Apple's recent release of the M1 series Macs, based on the newly minted Apple Silicon technology, was a hot topic in November. This led us to take a new look at Apple's past, present, and future through the lens of Disruption, published here in three parts. 
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## Part 1. Is Apple Disruptive? 

**Farshad**: Horace & Dave, thanks for joining this long lens look about Apple & <a href='/lenses/disruptive-market-entry'>Disruption</a>. I'd like to set the stage with an brief synopsis, and then ask three fundamental questions about Apple.

Apple has done an amazing job in advancing personal and mobile computing. They have brought some of the greatest products in the world to billions of happy customers. They have entered new markets methodically, taking on fierce, entrenched, and well-healed competitors. They’ve done so while growing market share, improving products and increasing margins. 

Most recently Apple has introduced their own M1 SoC, based on their foundational Apple Silicon technology, leaving behind Intel, the leading supplier of PC CPUs. 

Taking a long-lens look at Apple & Disruption, let us explore three questions: 

1. Is Apple Disruptive?
2. Is Apple Over-serving with  M1 Macs?
3. How does Apple defy Disruption?

Let's dive right in. ***Is Apple Disruptive?*** Horace, what do you think? 

**Horace:** Actually the reason I do Apple analysis is this. Apple is  the anomaly or the exception that makes the rule of disruption. The history of Apple has been both in confirmation of and in contradiction to the theory of disruption, thus observing Apple helps us better explain disruption. This is what Clay always had as a goal: Let’s find the anomaly, so that we can improve the theory.

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In looking at the graph of moving to higher margin versus a lower margin and lower performance is also present for Apple, however, the twist to that story with Apple has been that when looking at the upper end of the trajectory, they are often creating a new market.

In his classic disruption diagram, [Clay] puts a new market as a separate parallel plane, the Z dimension, which suggests there's a parallel market that can be created. Often what Apple does is combines the two markets so that that, Apple’s move looks like an up-market move in the original market, but it's also a down-market move in another parallel market. The iPhone is a classic case in point: it's far too good as a phone, but it's far, far too low-end to be a computer.

![Disruptive Market Entry](https://s3.amazonaws.com/strapi.dx.mba/ffa3f437d9eb4b508b435d3da4af0281.png)

And so when do you understand that, you realize that the disruption that occurred, it’s a market creation of an alternate way of spending your time. It's an alternate way of creating applications, which came to be known as apps. It’s a new way of communication through social media. It's new things you can do that you wouldn't dream of doing either with a phone or with a computer.  Architecturally, it’s a computer. Computer engineers will look at it and say, “oh yeah, I recognize within it a computer running on an operating system,” which used to run on a desktop or a workstation, or even the mini computer called Unix. And it runs on the microprocessor that eventually gets to be good enough and fast enough to be a desktop as they just did, but it's been packaged in a container and the market that did not exist before. And as a result, it redefines the P, or the Measure of Performance.

It redefines *P*, which is what the goal of an entrepreneur should be. Redefining *P* or recalibrating *P* is what is really at the heart of disruption. To create products that are worse or not good enough in the original dimension of performance, but awesome on a new dimension of performance. This is what Apple does over and over again. 

**Dave:** Jumping on the iPhone, it's been my long-held view that the iPhone was not disruptive, but sustaining to the mobile phone market—most users look at an iPhone and say this is a better phone. Certainly iPhone helped catapult consumers’ use of mobile services. So we can safely assume that the iPhone definitely sustained mobile phones. 

I believe the real disruptive force of the iPhone was not what Apple produced directly, but in their enabling a new form of software development. The iPhone, by way of the AppStore, was disruptive to software development. Before the AppStore, software development required many more people and expertise—both deep and broad—to essentially wrap their work around an operating system or to create something that interfaced with “programs” as we used to call them. But the AppStore enabled many more people with fewer resources, skills, and experience to make money creating software.

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<center><a href='https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=The+real+disruptive+force+of+the+iPhone+was+in+Apple+enabling+a+new+form+of+software+development.+via+@dxMBA&url=https://www.dx.mba/blog/:is-apple-disruptive-long-lens-apple-and-disruption'> ❝The real disruptive force of the iPhone was in Apple enabling a new form of software development.❞</a></center>
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With this, the iPhone passed one of our “disruptive innovation litmus tests”: enabling a larger population of people with less expertise and fewer resources to do something that in the past could only be done by experts or was available to people and orgs that had more resources.

**Horace:** And now apps are constantly being refreshed and updated without developers having to box them and put them on the shelf, and without the licensing terms which used to be onerous: end-user license agreements, corporate deals and so on.

They changed distribution. And as a result of that, they changed the economics and they changed the fabric of computing, from the software side. It's hard to get this across because software businesses are complex to explain. But the scope is vast—they enabled different layers of software to be created, for example, the whole ride-hailing industry wouldn't exist for, well, not for the smartphone because it required your location when you summon it outdoors.

We have as, a result, not only billions and billions of dollars of income that's being generated through the AppStores, but also we have tens of millions of new workers in that value chain whom we call developers. They used to be employed in large corporations, but now increasingly they're self-employed or working in small companies.

**Farshad:** This very much reflects my personal experience as an app developer around the birth of the iPhone. The iPhone was definitely a marvel of engineering but I just didn't see it as a business. When Apple opened the iPhone up to developers, I imagined it would be a fun hobby. I just didn't see it in the same class as our client work. But my partner Lauren, insisted that we figure out a way to release some apps on the AppStore. She thought this was a great opportunity. By piggybacking on Apple’s brand, customer relationships and distribution network, we would have a new class of users—the consumers. When I mentioned to an indy software developer friend, he asked bluntly: “how many $1 apps do you have to sell to pay your bills?”

This was too good an opportunity to pass up. So I created a simple app called Digital Clock signed it and uploaded it to Apple’s backend—it turned out to be the first of its kind on AppStore! Apple's developer documentation back then was even more scant than now, and Apple had put the developers under NDA so we couldn't even use resources like StackOverflow. We were flying blind the first couple of weeks. We didn’t even know how many downloads we had. Finally we found the right person to call and they turned on  app “sales” reports. By then we figured we may have a couple of hundred free downloads. When they finally sent us the report, it was not at all what we expected. We had 17,000 downloads! Not total over two weeks, 17,000 on a single day! In one day, we had served more users than all our previous work combined. This was until the next day, when our downloads more than doubled!

<iframe width='100%' height='480' src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xo9cKe_Fch8" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

My point for telling this story is that, even in its early days, iPhone’s scale was staggering. Before we could blink, we had millions of downloads by customers we didn’t know in half of the countries around the world, by simply signing the App and uploading it to Apple’s servers. Apple took care of the rest of the business stuff, tally the downloads every day and deposit money into our account every month. At the end, the app sales helped us offset the loss of our corporate customers during the financial meltdown. And this was 2008. Today, Digital Clock is a genre that includes thousands of apps. There are hundreds of thousands if not millions of developers like us. The scale is unfathomable. 

**Horace:** Yes. Like you said, Farshad, the AppStore enabled innovation in packaging, pricing, and distribution. And as the market has grown, it’s now morphing into subscriptions where developers can go from $1 per download to $1 per month. When Apple touts that they have 600 million subscriptions, it’s not their own but the subscriptions sold by third-party apps enabled by Apple devices. Imagine that: as a software developer, you're being told that you can get customers to give you a monthly payment! Wow!

**Farshad:** That’s true. When I now replay my early AppStore experiences through the lens of disruption, I can see how the iPhone and AppStore met the *litmus tests* you guys mentioned: that iPhone was a worse computing device than computers, but it also was awesome in another dimension! It was characteristically different than working for corporations. 

**Horace:** And it created [a whole new universe around this] but it's so subtle and so difficult to convey. I use this notion that it's a computer only to simplify and make it more palatable.

The fact of the matter is that the iPhone completely reshaped computing, which means it created a new ecosystem, a value network. And by this, I mean tha software distribution, oftware creation, the business model in software has completely changed. 

And all of those things meant that you had to have a cellphone. And we don't think about it now, but the imagined that that pre-smartphone we could not have had ride-hailing. We could not have had micromobility. We could not have had social media as we know it today, which itself created a niche consumption of media. Where we used to think of media as either half an hour sitcom, or a one hour drama, or a two hour movie, and now we have a six-second TikTok.

So this gives the apps the ability to slice content down to such tiny, tiny increments of time that fill up spaces that would be otherwise unoccupied. This is classic non-consumption disruption.

So the iPhone enabled all these things: it enabled new communications, that enabled new consumption, that enabled new transportation that…  So do you give credit to the iPhone and let Apple just sitse there and collect rents on all this? Or do you give credit to the whole system that was created? 

Are the disruptors the engineers who wrote the apps? Or are the disruptors the Facebooks and Twitters? In their own right, they changed media, they changed the way we think about our approach to information.

The idea of the disruptive theory is that you want to use it to point to causality of the innovation—what and who caused the transformation? But what we find in reality, is that the world is multi-causal, it’s hard to pinpoint which is the real cause. And all it can do is to tell multiple causes, but it’s kind of hard to predict them. It’s fascinating.

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<center>Should you apply a disruptive or sustaining strategy? </center>
<center>Meet up with the authors for a <a href='https://dxmba.squarespace.com/engage/unstuck-assist-trial'>free consult</a>.
</div>

**Dave:** Yes! 
Maybe I sound like a broken record, but the key thing Apple did that helped in the success of the iPhone was the AppStore. And to make AppStore successful, Apple had to use a different business model type. This topic probably requires its own discussion, but we have briefly introduced it here. 

We’ve so far talked about two kinds of disruptive innovation in this conversation: First, low-end disruption, when an entrant sells a cheaper solution to customers who are over-served by the incumbent players (ex: Excel → Google Sheets). The second is by creating a new market—finding non-consumption and exploiting it (ex: pocket transistor radio or the Walkman, used by teenagers).

But there is yet a [third type of disruptive innovation]( /blog/:three-kinds-of-disruption-the-3rd-kind), where a firm causes fundamental changes in its business model to enable the transformation of the market. With the AppStore, Apple changed how they and their developers did business—their relationship with each other and with their respective customers. To make this happen, Apple maintained what we call a “value-added process" business model,—really, just making stuff and selling the end product—while also creating a “facilitatednetwork" business model, where people pay to participate in the network.  

**Horace:** Yes, it’s critical to be aware of the change in the customer definition, as in mobile computing we end up with a new value chain as did the developers. This may as well be the glaring omission in the PC and particularly on the Mac because this ecosystem didn’t emerge, certainly not thriving in the same way, partly because of legacy issues, partly because of corporate customers and perhaps because the lack of an appropriate network business model.  But we can see that something is fundamentally missing. 

**Farshad:**	This is  a good segue to our second question which is whether Apple is over-serving with the Mac. Thank you both for this very insightful conversation! Looking forward to taking on the second question! 

<hr/>
<em>
<strong>Do you have a <span class='highlight'>Disruptive Strategy</span> for your business? </strong>

Are you confident about it?
What about your competition?<br/>
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Sign up for a <a href='https://dxmba.squarespace.com/engage/unstuck-assist-trial'>free consultation</a>  to learn, <em>with aboslutely no strings attached.</em></strong>
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A Long-Lens Look at Apple and Disruption


Apple’s recent release of the M1 series Macs based on Apple Silicon technology, was perhaps the biggest Apple technology advance in 2020. This led us to take a new look at Apple’s past, present, and future through the long lens of Disruption theory.
<img src='https://s3.amazonaws.com/strapi.dx.mba/6fa1be626170409a80a33bda9f42c22d.png' width='25%' align='right'/>

1. [Is Apple Disruptive?](../blog/is-apple-disruptive-long-lens-apple-and-disruption)
2. Is Apple Over-serving with M1 Macs?
3. How does Apple defy Disruption?

The first part of our discussion explored how Apple’s sustaining innovations (e.g., Smartphones) are typically disruptive to the markets where Apple itself operates (e.g. Computers). 
In this second part of the article, we discussed the Mac itself, and in particular, the introduction of M1.


# Part 2. Is Apple Over-serving with M1 Macs?

**Dave:**  After the M1 Macs launched last year, I told Farshad that I'm skeptical. That is, I see the M1 as over-shooting mainstream customers’ needs. Right now, most Macs provide performance along many dimensions that exceeds what users need or want. Having said that, I recognize there’s a good chance I’m wrong about this.

**Farshad**:		Since the M1 release, I’ve had a chance to talk with a few MacBook Air users, whom I would put in the median demand category. They seemed to be happy with their Intel MacBooks: the battery life, and general performance. I didn’t hear a lot of complaints about how long it took to zip files, or the number of tabs they can keep open. Sure the cooling fan kicks in sometime, but users didn’t seem very bothered with it. 

Anecdotal as it was, in my hallway testing, I couldn’t find counters to Dave’s hypothesis. At the same time, my feed is full of developers, video producers or other techies report  blazing speed in compression and compilation. 

**Horace:**  Let’s take the MacBook. It’s striking is that its form has not changed much in the past two decades. At least with the iPhone, we have a new input method with touch, whereas with the Mac we’ve had the exact same methods. 

Even the iPad has a different interface. It’s really a computer, as powerful as a Mac with a screen almost as big as a Mac, and now with a keyboard that gets bolted onto it as if it were a Mac, but it has a touch input and touch user experience. And so we can argue that iPad is in a different market because of the way it's used. But in the case of the Mac the question is: how much further up the sustaining trajectory can you go in terms of performance in the same dimension? 

Now, again, the devil's in the details. One thing I would add is that the Mac, under Apple’s stewardship, did move to a new dimension of performance by becoming thin and portable. Thus power consumption became a key. It’s been 25 years, since the modern laptop form factor was introduced in the 90s. Apple just pushed and pushed in that direction and arguably created the best examples of laptops in the world. So now, we can ask the the question: after more than two decades of that improvement, where are we with this? Is the M1 necessary? Or will the M1 going to cause an overshoot?

**Horace:**  And so the struggle for Mac, as a product, is going to be: will Macs become tools for content creators only? If so, it’ll be thought of as the creative tool, which it’s pretty good at. But then it's not going to scale to be the mainstream consumer tool because it’s already over-serving. 

**Dave:**  That’s my concern.

**Horace**:		With the M1 what we're seeing is more portability, certainly with better power management. But what about this performance?  What we need to ask is what could possibly absorb that extra performance? We see these amusing pundit reviews that say, “Oh, I can not get the system to slow down, or the fans to come up, even though I have a ridiculous number of tabs open in my browser”, or “I do some number of things at once, while on a zoom call plus this and that thing”.

**Dave:**		I think we can all agree that the M1 is overpowered for most users, at least at this point. It’s important to recognize that over-serving customer needs by a firm does not guarantee disruption by new entrants. Often firms overshoot because they’re setting the stage for some advance. Given your point about content creators, Horace, perhaps Apple is using this as an opportunity to discover what  new uses a much faster chip can be put to. In fact, it’s my belief that this is essentially how Apple used the iPhone and the App Store—to discover new Jobs to be Done.

**Horace:**  Exactly. This is where technology people sit around and ponder, well, what about virtual reality or augmented reality? Can we dream up some nice, cool applications? But the market will decide whether this will be a success. And so that's where we have yet to put the pieces together. And if there is a worry about the Mac, it is that it needs to find a job for itself beyond being a superlative creativity tool, which it already is.

**Farshad:**		Look guys, it’s hard to argue that what Apple has achieved with M1 is anything but a technological marvel as a result of a huge strategic bet. Like Horace said, the devil’s in the details. Let’s just look at M1 Mac's first release. There was speculation that Apple would start with just a single high-end M1 Mac first, or that Apple would charge a premium. Supply chain pundits thought there would be major delay. None of these guesses were correct. Apple release lower-end Macs, with performance guard rails, and the price in line with before, and twisted the supply chain to work during a global pandemic.

Apple is clearly committing to a whole new level of computing. Apple is no longer a niche company. They are world’s top technology company. In modern age of computing, making your own chips is as risky as it gets: the designs are getting [ever more complex](https://ourworldindata.org/technological-progress#the-exponential-increase-of-the-number-of-transistors-on-integrated-circuits), the [sizes in nanometers](https://www.hpcwire.com/2020/06/01/10nm-7nm-5nm-should-the-chip-nanometer-metric-be-replaced/), and volumes growing into billions. One bad chip bug can wreak havoc for an integrated brand like Apple, as the old computing stars learned the hard way.  I would compare the all-in, high-stakes wager that Cook has placed on Johny Srouji & company is as audacious bet as Jobs ever placed: on the Mac, the iPod and the iPhone teams.

*But why?* Why is Apple making such a big bet? Is it just that Apple can't stop itself from improving products? Is it further value chain evolution? Is it like the change to Solid State Disks (SSDs), which just moved consumer expectations to faster performance? Is it just an efficiency innovation, slashing Mac’s BOM by $150+ by removing Intel's expensive CPU and improve Apple's already-high margins? Or is there a higher level target beyond the horizon that we can't see?

**Horace:**  Playing devil's advocate, I think the argument that Apple would make is to say, look, we want to make a great experience, and we want to make the best product. And that’s always been a North star, a guiding light. And so here's how they see it. First of all, we're going to be able to deliver a product that doesn't look or have an outward appearance that's different, or represents easily recognizable leaps in functionality. Still, it's going to be just smoother and better in polished in every way. So this is classic Steve Jobs. We'll call it polishing rocks–you put things into a process of polishing, and what comes out is simply brilliant.

But what we are asking ourselves is: can there be a quantum leap, not an incremental one. And the leap would be towards something, and we just don't know what jobs the Mac could be hired for beyond what it is today. And I think Apple's answer, if I were to put it to them would be well, yes. 

They would look at the creation of content that is now democratized—for example, video editing. So YouTube videos by the billion are enabled by the software that runs on a Mac, now with 4K and frame rates that are just incredible. Where does that lead? You can sort of see two, three steps ahead, but you don't know the full journey. Look at the neural engine in the chip. Whether it ends up being some kind of artificial intelligence, part of high-end decision systems, or entertainment systems that are mind-boggling and unforeseeable right now, we just don't know. But where is it leading?I don't know. I struggle with this all the time. I just don't know. I just wish I could see that future.

**Farshad:**		Yes! I have been pondering that too.  What is a job that’ll require more computing than a Desktop PC? One lesson I remember from graduate school that Thinking Machines’ early architectures had these super fast processors but compute-time tended to be bogged down by I/O time. That is, big computations usually require big data to be streamed in, and a PC is simply limited because it’s gated by the network. If I were to have a big computer that needed to have a lot of data from the internet or whatnot, it's much better to place it on the backbone, on Google or AWS cloud, and not in my office. And I doubt if Apple is getting into cloud server business.

I could think of *one* other way to get a lot of data to fill the pipeline of an M*n* processor. And that’s with lots of sensory data. But if this were a handheld product, it would use the A-series chips. So what I ended up with is a *large* mobile device, which needs access to lots of power that helps it drive lots of processing, perhaps AI &amp; ML.

What I ended up with is the autonomous car.

So now, with the M-series, is hitting the high end for one market (computers) that is too low end for another (autonomous drive).  As speculative as this sounds, it does fit the criteria.

**Dave:**	The car totally makes sense to me—in more than one way. First of all, Apple can learn while underwriting the development of a better chip or chipset by putting these M1 chips in computers. Second, and possibly more important, is an issue that comes down to one of the fundamental principles of disruption: the theory of integration and modularity—which Horace has helped to advance. The theory says that because in an early market, firms typically need to improve, their products need an integrated architecture. You can only maximize overall performance by having end-to-end control of a product or service. 

This is similar to what you’re saying Farshad. You’re saying they need more control. But there’s another aspect to this: modular architectures just can’t be “tuned” to maximal performance in the same way an integrated architecture can.

**Farshad:** 		Yes. Also, Horace, when you were talking about the interface changes from Mac to iOS, it struck me that the desktop&#8594;laptop transition required much less adjustment. However, for Apple, designing a car is an opportunity to completely redefine an old interface, as they did with the watch. They may not be able to cut the steering wheel right way, like the Home button, streeing wheel will be a vestiage of the physical world they'll remove later. But it's hard to imagine  Apple designing a car that doesn't have a completely new user experience. I bet they would like some to think of Apple Car to Tesla as early iPhones were to Blackberries.

**Horace:** 	There’s another thing. Remember we talked last time about photography? Apple’s progress on this was not principally driven just by lenses or sensors, but through the application of *computational power*. And that’s certainly going to be necessary for a car.

**Dave:** 		This can explain why the iPad has LIDAR!

**Horace:**		Getting a little speculate here…

**Dave:** 		Fair enough. One last thing from me is that Apple’s corporate structure enables their progress and innovation. There’s a recent Harvard Business Review article on this. Apple is not organized like most other large-scale enterprises. Most product companies  are organized by divisions—usually around a product or group of them—each with its own P&L pushed as far down into the organization as possible. And an article of faith in the modern firm is that accountability and decision rights should be matched. Apple, on the other hand is organized functionally with the principal driving aim of which is matching decision rights with domain expertise. This enables more technical advances, as well as productive exchanges between functional units—since those interactions take place among Apple’s top experts in each function.  

**Horace:** 		Yes. Now we’re wandering toward another important area where Apple is unique or unusual. Why don’t we punt this to a future discussion?

**Farshad:** 		Let's do that. Thank you, Horace &amp; Dave, for a great discussion! Now, I am <em>really</em> looking forward to the next part. We've saved the best for the last: a study of how Apple continues to defy the forces of disruption year after year, and product after product.

--- 
END
--- 

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<center><a href='https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=The+real+disruptive+force+of+the+iPhone+was+in+Apple+enabling+a+new+form+of+software+development.+via+@dxMBA&url=https://www.dx.mba/blog/:is-apple-disruptive-long-lens-apple-and-disruption'> ❝The real disruptive force of the iPhone was in Apple enabling a new form of software development.❞</a></center>
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<div style='border: 1px dashed #DA3B26; padding: 30px; margin: 50px;'>
<h4 class='title' style='text-align: center'>
<center>Should you apply a disruptive or sustaining strategy? </center>
<center>Meet up with the authors for a <a href='https://dxmba.squarespace.com/engage/unstuck-assist-trial'>free consult</a>.
</div>

<hr/>
<em>
<strong>Do you have a <span class='highlight'>Disruptive Strategy</span> for your business? </strong>

Are you confident about it?
What about your competition?<br/>
<strong><em>
Sign up for a <a href='https://dxmba.squarespace.com/engage/unstuck-assist-trial'>free consultation</a>  to learn, <em>with aboslutely no strings attached.</em></strong>
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A Long-Lens Look at Apple and Disruption. Part 2: Is Apple Overserving with M1 Macs?

Ethos is character or, in a sense, credibility. This is the answer to, “why should I listen to this person or this message?” Sometimes we have credibility immediately—based on our connection to others our our reputation—but we can also build credibility in various ways. In the data-heavy world we live in, for instance, a grasp of data and its import generally builds ethos.

Logos is the logic or narrative that makes sense of facts and the world around us. This is the answer to, “what’s the message?” To engage people, listeners must be able to trace the reasoning, follow the story that the speaker tells. 

Pathos is the emotional resonance for the audience. This is the answer to, “how does it connect to me?” It’s not enough to have dry facts or even facts that have clear logic. To engage people we must connect (modestly) emotionally—listeners should be able to see themselves in the message. 

These interlocking principles have stood the test of time. To engage, to persuade we must balance these three elements.

The principles of engagement are as old as Western civilization. Aristotle broke persuasion into three elements: ethos, logos, pathos. As with hotspots, all three work together to engage people and inspire them to follow.

Ethos is character or, in a sense, credibility. This is the answer to, “why should I listen to this person or this message?” Sometimes we have credibility immediately—based on our connection to others our our reputation—but we can also build credibility in various ways. In the data-heavy world we live in, for instance, a grasp of data and its import generally builds ethos.

Logos is the logic or narrative that makes sense of facts and the world around us. This is the answer to, “what’s the message?” To engage people, listeners must be able to trace the reasoning, follow the story that the speaker tells. 

Pathos is the emotional resonance for the audience. This is the answer to, “how does it connect to me?” It’s not enough to have dry facts or even facts that have clear logic. To engage people we must connect (modestly) emotionally—listeners should be able to see themselves in the message. 

These interlocking principles have stood the test of time. To engage, to persuade we must balance these three elements.


Engagement.pdf

Engagement - thumb.jpeg

The principles of engagement are as old as Western civilization. Aristotle broke persuasion into three elements: ethos, logos, pathos. As with hotspots, all three work together to engage people and inspire them to follow.

Horace Dediu