It’s time for the PC folk of the world to understand that Apple has won the computer war. It didn’t win by becoming the dominant computer manufacturer – there’s a big difference between winning a battle and winning a war. It won the war through the simplest of strategies: understanding what the war was actually about.
The first step to winning is understanding what you’re competing about. For years, Apple misunderstood this, and almost destroyed itself in the process. However, in 1996, when they reacquired Steve Jobs and acquired NeXT, they not only rediscovered their why, but they also discovered the fundamental problem in computing: that the natural evolution of the industry was not towards more complex systems, but to simpler systems.
Consumers want simplicity, not complexity. They want a system they can power on and know it will work, regardless of when they last used it, or what it looks like ‘under the hood’.
But hang on, I hear some people say say – I want to fiddle with the inner workings, or I want to see what it looks like under the hood. For those people, that may very well be right.
But those people are not all people – and whether those people want to admit it or not, they’re in an ever shrinking minority.
It didn’t start that way – not by a long shot. Back in the day when Apple was just starting, people built their own computers; I’m not talking buying a case, some cards, drives, CPU and memory and plugging them all together – I’m talking about something much lower level – buying the individual chips and attaching them to the circuit board, etc. A computer was built one small, fiddly component at a time.
As such, this only attracted what we’d these days describe as hard-core geeks. Enter Apple – already at that point, its focus, it’s why was to make computers that would enable users. So at a time when people were manually soldering bits and pieces, Apple started with something much closer to a conventional computer – and since then it’s just kept on going down that path.
Fast forward to 2011, and Apple has proven that consumers want simplicity. It’s not about sacrificing performance, or “dumbing” things down, it’s about ease of use.
Think about it: almost everything we do and all technology we evolve, we evolve it to be simpler and easier to use. I’ve watched “historical” dramas that saw women ironing by putting hot charcoals in an iron to keep it hot. I’ve used toasters that required you to pull down the cover, put the bread in at the risk of burning yourself against the element, and toast one side at a time.
All technology used by humans seem to share two evolutionary traits:
- They get more powerful/more efficient
- They get easier for regular people to use
At the same time, there’s a lot of technology which, regardless of how consumer-oriented it’s got, you’ll have some people who want to tweak it and make it work faster. That’s why, for instance, despite the long history of advances in things even as simple as say, cooking meat in the open, you get people who feel that it could be done faster by doing something like using liquid oxygen to get the BBQ hot faster. Or to put it another way – some people are computer overclockers, and others are BBQ overclockers. But neither the average computer user, nor the average BBQ user, are interested in overclocking their tools.
Look at cars as a perfect example. These days, cars are at the point where the average person wants to get in, turn a key (or press a button), have the car start, and then drive off. Automatic transmissions were introduced long ago, but there are still cars which have manual transmissions. But even cars that have manual transmissions are more advanced than cars from a decade ago. Most cars now have power steering. Many cars have advanced brake systems. We’re starting to see cars with collision avoidance systems, with the ability to park themselves – and so on. In ten years time this won’t be just in the top of the line cars – it’ll be appearing in the standard cars that the average person buys.
There are still car owners who want to push their vehicle to its limits and beyond. You start with the basics – like people who are “petrol heads” – enthusiasts who want a hotted up car. Above and beyond that though, you get the car owners who are into high performance engine tuning, people who not only want to get every ounce they can out of their car, but will frequently do as much as they can to increase what the car can give beyond what any normal driver would consider. They’re car overclockers.
There’s a place for overclockers in the world, regardless of the technology that’s being overclocked. But the simple fact remains that the average consumer does not want to overclock their device. When the average person goes to buy a kettle, it’s not on the basis of seeing how extensible it is so that maybe, say, an extra 4 elements can be put in it to boil the water really fast. It’s bought to boil water.
I think Apple almost inherently offends a lot of overclockers because it creates a much more closed in system. That closed in system means they can’t tweak components, performance, etc., to their hearts’ desire: from the most basic (theming the OS) through to the most complex (hacking it to run on any hardware), Apple sacrifice non-consumer extensibility at the expense of making it more accessible to an increasing number of consumers. Nothing demonstrated this more than iOS – be it on the iPad or iPhone, or even the iPod Touch. Both for the consumers, and for the overclockers.
It’s the natural evolution of technology.
Apple won: those computer and computing devices companies out there that are smart will at some point realise how Apple won and start to deliver similar products aimed at consumers, leaving the overclockers to continue to do their own pursuits the same way they have done in every technology area.
Then everyone will win.