Here’s How Apple Could Kill the Amazon Echo
The company has an edge when it comes to turning shopping experiences into gadgets.
Tim Cook, chief executive officer of Apple Inc., smiles in front of a monitor displaying Amazon.com Inc. signage during the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Jose, California, U.S., on Monday, June 5, 2017.
Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg/BloombergIn January 2007, just before Apple Inc. unveiled the iPhone, Steve Jobs walked onstage at the Macworld San Francisco trade show and promised not one but three revolutionary products: a touchscreen music player that would replace your iPod, a cell phone, and “a breakthrough Internet communications device.” Then he delivered the punch line: “These are not three separate devices. This is one device.”
It’s now conventional wisdom that this moment represented an inflection point for Jobs’s career and his company, because the iPhone would become the most successful technology product of all time and Apple the world’s most valuable business. It’s easy to forget that the iPhone, now seen as having started the smartphone revolution, wasn’t particularly early to the market. After all, 2007 was the year of peak CrackBerry.