6 THINGS APPLE GOT WRONG
Apple is one the world’s biggest, most influential companies. Under the able leadership of Steve Jobs, the company grew from humble beginnings to being a market leader, a behemoth, and the pioneer behind such products as the iPod, the iPad and the iPhone which have revolutionised the way in which we consume media today.
But neither Apple nor Steve Jobs were always right. Here we’re listing a few occasions on which the company – or its maker – got it wrong.
1. No innovation in hardware
In a 1985 interview with Playboy, Steve Jobs said that IBM and Apple will be the only computer manufacturing companies in the world. He said that there will not be any third place or fourth place companies, because most of the innovation would happen in software. ‘There is no innovation in hardware,’ he said, and now pretty much every electronics company in the world is producing computers.
2. iTunes is just for music
When asked in 2003 whether it is possible to use iTunes to download movies, Jobs said that it was a remote possibility because movies take forever to download. He thought that people would be more interested in downloading music than in movies. But as of 2013, iTunes users have downloaded more than one billion TV episodes and 380 million movies.
3. Who would watch movies on iPods?
Steve Jobs once said, ‘I’m not convinced that people would want to watch movies on a tiny little screen. As far as we’re concerned, it’s all about the music.’ But two years later, Apple decided quite the opposite and introduced an iPod with a 2.7-inch screen that could display photos and play videos.
4. People aren’t interested in tablets
In a 2003 interview, Steve Jobs said that he wasn’t convinced there was a market for tablets. ‘People want keyboards,’ he said, ‘and the more we look at a tablet, the more we think that it’s going to fail.’ Interestingly enough, not more than a year after this, Apple launched the iPad, and the rest, as they say, is history.
5. People don’t want to use big phones
In 2010, Steve Jobs mocked big phones that people ‘cannot get their hands around’, emphatically stating that nobody wanted to buy a phone that is too big. But the market proved him wrong, and people went for bigger phones as long as the features were there, and therefore Apple launched their iPhone 5 with a 3.99-inch display, and then the iPhone 6 with a 4.7-inch display.
6. 9.7 inches ‘minimum size’ for an iPad
‘Apple’s done extensive user-testing on touch interfaces over many years, and we really understand this stuff,” Jobs said in 2012. “There are clear limits of how close you can physically place elements on a touch screen before users cannot reliably tap, flick or pinch them. This is one of the key reasons we think the 10-inch screen size is the minimum size required to create great tablet apps.’
Two years later, Apple announced the 7.9-inch iPad Mini.