Rain

drewfx1
 
What died with Jobs is more the myth than anything else. 
 

As a user of Apple products myself, that is not my experience. And there seems to be a consensus among other Apple users around me, most of who can be pretty critical - and who were even before Jobs died.  

Maybe not the typical fanboys/legion of idiots most often portrayed as the monolithic Apple users base by people with a grudge against the company to conveniently support their argument, but not to be dismissed as an insignificant exception. Unless one's just trying to make a point.
 
Of course, as a non-user, one's perception may be entirely different...

 
Well sure it's easy to get a "consensus" when you just dismiss dissenting arguments out of hand. 

bitflipper
 So WTF is Sennheiser talking about?

The only widely spread standard that has "come and gone", as far as I remember, is the DIN-plug. Being a German company, Sennheiser perhaps over emphasizes a little :o)

Apple didn't get where they are by making nothing but bad decisions, and the cynic in me does wonder if having lots of stuff about all going on about the iPhone 7 months before it will see the light of day might even be a marketing ploy.

Apple has succeeded despite its bad decisions. There have been many. It's been awhile since an Apple product has burst into flames, but the company's history is loaded with questionable moves and embarrassing fails. The one thing they've been consistently good at is marketing.
 
I was once an Apple user, one of the early adopters that initially put the company on the map. I didn't leave them, they left me.

bitflipper
The one thing they've been consistently good at is marketing.

To be fair, I think they've also put out a number of good products that were very appealing to a large number of people - and that's not all just because of marketing.
 
I think they've actually done a very good job of creating products that allow people who are not particularly technical (among others) to embrace technology much more effectively than many of their competitors. I suspect that this accounts for some of the enthusiasm among some of their user base.
 
They've also brought new technologies into mainstream use, in part because customers were willing to pay a premium for Apple products featuring technologies that otherwise were too expensive and/or (up until then) bleeding edge for mainstream appeal.

All companies make mistakes and bad decisions. If the company is big enough and the mistakes small enough it will survive, otherwise it won't.

The classic examples of computer manufacturer terrible decisions are how Commodore mismanaged the development of the Amiga. A problem made worse by the person they eventually sold the rights to. As someone said at the time if the same marketing strategy had been used by KFC there would have been posters imploring us to "Come eat our greasy, warm chunks of dead birds, served with extra grease."

So a line of computers that had a superb graphical/command line OS, smooth multi-tasking and a good chunk of the rapidly growing 3D rendering market was allowed to wither and die at a point when Gates was claiming multi-tasking wasn't necessary because the computer operator could only do one thing at a time, NetBEUI was the only networking protocol to be allowed and what do you mean, you can't write your own config.sys and autoexec.bat files?

Apple, I think, have always had at least three or four different and in many ways conflicing types of customer, with overlaps between them of course. As far as desktop and laptop computers are concerned at any rate. And some of them are like a religious cult - queueing for days to get an early example of what everyone who wants one will be using in a few weeks time, or even mourning the dead gods of the 68000 power PC chip and Apple OS of the 1990s.

Keeping the "I don't want a single uncool ugly, ugly wire or extra box on my nice tidy desk or to have to configure anything" crowd and the audio/graphics/video/dtp world happy at the same time is not an easy balancing trick.

As for other devices, the success of the iPad saw MS frantically trying to catch up and altering its desktop OS to make it much more like Windows on a tablet. A move not exactly welcomed with joy by we on the receiving end.

drewfx1
 
 Well sure it's easy to get a "consensus" when you just dismiss dissenting arguments out of hand. 

It's not so much the nature of the argument as the source of the argument that's the decisive factor - no offense intended. :)

God I miss my Amiga. I loved that OS. I also love that it's been kept alive and developed all these years (Hyperion?) although I seem to remember reading about some legal nastiness associated with it. 

They put out products that are intovative, easy to use, and just plain work. Most of the time, the rest of the pack has been trying to catch up with their new products. Their marketing is great. Of course they are successful.

They may not be the first to come up with things but they certainly do it in a way which shifts units. And surely that's all part of it - technology is the marriage of science and capitalism. Science makes the product, capitalism gets it on the shelves. They are mutually dependent on each other. Without the marketing and distribution, there would be no profits to reinvest in new development. 
 
Apple weren't the first to make an MP3 player, but it was their genius marketing (and a fantastic design) which made iPods a household name. None of the other ones at the time had a hope in hell of becoming as popular as Apple's. I remember around 2002 or so my friend showing me his brand new iPod. At the time I still thought my Minidisc player was ****en, but I had started to hear the iPod hype. I had heard of MP3 players before but nothing piqued my interest until I saw and used an iPod. It's not enough to simply make a great product - whether or not it catches on is very heavily dependent on how you market it. iPods put Apple on the map. Even if you'd never used an Apple computer, you'd heard of iPods. By 2007 Apple was reporting quarterly revenue figures of $7 billion and almost a third of that was from iPod sales. 

Apple will be the first company to require a jack implanted in your neck and the apple heads will line up at the genius bar to be the first...
 
JR