Page 162 - The Apple Experience
P. 162
When I walked into the Apple Store near the Paris Opera—one of the
most beautiful Apple Stores in the world—I asked a specialist named
Philippe about the new iPhone 4S that had recently been introduced.
“Philippe, why should I get one of these new phones instead of sticking
with the iPhone 4, which suits me just fine?” I asked.
“The iPhone 4S is our best phone yet,” he said. “It’s faster, has better
graphics, and takes better photographs and video.” Not once did he mention
the specs of the A5 chip, which makes it all possible, because Philippe knew
that speeds and feeds don’t matter to most consumers as much as what those
specs mean to their daily lives. I found it remarkable that 6,000 miles from
Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California, a Specialist in France could
communicate as clearly and effectively as sales floor Specialists in Apple’s
Silicon Valley stores. Sell the benefit—every Apple employee gets the
message.
Few people care that the iPhone 4S has a dual-core A5 chip. Technically
speaking, the A5 chip “contains a rendition of a chip based upon the dual-
core ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore CPU with NEON SIMD accelerator and a
dual core PowerVR SGX543MP2 GPU.” Does the previous explanation
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inspire you to run out and buy a new phone today? Of course not. It’s not
inspiring, because it’s not about you. It’s about the technology. Customers
would never see such an explanation in Apple’s marketing material nor would
they hear anything nearly as technical spoken by Apple Store employees.
Instead, they might hear something similar to Philippe’s conversation: Our
new A5 chip makes everything faster—browsing the web, going from app to
app, gaming, and doing just about everything.
When Apple sent an e-mail to millions of customers introducing its new
iPhone 4S, the first sentence of the e-mail said that the iPhone 4S was
Apple’s most amazing iPhone yet. Why? Because of Siri, among the other