With the recent announcement of Steve Jobs stepping down as CEO at Apple there has been quite a lot of reflection in the papers on what impact he has made since returning to the business. As a genius in his own right, the speed at which Apple has become, if briefly, the most valuable business in the world has been hard to believe.
Considering that really the iMac was the first device to make it into general consciousness and that even today the business success is down to just a few key products such as the iPod, iPhone, iTunes, iMac and so forth. One interesting point though is how quickly these products have evolved to not only become icons, but dramatically different to anything else on the market with the latest cutting edge technology.
For some reason we had in the office yesterday three different generations of iPod Nano with the first one (can you guess which one?) being launched in 2004. While the storage hasn’t dramatically increased, as the oldest model still has a credible 4 GB, the size certainly has.
Let’s hope Steve’s successor can continue with this level of success, the recent drop in the stock value probably reflects the impression that he won’t be able to. I hope he can as I can’t envisage what the next generation of products will look like. Imagine if the car industry developed at this pace?
Now if only Apple could design a device where needing to change the battery doesn’t require you to pack the whole device off to a repair centre for two weeks 🙂 . Likewise many of us like devices that can be updated or properly unlocked without becoming bricked due to agressive security methods.
I agree – iPhone just about can last 1 hour now from a full charge…