Former Apple exec: The pipeline that Steve Jobs started is over, Apple has fundamentally changed

“Samsung Electronics Co.’s newest flagship smartphone… the Galaxy S8 grew longer, slimmer and dropped most of the frame surrounding the display, for a sleek design many in the tech industry contend has bested Apple Inc.’s iPhone—some would say for the first time,” Timothy W. Martin and Tripp Mickle report for The Wall Street Journal. “Ten years after Apple launched the first iPhone, the smartphone war is shifting to how a phone looks and feels.”

“How a smartphone looks now accounts for about half a consumer’s purchase decision, with the assessment formed in roughly one second, according to Charles L. Mauro, president of MauroNewMedia, a product-design research firm that has done consulting work for Apple and Samsung,” Martin and Mickle report. “Mr. Mauro says peer-reviewed research reveals aesthetics matter much more than previously believed, as older surveys pegged looks as influencing only 7% of a phone purchase.”

“Some design experts wonder if the Galaxy S8’s visual leap says more about Apple and its chief executive, Tim Cook, whose operational skills contrast with the visionary talents of his predecessor, Steve Jobs,” Martin and Mickle report. “‘It’s not so much that Samsung has gotten better, but Apple has fundamentally changed,’ said Hugh Dubberly, a former Apple creative director and former member of Samsung’s global design advisory board. ‘The pipeline that Steve [Jobs] started is over.'”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: By SteveJack

This “report” reads like a story planted by Samsung’s publicity propaganda department.

Samsung — and for that matter, Google, LG, Huawei, and the rest of the fake iPhone peddlers — want the ignorati to focus only on hardware, where they can seem to compete (even though Samsung and every other Android vendor are hopelessly outdone on custom silicon at every turn by Apple) and ignore the software (including how iOS is optimized to Apple’s custom silicon) like ARKit and services like Apple Pay, iMessage, etc. because they know they are screwed, that they simply cannot compete with Apple, and that the gulf is widening with each passing year.

The fake iPhone peddlers only hope is to get people to focus on the exterior and bullet-pointed spec sheets and hope that enough buyers fail to look any further lest they see clearly the inferior wares that Samsung, Google, LG et al. are trying to sell.

SteveJack is a long-time Macintosh user, iOS user, former web designer, multimedia producer and a regular contributor to the MacDailyNews Opinion section who also basically called the iPhone over five years before Steve Jobs unveiled it.