Personally I am very surprised to hear that Apple has no plans for a mobile phone, although I agree that building one themselves would be madness.
I guess this means that the value they bring to the area of mobiles will be via .Mac and iSync.
Strange news.
Apple would need the aid, and good will of the phone manufacturers to bring about and market a Cell phone. It might be better for then to work with as many of these companies as possible to get a common technology accepted (Did someone say Standards? or Quicktime market share potential?) that helps to sell Macs than to compete head on with all of the companies at once. This keeps their market as broad as possible with a minimum of finanical risk to Apple.
As i side note i recently switched syncing my clie NX70V from my pc to my mac and it works great (w/missing sync). MS has entourage conduits and everything.
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." "We look at the tablet and we think it's going to fail." Tablets appeal to rich guys with plenty of other PCs and devices already. "And people accuse us of niche markets." I get a lot of pressure to do a PDA. What people really seem to want to do with these is get the data out. We believe cell phones are going to carry this information. We didn't think we'd do well in the cell phone business. What we've done instead is we've written what we think is some of the best software in the world to start syncing information between devices. We believe that mode is what cell phones need to get to. We chose to do the iPod instead of a PDA.
Looks like Steve is just waiting for those of us who still want pen input to die.
Looks like Steve is just waiting for those of us who still want pen input to die.
The truly choice moment arrives when you realize that, before you read the quote Murk refers to, Steve Jobs and the interviewer had this little exchange:
>>>>>M: The market share for Apple has not increased dramatically; why?
J: We ask ourselves that a lot. (Audience laughs.) We serve three primary markets: consumers, education and creative professionals. The pro market has been suffering economically for the last few years, same with education. We've more than doubled our share of the consumer market, it's now between 5-10%.<<<<<
Consumers, education and creative professionals... and there's insufficient market potential for a tablet if not a PDA?
I believe Mr. Jobs is wrong in his assessment. How about mobile professionals, professionals that walk around all day long? How about kids learning to write? And creative professionals would reject a work setting as it is described in my signature? (thanks again to Mr. Andy Ihnatko for letting me use that quote).
I can see the reasons to not go into cellphones and pda's and the market for tablets is still limited, but...
I don't know how marketing studies can conclude that people don't want portable movie devices.
MacsRGood4U: Not much of a market for watching movies or showing photos on iPods or other small devices. Screen too small until someone invents a great folding screen. However he does see potential to use small device to drive a TV as the presentation vehicle.
Maybe if you just use a b/w iPod screen, but if you showed ANY focus group a iPod-sized (but larger) device with a 4" color screen displaying Matrix trailers, you couldn't possibly get negative comments. Now hardrives and imbedded graphic chips should be getting to that size soon.
My concern with Steve's comments is that Apple is content to incrementally improve products, especially software, without pushing for the killer app or device. That won't make for many "switchers" no matter how elegant Panther looks. \
Comments
Originally posted by Harald
Personally I am very surprised to hear that Apple has no plans for a mobile phone, although I agree that building one themselves would be madness.
I guess this means that the value they bring to the area of mobiles will be via .Mac and iSync.
Strange news.
Apple would need the aid, and good will of the phone manufacturers to bring about and market a Cell phone. It might be better for then to work with as many of these companies as possible to get a common technology accepted (Did someone say Standards? or Quicktime market share potential?) that helps to sell Macs than to compete head on with all of the companies at once. This keeps their market as broad as possible with a minimum of finanical risk to Apple.
Palm ain't makin' it.
Aries 1B
(Wow! 199 posts! Gotta make the next one a daisy!)
Quote SJ:
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." "We look at the tablet and we think it's going to fail." Tablets appeal to rich guys with plenty of other PCs and devices already. "And people accuse us of niche markets." I get a lot of pressure to do a PDA. What people really seem to want to do with these is get the data out. We believe cell phones are going to carry this information. We didn't think we'd do well in the cell phone business. What we've done instead is we've written what we think is some of the best software in the world to start syncing information between devices. We believe that mode is what cell phones need to get to. We chose to do the iPod instead of a PDA.
Looks like Steve is just waiting for those of us who still want pen input to die.
Originally posted by murk
Sorry, but it looks like no tablet either. More info on Job's comments
Looks like Steve is just waiting for those of us who still want pen input to die.
The truly choice moment arrives when you realize that, before you read the quote Murk refers to, Steve Jobs and the interviewer had this little exchange:
>>>>>M: The market share for Apple has not increased dramatically; why?
J: We ask ourselves that a lot. (Audience laughs.) We serve three primary markets: consumers, education and creative professionals. The pro market has been suffering economically for the last few years, same with education. We've more than doubled our share of the consumer market, it's now between 5-10%.<<<<<
Consumers, education and creative professionals... and there's insufficient market potential for a tablet if not a PDA?
I believe Mr. Jobs is wrong in his assessment. How about mobile professionals, professionals that walk around all day long? How about kids learning to write? And creative professionals would reject a work setting as it is described in my signature? (thanks again to Mr. Andy Ihnatko for letting me use that quote).
...times that try men's souls..."
Aries 1B
And as he said, the Pro segment is in a slump. They can't afford to spend lots of cash on tablets unless they really, really need them.
I don't know how marketing studies can conclude that people don't want portable movie devices.
MacsRGood4U: Not much of a market for watching movies or showing photos on iPods or other small devices. Screen too small until someone invents a great folding screen. However he does see potential to use small device to drive a TV as the presentation vehicle.
Maybe if you just use a b/w iPod screen, but if you showed ANY focus group a iPod-sized (but larger) device with a 4" color screen displaying Matrix trailers, you couldn't possibly get negative comments. Now hardrives and imbedded graphic chips should be getting to that size soon.
My concern with Steve's comments is that Apple is content to incrementally improve products, especially software, without pushing for the killer app or device. That won't make for many "switchers" no matter how elegant Panther looks.