Apple has a master plan and I'm gonna share exactly what I think it is but before that'll make sense how did Apple get to here how did Apple manage to create the most profitable fan base on the planet it's simple no really it's the principle of simplicity but creating simplicity for the user actually means a lot of work behind the scenes.
Take the Apple pencil when I put it down it rolls up until the word pencil is facing up and then it'll just stop that means if I put it down now it won't keep rolling it won't fall off the table it'll just sit there and it's such a simple trick as far as the user is concerned that you don't even realize it's happening but Apple spent months working on the weight distribution or product packaging for the iPhone Apple tested hundreds of different prototypes just to get a box that opens at a constant velocity when you lift the lids not so slow that it's annoying but slow enough that it builds anticipation for when you see your new phone.
The iPhone 11 can take 4k video at 60 frames per second but when you do that what your iPhone is actually doing is shooting 4k at 120 frames per second with every alternating frame being a low exposure frame which is fused with a normal exposure frame to keep the brightest areas from over exposing and I feel like a lot of companies would make a huge racket about being able to do this but Apple just decided that that's gonna make our product less simple so we're not gonna talk about it and this whole concept of creating simplicity Apple uses it for everything take product announcements tech companies just keep talking while is Twitter page for example makes five announcements a day there's a promotional offer or they're sharing a review someone's left with early and then you realize the huawei has 15 different accounts for doing this at the same time they've got billboard ads and YouTube ads and Facebook ads all year round and you kind of care but because you see so much of this messaging from all of these companies while his messaging blends into Samsung's messaging which blends in to LG's messaging and it all just becomes noise so what does Apple do Apple is silent for 95% of the year they have 4.5 million followers on Twitter but they've never made a proper tweet and so when Apple does make an announcement it's like the whole tech world stops to listen to what they have to say it's not like Apple is any more important than Samsung is just that Apple keeps it simple they just talk when they have something big to say and I think in that sense they do it right simple is even how Apple addresses its products and I won't lie to you I think this can be kind of annoying for tech savvy people like us who want specks and numbers and they just don't do it Apple doesn't communicate features they talk about benefits for the simple reason that this makes people feel something.
You might remember when they launched the first iPod I wouldn't say it was anything groundbreaking it was okay and if all they did was to just say look we've got a new mp3 player it's got five gigabytes of storage I don't think anyone would have cared but the angle Apple took was this product will give you a thousand songs in your pocket think about that line and when you think about it you're probably not thinking anymore about a dull box and storage capacities you're thinking about your own playlists and flicking through it on your iPod with your favorite song being blasted through your ears you feel and the final thing Apple does to make things simple for their customers is Apple pretends other brands don't exist they don't mention other companies they don't compare benchmark scores to Samsung all they say is that this model is a certain percent faster than the last model and that's all you need to know and I think this is subconsciously effects every single person who drops what they're doing to listen to our poll it changed the question in their head of which phone do I buy to which i phone do i buy and for the people who are already in that ecosystem it creates lock-in it means that from the point when you buy your first iPhone the only decision you have to make from that point onwards is do I buy this iPhone or do I wait until the next year and Apple does the exact same thing with its ecosystem products they act like air pods or the only ear phones on the planet that the Apple watch is the only watch you could possibly consider buying it's almost like they live in a parallel universe where the only tech products that exist are Apple products it here's the thing the way they've managed to connect with people through simplicity means that Apple fans follow suit you probably know a few people like this they have an iPhone they have air pods they might even call themselves tech enthusiasts but really the only tech that matters to them is Apple tech so okay Apple is killing it right now and no stat better represents this then how they have around 20% of the small market which is good but how with only this they have 66 percent of all profits that's crazy because Apple makes their own chipsets too for every phone they sell they save the 30 or $50 cut that every Android maker has to give straight to Qualcomm so more profit but this is where we start to look forward because apples been acting weird apples been doing a lot of things recently that seem very uh napple and my theory as to why is that smartphone sales are falling this in itself is not surprising a lot of the people who just want to working smartphone now have a working smartphone but what is interesting is how Apple over the last three years has slowly but surely changed tact well historically Apple has been perfectly happy with this twenty percent market share because they make so much profit per model if this pool of people who are buying new phone starts to shrink then tech companies have to start looking for a profit in other places enter subscription-based services like Apple music and here's the beauty of one of these instead of a normal purchase where let's say I'm the company I've got to convince you to buy this year I've got to convince you to buy again next year and then I've got to convince you to buy again the year after that with the subscription I've only got to convince you to buy once and then providing I don't disappoint you or mess up that's it steady predictable income how much income you might ask well.
Apple currently has six main subscriptions on offer you've got a blockad on Apple TV plus which are $5 a month each you've got Apple music news plus an iCloud which have $10 a month each and then the iPhone upgrade program where you always get the latest iPhone is gonna cost you around $50 a month add these up that's $90 a month which across two years is two thousand one hundred and sixty dollars and after all that you still don't own the phone if you want to keep it you pay for it so you can understand that as far as tech companies are concerned subscriptions are the future and Apple isn't the only one it's slowly but surely whether you've noticed it or not pretty much every internet company is slowly creeping towards some sort of monthly payment I was in prime even YouTube with YouTube premium and I think it's only a matter of time before we get Apple Plus or some sort of equivalent where Apple throws all of these things together into some sort of bundled subscription service but this is Apple's big dilemma their past strategy doesn't fit perfectly into this new future if you want to sell a subscription to people, you've got to get your device into as many people's hands as possible but Apple hasn't really done this if anything Apple has purposefully sold their phones to fewer people to keep things simple Apple could have made 50 different phones for every single possible price point but they didn't because they wanted to focus on a few models and really control the end-user experience you can't do that as well with 50 different phones as a result Android right now has almost 80% of the smartphone users worldwide and even though this group of people is on average a lower-income group it's also a rising income group so to counter this Apple has needed to become a bit more like Android they've needed to offer multiple phones and multiple different price points and I think that's the reason we got the iPhone SE II it's a to give longtime iPhone 6 or iPhone 7 users an affordable upgrade option so they don't go over to Android and B to steal Android users because every person who JumpShip to iPhone is one more person who could subscribe to Apple News plus and Apple music.
Over the last few weeks, Apple's revealed two pieces of information that means that I'm now 99 percent convinced so first up iOS 14 for the longest time Android has had a few killer advantages over iOS customization choice granular control and there's a simple feature that Apple could have added them at any time but they didn't because historically Apple has benefited from having tight control over the end-user experience but iOS 14 changes that it introduced a range of all resizable widgets for the first time ever you now get an app drawer so you don't need to have order apps on your home screens you can change your default browser and picture-in-picture mode means that Apple's multitasking no longer sucks why did Apple wait 10 years to add such simple things to their phones well I would say it's because now more than ever Apple needs Android users to switch iOS 14 is a direct attack on Android.
If you've ever tried to buy a Macbook you'll have noticed something very funny about them you have absolutely no idea when the next one is coming out it could be January could be June could be not at all this year no isn't that kind of weird from a company that releases their iPhones so on the dot predictably well long story short for quite a few years now Apple has been relying on Intel to produce its processors and AMD to produce their graphics and it's not paying off Apple has no control over how much performance improves each time sometimes Intel delivers the chip and it's like literally a five percent improvement and also they're often delayed which means the Apple ends up delivering a late product to consumers and one that they're not particularly proud of so a few weeks ago Apple basically said forget this we're gonna use our own chips for our MacBooks and on the face of it, this seems like just a knee-jerk reaction to Intel's inconsistency but I'd be willing to bet that Apple has been planning to do this for a long time anyway why - for more users into Apple services as of right now Apple only controls like 10% of the computer market so there's the potential to reach a vast amount of new people who don't at all use any Apple products and using their own chips could be the key to that by using a similar mobile chip to the one found in the iPhones and the iPad pro Apple could make a hyper efficient laptop in a super slim body with a full two day battery life and call me crazy I think there's a good chance Apple will make a cheaper model - after all they can manufacture a powerful phone chipset for $30 so they could quite feasibly create a laptop equivalent about 450 and when you put that up against other companies like Dell and Acer who are going to be paying $300 to Intel and AMD for the equivalent Apple has a serious strategic leg up and the other implication of using Apple mobile chips is that it doesn't just make Mac's more appealing it makes all Apple products more appealing because with this Mac's can now use iOS applications and with a bit of tweaking, iOS can run Mac applications now obviously you're not just gonna sit there playing Angry Birds on your laptop but this is huge Apple is bringing together two different user bases and everyone wins developers have more of an incentive to make apps for Apple because now all of a sudden they can be used by a larger pool of people and the customers benefit if you're a Mac user you're suddenly getting access to the biggest app store in the world and if you're an iPhone or iPad user you might well end up seeing pro level photo and video editing apps which were made for Mac and then ported over so what's the big picture here how does all this tie together I'm about to tell you that the Mac is about to merge with the iPad and the iPhone to become some sort of hybrid super machine no for the simple reason that Apple wants you to buy all of their products Apple doesn't want a beta test with a new product category, they want to just have the best products within each existing category think about it at the very center of everything is Apple services to get sustained profit over time this is where Apple wants to get people and for a while now the main funnel the main entry point into these services has been the iPhone the iPhone would lead people into Apple music Apple news and also other Apple products the watch air pods the iPad but because the iPhone was expensive and because it was the only real main entry point Apple needed more of flow into their services so they introduced iOS 14 and the new iPhone SE they somewhat gave up the simplicity and the control they'd worked so hard to create in order to make the iPhones more accessible and instead of just relying on the iPhone Apple snow made its other products more distinct and more able to stand on their own two feet they've turned the iPad from just a big iPhone into a computer with its own iPad OS operating system they turn the watch from an iPhone accessory to an independent SmartWatch with its own App Store and most people would say it's not just the best SmartWatch for if you have an iPhone it's the best SmartWatch full-stop Apple's about to make a Mac that's far better than any map before and one that might just be cheaper you get the idea and before you know it Apple's got multiple products dominating their own respective product categories all feeding a much wider user base into this core of Apple services you see it right the iPhone is no longer a bottleneck and I would go as far as to say that once you've reached the middle there's a ricochet defect because of how each of these products is almost purpose-built to run Apple services once a person has reached the middle and is paying monthly to use those Apple services they might as well buy more Apple devices to consume them with so the sale of one piece of hardware indirectly leads to the sale of more hardware there's one more thing a lot of people don't like Apple's new software skins there are icons that look very rounded there are strange shadows behind things even though.
Apple has spent literally the last 10 years trying to remove shadows and Siri is now a 3d shape why did Apple just stop paying its designers and this is their way of trolling us probably not I think it's because augmented reality is coming to Apple is working on some sort of glasses or headset that gives you some smart capabilities on your face and I think Apple's recent announcements orbit confirm this they even said that air pods are getting an update that allows for spatial audio why could that be and the reason augmented reality is so potentially important is that it's a completely new category of products where frankly the sky's the limit no one knows what it's capable of and guess what it's the perfect channel to lead more users to Apple news and Apple music I could bet my bottom dollar that whatever this thing is Apple comes out with it will support Apple's services. So these are just my thoughts and as a fun little challenge to myself, I actually tried to write this article using Apple's own philosophies.
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