How Apple Helped Create the Connected Economy

Apple slipped the gloomy Earth economy bonds during intraday trading on Monday, Jan.3, becoming the first US company to reach a valuation of $ 3 trillion before falling back.

Only a few months after the 10^e anniversary of Steve Jobs’ death in October 2011, the company he founded, left, then returned and became a force of ingenuity and commerce that is changing humanity is, in many ways, the ancestor of the connected economy in which we now live.

Critics of the company say today that is no longer the innovation engine Jobs built, while supporters argue that Apple laid the foundation – in part perceptual through groundbreaking marketing – for it. connected economy, in particular the mobile Internet.

Jobs grasped the technological efficiency and dramatically improved user experiences that platforms and ecosystems can provide, and arguably, inspiration was what started it all.

A favorite of graphic designers, Macintosh (Mac) computers made the company a smaller, sexier player compared to many of the competitors in the PC camp in the 1990s. Mac’s attempts at smart devices always seemed to fall flat. , like the Pippin and the Newton, which Jobs would have seen as playful line extensions.

He had something else in mind.

In 2014, the Wall Street Journal published emails from the late Jobs in which he named 2011 “the year of the cloud”, saying that “we invented the concept of digital hub” while expressing a grand vision of ” tie all of our products together, so we lock customers into our ecosystem.

With the exception of the ‘lockdown’, it looks like the smaller-scale connected economy.

See also: The connected consumer in the digital economy: who wants to live in a connected digital economy – and why?

Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, and in 2001 the first iPod was released. It combined device miniaturization with a music database (iTunes) approach that was light years ahead of the reigning portable technology of the day – a compact disc playing Discman and two CD books.

Music and device were now one, and it was a giant leap towards connection.

To call the iPhone’s introduction in 2007 a “game changer” is, on this rare occasion, an understatement. Blackberry was the established smartphone then, and millions of people were devoted to their Blackberries. They laughed at the first iPhones, but within a year or two they had one.

What made consumers change their minds? See their friends effortlessly take and send high-resolution photos and videos, and share YouTube music clips on something called Facebook. When the App Store launched in 2008, it began a long-term love affair with mobile computing that landed us on the doorstep of the connected economy of 2022.

In 2012, Apple added its mobile wallet, followed by Apple Pay in 2014, closing the loop on a fully interoperable ecosystem where consumers can watch TV, listen to music, play games, communicate, make purchases and more. pay, while sitting in an Uber, an airplane seat – or anywhere they choose.

Also read: 73 million American consumers already live in the connected economy

To this day, iPhone owners have yet to acclimatize to Apple Pay in droves. The PYMNTS report “Apple Pay at 7: Winning the Battle but Losing the War In-Store” notes that “Apple Pay is doing better than other mobile wallets in the United States, but it still puts it on the losing side of the war. during -payments in store. Consumers only use mobile wallets for 4.5% of their in-person purchases in 2021, 26% less often than in 2019, meaning Apple has increased its share of a shrinking market.

We didn’t hear the end of Apple Pay, just as we hadn’t seen Steve Jobs’ last one in 1997. It’s easy to imagine that he would have been delighted with the brief stock market fireworks display. today.

Get the report: Apple Pay to Seven