The Apple Company and Planned Obsolescence

Failure is not a state, not a status, not an attribute proper to some, “losers”, it is a possible step in any life course, and in an entrepreneur’s life failure is naturally linked to risk taking.  Not all entrepreneurs have the same relationship to their company, however all have a relationship to success and failure. Losing the business that one has created is first a personal injury, narcissistic, intimate, it is often a traumatic event on many levels. 

In a company, there is always an individual with a certain entrepreneurial spirit and entrepreneurial spirit.

Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, has this ability to take risks to commit capital into an adventure of bringing something new, creative, by employing and combining the most efficient way possible of various resources. This entrepreneurial logic of Steve Jobs fully shapes Apple since its departure in 1985 leads the company to its dark years, without innovation, in a market increasingly demanding and facing the rise of Microsoft. His return in 1997 will mark the renewal of the company. 

Entrepreneurial Opportunities 

Apple has developed different skills in several sectors. Based on its original expertise in computers, Apple launched in 1997 the iMac, an ergonomic product, at the forefront of technology and to accommodate the latest video games. He later developed a skill in digital music player with the iPod, which he then expanded to mobile phone (iPhone) and tablets with the iPad. 

The core competency acquired by Apple is a technological mastery unique in the digital music player, with the iPod, and the mobile phone, with the iPhone. These products are unique, with a modern look, with pioneering touch screens and an innovative and powerful service thanks to the iTunes software and the App Store. It allows the company to benefit from an undeniable competitive advantage in this sector. There is the before and the after iPhone. Its core competence also lies in the development of a unique cross-functional skill with iPhone application developers. 

The first entrepreneurial opportunity for Apple automaker the truth is we do not know yet what the Apple will look like, but we already know what the ambitions of Apple are, a future likely automaker. The car project that Apple would not build, but would design entirely, subcontracting manufacturing to several OEMs or even a major brand, is called Titan. But for all that, it’s just a prototype name, not the definitive name of the vehicle. According to several well-informed sources in the world of the long-time computer manufacturer, business plans have set the goal of building (and selling) 500,000 vehicles in the first year, or at least the first 12 months. The car could be launched by 2020. 

Launch of the Apple car before 2020, an astronomical figure as we know that Tesla, although launched for several years, sold in all and yet 50 000 cars in 2015. But to reach such a figure so quickly, Apple has unique strengths. First, it has sold more than one billion iPhones in the world, in less than nine years. So many potential customers, even if any owner of a smartphone is not a car client to blow on. Then, because Apple will probably not only sell cars to individuals or even companies, on the pretext that they are “cool”, design, electric, reliable, innovative etc. No, Apple could very well be preparing a shock, by launching cars able to circulate in almost total autonomy, if not totally autonomous, ahead of all other manufacturers in this market. 

Now the Apple because does not exist yet, except perhaps in the state of concept in computers, and perhaps in the state of model, somewhere locked in double tower. To produce 500,000 cars, it will take a big, a very big factory, or a vehicle capable of being produced in several different places, easily. That’s good: that’s exactly what Apple’s engineers would work on. 

Apple has come a long way since the launch of its Titan project in 2014. At that time, the Cupertino company dreamed of a driverless mobility solution with an apple crunched on the grille. Today, it has completely changed direction and focuses on the development of the software part rather than the design of a machine that would be manufactured in-house from A to Z. The latest news would be a partnership with Volkswagen for designing autonomous shuttles to transport Apple employees between two Silicon Valley campuses in the United States. Volkswagen would supply Transporter T6 vans as a kit (body, chassis, running gear and wheels) while Apple would take care of incorporating batteries, seats and dashboard into the cabin. 

There is no reason to say that the apple brand will not have the opportunity to gain the confidence of manufacturers in a close future. It remains for Apple to develop an autonomous driving system effective and above all more attractive than those presented by the competition. The latter is fierce and is named mainly Tesla and Waymo (Google), two giants who have established themselves in a sector booming. It’s smart to be able to predict exactly when this technology will be viable for the public and which actors will be the strongest at that moment. 

The second entrepreneurial opportunity for Apple is apple will produce its own TV series. This investment requires from APPLE to invest a billion dollars to produce its own TV series, such an investment would confirm the group’s ambitions in the streaming market and could be a step towards launching a competing service at Netflix.

Apple is about to move up a gear in the video. According to the Wall Street Journal, the apple group is ready to spend $ 1 billion over the next twelve months to produce its own series. Such an investment would confirm the Apple’s ambitions in the burgeoning streaming market and could also be a first step towards launching a competing service to Netflix.  According to the US financial newspaper, Apple initially aims to finance a dozen series of “high quality”, which can compete with the productions of television channels or Netflix. Their cost is several million dollars per episode. The company has already begun discussions with Hollywood studios. She lured two Sony Pictures executives, which led to several successes. 

These new series should mark an acceleration in the strategy of creating original content. Since the beginning of the year, Apple has already produced two programs, “Planet of the Apps” and “Carpool Karaoke”, which did not appeal to critics. Accessible only on Apple Music, they aim to enrich the paid offer of music listening that remains at a distance from that of Spotify, the Swedish leader in the sector. 

The last entrepreneurial opportunity is Apple will invest in its datacenters in the United States, in my opinion I think this a good investment for the country since Apple is planning not only an investment of $ 10 billion in the expansion of its datacenters, but also the opening of many offices throughout the United States, including a campus in Austin where $ 1 billion will be spent. Apple will invest to open all these new offices, it will pay $ 1 billion just in the creation of a campus in Austin, Texas. These 54-hectare offices will initially employ 5,000 people but have a capacity of 15,000. Jobs created will include a wide range of functions, including engineering, R & D, operations, finance , sales and customer support.

6,200 people are already working for Apple in Austin, making it the largest population of employees of the company after Cupertino. Apple plans to invest no less than $ 10 billion over the next five years in its US datacenters. 4.5 billion this year and next. Its three centers in North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada are being expanded. The latest, in Iowa, under construction since 2017 in Waukee, the end of the work and the launch has been announced for 2020. 

Entrepreneurial Assessment 

The entrepreneurial opportunity for Apple automaker. autonomous cars are in the news. but if the technological prowess impresses, that the implications on the policy of insurance and responsibility in the event of accident worries, the consequences in matter of economy are still unrecognized. most individuals see standalone as a technical feat and radiant future, in which we can all play at the PlayStation driver included in the car on the road. but it seems that the transition from our fleet of polluting thermal vehicles to a clean autonomous car park will not be smooth in the space of a few decades, the adoption of these new means of transport is expected to disrupt the developed economies and have an impact on the economy. economics (pest analyze) and destroy millions of jobs, workers, gas, mechanics, handlers … apple is working on an electric car with autonomous properties. 

All this shows in 10 to 15 years, autonomous cars will be as common on our roads as convertibles nowadays. and the sum of innovations brought in the wake of this industrial and technological revolution is unimaginable, these major changes at the origin of a new economic order will cause at the economic level a wave of unprecedented job losses without the world especially in developed countries where local production of vehicles is customary.  If the democratization of the autonomous vehicles thus optimized, in terms of security but also of respect of the environment has excellent collateral effects, it is not necessarily the case of its impact on the economy as we know it currently. 

The impact on the economy and the jobs, if tomorrow we all have autonomous cars, the number of victims of road accidents would be tiny, the round trips to look for a parking space would disappear, thus making us gain dozens of hours each year. Giant parking spaces that have become useless would make it possible to recover a surface at an inestimable cost for the development and construction of additional housing, while greatly reducing the various forms of pollution in the city. 

Almost 60% of American adults would like to own a self-driving car and 32% would even be willing to stop driving. unfortunately, the car manufacturers of yesterday and today should be struggling to manage transition and the builders of tomorrow are more likely to be Tesla, Google or Uber.  Parking, insurance, financing loans, maintenance network, manufacturing of spare parts rental service and public transport are all services that will be hit hard by the adoption of autonomous connected cars. 

Trends 

One of the major trends that will be affecting the smartphone market is Planned obsolescence which the set of techniques by which a marketer aims to deliberately reduce the life of a product to increase its replacement rate. Planned obsolescence feeds overconsumption and overproduction. It contributes to the increase of waste, the intensification of pollution as well as the increase of waste of raw materials and energy. This technique artificially feeds growth. 

Impact on Opportunities 

 The three entrepreneurial opportunities that I talked about at the beginning of this paper will be affected by several problems. Regarding the first entrepreneurial opportunity, the hypothesis of releasing a vehicle entirely designed by Apple is not yet ruled out. The company would prefer to leave several options in the future and if it fails to create a satisfactory car, the software could be a way out. Apple could also buy an existing automaker to speed up the process, all options would still be considered.  

According to the company, Tim Cook would have validated this project, whose code name is “Titan”, a year ago. He would have given responsibility to Steve Zadesky, vice president of product design at Apple and former engineer at Ford. Steve Zadesky would be allowed to form a team of 1,000 people, recruiting the best from Apple. This project could be a great way to keep the best employees in the company looking for new challenges, especially at Tesla. There are already several hundred employees working on the Titan project. They would be grouped in a secret place but close to the Apple headquarters in Cupertino. The areas of investigation of this team would focus on robotics, metals and materials. 

For the second entrepreneurial opportunity for Apple is apple will produce its own TV series. In theory, this mythical Apple TV should be a streaming service with a nice standalone interface allowing the user to choose from a selection of channels to which he would subscribe. This service would be available on all Apple devices and, like Netflix, it should allow to resume a program where we had stopped whatever equipment used. first problem, the leaders of the audio-visual had well seen the worries caused by Apple to the music industry and they were anxious not to fall in the same trap. 

For years, television channels, which could have gone so far as to put garlic around their necks to keep Apple at bay, have simply refused the dialogue. Rumor has it that the few channels that had discussed Apple’s possible participation in a streaming service had asked for sums so ridiculously astronomical that their proposals barely deserved a response. People wishing to take advantage of a hypothetical Apple TV would have no choice but to stay connected to the internet through companies that already offer TV services. In the United States, broadband internet is for the most part monopoly, at best duopoly. This means that people wishing to take advantage of a hypothetical Apple TV would have no choice but to remain connected to the Internet through companies whose pay television services would be undermined by the Apple brand. Obviously, multichannel distributors of audiovisual programs would not stay here without doing anything. 

As soon as consumers start giving up their pay TVs for Apple TV, they will only have to raise the price of their broadband offers. Or to limit the amount of data. Or to put on the market one of these special offers “valid for six months (subject to a subscription of 2 years)” which would make their internet and television packs much cheaper compared to the Apple service. 

The last entrepreneurial opportunity is Apple will invest in its datacenters in United States. Apple will need pay 38 billion US tax on profits abroad, Apple will pay 38 billion dollars to the US tax. In accordance with the tax reform voted at the end of 2017 by the Congress, the firm at the apple will have to pay an exceptional tax on its cash currently stored abroad. On this occasion, it should repatriate some of its cash in the United States, where it promises to invest 30 billion dollars and create 20,000 jobs over the next five years. For this reason, apple is going to use millions of dollars. 

When it comes to the technology trend, I esteem that this trend will also help the sustainability of Apple but the trend like planned obsolescence could cause major problems to the company since the firm admitted to slowing older smartphones, citing battery problems. Many see this as an incentive to buy new models. 

By admitting to having constrained the performance of some of its smartphones, Apple sees reflect the suspicions of widespread practice of planned obsolescence. Even if the offending update was supposed to solve battery problems, many consumers saw a maneuver by the apple firm to encourage homeowners to renew equipment that was only two or three years old. 

Its lack of transparency first: the giant in Cupertino, California, ignored the side effects of its updates, so that its customers may have felt the need to change phones without knowing the cause of the slowdowns felt. In addition, the debate has resurfaced critics on the design of its smartphones, which makes complex or expensive replacement of a room.

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