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Apple Hires Away TAG Heuer's VP of Global Sales
An anonymous reader writes With Apple rumored to be entering the wearables market this Fall, the company's string of notable hires continues. CNBC is reporting today that Apple recently poached Patrick Pruniaux away from TAG Heuer where he served as the company's VP of global sales for the past five years. TAG Heuer, in case you're unfamiliar, is a Swiss-based manufacturer of luxury watches. Word of the Pruniaux hire comes just shortly after it was discovered that Apple hired the lead software engineer away from Atlas Wearables, a company working on a fitness tracker capable of measuring a plethora of exercise related data.
Watches represent the time of segregation and white power for most...
No. Just no. My god what a silly-ass comment. Most people wore watches well past 2000. The thing of ditching your watch and using your cell phone instead really only took off with the era of smart phones. So unless you're claiming that the time of segregation ended in the 21st century, instead of the 1960s & 1970s...
hire one from a soft drink company?
Not soft drinks, again, but maybe someone from LVMH (Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy).
Apple is transforming itself into a luxury goods conglomerate.
Now what are they planning to counter Google Glasses . . . ?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
That Apple sells overpriced shit for posers.
This. I have been saying this for years.
Apple is, and day by day, more and more - a boutique brand. Their pricing is incompatible with all but a handful of wealthy nations, and within those nations, upper income consumers. Their market share is very, very small.
They make high quality, beautifully designed, well thought out products that include luxury differentiators that are unnecessary for most users' needs. Billeted unibody aluminum cases in a world of plastic. Very high resolution laptop & desktop displays in a world of commodity 1920x1080. High speed SSD in a world of SATA spinny hard drives - that now, with RAM caching on-drive, are almost as fast as SSD. And the list of "luxury differentiators" goes on. And, most people who buy their products use them to do exactly the same work as the commodity Windows machines costing half the price.
And, Apple makes virtually nothing themselves - they design, and use a slew of Asian contract manufacturers to build their products - making them something of an analogue for European high fashion clothing brands. Design Studio to Runway, email the patterns off to Vietnam, container ship the fall dresses to the stores in a couple months. Design Studio to emailing the schematics off to FoxConn, container ship the phones for fall launch in a couple months.
Apple has probably resigned itself to the fact they will never move the marker significantly either direction for market share. Like any premium consumer brand targeted at upper middle to upper income consumers - Bose, BMW, etc. - There exists at any point in time a percentage of the population wanting those differentiators. And by adding a few tiny, special wrinkles to your products, the margins can be increased handsomely.
"Sapphire display glass." A Red Herring. The Corning "Gorilla Glass" product currently available is incredibly scratch resistant and costs 1/10th the price. The entire issue is obviated by the phone chassis being machined of aluminum, which is extremely soft and will scratch or dent badly from foreign objects in your pocket or hard surface drops, so the first thing most iPhone owners do is entomb their device in exactly the kind of design-hiding, ugly plastic case that makes Jony Ive bolt wide awake at night in a cold sweat.
But, another luxury differentiator that looks fantastic with a stylish Keynote slide transition, and a cute bar chart boasting of comparative surface hardnesses.
Luxury differentiators, small boutique brands, huge margins, discriminating consumers - all of Apple's recent executive hires have been from clothing & luxury wearable companies. It would appear they've made peace with their position in the world.
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Problem is, when it is a tech product it has technological outperform all rivals, think, supercars. If they don't people will laugh at the idiots that buy them and as they are bought neither for use or comfort but for poseur value it kind of defeats the purpose.
The internet already is doing a lot of damage to the poseur value of products. Why supercar if you can't drive it like one, why branded clothing if you could spend less going to a tailor and get the same thing custom made and custom fitted, why sit in a big empty macmansion and be stuck with a long commute. When bullshit marketing controlled the airwaves, as it still does on the idiot box, sure the poseur spend big to be someone lies ruled but, on the internet everyone's voices are heard and marketing bullshit is being seen as marketing bullshit. In this case so much so, that Apple's marketing bubble is now deflating and they are desperate to pump more hot air into it.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Apple makes virtually nothing themselves - they design, and use a slew of Asian contract manufacturers to build their products
Isn't that the case with pretty much every PC maker out there?
Anyway, Apple these days makes me sad. I like OS X, but I don't really like their hardware anymore. Remember the original iMac, or the sunflower one? The clamshell iBook? The G4 Cube? They had such interesting and unique designs. Their current stuff, though... most of what they have is some slight variation of a featureless slab. So refined, so minimalistic, so elegant, so chic, so skull-numbingly boring.
Circumcision is child abuse.
> Their pricing is incompatible with all but a handful of wealthy nations,...
You clearly haven't priced Lenovo X0 Carbons or Toshiba Kiras. Apple is hardly alone in offering high quality products. And the beauty of it is, nobody is twisting anyone's arm to buy them. Yet they still fly off the shelves faster than X0 Carbons or Kiras.
> They make high quality, beautifully designed, well thought out products that include ...
> luxury differentiators that are unnecessary for most users' needs. Billeted unibody
> aluminum cases in a world of plastic.
Unnecessary for most users' needs? According to whom? I guess you've never had to lug one of those five pound plastic commodity pieces of crap all day. A two pound Macbook Air is a delight by comparison. (yeah, yeah, I also backpack and carry a 50+ lb backpack up to 12,000+ feet. Apples and oranges, no comparison.)
> "Sapphire display glass." A Red Herring. The Corning "Gorilla Glass" product currently
> available is incredibly scratch resistant and costs 1/10th the price.
My scratched iPhone4 glass says different – mine's pretty beat up; probably because I don't have my phone entombed in a slab of plastic. I want my slim little phone to slip into my pocket and not look like I'm walking around happy to have seen a hot chick. Sapphire isn't new – even cheap watches have had sapphire crystals since I was a kid, over forty years ago.
I dunno, you kinda sound angry, as if you can't afford one, so you have to berate them. Or you could save up a little longer until you can afford one. I can almost guarantee you'll be glad you did.
Great so now I can get a smart watch that is 1mm thinner and twice the price and one piece of aluminum, big deal!
Hiring a non-computer executive? What's next, will they hire one from a soft drink company?
more like, hiring a tag heuer exec for iwatches, hiring the burberry CEO to be SVP retail, hiring a YSL exec for "special projects". apple is going high fashion!
Remember the original iMac, or the sunflower one? The clamshell iBook? The G4 Cube? They had such interesting and unique designs. Their current stuff, though... most of what they have is some slight variation of a featureless slab. So refined, so minimalistic, so elegant, so chic, so skull-numbingly boring.
totally agree. like the new mac pro? totally lame! asleep at the switch! practically a beige box.
That is one of the few exceptions, along with certain colorful iPhone and iPod models. Everything else is boring metal slabs.
Circumcision is child abuse.
I'm not in love with a lot of iOS, but I have to say Android is shit. For a lot of same reasons that windows is shit when delivered by the average computer manufacterer with all their "helpful" tweaks (OSX wins here completely, but I hate OSX and build my own PC running Linux or Win7).
Apple can deliver a good experience for most out of the box without people having to root their phone/tablet and install a fresh OS. Few competing manufacturers can say that, surprisingly. The urge for shitware is too strong.
Let's assume that Apple computer costs $500 more than a PC computer, I don't think so, but that's giving you the most on the difference, Over the course of 3 years, which is the average life of a computer, you need to amortize those $500 in some sort of benefit. For me it is easy, I use a computer 60 hours a week, on PC I would accomplish the same tasks in about 62 hours. Those 2 hours a week, over 150 weeks are 300 hours I save. So for a heavy user like me, if you make more than $1.66 an hour, this is a no brainer. I make substantially more than that, but still. But even if you are a light user and use the computer 10 hours a week, and make over $10 an hour, it comes to the same decision. You don't have to be particularly wealthy or smart for Apple to make a better choice. Actually, if you are computer illiterate, Apple is by far the better choice. It comes up similar with phones. Then you start to get the synergy of the whole ecosystem, if there is Apple store nearby, you have a strong win. That's why Apple has such a strong commercial success. People eventually find out it is easier to work with and ultimately saves time and hassle.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
And, Apple makes virtually nothing themselves - they design, and use a slew of Asian contract manufacturers to build their products - making them something of an analogue for European high fashion clothing brands.
This is silly.....every computer company does this. The surprising thing with Apple is how much they actually design themselves, compared to, say, Dell.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Guess what the glass on an iPhone is? Yes, Gorilla Glass!
Ever since the very first iPhone - Apple actually was the company that got Corning to resurrect it (Corning actually shelved the idea because it wasn't commercially viable), and the glass has been Gorilla Glass ever since then.
They make high quality, beautifully designed, well thought out products that include luxury differentiators that are unnecessary for most users' needs. Billeted unibody aluminum cases in a world of plastic. Very high resolution laptop & desktop displays in a world of commodity 1920x1080.
That was true years ago, but these days they have been surpassed in most areas. The iPhone and iPad in particular are looking decidedly mid range now, especially the iPhone screen and body. Other manufacturers offer just as good quality, design and high end production but with more features and a better price.
Jobs knew that was inevitable and kept pushing hard to innovate and come out with new features. Sometimes they were half-baked, but that didn't matter because the hype sold them anyway. Cook doesn't seem to have the knack of doing that now. Perhaps a smart watch or the Beats acquisition will generate something.
This hiring doesn't really bode well though. Jobs would create a new market for himself based on hype, then move on to a new one when the competition moved in. Cook is just following others and trying to get into established markets by hiring people with experience of them. Maybe it will work, maybe not, only time will tell.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Sorry,no - I typed my post on a fully loaded i7 15" rMBP w/16 gb RAM.
Just calling it like I see it. And as I see it, Apple is a boutique design company that makes expensive products with often superfluous differentiators. Truly the "carbon fiber and burled walnut" of tech products.
Your iPhone 4 does not have Gorilla Glass 2, or Gorilla Glass 3 on it.
The laptops you mentioned aren't selling well because consumers are repelled by Windows 8, the design of most Windows laptops right now is dreadful, and Apple's marketing is ferocious.
I owned a 13" MacBook Air before I bought my rMBP, and yes, they are nice little units.
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There are references out in the wild as to Ives' design influences. I can't remember if it was from the Walter Isaacson "Jobs" biography or elsewhere, but I read that both Jobs & Ives were huge devotees of Braun and their product design from the 1960s -1980s.
Lots of stainless steel, flat surfaces, needless but visually appealing accent holes, etc. It was joked that the old Mac Pro - the "Cheese Grater" looked exactly like an old Braun electric shaver, and the holes on the front resembled the foil shaver surface.
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Are you saying the Reality Distortion Field is slipping? ; ]
Well, look at Beats. They really are horrible quality headphones, but they have extremely effective lifestyle marketing driven by hip-hop royalty & superstar athletes.
Their actual differentiators are the very thick, colored silicon rubber coated headphone cord that "feels substantial" and the softness of their ear cups, and the head rest foam. Granted, a pair of Klipsch headphones for half the price are better headphones, but "Dr. Dre" isn't endorsing those, and Carmello Anthony and LeBron aren't stepping off buses with them around their necks.
Fifteen years before that it was a few dollars worth of rubber and leather stitched together in SouthEast Asia being sold for well over $100 because some basketball player from Chicago had his logo - sorry, the logo Nike, or their ad firm created - glue on the side of each shoe.
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Much of the tech is designed by other companies, which sometimes they buy. It isn't a product of their own long term r&d as such.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Sales of computers running Windows have been in decline for may years now. In April, IDC reported that world-wide shipments of laptops and desktops fell 14% in the first quarter from a year earlier. That is the sharpest drop since IDC began tracking this data in 1994 and marks the fourth straight quarter of declines.
Even if all the issues you identified were resolved, I don't believe that it would reverse that trend.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
They've been hiring CPU and GPU designers for the last few years and their last CPU was their own design and outperformed rival CPU's at the time.
"but these days they have been surpassed in most areas" - their last CPU outperformed rival phone CPUs.
Their market share is very, very small.
What Apple has the sense to realise is that it's profit share that matters, not market share.
As regards the brand thing, a brand is a promise of quality. And so you only get to be a premium brand by delivering premium quality. Marketing and expensive prices alone don't cut it for long.
I would agree with you to a certain extent - they have definitely optimized the aluminum unibody chassis. I think in recent years they have focused much more on industrial design and product design than outward shells. But no less innovative. Consider retina notebooks, 12 hr battery life, multitouch trackpad, PCI ssds, thunderbolt, getting rid of DVD drives, many price drops due to manufacturing efficiencies without sacrificing the product, Mac Pro manufactured by apple in USA. Next time you go to the apple store, look at the keyboards across their entire macbook line from 11" to 15". It's the same damn keyboard. Remember the net books with absurdly crappy keyboards? No such compromises with apple. In short, the company has been innovating continuously, even though it's all been in the same package.
Reading your original post, I see you weren't talking about innovation, you were talking about boring. Again, true to a certain extent. Their designs used to be much more fanciful. In college my wife had one of those second gen CRT iMacs, the purple one. She called it Aurora, after the princess in Sleeping Beauty. The matching usb printer she called Prints Phillip. There was a certain whimsy in their products that is largely gone. Like the happy-go-lucky youth who grows into the stern and ruthlessly effective adult.
Yeah, nut everyone with half a brain who reads the reviews knows that Beats suck for the price. So point and laugh at the suckers and teach the a lesson they need to learn, don't believe anything coming out of the mouths of pseudo celebrity douche bags, they are full of it. I as a rule steer clear of any product with a psuedo celebrity endorsement, the immediate thought is they have wasted money spending it on the douche nozzle rather than on making a quality product. Now that's the lesson that needs to be spread far and wide.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
This. I have been saying this for years.
Apple is, and day by day, more and more - a boutique brand.
http://www.cnet.com/news/samsung-adds-swarovski-bling-and-bedazzle-to-its-galaxy-s5/ - Samsung is the boutique-meister.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Much of the tech is designed by other companies, which sometimes they buy. It isn't a product of their own long term r&d as such.
Again, what has DELL ever designed themselves?
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Hiring a non-computer executive? What's next, will they hire one from a soft drink company?
More importantly: Apple hiring anybody? Must be about iWatch. Apple on medical tech hiring spree, a possible hint of iWatch plans.
Apple hires somebody who worked for high-end fashion house Yves Saint Laurent? Let's ignore that YSL hired somebody formerly working at Apple and didn't go into making computers or smartphones - coincidently the same guy.
Apple hires anybody: pundits say its a replacement for Tim Cook.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
And ironically, we're heading back to watches because the smartphones are so damn big they're useless now at consulting often, so instead the phone must live in some deep recess because it's not so convenient to hold or carry anymore.
Or so big that every beep/buzz/text that comes in is too troublesome to check, and nomophobia (the fear of missing out, or the fear of not having your phone) means one must compulsively check it.
He comes from a company which makes and sells watches. He knows about making and selling watches, and what people look for in a watch.
Apple is rumored to be getting into the business of making smart watches.
I don't think this is nearly as crazy as you seem to think it is.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
But just like the Macintosh vs Wintel battles of the 80s-90s, the cheaper substitutes will tend to win out over the long run in mind and marketshare as the lower cost devices gain in quality
If that were true, Commodore would have won, not the PC. PCs were expensive back then. Not as expensive as Macs but far more expensive than PET/C64/Amiga.
The hard part for Apple is to keep churning out super innovative products like the original Macintosh, Mac OS X, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, and maybe the iWatch-or-whatever-they'll-call-it.
Not really. None of those have been the very first of their category. Apple's secret is hard work following a particular set of design principles, not lucky flashes of inspiration.