With today's news that Apple has finally missed quarterly earnings expectations for the first time since 2008, Steve Jobs' death, a "disappointing" iPhone 4S release (depending on who you ask)...the question begs to be asked..
Is something wrong at Apple?
Will they no longer be able to dominate?
My opinion is: They will still dominate, they will still make fantastic products, but... the magic will be gone. Already you can feel the magic waning. This is not entirely Apple's fault. Consumers, as whole, have gotten so demanding, so selfish, that if Apple doesn't releasing a ground-breaking device every 12 months, we bitch and whine as if we were denied our God-given right to gadget gratification.
This pattern is pervasive in all of humanity. You buy a gadget x. You enjoy it like crazy for the first few weeks as if you were carrying a portable cocaine intravenous drip. Then after a month, your interest wanes, and then a year later, you're back at Best Buy sniffing for new models, envying the latest and greatest that other people are carrying, wishing that your two-year contract would magically be cut in half, so you can get your next gadget fix as soon as possible.
This kind of pathological behavior is no different from drug addicts. I call it Gadget Cocaine. The problem with Gadget Cocaine, is that every smartphone model you buy can only supply you a finite amount of pleasure that diminishes exponentially over time. And once that pleasure has been used up, you have no choice but to go back to Best Buy for the latest and greatest, gawking at the next models, and repeating this pattern endlessly. The only way to keep yourself happy, is to keep buying up new models to refill your supply of Gadget Cocaine jollies.
Actually, this wouldn't be so bad if you could extract the same amount of pleasure from each gadget you buy. But the problem is, just like real drugs, is that the more Gadget Cocaine you take, the more your body becomes tolerant to it. You become numb to the pleasures of getting a new gadget, and it takes more and more gadgets coming in at a faster rate to keep you satisfied.
If you were once satisfied with buying one new gadget per year, that will not last forever. Soon one gadget per year will only make you feel... okay. You'll need two gadgets a year... then three, then four. Unless you resort to some kind of meditation and strive for non-attachment, your desire for Gadget Cocaine will keep ballooning without bounds like the national debt.
I say this with confidence because this is exactly what has happened to me. When I was in my early twenties, strapped for cash, buying a new computer, or cell phone, would make me so fucking high that the jollies would reverberate for about half a year.
Now, with so much money at my disposal, in the span of less than a year I have bought a iPhone 4S, iPhone 4 White, Macbook Air 2011, Galaxy S2, Macbook Pro 2011, Macbook Air 2010, Macbook Pro 2010, iPhone 3GS White, iPod Touch 4G, iPod Touch 3G, iPad 2, iPad 1 - basically every major Apple product release, I snatched up right away.
My latest purchase, an iPhone 4S, gave me so little pleasure, so little feeling, that within a few days of purchase, I didn't really have any feeling for it anymore. It was just... another iPhone.
Now when you see news headlines that say "iPhone 4S out for 2 days, rumors about iPhone 5 already circulating", it starts to all make sense now, doesn't it? The phenomena that is occurring within me, is also occurring on a massive scale in the general population.
And this is Apple's dilemna. Apple needs to keep feeding Gadget Cocaine to the masses. You'd think that releasing a few new iDevices each year would do the trick. Well it used to to the trick a few years ago. You could blow people away with incremental releases, small updates to existing iDevices. It was all kind of new back then. It'd keep them happy. But now people have had too much Gadget Cocaine, their brains have become numb to pleasure, become used to pitiful incremental releases...that to blow them away now... is to Change Everything Again.
How can Apple do that - with the pressure of continually updating the iPhone and iPad family of products - with the pressure of satisfying endlessly increasing Wall Street earnings expectations - how can they even have any kind of intellectual freedom of making a new iDevice?
My feeling is, they don't. They are weighed down with the pressure of just feeding us with Gadget Cocaine as increasing rates, and the only way they can sustain this is by doing the obvious - upgrading existing models without major redesigns. Stick faster processors, make something a little lighter, a little thinner... but without changing the internal design concepts.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it, right? This is exactly NOT how Apple made it big. Steve Jobs did what even I couldn't forsee, he said fuck you to the status quo, fuck you to the accepted conventions, and made an entire classification of devices. I have a feeling that while making the first iPhone may have been fun and entertaining, it must've gotten progressively harder and harder to keep innovating something ground-breaking afterwards.
Now that he has passed away, Apple will most likely resort to playing it safe, being conservative, and gasp... focused on satisfying customer's immediate demands. But this is not the road that Apple used to take. Innovation is not just sticking faster processors and making things thinner. It's precisely what Jobs did with the iPhone and to a lesser extent, the iPad - to Change Everything Again.
With the masses clamoring for their next Gadget Cocaine fix, with Wall Street clamoring for higher earnings, with investors breathing down Apple's back for stockpiling so much cash... I think Apple simply cannot Change Everything Again. Customers are too difficult to satisfy, there is no more intellectual freedom, and there is no more Steve Jobs.
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