Apple will have to work harder to satisfy demanding consumers

If Apple were a person, it wouldn’t be the type to run to catch a flight and skid to the boarding gate, sweating. Apple would parade, calm and unhurried. Trying hard is not “cool”.

But now the company has to rush to please us, demanding consumers. How is Apple’s effort? An explosion of product options.

Before being the company’s chief executive, Tim Cook had boasted for more than a decade that all his products fit on a table. His point was that Apple focused on doing a small number of things exceptionally well. No sweat.

Today, Apple sells eight different iPhone models, including versions released in recent years. The company offers ten different Mac computers and five editions of the iPad tablet. It also sells TV sets, wristwatches, fitness and music software, home speakers, various models of headphones, etc., etc.

In a pre-recorded video presentation on Tuesday (8), Apple discusses updated versions of some products in its line, which no longer fit on a regular table. Today Apple needs the UN Security Council table to expose everything.

Apple’s move to “Yes, more” is another sign of technology’s transformation, moving from occupying a geeky niche to providing essential but commonplace consumer products like cars or breakfast cereals. Manufacturers offer a number of options to satisfy our possible whims and catch the attention of buyers.

Complexity is a sign that a company can no longer take its customers for granted. You have to make an effort to win us over.

This also happened with Ford. There is an old Henry Ford quote that a customer could have any color of car he wanted, “as long as it was black.” Limited choice was a necessity when assembly-line production was still new, but the joke also showed the power that Ford Motor Co. primitive had on customers. Cars were new, and people took what they could.

We know that consumer products are no longer like that. Today at Ford you can choose from eight truck models, including a Ford F-150 XLT, an F-150 Lariat, an F-150 King Ranch, an F-150 Platinum and an F-150 Tremor. Black is definitely not the only color option.

More options are great, but they can also be a hindrance. I bet some new car buyers have a hard time choosing between Ford trucks. Not long ago, I thought about buying the Apple TV streaming device and had to do some research to find out the differences between the options the company was selling. I didn’t buy any.

A side note: we may not need Apple’s product infomercials like Tuesday’s.

These staged presentations dedicated to what appears to be the 32nd version of an iPad made a little more sense when the technology was limited to a shiny thing in a box, aimed primarily at the die-hard 1%. But today technology is everything, and for everyone. And it’s increasingly useful when we’re not noticing. This includes intelligent software that makes us read only the important emails or detects a defect in the factory assembly line before it fails.

My thesis is that having options is generally good for us. But it’s also strange for Apple. The company is a genius at segmentation, marketing and pricing strategies, but it tends to behave as if it just makes amazing products and – oops, where did these giant piles of cash come from? Nobody wants to try too hard.

Apple managed to preserve the image of being exclusive and “cool” by selling one of the most used commodities on the planet. Smartphones and many other technologies in our lives are extremely useful and completely normal needs. We should have stopped treating the companies behind them like wizards by now.

Apple now has almost the same variety of products as Cheerios cereal. This should demystify the company a bit.

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves