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It's unfortunate that Gruber has essentially become synonymous with Apple fanboyism, because I think he raises some salient points here. To any reader that is familiar with his writing, it'll come across as the typical Apple cheerleading, suggesting that weaknesses are actually strengths, and any competition isn't really competition because Apple is really just engaged in a long-term, visionary, eleventy-dimensional chess match in its noble and exalted goal of driving the human race forward. But I agree with him on the first two misconceptions he tries to correct. The iPhone was never a market share game. In 2004, the original Motorola RAZR was like $400 at launch, and three months later it came free in cereal boxes. That's what you do when you are trying to gain market share. Apple's products are effectively a luxury brand for consumer electronics, and criticizing Apple for not winning the market share game is like criticizing Lulumelon for selling fewer yoga pants than Target. Also, the iPhone and iPhone 3G were objectively great products. It would have been great even if RIM wasn't releasing awful products by comparison. Their other product lines have continued to be popular even as other companies have learned how to make products that are just as thin or have screens just as sharp. So I agree with him on that point, that there's not much merit to the argument, "well the iPhone only sold well because everyone else sucks, and now the Galaxy is just as good so they're screwed." But, his third point is where I diverge with him on his conclusions. "Apple is a great competitor. In the PC industry they’ve fought back from the brink of bankruptcy to become the most profitable and fastest-growing PC maker in the world. They came in and stole the music player market, and have dominated it for over a decade." Well, look. To suggest that this is a fait accompli, without even mentioning the fact that Steve Jobs is no longer with the company so maybe they're going to struggle in learning how to 'fight back' without him, is extremely misguided to me. I never knew Steve Jobs personally, but I'd like to think that if he visited Apple now, he'd say something like, "I've been dead for two years and we're still talking about which company is better at making flat touch screen computers? That's boring now. Let's invent something new. And by the way, fire whomever thought it was okay to have 21 icons on the iPhone 5." Like I said, I don't know Steve Jobs, and I don't work at Apple. But it would seem like if you're going to suggest Apple's still on the ball and market share is irrelevant because they're focused on 'advancing the human race,' you'd probably want to explain how they're going to do it without the one guy that coined the motto to begin with. |
To believe that without Steve Apple can't compete with Samsung, is to claim that the Apple management team are less capable than the management at Samsung.
On the evidence of the misogynist clown show of a launch event for the S4, you know what? I think Apple will do just fine.