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Apple stopped being "Apple Computers" 14 years ago. They're explicitly a mobile devices company, and fitness fits perfectly into that mission I think.


Absolutely. But it doesn't look like they are any good at it, considering how the Apple Watch totally didn't eat the market of incumbents like Garmin at all (Garmin is almost drowning in money now that the Apple Watch has made it socially acceptable to spend high sums on wrist gadgets). The Apple watch excels in engineering, but the software environment is so focused on mainstream appeal that almost everybody has some niche interest that isn't served there at all. And those niches are tight: one might think for example that Garmin and Peloton are direct competitors in the field of home indoor workout bikes (Garmin via the Tacx Neo Bike) but in reality those serve very different markets with almost zero overlap. Apple misses all those niches because they are not only committed to ignoring niche features but also exert too much control on the walls of their garden that third parties won't rely on them as a platform.


> considering how the Apple Watch totally didn't eat the market of incumbents like Garmin at all

Someone forgot to tell everyone buying a smartwatch that - Apple has a 50% marketshare in the market, whereas Garmin is around 7%.

[1] https://www.t4.ai/industry/smartwatch-market-share


Not a contradiction, the market grew much faster than the market share of the Apple Watch.


https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_fixedness

Has CPU, memory, storage, and is user programmable.

Smells like a computer to me.

The first “computers” were people. A pedant might say the entire industry moved on from “computers”.


No, Apple Computers legally changed their company name to just Apple many years ago after they introduced the iPhone.


A legal name change means they stopped making “computers” from an engineers perspective?

Banal political filings have little bearing on what makes a computer.


No one claimed Apple stopped making computers, so you're attacking a straw man here. All that was pointed out is that there is no Apple Computer (note the capitalization) company anymore, as it was renamed to Apple Inc. in 2007.


What’s the difference between a computer and a “mobile device”?

OP made a pointless semantic separation.


I interpreted "OP" as mentioning "Apple Computer" for emphasis, as in they are a computer company, not a fitness company.

This was a flawed comment because the premise was incorrect - they stopped being "Apple Computer" a long time ago.

Yes, Apple makes computers like macs and iphones and watches. A huge part of their "watch computer" is fitness, and they have an on-demand fitness video service to accompany that.


Neat article. It occurs to me that much of the history of interactive fiction consists of exploiting players' sense of functional fixedness.


That was my point: both of these companies have expanded well beyond their initial purpose and now overlap. If you look at their origins, there is no overlap at all.




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