Apple may not be the best innovator, but it's the best marketer
Apple is known to be an extremely innovative company. After all, it spawned the digital arms race in the 1970's with the first personal computers and then brought the graphical user interface with the first Mac. However, the Apple of today isn't as innovative as the hype suggests. If there is something it is best at, then you have say, it is marketing. When Apple launched its new range of products a couple of days ago, it wasn't the innovative company that took centrestage, it was Apple's marketing juggernaut that dominated the show.
A lot of things the company claimed were not its own innovations, though Apple did not actually claim technologies to be its own. You had heard things like "for the first time in an iPad".
However, by remaining in the confines of its own product line and not getting into comparisons with its rivals, Apple ensured that the new features were unique. Its products are wildly popular, and that's what the consumer basically needs to know or cares about. The company is a master at taking advantage of its scale.
Apple unveiled a feature called "Live Photos" which really sounded like a fancy word for GIF images. It got mocked on Twitter, but this was a company which stays so much in its own bubble that it doesn't care about what people say. The iPhone is the most popular phone in the world and the iPhone 6S with Live Photos will enable masses with "GIF-like" images. In time, Apple will get the credit for this.
It unveiled a stylus called the "Pencil", a new smart keyboard and also a larger iPad Pro. There was nothing unique about all the three. We've seen similar tablets, similar keyboard and a pen by Microsoft. In fact, all Windows products can multitask like the new iPad Pro; they've had the ability for years.
The difference was how it was pitched. Apple's head of marketing Phil Schiller said, "The iPad Pro is faster than 80 per cent of the portable computers sold in 2015." He did not dwell much on pomp or the millions of Windows apps that a user can enjoy on a Microsoft Surface driven by an Intel processor. He just focussed on a core element and then compared how the new A9 processor was desktop class and how the iPad's performance has improved by 360 per cent in the last five years.
Now that is what Apple's rivals have to learn.
Even with the Apple TV you would have to say that it wasn't as groundbreaking as it was made out to be. Yes, it has Siri voice controls, but we've seen that before on Google TV and is a core feature of the Xbox One console. Yes, it has apps and the remote has a touchpad, but that was a minor technical limitation which Apple took years to solve.
We've also seen the touchpad before on many smart TVs. You expect Apple to provide a seamless experience like no other, but certainly it wasn't first to the punch.
Finally, even the 16GB base storage on the iPhone 6S is a marketing masterstroke. Apple is basically nudging people to opt for the more expensive 64GB and 128GB models because they will likely yield more margins. This will be especially true because given the new features like higher resolution 12-megapixel camera, 4K video and live photos, the iPhone 6S will consume a lot more memory than its predecessors.
Apple is brilliant at nailing the implementation of a feature and it is even better at selling that fact to the consumer. But the modern Apple is rarely the first company to introduce a new technology first. Instead, it is a company that is known to wait patiently for technology to mature so that it can properly implement it on its products.