True love waits
Back in the 80s Steve Jobs famously told the Macintosh development team, “Real artists ship,” an aphorism that’s often taken as a paean to crunch culture and an exhortation to get the product out the door no matter what. But it’s worth bearing in mind that he also told them: “Don’t compromise!” He wanted it done, and he also wanted it to be perfect. No wonder people found the guy hard to work with.
In reality, of course, “perfect” and “now” are often mutually exclusive, and Apple’s usual philosophy in such situations is that it’s better to be late than rubbish. Time and time again, from smartphones to wireless headphones, the company has sat on the sidelines biding its time while rivals rush to enter a new market, before joining late with a well-made and dominant product. Just as important, however, are the times when Apple explored a market and decided not to bother: we now know there really was an Apple television, for example, but the company decided not to ship after all. The fuller quotation could be: “Real artists ship thoughtfully designed products that make sense in the current marketplace, and cancel projects that don’t.”
The importance of this approach, as ever, is proven by the exceptions. Sometimes Apple does burst out of the starting blocks full of hope and naive eagerness, and the results are rarely pretty: Apple Maps, for instance, was patently unready for the market at launch, while the TV+ service, despite being a late entrant to the streaming market, was not yet sufficiently supplied with content for a normal period, let alone the pandemic to come. In both cases, it’s understandable why Apple didn’t want to wait any longer (mapping services need user data to grow, for instance), but each in its own way shows the dangers of precipitancy and its risks for a company’s brand.
It remains to be seen which category, late or never, will apply to Apple’s long-rumored mixed-reality headset, which was expected to debut this spring (then again, we’ve heard that one before), and is now apparently delayed until the summer. After a certain point, delays start to hint at deeper problems, and bitter experience from the AirPower saga means I won’t be counting my mixed-reality chickens until they’ve hatched.
Then again, I’d rather wait than see a rushed product, and if the engineers can’t iron out the problems I’m happy to miss out entirely. The thing that separates Apple from other tech companies is its greater willingness to say the most important word in business: no. And its ability, most of the time, to ignore pressure to ship prematurely… no matter where it comes from.
