Asymco

“Reassuringly expensive” Good description for both the gift and the status market sectors.

In book publishing, you can aim at selling a million books at buck apiece or one book for a million bucks. It does matter which pole you aim at. My mentor used to say, more usefully, “do a good book, price it to do another good book.”

Or you can just do The Good Book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Saint_John's_Bible

Here’s a scenario:
– The iPhone name is retired and the next would be iPhone is called a Mac Nano with retina display. It has OSX and IOS modes.
– Apple comes out with the standalone 5K monitor that only works with the Mac Nano and Mac Mini.
– Apple charges a premium on the 5K monitors because people already have the Mac Nano and $2,200 for a 27″ 5K computer is a steal.
– Apple sells a lot of 5K monitors.

This is a great way to get the massive pool of iPhone users on a Mac. It’s also a means to get current Mac users without 5K to make the jump.

Most importantly it puts Mac on the two year upgrade cycle. The iPhones are “good enough” as you say for phones. If our desktop performance was contingent on our iPhone’s performance, than we’d upgrade them every two years. It’s a clever way to get our desktops subsidized.

Does anyone see unintended consequences with this strategy?

Horace,

Fabulous analysis of Determinism vs Probabilism and the impact on how people and companies think and act based on that!

That makes me rethink the whole question around why Apple is doing the watch in the first place.

Fundamentally, Apple has been set by Steve Jobs to run based on deterministic methods but that was done essentially by drastically reducing the number of probabilities through focusing on just a few things. As such the number of probable outcomes is artificially constrained to a very low number. This may be the key in understanding how the deterministic approach would be applied and it works in business. In essence, and by following your logic, the deterministic approach would be a particular case of probabilism.

From a fundamental physical standpoint, the phone product in general is a product that is suited very well to the deterministic approach. The device is sturdy and resilient enough and it’s supposed to interact inside universe that’s entirely man made, tightly controlled and deterministic in itself: connections, networks, apps, user interaction, etc. So no wonder it’s been and it is so successful. Everything around it it’s deterministic.

You can probably say the same thing about the PC and the tablet.

Your whole theory of Probabilism vs Determinism in business basically explains why Apple as a company is so successful.

But the watch is a different story. Trying to understand the logic of Apple doing this move, two things come to mind:

One: the watch is a moat. It has no major influence on Apple’s portfolio other than keeping the competitor’s away from the Apple ecosystem. Apple basically wants to make sure Apple user won’t wear a Microsoft or a Samsung watch therefore leaving the door open for these competitors to create nests of opportunity into its own ecosystem. That includes bands and watches and alikes.

Two: the watch is a fundamental shift from the jobsian approach towards probabilism. That based on the premise that the main job for the watch is to constantly interact with the human body and constantly capture health data.

From a fundamental physical standpoint, unlike the phone, the watch is a device under two constant physical major stresses: mechanical actions (the watch worn on a wrist is supposed to be banged, smashed, scratched – much more that a phone would be) and fluid actions (sweat, water splashes from washing hands, taking showers, swimming, etc). The existing watches have come to a point where they can sustain these types of physical stress and still do their jobs very well. But none of the watches out there are collecting health data from the human body. The way the current sensor technology works for wrist devices requires accurate measurement of electrical micro-currents from the skin, temperature, color, chemical variations, etc.

This type of environment is highly probabilistic and if you add the possibility of fluids interacting with the sensors (I am assuming that the device core in itself is waterproof and immune to fluids).

So what is that going to give us? Unless the sensor technology becomes 99% immune to such disturbances, the watch may remain a niche device with limited applicability. The major problem is that for the health application, a large number of data points is required. If the sensor is not accurate even for a limited period of time, then the whole data collected becomes useless.

Unless there is something else that I can’t discern here and based on the above, I believe the watch will ultimately be of lesser importance that the Ipod was.

I am also thinking that a third possibility is that the watch will be a “bridge” product in the same way the Ipod helped Apple ultimately create the the Iphone. But this is pure speculation …

On planned obsolescence – I have to think Apple does indeed engage in this strategically. Let me give you a few examples, mac mini, is crippled, not even RAM is upgradeable, non-5K mac, same, RAM capped and soldered. Why would Apple do this? Another example; the Retina MacBook Pro, a professional computer, users today wish they had 16GB and later on they will wish they had 32GB RAM. The MBP has processors that will still be capable 2 or 3 years down the road but with RAM being capped clearly has my blessing on what dictates planned obsolescence.

It’s a pity that this is the case but this will certainly have people upgrading their machines not by adding RAM, that’s not an option, it will require a whole new machine.

For all Apple is made up to be, this is one area that simply deserves an explanation by Ive’s design team and extended engineering teams. I believe this is marketing driven.

As a disclaimer, I have been exclusively using Macintosh since 1987. My first Mac was a Iix.

My comments are regrettable because I think Apple can and should build more expandable products; in the process delivering much more sustainable devices that can render a longer useful life for the user. Now I know that overtime, products get replaced and their energy footprints do drop, new products are just more energy efficient;. comparing the first iMac to the current iMac is a strong example. One might argue that it’s more environmentally sound to replace the machine when more RAM is otherwise required because a newer machine uses less energy so the energy offset will make up etc.

I encourage any journalist who might have an op to interview Cook, to ask him about these shortcomings and for an explanation on this strategy of deliberately removing the option(s) of upgrading basic components like RAM. What is the strategy?