Apple, undisputed masters of marketing and sales, do one thing extremely well. Yes, great showmanship, great ecosystem (we’ll take care of you) and great product quality are part of their strategy. However, less talked about is how they remove features.
How can you ship a modern desktop pc without a DVD drive? What about the lack of even batting an eye at bluray? Hdmi out? VGA out? Dvi out? All are out or never made it on a single laptop. And why should they have? Hdmi is shackled by licenses that apple doesn’t want to pay for, nor should, VGA and dvi are big, clunky, and despite cries unmodern. Even the Ethernet port is on the chopping block. When is the last time you plugged in?
Instead of holding themselves to the standards and appeasement of third parties, apple steers its own ship. How many aged and decade old drivers does microsoft still work hard to support? And this mentality of steering your own ships means features come and go at their behest. Instead of legacy support and wasting manpower, apple focuses on what it feels important.
And this allows them to focus with laser percision on what the show, marketing, and product is really about. It’s not a product that can do everything for everyone. Why try to create such? Those products are only humbled messes of garbage. When you give in to every whim, you make no one happy. People love backbone. And people love to be flocked. Someone to tell them, ‘this is the way you need to use it.’ Nothing more, nothing less.
But more interesting is the uproar at a lack of functionality that is cast upon apple products. Only one app store and nothing unapproved by apple? That is what people want. People dont want viruses and shotty software and something that will run your battery down. Truth of the matter is, a 30 pin dock connector is all you need on an iPad. 16GB is all you need right now.
But beyond this, the lack of throwing a kitchen sink forces people to think. It inspires them to imagine a world with very clear rules and how they need to change their life to those rules. It’s a buy in directly to the images and ideals of the products and the company. It’s telling people, we had really smart people spend a lot of time to figure these things out and this is the best way to do something.
The world keeps moving. Technology keeps moving. Apple just reminds us and forces us to keep moving with it.