Paul Carey

Apple’s last decade has been impressive indeed. Jobs’ stewardship has seen Apple release products that have done more than just change people’s perception of technology. Starting with the iMac and culminating with the iPhone, Apple’s products have changed people’s behaviour - quite a feat in a world saturated with technology. But Apple’s innovation comes at a price. Apple’s products typically work seamlessly and integrate seamlessly. A very limited hardware range helps achieve a level of system stability that’s all too difficult to reach in the combinatorial world of PC hardware. But Apple benefits from that chaos, the cut and thrust of PC hardware development encourages device innovation at a rapid pace that could never be known in a homogenous environment. Nvidia has released more chipsets in the last year alone than Apple has released computers in the last few years combined. Nvidia can do this only because its chipsets will find a home with many different OEMs. Think back to 1984. What if the hammer really had slain Big Brother, if Apple had maintained it’s 1982 market share lead? The computing world today would almost certainly be the poorer for it. Consider a scenario where Apple holds more than an 80% share of the home computer market. Releasing just a few computers a year, losing or winning a contract would be critical to the health of ATI and Nvidia, Intel and AMD. Could they all survive? Maybe. But even if they did, such a climate would surely dictate a level of risk aversion that would gut their R&D budgets. What Apple does better than anyone else is innovate by combining existing technologies, packaging them into must-have products. But the existence of the underlying technologies depends on the heterogeneity of the PC market. Put simply, Apple couldn’t be Apple, couldn’t create the products that define it, if it itself dominated the market. The homogenous Apple environment is a good place to be in, cosy, looking outside to where the nuts and bolts innovation happens, happy in the knowledge that Apple will suck it up, and apply it in a way that no other company could. But as Macs become increasingly popular, will it stay that way?