Here's a fun sport for Apple watchers, aficionados and detractors alike: has Apple jumped the shark yet in the post-Steve era?
(The game's a bit Candyland-esque; we always arrive at "yes": if Apple's strategy is inflexible post-Steve, they're doomed, if they make any changes, they are also doomed.)
Let's play anyway.
The big, flashing, worrying sign of changed-for-the-worse Apple isn't any hullaboloo about Warhol and luxury, it's that Apple didn't show us a product!
All they have is a fancy looking piece of hardware and a bunch of tech demos with a UI that clearly isn't cohesive or thought out enough to work in the real world.
And then, on top of that, they bragged a bit about how many features the Watch was going to have.
This is real "danger Will Robinson" territory for Apple, in the traditional Gruber understanding of what makes Apple great: focussing on actual products with a a well-thought out core rather than a lard of features or pie-in-the-sky tech demos.
Gruber buries the lead a bit on this dramatic change. He doesn't get around to mentioning it until deep into the article, and then rather wavily dismisses the change with this bizarre explanation:
He suggests that Apple decided to demo a non-product because they couldn't keep the hardware secret long enough for the software to catch up.
If that's true, that means, what, Apple views secret-unveilings as its core principle?
But I think more likely is that Gruber mind is just going through reflexive contortions of justification here, and the truth is simpler: Apple is slowly losing the focus that for a brief few years really did make it unique among tech companies.
Certainly hope to end up eating crow on this, though. :)
(The game's a bit Candyland-esque; we always arrive at "yes": if Apple's strategy is inflexible post-Steve, they're doomed, if they make any changes, they are also doomed.)
Let's play anyway.
The big, flashing, worrying sign of changed-for-the-worse Apple isn't any hullaboloo about Warhol and luxury, it's that Apple didn't show us a product!
All they have is a fancy looking piece of hardware and a bunch of tech demos with a UI that clearly isn't cohesive or thought out enough to work in the real world.
And then, on top of that, they bragged a bit about how many features the Watch was going to have.
This is real "danger Will Robinson" territory for Apple, in the traditional Gruber understanding of what makes Apple great: focussing on actual products with a a well-thought out core rather than a lard of features or pie-in-the-sky tech demos.
Gruber buries the lead a bit on this dramatic change. He doesn't get around to mentioning it until deep into the article, and then rather wavily dismisses the change with this bizarre explanation:
He suggests that Apple decided to demo a non-product because they couldn't keep the hardware secret long enough for the software to catch up.
If that's true, that means, what, Apple views secret-unveilings as its core principle?
But I think more likely is that Gruber mind is just going through reflexive contortions of justification here, and the truth is simpler: Apple is slowly losing the focus that for a brief few years really did make it unique among tech companies.
Certainly hope to end up eating crow on this, though. :)