Apple Competitive Advantage

Apple enjoyed the first move advantage with its introduction of first affordable computer, the Macintosh, and being at the top of the computing market for a period of time with the development of Apple Desktop, Macbook Air, Macbook Pro, etc. Apple’s competitive advantages are its innovation, ease of use, design elegance and customer’s loyalty which allowed apple to sell its products at a premium price. But its competitive advantage couldn’t maintain after formation of new companies, like IBM, Dell, and HP. Apple's market share is decreasing while others are increasing. Apple failed to compete with these new initiatives and fell behind.

To support a sustainable competitive advantage, the competitive advantages must be valuable, rare, costly to imitate and nonsubstitutable. For valuable, one of the values that apple provided to customers must be its integrated user-interface of its computers. However, with the development of technology, such as Microsoft, it developed Window 8 operating system which is also user-friendly and common to use by customers. The value of Apple perceived by customers is no longer unique and its competitors can also provide similar value.

For rare, it has a unique and separated operating system. However, under its unique operating system, some software cannot suit it and hence cannot run. Some customers complained that they get "this software cannot be installed on this computer" error. Therefore, the rareness of its operating system created some problems and weakened this competitive advantage.

For costly to imitate, one of the competitive advantage is its unique design. It is simple and light which makes it special. However, with the development of technology, the design is easy to copy which is not costly. For example, HP's Envy Spectre XT Ultrabook has a similar design with Macbook. We can see that many computer competitors tried to use similar design.

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