Tim Cook is giving the commencement speech at George Washington University tomorrow and will be receiving an honorary doctorate. It better not be in logistics.
This is funny--truly.
However, Tim Cook is actually one of the logistic geniuses of our time. If anyone else were running Apple right now, the situation would have been even worse. There are a number of reasons we have had to wait a few weeks (notice it's just a few weeks, not months) for a completely new product.
1. Production Time: Yes, it was 8 months from the time they announced the watch until they began to sell them. Those were not 8 months of production but 8 months of refining the product. I am glad they took more time to refine the watch than to just begin cranking them out beginning in the fall.
2. Unknown number of orders: Nobody knew how many of these things people would want. Yes, there are always the early adopters, like many of us, but we are not the bulk of orders. I wasn't even sure I wanted one until a few weeks before launch as the watch become a more known quantity and I realized how I would use it.
3. Production constraints: Nobody can defy the laws of physics. To make something you need materials and labor. There continue to be a record number of iPhones produced even as they bring on a completely new product. There are not just a few thousand people waiting around in China with nothing to do. They had to go out and hire thousands of new employees, many of whom probably moved from elsewhere in China. Because of refining the product until the last month, they have not had a lot of time to produce mass quantities of the watch.
4. Production problems: These are inevitable with a new product. Whether the taptic engine or black bands, manufacturing problems were inevitable. At least it's Apple dealing with it. With other companies this would have led to months delay, rather than days. I'm glad they take the little bit of extra time to get it right rather than shipping defective devices that would not last and would have led to a massive recall.
I think the biggest problem with this whole thing, as many of you have noted, was the expectations of the timing of shipping this thing. Maybe it would have been better if they had begun to take pre-orders from the early adopters months in advance to get a better sense of how many to make of each variety of watch.
Regardless, we will all get our new watches within the next few weeks, two months after release at the very longest. In the greater scheme of things, that's not too bad. I would have loved to have had the watch a month ago, but I did not have it before and life was pretty good. I'm still looking forward to my new toy!
