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The Apple of today is turning its back on that creative class. Apple no longer designs for creators of digital media, who tend to be very demanding about product quality. Instead, Apple builds for consumers—in both senses of the word: people who spend their own money, rather than their companies', and people who consume digital media, as opposed to people who produce it. Focusing on digital consumption has made Apple wildly profitable, but the company's products have trended downwards in quality, flexibility, and even reliability.
This became painfully clear last year when Apple released MacOS 10.7 "Lion"—an operating system update that, unlike previous versions, was optimized so that desktops and laptops would have an experience more consistent with Apple's iPad. Visually pleasing as ever, Lion nevertheless has been deeply frustrating for me and others.
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Taken one at a time, each of these decisions made good business sense. Most of Apple's customers—the digital consumers—weren't using these products and features. Apple clearly can't be all things to all users. But in each of these cases, the company avoided the extra effort required to satisfy creative elites, catering to the mainstream market instead. This strategy is sure to be profitable at first, but in the long run, it will rob Apple of the very differently thinking content creators and software developers who made the Mac great.
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