Not only did Apple introduce two fabulous iPhones the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, but also started the process of changing the world with Apple Pay and Apple Watch.
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Once upon a time, Apple was a small company with great ideas. Some of those ideas fizzled in the marketplace, but Apple kept on folding advanced technologies back into its thinking and development process.
Today, Apple is a much larger and more persuasive company, still bursting with great ideas. When Apple partners with banks and retailers, it's not a small effort that depends on smooth sailing and disorganized competition from others. Rather, Apple's brand, global reach, resources and suite of technologies are so powerful that initiatives like Apple Pay, Apple Watch and fitness monitoring won't stumble out of the gate. Instead, they'll be embraced by hundreds of millions of customers.
The Way Forward
...it's been an irritation for years that major credit card companies have been slow to adopt the more advanced technologies used in Europe, smart credit cards. If Apple can use its technology and market clout to effect a favorable change in the technology that helps its customers enjoy the secure and fruitful use of its iPhones for financial transactions, the company is going to sell a whole lot more of them.
It's a synergistic effect. Apple leverages its security expertise to enable a more modern form of retail payments. That, in turn, engenders confidence in the iPhone and creates demand. The iPhone 6 and Apple Pay can't be looked at in isolation, and we see that Apple's not just after a piece of the retail payment piece of pie.
Instead, Apple uses its expertise to do things few other companies can achieve, and by making our lives better in areas the company tackles, we become more loyal customers. Almost certainly, we'll walk into a store and say, "Can I use Apple Pay? No? Darn!" The merchant gets the message in droves, and it all feeds on itself.
Apple Watch
Tim Cook said that his company has been working incredibly hard for a long time on the Apple Watch.
The Apple Watch doodles: more than meets the eye.
This morning we saw the fruits of that labor, and the wait was worth it.
Those of us who follow Apple very closely have been feeling that Apple would blow the smartphone and luxury wristwatch markets out of the water. That's because its takes an appreciation of Apple's ability to integrate a family of products in a sensible way and yet introduce new innovations. Perhaps the most notable is the UI elements that comprise the Apple Watch.
It takes great courage and insights into human factors to resist trying to force an iPhone UI into a small watch. One example of that is the digital crown that so smartly handles operations on the display.
As we suspected, it's absolutely brilliant of Apple to merge the Apple Watch, NFC, and Apple Payments. Each technology, taken together, is tentative and incoherent. Apple took its time and merged all three the right way. The product drought in early 2014 was worth the wait in hindsight.
Another mechanism I appreciate, thanks to the infrastructure of messaging, is the personal doodles to between users. It looked rather dorky when first presented, but I think it has the capacity to change how we communicate with each other in charming and useful ways. It won't take long for those interpersonal doodles to appear in TV shows and movies.
Synergy is Everything
There's a reason no products or technologies, other than the iPhone 6, Apple Pay and Apple Watch, were presented. These products fit together so seamlessly that one would hardly contemplate using one without the other. The products will propel each other synergistically, and that's good for Apple and good for our technical lives.
And we're loving it.