’s price. Investors clearly see the Watch as an “interface to an interface” – the latter being the iPhone – rather than a device in and of itself, like the iPhone was back during its early days. That is a device that changed the status quo by introducing a new interface. Remember Steve Ballmer laughing off the iPhone?”
MacDailyNews Take: Why, yes. Yes, we do.
“Apple should see the Watch as a potential game-changer. Not in the way the iPod, iPhone and iPad revolutionised portable music or computing, but rather as game changer in the field of quantified self and the Internet of Things – specifically, in the harvesting of personal data for the field of medicine,” Blankenhorn writes. “But to succeed in the collection of health data… means adding encryption. It means taking responsibility for the data’s security. How can Apple do that if the FBI stands ready to break that encryption at the drop of a court order? That’s why Apple’s fight against the FBI mattered…”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple Watch is routinely underestimated, sometimes even by users of the 1st generation device. Someday, we’ll look back at the Apple Watch naysayers and laugh, just as we laughed at those who said the Mac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad would never sell and would never matter.