I'm the last guy to write apple off. I think they've evolved an environment that allows them to be surprisingly agile for such a large organization. But I think for the next little while at least, the money in tech will be recurrents. Remember back when a stolen copy of Creative Suite was pretty much de rigeur? And it went along with your stolen copy of Office? Both of those are now on a recurrent monthly charge, and the people who used to steal them hand over fist are now paying a monthly rate. When freakin' Avid decides that recurrent is the way to structure you know there's gold in them thar hills. And Apple has nothing that interests people on a monthly basis. I got out of the iPhone ecosystem 'cuz I couldn't stomach a thousand dollar phone. My wife is still rockin' a 5S and will be until it won't power up any longer. The article talks about "gotchaware" basically, where Apple needs to figure out new ways to trick people into upgrading into later and later versions of iOS, not because there are compelling reasons but because otherwise Apple can't sell phones. And with Google, Yahoo and Amazon all sucking your photos up to the cloud for free, you don't need a 128GB iPhone anymore. Are people really going to pay for whatever they're calling Beats? When Google Music is free? Not to mention Spotify, Last.fm and all the rest? My phone shoots 4k video at 60 frames/second. It's got an HD display. It's got 64GB of storage. And it cost me $350. People are paying for Apple's margins but I mean, I've got a half-dozen Apple computers in this house and I had my last straw. How long can Apple keep banking on the App gravy train?
I would love Apple to find a niche in a high end personal privacy data solutions. Google already winning the personal information war through searches alone, which speak nothing of photos and emails and documents and whatever else they keep safe for you. Apple still has some ground on the "everything just works" aspect. If they could use that to make a personal cloud that never talked to apple servers and ran my personal needs, like home automation, personal storage and access to files from anywhere, they could continue to pump out hardware and create a much larger app ecosystem. Plus they could make personal privacy cool.
Don't worry, I'm not confusing what I want to happen with what will happen. I would still like it though.
Yea, my issue is that all the products that came after the iPhone were all simply extensions of the iPhone in design. The iPod's, iPad's, and apple watch were all centered around the iPhone. Apple hasn't really made any real strides technologically since the iPhone.
The technological strides are quite significant. Conceptually though you are absolutely correct, the iPhone concept is Apple's current hammer. I'm just surprised at how effective it's been. For example, they successfully bludgened the netbook market with the iPad even though people clearly prefer a keyboard in front of their 10" screen... even when it is an iPad. I suppose the concept is flexible enough for people to make it work even wjen it's not ideal for the job. It remains to be seen if they can keep up in wearable computing with that attitude.
That was my point. Jobs refused to make one though and up until the iPad Apple insisted that an iPod touch was a much better device for the niche. They found their hammer with the touch screen rectangle and so far things have been similar enough to nails for it to work.