When Steve Jobs pulled the stunning first-generation MacBook Air out of its paper bag more than a decade ago, the world went wild.
Has Apple lost its innovative power?
The first-generation MacBook Air
The MacBook truly redefined the notebook computer. To this day, you'll find that a MacBook design can actually be used for as long as a decade. What's even scarier is that even today, when you look at the MacBook Air from a decade ago, its design, look, and feel are still ahead of its time.
The same thing can be interpreted in different ways. Some see it as the genius of Steve Jobs and Apple's design. Others think that a decade of products that are a shell doesn't mean that Apple hasn't innovated halfway through the decade?
If you've paid attention to every Apple fall event since the iPhone 6S, you'll notice this: after almost every event, the Internet is flooded with the same criticism: Apple is no good, and there's no innovation at all. This has been especially true in the last two years, with last year's iPhone XR/Xs and this year's iPhone 11/Pro.
Last year's biggest? Innovation? was what? The addition of? Dual SIM dual standby? feature. The biggest innovation this year? innovation? What is it? For the first time in 12 years, prices haven't gone up.
But what does that mean? The innovation? What does it mean? According to wikipedia, innovation means to create or create new, and it means to be the first.
Let's take a look back at where everyone in the community, and in the media, has focused their Diss about Apple's lack of innovation.
I think that would mean? Hardware?
If you look at it from this dimension, perhaps Apple has indeed lost innovation. But if you look at it from a different angle, the view might be different.
The book "The Innovator's Dilemma" is said to be one of the very few books Steve Jobs recommended during his lifetime. The book is about why big, established companies are blind to emerging markets and thus sit on the sidelines or even go straight to failure. The author summarizes two technologies that drive progress:
As the name implies, the so-called continuity technology is the technology that has already existed before, and the technology that comes after it is optimized and enhanced on its basis. Many big companies are doing well in continuity technology, even these technologies are directly created by themselves. For example, Google's search technology, all of the search speed optimization, indexing, PageRank tuning, etc., are the embodiment of continuity technology.
The so-called disruptive technology is a complete and total technological innovation. The representative of Apple led by Steve Jobs created and put into mass production of MacBook and iPhone series. MacBook production, directly led to IBM's PC computers by a huge impact, from the market share of the first computer giant, to the final sale of the entire personal computer department. iPhone's emergence, directly led to Nokia, BlackBerry, and other cell phone manufacturers, the fall of. The emergence of disruptive technologies can lead directly to the rapid decline of previously best brands and companies in just a few years.
This is one of the decisive factors in Apple's rapid rise from the sea of startups in Silicon Valley: disruptive technologies bring about fundamental change and maximize innovation. That's why, over a long span of time, Apple has always stood for innovation and has always prided itself on being an innovator. Even years after Steve Jobs' death, when Apple built Appleland, it still described it as:
All of this, whether it's a fan or a passerby, has been heard of, and is even familiar. But why is Apple, now, criticized for not being innovative enough or cool enough?
The root of the problem, I think, is that Apple itself has encountered an innovator's dilemma: the MacBook and iPhone series were disruptive technologies that transcended their time, and caused the entire industry to emulate them, leading to years of follow-through and failure to come up with more heavyweight products.
When disruptive technology becomes continuous, there is less innovation and the pace of change is slower.
So many people will feel that Apple has lost its innovative power.
If you look at Apple's fall conference, you'll see that while hardware products such as the MacBook, iPhone, and iWatch were the main attraction, the software and service products offered by Apple are also carrying more and more weight.
Is Apple losing its innovative power?
Apple's 2017 job classifications
Is Apple a hardware product company? It is.
Is Apple just a hardware product company? Of course not.
According to Apple's 2017 hiring data, 34% of the more than 7,000 open job listings were for hardware engineering jobs and 28% for software engineering jobs, which accounted for more than 60% of the overall number of jobs.
As you can see, hardware engineers are still the mainstay of Apple's recruiting efforts, but the share of software engineers hiring isn't much lower than the former.
In fact, Apple has invested huge human, material, and financial resources in AI, drones, smart healthcare, 5G chips, and other innovations that viewers may often overlook:
A family that?
A hardware-only company?
Another company? No innovation? The company has been in the business for over a decade, and it is now in the process of developing its own products. a company that has been doing this for a decade. Can a tech company with the world's largest market capitalization even break the trillion-dollar mark at one point? The answer is clearly no.
Last year, Apple announced that in the new fiscal year, it would start reporting revenue and cost of sales for its overall products and services, and would no longer provide separate unit sales figures for iPhones, iPads, and Macs, in an attempt to shift the focus of the market's earnings reports from device sales to service business growth and hardware gross margins.
Is Apple losing its innovation?
Photo credit: ICphoto
From selling products to selling services, Apple has initiated a transformation.
The smart hardware market has become saturated, and in the last one or two quarters, the shipments of almost all brands of cell phones have been declining, except for Huawei, the Bug. when the market has been transformed from a blue sea to a red sea, innovation in hardware is no longer a sharp weapon to harvest the market. The future competition must be software-based and service-oriented, and I believe this is why Apple chose to transform.