5 ms·
It has nothing to do with Apple. It has to do with a successful product. I saw how the iPhone was received at the time. In my environment of Nokia enthusiastic
by Htsthbjig 12y ago
It has nothing to do with Apple. It has to do with a successful product.
I saw how the iPhone was received at the time. In my environment of Nokia enthusiastics in Europe it was received with extreme skepticism.
Everybody said: "A phone where your fingers cloud the screen never will take off". "The battery lasts so little for a phone". "No way I am using a phone with the battery soldered". "I can't type while in the class, meeting or whatever", "glass phones are so fragile"...
Three years later, all of them will be using an iPhone or iPhone-like phone.
People value success histories, because knowing what is going to success is really useful.
E.g I bought Apple stock before the iPhone launch because there were rumors that Apple would be launching it, and I supposed that Apple were going to do it right after the people of "Telefonica"(a european telecomunications company) offering me something like 60 dollars for the entire rights of my smartphone App, which took months to make and won a big contest as people loved it.
It was so monopolized market that was a big opportunity for disruption.
I won a lot of money with the Apple stock, after that I bought stock from companies like ARM holdings and device sensors as I supposed that were going to benefit from a boom in smartphones and tablets later.
I supposed it right and the money I earned was extremely useful in making my own company later.
On the other hand, I personally met the guy that founded twitter and did not invested on his company, because it was a startup like any other.
There is value in knowing what is going to success, and this is the reason people is interested in success stories, as learning about them let them identify future success.
People care about Apple products only because Apple has a surprisingly high level of recent successes.
- rmc 12y agoIt wasn't just the iPhone. Remember the Slashdot review of the iPod? "No wireless, less space than a Nomad. Lame."
- vacri 12y agoA lot of the ipods were overpriced and underfeatured. They were shiny, but didn't always work as well as competitors. I once bought a video ipod - that was a mistake. And no radio? Crazy.
- rmc 12y agoAnd yet Apple probably makes billions of dollars per year from the iPod and it has become almost the colloqual term for "portable digital music player". Crazy.
- Iftheshoefits 12y agoNot crazy; marketing. Apple's marketing is very good, and it gets a lot of positive press (read: free positive marketing). One of their most successful plays, in my opinion, is to have become almost identified with "high-tech" consumer gadgetry. They have a target market that consists mainly of affluent people who are not only willing to spend their cash on consumer electronics, but desire to do so in a specific way that helps them identify as a "techy" or "tech geek" or what have you. Apple's target market is a set of people who are paying for a product as much because it has the Apple logo on it as because of what it does. For better or worse.
- kamjam 12y agoI never looked at an iPod until at least the 4th gen, although fairly expensive compared to the competition, it had 60Gb space on the photo model. I didn't care about that much space for music, but it also doubled up as an external hard disk! I bought a 5th gen in the end, which I still own. Most of my music plays off my phone so it was not worth upgrading but I still keep it synced and the battery lasts longer than phone!
- ceejayoz 12y agoApple has a long history of ditching features that power users demand and call omission "crazy", then seeing the industry ditch those same features a few years later. Floppy drives. CD drives. Ethernet ports. Flash support.
- freehunter 12y agoWell power users complain because they still need to use those things. Mainstram users don't. I can remember starting my career well after the introduction of USB flash drives and still getting software on CD or even floppy if we went back a few versions. We laughed at the fact that our computers still had floppy drives even while we were loading software from a handful of the bastards.
- untog 12y agoI think we all remember that review, because it gets brought out any time someone criticises an Apple product at launch. In any case, I feel like it's a little unfair to judge in hindsight like that. It had no PC compatibility, nor USB connectivity. To anyone other than a Mac user it was a dud. At the time.