kingwr wrote:It has Intel hardware, but it took Apple making MacBooks and MacBook Airs (which I own) to push the PC world into Ultrabook territory, just like the iPod (which I own) dominated the MP3 player market, iPhone (which I own) pushed the cellphone world into touchscreen and app territory, and iPads (which I own) created the tablet marketplace. You have to be a serious hater not to see how Apple innovation in the last 7 to 8 years has dramatically changed the landscape in PCs, tablets, music players, and cellphones. I wish they would do the same for TV.
I think you've bought into a version of history that Apple wants you to believe.
The iPod wasn't a runaway success when it was first released. It took 18 months to sell a million units. Of course, it was Mac only for most of that time, and a million unit's in the Mac world was a huge success, so when iTunes for Windows was finally released, people were prepared to spend $400 on this "massively successful" MP3 player that was in fact wasn't "massively successful" compared to equipment in the Windows market.
iTunes was what really made the difference - you couldn't (easily) play your iTunes purchases on those other MP3 players, and iTunes did a better job than most of it's competitors at the time.
The iPhone also wasn't quite the revolution that people seem to remember - it was still being outsold by BlackBerry a year after launch, and it wasn't the first phone with a touch-screen, or the first phone with an app-store (in fact, the app-store didn't turn up until almost 18 months after the iPhone was introduced). But it did come with that price premium that people automatically attached to iGear, which allowed Apple to spend $650 million between 2007 and 2011 in iPhone advertising (as against $150 million to actually develop the iPhone). In the US market, it also introduced customers to the idea that you could pay for a phone seperately from the phone service.
By the time the iPad came out, Apple recognized that playing the premium game might be dangerous. Instead of the $1000 price tag that many thought the market would bear, the iPad came out at $600. This was because the hardware was coming along in leaps and bounds, and Apple recognized that giving it's competitors a $1000 budget for hardware would make the market too attractive. By lowering the ceiling, the early competitors to the iPad ended up making compromises that gave the iPad a clear field for longer than would otherwise have been the case.
And yet the iPad itself isn't a game-changer, per se. It's not fair to say that it's just a big smart phone, but technically, it doesn't really do much more than a smart phone. Most of the 40 million iPads sold in 2011 were sold in addition to, not instead of, PCs and laptops.
The big takeaway from all this is that ordinary users were prepared to pay $100-$200 extra for the Apple brand, and it was able to leverage success in one area to build success in another. If Microsoft had been able to generate even $50 in profit for every successful WMC deployment, I think we'd have seen a very, very different approach, but that's not the eco-system that developed. Microsoft wouldn't have been allowed to develop an App-store model (everyone else would have screamed anti-trust) and the only obvious route to revenue for WMC was in partnership with the media providers, and that's never going to be happy place - just ask any average Cable-Co ATM (aka customer)
