I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. If you are really and truly into the Apple ecosystem, you could do a lot worse than just follow the blog Daring Fireball. I mean that in multiple ways. His blog is one of the most popular (if not the most popular) blog on all things Apple. Popularity isn’t a great metric for deciding if reading something is worth your time, but in this case, the popularity is spot on.
But it’s more than that: another reason for following John Gruber’s blog is you learn about a trait that is common to this blog and to Apple: painstaking attention to detail. Read this article, but read especially footnote 2, to get a sense of what I mean. There are many, many examples of Apple’s painstaking attention to detail, of course, but this story is one of my favorites.
There is no end to these kind of stories, by the way. Here’s another:
Prior to the patent filing, Apple carried out research into breathing rates during sleep and found that the average respiratory rate for adults is 12–20 breaths per minute. They used a rate of 12 cycles per minute (the low end of the scale) to derive a model for how the light should behave to create a feeling of calm and make the product seem more human.
But finding the right rate wasn’t enough, they needed the light to not just blink, but “breathe.” Most previous sleep LEDs were just driven directly from the system chipset and could only switch on or off and not have the gradual glow that Apple integrated into their devices. This meant going to the expense of creating a new controller chip which could drive the LED light and change its brightness when the main CPU was shut down, all without harming battery life.
Anybody who is an Android/PC user instead (such as I), can’t help but be envious of this trait in Apple products.
There are many, many books/videos/podcasts you can refer to to understand Apple’s growth in the early years, and any one reference doesn’t necessarily mean the others are worse, but let’s begin with this simple one. Here’s Wikipedia on the same topic, much more detail, of course.
Before it became one of the wealthiest companies in the world, Apple Inc. was a tiny start-up in Los Altos, California. Co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, both college dropouts, wanted to develop the world’s first user-friendly personal computer. Their work ended up revolutionizing the computer industry and changing the face of consumer technology. Along with tech giants like Microsoft and IBM, Apple helped make computers part of everyday life, ushering in the Digital Revolution and the Information Age.
The production function and complementary goods are two topics that every student of economics is taught again and again. Here’s how Steve Jobs explains it:
You can’t really learn the history of Apple without learning about John Sculley firing Steve Jobs.
According to Sculley’s wishes, Steve Jobs was to represent the company externally as a new Apple chairman without influencing the core business. As Jobs got wind of these plans to deprive him of his power, he tried to arrange a coup against Sculley on the Apple board. Sculley told the board: “I’m asking Steve to step down and you can back me on it and then I take responsibility for running the company, or we can do nothing and you’re going to find yourselves a new CEO.” The majority of the board backed the ex-Pepsi man and turned away from Steve Jobs.
And the one guy who helped Steve Jobs achieve his vision for Apple once Jobs came back was, of course, Jony Ive. This is a very, very long article but a fun read, not just about the relationship between Ive and Jobs, but also about Ive and Apple. Jony Ive no longer works at Apple of course (well, kinda sorta), but you can’t understand Apple without knowing more about Ive.
Jobs’s taste for merciless criticism was notorious; Ive recalled that, years ago, after seeing colleagues crushed, he protested. Jobs replied, “Why would you be vague?,” arguing that ambiguity was a form of selfishness: “You don’t care about how they feel! You’re being vain, you want them to like you.” Ive was furious, but came to agree. “It’s really demeaning to think that, in this deep desire to be liked, you’ve compromised giving clear, unambiguous feedback,” he said. He lamented that there were “so many anecdotes” about Jobs’s acerbity: “His intention, and motivation, wasn’t to be hurtful.”
Apple has bee, for most of its history, defined by its hardware. That still remains true, for the most part. But where does Apple News, Apple Music, Apple TV fit in?
Apple, in the near future will be as much about services as it is about hardware, and maybe more so. That’s, according to Ben Thompson, the most likely (and correct, in his view) trajectory for Apple.
CEO Tim Cook and CFO Luca Maestri have been pushing the narrative that Apple is a services company for two years now, starting with the 1Q 2016 earnings call in January, 2016. At that time iPhone growth had barely budged year-over-year (it would fall the following three quarters), and it came across a bit as a diversion; after all, it’s not like the company was changing its business model
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