Absolutely not! You have no idea what a convoluted mess the product lineup was before Steve Jobs return.
And then with this new strategy ...
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Remembering Apple CEO Steve Jobs on His Birthday
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And then with this new strategy ...
He was after the market dominance and profit but I don't think he was was willing to sacrifice product quality to get there. What Steve understood better than anyone is that the product comes first, hence make insanely great products and the rest will follow. The design teams ran Apple under his watch. Jony Ive was the second most powerful person after him and made him untouchable. Unlike Tim Cook who is diversifying products for no reason at all other than profit.
Under Steve there wouldn't be anyone saying they need to build this iPhone to hit this price point with a 40% profit margin. He would just task them with building the best phone possible at the time regardless of cost. He used to colour code factory machines and made sure they looked good inside and out. I don't think budget ever really mattered to him. He was willing to blow $100m in cash reserves at the time to take on Google and Android.
Apples current chips in iPhones and iPads etc are all evolutions of what began with the original iPhone and iPad which Steve Jobs oversaw. The Apple Silicon in Macs is also based off these. So what you see today is possible due to the foundations he lay when he was alive. So in essence these are still his products. The only difference is he would have packaged everything into one iPhone model.
With the current fragmentation of products at various price points you can clearly see its a greedy money grab. When Steve was in charge there was no need to create a lower cost model for instance. What used to happen was the previous years model received a price drop, as it should due to older technology. They have economies of scale and have all the moulds and machines ready for manufacturing why get rid of the previous years model altogether? It would be cheaper to carry on running that operation.
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Is that first image taken from Apples website today? Lol
But Steve is right in that video. The A-team can work on many more products if a simpler product line up exists and they could refresh them at a faster rate. Macs used to be updated very frequently under Steve, 6-12 months.
He definitely simplified the lineups, which Apple desperately needed, but that PowerBook is my favourite item in that “after” picture, and it didn’t really change much. The iMac was great and the colours did sell well to a market they needed to capture, but the pro lineup didn’t need the colour (or round mouse.) NextStep was Job’s true jewel and cancelling the clones surely helped Apple’s bottom line a lot.
Apple pulled off the PowerPC transition without him, which was actually pretty amazing, especially at the time, so their hardware was actually good, just unfocused. I had (have) a PowerMac 7500 and, as boring as the beige may have been, it was amazingly easy to upgrade, which is what I miss the most in the last 25 years of Apple change.
But Jobs was certainly amazing, and I would love to see his take on the current technological landscape and what everyone is doing with the products he helped create. I expect he would have mixed emotions, since as much as those products have increased the ability for people to interact, the faceless method of the interactions (and possibly the ability to communicate with people we doesn’t actually know) seems to have reduced a lot of the compassion/humanity of the interactions, like we have forgotten there is a person behind the avatar (usually, anyway! 😃) RIP Steve!
Really? I only recall the new models coming out, usually with better features for the same price, and the old models being sold off cheaper to clear stock. I could have sworn the prior year’s model being held over as the cheaper version started with the phones after Steve was gone.
Apple's product development takes around 18 months for a new Mac. At least, it did at the time. It's why the Twentieth Anniversary Mac was such a mess - they only thought about it 12 months before debut.
I am not dismissing Jobs. But - to portray the iMac as something that Jobs created from inception is foolish. It would have been a re-worked design that was already well and truly in development.
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Can accept when I'm wrong:
iMac G3 - Wikipedia
Jobs made his decree in Sept 1997, and it went on sale in August 1998.
Have always understood that whilst the "look" of the machine was 100% Jobs, the guts would have been the "next" low end Mac, rather than a complete redesign.
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The guts don't matter. The Brothers Wright didn't invent the wing profile, the propeller or the aero engine. They just made it all fly. Xerox PARC invented the GUI before the Macintosh, but their Xerox Alto was as big and expensive as a cabinet. Toshiba miniaturized the hard drive, which became the guts of the iPod and the clickwheel idea was stolen from a Philips remote. Other phones had touchscreens and app stores before the iPhone. All inventions are just slight adaptations of somebody else's prior work. We communicate with an alphabet the Phoenicians came up with, before the Romans adopted it, before Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press, and then Steve Jobs came along and insisted the Mac must have support for professional font management on the same level.
The design is the invention.
Thanks for the video! What a blast from the past! I’d completely forgotten how much they originally staggered the release dates, and it is so weird to hear everyone cheer about the dates as he announced them. I wonder how much complaining that would cause these days.
Gone far too soon. I often wonder how things would be different if he was still around. He made a huge impact on the world.
I loved that iPhone 4, still remember seeing the design and the retina display in person. It was miles ahead of anything else.
I was late to the party - came aboard in 2010 and didn't have a lot of spare change, but wanted in on the AAPL bandwagon. Had enough for 15 shares....never bought more.....nor sold any....now have over 400 and a nice yearly dividend.
