Companies do this all the time. The typical social media response is to call market positioning of a given product a “miss”, when the reality may be that the company didn’t make it for you. People said the RTX 4000-series was a miss. People who were already on 3000-series GPUs. The truth might be that nVidia knew exactly what they were doing, marked the risk down appropriately on the books, and moved ahead with the plan to upgrade their gaming GPU line to the next architecture. And while marketing position of the initial RTX 4000-series cards has experienced some challenge, I am not certain that you could call the entire product-line a miss. The truth may be that nVidia simply did not want the customers who were already on RTX 3000-series hardware as the primary return customers that they were catering to.
Such is the way with other consumer products. Companies that raise the bar on legacy products with a design refresh, and bump the specs, sometimes tend the move the product up-scale. Of course they know it will cause some negative impact and loss of customers. They’ve decided that that is an acceptable risk. And they’ve decided that there are some potential customers for that product category and price point that they no longer want.
Rumour leaked this week that the iPhone 15 and variants, (the ones that are coming with USB-C at least), may include the same type of authenticator chip that was eventually incorporated into the Lightning cable. This may mean that Apple may not allow some devices to be supported on the iPhone unless they achieve Apple approval/certification as a compatible USB-C device with the iPhone, at least. That’s seems like it will cause a bit of a row amongst the Apple faithful when it is officially announced.
Apple’s moves, both this one and its legacy penchant to do similar, are typical for the electronics giant. And it is less frequently that it is a matter of moving customers upscale in Apple’s case as moving customers along to a newer standard and spec, so that they can quickly no longer have to expend money, staff, manufacturing, and other operations capital, on the old and any baggage that it brings along with it. Earlier this week we talked about perception, image, and exposure. The problem is that these moves stand out and are stark in a much more exacerbating way than before. Because Microsoft, Google, and others, are focused on making their software and hardware as unilaterally compatible with multiple other products as they can. Apple’s products have long been seen as being stingy with regards to interoperability. But this instance of allegedly going out of its way to make a thing that the European Union forced them to make…out of the basis of it making iOS devices more compatible with the daily lives and households of Europeans…and taking action that will make it clearly less compatible with things outside of the Apple ecosystem. That is giving me pause to determine if this is a instance where Apple is telling me it does not want me as a customer. Yet again, reminding everyone that products within the Apple ecosystem are really made, and only have their maximum return on investment, for those who wrap themselves entirely in the veil of buying everything Apple. For everyone else, this tells people that Apple is not a company that looks to support those who want to integrate some Apple products into their lives based solely on specific use-cases. It is either All-Apple, or you are on your own.
Rounding Off Infinity 