Mac Users as Incurable Early Adopters
Wall Street Journal’s Nick Wingfield article The Downside to Apple’s Frequent Product Updates caught the attention of several Apple oriented news sites. A quote from analyst Gene Munster that Nick quoted
Given the fact that the pace of Apple product improvements is between two times and four times faster than PC-based products, Apple buyers will always have a higher degree of buyer’s remorse.
An interesting anthropological view of Apple’s product marketing and product lifecycle process – get used to buyer’s remorse because that’s the way Apple does things. Apple perfected this technique by making each product release – not about numerical performance – but perceived benefit or value. In my mind, this means every long time Mac user is a sort of incurable early adopter to the Apple ecosystem.
Early adopters jump aboard a new product platform because of perceived value – usually perceived value that gives them an order of magnitude advantage over near or competing solutions – and are happy to pay a premium for a first generation or near first generation solution. What they buy is usually not on any corporate sanctioned list, either. What is so different here?
I can predict the argument that Apple just delivers what people want – and everything – hardware and software – is beautifully integrated. And I agree. Because Apple depends only on Apple technologies for both hardware and software, they can take the time to ensure the newest releases of their end user software products and end user hardware products are highly optimized to work together – so highly optimized that the benefits of upgrading everything at once becomes even more desirable.
For example – consider an operating system upgrade to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Until Mac OS 7.x, operating system upgrades were essentially free. Then they became a fractional cost from the previous version. And now – you are effectively paying full retail of $129 or somewhere close to that. This upgrade is not optimized for your old hardware – the greater investment you have in old hardware (RAM, speed, etc) the more likely you will pay your $129 to get the upgrade. If you run a lower end consumer machine like the Mac Mini, are you better off paying the $600 to get a new Mac Mini which comes with not only the newest version of the operating system, but also newer versions of many Apple consumer applications – all running much faster than your old mini?
I wouldn’t argue with Nick’s premise here – but I would argue that the universe that Apple operates in is a pocket universe that has nothing to do with the computer industry of Microsoft.
