Businessweek Scores Interviews With Cook, Ive, and Federighi

Sam Grobart, writing for Businessweek:

To Cook, the mobile industry doesn’t race to the bottom, it splits. One part does indeed go cheap, with commoditized products that compete on little more than price. “There’s always a large junk part of the market,” he says. “We’re not in the junk business.” The upper end of the industry justifies its higher prices with greater value. “There’s a segment of the market that really wants a product that does a lot for them, and I want to compete like crazy for those customers,” he says. “I’m not going to lose sleep over that other market, because it’s just not who we are. Fortunately, both of these markets are so big, and there’s so many people that care and want a great experience from their phone or their tablet, that Apple can have a really good business.”

“We’re not in the junk business” is exactly why none of us should have expected the 5C to be cheaper than it is.

Concluding, Grobart writes:

You could say that Apple’s approach in mobile ignores history, specifically the Mac/Windows wars of the 1990s, which Apple clearly lost.

I know this is universally accepted as gospel in the business world, but how does this jibe with the fact that Apple has been the most profitable PC-maker in the world for the last decade? Not counting iPads or iPhones, just Macs, Apple makes more profit than any company producing Windows PCs — and yet we’re supposed to accept as fact that Apple “clearly lost” the Windows-vs.-Mac war? Methinks Grobart should have paid more attention to Cook regarding junk businesses.

★ Thursday, 19 September 2013