The Art of Adaptability, as seen in Apple events over the years

At the Apple event last night (provided you were following the event from India), the Cupertino giant announced a range of products. Among them the iPhone 6S, iPhone 6S Plus , new  Apple TV and the 12.9-inch iPad Pro . While the iPhones were clearly the most eagerly awaited devices, and rightly so considering the innovations Apple announced with these phones, the iPad Pro also managed to garner a lot of applause.

The iPad Pro was the only tablet announced and one look at its specifications and price point, makes it clear that the tablet is aimed at the professional and enterprise consumers. Along with the iPad Pro, Apple also announced two accessories, a Smart Keyboard and Apple Pencil, a stylus.

Yes, a stylus! Why the stress on an Apple tablet having a stylus? Well, just check out the video from the Macworld 2007 keynote.

If you have been following Apple from the Steve Jobs era, a stylus is an accessory that Jobs did not approve of. In fact, he had gone on to say that if you have a stylus for your tablet, then the product team has failed.  

Apple has slowly but surely been doing things, that its charismatic co-founder expressly disapproved of in the past. Here is a list of more examples, where Apple has mellowed down over the years.

Smaller sized tablets

Apple iPads have had the 9.7-inch display size since its first tablet - the iPad - was launched back in 2010. This continues even today with the iPad Air 2, but you also have the iPad minis for company.

But back in October 2010, this is what Steve Jobs had to say against going any lower than the ‘perfect 9.7-inch’ screen size.

“Apple has done expensive user testing on touch interfaces over many years, and we really understand this stuff. There are clear limits of how close you can place physical elements on a touch screen, before users cannot reliably tap, flick or pinch them. This is one of the key reasons we think the 10-inch screen size is the minimum size required to create great tablet apps.” Jobs went on to say how the 7-inch tablets only offered 45% benefit over the 10-inch iPads as opposed to 70%. He dismissed increasing the resolution on 7-inch screen sizes, “unless your tablet also includes sandpaper, so that the user can sand down their fingers to around one-quarter of their present size.”

In typical Jobs fashion, he even ended this rant with a quotable quote. “The seven-inch tablets are tweeners. Too big to compete with a smartphone; too small to compete with an iPad.”

And yet, only two years later, Apple released the 7.9-inch iPad mini.

Big-screen phones

Apple released the first iPhone in a 3.5-inch form factor and back in 2007, this phone size was quite mainstream. Over the years, competitors started coming out with phones beyond 4-inches and even 5-inches. Samsung literally started the phablet trend when it released the first Galaxy Note back at IFA Berlin in 2011, at a whopping 5.3-inch display size. Mind you, this was in an era where even 4.5-inch phones were considered huge.

So naturally, Steve Jobs and in effect Apple had a thing or two to say about the trend of large screen phones. When the Antennagate issue had cropped up and Jobs was questioned why the company wasn’t making bigger phones to give more space for the antenna, Jobs naturally scoffed at the suggestion. Calling the Samsung Galaxy S phones ‘Hummers’, he had said that one cannot get their hands around the Samsung phones and no one would buy them.

With the iPhone 5, Apple moved on to the 4-inch screen size in 2012, and last year Apple launched the iPhone 6 at 4.7-inches and iPhone 6 Plus at 5.5-inches.

Calling rivals on stage

OK, so we have seen Steve Jobs and Bill Gates share stage at Macworld (Boston 1997) . But since the launch of the iPhone in 2007, there has hardly been any instance of competitors such as Microsoft or Adobe taking to the stage to demo something. Only reference to these companies on the Apple events happened if Apple wanted to put them down, either via graphics showing numbers or simply via verbal taunts.

Somewhere in the middle of the keynote last night, Tim Cook introduced Microsoft’s Kirk Koenigsbauer who demoed the Microsoft Office apps on the iPad Pro. This was followed by Adobe’s Eric Snowden showcasing Adobe Fix on stage. For anyone following these companies as long as we have, was left wondering, “What is happening? What next? A Google rep demoing something?”

These are two traditional rivals of Apple. Microsoft has been mocked  countless times and it has given it back to Apple as good as it has got. Apple’s beef with Adobe Flash is quite well known. Walt Mossberg quite precisely described these turn of events as, “Now Adobe, it’s like a parade of conquered rivals paying homage.”

So, Apple is no longer that stubborn company headed by maverick co-founder Jobs. Over the years we have seen the company adapt and do things which Jobs would have certainly disapproved. Tim Cook, may not have the charisma of Steve Jobs, but under his leadership, the Cupertino based company has gone from strength to strength.

As a bonus fact, Tim Cook even mentioned India when talking about iPhone sales numbers before he started off with his iPhone 6S announcement. That is something that was unthinkable in the Jobs era.