Daniel Lyons, the Newsweek tech writer notorious for his Fake Steve Jobs blog, penned an epistolary piece last week (R.I.P., Macintosh) in which he asks and answers the question: “Is Apple ignoring its signature line of computers and laptops? Yup.”
The columnist claims that with the iPhone and the iPad as the Dear Leader’s new pets, Steve Jobs has kicked the Mac to the curb (or kerb for our British readers). Lyons backs his claim with the following evidence: Apple’s 2010 WWDC was focused on the iPhone OS only; there were no Best Applications awards for the Mac, only for iPhone/iPad apps; and, drum roll, the iPhone OS was renamed iOS (the name is licensed from Cisco, just as the iPhone moniker was).
Lyons may be onto something, but in his desperate quest for page views at Newsweek (itself kicked to the curb by its soon former owner, the Washington Post Company) our columnist has yielded to the crass motives and hyperbole he loves to lampoon.
Yes, Steve Jobs said the PC (including the Mac) isn’t “the future”, but he didn’t go on to euthanize it.
Let’s go back to the evening of June 1st, 2010. We’re at the D8 conference discussed here last week. Steve Jobs is interviewed by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher; you can find the entire 95-minute video here.
(Sorry, iPad users, it’s Flash…but, wait…nevermind. Although the interview shows up as Flash on my antique personal computer, when I watch it on my iPad, behold!, the site detects the iPad client and spews an H.264 video stream. We can take this as a sign that the WSJ doesn’t want to miss the advertising revenue of 100 million iPod Touch/iPhone/iPad devices out there, and as a preview of what other sites will do, as well. And perhaps it’s a problem with my old desktop machine or older eyes, but the video look better on the iPad than it does on my PC.)
I’m watching the video as I write this. It completes and, in places, corrects my recollection of the event. Whatever one thinks of Steve Jobs—and the video won’t change many minds—the conversation contains a number of gems, such as Steve’s pithy view of the enterprise market (between 28:30 and 29:15), his take on the Adobe controversy, his pronouncement of carriers as “orifices” (that was a few years ago, recalled by Walt for laughs), the importance of editorial functions (Jobs doesn’t want us to “descend into a nation of bloggers”), how he looks at his job (around 59:00), and more. I know an hour and a half is a lot, but pay attention to what’s said and not said and, just as important, the face and body language.
The bit about the future of the PC comes between minutes 45 and 51. There, Apple’s CEO lays out his vision of the post-PC era in a string of very carefully weighed statements, interspersed with personal insights into the changes in user interaction brought about by the new very personal devices.
As Apple unties the software platform from the iPhone, one can imagine a number of iOS-powered devices in its future. Apple won’t necessarily follow HP’s example, but the latter has made it clear that they’ll use the newly-acquired Palm WebOS in devices such as printers. This is a high volume business, one where the traditional embedded software is user-hostile. Just imagine a Palm Pre screen grafted onto a printer.
In the D8 video, Jobs explains how difficult it would be to make an Apple TV that would replace the ugly set-top boxes foisted upon us by cable operators. He’s correct, the cable industry is a bad scene—just try to get a CableCard—but, as Mossberg reminds him, Jobs said the same thing years ago about phone carriers. What about the iPhone, then? “We managed to solve the problem…”
However you want to position it, the future appears to belong to the new breed of very personal computers. But the transition to the new era? Nowhere do we hear a date, or even a rate of change. There are even a few admissions of “we don’t know”. (The Apple people I spoke with don’t know either. Some will admit that they’re awestruck by the market reaction to the iPad. They’ve gotten used to the iPhone after three years, but the iPad…they’re happily puzzled. They knew it was a solid product, but, geeks that they are, they didn’t foresee the traction from normal humans.)
In other words, Jobs has no intention to “Osborne” the Mac and has said so. There are still many applications, ranging from professional photo and movie editing to hard-core document preparation, where the computing power of a PC is required. This is, of course, the kind of objection the incumbents always raise: The new thing is a toy, it’s too small and underpowered, it lacks this list of attributes and that array of devices. All true statements, but as the interloper pushes in, aided by a combination of simplicity, price, and ease-of-use, the incumbent plays to its strengths by increasing its natural attributes, its raw power and richer function set…and thus sets the pace for the new genre to surely but slowly gain more muscle and and broaden its uses. We’ve seen it before: minis versus mainframes, PCs versus minis and workstations.
Here, history hasn’t exactly repeated itself. What’s happened before our eyes is that the smartphone form factor—and inherent computing power “weakness”—has allowed it to skip some of the growing pains and jump to general acceptance. Being smaller, they aren’t expected to run legacy applications such as Office. Unencumbered by that burden, smartphones can flourish and gain momentum. Riding that momentum, the newest tablets have broadened the genre’s usability without having to pay the Office ransom that, in effect, castrated the PC Tablet.
In Q1 2010, the iPhone made as much revenue (to say nothing of profit) as the Mac and iPod combined. Assuming 2.5 million iPads sold in the quarter ending June 30th, with a few shiny iPhone 4’s sprinkled in, the Mac versus iPhone/iPad picture will become accentuated.
So, yes, Google with Android, Apple with iOS and, perhaps, HP with WebOS have ushered in a new era of post-PC personal computing. The PC won’t reign supreme anymore…but it will still be around for a long time.
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20 Comments
Personally, I need to have at least one device around the house with the full power of a Mac, but many people really don’t. I can’t look into Steve Job’s mind, but I can see that I was right about the iPad having the potential to grab a lot of the netbook market. We are in for a wild ride and I’m glad my portfolio is heavily weighted with AAPL (At this time, I don’t see the upstarts, like Android, being able to catch up).
I am a power user and for me iPad looks under powered and can not serve my heavy lifting needs. But there are lot of other people who don’t need Windows.
The popularity of iPod, iPhone, and iPad are the reasons why Apple’s Mac business will continue to grow every year. The “halo effect” was first observed with the overwhelming success of iPods (and iTunes), even back when Macs where PowerPC-based. The transition to Intel in 2006 removed one major mental obstacle for Windows PC users “switching,” and the introduction of iPhone in 2007 further enhanced the “halo.”
Now, iPad creates a brand new surge of first-time Apple customers; it won’t be long before most of them are considering a Mac to replace their aging Windows XP machines. Yes, you still need a computer that runs iTunes nearby to set up, sync, and maintain an iPad.
> Is Apple ignoring its signature line of computers and laptops? Yup.
I don’t see how anyone (who is not a moron) can say Apple is ignoring its Mac business, when it just recently significantly upgraded its MacBook and MacBook Pro models (the core of the Mac business). iMacs were updated less than one year ago with an amazing 27-inch model. And the latest Mac OS X release, Snow Leopard, is still only about 8-9 months old. In the last completed quarter, Mac sales grew more than 30% compared to the previous year. Yup, it sure sounds like Apple is ignoring its Mac business.
There’s a nice original G4 gathering dust under my desk. It’s gathering dust because my MBP finally took over its utility, including light video editing. And for the past couple of months, my MBP has been frequently sitting idle while I read and write blogs (and watch the occasional SJ video) from the couch on my iPad.
Still need the MBP to do actual work, of course. But a lot of what I do on a computer isn’t work, and haven’t really enjoyed doing it on a computer to begin with. The PC’s not dead, it’s just… resting. Beautiful plumage, though.
The smartphone is the computer.
The PC is dead. It just doesn’t know it yet.
Computing devices are becoming so powerful and so cheap, relative to just 10 years ago, that we can have multiple devices optimized for specific needs.
Agreed – that Lyons article was utter clickbait.
Apple have to be one of the most deliberate companies on earth – when’s the last time they really sidelined a major product line (the G4 Cube?). Besides, the Mac is outrageously profitable. Just nonsense, Lyons.
That said, I hope a few innovations of the “Post PC” trickle up to the Mac – frankly, if I could extend my battery life by working on my Macbook Pro in something like iOS’s carefully tailored multitasking, I’d go for it. An App Store for OSX would be a huge boon for the platform – Jobs has shot down the idea (in fan e-mails) but I hope to see it.
I read this up to the point where you refer to Job’s interview at D8 2010. You probably need to watch again his interview from D8 in 2003, where he ditches on …tablets. Jobs is either lying or clueless; in any case we shouldn’t give s**t on anything he says. If, only if, we escape the RDF before he opens his mouth
I’m guessing that eventually we’ll have a smart phone which will dock with a keyboard and (suitably huge) monitor, and that will be a desktop computer. I’d give it 5 years, tops.
@Barton
you don’t have to wait that long :p
There is a great deal of misunderstanding about what is going on. Steve Jobs is right; The nature of the PC is changing. Like with Steve’s Trucks and Cars analogy; PC’s aren’t going away, but their forms and functions may change. Technology is mostly driving this, but not all.
Apple is attempting to satisfy a new market which potentially is much larger than the current stagnant computer market. This new growth will be in satisfying the needs of content consumers, not content producers. Many of these people are anti-technological, so any solution must satisfy their needs in a way that Netbooks and Desktops cannot now.
I read a recent poll which said that 27% of Americans (65% throughout the world) do not use a computer. Apple is setting out to lower that number greatly. How? By changing the way in which we react to a computer; this change is as profound as from moving from the command line to the GUI.
Another trend is the Computer-on-a-Chip. Apple is using, in the iPad and the new iPhone 4, the A4 CoC which has an ARM Cortex A8 processor. The Computer-on-a-Chip will become ubiquitous and very cheap; it will wind up in everything along with RFID. These computers must inter-communicate wirelessly. The iPad can easily act as a front end for a distributed system on a local area network, such as for TV downloads or controlling house systems.
The LAN, thus, becomes your computer. Although, most people won’t much more than the iPad, we are apt to see a series of special purpose devices to act as wireless peripherals, home servers, backups, mass storage, cameras, sensors, etc.
It seems likely that Apple has thought this new system through and is positioning itself to take advantage of coming trends. Microsoft is betting on the past; Google is betting on the Cloud and Apple is betting on distributed processing. It will be interesting to see who wins.
versatility, simplicity, affordable price, and ease-of-use- that’s a netbook, bought by 30 million normal humans in 2009 and projected 50 million in 2010.
> HP’s example, but the latter has made it clear that they’ll use the newly-acquired Palm WebOS in devices such as printers.
HP has long supplied raster driver software and printer networking controllers with support for web server for remote printer management. Perhaps there is more to it than remote printer management, though.
/hh
Louis Wheeler is no doubt right. I keep forgetting, in my paranoia, the difference between producers and consumers. Simple as that. There will always be a computer market for both, and a great number of folks are, simply, “consumers” without the power needs of “producers”. Thanks for reminding me!
nice post man
PCs will be around for long time, but since ~ 2000 …PCs are no longer the center of innovation. Technology innovation is driven by the mobile industry.
Next up for Apple? Jobs is setting his sights on the home considering how & when to bring Apple experience to the big screen TV. My guess is 2011 or 2012 the latest.
btw – the view “Carriers (and operators) are orifices” – is a view shared with Google.
Tek
thx for info
My opinion, Apple will back away from the MAC as a result of the Open Standards that have crept in.
http://danielnenni.com/2010/06/22/open-standards-apple-is-the-antichrist/
Fortunately the iSeries of products has brought Apple back home to proprietary technologies that consumers pay dearly for.
D.A.N.
great artcle
I like your article…
thank you for sharing
Today, I went to the beachfront with my children. I found a sea
shell and gave it to my 4 year old daughter and said “You can hear the ocean if you put this to your ear.” She put the shell to her
ear and screamed. There was a hermit crab inside and it pinched
her ear. She never wants to go back! LoL I know this is completely off topic but I had to tell
someone!
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