Quote:
Originally Posted by Geralt
Apple IS lo[]sing it[,] same as facebook.
There is this whole new young generation that doesn't want the same thing their moms and paps are using. Happens every time.
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That might be the most arbitrary (and therefore charitable) explanation I've read so far: Disowning Apple the moment one's parents choose to like it. Embracing the supposedly protean as opposed to the purportedly fixed.
I tend not to accept that premise, since many of who have stopped buying iDevices aren't young. More obvious reasons for the change might be users' frustrations with Apple's limitations and cost/value ratio -- reasons which seem so obvious you might wonder why we're talking about this at all.
There's another reason as well: Apple appealed to consumers on the level of craftmanship and fixed media (whether or not the appeal was true), which was part of the reason the walled garden seemed palatable to users: Hard drives and SSDs replaced physical media, but those were simply more accommodating physical media. What we're seeing now is the toppling of fixed media semi-empires.
Apple's current models seem linked to that somehow. Despite the late embrace of online storage, the aesthetics of an iPad still make you think of a laptop publishing career machine from the '90s -- an extension of the very first silver-painted MacBook Pros.
The iPod debuted in 2001, after all. Those of us who preferred darker colors had issues with that nurse-white enameled-and-lacquered-hospital-hardware aesthetic even then.