Do Apple Products Warrant Their Premium Price?
When I walked through the Apple store, I saw roughly the same core products they had a few years ago. The Mac is a stagnant platform. The iPad is still running a blown up phone OS. Under Tim Cook, Apple has certainly been innovative in a lot of ways, and most of that is with the processors for iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. The iPhone design is amazing, but I want to be thinking what’s past iPhone. The store is massive, well staffed, and there were tons of customers everywhere.
All of its products are on display, but the walls are covered with accessories for its products. The accessory ecosystem around Apple’s hardware products is certainly something Apple has grown in the last few years. With iPhone and iPad cases and Apple Watch bands carrying a premium price, Apple’s margins on its products (when added with its hardware margins) is just outstanding.
When I browsed through the Microsoft store, I saw their line of surface laptops. I’m not going to pretend that I am considering buying one of them, because I don’t enjoy using Windows at all. I can appreciate their willingness to take chances with a form factor, though. While it wasn’t as busy as the Apple store, there were still plenty of customers in there. When I look at the Surface laptops (especially the ones with detachable keyboards), I do get really envious of being able to carry one device for tablet and laptop computing.
In playing with their tablets, they are nowhere near as polished as the iPad, but they aren’t bad for the price. If you simply want something for content consumption, it’s hard to ignore them.
The Next Ten Years
In the days since I walked around these stores, I’ve been thinking through what the next ten years of consumer technology might look like. I’ve felt like there has been this general unrest with some of Apple’s longtime users for a while. We all love our iPhones (so much that Apple had to build tools to help us not use them so much), but the Mac hardware line is stagnant. I’m discussing buying 50+ laptops with Apple right now, and I don’t trust the MacBook keyboard, and the MacBook Air is long in the tooth.
The iPad hardware is amazing, but the software still lacks for a lot of use cases. The HomePod sounds great, but it’s overpriced for what it can do compared to alternatives. The Apple TV is great, but it runs essentially the same apps as devices (Fire TV) that are 1/3rd the cost. Siri has grown at a snail’s pace compared to Alexa and Google Assistant.
Apple used to be about premium experiences compared to the competitors, but I do not see “premium” on any products except iPhone. It seems like now they are counting on the Apple brand to sell the products versus a best in class experience. On the flip side, I feel like there are so many categories they could make a meaningful impact in (home networking, home automation products, and expanded cloud services) that it perplexes me why they don’t.
Tim’s Gambit
Back in 2012, Jony Ive said this:
Does this sound like Apple in 2018? It doesn’t seem like it to me. I’m still carrying an iPhone X, using my Apple TVs daily, and I am writing this on a MacBook Pro, but I am not sure I still have the affection for the products I once did.
Do Apple products warrant their premium price in 2018? I think so, but I am not so sure when looking ahead to the next few years. All of its competitors seem to be providing really good experiences for less money.
