Just a touchpad and a screen: A grand unified theory of Apple’s next big move

Just a touchpad and a screen: A grand unified theory of Apple’s next big move » VentureBeat:


Ever since Apple’s chief financial officer, Peter Oppenheimer, referred to a “future product transition” during the company’s most recent earnings call, the tech news world has been abuzz.

For what it’s worth, I think the blogs and fanboys are blowing this way out of proportion with what the reality is going to be — and then (as usual) will blame Apple for it not being as absolutely gosh-wow as they dreamed it might be.

I’m still convinced reality is more evolutionary than revolutionary. First, Steve generally schedules his revolutions in January and at WWDC when he can take the stage and really give the hype machine a push. Moving into the holiday season, it’s more about focus on how to sell zillions of things for christmas, and things requiring lots of explanation and long-selling times simply don’t fit.

What Oppenheimer said fits new price/performance models just as easily as it does a tablet PC — and bluntly, you’ll sell many zillions more of things if you tweak the margins down a couple of points than if you introduce some really nifty gosh-wow piece of the future that people won’t really understand why they will want one for three months when the advertising and marketing materials and early adopters explain why this is gosh-wow.

So you’re a lot more likely to see revamps of existing products at new, lower price/performance points with reduced margins than you are things that’ll make the fanboys drool and stand in line for a week to be first to get one. And, of course, when that happens, the fanboys (and the analysts that depend on apple hype to actually see their name sin newspapers twice a year) will blame Apple for not coming through with something it hasn’t actually been promising… Again.

Just sayin….

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