[dilap]

Here's a fun sport for Apple watchers, aficionados and detractors alike: has Apple jumped the shark yet in the post-Steve era?

(The game's a bit Candyland-esque; we always arrive at "yes": if Apple's strategy is inflexible post-Steve, they're doomed, if they make any changes, they are also doomed.)

Let's play anyway.

The big, flashing, worrying sign of changed-for-the-worse Apple isn't any hullaboloo about Warhol and luxury, it's that Apple didn't show us a product!

All they have is a fancy looking piece of hardware and a bunch of tech demos with a UI that clearly isn't cohesive or thought out enough to work in the real world.

And then, on top of that, they bragged a bit about how many features the Watch was going to have.

This is real "danger Will Robinson" territory for Apple, in the traditional Gruber understanding of what makes Apple great: focussing on actual products with a a well-thought out core rather than a lard of features or pie-in-the-sky tech demos.

Gruber buries the lead a bit on this dramatic change. He doesn't get around to mentioning it until deep into the article, and then rather wavily dismisses the change with this bizarre explanation:

He suggests that Apple decided to demo a non-product because they couldn't keep the hardware secret long enough for the software to catch up.

If that's true, that means, what, Apple views secret-unveilings as its core principle?

But I think more likely is that Gruber mind is just going through reflexive contortions of justification here, and the truth is simpler: Apple is slowly losing the focus that for a brief few years really did make it unique among tech companies.

Certainly hope to end up eating crow on this, though. :)

[glenra]

Secret-unveilings are worth many millions of dollars in free publicity. Apple gets front-page stories for all their product announcements because they're news. Without that, they'd have a much harder time. If that was at all at risk here, it was probably worth announcing early.

Also, Gruber correctly points out that the Osborne Effect might help them here - if the product seems promising enough, some people will postpone buying something else to wait for the Apple product. We should still expect subsequent versions return to the "you can buy this next week!" model.

[dilap]

I don't know, the advance leaks of the last few iPhones doesn't seem to have hurt their publicity much. (And millions ain't much to Apple; they are rumored to have spent millions on the U2 debacle. But I do take your greater point about the massive interest in Apple's product announcements being very valuable...)

[glenra]

I just looked it up - the usual estimate is that the original iPhone introduction generated $400 million worth of free publicity. Even to Apple, that's a lot.

(eg: http://gizmodo.com/243222/iphone-generated-400-million-in-fr... )

Although one might argue that Apple TODAY is so much of a market leader they don't need the surprise factor as much as they did in times past. Apple used to be a clear underdog that punched way above its weight class by using gimmicks and clever marketing for their signal to escape an over-crowded playing field. Now that Apple is the big dog, they might not need that so much.

Tim's clearly no Steve, but maybe he doesn't need to be.

[elblanco]

> in the traditional Gruber understanding of what makes Apple great

The thing is, Gruber's mutant power is the ability to turntwist just about anything Apple does into a core Apple value and what defines them and makes them great.

In other words, what Gruber thinks and writes about basically doesn't matter, because Apple could do just about anything and he'd clap for it and stand in line.

[awinder]

Except that he continually derides iCloud...

[IBM]

Much like the iPhone announcement then.

[blinkingled]

Ugh, I am not sure if you are being sarcastic but it in fact is exactly unlike the original iPhone announcement. The OG iPhone solved a long standing problem that no one else had managed to solve elegantly. It did few things and it did them better than anything else before it.

Apple Watch - well your turn to tell me how it is anything like the iPhone - Apple actually did not tell us what problem it is solving - why competitors' watches are horrible, why I need the Apple Watch etc. That's the worrying thing about this.

[EmmaGin]

Read Ben Thompson's Apple Watch: Asking Why And Saying No for an examination of why the AppleWatch announcement is very announcement is very different from the iPhone announcement (along with the iPod and iPad announcements too).

http://stratechery.com/2014/apple-watch-asking-saying/

This is the first Apple announcement I can readily recall where they didn't mention a shipping date, battery life and full pricing details for the new product.