Chuq’s Advice for Apple
If I could only offer one thing to Apple, it’s this: “it’s okay to slow down — a little”. The iPhone has to ship a new version ever year, and you can’t take your eye off that for a minute, but other parts of the product line don’t need that kind of continuous update. MacOS would be okay with a new release every 18 months or two years, or a feature release as a tick and a performance release as a tock in a two year cycle.
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When people are nervous, when they don’t know what might happen to the things they depend on in their life and work, they start speculating. And when there’s nothing to fill the space in the social media and online conversation space, that speculation ends up taking on a life of its own, especially the speculations of the better known, louder enthusiasts and influencers. The best antidote for that is to get in front of it with enough information to prefer the speculations from catching everyone’s attention in the first place.
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I find it interesting that Apple seems to have chosen the “Tim writes an internal email that he likely knows will get leaked” as a tactic here, because I’m guessing it being a leak prevents it from being liable to the same kind of SEC “forward thinking” rules and regulations that his more formal communications might be held to. Nice hack.
Previously: Apple’s 2016 in Review.
