Apple’s strategy is going to change… but which way will it change?
iPhone 6 To Be A Powerhouse
- The rate of performance of devices are doubling at an exponential rate. Within the last year of mobile computing we have gone from 2 to 4 to 8 core processors. And equally the iphone has technologically moved in similar fashion
- The cost of Apple devices are the highest in the market, but this is often offset by (a) support (b) lasting potential of the device, they simply all work very well despite their age. Devices from 2007-2008 are holding well on their own today. Though their ages are certainly showing.
- If the industry continues at this rate of performance doubling each 360 days, the phones of 3 years from now will easily have 8x the performance of the iPhone 5. 25x the performance of the iPhone 5 in 5 years. This is radically insane amount of horsepower.
- 3 Years to pay 1000 dollars for a device is costly, premium devices stretched to 4-5 years is reasonable however.
So the question is this.
I think it’s safe to say that Apple’s strategy cannot stay the same as it has been for the last 7-8 years. Something will need to change:
- Will Apple lower it’s prices? Because it’s just unreasonable to have your customers pay 1000 dollars and have it’s performance doubled in 12 months and be _that_ much behind instigating much outrage or customers who switch platforms because it’s easier to absorb 600-700 per year for an equivalent device?
- Apple stops with the performance pushing and aims for performance switching. Miniaturizing devices or processing units and moves into different form factors and designs for computing? Software generally no longer pushes the device except at a video game level.
A or B? Or (C) your own thoughts on the future;
WRITTEN BY I_ROBOTO
Software Is Key For Apple
I honestly don’t see advances in performance holding much sway, what we’re increasingly seeing is that even old processors are perfectly capable of handling most functions smoothly, it’s not such a bottle-neck for the user experience as it used to be.
For a company like Apple, I think their biggest challenge in the future is going to be how they manage their image through design. We can already see one problem for future iOS and Mac devices that didn’t apply before, which is that rival companies have actually now woken up to the importance of good industrial design, and it’s steadily working to make Apple’s own style less unique in the crowd. It’s time for Apple to move on that issue, which we might see them do in software at WWDC.
In hardware, well maybe my logic is screwy here but I think when the iPod and the iPhone effectively became the face of Apple, that’s really what drove the modernist industrial design of their other products since, not any kind of innate superiority of that style. I mean the first iMac was good looking for what it was, iconic even, but not minimalist or modernist.
It was just appropriate for the time. What drove out those translucent multicoloured plastic casings was the fact that it failed to carry over well to smaller forms. Minimalism was a natural step to take when Apple made their first handhelds.
Similarly, it’s obvious that smartphone-style minimalism isn’t going to carry over well to wearable devices. Would anyone argue that Google Glass doesn’t really hammer that home? Wearables need to be far more expressive of individual tastes, and if wearables become the new face of Apple, they would most likely only achieve that by not looking like an iPhone 5.
Future iOS devices, and possibly even OS X devices, would then be expected to keep up with whatever that new standard is. So I’m expecting Apple to make a kind of modernist to post-modernist shift in the coming years, or to be flattened if another company leads that shift.
