If Tim Cook is the operational brains behind Apple, then Phil Schiller is the showman. Since Steve Jobs passed away, Schiller has been the go-to guy for product unveilings at Apple’s high-profile media events. This past Tuesday, Schiller showed off a number of brand new products to the world, including the iPad mini and all-new iMac.
What does Apple’s marketing guru think about the company’s approach to designing products like the Mac?
Harry McCracken of TIME interviewed Schiller after the iPad mini event Tuesday. There are some good tidbits from Schiller about how Apple sees innovation on the desktop:
“It’s always been about making the best Mac we know how. Among the many benefits are making it easy to use and affordable, with great features. This high level of integration is part of delivering on that.”
Schiller pointed out some of the downsides of the technologies it’s removed or downplayed: rotating hard disks, for instance, use more power and are more likely to have reliability issues than solid-state storage.
“These old technologies are holding us back,” he said. “They’re anchors on where we want to go.”
“We find the things that have outlived their useful purpose. Our competitors are afraid to remove them. We try to find better solutions — our customers have given us a lot of trust.”
Schiller also talks about the reason Apple abandoned optical drives in the new iMac and why you’ll never see Apple release a Blu-ray drive. “They’re [optical drives] mechanical and sometimes break, they use power and are large,” according to Schiller. Head on over to TIME to read the whole interview with Apple’s senior marketing guru.
Source: TIME
Image: Bloomberg
