> If you look at Apple's trajectory over the last 15 years, you can see the vision was consistently outlined from the very beginning—the Digital Hub strategy (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9046oXrm7f8).
That's not really the case though. As Jobs outlined it in that video, the Digital Hub strategy was to sell Macintoshes by positioning them as something you could dock your consumer-electronics gadgets, mostly from third parties, into. It was a plan to sell hubs, not spokes. This strategy had limited viability for Apple, because a typical consumer wasn't likely to think "I've just bought this $500 camcorder, so now I need to spend twice that or more on a Mac in order to offload and edit the video". If they were going to use any computer as the digital hub for their camcorder, it was probably going to be their Windows PC. That's probably why iTunes for Windows was such a difficult and long-drawn-out decision for Jobs: because it was a decision to mostly abandon the Digital Hub approach in favour of selling more of the spokes. Then Apple's slow and initially reluctant embrace of the "post-PC era" with over-the-air iDevice updates and cloud storage to partly displace iTunes means that it's increasingly taking nearly the opposite of Jobs' 2001 stance: "We're clearly migrating away from the PC as the centrepiece" and "We don't think of it in terms of the PC business anymore" are things that Tim Cook could say today without really startling anyone.