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No Convergence of iOS & OS X
Reading MacRumors reporting on today’s Apple financial results conference call, this jumped out at me:
Q: Can you talk about how you think about the markets for tablets and PC devices going forward? You’ve been fairly clear about saying that tablets will eclipse PC’s in volume at some point, and they are somewhat discrete markets. There seems to be a lot of work on PC platforms to combine PC and tablet experiences going forward. Can you comment on why you don’t believe the MacBook Air and tablet markets won’t converge? Isn’t it realistic to believe that we’ll have a device under 2 lbs that will be a notebook and a tablet? Can you comment on why you don’t think that product will come?
A: Anything can be forced to converge. The products are about tradeoffs. You begin to make tradeoffs to the point where what you have left at the end of the day doesn’t please anyone. You can converge a toaster and a refrigerator but those won’t be pleasing to the user. Our view is that the tablet market is huge and we’ve said that since day one. We didn’t wait until we had results. We were using them here and it was clear to us that there was so much you could do and the reasons people used them would be so broad, the iPad is so useful in consumer, and enterprise and education — the applications are so easy to make very meaningful for someone and there is such an abundance of those, as the ecosystem gets better and better — we’ll continue to double down on making great products. The limit here is nowhere in sight. It’s been 2 years since we shipped the iPad and we’ve sold more than 60 million iPads. Took 24 years to sell that many Macs, 5 years to sell that many iPods, 3 years to sell that many iPhones.
iPad is a great product, appeal is universal, I could not be happier with being in the market and the level at which we’re innovating in the product and the ecosystem.
I also believe that there is a very good market for the MacBook Air and we continue to innovate in that product. I do think that it appeals to someone that has a little bit different requirements. You wouldn’t want to put these things together because you wind up compromising and not pleasing either user. Some people prefer to own both, but to make the compromises on convergence… we’re not going to that party. Others might, particularly from a defensive point of view but we’re going to play in both.
The implication is clear. OS X and iOS are separate UIs for separate use cases, and they will remain so. That last line in the quote above is a clear shot at Windows 8.
Best,
Andy -
38 Replies
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[Andrew Richards] “The implication is clear. OS X and iOS are separate UIs for separate use cases, and they will remain so. “
We also know that the Air is safe. What makes me really angry, though, is that it is also clear that they’ve abandoned the Toasterator. I wanted one in white with a nice Braun-like finish.
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Also this-
“The new iPad is off to a great start, and across the year, you’re going to see a lot more of the kind of innovation that only Apple can deliver.”
Vague. But…
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“There are no plans to make a tablet. It turns out people want keyboards. When Apple first started out, People couldn’t type. We realized: Death would eventually take care of this. And so, people know how to type now. And if you do email of any volume, you gotta have a keyboard.”
and
“We look at the tablet and we think it’s going to fail. And people accuse US of niche markets! Tablets appeal to rich guys with plenty of other PCs and devices already.”
and
“I’m not convinced people want to watch movies on a tiny little screen.”
Steve Jobs in 2003, when asked directly by Walt Mossberg of The Wall St. Journal, are you working on a tablet and do you have plans for movies on iPods.
The plan is the plan until the plan changes. Unless they’re outright, uhm, prevaricating, and would just as soon not let you know what the plan actually is.
Tim Wilson
Associate Publisher, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine
Twitter: timdoubleyou -
[Tim Wilson] “The plan is the plan until the plan changes. Unless they’re outright, uhm, prevaricating, and would just as soon not let you know what the plan actually is.”
I feel the same way, and you can simply add a big “for now” at the end, but there’s no way they could go all iOS today.
No one could contribute to the AppStore.
And we also have to remember, the Internet was slow and expensive in 2003.
And don’t forget what an iPod looked like in 2003: https://www.apple.com/pr/products/ipodhistory/
Jeremy
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[Jeremy Garchow] “And don’t forget what an iPod looked like in 2003”
Or the “tablets” Jobs was rightfully scoffing at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Tablet_PC
Best,
Andy -
[Tim Wilson] “The plan is the plan until the plan changes.”
And when it changes, it was always the plan.
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[Chris Harlan] “[Tim Wilson] “The plan is the plan until the plan changes.”
And when it changes, it was always the plan.”
Ha! Exactly.
Another quote from the 2003 interview: “We didn’t think we’d do well in the cell phone business…We chose to do the iPod instead of a PDA.”
So yeah, in 2003 they didn’t think they’d do well in the phone business. In 2007, they started doing pretty well. Maybe in 2003 they thought they’d do really, really well in the phone business in a few years and were already working on it.
It took until 2010 to get all the way there with iPad, but what came to pass in 7 years is pretty much the EXACT opposite of what Steve said in 2003.
Not that they’re lying today (or then), but none of these guys are obligated to tell the whole truth. No disrespect intended but it’s more like they’re obligated NOT to tell the whole truth. “We’re not planning today” ain’t worth much in the long haul, and I’m okay with that.
Tim Wilson
Associate Publisher, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine
Twitter: timdoubleyou -
Jobs also panned the Kindle because “no one reads anymore” and said that flash-based MP3 players always ended up discarded because they are too small. In both cases iPads and iPod Shuffles had to be sitting in a lab somewhere deep in the bowels of Cupertino.
-Andrew
2.9 GHz 8-core (4,1), FCP 7.0.3, 10.6.6
Blackmagic Multibridge Eclipse (7.9.5) -
[Andrew Kimery] “Jobs also panned the Kindle because “no one reads anymore” and said that flash-based MP3 players always ended up discarded because they are too small. In both cases iPads and iPod Shuffles had to be sitting in a lab somewhere deep in the bowels of Cupertino.”
He was sort of right about books:
Apple did books because they were easy once the iPad was out there and the iTunes Store infrastructure was in place, not because they were a big market.
But yes, Apple has a history of insisting certain products aren’t worthwhile until they start making them. In some cases (when Apple only enters markets years later), it might even be genuine — Apple really doesn’t think certain products are worthwhile until new technologies and new approaches make them so. It’s quite possible that Apple doesn’t quite see how iOS and OS X could be usefully merged today, but they’ve got people working on figuring it out.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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Hmm, you realize that a tablet in 2003 was basically a notebook without a keyboard,
that cost around 3000 Dollar?
It didn’t have a capacitive touchscreen and it did fail.
So they didn’t change the plan and never build a 2003 tablet…
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