By trevonduckworth
In this blog I’m going to try to write about how Apple conquered the market in the past decades with their unique design of their products, and how valuable their design prowess is.
Apple Inc was created in 1976 by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in a garage. While Wozniak had the brains and knowledge of computers, Jobs had the vision. Jobs’ love of simplicity in design came from when he became a practitioner of Buddhism. His obsession in design led the company to where it is in this day; one of the leading tech companies in the world.
Jobs and Jony Ive, the former CDO (chief design officer) of Apple, came up with the iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, MacBook, and the Apple watch, which are all very successful products of Apple and they all have one thing in common; their design statement. There’s no denying how successful the company is because their design-first strategy, compelling millions of customers to buy their gorgeous looking products.
Since I was too young to remember the iMac era of Apple, let’s try to look at when the first iPhone came out. In 2007, Jobs introduced the first iPhone to the world, and the world fell in love with the phone. Sure, the iPhone wasn’t the first phone with a touchscreen, but it did have an easy to use and simple operating system. The first iPhone had two of the four powers of design (Borja, 2006) and those are: Design as differentiator (market advantage derived from design-based differentiation of company products/services) and Design as integrator (Design as a resource that improves new product development processes)
As a differentiator, the first iPhone conquered the phone market in the mid 2000’s because the market was saturated with flip-phones and button-based phones. There were of course touchscreen phones at the time like the LG Prada and the Samsung F700 but they generally had a complicated/ hard to use operating system.
As an integrator, Apple introduced the App Store for the iPhone in 2008, a virtual software store where you can download and/or buy application programs for the iPhone. Not only was the App Store a user-friendly software store, it also encouraged third-party developers to create innovative software applications for the iPhone. Third party software businesses flourished and there is now a new market in the tech industry; app development, thanks to Apple’s design of their mobile software store. Companies like Uber, Yelp and Spotify got successful after the launch of the App Store.
In conclusion, Apple has managed to conquer not only the computer market, but also the phone and software market with its simple and unique design.
Sources:
“Apple” by Kennethwan is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/how-steve-jobs-love-of-simplicity-fueled-a-design-revolution-23868877/
https://bura.brunel.ac.uk/bitstream/2438/1388/1/Four%20Powers%20of%20Design.pdf
http://www.pacebutler.com/blog/touch-screen-phones-before-iphone/
Making sense of art and design industries 