New head of retail department O'Brien
As Apple The head of the company's retail department, Deirdre O'Brien, recognized the seriousness of the COVID-19 epidemic earlier than most people. She had a deep understanding of the COVID-19 epidemic early in the year. She said: "It's amazing to see the company quickly enter the crisis management mode." She described that Apple had gathered the company's safety and health departments and epidemiological experts outside the company to discuss countermeasures. "We soon found out that we were not fully prepared to continue operating stores in the epidemic, so we made the decision to close stores and offices." Apple announced on February 1 that it would stop operating in China - CEO Tim Cook made this decision. The experience of this closure provides a very valuable reference experience for Apple's sales strategy during the whole crisis. O'Brien said, "We applied the experience we learned in China to our stores and institutions around the world. We were one of the first companies to close down in the United States, Europe and other parts of Asia, and it was very timely to do so at that time."
During the new championship period, many responsibilities fell on O'Brien. She has worked at Apple for 30 years and is now the most powerful woman in Apple, managing 150000 employees of the company. In February 2019, as the senior vice president of the company, she added the supervision of physical stores and online stores to her job responsibilities. O'Brien is optimistic by nature. She explained how the company responded to the crisis of New Champions in relevant interviews. On March 13, Apple closed its stores in the United States and Europe and asked employees to stay at home indefinitely. But Cook also sent another key message to employees and customers that day: Apple reopened all its stores in China.
Apple has established a dynamic operation mode of closing and reopening stores according to the company's newly formulated epidemic response plan. O'Brien said, "When we reopen a store, we will check the virus infection rate of the local community and the local epidemic prevention regulations.".
Apple also decided to produce its own masks. At the beginning of the epidemic, the company donated millions of N95 masks for fire prevention to medical institutions. In order not to increase the burden on the medical system, Apple first asked its industrial design team to design a mask, and then developed a three-layer mask (a surgical style adjustable shoulder belt mask). This mask is only for internal use, not for external sale. People can't buy it from Apple's online store, so they can't put it in socks as a gift for Christmas.
In response to the epidemic crisis, Apple stores around the country are also adjusting their business models. Some stores have set up a fast window similar to the fast-food restaurant's hawking window, through which customers can get Apple products without entering the store. Another thing that O'Brien is proud of is that the one-on-one interaction mode of merchants and customers that usually happens in stores has now been successfully virtualized. Apple's product sales experts can now serve customers at home. O'Brien said that recently, the company even transferred some activities that took place in physical stores, such as the "Today at Apple" activity, to online. "All the products that used to be available in physical stores are now available online."
Then, will the operation mode of more than 500 Apple stores change forever because of the epidemic, even though the epidemic has not recovered in the past? O'Brien's predecessor, Angela Arentz (once a Burberry executive), is not only a company operation master, but also a fashion trend leader. Her legacy at Apple is to build the Apple store into a "city square". In this "city square", people can wander around, listen to music, and feel the atmosphere of fashion. Finally, they can pay for Apple's new products in a pleasant atmosphere. Angela Arentz left her job on April 16, 2019 (Apple successfully dumped the pot of iPhone price rise on her).
In terms of working mode, O'Brien is more like her boss, Tim Cook. She believes that after the epidemic ends, Apple stores will still be a favorite place for people to relax. "People still like our store very much," she said.
In fact, most Apple stores in China are busy again. However, in the next few weeks, with the increase in the number of COVID-19 infections, Apple customers in the United States and Europe may see more fast window stores and more stores closed.
A few weeks ago, Apple stores in Manhattan's Soho District reopened. This is one of Apple's earliest retail stores, and Steve Jobs himself attended the opening ceremony of this store at that time. However, the security measures for this reopening are even stricter than those for the opening ceremony that year. The security guard pointed a temperature gun at the customer's head while checking whether the appointment was valid, and then sent the customer to the store where he communicated with a salesperson. Both parties wear masks to chat, and the sales staff will invite the customer to try out the new iPhone on the table, but the customer may not want to try out because he or she does not wear gloves. In short, Apple will open its doors no matter whether the COVID-19 epidemic is over or not.
Hardware business: take tough measures to ensure hardware manufacturing under the epidemic situation; Chip strategic attack and defense
Bloomberg recently reported on an online meeting of Apple employees. Among them, Tim Cook, Chief Operating Officer Jeff· Williams , chief software engineer Eddie Kuey and hardware director
Dan Riccio and other executives introduced the company's future plans to employees and how Apple has responded to the epidemic so far.
Dan Riccio, Apple's hardware director, told employees at the meeting that the COVID-19 epidemic had brought "great challenges" to Apple's product design process and led to major adjustments in the production process. Apple's product design is usually carried out on site in the company's laboratory. Apple usually starts the production of new products that come into the market in the fall of that year in March every year.
But in March this year, the new crown attacked the United States, seriously affecting Apple's R&D and production progress. Under severe circumstances, Apple has taken a series of tough measures to ensure the smooth progress of the production process: engineers remotely control robots at home, use augmented reality technology on iPads, and work together with employees still struggling in the factory. These measures finally paid off: Apple successfully launched a series of new products this fall, including four new iPhones, a new Apple Watch, a HomePod Mini and several new Mac PCs. Also in this online meeting, Cook told employees that most teams "seem" not to return to the office before June 2021.
In addition, another important trend of Apple this year is chip manufacturing. This fall, Apple replaced the Intel The processor has overturned people's view of laptop chips overnight.
At present, the latest progress of Apple's chip plan is that the research and development of mobile phone chips has officially started. This means that Apple will high pass The demand for chips will be greatly reduced. Johnny Sluggie, senior vice president of Apple hardware, said: "This year, we launched the development of the first mobile modem chip, which is a key strategic transformation for us."
The news was not unexpected. Last July, Apple acquired Intel's smartphone modem chip business. Apple sent a strong signal through this acquisition: it will develop its own mobile phone chips, but sooner or later.
Before acquiring Intel's modem business, Apple also reached a settlement with Qualcomm on patent infringement, and reached a multi-year agreement on wireless IP matters - Apple paid Qualcomm $4.5 billion and obtained the chips needed to manufacture 5GiPhone from Qualcomm.
If Apple has its own mobile phone chip, it can reduce its dependence on Qualcomm, and may even produce mobile phone chips with better performance to provide better battery life. On computer chips, the ARM chips developed by Apple are better than those provided by Intel.
New business development: enter the search field; Automatic driving change of command
Google Billions of dollars are paid to Apple every year to ensure the dominance of its search engine on the iPhone platform, but now the antitrust authorities in the United States have launched an investigation. Affected by this, Apple began to speed up the development of its own search technology.
Apple recently made a small change to the latest version of the iPhone operating system (iOS 14): when a user directly enters a query from the home screen, it will display Apple's own search results and directly link to relevant websites. This online search capability marks an important direction for Apple's future development. At the same time, this may also be the starting point for Apple to compete comprehensively with Google's search business.
Two and a half years ago, Apple poached Google's search executive. This recruitment is ostensibly intended to improve its AI computing power and improve the ability of virtual assistant Siri, but the real purpose is to target the search field.
"They (Apple) have a trustworthy team. If they are willing, they have enough experience to build a more general search engine," said Bill Kauffland, former engineering director of Google and current partner of Sequoia Capital.
It may take years to build a search engine that can compete with Google. However, Apple's profit this year is expected to exceed $55 billion, with a net cash reserve of $81 billion. Therefore, Apple has the ability to make long-term investments in search.
Apple has always tried to own and control all the important parts in its product ecosystem, from the iPhone chip to the tight integration of software and hardware. However, for more than a decade, Apple has been insisting on Google Search as the default search engine on its iPhone platform.
But at present, the U.S. Department of Justice has made the annual payment of $8-12 billion from Google to Apple the central issue of its anti-monopoly litigation. With the increasing pressure of anti-monopoly investigation, Apple's motivation to change the status quo is becoming stronger and stronger.
Industry insiders believe that Apple's expansion in the search field is very natural, and it has the ability to collect user big data and learn from it.
However, some observers do not believe that Apple has the opportunity to develop into a strong competitor of Google. They believe that it will be a very difficult task for Apple to catch up with Google in the search field. "Google's advantage comes from its scale, and endless user feedback can help Google adjust and improve its search results." "Google receives hundreds of millions of query requests from users around the world every minute - a huge advantage in terms of data."
On the other hand, Apple handed over its autonomous car division to John Janendria, a senior executive of AI, for leadership. Janendriya will be responsible for supervising Apple's continuous work in the field of automatic driving systems, which may eventually be used for Apple Car, a car developed by Apple itself. This automatic driving system research and development project is called "Titan" in Apple, which was originally in the charge of Doug Feld. A person familiar with the change said that hundreds of engineers in Feld's team have all been transferred to the artificial intelligence and machine learning team in Janendriya.
In 2014, Apple began to develop autonomous electric vehicles, trying to catch up Tesla And other manufacturers. But in 2016, the project was blocked. It was reported at that time that the Titan project had many problems in development direction, leadership management and technical challenges. Apple then asked Mansfield, the retired senior vice president of chip technology, to lead the project. Under the leadership of Mansfield, the project transformed from automobile development to the development of basic automatic driving system only.
In 2017, Cook said that the development of automatic driving system is "the mother of all AI projects", and he also said that this work "is probably one of the most difficult AI projects to promote". Since then, Apple has cut some employees of the project, but the development work continues. Since 2017, Apple has tested automatic driving technology on the roads in the San Francisco Bay Area. According to the California Vehicle Administration, Apple currently has 66 test vehicles.
We can imagine that there are two displays showing the performance of Apple in 2020 at the same time. On one screen, you can see Apple's engineers mass produce new generation iPhones, iPads and Macintosh computers in the factory. But on the other screen, you can see the closed Apple store, the empty office, and the intensive video conference of executives. It was in these video conferences that executives made decisions one by one, changing the way Apple sold and supported its products during the New Champions pandemic. The era that mobile phone innovation was equal to Apple's innovation has gone completely, and Apple is trying to get rid of the high dependence on iPhone.
Apple produces masks, which sounds wrong. But don't forget that this company did the same thing that deviated from its main business earlier - Apple applied for a pizza box patent in 2010.
In 2017, Apple finally applied this patented technology to the canteen of the new headquarters. This pizza box has a heat dissipation hole on the top, which can prevent steam condensation from wetting the pizza crust and damaging the food taste, thus ensuring the dining experience of Apple employees. At that time, the pizza box even stole the limelight of Apple Park, Apple's new headquarters in the shape of a spaceship, and became a hot topic on social media. Apple's answer to the question of whether it is worth applying for such a patent is that the perfect working and living environment, including the perfect pizza box, will encourage engineers, designers, and even restaurant managers here to create products that match it and pursue higher levels of quality and innovation. (Woodcutter)
