Apple Is Past Its Prime

I’m a little late to the party here, but I honestly think Apple has finally made the shift from an innovator to a profit protector. When I got my iPod in the early 2000’s, it was one of the best tech investments I had ever made. My second Apple purchase was an iPad 2, which was the best tablet on the market by miles. Nothing could touch Apple products, and their popularity skyrocketed.

When I looked at their recent product releases, they are all just incremental adjustments to past innovations. Faster processor. Thinner body. Brighter screen. While these are certainly improvements, they don’t come with the same flair that propelled them from nearly bankrupt to the most valuable company on Earth in a little over a decade.

Shareholders are certainly happy with the influx of money now, but so were Microsoft shareholders in the 90’s. Complacency has set in, and if they don’t start taking risks and pushing the envelope once again, Apple will die on the vine like so many other tech giants.

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About Stephen Murphy

Stephen Murphy is a marketer, speaker and family man from the Jersey Shore.

Comments

Schmittsticles says

November 8, 2012 at 11:05 pm

I very much like the at the end. great point though, I couldn’t agree with you more.

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- schmittsticles says
  
  November 8, 2012 at 11:06 pm
  
  i was referring to the closing rant tag, which was stripped out of my original comment
  
  Reply
Nicholas Casci says

November 9, 2012 at 12:49 pm

Nowhere is this more evident than yesterday’s news that the Galaxy SIII is now the best-selling smartphone on the market. While Apple has been doing precisely what you’ve listed: tweaking the current design with few real innovations, the Galaxy SIII truly is a remarkable and innovative bit of hardware. http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/08/us-samsung-smartphones-idUSBRE8A70GG20121108

Android 4.0 ICS and 4.1 Jelly Bean are years ahead of iOS 6. And it shows because iOS has been playing catch up with Android for the past two years. It wasn’t until the iPhone 4 that Apple phones even had a notification bar! And now, 80% of the alerts are ads and spam, and there isn’t even a date in the bar.

I could type even more about OSX and how unenthused and disappointed I am with OSX 10.7 Lion. But briefly, OSX 10.5 Leopard was truly a remarkable OS update, completely changing. 10.7 is laggy, clunky, and often brings my 2.2 GHz i7 MacBook Pro with 4GB DDR3 RAM to a grinding halt. This is supposed to be the fast, streamlined OS. Now they’re just “innovating” for innovation’s sake, not to make a truly great product but to make a newer-ish product that will undoubtedly sell well and protect share price.

Couldn’t agree more with you: Apple products are in the “maturity” phase of their PLCM and it’s only through massive marketing campaigns and fervent brand loyalty that they haven’t hit the “declining” phase (if they haven’t already).

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