Apple Sauce

I watched the Apple announcement on 9/10/13 with some extra interest as I've really been pursuing Android as the next mass market computing platform and wanted to see if Apple was going to attempt to reclaim it's dominant smartphone position. It was clear from the announcement that Apple has given up on that idea and wants to milk iPhone for profits. I think their hope is that when they make their big move into wearables in 2014 that iPhone will benefit from the (shackled) halo effect. and iWatch will be the next big thing.

My evidence is simply that Apple did only one significant thing at this announcement (a slightly improved 5S is just not a big deal), they took the iPhone 5 that would normally have been offered for $99 on contract and sucked the beauty and cost out of it and wrapped a rather dated phone in colored plastic. This is cynical, though possibly profitable.

But given the analysis of the Apple Stockholm Syndrome Club (Gruber, Bilton, Mossberg, Arment, Dediu, Evans) who collectively seem to think that the 5C is fantastic and a brilliant thing for Apple to do, I'm pretty convinced Apple's days of relevance in smartphones are numbered. The "thinking" appears to be that people love colors and it's great that Apple will be able to keep their margins high. I can see Tim Cook maybe seeing the world this way but not an Apple consumer who must pay a high price for a dated, plastic phone that Jobs never would have made. Yes, Jobs would never have taken what was still good about an iPhone 5 (it's design, materials, craftsmanship) and replaced it with colored plastic for the same price. It simply screams "sucker!" to Apple consumers.

But the punditry is sufficiently deluded that they really believe that what is best for Apple - making more money in the short term (ignore the brand trashing) is actually good for Apple consumers. To be fair, they may not deluded but just be getting paid by Apple to spew this non-sense.

Anyway, Android is winning because the model is open. Consumers get a broad choice of good phones at much better prices. Charitably, the Apple gadgets may still be fine, but platforms tend to converge towards ubiquity and iOS has a lousy story circa 2013.