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How Would You Feel If Apple Shared Nokia’s Fate?

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Sami13496

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How would you feel if Apple ended up sharing Nokia’s fate and its current business disappeared, becoming, for example, just a semiconductor manufacturer?

For many of us, Apple is an important part of our everyday user experience. It’s more than just a company that makes devices; it’s an ecosystem and, for some, even a lifestyle. Many of us also enjoy following Apple and everything related to it, including discussions here on this forum.
 
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It's just another tech company now. It still has an advantage over companies like Google and Microsoft in terms of privacy and trust, but that's about it. I used to care deeply about Apple, but it seems to care more about user engagement than user satisfaction, and I'm so tired of its mindless UI/UX changes and unnecessary complexity that my loyalty is rapidly disappearing. I can't remember the last time I was truly delighted by an Apple product, except perhaps for the performance characteristics of the M1 MacBook Air hardware when it first came out. When I hear of an impending release, my first thought isn't anticipation of great new features, but rather wondering what is likely to break or be half-baked. I still prefer Apple products, but that's mostly inertia. I've already mourned for the company that Apple used to be. I'd be sad if Apple shares Nokia's fate, but it will be more out of nostalgia than any current loss.
 
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Apple certainly has the installed-base advantage. And it could protect the iPhone by making it central to any future AI accessories. The iPhone could do the heavy-lifting processing for future smartglasses, AirPods, pendants, comm badges etc (at least until it becomes possible and practical to have the processing in the devices themselves).
 
Sami13496 said:
How would you feel if Apple ended up sharing Nokia’s fate and its current business disappeared, becoming, for example, just a semiconductor manufacturer?

For many of us, Apple is an important part of our everyday user experience. It’s more than just a company that makes devices; it’s an ecosystem and, for some, even a lifestyle. Many of us also enjoy following Apple and everything related to it, including discussions here on this forum.
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I would be very, very sad. Fortunately Apple are too big to fail 🥳
 
Would not care too much, I would just switch to Linux on a Microsoft surface laptop instead. If Linux had at least one pretty desktop environment I would have switched already, probably. Switching phones would be harder but not a big deal to me.
 
Sami13496 said:
How would you feel if Apple ended up sharing Nokia’s fate and its current business disappeared, becoming, for example, just a semiconductor manufacturer?
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Wouldn't really care at all.

In fact, I think it's healthier over the long term if companies come/go eventually.

Aggregating power to the point of it becoming impossible to fail has an entire set of baked in problems inherent to it.

Whether Apple fans have realized it or not, the company has already veered quite a ways away from many of the core ideas and ideology. Branding is very good at obfuscating that stuff. It's why "brand" is so heavily valued and leaned into it. People trust it even as the underlying entity changes.
 
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I think it would take many years for that to happen, in much the same way that Nokia didn't suddenly become irrelevant to most consumers overnight... so if the same thing happened to Apple, I think most Apple fans now would have years to switch to something else. Something better.

...I don't think there's anything better, not right now anyways.
 
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If I’m not mistaken, didn’t Nokia mostly fail because they bet all of their phone division on the already falling apart windows mobile operating system?
Could be wrong here, but, I don’t think Apple is going to have that particular problem ever. They aren’t really the company to go to Microsoft for help, at least not since 1997.
 
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I believe Nokia failed because it kept focusing on ”normal” phones for far too long, even after it had become obvious that smartphones were the future. As a result, the company missed the biggest shift in the mobile industry. In other words, it failed to innovate quickly enough.

By the time Nokia realized what had happened, it tried to save itself by jumping on the Windows Phone bandwagon but that platform ultimately failed as well.

If Nokia had started developing a modern smartphone operating system early enough, things might have turned out very differently. Perhaps it would still be a major player today, and we would have a third mobile ecosystem alongside iOS and Android.

In a way, Nokia did try. Does anyone remember MeeGo?

MeeGo was intended to become the future operating system for Nokia’s smartphones. However, on February 11, 2011, then-CEO Stephen Elop announced that Nokia’s future smartphones would instead be based on Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 platform. As a result, the MeeGo project was discontinued.
 
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josehill said:
It's just another tech company now. It still has an advantage over companies like Google and Microsoft in terms of privacy and trust, but that's about it. I used to care deeply about Apple, but it seems to care more about user engagement than user satisfaction, and I'm so tired of its mindless UI/UX changes and unnecessary complexity that my loyalty is rapidly disappearing. I can't remember the last time I was truly delighted by an Apple product, except perhaps for the performance characteristics of the M1 MacBook Air hardware when it first came out. When I hear of an impending release, my first thought isn't anticipation of great new features, but rather wondering what is likely to break or be half-baked. I still prefer Apple products, but that's mostly inertia. I've already mourned for the company that Apple used to be. I'd be sad if Apple shares Nokia's fate, but it will be more out of nostalgia than any current loss.
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This. I quit "caping up" for companies years ago. I now have my own cloud server, locally hosted, and don't have to use any of them. I am pretty OS agnostic these days.

I like how you put it. I also have already mourned the company Apple used to be--along with the tech scene in general.
 
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Sami13496 said:
I believe Nokia failed because it kept focusing on ”normal” phones for far too long, even after it had become obvious that smartphones were the future. As a result, the company missed the biggest shift in the mobile industry. In other words, it failed to innovate quickly enough.

By the time Nokia realized what had happened, it tried to save itself by jumping on the Windows Phone bandwagon but that platform ultimately failed as well.

If Nokia had started developing a modern smartphone operating system early enough, things might have turned out very differently. Perhaps it would still be a major player today, and we would have a third mobile ecosystem alongside iOS and Android.

In a way, Nokia did try. Does anyone remember MeeGo?

MeeGo was intended to become the future operating system for Nokia’s smartphones. However, on February 11, 2011, then-CEO Stephen Elop announced that Nokia’s future smartphones would instead be based on Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 platform. As a result, the MeeGo project was discontinued.
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Had Nokia gone with Android they could have led that market. We’ll never really know.

There wasn’t room for a 3rd ecosystem. Windows Phone proved that. It was a good OS but didn’t gain the traction needed to survive.
 
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Paul1964 said:
Had Nokia gone with Android they could have led that market. We’ll never really know.

There wasn’t room for a 3rd ecosystem. Windows Phone proved that. It was a good OS but didn’t gain the traction needed to survive.
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That's not on Nokia, Microsoft pulled the plug too early. What they should have done is toughed it out a few more years and really tried to get the enterprise market. It was an awesome OS.

Oh, and they (MS) should have flat out developed an emulator to work with android and/or paid devs to make Windows native mobile apps. They just had to continue to invest.
 
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josehill said:
It's just another tech company now. It still has an advantage over companies like Google and Microsoft in terms of privacy and trust, but that's about it. I used to care deeply about Apple, but it seems to care more about user engagement than user satisfaction, and I'm so tired of its mindless UI/UX changes and unnecessary complexity that my loyalty is rapidly disappearing. I can't remember the last time I was truly delighted by an Apple product, except perhaps for the performance characteristics of the M1 MacBook Air hardware when it first came out. When I hear of an impending release, my first thought isn't anticipation of great new features, but rather wondering what is likely to break or be half-baked. I still prefer Apple products, but that's mostly inertia. I've already mourned for the company that Apple used to be. I'd be sad if Apple shares Nokia's fate, but it will be more out of nostalgia than any current loss.
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Very well said.

The delight is all but gone and I think a lot of of us still use it because it’s just the least bad choice, and we are already using it so there is inertia and sunk cost on hardware and software.
 
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