[eckyptang]

In the interest of backing up my statement and sticking to my guns:

Take the marketing and hype away from Apple, and what is it? A Foxconn rebranding outfit, a 1990s style UNIX outfit which ships proprietary hardware and a media pushing company with a less than 7% market share of the IT industry with many rising competitors. That is it.

That is no different than Sony 10 years ago. And look where they are now.

Hype cannot be maintained forever. When you can no longer outdo yourself, it's gone. This is happening rapidly. People used to wait on Apple news announcements. I mean hell even I did as they usually stepped up the game. But what have they delivered of note recently: absolutely sod all. Lumias are starting to tread on their innovation territory, Surface is less than a month away, Google has taken over the appliance model and the mobile market is dominated by South Korean giant Samsung.

They're losing the marketing battle as that's all they had and they're suing everyone on the way down.

My main problem is that people worship Jobs as some kind of idol. I think he was an extremely bad role model and a warning rather than a sign. Sure he knocked up Apple's market cap, which is his only real acheivement, but it in the process he shafted just about everyone on the way, destroyed the perception of an open computing model, lied persistently about bad products and ripped off other people's work persistently.

The guy was technically speaking in every way an utter psychopathic arrogant asshole with no remnant of humanity. But a good marketer.

I'm fed up with reading all the tripe about him.

[arn]

Your position is absurd and contradictory.

The hype and popularity exists because Apple has produced very compelling products. The iPod and the iPhone were both leaps and bounds ahead of the competition at their launch. It's also clear that Jobs was the driving force behind their vision.

You say that "even [you]" waited on Apple announcements because "they usually stepped up the game" which translates into the fact that Apple made better/interesting/more innovative products. Note you didn't say "even I waited on Apple news announcements because their marketing was so amazing."

You say that Lumias are treading on their "innovation" territory. Not their marketing territory, their innovation territory.

If it was all marketing, they would still be winning by your argument. Has their marketing dramatically changed in the past few years?

The only rational way to reconcile this is by you saying "oh, by marketing, I mean the whole product package, user interface, software, and hardware design". In which case, you just are simply defining marketing wrong.

[eckyptang]

The iPod and iPhone were not leaps and bounds ahead. That is a common misconception which is powered by the marketing hype. There were other products out there which were far superior. Archos produced better music players and Nokia produced far better phones under the Symbian banner.

The differentiator was the marketing hype.

They stepped up the game by delivering on day zero which made people hang on them. That is still marketing.

Lumia marketing is horrible, but they are producing hype via innovation. Apple don't do that any more. They have nothing to deliver any more.

Their marketing has changed from "new product" to "new incremental improvement" i.e. the hype is dying.

Marketing here is purely spin.

[shenberg]

I'll bite on the Symbian claim.

Saying that the iPhone is not leaps and bounds better than anything else in the market at the time is disingenuous - if you used both the N95's browser (with the crummy joystick-controlled mouse) and the iPhone's multitouch browser, you'd know there is no comparison.

I'll go further and say the Nokia phones at the time were much more marketing-driven. They had huge checklists of features _so that marketing could say they have "more features"_ (e.g. irDA), but the core experience was poor (unresponsive and confusing UI, bad input methods) it didn't matter.

Did Nokia make better phones? In one sense, yes - they had longer battery lives, better cameras, they worked much better as phones, for chrissake. But, in the most important way, the iPhone blew everything out of the water - which phone people would prefer to use. I preferred a usable browsing and mapping experience to the jack-of-all-trades and master of none approach of Nokia phones, and apparently, so did the market.

[eckyptang]

Well you kind of justified my point:

The iPhone is a crappy phone with crappy battery life and has a crappy camera. None of this is desirable nor unique (O2 XDA kind of nailed all of these in 2002).

Apple however made it successful through marketing.

And don't mention usable mapping after the last week or so :)

[Synaesthesia]

It's got a good web browser, good media playback, good apps and games, and good display. The camera isn't crappy either IMO.

[whatusername]

on launch the iPhone didn't have a great camera. (Or apps)

[freyr]

How many people need to tell you you're wrong? Google "smartphone 2007" and take a look at the iPhone's competition at the time. The iPhone was leaps and bounds ahead because it focused on the features more users care about most. It's no coincidence that the other smartphones of 2007 look like ancient relics and the iPhone looks like a modern phone.

Sure, Apple's marketing is better than that of their competitors. But good marketing and good products aren't mutually exclusive.

That said, since the original iPhone, the updates have gotten increasingly incremental, and the competitors have closed the gap.

[Synaesthesia]

The iPod was way ahead in terms of thickness, simplicity and battery life. Things that mattered. At the time it was a technical marvel, competing hard disk players were huge and clunky EG Creative nomad.

The iPhone was way ahead of Nokia Symbian phones in power of its web browser, display, touch sensitivity etc.

[altcognito]

Totally agree with this. It's not that Apple did anything in particular, it's that they bring together the best of everything in a single device. Honestly, this has been their mode of operation from the beginning. They have decent vision but, at least under Jobs, execution is generally flawless.

[anextio]

> Nokia produced far better phones under the Symbian banner

The problem here is that you appear to have no idea what the word "better" means to a consumer, as opposed to a hacker.

And that's why you can't understand Apple's success and write it off to "marketing".

[rustynails77]

Don't dismiss Jobsy's (or his team's) contributions out of hand. They knew that an app store was key to the success of Apple's new device, so they made minimal profit off the App store.

What Jobsy did was more than marketing - but a lot of it was marketing. He drove things in a particular direction, which makes him somewhat of a visionary - not just a marketer.

On the other hand, I agree with the great grand-parent poster. What Apple had was not significantly better, just packaged better. I view that as a visionary rather than marketing.

[6ren]

I hesitate to contribute to a troll thread, but Apple is a commercialiser of technology. That involves both marketing and engineering - it's not creating a new vision, but realizing a vision.

For example, with the iPhone 5, they doubled CPU performance in a year - better than Moore's Law. It's not a new vision, but it is an engineering accomplishment.

[rustynails77]

And? The specs for the Nexus 7 out-performed the iPhone 5 - even though it was released earlier. You could argue that this is quad-core and apps need to be coded to use quad cores etc etc. The point is that I don't understand your point. I agree that Apple do more than marketing, but marketing is one of their greatest strengths .. prior to this Samsung trial at least.. What was a BAD PR move.

[6ren]

Yes, it's better than quad-core for that reason. Also smaller, lighter, uses less battery etc. We already have faster PCs; the achievement is doing so within the other constraints.

Yes, marketing is their greatest strength, but "marketing" includes more than advertising, more than design, it's also knowing what will be wanted, and making it happen. Jobs actually cited Sony as a great inspiration - and perhaps we forget now, but they did create the first commercially successful transistor radio and the walkman (also Trinitron TV and the first playstation, and a bunch of other stuff in their heyday). I would say these are close parallels to Sony with the iPod, and arguably the iPhone and iPad.

My point is that Apple doesn't do invention of new technology, but commercialization of technology. A great example is the mouse: PARC invented it, Apple commercialized it. I think it's a cool and impressive thing to commercialize technology, but it's no more than that (unless Apples starts doing fundamental research like PARC, Bell Labs and IBM used to do).

[glenra]

PARC didn't invent the mouse.

Yes, they built a mouse and shipped it as part of an integrated product, but it had been invented by others more than a decade earlier. It had even shipped in a product well before they did it. PARC is actually in pretty much the same position there that you're putting Apple - they took an existing idea and made it a bit more commercial than it had been. Englebart's mouse was unreliable and uncommerical; PARC's mouse was more practical to make, more reliable, but way too expensive; Apple's mouse was finally reliable and cheap.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_%28computing%29#Early_mic...

[6ren]

Thanks - I thought Engelbart was at PARC, incorrectly. Well, I'm happy for there to be stages of commercialization, just as there are stages of invention (and not always a clear demarcation), people improving what went before is the way.

Interesting that Engelbart patented the mouse. http://www.google.com/patents/US3541541?printsec=abstract#v=...

[ryanpetrich]

The Nexus 7 doesn't have better specs all around—the iPhone 5's GPU is considerably more powerful.

[sjwright]

A large device is more powerful than a small device. Film at 11.

[czr80]

I'm not sure how you can simultaneously say: "I mean hell even I did as they usually stepped up the game" and also "They're losing the marketing battle as that's all they had".

If they "stepped up the game" then surely there is (or was) something more happening than simply "hype"?

Who knows what will happen next - maybe others have or soon will catch up and Apple will crash and burn. We'll see. Still, to dismiss a pretty remarkable run over the last decade as "just marketing" is really to miss a lot, not to mention implicitly reducing everyone else in the industry to idiots who for some bizarre reason couldn't hire a good ad agency.

[eckyptang]

Sorry I should be more clear: "stepping up the game" is their marketing innovation of delivering something then announcing it rather than the industry norm of doing it the other way round and people being bored by the time it is released.

Unfortunately they have nothing to throw out now - it's all minor improvements on something they've already sold.

None of their most "innovative products" are remarkable - it's all hype.

[czr80]

Hmmm... how do you reconcile your theory with the fact that the original iPhone was announced 6 months before it launched?

[rustynails77]

Not sure what you mean here, but I agree largely with the grand-parent poster. Apple are struggling to innovate and others are catching up (not just Android). So rather than try to innovate, they are litigating. In some ways it's a good sign, in other ways it's bad. The market is maturing, but Apple is struggling to keep in the driving seat - and they are being overtaken by others.

In the end, I want what's best for us all. Healthy competition.

[gurkendoktor]

> So rather than try to innovate, they are litigating.

Apple's legal team haven't ever been nice guys, since way before the iPhone (maybe even before Jobs' return, I don't know).

This is a false dichotomy, Apple is not suddenly forcing its engineers to study law.