Apple’s Minimum Viable Product

I always hate when designers talk about how Steve Jobs is so amazing and how he’d never settle for anything but the best, blah blah blah. Yes, that’s true, but they’ve been a public company since 1980, they’ve had billions of dollars and 1000s of amazingly talented people on their team.

Before the IPO, at the very beginning when it was just the founders, their first product was the following:

The Apple I, Apple’s first product, was sold as an assembled circuit board and lacked basic features such as a keyboard, monitor, and case. The owner of this unit added a keyboard and a wooden case.

It was a motherboard. Not even a computer- just a motherboard.

I think it’s important to remember when we’re all trying to start something from scratch that you have to start at zero, and the first product will probably suck. It’ll be a motherboard, when what you really wanted to build was an all-aluminum Macbook Air with a Retina display.

But you gotta start somewhere.

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http://twitter.com/smit1293 Smit Patel

This is great short post. People spend months building the product only to realize that its useless. This shows that quick and dirty MVP’s are the best way to test your product because if people want this version, then the better one will be a hit.
http://twitter.com/rodedwards rodedwards

Let me offer a counter-thought: MVPs are good for testing out markets where there aren’t successful incumbents.
pdobson

This might sound a little crazy, but it’s still a beautiful motherboard. Look how aligned all the chips are, in a perfect grid layout.

Sure, the couldn’t afford a brushed aluminum case yet, but what they decided to execute on, they executed extremely well on.

Don’t let your MVP suck for lack of execution, make sure it sucks for lack of features.
Jeremy Williams

I hadn’t thought about that, but you are right, it really is a work of art, and I’m sure Woz took much pride in that :)
http://twitter.com/Rawporter Rawporter

This is awesome. Resembles the MVP we launched late November!
http://twitter.com/sisilmehta sisil mehta

Could the ckt board have been smaller and hence cheaper if it was conveniently arranged rather than beautifully ? The beauty of the board doesn’t provide functionality and hence is immaterial.
http://twitter.com/jonwhite123 Jon White

Apple / Jobs understood what was critical and what was not. The first ipod was OSX only and required firewire. Another example….
http://petegrif.tumblr.com/ Pete Griffiths

Nice :)
http://hegranes.com/ jonathan hegranes

Jobs had to learn what was critical. During his early days at Apple his projects went over budget and were late. This continued at Next. He was awful at this initially.

It was only late in his career that he learned to make the necessary trade-offs that kept the product true to its essence, but with necessary engineering, features, etc. trade-offs.
http://twitter.com/le_isms Le Zhang

You hit the nail on the head –it’s probably not a good idea to compare yourself to a company like Apple when you don’t have the resources of Apple. You need to make the best of what you have.
http://andrewchenblog.com Andrew Chen

I think the notion of “viable” just changes a lot. If your market has lots of incumbents, then you have more featureset and expectations to match than relatively early/new markets.
http://twitter.com/luciamanescau Lucía Manescau

The beauty of that product is not physical, is the difference. How many motherboards like that were made when jobs and wozniak build it? For us something like that isn’t important, but we musn’t forgot the perspective of the time and the innovation. When they build the Apple I nothing like that exists, neither a motherboard like this one, so definitly, on that moment, that product doesn’t suck but was great.
http://geekfun.com/ Erik S.

You can still compete with non-consumption in established markets. In fact, you pretty much have to, because an upstart is never going to compete with a successful incumbent on features unless they have massive resources or the incumbent has a mortal wound.
http://giffconstable.com giffc

Amen
http://blog.databigbang.com Sebastian Wain

I don’t think it was a minimum viable product.

An MVP at that time will be something like the Altair instead of a computer that connects with the TV and using a keyboard. Also the Apple I has the BASIC programming language. Assembler or Machine Code will be choosen for an MVP.
http://andrewchenblog.com Andrew Chen

Isn’t it obvious that they could have supplied casing? And supplied a keyboard, monitor, and other components of their choosing as well? Yes, the standards for a “complete” product were lower back then, yet it’s still obvious they could have done even more. And soon they did, with the Apple II.
http://andrewchenblog.com Andrew Chen

You built a motherboard?
http://blog.databigbang.com Sebastian Wain

The perceived value was so high that casing, keyboard, and monitor where not necessary. They don’t prevent any hobbyist to run for purchasing the Apple I. So I think it is more about value. I don’t think that current startups MVPs passes this value threshold. Google didn’t make me change instantaneously from Altavista because they didn’t have a “NEAR operator” and I need that for the 90s search queries.

Mainly thinking in the “electronic kits era”. This Apple I was a revolution for hobbyists. They wanted to sell “electronic kits” at one point. I can personally feel the emotions of that era. A few leds in the Altair where enough to trigger all kind of sensations.

I think that now we can now talk about MVP because we have more and cheaper signals (e.g: analytics) in the startup phase.
http://andrewchenblog.com Andrew Chen

I think your phrase here says it all: “The perceived value was so high that casing, keyboard, and monitor where not necessary.”

That’s a good definition of an MVP- build something of such great value that you don’t have to do the extraneous and unnecessary parts. By that definition, the Apple I was clearly an MVP because there were clear things they *could* have added, but like you said, it was unnecessary.
http://twitter.com/andyidsinga andyidsinga

Funny – I’m watching Triumph of the Nerds (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFL9IyJ_qHk) this very moment ..and saw your post :)
http://twitter.com/Praveensss Praveen S

Absolutely spot on there.
http://twitter.com/ankurdinesh Ankur Sharma

It’s a profound short post. I believe it doesn’t just apply in the case of start-ups but also in the case of large organizations, where shipping projects can be nightmare. Shipping prototypes in the form of MVPs can be path breaking and would make sure that it tests the viability of the idea before they go all hog. Success of prototype, will also make sure that prototype builders have something to show to for a result in the Organization.
pdobson

The board was already the cheapest of its kind at the time. Wozniak was obsessed with making his boards as small and efficient as possible – he was the first person in the world to experience personal computing.

And everyone who owns a computer should be happy that Apple didn’t agree with your idea that the beauty of a product is immaterial. All of our computers would likely be in ugly steel cases that look more like toasters than the molded plastic cases that Apple introduced with the Apple II.
http://twitter.com/grinkot Boris Grinkot

While I definitely agree that Apple’s success is constantly misinterpreted by designers and entrepreneurs (especially to say that they should be able to dictate what customers want — just like Steve Jobs!), I wonder if calling this particular product an MVP is a stretch to retro-fit Lean Startup lingo.

An MVP is an experiment, not just anything that looks rudimentary. This circuit board may seem “minimal” to us in 2012, but based on the information above (I am open to being proven wrong with additional historical info), it was really just what their customer had ordered.

Apple wasn’t testing a need. They were just producing a product that was as full-featured as the market required at the time.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1101148 Camilo Acosta

The grid layout was Jobs idea, if I remember correctly from the book, so that it would look beautiful inside.
http://www.facebook.com/norberto.bezi Norberto C. Bezi

I think while woz was working on Apple I the lean revolution was at full speed around Toyota. If you are looking for early adopters you are looking in the wrong country and the wrong time.

@andrewchen