Cook has ruined Apple's corporate culture. Why does Apple treat the Chinese market differently?

Recently, "China Red" should have been all over everyone's WeChat Moments. The starting point of this China Red is the launch of the new color of iPhone 7. With Apple's influence, many brands also want to take advantage of the popularity, so many people's WeChat Moments have become "red". In fact, this red iPhone 7 is nothing special, it's just a different color.

Red has a very profound meaning to China. In China, red represents auspiciousness, happiness, warmth, unrestrainedness, passion, fighting spirit, revolution and a series of positive elements, and is deeply loved by Chinese people. Secondly, red is very eye-catching and has absolute appeal to some consumers who have no pockets after buying an iPhone.

Faced with the weakening Chinese market for iPhone 7, the appearance of the red body is nothing more than a way to make money under the guise of "Chinese red". In fact, in the past few years, with Cook taking office, Apple has gradually moved towards a profit-centered model, and both its products and concepts have begun to run counter to the original Apple.

The loss of corporate culture and the pursuit of money have become the essence

Apple during the Jobs era was a design-driven company, which can be summed up in one word: “disruption.” Jobs’ iPhone disrupted the entire mobile phone industry and also disrupted consumers’ perception of mobile phones. This was closely related to Jobs’ personal preferences. He loved the Beatles the most. The Beatles were a revolution in music culture, and anti-traditionalism was their biggest feature. Jobs’ most admired figure in the technology circle was Bob Noyce, one of the founders of Intel. It can be said that without him, there would be no Intel today, and there might not be the way information is transmitted to all mankind today.

The iPhone designed by Steve Jobs during his tenure refreshed people's cognition in terms of appearance and industrial design. The touch screen era was officially opened from Steve Jobs' iPhone. In 2007, the first iPhone was released. At that time, a simple action of "smoothly sliding the address book" caused everyone on the scene to scream. It doesn't seem novel at all today, but at that time, basically no mobile phone could complete this action. Without Steve Jobs and Apple, it cannot be said that the way of mobile phone interaction will not change, but at least the era of "swiping fingers" will come a few years later.

If Jobs was an excellent designer, then Cook can only be regarded as a qualified businessman. Apple in the Cook era is a sales strategy-driven enterprise. Jobs focused on products, while Cook focused on profits.

After Jobs left, Cook took over, and Apple immediately ushered in a transformation in its business model. Everything is about interests. Counting the mobile phone products after Cook took office, apart from fingerprint recognition, what other design innovations can be shown? Don't mention 3D Touch, it is a useless function, with few options and many software does not support it.

Corporate culture is the cornerstone of a company's growth and development. Apple in the Steve Jobs era had been making progress, both in terms of market and sales. But today, Apple is on the decline, especially in the Chinese market. In the fourth quarter of 2016, Apple's sales in China fell 30% year-on-year, which indirectly proves that the sales-centric Apple has begun to decline.

The team chaos system has become negatively optimized

What is the biggest competitive advantage of the iPhone? Of course, it is the iOS system. Since the birth of iOS, the Unix-based system means that it is smoother and easier to manage than Android. This is also true in reality. Anyone who has used an iPhone knows that no matter how you use iOS, it is very smooth and has relatively few system bugs, making it very competitive compared to Android.

Android had a bad start. Compiling it according to Linux meant that it was open. Openness also meant chaos. Both the software market and management mechanism were much more complicated than iOS. In addition, Android was rubbish before 5.0. The native system was basically a framework, and there was no optimization at all. Android, which did not have an advantage in the first place, was stretched to the limit in front of iOS.

Now, iOS and Android seem to have suddenly switched roles, not just in terms of their essence, but in the impressions they give to people. Since Android 5.0, it seems to have changed its previous weaknesses in optimization, and has made changes to the native system. The ART mode has also further improved the fluency of Android. Now, Android 7.0 has become as smooth as iOS in terms of fluency and user experience.

iOS has been buggy recently, which makes some people wonder where the old iOS has gone. It is an indisputable fact that iOS has become more and more open, and localization has become the trend of iOS. For example, the only input method in iOS used to be Apple Input Method, but now the input method interface is open.

Although it is open, the user experience has not improved much, and system problems have begun to occur frequently. The main problems are still concentrated on application incompatibility and system instability causing crashes. The 1970 bricking bug is probably still fresh in people's memory. In addition to these problems, there are also a series of problems that have been exposed recently, such as the Wifi function automatically hiding, unable to connect, and data loss.

Why do iOS frequently encounter problems? In fact, the biggest reason is that the company's values ​​have shifted and its commercial color has become increasingly serious. Data shows that in the fourth quarter of 2014, Apple's iOS operating system accounted for a record high of 88.7% of the smartphone profit market. Not to mention the value of iOS itself, just look at its increasingly open system. Is it also a preparation for making money?

In addition, as time goes by, there are more and more Apple devices, and the number of iOS-compatible models will definitely increase. In the past, there were only a few iPhone devices, and even if there were hardware differences, they could be handled with ease. Now, with the increase in products, even if the iPhone is relatively closed and the hardware control is also very good, it has to be said that there are still big differences, and the difficulty is naturally increased a lot.

The reason why iOS has frequent problems is also closely related to its internal personnel structure. An Apple engineer said in an interview: "Based on my own experience using iPhone, there have indeed been many problems with iOS software in recent years. The company has hired a lot of Indians. There are more and more Indians working in enterprise software, service and support departments. If an Indian becomes a manager, he will immediately have a large number of Indians under him, and the other white people and Chinese will be squeezed out." According to statistics, nearly one-third of Apple's engineers are from India, so it is not groundless to say that the increasing number of iOS problems is related to Indians.

No matter what the reason is, the iPhone system has indeed become worse and worse in terms of user experience, and the current iOS is no longer the iOS we are familiar with. Whether this problem is attributed to the iOS team or to the Indians, they are all Apple insiders after all, and all we can say is that iOS is not as serious and meticulous as before.

Lack of hardware innovation and increasingly ugly appearance

The iPhone's CPU does not overly pursue the number of cores, but thanks to the better optimization of iOS and its processor, the phone is smoother to use than the top Android flagships. In the past few years since Cook took over, Apple has fallen from an industry leader to a follower. Now the only thing left for the iPhone is the brand and the sentiment.

The recent iPhone models have really inherited a good "inheritance". Of course, the appearance is not unchanged, but getting uglier. The protruding camera, the ugly three-stage structure and the white antenna band. The aluminum alloy material of the body will be easily corroded by sweat stains and paint will fall off. Of course, this is a common problem of materials. The current solution is to maintain it well.

In addition to the appearance, the screen-to-body ratio has not increased. Nowadays, a high screen-to-body ratio has become more and more popular. Samsung, Xiaomi and other Android manufacturers have begun to make great efforts in screen-to-body ratio. It seems that this has become a trend in the development of mobile phones, but iPhone is indifferent to it. Maybe Apple pays more attention to the coordination of the whole machine and the protection of the screen. In addition, the wide color gamut screen of iPhone 7 is indeed worthy of praise.

In addition to the resolution, there is the problem of screen material. OLED screens are popular nowadays and have many advantages over LCD screens. The principle of self-luminescence can save more space to accommodate other components. In addition, there are a series of advantages such as pure black background, energy saving, wide color gamut, etc. However, OLED screens have been popular for several years, but Apple is still using LCD. If we say that OLED technology had shortcomings in brightness and color display a few years ago, Samsung has basically solved them perfectly now. It is not difficult for Apple to get it with its size.

The pain point of iPhone users is the battery life of the phone. The battery compartment is so small, and the small battery capacity is understandable, but why not add fast charging? Nowadays, many Android manufacturers use fast charging as a selling point, such as OPPO, Huawei, Meizu, etc., and they are embarrassed to go public without fast charging. Apple's lack of fast charging should be a technical problem. It does not mean that it cannot implement the existing fast charging solutions, but it may have given up fast charging for the purpose of safety and battery protection. I hope that iPhone's fast charging can meet consumers as soon as possible.

The iPhone is now on a downward trend in terms of industrial design and sales. Nokia has also used the method of changing the shell to continue to make money. A few years ago, when Nokia was declining from its heyday, in order to continue selling some popular models, it often only changed the shell color and concept to sell them as new models, such as the arcade N73, the subsequent N73ie and music version, the variant Black King Kong version of 5700XM, etc.

The iPhone's hardware can't keep up with the mainstream and it's closely related to Apple's current concept of making money. First of all, developing new hardware is indeed very labor-intensive and financially intensive; secondly, there is the risk of innovation, which may become the next "boom 7" if it goes wrong. All Apple can do is use the existing old technology, modify it, and use it to the extreme to create the illusion of innovation, but in fact, it is still difficult to escape the essence of "outdated".

Product subtraction is in conflict with creativity and portability
Recently, Apple has been "doing subtraction" in both mobile phones and MAC. The reason why electronic products such as mobile phones and laptops appear and become popular is because they facilitate people's lives. In other words, the original intention of such products should be to be as beautiful as possible, while practicality is still the most important.

However, the iPhone 7 has removed the headphone jack. If it is purely for waterproofing, it is not necessary. Samsung's headphone jack can achieve IP68 level dust and water resistance, while the iPhone 7 only achieves IP67 level, so waterproofing is not the main reason; putting the headphone DAC external to improve the sound quality and make it replaceable is obviously not its purpose, because even if a third-party interface appears, it must be authorized by Apple before it can be used.

Apple's purpose in doing this is nothing more than one - to promote its Bluetooth headsets, in fact, to make money. So Apple AirPods came out, and the price of 1,288 yuan also made many consumers stay away. There is nothing wrong with Bluetooth headsets themselves, but the combination of the two is Apple's money-making routine.

In addition to the iPhone's reduction, Apple's 12-inch MacBook also has only one USB Type-C port. Those who have read the relevant disassembly tutorials can find that even with a very high degree of integration, there is still space for two USB ports, so just like the removal of the headphone jack, it is just to sell accessories to make money. Apple's USB Type-C accessories, equipped with audio and video converters with three interfaces of VGA/HDMI, USB 3.0 and USB Type-C, are priced at 588 yuan, while the USB Type-C to normal USB adapter is priced at 138 yuan.

Subtraction is a process that electronic products should go through, and there is nothing wrong with this process. For example, in the PC era a few years ago, optical drives were a standard component of laptops. With the development of network, hard disk and mobile storage technology, optical drives have been used less and less, and it is normal to remove them. However, Apple removed some necessary interfaces in order to make money, which is very excessive, because after all, it not only increases the budget for users but also brings a series of usage confusions.

From replacement to repair, the after-sales policy is full of loopholes

Since the iPhone 6 battery problem, Apple has introduced a policy of only repairing and not replacing. Previously, Apple's iPhone warranty policy stipulated that domestic iPhone users within the warranty period could go to an Apple retail store to exchange for a new iPhone after the device malfunctioned, and the warranty period would be recalculated for one year from the day of the replacement. However, after the current Apple warranty policy change, only faulty batteries, displays, motherboards and other components will be replaced free of charge, so the after-sales service of "replacement instead of repair" or "whole machine exchange" is no longer available. The warranty period of the iPhone that undergoes after-sales service will no longer be reset for one year, and will continue based on the remaining warranty period.

The cancellation of the "replacement instead of repair" or "whole machine exchange" policy, Apple personnel said "this is determined by China's national conditions. If this is the case, many people will take advantage of it." Indeed, many consumers will take advantage of this loophole, such as damaging the phone when the warranty period is about to expire and then going to after-sales service to exchange for a new one, but after all, it is still a minority. If it is said that there will be no more replacements and only repairs, it can be justified. Why is the warranty period not reset after the repair? Logically speaking, the warranty period of a repaired phone should be calculated from the beginning, at least for the corresponding replaced parts. Apple's behavior is indeed very inappropriate.

In addition to some new policies recently introduced, Apple still has many after-sales loopholes. For example, no warranty without invoice. Of course, no warranty does not mean that the product will not be repaired, but it cannot be repaired at the direct stores. Regardless of the fault, the original purchase invoice must be presented for repair of devices not sold at direct stores and official websites. If the product is not sold on Apple's official website or direct stores, after the invoice is lost, you can go to an Apple authorized repair point for after-sales warranty, but you cannot go to the direct stores for warranty.

Apple's after-sales regulations clearly violate relevant legal provisions. According to Article 9 of the Mobile Phone Three Guarantees Law, "If the consumer loses the delivery invoice and the three-guarantee certificate, and cannot provide valid evidence such as the bottom copy of the delivery invoice or a copy of the delivery invoice (bottom copy), but the factory date shown on the host machine body number (IMEI serial number) is still within the three-guarantee validity period, the 90th day after the factory date shall be the starting date of the three-guarantee validity period, and the seller, repairer, and manufacturer shall be responsible for free repairs in accordance with these regulations."

The increasingly strong commercial atmosphere has gradually swallowed up its design-driven nature. As a leading company in the technology industry, Apple's professional ethics have been lost, and what remains is the so-called brand and sentiment. Apple, without innovation and design, has begun to decay and is heading towards its end. "Technology is based on changing the shell" is the best interpretation of Nokia back then. Now Apple continues on the old path, and I believe it will not be far from Nokia's fate.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.