"Building a hardware startup is hard, but trying to build one that competes with Apple is nearly impossible."
So what is it? Hard or not?
So what is it? Hard or not?
1. Apple products are glossy and polished, aiming to capture the premium end of a large consumer market for very complex products.
2. Doing this better than Apple is very difficult.
3. However, other less difficult business opportunities exist.
Apple also maintains very high margins, something that leaves more than enough room for another company to compete on price. The trap here is instead of producing a good product at a better price, most companies produce the cheapest possible product in a race to the bottom.
Find something Apple isn't doing, doesn't seem interested in doing, and use their business model. It worked for Nest. It worked for Tesla. It could work for you.
You just made the case against this. The fact that they won't make an IoT blender is why they're hard to compete with. Apple is the polar opposite of Google in so many ways but a big one is their organizational mentality of "more wood behind fewer arrows". Apple is the batter in a no-called-strike baseball game (to borrow a Buffett quote) which means they're only going to swing when they get a fastball right over the plate.
Apple has high margins but it's actually because they have the lowest costs. In Porter's terms, they're the benefit leader but they're also the cost leader.
>Find something Apple isn't doing, doesn't seem interested in doing, and use their business model.
This isn't actually competing with them then. This advice is probably valid, but you're basically saying to just be the Apple of some other industry (like Keurig or Nespresso).
There's a lot of other industries that need an Apple and don't have one. Who is the Apple of toilets? Of mattresses? Of 3D printers? Of blenders?
Some have leaders that succeed not based on having a superior product, but by their crushing marketing pressure and omnipresent retail representation. They're ripe for disruption.
This is what companies like Anker and Aukey are doing too. They compete directly against Apple's accessories with a well polished, durable product, for cheaper than what Apple charges.