At this week's World Wide Developers Conference I was surprised that Apple felt the need to highlight all the little things intended to define the company. It was as if executives are worried that the Apple faithful doubts whether the company is still cool now that Samsung sells more smartphones.
Apple CEO Tim Cook started the conference with a silent video entitled "Intention" that says:
If everyone is busy making everything how can anyone perfect anything? We start to confuse convenience with joy, abundance with choice. Designing something requires focus. The first thing we ask is what do we want people to feel? Delight. Surprise. Love. Connection. Then we begin to craft around our intention. It takes time. There are a thousand no's for every yes. We simplify. We perfect. We start over. Until everything we touch enhances each life it touches. Only then do we sign our work Designed by Apple in California.
At the end of the keynote, he played a new TV ad called "Our Signature" that shows people using Apple products. A voiceover says:
This is it. This is what matters. The experience of a product. How will it make someone feel? Will it make life better? Does it deserve to exist? We spend a lot of time on a few great things, until every idea we touch enhances each life it touches. You may rarely look at it but you'll always feel it. This is our signature and it means everything.
The spot closes with text saying "Designed by Apple in California."
Both are quite good videos but I'm not sure they are entirely necessary. After all, people have a pretty good feel for Apple. As Cook put it, Apple doesn't necessarily care about making the most products, but "we want to make the best products that people use more and love more than anyone else's."
That's been true for a very long time and I was surprised Apple felt the need to say it so repeatedly. After all, you don't hear Microsoft or Google defining themselves too often. (Although, the Microsoft commercials with Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld a few years ago were very strange.) And while Apple under Steve Jobs was known for inspiring commercials such as the "Think Different" series, they never seemed to focus so much on the company itself.
Jobs was not mentioned by name in any of the videos, but Apple executives seem to be spending a lot of time trying to prove that the company still has the innovative qualities that have made Apple so strong. Even at the All Things Digital conference earlier this month, a few attendees were asking Cook to be more of a visionary, more like Jobs, possibly revealing uncertainties about Cook's ability to drive innovation.
In talking about the Mac, Cook stressed that the company still has "lots of innovation left," and when Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller unveiled the Mac Pro, he had to remark, "Can't innovate anymore? My ass."
All that emphasis on innovation is fineafter all, we want more innovation. But the repeated mentions strike me as a bit odd. Real breakthrough productsthe Mac, the original iPod, the iPhone, or the iPad in Apple's casedon't come out every year, and the market really doesn't want them to.
I can argue that OS X Mavericks is not a radical departure from previous desktop OSes and I'd love to see some bigger changes, but desktop operating systems have long been pretty mature. It's not like the jarring UI changes in Microsoft Windows 8 have been well-received.
The changes in iOS 7 look great, and I'm excited to try it out. The fact that most of the concepts aren't completely new doesn't bother me; I'd rather see Apple really polish more of the features than add a lot of things that don't really seem thought out. The design is differentsome say it reminds them of Windows Phone but it really takes cues from lots of other productsand that seems good to me. And of course, the new Mac Pro looks very different from other workstations.
Even so, the bulk of the changes we saw this year were incremental. I can argue the same thing about what we saw at Google I/O last month, or about Microsoft's announcements surrounding Windows 8.1. But that's OK. Big changes tend not to come on an annual schedule.
I wasn't particularly disappointed by WWDC, although I certainly do expect to see new iPhones this fall and want something newer then. Still, it seems that the products themselves are strong enough to stand on their own so I can't help but wonder why Apple feels it needs to explain itself.
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