IN the last few days, most of the excitement has been on new products introduced, and leading the light was Apple and Microsoft.
As you may know, Microsoft and Apple essentially followed different strategies. Microsoft was predominantly a software company. They designed windows and applications and made it their business model, so that they let partners design the computer and the notebooks.
Apple, on the other hand, believed in a unifying experience—not only does it make its own software, and hardware, but it even went to the extent of designing its own stores to sell them.
The success of Apple meant everybody is now following the same formula, and a few years ago, Microsoft decided to design its own notebooks—the Surface series, which has been winning quite a number of accolades and has become a notebook of choice for many. In a number of reviews, it has even been acing that of the Apple Macbooks.
Microsoft decided to do it again, and introduced the Surface Studio. It is a special workstation with a 28 inch PixelSense Display that you can use for advanced artwork. It is quite a showpiece, and a few days after introduction, it has amassed millions of shows already on Youtube. This means there is enormous interest. The onus, of course, is if you design good hardware, it creates a halo effect on your many other products.
Apple also introduced new Macbook Pro series, and also new Ipad Pros. The new Ipad was marked also as a possible notebook, since it can come with a Pencil or even a keyboard. They also come in either 10.5 inch or 12.9 inch screens. This is a significant investment of Apple, because it is really the first time in so many years that it introduced some change in its line, which is designed to stop the deteriorating sales of Ipads which has happened over the last few years.
What is significant in the Ipad is that it comes in very high resolution (with over five megapixels of resolution), but also with a new Promotion display technology, which features a new 120 hz refresh rates, which means that motion and animation are not only smoother, more responsive, but also crisper. It also boasts that this new display technology makes the Apple pencil more responsive, and the experience almost like writing on paper.
The other big name in technology was not standing idle either.
Google introduced its new Android phone also called Pixel. Google normally doesn’t announce sales figures, but reports have it that at least one million units must have been sold in its first six months. This is huge, but of course, not as big. Apple sells over 70 million iPhones every quarter, and Samsung sold five million Galaxy S8 in its first month of introduction.
Nevertheless, in its last report of BrandZ Global rankings, Google was the number one brand (grew seven percent), and its brand was worth $245 billion, while Apple was only second (and only grew three percent over last year) at around $234 billion. Microsoft was third, Amazon was fourth, while Facebook was fifth. This is significant in that the top five brands in the world are now from tech companies.
You might be intrested to know that the non-tech top brand is Visa (no. 7), and that the top brand not American is TenCent (no. 8 from China, and owner of WeChat, which is used by over 800 million Chinese). Rounding it off, IBM was no. 9, McDonalds no. 10, while Coke was no. 13. Top car company brand was Toyota, which was no. 30.