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Apple aggressively focus on low-volume high-margin opportunities, have been doing so for some decades, and have a giant war chest to make bets with. In many way

Apple aggressively focus on low-volume high-margin opportunities, have been doing so for some decades, and have a giant war chest to make bets with. In many ways, they work like the very very large version of a successfully bootstrapped business. Most of their peers pursue maximum volume in an attempt to dominate a market and drown all competition, inebitably at much lower margins. It's the continuation of the VC launch-or-bust rocketship model most of them were born from. The difference then means that Apple can try making something really unique and compelling and call it a profitable success based on much much smaller sales volume. And if it does happen to launch like a rocketship (as the iPod, iPhone, and iPad each did) all the better. But their peers set a much higher mark for sales volume when thinking about what's a success or failure. If a product is only lightly taken up, even if nominally profitable at their margins, it's more like a distraction or clue rather than a success in itself. So they scavenge the project and move on to an alternative market or a parallel product idea. This all sets Apple up to make slow, well-considered bets on quality and design coherency instead of strictly trying to race to market and outmaneuver everyone for volume.

alt227 3y ago
Apple have only had 1 successful product, and thats a flat device with a screen for media consumption. iPod, iPhone, and iPad are just different sizes of this device. The only thing Apple have done which elevated themselves above their peers is have marketing which positioned them higher in the market. Remember those Black and White ads of Steve Jobs next to Ghandi, Malcolm X, and Charlie Chaplin? They are paying off now in spades.
- swatcoder 3y ago
  That interpretation seems pretty out of sync with their financial history across divisions, their operating margin across divisions, their customer loyalty across divisions, and pretty much everyone's experience of the world, but maybe you're right. You may not like their products, and you may think their customers are idiots hypnotized by villianous marketers or something, but that's kind of the point of it all: by targetting high margins and precisely volume instead of low margins and maximum volume, they really don't need to care what you think. And that lets them approach products differently.
  - alt227 3y ago
    >You may not like their products, and you may think their customers are idiots hypnotized by villianous marketers or something. Thats quite a stretch to assume that opinion from my comment? I actually love Macbook Pros. IMO they are the best Laptop ever built. However in the global market of laptops they are not patrticularly successful. The entiety of the MacOS ecosystem (of which Macbook Pros are a small percentage) barely breaks 20% of the market share. Are their products more reliable, more fully featured, and objectivley better than their competitiors? No they are not. The reason they are regarded as a more premium option in the market is not because they make less product with more profit margin, its because they have had an incredibly clever marketing department for the last 20 years meticulously curating their brand presence and public perception into being the most premium tech company which produces the best products.
    - mcphage 3y ago
      > The entiety of the MacOS ecosystem (of which Macbook Pros are a small percentage) barely breaks 20% of the market share. Market share is the goal, making money is the goal. Market share helps, but it isn't the same thing. MacBooks do pretty well.
    - Karrot_Kream 3y ago
      That's the difference in strategy. Apple only cares about profits not about market share. Market share only matters when margins are low and you need volume to bring revenue numbers up. When your margins are high, you can have a much smaller market share but also use that to create a more opinionated brand image and drive brand loyalty.
      - alt227 3y ago
        Thats fine until your revenue growth stagnates. Its then that your shareholders come knocking demanding growth, at which point market share becomes incredibly important. When that happens, opinionated brand image needs to become much more generic brand image to start attracting more of the market. This is what happened with Xerox, IBM, Microsoft, and it will happen to Apple too.
- astrange 3y ago
  That's not what marketing is. Marketing is knowing what products people will enjoy buying, not just making ads after the fact. I also don't think most customers are old enough to remember those ads.
matwood 3y ago
> Apple aggressively focus on low-volume high-margin opportunities It's hard to call anything selling 200M+ units/year low volume.
- swatcoder 3y ago
  That's the happy accident. That's the point. They didn't need those numbers for the iPhone to be worth their original R&D effort, but winning those numbers is even more advantageous for them because of their core philosophy around volume and margins. Meanwhile, Microsoft/Google/etc are playing a whole different game. When they succeed, they also saturate a market, but that's the only time they call it a success and so they approach the whole product design process differently.

alt227 3y ago

Apple have only had 1 successful product, and thats a flat device with a screen for media consumption. iPod, iPhone, and iPad are just different sizes of this device. The only thing Apple have done which elevated themselves above their peers is have marketing which positioned them higher in the market. Remember those Black and White ads of Steve Jobs next to Ghandi, Malcolm X, and Charlie Chaplin? They are paying off now in spades.

swatcoder 3y ago
That interpretation seems pretty out of sync with their financial history across divisions, their operating margin across divisions, their customer loyalty across divisions, and pretty much everyone's experience of the world, but maybe you're right. You may not like their products, and you may think their customers are idiots hypnotized by villianous marketers or something, but that's kind of the point of it all: by targetting high margins and precisely volume instead of low margins and maximum volume, they really don't need to care what you think. And that lets them approach products differently.
- alt227 3y ago
  >You may not like their products, and you may think their customers are idiots hypnotized by villianous marketers or something. Thats quite a stretch to assume that opinion from my comment? I actually love Macbook Pros. IMO they are the best Laptop ever built. However in the global market of laptops they are not patrticularly successful. The entiety of the MacOS ecosystem (of which Macbook Pros are a small percentage) barely breaks 20% of the market share. Are their products more reliable, more fully featured, and objectivley better than their competitiors? No they are not. The reason they are regarded as a more premium option in the market is not because they make less product with more profit margin, its because they have had an incredibly clever marketing department for the last 20 years meticulously curating their brand presence and public perception into being the most premium tech company which produces the best products.
  - mcphage 3y ago
    > The entiety of the MacOS ecosystem (of which Macbook Pros are a small percentage) barely breaks 20% of the market share. Market share is the goal, making money is the goal. Market share helps, but it isn't the same thing. MacBooks do pretty well.
  - Karrot_Kream 3y ago
    That's the difference in strategy. Apple only cares about profits not about market share. Market share only matters when margins are low and you need volume to bring revenue numbers up. When your margins are high, you can have a much smaller market share but also use that to create a more opinionated brand image and drive brand loyalty.
    - alt227 3y ago
      Thats fine until your revenue growth stagnates. Its then that your shareholders come knocking demanding growth, at which point market share becomes incredibly important. When that happens, opinionated brand image needs to become much more generic brand image to start attracting more of the market. This is what happened with Xerox, IBM, Microsoft, and it will happen to Apple too.
astrange 3y ago
That's not what marketing is. Marketing is knowing what products people will enjoy buying, not just making ads after the fact. I also don't think most customers are old enough to remember those ads.

matwood 3y ago

> Apple aggressively focus on low-volume high-margin opportunities It's hard to call anything selling 200M+ units/year low volume.

swatcoder 3y ago
That's the happy accident. That's the point. They didn't need those numbers for the iPhone to be worth their original R&D effort, but winning those numbers is even more advantageous for them because of their core philosophy around volume and margins. Meanwhile, Microsoft/Google/etc are playing a whole different game. When they succeed, they also saturate a market, but that's the only time they call it a success and so they approach the whole product design process differently.