I don't understand how Steve Job's personal charisma affects how majority of Apple customers feel about their products.
Correct me if I'm wrong, majority of Apple's customers don't go around looking for Steve Jobs (if they know the name in the first place - before he passed away of course) videos and sales pitches.
(RDF or NOT) --> (People around SJ) -/-> (Average Apple customer)
Well, Steve Jobs shaped the image of Apple as a company and it's products, and ensured things worked the way he wanted them to, right or wrong, from the inside out.....
There's a reason people go nuts over most apple products, and it's not because Steve jobs gets up on stage, and it's not because of technical specifications.... it's because he managed to setup the company to produce and market products that carried a bit of that magic with them for some reason. The packaging, the styling, etc...... we can argue that a box is just a box, but I can't help but notice when I give someone an iPod for christmas or something the fascination they have with simply opening the box. They start delicately examining the box and protecting it, usually keeping it afterwards for no explicable reason, even before getting to the product at hand.
So a box is more than just packaging obviously... if it has that effect on people, it bolsters the brand..... pretty simple.
The great thing about humans in groups - once you are charming enough to sell the right 10-20% of a population on your own, with luck, other people will soon start to copy them, and pretty soon you are the Catholic church, or Facebook, or Apple.
You mean 10-20% of Apple customers were exposed to personal interactions with Steve Jobs? I'm not sure on that.
Example: Apple had almost spent nothing on adverts or anything in India until a year (or two) ago. And yet the iPod was super duper popular. (Other products not as much as for the average Indian the price of the product + 30% tax by the govt. on the import puts them out of reach.)
The millions of Apple customers today have little in common with the tiny hardcore group of Mac users who were hanging on for dear life back in the late 1990s. For those people, Jobs was the savior.
The "Shitinabox" thing dates back to the Mac Cube, which actually did sell well for a couple months after release. (Presumably mostly because it was Steve Jobs Approved.) I think it was popularized by John Dvorak.
Probably. But today's Apple isn't built on those hardcore Mac users. I wasn't one of them. If I go back in time, I would prefer XP over what Apple was shipping in 2002. I only have Apple stuff _after_ they became good again. (Too young to have had a chance to buy the originals - Apple II et al.) OS X is UNIX - love that - and it has nice proprietary apps which to me add lot of value to everyday life.
Correct me if I'm wrong, majority of Apple's customers don't go around looking for Steve Jobs (if they know the name in the first place - before he passed away of course) videos and sales pitches.
(RDF or NOT) --> (People around SJ) -/-> (Average Apple customer)