Apple Event

I have always been a fan of Apple, but the admiration for the company grows every year.

The company often draws criticisms such as lack of innovation, predatory practices and pricey products. While some of their practices such as expensive accessories or making features obsolete after only 2-3 years are good points (I am on my 3rd Mac charger that costs $85 more or less each), I wouldn’t do it any differently if I were in Apple’s management team. The same goes for high prices. If my company had such a degree of inelasticity (demand isn’t much affected despite higher prices), I’d do the same. Plus, Samsung increased the price of its flagship phone to $1,000 too but it hasn’t sold as well as its Apple counterpart. Granted, Apple is rarely the first to introduce stuff. They prioritize in doing it right and I like that approach. What’s the point of introducing new stuff if it doesn’t work well? Ask Samsung 7.

Instead, innovation from Apple is the ability to deliver more performance and add more features to a small device year after year. Imagine the yearly tasks of coming up with the design of the hardware, getting it right so that customers are so happy, deciding on what features to add, manufacturing the chips, rewriting the software, integrating the hardware and software, planning the distribution, strategizing the line-up to avoid cannibalization…It sounds exceedingly complex and difficult to me. The result? They are the first American company to reach a trillion dollar market cap. Their average selling price for phones increased after the introduction of iPhone X. Revenue and profit keep rising. And customers are happy. I have a mid-2012 Mac and an iPhone 5S. They are still working well and I don’t imagine I’ll come back to Windows or Android any time soon.

This morning, Apple did it again with a plethora of updates to their Watch and iPhone. A lot of new features and performance are added to small devices. Some enhanced products come at more or less the same price as last year’s new-then arrivals. I was impressed by the Apple Watch. It is now FDA-approved and can detect irregular heartbeats, ECG as well as falls. At this rate, I’d not be surprised in a 3-4 year time that their Watches will be instrumental to people’s health tracking and safety.

I think Apple is a brilliant example of focus, product-centric design, strategy and execution.