Quote:
Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward
I going to stick my oar in...(I haven't had enough rocks thrown at me lately...)
Apple's talent has always been at taken an exist product/niche, which was relatively small, and with relatively clunky products, and creating an elegant, smooth product/interface for it. And charging a premium price for the resulting product.
It usually took years for competition to create a similar product, and reduce Apple's product to a niche product among the cognoscenti. It has happened over and over. (The only product where Apple maintained a major lead is the iPod, due to being there "fustest with the mostest" with iTunes. But even there, the competition offered a compelling price/performance ratio.)
So the real question about Apple's current lack of product is...what is out there that needs a "spiffing up" to become a mainstream product? The only thing I can think of would be a streaming media player (a spiffed up Roku) But is the marketplace going to pay, say $400, for a replacement of a product that costs $80-$100 currently? Or is there some other product you can think of to be "spiffed up"? That's Apple's future. And it has been since 1982...
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Very good points.
Apple's thing these past 10 or so years has been to take a so so product and reinvent it.
iPod from the old mp3 players. (I had a mp3 player with 32 MB of memory and earphones. I would download songs, use a program to compress the songs and try to get as many as I could on my device. There was no selector dial and certainly no display. 16 songs was my usual limit.)
iPhone from PDAs, and simple feature clamshell and brick phones. ( I had both.)
iPad from a failed MS tablet
They are trying with TVs as I mentioned earlier, but like watches, and other wearable devices there hasn't been any signs of a "breakthrough" that would wow even the Apple faithful. (After all most are spending all their spare money on iPhones and iPads.)