🖋️ Sometimes 'Non Obvious' comes disguised as 'Obvious'

I just read 🔗 Apple design and balance. "there’s a deeper problem with Apple: they rarely build anything now except the most obvious products.|" 💬 Manton Reece I wonder what the unobvious products might be? Well if we knew that - they wouldn’t be unobvious. Would they? So let’s just choose one on my favourite unobvious products from earlier this year - The Neo. But it’s just a laptop …. Well, it is definitely a laptop, but it is not ‘just a laptop’ - it is a non obvious laptop. not a rehash of old parts - brand new with a price point that nobody predicted resulting in substantial sales growth in Macs whilst the rest of the PC industry is declining with performance that beats out PCs that sell for over $1,000 side note - I would also argue that the Apple Vision was also 'not obvious' - but people didn't like it (well that is what the news said) so it gets dumped into the 'antenna-gate' list and seen as a an example of #FAIL but as Wayne said: “You miss 100% of the shots you never take” So What Is Happening 🔗 Horace Dediu reminds us that all this comes from from a manufacturer that already has … "sales of about 24 million Macs for a base of 260 million users - implying a life span for Macs of nearly 11 years - compared to the life span for the non-Mac PC of 5." "$33 billion in annual revenues - putting them among the top four three PC vendors in terms of revenue and number one in operating margin - making Apple not only the most profitable PC vendor, but also capturing over 60% of the available PC hardware profits" It seems to be that the Apple cognoscenti see this as a Ternus driven program - and of course - along with ‘Johny’ I would full expect more of this after September because this is about to become another pivot - and a welcome one - assuming that Tim’s engines continue to work. Steve Era - CEO plus design - because that was mainly about differentiation in an age of (very) bland. Tim Era - CEO plus operations - because that was mainly about scaling up with unrivalled supply chains, effectiveness and efficiencies. John Era - CEO plus hardware - because we are now moving into the next stage of evolution where they are starting with a highly differentiated vertically integrated hardware stack. Differentiation again - but mainly defining new categories. (No need to differentiate if you are the category). AND I think 🔗 Om’s recent piece about AI having their ‘iPhone’ moment relates needs to be absorbed. "The plateau came faster than anyone expected. By the early 2010s, the core smartphone experience was essentially perfected in functional terms. The differential between one year’s model and the next shrank from obvious to marginal." 💬 Om This is the innovation comparison. Too often I sense a tone that “if you haven’t ‘destroyed something and rebuilt from the ashes’ - then it wasn’t innovation - it was just a marginal improvement” I would beg to differ - but that is for a different time. But this obvious / non obvious distinction falls into the same bucket. We are so tuned into expecting the next big thing to be totally different - to not be obvious - that we have become jaded because we only see what is in front of us - and judge based on what we see - the device. The truth is that we should be looking at what we used to call ‘Whole Product’ … developed by Kotler, built up by Levitt - and turned mainstream by a combination of Tom Peters, Regis McKenna and Geoff Moore. Not going into it here - maybe another post - but easy to 🔗 look up a wiki primer. And Then To work with a computing device … you need ‘I’ and ‘O’ We have things like keyboard, touch, speech, mouse, gestures on the ‘I’ side We have other things like screens and speakers to manage the ‘O’ side. It probably is why I have never worked at Apple - but I have a hard time imagining how to bypass my 5 (6?) senses so that I can interact with a computing device - though if the pre-publicity of the broship of ‘Sam and Jonny’ is to be believed - they have done it. I look forward to it. Possible Futures? We seem to be excited about a variety of new form factors coming down the pike - but really - revolutionary? Unobvious- I don’t think so - I’m looking at you folding screens, rolled up keyboards and retro music players … BUT We are seeing labs exploring mind control - and really quite brilliant - but ‘labs’ is the giveaway. Rabbit R1 and the Humane Pin both ‘arrived’ with grand applause and were then stomped on. To me the Vision Pro was a truly new and innovative - NON OBVIOUS - device - sounds like it is going to be scrapped under Ternus - but the fact remains it didn’t sell well (at least that is what we read) and so relegated to ‘forgotten’ - see above. Heavens we even have ‘Matrix chips’ under development - thanks to Musk - so unclear what that adoption is likely to be. "All to say: like always, life ain’t simple. Life is so hard and complicated in so much of our lives these days that we yearn for simple. But simple is a very thin edge of a very thick wedge." Flagging this post with 🚧 because I have a feeling I will be coming back to it.