iPad’s growth last quarter was so slow with only 9% revenue growth year over year. Dediu speculated that this might because anticipation of new product. I’m sure next quarter they going to have a record breaking iPad sales though.
The iPod sales is declining as it has always been for the past many quarters. It’s amazing how much effort Apple put into product line that’s declining this quickly with the iPod refresh last month.
A few days ago Apple announced new Macbook Pro, iMac, Mac Mini, iPad, and iPad Mini. This is one of the biggest Apple event this year.
The launch of the iPad mini is a lot like a deja vu to the iPod mini launch in 2004. Remember what happened? Apple announced 4GB iPod mini at $249, while the regular 15GB iPod was selling for $299. A mere $50 difference. Yet a lot of people bought the iPod mini, it went to be one of the best selling iPods of all time.
Why did this phenomenon happen? Why did people pay for iPod Mini that’s only $50 less than the iPod that has more than twice the storage? Part of this lies on the fact that many people’s need is not as demanding as the geeks. Not that many people have 15GB of music. As for the iPad mini case not many people want to pay for the retina display or the faster chip, simply because they don’t see that much value on those features. Secondly, there’s a bunch of people who just always think any technology is too expensive for them, until it hits a price point. Then everything that’s more expensive after that will not be too expensive anymore. One of the examples of this is when people started buying PCs for every home in the 90s. It was previously a really expensive piece of technology. This is what the iPad mini aims to be, the tablet for everyone.
So why doesn’t Apple compete with Amazon’s Kindle Fire or Google’s Nexus 7 pricing? Felix Salmon from Reuters summarised this nicely:
Apple, famously, has the same pricing philosophy as Louis Vuitton: it sells premium products at premium prices, and it never discounts. That philosophy has made it an aspirational brand worldwide: you don’t see vendors in China selling fake Google Nexus 7s. Sometimes, as with the iPhone and iPad, the world beats a path to the company’s door in any case. Other times, as in the case of wireless routers or external displays, Apple’s products are so much more expensive than the competition that only the rich Apple faithful tend to buy them. But that uncompromising devotion to the fundamental philosophy is what has made Apple such a powerful global brand.
Simply put, they don’t need to. They’re not in the same game. They’re not in the game of race to the bottom. Remember: iPods has never been the cheapest MP3 player, and yet it still retains 70% of the MP3 market share until today. Apple don’t care about the other 30% of the MP3 player users who just wouldn’t buy anything but the cheapest one. iPad mini might just be the product that will let Apple retain the tablet market share for the years ahead.
Some people who just bought third generation iPad were really upset after the announcement. Only 7 months after the launch of the iPad 3, Apple launched the new iPad 41, breaking their 1 year cycle tradition. The third generation iPad is a great device. It still is today. It’s worth thinking about why Apple released a new iPad just 7 months after the launch of iPad 3.
Firstly, the iPad release cycle has never been a great fit for the holiday season. Spring release made the iPad an unlikely holiday present choice for some people. iPods has always been released in the autumn, just before the holiday season. iPhone has usually been released in WWDC in June, but for the past two years it has been moved to the autumn as well. So if they want to move the schedule over to autumn release, it came down to two choices:
Had they chosen the second option, iPad 3 would be the longest lived iOS device. The longest lived iOS device so far is iPhone 4 with 16 months lifetime before iPhone 4S was announced. I bet this wasn’t an ideal situation for Apple. After about a year, the iPhone 4 hardware was sorely outdated among competitors. It still sold really well, but who knows how much more iPhone 4S could Apple have sold if it had been announced a few months earlier.
But here’s another thought: what if the iPad is now going to be announced every 6 months? If that was the case, then Apple did not intend to piss of every iPad 3 owners, but they were simply speeding up their hardware development. But I digressed. Apple has never been a company that releases a product that quickly. I’m sure the iPad 3 short lifetime is a very special case.
Hardware wise it’s quite a significant upgrade, but not one that should make iPad 3 owners want one. If A6X’s architecture is similar to the A6 architecture, it should be really fast. The cellular version of iPad 3 was certainly in a weird position that it doesn’t work in quite as many places as iPhone 5’s LTE. In Australia iPad 3 works with Telstra’s HSDPA network, but it certainly isn’t as fast as LTE. Another interesting tidbit is the iPad 4 does not use nano sim, like the iPhone 5 and iPad mini. I have no idea why they didn’t do that, but my guess is they were rushing it a bit. I was hoping that they’d made the iPad even thinner, but perhaps it will happen next time.
The new iMac is so beautiful. It’s so thin. The new Macbook Pro also looks gorgeous. Performance bump for Mac Mini is always welcome. Fusion drive for both Mac Mini and iMac looks like a really interesting combination. Mac Pro is still a sitting duck on a shelf.
One of the things that I notice in the new iMac is that it finally loses the optical drive. This is the second desktop Mac without optical drive, after Mac Mini lost it some time ago. My bet is when the Mac Pro is updated next year, it won’t lose the optical drive. Mac Pro has always been the longest inheritor of the legacy technologies, because some people still need it and some people buy Mac Pro for that very reason. But I might be wrong. Apple seems to be touting the Super Drive when they introduced the iMac,
So there’s only two Macs that ships with an optical drive now: non retina Macbook Pro and Mac Pro. My guess is that Apple keeps the old Macbook Pro around to fill the price gap between Macbook Air and Macbook Pro with retina display. Once the retina display laptops can hit low enough price point, Apple will probably stop selling non retina display Macbook Pros.
Also, now that iMac has been updated, I wonder if Apple is going to release a new Thunderbolt display. The last time Apple updated their display was on September 2011. I wouldn’t imagine them releasing a new one this year, but when they do it will probably adopt some of the iMac’s design.
Now we see why the last iPad was called The New iPad instead of iPad 3. ↩
A really good iPod ad from Apple. Much better than their other weird Siri ads.
Exactly one year ago, Steve Jobs passed away.
He was a visionary. He made a dent in the universe. He was an inspiration for me. He was an inspiration for many of us.
John Gruber’s piece last year is one of the most beautiful tributes that I’ve read:
Late last night, long hours after the news broke that he was gone, my thoughts returned to those grass stains on his shoes back in June. I realize only now why they caught my eye. Those grass stained sneakers were the product of limited time, well spent. And so the story I’ve told myself is this:
I like to think that in the run-up to his final keynote, Steve made time for a long, peaceful walk. Somewhere beautiful, where there are no footpaths and the grass grows thick. Hand-in-hand with his wife and family, the sun warm on their backs, smiles on their faces, love in their hearts, at peace with their fate.
We still miss you a lot, Steve.
Almost one year passed, and we all still miss him so much.
I’ve never like the back of iPhone 5 that much. I like the aluminum back, but I kept thinking why Apple didn’t make the back all aluminum. Why is it sandwiched by two small pieces of glass on the top and bottom?
After listening to Hypercritical last week, I now understand why Apple didn’t make the back all aluminum. Here’s a comparison of the back of the original iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 4, and iPhone 5:
Notice that the only iPhone that had an aluminum back before the iPhone 5 is the original iPhone. It doesn’t have an all aluminum back either. It has plastic on the bottom part. John Siracusa believed that this is because aluminum, unlike plastics or glasses, isn’t a good cellular signals conductor.
Similarly on iPads with cellular, there has always been a plastic bar on the top of the back of the iPad. Persumably this is to enable the iPad to receive the 3G signal, because the bar isn’t existent in the WiFi only iPad. What bothers me with this theory is that the iPod touch has a plastic spot on the back as well even though it does not need to receive 3G signals. I speculate that WiFi signals need to travel too, and in iPads it can travel through other parts like the bezel.
Aesthetically, iPhone 4’s back is still my favourite. I know it’s the most fragile one, but I still think it’s the most beautiful one. One would wonder if Apple will ever figure out how to make an iPhone with all aluminum back. It would probably look like iPod nano’s back. Obviously Apple likes the all aluminum back too, otherwise why would they always use the WiFi iPad in all their ads?
Tim Cook:
At Apple, we strive to make world-class products that deliver the best experience possible to our customers. With the launch of our new Maps last week, we fell short on this commitment. We are extremely sorry for the frustration this has caused our customers and we are doing everything we can to make Maps better.
If anyone thinks that Apple is changing, they’re not. They always apologise when they screw up really bad, and that’s good. It has happened twice in the past few years.
My friend Ronald Suwandi found out that Apple now says that Photo Stream uploads is now unlimited. This is so incredibly generous of Apple. I’m not sure if this means that the number of pictures stored in the iOS device is still limited to 1000, but it certainly means we can share unlimited amount of photos in shared Photo Stream.
In my Mountain Lion review:
I do have a theory on why Apple is not allowing this the users to have bigger storage in Photo Stream. I think if they let us buy more storage in Photo Stream, people with DSLR cameras who’ve just imported pictures to iPhoto will suddenly lost a lot of space in their iOS devices. While Macs can hold many gigabytes of photos, many iOS devices can only hold 16GB of storage.
Maybe I’m wrong. They might’ve found a way to get around this problem.
(Via Ronald Suwandi)
Curious Rat:
Nothing Apple announced last week was “boring.” What was announced was stable, cohesive, well-designed, beautiful, iterative, and on many levels, innovative, but not “boring.” What are boring are the proclamations from the bloggers on high who expect Apple to reinvent the wheel every year, when the majority of users don’t want to learn a new UI or button configuration with the arrival of a new moon. Apple shatters expectations when it enters a market, not when it’s already entrenched in one.
So true.
It seems like Australian iPhone owners will get turn by turn navigation, Siri local search, restaurant reviews, and many more. There are still many other US only features though.
AnandTech published a piece earlier about his analysis of Apple’s A6 SoC. If you’re technically savvy this is quite an interesting read.
Gigahertz in computing is to Megapixels in digital cameras. Anyone can make one with the same number, but they really don’t tell much and it has become a popular marketing tool. As noted in the piece:
Remember that in 2005 Intel hit 3.73GHz with the Pentium Extreme Edition. Seven years later Intel’s fastest client CPU only runs at 3.5GHz (3.9GHz with turbo) but has four times the cores and up to 3x the single threaded performance. Architecture, not just frequency, must improve over time.
It seems like Apple’s A6 chip is hitting the perfect balance between performance and battery efficiency. We won’t know for sure until next week, but it’s really interesting they custom engineer up to this very bit of the iPhone.
He looks so young.
Somehow that reminds me of this. Oh wait, that’s also an HP product.
Macrumors posted a really nice video of a hypothetical 4” iPhone. One thing that they didn’t show is the landscape keyboard. That might look a little bit awkward with the screen ratio.
Apple PR:
Apple today announced that Craig Federighi, Apple’s vice president of Mac Software Engineering, and Dan Riccio, Apple’s vice president of Hardware Engineering, have been promoted to senior vice presidents. Federighi and Riccio will report to Apple CEO Tim Cook and serve on Apple’s executive management team.
Apple also announced that Bob Mansfield, who announced his retirement in June, will remain at Apple. Mansfield will work on future products, reporting to Tim Cook.
Glad to hear all those good news. Great to hear Mansfield decided to keep working, not that retirement is a bad idea.
Gruber adds:
Apple now has their executives (after Tim Cook) listed in alphabetical order.
