Steve's Apple was just like Tim's Apple: all about incremental improvement.
Youngsters might not remember, but I've followed those keynotes and introductions since 2002 or so.
It took 4 years for the iPod to get a color screen -- and 8 years to get a video camera. Several years to get Wifi. The original iPhone wasn't 3G -- that was the next model. Those years we waited year over year for Jobs to announce some extremely incremental updates. And people cheered for them -- they were actually exciting, all the press was speculating and gushing, and it was e.g. just a few additional features on the iPod, like the touch wheel as opposed to the old click wheel.
New announcements like the iPhone and the iPad were rare under Jobs too. And those products were low hanging fruit for Apple themselves -- a mobile phone and a table. Quite basic stuff -- not some whole new product category like flying cars and whatever people expect to see.
Apple is not in the business of creating experimental stuff to dazzle geeks. It's in the business in incrementally improving mass market products.
Besides, what competitor exactly did introduce those mythical "Jobs-worthy" products that people ask from Apple to deliver? Google Glasses? Microsoft's laptop/tablet combo that failed to gain much traction and is returned like crazy? https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/14/16142490/microsoft-surfac...
What Apple did better, and affected the industry, was not innovation in the sense of some new BS product category that didn't exist ever, it was delivery. Better thought out, more polished, and with lots of innovation in the details. The kind of innovation that the iPhone models get incrementally but few can understand, but then you use a model from 2-3 years ago and it feels ancient after you've used the last one.
For such introductions of new products, the Apple Watch has been one such under Tim's, err, watch, and it does great in the market (in fact it's almost the only smartwatch people can actually see in the wild -- it outsold Samsung Galaxy watches so much in units it's not even funny).
I'm not more young now, I have see the evolution and never see any Apple Keynote or Steve speech because they talk for nothing wasting time , but I remember a things that every company still can't do now, reducing overwaste, improve autonomy. A single AAA battery did the job for a full week in my Rio MP3 Player. I don't care about fancy color screen, video camera? come on, wifi? useless. If the mp3 player isn't working for a full week the product wasn't better.
There was no improvement on the MP3 player, only the storage, but on crap Apple storage, you don't have choice to throw away a device that have slow memory 8GB? when you can buy a SD card? Too much innovation from Apple...
>A single AAA battery did the job for a full week in my Rio MP3 Player. I don't care about fancy color screen, video camera? come on, wifi? useless
Well, you might find yourself in the extreme minority on this.
It's not like non-color-screen, non wi-fi full-week-lasting mp3 players don't exist -- there are tons of such models.
It's just that the market has spoken, and most prefer to be able to also stream, plays apps, etc on their multi-purpose device than get one such.
>There was no improvement on the MP3 player, only the storage, but on crap Apple storage, you don't have choice to throw away a device that have slow memory 8GB? when you can buy a SD card?
Well, obviously companies like Apple don't cater to some small niche of music aficionados. Most people don't care for juggling cards and having different parts of their record collection on different SD cards or whatever -- they did it with CDs and such on 1999 out of necessity. Heck, most people will just stream today and be done with it.
Also not sure how "slow memory" means anything in the context of an mp3 player. Ever had problem reading mp3s from the memory quickly enough?
Youngsters might not remember, but I've followed those keynotes and introductions since 2002 or so.
It took 4 years for the iPod to get a color screen -- and 8 years to get a video camera. Several years to get Wifi. The original iPhone wasn't 3G -- that was the next model. Those years we waited year over year for Jobs to announce some extremely incremental updates. And people cheered for them -- they were actually exciting, all the press was speculating and gushing, and it was e.g. just a few additional features on the iPod, like the touch wheel as opposed to the old click wheel.
New announcements like the iPhone and the iPad were rare under Jobs too. And those products were low hanging fruit for Apple themselves -- a mobile phone and a table. Quite basic stuff -- not some whole new product category like flying cars and whatever people expect to see.
Apple is not in the business of creating experimental stuff to dazzle geeks. It's in the business in incrementally improving mass market products.
Besides, what competitor exactly did introduce those mythical "Jobs-worthy" products that people ask from Apple to deliver? Google Glasses? Microsoft's laptop/tablet combo that failed to gain much traction and is returned like crazy? https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/14/16142490/microsoft-surfac...
What Apple did better, and affected the industry, was not innovation in the sense of some new BS product category that didn't exist ever, it was delivery. Better thought out, more polished, and with lots of innovation in the details. The kind of innovation that the iPhone models get incrementally but few can understand, but then you use a model from 2-3 years ago and it feels ancient after you've used the last one.
For such introductions of new products, the Apple Watch has been one such under Tim's, err, watch, and it does great in the market (in fact it's almost the only smartwatch people can actually see in the wild -- it outsold Samsung Galaxy watches so much in units it's not even funny).