Apple's 1997 "Think Different" marketing campaign was one of its most memorable ever. Billboards and banners featured huge black-and-white portraits of performers, artists, scientists, and political leaders whose outsider ideas eventually became mainstream. The implicit message was that Apple's "insanely great" products were for quirky rebels who would one day dominate the world. The photo of Steve Jobs on the cover of his posthumous biography would have fit right in.
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.
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