Former Apple advertising consultant Ken Segall at the University of Arizona in March, 2013.
Ken Segall, author of Insanely Simple and former Apple advertising consultant, today posted a blog entry detailing his views on the evolving definition of “pro” at Apple. In it, Mr. Segall claims that Apple is working to rework the pro industry and grow a “larger audience of high-end consumers who can suddenly understand, enjoy and benefit” from the apps and hardware.
An even more interesting tidbit is what he reveals about Steve Jobs’ plans for the company’s pro products:
Could it possibly be? Would Apple ever even think about saying goodbye to the pro market?
I hope you’re sitting down for this, but Steve Jobs did in fact once consider that very option.
This was back in the days when iMac had established itself as a global bestseller. During one of the agency’s regular meetings with Steve, he shared that he was considering killing the pro products.
His rationale was as you might expect: consumer products have an unlimited upside, while pro products are aimed at a niche market that eats up major resources.
While FCP X wasn’t initially well-received by professionals, Logic Pro X has been receiving great reviews and the upcoming Mac Pro innovations display Apple’s continued commitment to developing powerful pro apps and hardware, despite the smaller market size and potential profits.
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The reasons why apple can afford to still create pro products, especially the new Mac Pro, is because they hire other specialist companies to the hard work of creating the internals. The exterior design of the hardware are most definitely done by Jonathan Ive and such. Also note that this is how a lot of other pro products are created by other companies. If anyone wants to disprove my statement, you may wish too but I do assure you this information is very likely to be true. Sorry for any grammatical errors my English ability is terrible.
Source?
Well so far they are doing a good job at starving them to death. We’ll see how that new Mac Pro will do.
@Shaddy B (for some reason it’s asking me to log in to WordPress to reply): I don’t think that’s true. I remember years back when the redesigned MBP’s came out reading that one of the hurdles was Steve Jobs going to his hardware engineering team and telling them he wanted the internals of the machine to be as beautiful and purposeful as the external case and design. That was done in-house. I doubt that the design of the new Mac Pro was handled any differently.