Take pre-orders a few weeks in advance, then everyone can have it day 1. No scalpers reselling them on eBay for 10 times the cost. No stampede at Apple stores because they already have a few weeks of inventory.
The accelerated product cycle is why you have awful launches like consoles. The product is barely finished and rushed into production in time for Christmas. There's not time to build the actual units. Slow down a bit and you can solve that problem.
Inventory in a warehouse does not have the kind of cost you think it does. Most of the "cost" people talk about are hypothetical profits that a different product occupying that space might generate in the same time. The real costs are insurance and warehouse leases. Per unit, it's almost nothing.
A company like Apple could easily stockpile months worth of inventory and never even notice the real physical cost of storing it.
Opportunity costs, or any other "virtual" cost, are still meaningful figures.
They sorta do a tick-tock cycle now, generally, its form factors on the 'tick', and significant hardware refresh on the 'tock'
Well, not Macs. They've never managed to settle into any kind of consistent upgrade cycle there. In the past I guess they could blame Intel somehow, but they're not even releasing an M2 iMac at all.
It was fairly easy. Intel's released products often would not meet original spec, or once it was throttled to fit into spec it didn't have significant performance gains over the prior generation. Often they would go generations without the performance warranting the increased part cost.
> They've never managed to settle into any kind of consistent upgrade cycle there
They would like an annual incremental upgrade cycle and a five year design cycle.
Even without Intel, they still have supply chain constraints. For instance, even with their own silicon, they are relying on TSMC to be able to meet process and production volume targets.
Releasing chips on a new process will likely lead to really odd effects due to yield issues - for instance, having a new CPU show up first in products with lower sales volume. That includes tiering, either with things like a regular vs "pro" phone, or retaining the older model of computer while charging more for the newer version.
Right now they appear to be on an 18 month cycle for Apple silicon, which is driving their new hardware (either with a new machine serving as the launch platform of some new SoC, or a design revamp of a machine based on existing SoC).
Humorously, the only product which has had an incremental update so far is the MacBook Pro 13".
I suspect they'll eventually have a two or three year "architecture" tick for their Mac and iPad SoCs. Depending on those architectures and the upstream changes at TSMC, there might be a lot of different SoCs released against that tick.
> but they're not even releasing an M2 iMac at all.
I'd be really shocked if they don't release a M2 iMac, most likely in March.
I couldn’t say the same about an Android phone of similar vintage (not counting lineageOS - there I can even still get the latest Android on my Oneplus One, but it’s more rough around the edges compared to the original OS)
A new iPhone every 5 years for example, would be dumb. Ignore the hype and marketing and just pick the one you'd like if and when you upgrade.
A tangent:
Personally, I wish more things had yearly upgrades and the backwards/forward compatibility Apple devices generally have. It's a different model, but it would be nice if game consoles had improved iterations yearly. The once a half decade model creates too much of a boom/bust cycle imho. If the Switch had a new, better version every year that was both forward and backward compatible within a "software generation" a lot of games like Pokemon wouldn't look and perform absolutely terribly.