Apple inc stands tall as a 1 Trillion USD worth organization, momentous occasion really. The first one to go there and will be there for quite some time now – can be pretty lonely at the top.
Personally to me, not a miracle at all. They were always destined to be there, just made it there sooner than later. Afterall they not only have one of the largest toplines across the globe but also the fattest bottom line.
Sans last few years, Apple always has been at the leading threshold edge of Design and Technology. They have really redefined the alphabet “I”. Google – the Verb, has already made it to the Oxford dictionary; not long before you see kids babbling ‘I’ for iPhone or an iPad or an iWatch.
What’s quite intriguing is the Apple’s falling out with the MacBook. The product which etched them permanently into the minds of the diehard Apple fanboys. MacBook as a product sets the benchmark for what a professional computing device ought to be – versatile, light, durable, aesthetic. Students love them, guys from creative agencies swear by them – and I don’t disagree. The MacBook deserves all the adulation it basks. Unfortunately, last few years Apple has not chosen to talk about the MacBook at all, there has been no serious upgrades, and I guess it’s not acquiring new users at a comparable rate to the other “i”Devices.
I think the MacBook defocus has been the fall out of transition between Steve Jobs and Tim Cook. Tim Cook has often touted the iPhone as the ‘mother of all the devices’ and the rest of the organization has clamored around.
Steve the businessman always looked for profit pool but Steve the visionary would never let go of something as fundamental as the Mac. A young Mac user of today is Apple acquiree forever. Initiate and acquire through Macbook – he is in for rest of the iDevices. To rationalize just compute the Customer lifetime value for this acquisition.
Now what’s amazing is Apple coming back strongly to talk about the Mac and that too in primetime Steve Jobs way. The ongoing Apple campaign “Behind the Mac” is an ode to Steve himself, the way he felt and thought about Brands. He never believed in the classic definition of the Brand – a logo, a symbol, a quote etc. He thought much more and much beyond about it. He took a lot of inspiration from Nike and the way they talked about their Brand, sometimes I guess more seriously than Phil Knight himself. chuckle!
Posting a youtube link from exactly 21 years back when Steve broke the first Apple Brand campaign, Think Different
(4:50 to 5:20, feel free to watch the entire thing, it’s an education anyway). He says “Nike is not about Air soles, Nike is about honoring great athletes, that’s who they are, that’s what they believe in!”
The Think Different campaign that broke that weekend in 1997 talked about people and paid home to those who thought and did things differently – The list is extremely distinguished Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King. Mohd. Ali. Here it is.
21 yrs later in 2018, Behind the Mac campaign upholds things that Steve Jobs truly believed in, it’s again come back to celebrate the great men and women of today, these are artists who have perfected their craftsmanship to a different league altogether. It’s not about the MacBook at all, it’s about those men and women and the transformation they have brought, though the Mac sits there as a proud prop, as a tool and weapon that propelled them to the heights they are at. Some of these guys are legends, some are at the cusp!
I love it and most people do! it’s upholding the true Apple values of celebrating the different, the misfits, the challengers of status quo. Some things should never change, core values are one of them – as Steve Jobs would say. On the other side, MacBook users would be more proud than happy, they are getting their due, after all.
Watch the Behind the Mac campaign series below.
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