International Apple Day +2
Here we are, two days after that moment when Cupertino becomes the center of the universe: International Apple Day. The day when Apple announces its new devices. The day when everyone yawned.
Last year, when Apple announced the iPhone 5, I commented that:
Don’t get me wrong: the iPhone 5 is a beautiful piece of technology. I’ll probably upgrade to one eventually (unless I decide to stick it out and see what the iPhone 6 looks like
). But it’s a lot closer to the iPhone 4s than the iPhone 3g was to the original iPhone. Apple may be growing the box, but it sure isn’t outside it, and they have lots of company in there.
So here’s the thing: Apple’s competitors are looking to find a way out of the box that Steve Jobs created. Is Apple?
Well, as it happened, I didn’t upgrade. I probably will get a 5S though. It’s not the best phone out there, but it’s good enough to make it not worth the effort to switch to another platform. I suppose I might feel differently if I were still doing engineering instead of management consulting. Hacking the phone just isn’t that interesting to me any more.
More to the point, though, is that Apple seems to be stuck in its box, or perhaps Apple Crate would be a better term. Either way, the world is moving past them. Yes, the iPhone 5S is a beautiful piece of technology. Apple put something together that very neatly builds on the previous generations of phones, with nothing out of place. It’s beautiful, it’s powerful, you know exactly what you’ll get. It’s safe.
Two years ago, when the iPhone 4S was announced instead of the i5, I commented that:
Even a bigger question than the i5 was whether or not Tim Cook could fill Steve Jobs’ turtleneck. I, for one, still don’t know.
As a good friend of mine observed, Apple is turning inward, much as it did the last time Steve Jobs left the company. This time, though, the only way he’s coming back is if they have the services of a really good medium or they manage to build an iSteve gadget, sort of the equivalent of IBM’s Watson but with the personality of Steve Jobs.
Somehow, I suspect that neither of those options are terribly likely to occur. That means it’s up to Tim Cook. He’s got the turtleneck now. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in the late 1990s, things looked pretty bleak for the company. Jobs took some real risks, and enjoyed some phenomenal successes as a result. So, Mr. Cook, perhaps it’s time to stop playing it safe. Toss the turtleneck, literally and metaphorically, and take a chance. Maybe next time you’ll surprise us.
