Tim Wilson
3
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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I hope you don’t think I’m kidding. This will be the easiest money Apple ever made.
The reason I haven’t replied to posts questioning this is that I am quite literally speechless. I can’t come up with something to say that doesn’t look condescending in print or isn’t laden with profanity. I am stupefied that there would be the least doubt about this. This is the absolutely definitive Apple product.
For the third time in composing this post, I just wrote and deleted a massive block of text to follow that. For now, I’ll leave it deleted. THAT’s how strongly I feel about it. I’m afraid to let myself say much more about it, unsure how I’ll be able to wipe my own exploded brains off the screen.
Carry on, lads. I’ll try to keep myself together.
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The problem I see is that you guys are using one extreme to write off the absolute mainstream of the thing.
Apple isn’t building a business on $5000 watches. They’re building a business on extending the iOS experience for less than the cost of a pair of Beats headphones.
It’s like computers. They’re building the business on iMacs and MacBook Airs, which are still by far their most popular computers. The Mac Pros are a niche business, and taken opportunistically.
And I really do believe they’ll take the same approach. In Times Square and Palm Desert, and dozens or hundreds of other locations, you’ll be able to walk out with a gold watch. In the thousands of others, you can walk out with a $500 or $1000 watch…more than an iPad, less than a MacBook Air, and something that will get much more use than either of those.
It’s a problem for people who still view Apple as innovators to think of products like this as having no precedent. Apple’s not even fifth in line. These products absolutely do, and they’re successful.
Apple will do what they did for music players and phones: show up late, grow the market for everyone, take only a small-ish share of that expanded market, and it will be vast piles of money.
You get that, right? Apple has around 20% of the smartphone business? And it’s a freaking fortune.
iWatch isn’t Apple TV, which really does have next to no use whatsoever (I say glaring at my own Apple TV: “DO something, damn you”). There was no real audience for something like that, and the goals still aren’t all that clearly defined.
Wearables DO have a meaningful prior audience. People who have them like them. As I mentioned in my previous post, those drooling inbred Android slobs (like me) have wrapped their heads around it. I have no doubt that good lucking, intelligent Apple users with control over their salivary glands will figure it out too.
Apple has been able to take the last three years to watch — WATCH!! GET IT??? — the other guys, analyze what went right and wrong, and by Brendan Behan I swear that Apple will use their giant brains, giant resources, and giant retail footprint to make crazy money from this.
But NOT because they’ll sell millions of $5000 watches. Because they’ll sell TENS of millions of ’em at $300-500.
Look, all they have to do is be as good as Beats at selling $400 pieces of plastic, and they have a billion dollar business on their hands in a year, 18 months TOPS — the big difference being that, unlike Beats, this thing has iOS in it: apps aplenty, massively customizable, and well within the financial reach of almost everyone buying an iPhone 6. A staggering number of people will buy both at once.
Fortunately, Apple has a great many trucks cleared and waiting to cart off the money.
You boys are thinking way, way too small. I assure you that Apple is not. Neither is Apple delusional that this market exists. It does, and Apple will grow it exponentially in a year, and with their small slice of it, they will make a fortune.
BTW, have not you Daring Fireballs been reading since 2012 about Apple working on this? I’m sure Apple and the stories about it started much earlier than that, but that’s when I can definitely remember regular coverage of it. Timmy has been making public presentations about for a long, long time, including the All Things D conference in May 2013. People like the New York Times and the Wall St Journal covered it, along with every tech site I can think of (Mashable, engadget, Tech Crunch, etc etc etc.)
Did this really catch you by surprise? Did it seem precipitous to you? I’m amazed that the Apple watchers — WATCHERS!!! GET IT??? — haven’t been all over this for AT LEAST 18 months, if not much more. Some have of course, but I’m amazed that people like DF are so widely missing the mark from a story they should have zeroed in on by 2012.
Not that I’ll buy one before the sun goes nova, mind you. But this is slam dunk money that Apple has been leaving on the table. Not for long, my friends. Not for long.
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “Five thousand dollar gold watches in an apple store is just wrong. there’s no way around it.”
I disagree completely. Does this Apple store look a place to buy a $5000 watch? In fact, it looks like the best place to buy a $5000 watch in the history of the world. It’s insanity NOT to sell $5000 watches there.
I don’t live in Manhattan. I live in a small mountain community with maybe 200 hundred houses. Not luxurious. Mine’s around 1500 square feet. Killer view looking into the valley mind you, but this is by no means a wealthy enclave. It’s not even an actual town.
My nearest Apple store is 25 minutes or so downhil, in Palm Desert. Got this picture from the Apple site. I think a gold watch would look just fine in here, don’t you?
What’s next to it?
Yeah, Gucci and some Bentleys. And just outside the frame: Tiffany.
Hardly a representative sample, so just at random, I decided to look at the very next Apple store to be opening: inside the Lynnhaven Mall in Virginia Beach, VA. Opening next week in fact.
Completely mainstream. The anchor stores are JC Penney, Dillard’s, Macy’s, and then an anchor cluster of Dave & Buster’s, Barnes & Noble, and Dick’s Sporting Goods. Absolutely classic American mall.
Inside, you’ll find even more classic American shopping: The Gap, Footlocker, an ear-piercing kiosk, GNC, Sunglass Hut, Cracker Barrel, Lens Crafters, Spencer Gifts (the 70s! Represent!), Limited, McDonalds in the food court, an AMC theater, etc. This is AMERICA.
And it includes FIVE stores that sell watches that cost more than $5000: again, absolutely mainstream companies like Zales and Kay Jeweler. MOST of what those stores sells costs less, but they carry plenty that costs a lot more, even if they might sell only a few a week.
And when I said 5 stores, I wasn’t even counting Macy’s, which DEFINITELY sells watches that go higher than $5000.
There are malls like this in every major city in America. Every one of them has stores that includes a few premium products among a mix that’s otherwise geared much below that.
Here’s my bottom line: It’s insane for Apple NOT to sell lifestyle products that cost a f-load more than an iPad. And it’s insane for Apple not sell them EXACTLY where most people are buying those products from other vendors: in malls, and in standalone stores areas that skew affluent.
Exactly the strategy that Apple has been pursuing from the beginning.
Apple knows that their audience skews affluent. Anybody remember the first carmaker that Apple worked with on direct support of iPods? Bueller? Bueller? Thaaat’s right, BMW.
Having said this, it’s conceivable that Apple won’t be heavily stocked with every model at every store. Among the coupla hundred to maybe $1000 models, maybe a display model of the top of the line. Maybe not even that. You can’t buy every Mac Pro at every mall, either. Those stores will happily take your order, though.
But a $5000 watch will look MUCH less out of place than a $2500 computer. People might go years without seeing a $2500 computer anywhere else, but they’ll pass 30 $5000 watches between the Pretzel Factory and the Flip Flop Shop, both of which you’ll find at the Lynnhaven Mall.
re: who this is for, what it’s doing, etc. Well, how big a need did you feel for an iPad before they existed? I’ll wager, none whatsoever.
The fact is that wearables have been around for years, and Android users have been merrily using them for a while now. Reviews are pretty typical for early generation products, running in the 4.4 star range at Best Buy, for example. If Android morons can figure it out, I’m sure that you smart, handsome Apple guys will figure it out, maybe just starting with a $300 model to take it for a spin or for a gift for a teenager or some such. And it’ll work its way into your life by 2016.
Or it won’t. Lifestyle wearables have little to do with the people who post here. They have a LOT to do with people who post in other forums in the COW, though, and elsewhere of course. Not just tech hoarders and early adopters, but also college kids and the subset of post-grad millenials with money to spend who are already plotting on pairing an iWatch with their iPhone 6.
The same people who spent MORE than the cost of an entry-model iWatch on their Beats headphones, even without an Apple logo on them. Abbbbbbsolutely mainstream.
This is going to be huge. You watch.
SEE WHAT I DID THERE
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[Jeremy Garchow] “The Apple Watch is a new way to interact with Apple technology. It is an access point. For now, it happens to be in the form of a watch.”
I don’t have a problem with the watch. You’re right, Jeremy, Android folks will be on the fourth generation of theirs by the time Apple’s ships theirs. No surprises, no panic, no pain.
But also no shift in Apple’s place in the world relative to computers or technology in general. My issue is with somebody saying that NOW Apple is moving beyond computers. Now? Really? This is the first time?
The flipside of Kremlinology is that you’re quite right, Jeremy, Apple doesn’t always change as much as appears. It’s crazy to say that Apple doesn’t care about computers anymore. Of course they do. I doubt one bit less than when they still had “Computer” in the name. (Ironically, I’ve seen analysis that their market share on the desktop may well be higher than their market share for smartphones.)
I also think that Apple loves pro software users as much as they did two weeks ago. For whatever THAT’s worth. LOL
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For the record, I like this U2 album A LOT, and I’ll be buying the expanded physical edition. After thinking they were done making good albums forever, I’m delighted.
[Andrew Kimery] “Don’t overtly control my device and I’ll pretended not to know that you can overtly control my device.”
I think that’s exactly right….but still sideways to the point. Nobody is surprised by bricking or deauthorizing illicit tracks. That’s an appropriate response, and even the most casual jailbreaker knows it’s not only a possible outcome, but a likely one.
This is fundamentally different.
Unsolicited mail used to be illegal, and people flipped out when it first became legal. Spam feels nefarious because it is in fact often nefarious: sent by criminals for criminal purposes. There was a time when spam didn’t exist, but when it arrived, people flipped out.
People’s phones and iPods have been spammed for the very first time, and they’re flipping out.
And this is different.
Mail and email are open-ended systems at the front. Anyone can now send anything. The idea of sync is CLOSED. Sync = MY STUFF, so this feels far more like a violation than junk mail. YOU are not supposed to be SENDING me ANYTHING. NOBODY is. This is MY STUFF.
The people who seemed to have freaked out hardest weren’t the ones who saw the folder sitting among other folders, and after grumbling, casually deleted it. It’s ones who just heard the music appear in shuffled playlists. It was not only not welcome, it REALLY felt like a violation when it appears unbidden between in the middle of your brain via your earbuds Beats headphones. People do personal things with their personal music. No telling what activities Apple might have interrupted with this.
The fact is that there was no precedent for this kind of violation of MY STUFF. I’m quite the fan of sites that delve deep into the iTunes terms of service. What’s in there is hilarious, but the most paranoid and antagonistic of them has never pointed out that Apple has the right to dump their crap on you, and you can’t opt out.
[Andrew Kimery] “Give all iTunes users a link (or code) to get the album for free and everything would’ve gone swimmingly.”
Except for U2. This all started because they literally couldn’t give away their last 2 singles — even after playing the Super Bowl and the Oscars, the two biggest TV events in the world. I don’t think Tim Cook had to twist their arms to take $100 million in exchange for Apple having the privilege of spamming half a billion unsuspecting people.
But even calling it spam trivializes it. The break-in simile is absolutely right. A pizza on the table is not benign, no matter how much I like pizza. Somebody BROKE IN to MY STUFF. There’s not a person on earth who knowingly consented to this.
So there we go. Apple innovation. Finding new ways to violate its customers trust.
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[James Ewart] “I think the marketing was a total disaster.”
No, you think the product life cycle management of FCP 7 was a disaster. Things like withdrawing the previous version had nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing to do with marketing.
Let me say it again: marketing creates demand. There was a figurative line around the block for the launch of the FCPX. There is absolutely no standard on earth by which this is not marketing success.
The use of the word “success” has nothing to do with notoriety or controversy. It has to do with the word “marketing.” The goal was to get people to download the software. People did.
[James Ewart] “It would have been much better to have been totally transparent about its state of development from a marketing point of view.”
At the risk of raising old ghosts, Apple has never included transparency about anything as part of its marketing programs….
….but WAS transparent about is future exactly ONCE, in its first presentation of FCPX.
I’ll say it again: pre-release marketing creates demand. The end. Nothing more. That’s ALL it does. Did Apple have to beat the drum to get people to download the software once it was available? NO.
The nature of the software, and other Apple policies related to the release, as well as people’s response to it, have nothing whatsoever to do with marketing.
This isn’t a trivial distinction. This basic misunderstanding of the nature of marketing, and the fundamental nature of Apple re: transparency from the day it was founded, created entirely unnecessary friction in the early days of trying to make sense of all of this. People like Larry muddied the water so thoroughly that I wondered (and still do) if they did it on purpose. Otherwise, I’d be left with the conclusion that he, and they, simply don’t understand the basics of what words mean and how Apple has always worked. Or that they don’t care.
I may well have the lowest opinion of Apple of anyone anywhere in the COW, and it pains me to say anything nice about them — but they absolutely stuck the landing with the marketing of FCPX, the role of which was to drive downloads, and which it did in fact accomplish.
Did people download it? Yes. Did LOTS of people download it? Yes.
Success.
And for that matter, the marketing very specifically said that FCPX represented Apple’s future. Did FCPX in fact represent Apple’s future? Yes, absolutely and unequivocally.
The largest outrcy was, and is, the timing for which FCPX represented Apple’s exclusive present.
That’s not a marketing issue. CONCEIVABLY it’s a PR issue…
…but to approach this from the other direction, could any amount of marketing fix the issues that people had with the release? NO. The only changes would have been, a) a different product upon its arrival, b) the previous version not immediately departing.
Neither of which are marketing issues.
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[Oliver Peters] “Yet they still managed to botch the launch of FCP X from the standpoint of marketing.”
That’s the one thing they got right: easily the most successfully marketed software launch in company history.
Now, we can have another discussion about the product management aspect vis a vis FCP 7…but not the marketing. Marketing creates demand, and the teeming (relatively small) throng couldn’t possibly have been more greatly amassed to download that thing. Read through the quite literally second-by-second reports in the Creative COW archive, as people were waiting in line. Did you get it yet? I can’t download it yet. Have you gotten it yet?????? We were getting 10 posts a minute for all of that day, occasionally higher.
Once people received the download, we also got a bit of traffic if I recall correctly….
Marketing task, though: 100% completed, with the greatest conceivable success.
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[Aindreas Gallagher] ” he also created the most naff moment in rock history and singularly destroyed U2 as a musical force. to the point where apple is now laying out instructions to remove unwanted U2 albums for customers.”
My wife and I chose to honeymoon in Ireland in 1985 meaningfully related to our love of U2, and we’ve taken no pleasure from the tedium of their 21st century releases…but indeed, their naff-ness has been well underway. This was prompted by an overwhelmingly underwhelming reaction to their first 2 singles this year, which failed to chart at all in most of the world. They could barely even give one of them away, as the offer of a free download wasn’t enough to motivate people to go get it.
So they asked Tim Cook for advice for how to sell U2 albums to people who no longer care about new U2 albums (ie, apparently damn near all of us), and Tim said, let’s just stick it in their iTunes without asking. Anyone who left their iPhone sync in the default state of automatically downloading new purchases would have it magically appear.
Bad, bad idea.
In addition to the picture above — one of my favorite recent additions to the internet, a tumblr called WhoisU2 has been archiving tweets around the theme of “Who are these people and how are they spamming my phone?” Hilarious, but do note, considerable NSFW language.
The unfortunate bit is that I think it’s their first good album in 17 years. It’s really good….but its deployment is indicative of Apple’s out-of-tune opulence. They paid U2 a reported $100 million for the privilege of infuriating more people than had ever heard of the band before.
Still, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Apple do something similar again. For example, if they’d first done this with a Beyonce album, I suspect the world might have thanked them….but with this much cash on hand, no need to spend any of it wisely….
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[Charlie Austin] [Quoting someone else] “Rather, I think Apple Watch is the first product from an Apple that has outgrown the computer industry. “
Wow, I think that’s way off. Apple dropped “Computer” from its company name in January 2007. Was that guy not around for that? And by then, Apple had already long outgrown the computer industry.
Look back through the COW archives as people here noted the day that the shiny new iPod provided more revenue than computers. Was that 2003? 2004? In any case, a dog’s age in tech years.
Dang, man. Add the iPhone and iPad to the list too for that matter.
I’m really stupefied by his statement. It makes no sense to me at all.
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[Bill Davis] “[Aindreas Gallagher] “on some level there has to be kremlinology around the removal. A lot of senior people have to be happy in order for that to go: basically why remove those few words?”
Nope. I’ve been in high level boardrooms and have seen this kind of sausage being made. “
Not at Apple, man. There’s never been a company in the history of history that has ever managed its messaging more thoroughly. Quite a bit has changed in the TC era, but not this. Boilerplate like this looks boring, but has profound implications for all kinds of things, some of them legal.
Additionally, Apple has moved its PR internally, and the team is shockingly small. Something like 20 people I think. (It came up in another thread. I’m counting on one of you to find it.) Nothing “slips” through a team that small.
It’s one thing to leave off a whole sentence, but somebody performed surgery, to remove specific words, in a specific place.
That’s why Apple is the one and only company that’s worth performing Kremlinology on. They care all the way down to the punctuation, they make remarkably few changes over time, and they take a very long time to deploy everything.
I guarantee that if some underling made a change to Apple’s self-description unbidden, the debris from their vaporized corpse would be changing the color of the sunset.
