Apple’s Got It On Lock at FISTFULAYEN

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Apple’s Got It On Lock

cute how it matches their stock price over the past five years

Indeed, Apple has it locked up. All they ever wanted was to sell you the hardware (the ITMS thing is a ruse), and they’ve won by pure Christensen physics (be the integrated solution where the technology is not yet good enough) against a monopolist on an army of dirt-cheap hardware. Even when the services dissipate, the hardware is all theirs. Speaking for myself my services will increasingly be non-Apple, but my hardware is 100% Apple for the foreseeable future.

My Apple history:

  • 1982, Apple II+
  • 1983, Apple IIe
  • 1992, NeXTstation, tattoo
  • 1995, PowerBook Duo Laptop + QuickTake camera for Beastie Boys tour
  • 2003, 12” PowerBook for Muse.Net OS X testing, iPod, replaced Sony Vaio
  • 2006, 15” MacBook Pro, replaced Sony Vaio
  • 2006, MacBook for Julie, replaced stolen eMachine
  • Toay, September 6th, 2007, Mac Mini replacing PC desktop (the slow one I’m typing on now, the one Rob gave me when we started Mediacode, the one that replaced the one Justin bought me when they hired me at Nullsoft), 2 iPod Nanos

Read between the lines and you can see fifteen years of reluctance to jump on the Apple ship. Even after the above replacements there are still two Windows machines running in my house (Zoe’s desktop and the file server), and I could take you on a tour of the Windows Media-compatible device graveyard, I’ve used almost every last one of them. I came kicking and screaming to Apple-land. I only bought my MacBook Pro a year ago after the Vaio I ordered arrived broken, they sent me another and it was broken, too. But now, living with both Macs and PCs (at work I still have both a Windows laptop and a Mac laptop), I can honestly say I wouldn’t even consider buying a Windows-based machine. It just seems like a crazy thing to do. If I’m buying it, everyone must be. What college kid would want to show up for their first day of school with a non-Apple? (fwiw, the stats back it up, Apple laptops were 17% of laptop sales in July, up from 12% in June.)

If in 2009 we’re using Yahoo! or Rhapsody or some new subscription service to get our Music on our Apple hardware, does Apple care? No. They never have. So long as we’re buying their circuitry, they don’t care where we’re getting the music from. And they’ve shifted the hardware tide irreversibly and created momentum that’ll easily carry them through Steve’s retirement if not Steve’s.

So yes, this is a bit of a confession. Something to point people to when they go, “Dude! Ian Rogers has an iPod Nano?! Is the world ending?!”

ian

ps – Just in case you wanted any more proof that Rob Lord is a visionary, he bought a shitload of Apple stock back in 2001.