What the Beats Deal Says About Apple: It Loves Tastemakers

If Silicon Valley is known, in the popular imagination, as a place bent on replacing human judgment with algorithmic efficiency, Apple wants to hold itself up as the one tech company that stands proudly against that trend. The firm has long played up personal dimension of tech. But the Beats deal, as well as several recent hires from the realms of luxury fashion and design, point to the firm’s growing interest in human curation and, especially, culturally-savvy expertise. Apple is doubling down on tastemakers.

In addition to Dr. Dre and Mr. Iovine, the firm recently hired Angela Ahrendts, the former chief executive of Burberry, to head up its retail division. Last year it hired Paul Deneve, who used to run the fashion house Yves Saint Laurent, to work on unspecified special projects at the firm. It also scooped up Ben Shaffer, who led the team that designed Nike’s innovative Flyknit running shoe. And at the top of this pyramid sits Jonathan Ive, Apple’s celebrated design chief, who now oversees both hardware and software design across the firm’s product line-up.

One interpretation of Apple’s growing attachment to high-culture is that we’re witnesses an inevitable reinvention, the first clear signs of what the company might become after the death of Steve Jobs. Ben Thompson, who writes the tech analysis site Stratechery, recently argued that the Beats deal suggested that Apple was transforming into a fashion house itself — a firm that “seeks to transcend computing, demoting technology to an essential ingredient of an aspirational brand that identifies its users as the truly with it.”

Mr. Thompson argued that the marketing shift could prove financially savvy in Asian markets, the most important areas for Apple’s long-term growth, where fashion brands are coveted and command premium prices. In an increasingly cut-throat tech business, where every technical innovation quickly becomes a cheap commodity, Apple’s emphasis on design, luxury and the perception that its services are meticulously curated by cultural experts might prove more lasting.

On the other hand, there is a more practical explanation for Apple’s interest in grabbing up a stable of cultural tastemakers: It takes all these people to replace Mr. Jobs.

In the past, Mr. Jobs stood as Apple’s sole authority on taste, the perfectionist who obsessed over every color and every material in every product, and whose interests ranged across cultural categories, from industrial design to music to retail. His decisions weren’t always right — he was initially opposed to third-party apps on the iPhone, among other errors — but the perception that he’d personally shaped customers’ devices was, at the very least, a handy marketing tool for Apple. Technology is complicated, and in a crowded market, every Apple product stood out with an implicit guarantee. Mr. Jobs, a tastemaker like no other, had taken care of all the hard work. Now you just had to use it.

In picking up gurus from fashion and music, and by emphasizing Apple’s commitment to human curation over algorithmic decision-making, Mr. Cook may be aiming to optimize what has always been Apple’s core strength, and what it lost when Mr. Jobs died: Human perspective and taste. Jony Ive, Angela Ahrendts, Paul Deneve, Ben Shaffer, Dr. Dre, and Jimmy Iovine — think of them as Apple’s Jobs Team