Will Apple become humble enough to change course?
I can tell you what Apple’s core business philosophy is in a heart beat—at least when it comes to its computers. The soldered RAM, the user’s inability to change hard drives, and the reduced grade in processing power, and the creation of enormous databanks the likes of Google all point to a determined corporate decision to increase user dependency to the company. It’s Apple greed to its core, one of Steve Jobs worst traits, sad to say. Jobs, to my surprise, was offended when companies producing accessories to their products had enormous margins of profit—which at one point caused him to create the ‘iPod sock’. (At first I thought he was joking, but he was actually serious about the product line—which did not last that long.)
Yet the key error in this strategy, to put it bluntly, is that the company assumes its users to be morons. The drastic decline in hard drive prices relative to the drastic increase in speed means that any consumer—driven if by sheer market forces in absence of critical thinking—will be tilted towards the complete opposite strategy: Apple independence with regard to storage. Few will be stupid enough to buy into Apple’s tactics, and often voiced critiques are increasingly common.
In this sense, Apple has taken the complete opposite approach to what it should have, thus missing an incredible market opportunity that has been increasingly consumed by non-direct rivals as Synology, QNAP, iXsystems, WesternDigital, and others producers of network attached storage devices or NAS. Consumers will always need storage space, and this is the one determining feature of the computers they care the most. Their drastic increase in sales during the last five years are a testament to their importance as ‘digital cabinets’ and ‘digital safes’, which can be found in nearly every home.
After all, it is not the computers that are important—as these die every 5 years or so, but rather the data that is stored in them. It is the data which represents the user value and input;it is the data which represents cherished memories, hard days of calculation, or inspired moments of creation. If you will recall, this is after all what had been so impressive about the advertisements upon Steve Jobs return: “Think Different”. Be an original, like Einstein, Mahatma Grandi, or John Lennon. The data stores in every personal computers is a testament to the uniqueness and individuality of the human condition.
So, dear Tim Cook, don’t waste your time being a follower of other companies, specifically Google or Tesla. It is very clear that you have lost sense of the mission that was once Apple. It is time, you brought this mission and these core ideals back to the company—as it appears to have all too easily lost its way amidst the death of its founder and the pressures of the market.