Upvoted b/c I think your rejection of Cringely is right, but the reason is different. Jobs/Apple are not in this for the money. They simply believe that iOS + cloud is a better way to compute.
It is a win-win for Aplle and the consumer, which is a great place for a company to be.
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2813-do-you-want-to-sell-suga...
Not so sure about that.
This is what I think motivates Steve Jobs: His insane passion for consumer computer electronics. Juicy and illuminating supporting fact: Jobs's first job was at the HP factory in Palo Alto at age 12. <http://www.playboy.com/articles/playboy-interview-steven-job...;
"I remember my first day, expressing my complete enthusiasm and bliss at being at Hewlett-Packard for the summer to my supervisor, a guy named Chris, telling him that my favorite thing in the whole world was electronics. I asked him what his favorite thing to do was and he looked at me and said, "To fuck!" [Laughs] I learned a lot that summer."
Every day he works, he energizes that little kid inside him. Not a bad life.
At WWDC. I won't say anything specific, but I'm beginning to think that Apple's business model is/has been to take all the awesome stuff that people developed in research labs since the 60's, and they're implementing it when/where it makes sense.
Basically, Apple has been in the business of arbitrage of R&D awesomeness. (As opposed to the most common use of R&D as a corporate epeen.) Considering there's decades of unimplemented (or badly implemented) good ideas, this seems like a sustainable model.
If this is true, then that is also google's model, except they're doing it with server-side algorithms as opposed to UI implementations/hardware form factors.
You don't think google invented MapReduce, their translation algos, their vision algos, their concurrency models and so on? They get them out of research papers from years gone by. Then they implement them at real-world scale, and iterate them until they're suitably awesome, just like apple does with the ideas they resurrect from academia.
This is analogous to how every perceived leap forward in programming paradigms always seems to end up dating back to 1956.
It is rarely good for a startup to be on the absolute bleeding edge of an industry, but if you can catch the tipping point[0] (and execute well), you have pretty much guaranteed success.
[0] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316346624/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...
There are a lot of examples of Apple's moneymindedness like margins on hardawre, upgrades cost, 30% of app cost etc. but the the most egregious is the 30% tithe on all in-app purchases and subscription content. The fact that they rejected Readability's app for the iPhone and iPad AFTER taking their FOSS code to implement the readability feature is Safari is one of the biggest examples of how Apple is squeezing the last bit of money. http://blog.readability.com/2011/02/an-open-letter-to-apple/
How altruistic is that?
You can find other references to that raise by using a search engine.
You mean you have no control over a factory that you're the primary(or only) customer of?
>How about HP, Cisco, Intel, Acer, Asus, Dell, Nokia, etc?
I was replying to your GP post that stated that Apple and Jobs weren't after profit margins only. So you mean Apple is as mindlessly profit driven(if not more) as all those other companies you just listed? Thanks for proving my point. http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2010/06/02/foxconn-pay-rai...
Oh, and sorry downvoters for insulting your religion with facts. I should have known better, I will toe in line so that I don't get banned due to bad karma. http://articles.cnn.com/2011-05-19/tech/apple.religion_1_app...
> So you mean Apple is as mindlessly profit driven(if not
> more) as all those other companies you just listed?
"In a survey published in 2010 by Oxfam Hong Kong, Foxconn ranked sixth for corporate social responsibility out of the 42 companies that then made up the Hang Seng index."