Mike Cane
11 HN mentions · mentioned in 9 months, 2016–2025
0:57 · 11K views · Mar 9, 2011
A one-minute clip from the All Things D conference in which Steve Jobs says Apple is fundamentally a software company, with iPod, Mac and iPhone all being software. He says the hardware is where the money is but the value is in the software.
Quoted whenever someone needs Jobs's own words that Apple sees itself as a software company.
11 comments from Hacker News
I think there are a few concrete things going on: * There are many more integration points between their products now. Shipping only the Mac or only the Mac and an iPod or even a first gen iPhone that can only get data into system apps via a USB cable is very simple compared to what they're making today. For Apple's best-cast customer, who owns a Mac, an iPhone, an iPad, an Apple TV, an Apple Watch, and who uses iCloud, how many integration points are involved now? Integration points are like the exponent on software complexity. It's where software goes to die. * They are still essentially a fat client company that's trying to build more cloud-oriented applications. This leads to additional complexity in the product that other companies just don't have to deal with. An obvious example that jumps to mind is iTunes vs. Spotify. If iTunes was just Apple's version of Spotify, how much better would it be? * Brain drain. Apple's stock made a lot of people a lot of money, and if you work there, you can't participate in the mobile revolution they started. Steve Jobs's passing could also be a natural book end for people in their careers to try something new, or find a job where they're not working 80 hours regularly, or to just take some time off. I guess the last one isn't really "concrete", and is more just me speculating, but I threw it out there because of a decent amount of anecdotal evidence I've seen. Here are some other things that are also just speculative but interesting to
>> There’s a general rule about consumer electronics: The older a device becomes, the more competitors appear and prices fall. This was true for televisions, personal computers and portable music players. >>It was supposed to happen with smartphones. But the iPhone has defied gravity. Because it is not the right comparison. Not even for portable music players which was mostly dominated by iPod. Quoting Steve Jobs [1]. > Apple view itself as a software company I remember, possibly in the same conference Steve basically said Apple is an Software company, you just have to buy Apple's hardware to use it. In that sense. iPhone is not consumer electronics. It is not hardware only. That is why you see all the other examples are race to the bottom for Consumer Electronics. If you look at Software, like Windows, It has been in the dominating position for the past 3 decade. [1] this video
Steve Jobs - Apple Is Software - YouTube this video Apple is a Software company, You just have to buy their Hardware first to use it. Apple lately has been too focused, or too worried about the Design of the product and lost sight of its main direction. To more accurately phase it, Apple is an Ecosystem company. You use its Software, Hardware and Services across all ( most ) segment. I'd argue Mac Pro should be the one of those segment, ( representing 1% of the total Mac Sales, and more like 0.1% of Apple's total revenue ) where they should make it impossible for average consumer to come up with a similar spec Machine with similar price. It doesn't mean Apple is making a loss, it is more likely Apple is just making very little profits on it. The Apple now, or the Mac Ecosystem now is very different to 20 years ago. iPhone manage to pull in Lots of new developers and Pros.
"If you look at the reason that the iPod exists, it's because these really great Japanese consumer electronics companies who kind of own the portable music market, invented it and owned it, couldn't do the appropriate software, couldn't conceive of and implement the appropriate software. Because an iPod's really just software. It's software in the iPod itself, it's software on the PC or the Mac, and it's software in the cloud for the store. And it's in a beautiful box, but it's software. If you look at what a Mac is, it's OS X, right? It's in a beautiful box, but it's OS X. And if you look at what an iPhone will hopefully be, it's software." - Steve Jobs (2007) this video
Steve Jobs himself said that Apple sees itself as a software company this video The above link is a video where he mentions that. It is true that Apple’s major software products like iOS and MacOS are only available on Apple’s own hardware. But the Steve Jobs justification for this (which he said in a different interview I can’t find right now so I will paraphrase) is that he felt Apple made the best hardware and software in the world so he wanted Apple’s customers to experience the best software on the best hardware possible which he felt only Apple could provide. (I wish I could find the exact quote.) Anyway according to Steve Jobs Apple is a software first company.