I wonder if they are releasing too fast with the iPad - with a mobile phone an annual release cycle makes sense as that market changes so fast and they are subsidised for a lot of people.
However the iPad is pretty billed as the future computer replacement. I don't think a new version every year will sell as well.
It's a computer too, so billing it as a computer replacement is fuzzy thinking at best. I note that I cannot recall anyone at Apple saying this.
According to Fortune, either Cook, Oppenheimer or Cue said this "Capitalizing on the "explosive" demand for the iPad, believing that tablets could end up being a bigger market than PCs. (If this is so, Sacconaghi calculates that the iPad could eventually be a $60 billion to $100 billion business for Apple.)"
That doesn't mean that PCs will go away, at $500 for the average (future!) price of a PC that still leaves room for 100 million PCs to be sold each year, which is still a lot of PCs. It also doesn't say at what point in the distant future this might occur.
On the other hand, if it is some breathless pundit speculating hard (as they are wont to do) who claims that the iPad is a future computer replacement, I take it with exactly the same seriousness as I do all their other breathless pronouncements about the 101 iPod/iPad/iPhone killers that are announced each week, which is to say I don't take it seriously at all.
None of the tech pundits can predict the future worth a damn. They've proved this time and time again. Gruber has a running joke with claim-chowder (a play on words for clam chowder), where he takes the stupid things people said in the past and calls them to task for it.
Let me replace the word computer for desktop/laptop if that helps you understand my point.
Don't get me wrong; I think there will still be developers using a laptop/desktop - I can't imagine trying to develop using an iPad. However for the average user do they really have the need of a desktop/laptop? For most people I would say no and ultimately it makes their lives easier.
I'll see if I can find the article where Jobs was saying that basically he saw the way computers [read desktops/laptops] are now as a dying market and the iPad/mobile market was the future. Maybe my statement was pushing it too much but the way I read it I think not.
Anyways my main point was that I just wonder if they are trying to push the iPad cycle too fast. Where in the subsidised mobile space it makes sense; will it make sense for tablets to be changing every 6-12 months?
used to be quite good, doesn't seem to be working at the moment. It shows the time between each revision, and when it was working clearly showed that sometimes there were only a couple of months between revisions, and sometimes there was a couple of years between revisions (the 30 inch monitor springs to mind).
Most Apple products were completely unpredictable in this regard. You could perhaps argue that the release of new computers or laptops was tied to intel's cpu release cycle, which while still appearing pseudo-random in terms of when Apple does their refresh, at least gives it some sane causal tie to the real world.
Oh, it seems to have loaded. So okay, right off the top we can see the iPod classic has in the past had refreshes as little as four and five months apart, and then 4 years (2006-09) where the new models came out in September each year.
Note that with Apple sometimes what counts as a 'new model' is really minor, even just something as small as a price drop.
iPod Touch, same thing, releases in September. Nano, September.
Shuffle, updated twice a year during 2006-09 period, only updated once last year.
Mac mini, updated twice in 2009, and not at all in 2008.
Since 2003 there have only been 4 years with a single iMac update, all the rest had two or more (2003 had 3!). So 13 updates in 8 years.
Mac Pro, only updated once a year since 2003 (2003 seem like a year where Apple pushed out a lot of refreshes).
MacBook, twice a year every year except 2005 and 2010, so 9 updates every 5 years.
MacBook Pro, multiple updates in a year not uncommon, 3 updates in 2006.
MacBook Air, once a year.
The first three iPhone updates were all 5 months apart (!!!)
The slowest updating ones of that lot mini, air and Mac Pro all feel (to me) like they update really slowly. Maybe the Pro will pick up with the switch to consumer chips instead of the server Xeons. In an industry with Moore's law (price per transistor halving every 18 months) running rampant back in the 2000s yearly or year and a half updates feel very slow.
The average Apple (hardware) product (including taking all the slowpokes into account) updates every 0.700205338809035 of a year. Call it eight and a half months.
So if they release a new iPad in March, seeing another one in November (just in time for Xmas! Funny that) would not be at all unreasonable.
