Apple Hires Away TAG Heuer's VP of Global Sales 67
An anonymous reader writes With Apple rumored to be entering the wearables market this Fall, the company's string of notable hires continues. CNBC is reporting today that Apple recently poached Patrick Pruniaux away from TAG Heuer where he served as the company's VP of global sales for the past five years. TAG Heuer, in case you're unfamiliar, is a Swiss-based manufacturer of luxury watches. Word of the Pruniaux hire comes just shortly after it was discovered that Apple hired the lead software engineer away from Atlas Wearables, a company working on a fitness tracker capable of measuring a plethora of exercise related data.
Re:What's next (Score:3, Insightful)
> Their pricing is incompatible with all but a handful of wealthy nations,...
You clearly haven't priced Lenovo X0 Carbons or Toshiba Kiras. Apple is hardly alone in offering high quality products. And the beauty of it is, nobody is twisting anyone's arm to buy them. Yet they still fly off the shelves faster than X0 Carbons or Kiras.
> They make high quality, beautifully designed, well thought out products that include ...
> luxury differentiators that are unnecessary for most users' needs. Billeted unibody
> aluminum cases in a world of plastic.
Unnecessary for most users' needs? According to whom? I guess you've never had to lug one of those five pound plastic commodity pieces of crap all day. A two pound Macbook Air is a delight by comparison. (yeah, yeah, I also backpack and carry a 50+ lb backpack up to 12,000+ feet. Apples and oranges, no comparison.)
> "Sapphire display glass." A Red Herring. The Corning "Gorilla Glass" product currently
> available is incredibly scratch resistant and costs 1/10th the price.
My scratched iPhone4 glass says different – mine's pretty beat up; probably because I don't have my phone entombed in a slab of plastic. I want my slim little phone to slip into my pocket and not look like I'm walking around happy to have seen a hot chick. Sapphire isn't new – even cheap watches have had sapphire crystals since I was a kid, over forty years ago.
I dunno, you kinda sound angry, as if you can't afford one, so you have to berate them. Or you could save up a little longer until you can afford one. I can almost guarantee you'll be glad you did.
Re:What's next (Score:5, Insightful)
And, Apple makes virtually nothing themselves - they design, and use a slew of Asian contract manufacturers to build their products - making them something of an analogue for European high fashion clothing brands.
This is silly.....every computer company does this. The surprising thing with Apple is how much they actually design themselves, compared to, say, Dell.
Re:What's next (Score:2, Insightful)
Their market share is very, very small.
What Apple has the sense to realise is that it's profit share that matters, not market share.
As regards the brand thing, a brand is a promise of quality. And so you only get to be a premium brand by delivering premium quality. Marketing and expensive prices alone don't cut it for long.