9.2 Apple’s Purifying Innovation Strategy

Marcos Antonio de Lima Filho, PhD.

Purifying innovation is a common pattern in the evolution of consumer electronics. In January 2008, when Steve Jobs introduced the first MacBook Air, Apple made the strategic decision to exclude some legacy technologies that were then considered standard components in most laptops. Figures 9.2.1 and 9.2.2 expose this contrast.

Back in 2008, the rising popularity of downloadable music, films, and software suggested that an optical disc drive would no longer be necessary. Soon, CDs and DVDs would compete with downloadable content, thus making its inclusion in a portable device an unnecessary burden. The removal of optical drives resulted in fewer parts, more energy efficiency, and more room for the batteries. This purifying innovation strategy allowed Apple to conceive a pioneering, ultra-slim profile for the MacBook Air. For a significant period, the Air held the title as the world’s thinnest laptop, measuring only 4mm at its borders (Figure 9.2.2).

Since uncertainty is inherent to any entrepreneurial activity, all innovation requires perception and courage; hence, the case with purifying innovation is no different. The selection of innovations rests upon an act of faith and the judgement that an invention will prove useful to some segment of the public and that it can be developed into a reliable device (Basalla, 1988). Some praised Apple’s decision, but many users received the MacBook Air with a dose of scepticism. To mitigate friction, Apple offered an optional USB external CD/DVD drive (Figure 9.2.3) and software for disc sharing between computers. A quick search on Amazon US reveals that Apple’s design choice was correct: only 20% of the top 50 laptop computers sold in 2018 included optical drives. This percentage has dropped to 0% in 2022.

Purifying Innovation, however, is much more than just making products look sleek and slim. The economic advantages of this pattern of design evolution shall not be underestimated. The strategy of replacing hardware with software solutions not only led Apple to substantial cost savings, but also created new profit streams through its content distribution and cloud-based services. To complement the design evolution of its products, Apple launched the Mac App Store as a solution for distributing software. Subsequently, the company introduced iCloud, a subscription-based service providing users with cloud storage, rendering manual backups unnecessary for many users.

The elimination of CD/DVD drives would also leverage Apple’s existing content distribution channels: the company has been selling downloadable music since 2003, and TV shows and movies since 2005. As a result, with the emergence of online channels as viable alternatives for distributing software, music, movies, and creating backups more efficiently than optical discs, this physical component became redundant.

Therefore, the economic benefits of purifying innovation are not restricted to discontinuing a high-cost component from millions of laptops. Considering Apple’s distribution model, which charges an average of 30% commission on each content purchase, it becomes evident that purifying innovation can generate new value.

Through successive revisions, Apple gradually discontinued many legacy features in its laptops and replaced them with novel alternatives, as illustrated in Figure 9.2.4. These transitions occurred within an evolving technological environment that fostered such adaptations. The diffusion of broadband internet, offering superior transfer rates, opened up the possibility to stream films and transmit gigabytes of data, such as games and software. This transformation rendered the CD/DVD drive less essential, gradually transforming them into an “anti-feature”:

Anti-feature product attributes provide insight into what you should leave out of a product. Including them can negatively impact customer satisfaction, and sometimes customers will pay more to not have to deal with them, or pick a competitor product that does not use the anti-feature (Hanington & Martin, 2019).

Hence, in an evolving technological environment, it is essential for designers to continuously reassess products and explore opportunities for both the addition and subtraction of features. This approach of purifying innovation seems to be a common product strategy at Apple, with the company frequently at the forefront of numerous technological changes, as stated by Steve Jobs:

So we have a history of doing that. As an example, we went from the 5 inch floppy disc to the 3.5 inch floppy disc with the Mac. We were the first to do that. We made the 3.5 inch floppy disc popular. Sony invented it and we put it in the first products. There were some good reasons we did that. We got rid of the floppy disc altogether in 1998 with the first iMac. We also got rid of these things called serial and parallel ports, and we were the first to adopt USB even though Intel had invented it. You first saw it in mass on iMacs. So, we have gotten rid of things. We were one of the first to get rid of optical drives with the MacBook Air, and I think things are moving in that direction as well. Sometimes, when we get rid of things like the floppy disc drive on the original iMac, people call us crazy (D: All Things Digital, 2010, 5:17).

However, many PC manufacturers do not share the same enthusiasm to accelerate cycles of technological adoption and replacement. This is a positive thing because consumers’ preferences are rarely homogeneous. As recognised long ago by Rogers (2003), users have varied degrees of willingness to adopt innovations. Users can be categorised accordingly as innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, or laggards. The same may be said of companies; after all, they are managed by people. Indeed, the vast majority of businesses are followers or laggards, while only a few are true innovators.

Indeed, some businesses have no connection whatsoever to product innovation. Their core business is based on purchasing and branding white-label products, which is purely marketing. Innovation followers are more likely to stick with directional and stabilising innovation strategies. Their “super-safe, no risk” mindset works to preserve the technological equilibrium instead of challenging it. True innovators, in comparison, take the heat and the risk inherent in their innovation efforts. Purifying innovation requires as much courage as disruptive innovation since both upset the status quo: “Some people are going to not like that, they're going to call us names”, said Steve Jobs.