[beachwood23]

I agree. There was little sign of the old Apple Arrogance that paved new product lines and pushed tech forward. Instead, the presentation explicitly mentioned several times that they only released these products because "customers asked for them."

As Steve Jobs famously said, "customers don't know what they want." This change of motivation in their product development is a significant one.

[parasubvert]

Steve Jobs never said that, or at least it's easily to misinterpret. Here's what he said:

"But in the end, for something this complicated, it's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them." (Businessweek, 1998)

The point is that Apple is VERY concerned about what customers want, and listen to customers, and usually achieves that through an engine of incremental improvement once the product is out there. They just don't believe in a focus-group approach to new products.

Secondly, the current internet meme is that Apple needs to slow down and make their products more stable. Yet we still want our innovation "drug hit" from their announcements. This is hard to balance.

[imglorp]

> As Steve Jobs famously said, "customers don't know what they want." This change of motivation in their product development is a significant one.

I wonder... What visionary, long term, skunkworks projects did Steve initiate into the pipeline before he fell ill? It should be safe to assume there were a number of secret exploratory rods into the fire, if the end of his career there was similar to the rest of it. Some should be emerging from dev right around now.

Where are they now and why aren't we seeing them? Did Steve run out of ideas? Or did they all get mothballed in favor of safer alternatives?