Will ‘move fast, ship quicker’ kill the Apple brand?

Tech writers seem hugely excited at news that new Apple CEO John Ternus intends to launch a wave of new products, presumably because we’ll get to fill our feeds waxing lyrical about all the new things. But what does it mean when a company known for a few great products begins to introduce lots of potentially lesser gadgets?

Will this dilute the Apple brand? Extend it? Or will an even greater sense of product ubiquity amplify the core products it creates? Will Apple’s new hardware drive huge revenue, or are these plans just a sign the company now intends to capitalize on its brand equity with a wave of new devices, some of which may fail?

More things, more money?

That’s not to say that the new products will fail, of course. I’m sure there are plenty of households that want an iPad on a base to use as a home security monitor, recipe-finder and call center to stay in touch with friends. I’m pretty certain touchscreen Macs and new all-glass-seeming iPhones will strike a chord. 

All of these products will no doubt enable Apple to identify and offer new services to boost that side of its income. Services have become the second-largest revenue stream for 21st-century Apple, after the iPhone. Online commentators claim Ternus wants to generate more revenue from that part of the Apple family.

Breaking the pattern

This shift in strategy suggests that a new internal culture may be coming into play at Apple, one that mirrors the ‘move fast and break things’ ethos that has become so popular in Silicon Valley while becoming vastly less popular outside it as we look at what the tech giants break. 

But at Apple’s scale, the main risk it faces is breaking too much. Can it really afford to introduce products that don’t capture the zeitgeist, and to what extent do the company’s product designers see the zeitgeist of today? That seems to be a completely appropriate question when the company’s former lead designer now makes a living crafting expensive watches and cars for Ferrari. 

A world in perma-crisis is less about aspiration and more about survival. Is distraction what we crave or a solution to what plagues us? Will Apple get it right with a tease of toys to delight us or bring in solutions that seem somehow less relevant to the masses? Can the company that gave us the iPod, the iMac, and the iPhone do something similar for the smart home? Distill the need, capture the zeitgeist, and design something possibly made in Vietnam we’ll buy for $$$…?

Or is it going to come up with the hardware equivalent of Ping?

We don’t have too long until we find out. 

Solving the smart home crisis

At time of writing, reports claim Apple will begin its new assault with a product reveal on October 13, where it’s expected to introduce that combined iPad/HomePod I referred to above, along with a bunch of upgrades for its existing smart home products: Apple TV, HomePod, and a new homeOS to glue it all together. 

If Apple gets this right, I do think it has a huge opportunity to open up the domestic intelligence market, given that so many of the products that have been thrown at that segment have proved pretty poor in the long run. How many times each decade are you supposed to replace a piece of smart kit, and is it really positive progress if its life span is a fraction of that of the utensil it’s meant to replace? 

A company that can deliver robust, resilient, easy to set up smart devices that last at least as long as their mechanical alternatives could do pretty well, although Apple isn’t expected yet to offer up an AI-savvy garlic press or coffee percolator, and I’m still waiting on the Apple iBike I asked for more than a decade ago.

Finding the sweet spot

In the end, the clamor for product is all very well, but we have to ask ourselves what resonates best, what matters most, and what direction we’re going in culturally, as the sweet spot in product design is — as the iPod showed us long ago — almost certainly about summarizing all those needs inside one beautiful package that does one thing well that you didn’t know how much you needed. 

Will Apple deliver? Will AI be its superpower to enable new product opportunity?

We’ll find out in a week or two.

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