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Apple has moved from traditional tech to consumer devices. College kids may one day decide Apple is not cool.

cmgreen 11y ago
Maybe but they've executed a great vendor lock in strategy for kids. Apple Purchases are shared with child accounts as is Family Sharing in Apple Music. Transition costs are going to be very high for those that are part of the "iPad mini is my first computer" generation.
danielrhodes 11y ago
Are college kids driving that market or are you just making an assumption?
- tosseraccount 11y ago
  College kids are the arbiters of cool.
  - threeseed 11y ago
    The fact you believe this shows you that you should really stop acting like you understand what is cool. The correct answer would have been that each age demographic has its own culture and trends. And even more so people aren't caring what other groups think or do.
Bud 11y ago
Just standard trolling about how Apple's success is transitory, without merit, and due to people finding them "cool" for no rational reason.
- tosseraccount 11y ago
  (I'll bite) Consider this : http://finviz.com/map.ashx?t=sec http://finviz.com/map.ashx?t=sec (finviz: a heatmap visualization of the stock market ) Note that Apple is in "Consumer Goods", not "Technology". At least one market analyst thinks their competitors are Proctor & Gamble and Coca Cola.
  - avn2109 11y ago
    People say Apple is a tech company or a toys for millenials company, but I claim that fundamentally Apple is a user experience company (maybe the only one). They dominate because Steve Jobs realized what business they're in, and none of their competitors have. This is like when the railroads' lunch was eaten by the tractor trailer because the railroads thought they were rail companies, when in fact they were transportation companies. Samsung and all the other competitors think they're in the device business, but they're not. They're in the UX business. It helps to have Steve Jobs, who was actually a user experience zealot and in a normal org would have been the CUXO, masquerading as a CEO. As an example, think of the difference between being an Apple vs. Samsung customer, all the way through the value chain. Shopping in that beautiful airy Apple store, experiencing those matte textures and ingenious packaging while unboxing your new devices, the industrial design wizardry that constructed a machine with such amazing fit and finish and tight panel gaps and textures, software that (sometimes, mostly) just works. Jobs was a strong enough leader to make a bunch of mostly-orthogonal disciplines (e.g. manufacturing, industrial design, software engineering, packaging design) subservient to the company's ultimate objective, which is UX. It doesn't hurt that Apple tends to execute best-in-class on each of these axes, but that's tactics not strategy. The big question for the future is whether Tim Cook understands this. It's left as an exercise for the reader whether the Apple watch is a product made by a UX company or by a company intent on duplicating the financial success of the ipad and iphone by cargo-culting the "create new device class" methods that worked before.
    - tosseraccount 11y ago
      The whole apple worship thing is kind of creepy to me. Sorry. (edit: go ahead fanboys, I got lots of karma for next time. go ahead and down vote my previous threads while your at it.)
      - avn2109 11y ago
        GP here: Don't get me wrong, I would rather see out-of-the-box Linux win in the laptop market and I strongly dislike walled gardens (mobile and otherwise) on philosophical grounds. But that doesn't stop me from hypothesizing about why Apple is making a boatload of money.
- cmsj 11y ago
  On an infinite timescale, that analysis will be correct ;)
  - arjunrc 11y ago
    God, I wish I could listen to Siracusa talk about Tech more than those 1:30 hours, that he does every week.
    - cmsj 11y ago
      Yes yes so much yes. FWIW he does a podcast with Merlin now, called Irreconcilable Differences, but it's not primarily about tech.
threeseed 11y ago
This cool factor has always been largely nonsense. College kids may buy an iPod based on it being cool but they sure as hell aren't going to spend thousands on a iPhone, MacBook or iPad based on nothing more than the perceived gain of social status. The fact is that PC laptops (apart from Surface) are largely cheap junk with bloat ware and questionable antics eg disabling software updates all of the place. Likewise iOS is far more polished, far better supported over the long term and is the primary development platform compared to Android. History has shown that people won't buy Apple products based on coolness alone eg. Cube, Newton, eMate.
- tosseraccount 11y ago
  Agreed. College kids never spend a lot on trying to gain social status.

Maybe but they've executed a great vendor lock in strategy for kids. Apple Purchases are shared with child accounts as is Family Sharing in Apple Music. Transition costs are going to be very high for those that are part of the "iPad mini is my first computer" generation.

danielrhodes 11y ago

Are college kids driving that market or are you just making an assumption?

tosseraccount 11y ago
College kids are the arbiters of cool.
- threeseed 11y ago
  The fact you believe this shows you that you should really stop acting like you understand what is cool. The correct answer would have been that each age demographic has its own culture and trends. And even more so people aren't caring what other groups think or do.

Bud 11y ago

Just standard trolling about how Apple's success is transitory, without merit, and due to people finding them "cool" for no rational reason.

tosseraccount 11y ago
(I'll bite) Consider this : http://finviz.com/map.ashx?t=sec http://finviz.com/map.ashx?t=sec (finviz: a heatmap visualization of the stock market ) Note that Apple is in "Consumer Goods", not "Technology". At least one market analyst thinks their competitors are Proctor & Gamble and Coca Cola.
- avn2109 11y ago
  People say Apple is a tech company or a toys for millenials company, but I claim that fundamentally Apple is a user experience company (maybe the only one). They dominate because Steve Jobs realized what business they're in, and none of their competitors have. This is like when the railroads' lunch was eaten by the tractor trailer because the railroads thought they were rail companies, when in fact they were transportation companies. Samsung and all the other competitors think they're in the device business, but they're not. They're in the UX business. It helps to have Steve Jobs, who was actually a user experience zealot and in a normal org would have been the CUXO, masquerading as a CEO. As an example, think of the difference between being an Apple vs. Samsung customer, all the way through the value chain. Shopping in that beautiful airy Apple store, experiencing those matte textures and ingenious packaging while unboxing your new devices, the industrial design wizardry that constructed a machine with such amazing fit and finish and tight panel gaps and textures, software that (sometimes, mostly) just works. Jobs was a strong enough leader to make a bunch of mostly-orthogonal disciplines (e.g. manufacturing, industrial design, software engineering, packaging design) subservient to the company's ultimate objective, which is UX. It doesn't hurt that Apple tends to execute best-in-class on each of these axes, but that's tactics not strategy. The big question for the future is whether Tim Cook understands this. It's left as an exercise for the reader whether the Apple watch is a product made by a UX company or by a company intent on duplicating the financial success of the ipad and iphone by cargo-culting the "create new device class" methods that worked before.
  - tosseraccount 11y ago
    The whole apple worship thing is kind of creepy to me. Sorry. (edit: go ahead fanboys, I got lots of karma for next time. go ahead and down vote my previous threads while your at it.)
    - avn2109 11y ago
      GP here: Don't get me wrong, I would rather see out-of-the-box Linux win in the laptop market and I strongly dislike walled gardens (mobile and otherwise) on philosophical grounds. But that doesn't stop me from hypothesizing about why Apple is making a boatload of money.
cmsj 11y ago
On an infinite timescale, that analysis will be correct ;)
- arjunrc 11y ago
  God, I wish I could listen to Siracusa talk about Tech more than those 1:30 hours, that he does every week.
  - cmsj 11y ago
    Yes yes so much yes. FWIW he does a podcast with Merlin now, called Irreconcilable Differences, but it's not primarily about tech.

threeseed 11y ago

This cool factor has always been largely nonsense. College kids may buy an iPod based on it being cool but they sure as hell aren't going to spend thousands on a iPhone, MacBook or iPad based on nothing more than the perceived gain of social status. The fact is that PC laptops (apart from Surface) are largely cheap junk with bloat ware and questionable antics eg disabling software updates all of the place. Likewise iOS is far more polished, far better supported over the long term and is the primary development platform compared to Android. History has shown that people won't buy Apple products based on coolness alone eg. Cube, Newton, eMate.

tosseraccount 11y ago
Agreed. College kids never spend a lot on trying to gain social status.