Just like people, no one can be young forever
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文 | No rust, baby elephants
The annual “Technology Spring Festival Evening”, Apple’s autumn conference ended.
Before the Apple Conference, there must be a good event to send a “review of the conference.” Duplicate, predictable processes, faster processors, longer endurance. This is enough to reveal that in recent years, Apple’s press conference has become increasingly lacking.
Of course this year is the same.
Information Summary:
[About the new ipad] from $329, 10.2 inches, A10 Fusion, not a full screen, support for keyboard and Apple Pencil, performance improvement, iPadOS, free to watch Apple TV for one year Plus, not a full screen, there is still a physical Home button. Performance improvement, equipped with iPadOS, booked today, delivery at the end of the month.
[About apple watch 5] The new AppleWatch supports full-day dials that are always on and off, with 18 hours of battery life unchanged. Built-in compass that supports emergency calls in 150 countries. New ceramic and titanium materials. 399 knives are available for sale, starting today and will be available for sale on September 20. Series 3 is priced at 199 knives.
[About iPhone11]With 6.1-inch Retina screen, equipped with A13 BionicProcessor, 12 million front wide-angle lens + 12 million pixel telephoto lens + 12 million pixel super wide-angle lens, 2x optical zoom, support night scene mode, 4K, slow motion video recording, battery life is one hour longer than iPhone XR, with purple, white Six colors, green, yellow, black and red, the speaker supports Dolby panoramic sound effects, starting at $699!
[About iPhone 11 pro] series, Pro 5.8 inches, Pro Max 6.5 inches, super retina XDR screen; A13 Bionic, battery life up 4-5 hours, fast charge; three camera solution is 12 million pixels, wide-angle telephoto super wide angle, standard 18W fast head, with green, gold, silver, gray four versions, iPhone 11 Pro from the price of 999 US dollars, iPhone 11 Pro Max from $ 1099.
Several hot words:
[5 hours of battery life improvement] Thanks to the improvement of the processor and OLED screen, the iPhone 11 Pro has improved its battery life. Compared with last year’s iPhone XS, the battery life can be increased by up to 5 hours.
[Yuba Camera] iPhone 11 Pro (5.8 inches) and iPhone 11 Pro Max (6.5 inches), with a new dark green color. The rear camera is designed for the three cameras, and it is dubbed by the netizens as “the Yuba”. It is ugly and intensive.
[Price Reduction] According to Apple’s official website in China, the iPhone 11 starts at 5,499 yuan, the iPhone 11 Pro starts at 8699 yuan, and the iPhone 11 Pro Max starts at 9599. Yuan, the highest 12,699 yuan.
The old model has two product line price cuts, the iPhone 8 series has been reduced to $449, and the iPhone XR series has been reduced to $599. The apple watch3 series has been reduced to $199.
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The whole series of Apple last year was called “big and expensive”, too high pricing, seriously affecting Apple’s sales. Especially XR, the sale will break. Apple had to cut the price all the way, and the move was once sprayed and could not take care of itself.
So, to say that the biggest news of the year, not technology, but the basic iPhone11 (XR upgrade) is 1000 yuan cheaper than last year – in the downturn of the market economy, the competition in the mobile phone industry is fierce today, Apple has to Make a “last fight.”
In addition, Tim Cook also made a rare move at the Apple conference to “wash the ground”. He said: The three iPhone users launched last year reached 99% satisfaction, which is satisfied by the entire industry. The highest degree is really unbelievable.
A sleek Cook, a surrendered Tim Cook, an apple that is no longer proud.
The theme of this conference is “Towards Innovation,” which is enough to doubt whether it is self-defeating.
As the successor to Steve Jobs, Cook and his apples have experienced the most criticisms in the past eight years, that is, “insufficient innovation.”
The most powerful testimony to this criticism is the stagnant growth of its fist product iPhone sales. In the past three years, Apple has sold nearly 650 million iPhones, and the annual sales growth rate is swinging around 0%. .
Correspondingly, in the third quarter of fiscal year 2019, Apple’s iPhone sales revenue was 25.99 billion US dollars, down 11.8% year-on-year. This is the first time in the past seven years, iPhone revenue fell below 50% for the first time. In the previous quarters, the iPhone’s revenue accounted for more than 60%.
Among them, the most embarrassing fall is also the Greater China area that has held Apple the highest.At the end of the year, XS max’s “bad” performance caused their revenues in the region to plummet more than 20%. On this basis, the growth of Huawei against the trend, and the gap in market share with Apple was also reduced to 1.88%.
In a way, Apple may be experiencing the biggest dilemma of the “post-Kuke era,” and beyond that, whether it is Cook or Apple, it is clear that there is an urgent need to find a “break of the road.” .
Although the founder of this dilemma is not Cook himself.
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If all the companies on this planet are sorted according to the difficulty of succession, Jobs and the apple he created should be second to none.
Combined with the recent hot spots of Ma Yun’s retirement, I personally think that it is more difficult to succeed Jobs, because it is also an outstanding entrepreneur, Jackma is a legend, and Jobs has been modified by crazy fans. God of the upper.
About the comparison between Cook and Jobs, one of the most acquainted ones said: “One is good at fighting the mountains and the other is good at defending the mountains.” Compared with the two, the difficulty of defending the mountains is undoubtedly greater. There are fewer shots and concerns, and in essence, this is a thankless job.
As one of the world’s largest electronics manufacturers, every time Apple sells a mobile phone, all that is involved is the brainstorming of the designers, and thousands of accessories upstream and downstream. Collaboration between business and operators. Jobs can only be responsible for the former. He turned Apple from a technology-led company into a design-led company. This is both Apple’s luck and its misfortune.
In fact, even at the most publicly skeptical moment, Apple’s R&D and design teams have not changed significantly compared to the Jobs era. In order to ensure the efficiency of communication, Jonny Ivey’s design team has been maintained at a scale of about 20 people, which is almost indistinguishable from the design team of Samsung’s 1,600 people next door.
In this, it’s not hard to see that Cook’s skating is thin. To some extent, in addition to the CEO, the Apple development team and the Apple team that overturned the smartphone market were almost in the same line, the only difference. Only the times.
In fact, this is the key to Apple’s “taste” in the eyes of some people.
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As the first generation of Apple “Godfather”, the label on Jobs is not just a simple “creation””New” and “paranoia”, “subversive” is also the evaluation given to him by this industry.
People who have experienced that era will not forget that after browsing the flip phone of a counter, they suddenly saw the shocking impression of the iPhone. As the “killer” that Apple has secretly developed over the years, the iPhone 4 turned out to be born. It almost completely disrupted the layout of the old generation of mobile phone manufacturers to kill and compete, and opened an era that only belongs to “smart phones.”
This kind of behavior that does not conform to the “squatting table” requires not only courage and discouragement, but more importantly, the external factors that require the “bare feet” of the table, as Comrade Lenin said, the most revolutionary. It will always be the proletariat.
As the newcomer to the world’s mobile phone manufacturers that year, in front of Apple, there are a number of veteran giants such as Samsung, Nokia, Sony, HTC, etc. For the apples that are waiting for admission, the old table If you are embarrassed, you will be embarrassed. There is no loss in anyway.
And nowadays, Apple, nowadays, with the increasing sales, has become one of the main talkers on this table. It is expected that this time it will come back with an industry “subversion”. It is impractical.
This is not the dilemma of Apple’s company. After the famous chip design companies Intel and Nvidia control the majority of the market, the speed of product replacement has become the “squeezing toothpaste”.
In essence, for companies that lose their competitive environment, they need to be more stable. Only when they are in a weak position in the industry, subversion and change have a certain rationality.
After all, “making a new product, so that your old products are slow-moving” is not the case that every business manager has the courage to try.
In addition to Jobs.
As a well-deserved monk in the IT industry, Steve Jobs’s life perfectly explains the true meaning of “initiating madness and even playing.”
Once, he was quite appreciative Professor Clayton Christensen made such a prediction, no matter what good products Apple made, one day, they will encounter a crisis. As the “innovator’s dilemma” theory states, people who invent a thing are often the ones who see the end at the latest.
And for this fatal curse, Jobs’ choice is to get out of the market ahead of time.
To this end, Apple, which started with a computer, switched to an iPod when it’s business, and it’s on the iPod.When I got into the good times, I launched the iPhone and completely cut off all the MP3s including my own products. After the iPhone sold historical data, it seems that in order to show the positioning of smart phones like the world, they switched to iPad.
After a full decade, thanks to this strategy, Apple has never met a real opponent – before any opponent in any field grows up, they have opened up a new continent and gracefully exit.
In the process, the development route that took around and the fascinating speeches of Jobs also earned them the reputation of “innovation”.
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If you can choose, Cook may want to be a myth like Jobs.
Unfortunately, myths are often doomed to only one.
At the beginning of the shift, Cook also tried to follow the strategy of Steve Jobs and continue to develop new markets. However, the response of the Apple Watch, which has been devoted to many years of hard work, is like a slap in the face, telling him that “this road is not feasible.”
Unscrupulously, Cook had to change Apple’s development strategy, from the past multi-point flowering to the death insurance iPhone, and gradually drifted away on this road, and eventually became the most hated of himself. people”.
Someone knows that this company, which was squandered by the public at the press conference last year, once smashed the “$999” price card in front of everyone, saying, “We want to do our best.” Maybe more people use it.”
Since October 2000, Apple will publish a form that is less than half a page long every three months, telling people: How many products we sold and how much we earned this quarter. The glorious tradition of this corporate history was also abolished indefinitely on the absurd grounds of “selling a lot of products that did not reflect the power of our business” at last year’s earnings conference.
What’s even more embarrassing is that at the press conference of iPad2, Jobs also smashed competitor Samsung for the same reason: “If you sell well, why don’t you dare to say it?”
“Why don’t you…”, which has become a fixed sentence of fruit powder, which is unfortunate and angry, but beyond that, the apple that has been sung for 8 years is still in this world. One of the best high-tech companies, the market value they have experienced in the past six months has slowly recovered and began to re-enter the high point.military.
In the words of Sony’s former CEO Akio Morita, Apple’s myth has not been shattered, but the classical era of relying on outstanding products to maintain the core competitiveness of the company is over.
Like people, no business can always be young, and always tears.
Maybe after all the dust settles, people will suddenly remember that the iPhone is still one of the best quality mobile phones in the world. Although it has been imitated by various brands, there has never been a product that can truly surpass the true meaning. it. In the eight years after the initial iPhone interview, the domestic brands still maintain a certain gap with the design details such as Caton and vibration.
Besides that, despite the endless stream of data, people’s discussion and attention to iPone is declining year by year, but at the moment I knocked on these characters, on the Weibo topic list, discussions about Apple’s conference Still firmly occupy the top of the list.
With the end of this conference, it is foreseeable that at least half a month in the future, about the aesthetic problem of the new iPhone Yuba camera, the iPhone compares the cost performance of the domestic mobile phone, and even buys the iPhone. Whether it is purely for the sake of showing off and other topics, it will continue to ferment on major social media platforms.
In a way, compared to the criticism of “insufficient innovation”, this is more like the “original sin” of Apple in the Cook era – as a company that focuses on the high-end market, its products illuminate the country. Behind the rapidly growing economic figures, there are strict barriers between the various classes.
(End)
*This article only represents the author’s personal opinion