[ad_1]
Taken alone the iPhone 15 Pro Max is a telephone extraordinary. Shell in incredible materials (lightweight and very resistant titanium), repairability at the highest levels, desktop-class processorcrazy screen for brightness and impact and scratch resistancevideo cameras of practically professional quality (and many professionals in fact use it to produce content that creates wealth).
Even a 20 Megabit per second USB 3 connection (with dedicated USB-C cable). An end of the world phone.
Put into perspective, It’s a “meh phone”: identical design to previous generations from 12 of 2020 (or from 2022 with Dynamic Island), enhancement of already existing functionsmarginal evolution of some features (the increases in processor and GPU are difficult to appreciate by those who call, send messages, surf and send emails), same autonomysame price.
Same everything apart from the USB-C port which, in everyday use, is convenient unless you are a fan of the Apple world and have half a dozen expensive Lightning cables at home that you can now use to tie up waste bags. In practice it is an iPhone 14 Pro with slightly more powerful USB-C.
The truth, as usual, does not exist: there is no phone that satisfies everyone, this is obvious. But it’s worth understanding why this year it appears even more evident than usual that the Apple that has accustomed us to twists and big surprises, that of One More Thing by Steve Jobs (the first iPhone, the first MacBook Air) and by Tim Cook (the Vision Pro) is actually the exception that proves the rule. And this year for iPhones we are talking about the rule, not the exception.
iPhone 15 and the controlled evolution of Tim Cook
Let’s try to find a reason, a rational point, to explain the evolutionary approach. Tim Cook has an engineer’s mentality. He has proven himself to be an extraordinary leader for Apple, making theagency a giant with a market capitalization and a size that Steve Jobs, who passed away twelve years ago, had never approached.
Did he do it through innovation? Of course, there’s that too, but above all he did it with method and control. It’s an evolution that he created a more than linear progressionencouraging incredible company growth.
Tim Cook tamed the beast of complexity and made a company manageable with contractors employing a million workers (Foxconn) to produce a hundred million extremely complex artefacts, with very high level workmanship and hundreds of components that come from all over the planet in an extremely compressed time frame. Millions of terminals are built for the first launch wave in just over a month.
To do this, he had to put creativity at the service of the company and not vice versa. So, instead of a brilliant and unruly company, or an overly creative and victim of the whims of designhas created a company that has put the square around a series of limitations and has established very rigid objectives that follow one another year after year and which lead to a form of innovation that we could call “continuous industrially sustainable innovation“.
A great company with regular products
So here are Apple’s cycles, which we consumers are used to because we see the regularity of product launches, and there is a whole sector of the internet whose favorite sport it’s trying to predict what’s new within a very clearly defined product and time matrix.
Behind these cycles there are on the one hand the innovation studied and firmly pursued by the women and men of Apple, and on the other the limitations of the industrial process. It goes on stage every year with a new product which, in order to be truly new, actually has a longer “hidden” cycle.
The body is designed years in advance and is repeated for at least three years. Many components change but not the complete design, which instead is modified internally, within the limits established for the external form: materials, components, their organization and repairability.
And when you make a new version of the phone, you don’t throw away anything from that model for years, maintaining a continuity that is also a legacy that allows you to amortize development costs and not to upset the production line every few months and above all the technical operations that the workers who will have to assemble the phones have learned.
Because changing a detail, moving a button or a component, means upsetting the production line, changing the processes, making the way in which the finished product is achieved more complex or in any case different.
These are the enormous consequences of each small pencil mark done in the anonymous notebook Apple designer (after the passing of Jony Ive), done lazily as he looks out the glass window of his office in Apple’s capital of Cupertino the Garden of Eden desired by Steve Jobs within the company headquarters complete with a rainbow arch to remember the richness and diversity of human experience and existence.
That pencil mark, or more likely that stroke of Apple Pencil on an iPad Prohas the power to change not only the aesthetic and user experience of millions and millions of Apple users, but also to revolutionize the production process, radically changing the supply chain and production phases. A responsibility that, ingeniously on the part of Tim Cook, the Apple leader managed to harness.
And so, following the adage that creativity is like a gas: if you compress it it becomes explosive but if you leave it alone it disperses, Tim Cook studied, like the good engineer he iswhat were all the possible limitations and constraints deriving from the technology (the physical dimensions of the components, their consumption, their thermal) and production (materials, product assembly processes, packaging, shipping, storage, sale, recovery and recycling) and imposed a gigantic mega-trial that brings order to all this.
A process in which innovations for the sole sake of surprising the public no longer exist, and instead we move forward with a very non-chaotic order in which new things arrive, slowly but regularly.
That’s why the new iPhone 15 and 15 Prolike new Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 they are products that have already been seen and perhaps even banal and, on the other hand, absolutely extraordinary and unique. This is because they have been thought out so well that there is no more room for improvisation, but there is still a feeling that it holds the Apple brand (and its marketing) together with its audience.
[ad_2]
Source link
