Why Apple Assembles in China

Wednesday, 20 January 2016

Arik Hesseldahl, writing for Recode on Donald Trump’s “we’re gonna get Apple to start building their damn computers and things in this country, instead of in other countries” campaign promise:

Any honest presidential candidate regardless of party should say clearly and indeed proudly that America doesn’t want these jobs to come back. Final assembly jobs are low-skilled, low-paying occupations; no American would wish to support a family on what the jobs would pay. Workers at China’s Foxconn, which manufacturers the iPhone, make about $402 per month after three months of on-the-job probation. Even at the lowest minimum wage in the U.S. — $5.15 an hour in Wyoming — American workers can’t beat that.

It’s not that simple. These jobs are certainly menial, but they’re not low-skill. As Tim Cook said on 60 Minutes:

Charlie Rose: So if it’s not wages, what is it?

Tim Cook: It’s skill. […]

Charlie Rose: They have more skills than American workers? They have more skills than —

Tim Cook: Now — now, hold on.

Charlie Rose: — German workers?

Tim Cook: Yeah, let me — let me — let me clear, China put an enormous focus on manufacturing. In what we would call, you and I would call vocational kind of skills. The U.S., over time, began to stop having as many vocational kind of skills. I mean, you can take every tool and die maker in the United States and probably put them in a room that we’re currently sitting in. In China, you would have to have multiple football fields.

Charlie Rose: Because they’ve taught those skills in their schools?

Tim Cook: It’s because it was a focus of them — it’s a focus of their educational system. And so that is the reality.

Wages are a huge factor, but for the sake of argument, let’s say Apple was willing to dip into its massive cash reserves and pay assembly line workers in the U.S. a good wage. Where would these U.S.-made iPhone be assembled? A year ago Apple sold 75 million iPhones in the fourth quarter of calendar 2014. There is no facility in the U.S. that can do that. There might not be anywhere in the world other than China that can operate at that sort of scale. That’s almost one million iPhones per day. 10 iPhones per second. Think about that.

You can say, well, Apple could dig even deeper into its coffers and build such facilities. And train tens of thousands of employees. But why would they? Part of the marvel of Apple’s operations is that they can assemble and sell an unfathomable number of devices but they’re not on the hook for the assembly plants and facilities. When iPhones go the way of the iPod in 10 or 15 or 20 years, Apple doesn’t have any factories to close or convert for other uses. Foxconn does.

The U.S. can’t compete with China on wages. It can’t compete on the size of the labor force. China has had a decades-long push in its education system to train these workers; the U.S. has not. And the U.S. doesn’t have the facilities or the proximity to the Asian component manufacturers.

The only way Apple could ever switch to U.S. assembly and manufacturing would be if they automated the entire process — to build machines that build the machines. That, in fact, is what NeXT did while they were in the hardware business. But NeXT only ever sold about 50,000 computers total. Apple needed to assemble 35,000 iPhones per hour last year.

So long as assembling these devices remains labor intensive, it has to happen in China. And if someday it becomes automated — if the machines are built by machines — by definition it’s not going to create manufacturing jobs.¹ ★

I do wonder about the purported Apple car. Would that be assembled in China, too? The U.S. does have automobile manufacturing expertise. And a car is so utterly unlike any product Apple has ever made that I feel like anything is possible. ↩︎

The Curious Case of the Curious Case

Friday, 11 December 2015

Joanna Stern tested Apple’s new Smart Battery Case for five days, and likes it a lot:

Let’s get this out of the way: The bar for battery-case design is extremely low. Most are chunky and made of black matte plastic, requiring you to attach two pieces to your phone. You choose a battery case for utility, not fashion.

Apple’s Smart Battery Case, though still fairly unsightly, is ahead of those. Bend back the top and slide in your phone. It feels just like Apple’s smooth, soft-touch wraparound silicone case, except… with a protruding, awkward battery on the back. The battery juts out as if your phone will soon give birth to a rectangular alien.

Still, I’ll take it over all the ugly messes sold by Mophie, Anker and others, especially since it provides better protection for the phone. A lip curves just above the screen to prevent the glass from hitting a hard surface and an interior lining provides better shock absorption than hard plastic. Plus, the grippy material is much easier to hold and doesn’t feel like it will slip from my hands.

The Verge’s Lauren Goode disagrees:

Apple’s smart battery case is fine, then, if you want a softer case or a “passive” battery charging experience, with zero control over or understanding of how the case actually charges your phone. Maybe that’s what Apple is hoping: that buyers of this thing will slip it on and never take it off, charging their iPhones entirely through the case’s Lightning port going forward, forgetting about its big ol’ bump in the back. They will be pleased, finally, with their iPhone 6’s or 6S’s battery life, and the memory of spending an extra $99 for it, rather than having it just work that way in the first place, will eventually fade away.

It’s fine if you don’t want exterior indicator lights, or a even a case that gives you a 0 to 100 percent charge. After all, this one was designed for the iPhone, by the same company that made your iPhone. For some people, that’s a big draw.

In either case this will probably sell like hot cakes. It fits nicely in holiday stockings. ’Tis the season. Just know that from a pure performance and even a design perspective, Apple’s effort is not the best you can get.

(I can almost see her eyes rolling as she typed those italicized words in the second quoted paragraph.)

Lewis Hilsenteger of Unbox Therapy best captured what most of us thought when we first saw it: “These things look weird.”

That was certainly my first impression when I got mine Tuesday morning. The looks-like-it’s-pregnant-with-an-iPod-Touch design is certainly curious. I think to understand why it looks like this we have to ask why it even exists:

People who use their phones heavily — power users, if you will — struggle to get through a day on a single charge with the iPhone 6/6S.
The Plus models offer so much more battery life that getting through the day on a single charge isn’t a problem, even for power users who are on their phones all day long. But most people don’t want an iPhone that large.
Apple has long sold third-party battery cases in its stores, so they know how popular they are.
Existing battery cases all suffer from similar design problems, as outlined by Joanna Stern above. They make the entire device look and feel chunky, and most of them are built from materials that don’t feel good. None of them integrate in any way with the software on the iPhone, and most of them use micro USB instead of Lightning for charging the case.
Lastly, Apple claims the Smart Battery Case tackles a problem I wasn’t aware existed: that existing battery cases adversely affect cellular reception because they’re putting a battery between the phone’s antenna and the exterior of the case.

So I think Apple’s priorities for the Smart Battery Case were as follows — and the order matters:

Provides effective battery life equivalent to the iPhone 6S Plus.
Feels good in your hand.
Makes it easy and elegant to insert and remove the phone.
Works as a durable protective case.
Prevents the case’s battery from affecting cellular reception.
Looks good.

That “looks good” is last on the list is unusual for an Apple product, to say the least. Looking good isn’t always first on Apple’s list of priorities, but it’s seldom far from the top. But in this case it makes sense: Apple sells great-looking silicone and leather cases for people who aren’t looking for a battery case, and all existing third-party battery cases are clunky in some way.

Ungainly though the case’s hump is, I can’t help but suspect one reason for it might be, counterintuitively, a certain vanity on the part of its designers. Not for the sake of the case itself, but for the iPhone. Third-party “thick from top to bottom” battery cases make it impossible to tell whether the enclosed phone is itself thick or thin. Apple’s Smart Battery Case makes it obvious that it’s a thin iPhone in a case which has a thick battery on the back. And I’ll say this for Apple: they are owning that hump. The hero photo of the case on the packaging is a face-on view of the back of the case.

But I think the main reasons for this design are practical. The battery doesn’t extend to the top in order to accommodate the hinge design for inserting and removing the phone. Why it doesn’t extend to the bottom is a little less obvious. I suspect one reason is that that’s where the “passively coupling antenna” is.¹ Extending the battery to cover it would defeat the purpose. Also, there’s a hand feel aspect to it — normally I rest the bottom of my iPhone on my pinky finger. With this case, I can rest the bottom ridge of the hump on my pinky, and it’s kind of nice. I also like putting my index finger atop the hump.

So the Smart Battery Case looks weird. Typical battery cases look fat. Whether you prefer the weird look of the Smart Battery Case to the fat look of a typical case is subjective. Me, I don’t like the way any of them look. But after using the Smart Battery Case for three days, and having previously spent time using the thinnest available cases from Mophie, I feel confident saying Apple’s Smart Battery Case feels better when you’re holding it than any other battery case, both because of the material and its shape. It’s not even a close call. It also feels sturdier — this is the most protective iPhone case Apple has ever made, with rigid reinforced sides and a slightly higher lip rising above the touchscreen. The Smart Battery Case also clearly looks better from your own face-on perspective when using the phone. (Mophie’s cases look better than most, but they emboss an obnoxious “mophie” logotype on the front-facing chin. If Apple doesn’t print anything on the front face of the iPhone, why in the world would a case maker?)

Patents, by the way, are a non-issue regarding the Smart Battery Case’s design. A well-placed little birdie who is perched in a position to know told me that Nilay Patel’s speculation that the unusual design was the byproduct of Apple trying to steer clear of patents held by Mophie (or any other company for that matter) are “absolute nonsense”. This birdie was unequivocal on the matter. Whether you like it, hate it, or are ambivalent about it, this is the battery case Apple wanted to make.

My take is that the Smart Battery Case is an inelegant design, but it is solving a problem for which, to date, no one has created an elegant solution. Apple has simply chosen to make different severe trade-offs than the existing competition. In that sense, it is a very Apple-like product — like the hockey-puck mouse or the iMac G4.

On Capacity, Simplicity, and the Intended Use Case

Most battery cases have an on/off toggle switch, controlling when the case is actually charging the phone. The reason for this is that you can squeeze more from a battery case if you only charge the phone when it’s mostly depleted. Here’s a passage from Mophie’s FAQ page:

When should I turn on my mophie case?

To get the most charge out of your case, turn it on around 10%-20% and keep the case charging without using it until your iPhone hits 80% battery life. From there, you can either wait until it gets low again or top it off when the battery is less than 80%. Apple’s batteries fast-charge to 80%, then switch to trickle charging for the last 20%.

Simplicity is a higher priority for Apple than fiddly control. If a peripheral can get by without an on/off switch, Apple is going to omit the switch. (Exhibit B: Apple Pencil.) The whole point of the Smart Battery Case is that you charge it up and put your iPhone in it and that’s it. Complaining about the lack of an on/off toggle or external charge capacity indicator lights on the Smart Battery Case reminds me of the complaints about the original iPhone omitting the then-ubiquitous green/red hardware buttons for starting and ending phone calls. Sure, there was a purpose to them, but in the end the simplification was worth it. If your iPhone is in the case, it’s charging. That’s it.

Regarding the battery capacity of the case, here’s Lauren Goode, author of the aforelinked review for The Verge, on Twitter:

A quick comparison for you: $99 Apple Battery Case 1877 mAh, $100 Mophie Juice Pack Air 2750 mAh, $50 Incipio Offgrid Express 3000 mAh

Nothing could better encapsulate the wrong way of looking at the Smart Battery Case than this tweet. The intended use of the Smart Battery Case is to allow prolonged, heavy use of an iPhone 6/6S throughout one day. In my testing, and judging by the reviews of others, its 1,877 mAh battery is enough for that. Adding a bigger battery would have just made it even heavier and more ungainly.

And the very name of the Incipio Offgrid Express suggests that it is intended for an entirely different use case: traveling away from power for more than a day.

Which in turn brings me to Tim Cook’s comments to Mashable’s Lance Ulanoff yesterday:

Some also see the introduction of an Apple battery case as an admission that battery life on the iPhone 6 and 6s isn’t all it should be.

Cook, though, said that “if you’re charging your phone every day, you probably don’t need this at all. But if you’re out hiking and you go on overnight trips… it’s kind of nice to have.”

The Smart Battery Case would certainly help with an overnight hiking trip, but I think Cook was off-message here, because that scenario is really not what it was designed for. Big 5,000 mAh (or more) external battery chargers (or the highest capacity, extremely thick battery cases from third parties) are far better suited to that scenario than the Smart Battery Case. But Ulanoff’s preceding paragraph points to the marketing predicament inherent in a first-party Apple battery case: that it implies the built-in battery of the iPhone 6S is insufficient.

The clear lesson is that it’s far better to give a phone more battery life by making the phone itself thicker and including a correspondingly thicker (and thus bigger) internal battery than by using any sort of external battery. After a few days using this case, my thoughts turn not to the Smart Battery Case itself but instead to my personal desire that Apple had made the 6/6S form factor slightly thicker. Not a lot thicker. Just a little — just enough to boost battery life around 15-20 percent or so.² That wouldn’t completely alleviate the need for external batteries. But it would eliminate a lot of my need — my phone dies only a few times a year, but when it does, it almost invariably happens very late at night.

I emphasized the word “personal” in the preceding paragraph because I realize my needs and desires are not representative of the majority. I think the battery life of the iPhone 6S as-is is sufficient for the vast majority of typical users. I suspect Cook went with the overnight hiking scenario specifically to avoid the implication that the built-in battery is insufficient. But the better explanation is that the built-in battery is insufficient for power users who use their iPhones far more than most people do.

My Advice

If you find yourself short on battery with your iPhone every day (or even most days), and you can’t make an adjustment to, say, put a charging dock on your desk or in your car to give your iPhone’s internal battery a periodic snack, then you should probably bite the bullet and switch to a 6S Plus. However bulky the Plus feels in your pocket and hands, it feels less bulky to me than the iPhone 6S with any battery pack. An iPhone 6S Plus, even with a normal case on it, weighs noticeably less than an iPhone 6S with the Smart Battery Case. If you need the extra battery capacity every day, you might as well get the Plus. (If you actually prefer the bigger Plus to the 4.7-inch devices, you’re in luck — you get the screen size you prefer, and a significantly longer-lasting battery. My advice here is for those who prefer the 4.7-inch size, other considerations aside.)

That doesn’t describe me, however. On a typical day, my iPhone 6S seldom drops below 20 percent by the time I go to sleep. But when I’m traveling, I often need a portable battery of some sort. Cellular coverage can be spotty (which drains the battery), and when I’m away from home, I tend to do more (or even the entirety) of my daily computing on the iPhone. Conferences, in particular, can be dreadful on battery life. At WWDC my iPhone can drop to 50 percent by the time the keynote is over Monday morning.

In recent years, rather than use a battery case, I’ve switched to carrying a portable external battery. My favorite for the past year or so is the $80 Mophie Powerstation Plus 2X. It’s relatively small, packs a 3,000 mAh capacity, and has built-in USB and Lightning cables. At conferences or for work travel, it’s easily stashed in my laptop bag, so my pockets aren’t weighed down at all, and my iPhone isn’t saddled with an unnatural case. If I do need to carry it in my pocket, it’s not too bad. It’s also easier to share with friends or family than a battery case. At night, I just plug the Powerstation into an AC adapter, and my iPhone into the Powerstation, and both devices get charged — no need for a separate charger or any additional cables.

The big advantage to using a battery case instead of an external battery pack is that you can easily keep using your phone while it charges. That’s awkward, at best, while your phone is tethered by a cable to a small brick.

If I were going to go back to using a battery case, there’s no question in my mind that I’d go with Apple’s. The only downside to it compared to Mophie’s (and the others — but I think Mophie is clearly the leader of the pack) is that it looks funny from the back. But to my eyes it doesn’t look that funny, and though third-party cases don’t look weird, they don’t look (or feel) good. In every other way, Apple’s Smart Battery Case wins: it’s all Lightning, so any Lightning peripherals you have will work, and there’s no need to pack a grody micro USB cable; it supplies more than enough additional power to get you through an active day; its unibody design makes it much easier to insert and remove the phone; and it feels much better in hand. ★

My understanding of how this “passively assistive antenna” works is that it takes the cellular signal and amplifies it as it passes through the case in a way that makes it easier for the iPhone’s antenna to “hear”. Sort of like the antenna equivalent of cupping your hand around your ear. I have no idea whether this is legit, or some sort of placebo marketing bullshit, but it would be interesting to see someone measure the cellular reception of (a) a naked iPhone 6S, (b) the same iPhone in a, say, Mophie battery case, and (c) the same iPhone in the Smart Battery Case. ↩︎
The iPhone 6 and 6S are actually 0.2mm thinner than their corresponding Plus models. That’s sort of crazy. The difference is barely perceptible, but if anything, the 6 and 6S should be a little thicker, not thinner, than the Plus models. ↩︎︎

What Goes Up

Friday, 13 November 2015

This piece by Bryan Clark for TheNextWeb caught my eye last weekend — “We’ve Reached — Maybe Passed — Peak Apple: Why the Narrative Needs to Change”:

Last month, Apple’s latest earnings call announced its “most successful year ever.” The numbers were reported, the stories were spun and Wall Street basically anointed Apple the god of capitalism.

They’re all wrong.

Apple wasn’t wrong — fiscal 2015 was Apple’s most successful year ever, by the objective measures of both revenue and profit. I suppose you can decide to define “most successful year ever” in terms of something else, like percentage growth or stock price gains, but revenue and profit are pretty fair measures.

I missed it where “Wall Street basically anointed Apple the god of capitalism”. All I noticed was that Apple’s stock price went up about two percent the day after earnings were announced and has since fallen back to where it was before Q4 earnings were announced.

The actual story, the story we should be telling, involves a different narrative. Apple is the largest company in the world, but success is fleeting. While the numbers are impressive, they don’t come close to painting an accurate picture about how much trouble Apple is really in.

Apple’s rise under Steve Jobs was historic. Its fall under Tim Cook is going to be much slower, more painful.

The fall usually is more painful than the rise. Who writes a sentence like that?

And if Apple’s fall under Cook is much slower than its rise under Steve Jobs, it’s going to take 20 or 30 years. Apple’s revival was long, slow, and relatively steady.

Apple lives and dies by the iPhone. iPad sales are flat, iPod’s are all but irrelevant, and while Mac sales are up, they’re nowhere close to the workhorse that can continue to carry Apple should they experience a downturn in iPhone sales. There is no Plan B.

One look at the numbers tells a pretty decisive tale.

Percentage of revenue derived from iPhone sales:

2012: 46.38%

2013: 52.07%

2014: 56.21%

2015: 62.54%

This is the part of Clark’s piece that got my attention. It’s a common refrain these days — just search Google for “Apple is too dependent on the iPhone”.

Clark makes it sound like this is because the rest of Apple’s business is in decline, whereas the truth is that the iPhone continues to grow at an astonishing rate that even Apple’s other successful products can’t match. Is it worrisome that iPad sales continue to decline? Sure. Would it be better for Apple if the iPad were selling in iPhone-esque quantities? Of course. But iPad still sold 9.9 million units and generated $4.3 billion in revenue last quarter.

Arguing that Apple is in trouble because the iPhone is so popular is like arguing that the ’90s-era Chicago Bulls were in trouble because Michael Jordan was so good. It’s true Jordan couldn’t play forever — and the iPhone won’t be the most profitable product in the world forever. But in the meantime, the Bulls were well-nigh unbeatable, and Apple, for now at least, is unfathomably profitable.¹ Just like how it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, it’s better to have tremendous success for some period of time than never to have had tremendous success in the first place. Right?

What I don’t get is why Apple gets singled out for its singular success, but other companies don’t. 92 percent of Google’s revenue last year came from online advertising. And more importantly, I don’t get why Apple’s non-iPhone businesses are so quickly written off only because they’re so much smaller than the iPhone.

Apple’s total revenue for last quarter was $51.5 billion. The iPhone accounted for $32.2 billion of that, which means Apple’s non-iPhone business generated about $19.3 billion in revenue. All of Microsoft in the same three months: around $21 billion. All of Google: $18.78 billion. Facebook: $4.5 billion. Take away every single iPhone sold — all of them — and Apple’s remaining business for the quarter was almost as big as Microsoft’s, bigger than Google’s, and more than four times the size of Facebook’s. And this is for the July-September quarter, not the October-December holiday quarter in which Apple is strongest.

Nothing in the world compares to Apple’s iPhone business, including anything else Apple makes. But a multi-billion-per-quarter business here (Mac), a multi-billion-per-quarter business there (iPad), a “Services” division that generates more revenue than Facebook, and an “Other” category (Watch, Apple TV, Beats, iPod) that booked $3 billion in a non-holiday quarter — and it’s clear that Apple’s non-iPhone businesses, combined, amount to a massive enterprise.

Here’s a Larry Dignon column about whether iPad Pro will make “iPad material to Apple again”:

Apple’s iPad sales are on the borderline of being immaterial to the company, but some analysts are betting that enterprise sales of the iPad Pro can turn the product line around. […]

Nevertheless, the iPad franchise is sucking wind relative to the iPhone. Apple’s annual report shows the iPad is 10 percent of overall sales. Once a business falls below 10 percent a company doesn’t have to break it out. In other words, the iPad could be lumped into “other” with the Apple Watch and iPod if current trends continue.

This is a product line that, in and of itself, generated just about exactly the same revenue last quarter as all of Google’s non-advertising business did for the entire fiscal year. But Apple is the company that is considered lopsided and worrisomely dependent upon a single product.

Name a product introduced in the last five years that has been more successful than the iPad — either in terms of revenue and profit for its maker, or in terms of aggregate hours of daily use and customer satisfaction of its users. I can’t think of one.

Now consider the Apple Watch. Fast Company called it “a flop” back in July. Here’s a guy on Quora — Jason Lancaster, editor of a website called Accurate Auto Advice — answering, in the affirmative, whether Apple has “already lost the market for self driving cars” (not joking):

Third, Apple may have peaked. Call me a hater, but what reason is there to assume Apple’s reputation is going to stay where it is? The watch was a flop, and their only consistent source of success is the iPhone, as the market for Macs and iPads is drying up (as it is for all computer hardware companies).

Forget the fact that Mac sales are growing, or that iPad sales, though in decline, remain roughly 10 million per quarter. What I enjoy about this is Lancaster’s having written off the Watch as a flop — he even uses the past tense.

Here’s what that flop looks like:

Apple has shipped seven million Apple Watches since its introduction this spring, giving the technology giant a firm lead in the nascent smartwatch market, according to researcher Canalys.

That number falls shy of some Wall Street analysts’ expectations for Apple’s first new device category since 2010. But, for perspective, consider this: Apple sold more smartwatches from April through September than all other vendors combined sold over the past five quarters, Canalys reports.

If we estimate the average selling price for an Apple Watch at $500 (reasonable), that’s $3.5 billion in revenue for the year to date — prior to the holiday quarter that is almost certainly going to be the strongest for watch sales annually.

Back to Bryan Clark’s TheNextWeb piece:

Steve Jobs is almost entirely responsible for Apple’s cult-like following.

By streamlining the company in an attempt to make it profitable, the same vision started to makes its way through every product Apple created. Rather than bloated and flashy, Jobs created a movement of decidedly minimalist devices that required not much more than an occasional charge and a user that knew where the power button was.

Between aesthetically pleasing design, rock-solid hardware, and software that responded as if it were built for the machine — not in spite of it — Apple culture became a cult of Jobs-worshipping consumers willing to buy anything with a lowercase “i” in front of it.

That never happened. The G4 Cube didn’t sell. iPod Hi-Fi didn’t sell. Those weren’t just non-hit products — they were both products that Steve Jobs himself really liked. I’ve heard that he had a stack of unopened iPod Hi-Fis in his office. Apple products have never been blindly accepted by the mass market — they’ve succeeded on their merits and by meeting actual demand. As I wrote two years ago:

To posit that Apple customers are somehow different, that when they feel screwed by Apple their response is to go back for more, is “Cult of Mac” logic — the supposition that most Apple customers are irrational zealots or trend followers who just mindlessly buy anything with an Apple logo on it. The truth is the opposite: Apple’s business is making customers happy, and keeping them happy. They make products for discriminating people who have higher standards and less tolerance for design flaws or problems.

Clark finally tells us what Apple’s biggest problems are:

There are larger issues on the horizon: For example, how does Apple compete with Windows and Android?

Both have proven to be amazingly adept in recent years not only at competing with Apple in form factor, but functionality as well.

Two companies that are innovating, not searching for identity outside of a singular product.

Two companies that are on the way up, not down.

Windows and Android, got it.

The Apple Watch is great, but it’s never going to carry Apple like the iPhone until it works like one. The watch is undeniably cool, but it really fails to do anything better than your phone.

To make matters worse, you have to have an iPhone close by in order to even use most of its features. Similar Android models are self-contained and only require an occasional sync.

The autonomous car project sounds promising, but competing against Google and Tesla in addition to auto industry giants like Lexus and Mercedes is an uphill battle full of technology challenges, government red tape and changing century-old transportation conventions.

The best I can gather from this mishmash of a conclusion is that Apple Watch should have somehow debuted as a first-generation product that could stand toe-to-toe with the iPhone (which is now in its ninth generation), and that Apple’s car product should already be here. If there were no rumors of an Apple car, we’d be hearing that Apple is going to miss out on the next big industry that is ripe for disruption from the tech industry. But because there are rumors and hints pointing to an Apple car, we’re hearing that cars are too difficult, the established companies too entrenched. Ed Colligan’s line for the ages — “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.” — was also about an industry full of longstanding giants, Google, technology challenges, government red tape, and century-old conventions. Minus the “government red tape”, that’s a pretty good description of the watch and home entertainment system industries, too.

I’m not here to argue the opposite of Colligan — that Apple’s success in these new fields is preordained — because that would be foolish. But it’s just as foolish to argue that Apple can’t succeed — or that anything less than iPhone-sized success in a new endeavor is a failure. ★

The iPhone, however, is unlikely to take a year off in the prime of its career to play baseball. ↩︎

Sunday, 31 January 2016

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