- Last Friday, Apple’s iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c went on sale. The company sold nine million of them in the first weekend, breaking the five-million-phone record it set last year with the iPhone 5. I sort of thought that was clearly good news for Apple and the iPhone. Or at least not, you know, worrisome news.
Then I read a piece by Sandy Cannold at ABCNews.com (which I found via MG Siegler’s ParisLemon). Cannold says that the new iPhones selling so well and generating so much hoopla is potentially alarming:
To me though, all this over-the-top fanfare and even the record-breaking first weekend of sales could actually be cause for concern. Now before Apple lovers pillory me and say that I have no idea what I am talking about, hear me out. I fully concede that Apple is going to make billions in profit from the sale of these new devices and the company is in no danger of becoming Blackberry or Nokia. But the reason I am voicing a bit of doubt is that it seems like Apple is now trying to squeeze every last bit of profit it can out of an aging, shall we call it, iStone.
I still think Apple was more innovative under Jobs' reign. The author of this article wants us to look 'at the numbers' but only counts to six. Wasn't Tiger / Leopard a huge step forward? The white and aluminium iMacs, being the most important iMacs for the masses and thus for Apple? Just to name a few. Apple has always been incrementally upgrading their devices. When they launch a new product in a new market, they try different ideas out and if it sticks, they turn to incremental upgrades. It just seems like they don't launch new products anymore, and that their incrementally updated devices like the iPhone have reached a point of saturation. If we can learn any lesson from the product life cycle, it's that products need to innovate, as it pushes them back from saturation / maturity to a state in which growth is still possible. I have no doubt that the new iPhone and the next one will sell good, but it looks like we've come at a point at which the company's growth starts to decrease. I don't see Apple revolutionizing markets anytime soon, which means that pretty soon all the products will have such minor upgrades that it doens't matter to buy new ones. iMacs, iPads and iPhones will only get a bit thinner and faster. Where is the Apple that surprised me?