Monday, March 9, 2015 wasn’t just the day that Apple launched a new wearable, refreshed the MacBook Air, or debuted an all-new MacBook. It also marked a distinct shift in Apple’s priorities and market focus. Apple may have launched its Apple Watch in a variety of price bands, but the focus and discussion has been largely on the $10,000+ Apple Watch Edition.
In many ways, this is a smart move for Apple. Much has been written about the decline of the middle class in America and the subsequent pounding that brands targeting the mass market have taken. A full discussion of these trends is rather outside ET’s coverage, but to summarize: Brands that target the lower and upper classes (think restaurants like Denny’s and high-end steakhouses) are doing well, while brands that built their cachet on appealing to the middle class have taken a pounding. The top 5% of earners accounted for 38% of personal consumption in 2014, up from 27% in 1992. It makes sense for Apple to follow the market in this regard, and the $10,000 – $17,000 Apple Watch Edition won’t offer better hardware or a different experience — it just wraps the same device in a sleeker package.
Apple Watch Edition, gold case, leather strap
For all that targeting luxury markets may be a smart move, it’s incontestably a differentapproach for the Cupertino company. Ever since Steve Jobs returned to the company, Apple has made its billions by targeting what I’d call the high-end of the mass market. The only mainstream Mac to come close to a luxury market was the 20th Anniversary Mac, which debuted in 1997 at a cost of $9,000. Job’s Apple marketed its own hardware as the premier device experience, but critically, it kept that experience just within reach of the middle-class pocketbook. The question of whether Apple hardware deserved its higher price has been argued until the horse is on the verge of becoming pâté, but Apple never tried to build luxury products like Rolex or Vertu. With the Apple Watch Edition, that’s changing.
One final note: I’d like to remark on the oddity of the “Apple Watch Edition” brand. Typically, you’d expect to see something along the lines of the “Apple Watch Signature Edition,” meaning the “Signature Edition” of the Apple Watch. Apple Watch Edition instead implies that it’s the “Watch Edition” of Apple itself.
This could be a marketing move meant to appeal to precisely the kind of consumer with $10,000+ to drop on a watch. Buying Apple’s Watch Edition is akin to buying something directly identified with Apple. It gives you a piece of the company in a way that buying a “Signature Edition of the Apple Watch” might not.
I could be wrong on that front — I’m a journalist, not a marketing executive. But it’s an interesting twist.
The MacBook: MacBook Air 2.0 or a bridge too far?
Meanwhile, there’s the new MacBook, a Core M-based system with an extremely modest CPU, a sharp (and by all accounts, gorgeous) display, and a new keyboard design. In many ways, it’s the MacBook Air 2.0, a system that sacrifices performance and port count (the MacBook has just one USB Type-C port for power, peripherals, and data transfer) compared to a brace of USB 3.0 ports, a Thunderbolt 2 port, and an SDXC card slot on the MacBook Air.
It’s very thin and mostly portless (not counting dongles)
One major difference between the MBA and the MB: The brand difference between the MacBook and the MacBook Air in 2015 is much smaller than the difference between the original MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro. Back in 2008, Jobs made much of the ability to slide the MacBook Air effortlessly into an envelope, and while the new MacBook is still much thinner than the MacBook Air, thinness doesn’t pack the same intrinsic “wow” factor seven years later.
Virtually everything is battery. That motherboard makes smartphones envious
The weight difference between the two platforms is also much smaller. When the MacBook Air debuted at 3 lbs, the traditional MacBook weighed in at roughly 5.4 lbs. Today, the MacBook hits the 2lb mark compared to the 11-inch MacBook Air at… 2.3 lbs. That’s a noticeable difference, to be sure, but it’s scarcely the stuff exciting product launches are made of. Reports indicate that the company’s new Force Touch interface, which tracks how hard you push the trackpad, is a better design than the butterfly switches that replace the old scissor-switched keyboards.
Apple’s design philosophy has always focused on minimalism. Many times this has paid off in better hardware that’s simpler and easier for the consumer to use. But I can’t help feeling as though the MacBook’s single port is a bridge too far. A $79 dongle is available with a single USB 3.0 port, a Type-C charge port, and an HDMI video adapter, but this still prevents the end-user from simultaneously using both a USB thumb drive and a stand-alone wired mouse. As much as I respect Apple’s innovations in many areas and agree that the highly compact motherboard is a top-notch achievement, the end result, baked around the mediocre Core M processor, just doesn’t feel very attractive — Retina Display notwithstanding.
Apple’s response to these criticisms would be that it still makes plenty of laptops with ports enough for both a mouse and a thumb drive, and that’s true. I don’t doubt that the MacBook will sell, and that plenty of people will be happy with its single-port option and svelte profile. Personally, I’ll never have much use for it — when I wrote that USB-C could eliminate laptop power cables a few months ago, I anticipated that manufacturers might use that space to add more useful ports, not remove ports altogether.
An uneven introduction
Part of the problem with yesterday’s announcements is that the Apple Watch’s technological capabilities have been overtaken by a discussion of its price, while the MacBook’s design feels like a tired repeat of a concept that was much more revolutionary back in 2008. “Make the MacBook Air Airy-er” isn’t a great tagline for an event, but that’s what the MacBook does. That doesn’t mean the system won’t sell, but it lacks the style or flair that Jobs summoned when he launched the original MacBook Air.
Speaking of Jobs, he’s cast a long, long shadow, but this event and its various launches feel largely free of his influence, if not his design principles. I won’t pretend to know whether Steve would’ve approved of Apple’s decision to pivot for the luxury market, but we can at least observe that Apple didn’t play in this space under his tenure. Cook has decided to do so.
A cynic might note that leaping to capture an untapped luxury market is an excellent example of selling sizzle over steak. We’ve previously written about the difficulty of nailing the wearables market and the lack of any current killer product. Selling Apple Watch Edition’s to those able to afford a $10,000-$17,000 gewgaw is one way to make certain your hardware is on the wrists of the rich and famous, even when they don’t know why they bought it or what it can do for them.
Just how cynical this prediction looks 12 months from now will depend on whether or not Apple is able to create a real ecosystem and value proposition around its new wearables. If the devices take off like the iPhone and iPad, the Apple Watch will cement itself in Apple’s product line as the inevitable future of any iPhone owner. If not, it’ll still make money in the interim — and that, after all, is what keeps investors happy.
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