Apple's "Faster Horses" Fallback Strategy
Apple tends to do this thing from time to time where they seem as if they’re not listening to their user base — or worse, that they’re neglecting certain product lines. The reasons why are never nefarious as much as they’re a combination of hubris and focus. Apple has a long track record of success in not giving people “the faster horse” as it were. That is, even if that’s what they’re clamoring for, and think they want, the company thinks they can delight the user base by doing things differently and inventing around their products. At the same time, they’re doing a lot these days, and even if they could do everything for all their products, there’s a certain strength in being able to focus on what matters at any given moment in time. “A thousand nos for every yes”, as their mantra goes.
The most obvious recent example of this is the Mac Pro.1 It’s a product which has seemingly ebbed and flowed out of focus for the company over a few cycles now. At one point, they thought they could delight that user base with some design and engineering breakthroughs that led to the “trash can” version of the machine. But ultimately, what the user base wanted was the sort of “faster horses” option — the fastest Mac possible, size be damned, with the most amount of ports. So Apple eventually pivoted to that strategy. But it took a while because there were simply a dozen other things that were a higher priority for their famous focus.2