On Tuesday, Apple (AAPL) made a number of product announcements including one for the iPad Mini, the fourth-generation iPad, a 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display and updated Mac Minis. To me it was striking from yesterday’s event that Tim Cook appears to be abandoning Steve Jobs’ strategies that made Apple so successful.
Steve Jobs’ hallmark was innovation that changed the world. Yesterday’s Apple announcement shows that Apple is failing to innovate like it did under Jobs. Now, in a departure from Jobs’ era, Apple is simply making incremental improvements to well-engineered products that are not game changers.
Jobs was the master of the ‘wow factor.’ There was no ‘wow’ in yesterday’s Apple presentation. At best the announcement was underwhelming. Apple has become such a strong brand, in part due to the cache that Jobs generated. The new products do nothing to strengthen the brand.
Value Proposition Weaker
Under Jobs, Apple produced products with strong feature sets at a reasonable price. The products announced yesterday do have strong features, but they are not unique. The value proposition compared to Amazon.com‘s Kindle and Google‘s Nexus is not as strong as has been customary for Apple.
The buzz that Jobs generated about Apple products helped Apple become the largest company in the world by market capitalization. There was plenty of buzz about iPad Mini, but the buzz seems to be backfiring to some extent as the price points are higher than most expectations. Yesterday Apple also introduced fourth-generation iPad….Read more at Forbes
