But any ecologist will tell you that exponential and logistic growth look very similar...until all of a sudden they don't.
I'm pretty sure that they weren't sold outside the US at least to start with.
Wikipedia says this[0]:
Jobs unveiled the iPhone to the public on January 9, 2007, at the Macworld 2007 convention at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.[34] The two initial models, a 4 GB model priced at US$ 499 and an 8 GB model at US$ 599, went on sale in the United States on June 29, 2007, at 6:00 pm local time, while hundreds of customers lined up outside the stores nationwide.[35] The passionate reaction to the launch of the iPhone resulted in sections of the media dubbing it the 'Jesus phone'.[36][37] Following this successful release in the US, the first generation iPhone was made available in the UK, France, and Germany in November 2007, and Ireland and Austria in the spring of 2008.
On July 11, 2008, Apple released the iPhone 3G in twenty-two countries, including the original six.[38] Apple released the iPhone 3G in upwards of eighty countries and territories.[39] Apple announced the iPhone 3GS on June 8, 2009, along with plans to release it later in June, July, and August, starting with the US, Canada and major European countries on June 19.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iphone#History_and_availability
I don't really see that. I own a Galaxy Note (read: HUGE phone) and yet I still own a tablet. A larger iPhone won't be as large as the Galaxy Note, it just isn't Apple's way, at most it will be similar to the Galaxy S5.
To me the iPad has a niche that it covers (e.g. reading books, larger "table" games, etc) and even a large iPhone won't cut into that business much. Even if the iPhone was Galaxy Note sized I'd still buy an iPad, only maybe one single use case would shift and that is a minor one.
Around me (lots of expats with kids) the iPad is a killer to give your family back home instant connectivity in as much maintenance free and foolproof package as you can get. ( no cable, no malware, no driver, understood and supported by your internet provider, always on, minimal learning curve )
My point of view is the opposite, how is it useful at all for tech people. I never found any business case where either laptop, desktop or smartphone was not more convenient (the exception is reading, but I'm part of that minority that prefer to read on their smartphone)
I remember getting a tablet a while ago with a Pixel Qi screen that essentially doubled as an e-reader... wonder where that technology (and the Qualcomm Mirasol etc) all went.
iPad 2 is still a good device for reading and browsing the internet - hence people just don't throw it in the trash after 2 years and buy a new one like phones.
It's beginning to look like their average useful life is far longer than that of a Phone and also longer than a desktop or laptop. As a result the replacement rate may be fairly low. I'm in the market for another iPhone this year due to contract exipiry, but my household has reached iPad saturation. The kid's Minis are still going strong and we bought an Air last year after giving our '2' to a relative and it's still going strong too. It's hard to see when or why we'd need to get a new ipad as long as any of our current ones still work. That's probably another 3 years at least, possibly 5.
Tim Cook mentioned that in emerging markets iPads grow much faster and that's likely because it is their main computer.
Also I don't think Apple is too worried about a larger iPhone cannibalizing iPads. A larger iPhone would likely sell for $750 (for 5.5 inches) which is much more than most people spend on an iPad and likely carries higher margins.
In emerging markets, the most common "main computer" isn't a tablet, it's a smartphone, by a mile. That points directly at the iPad's huge emerging-markets weakness. A "good enough" phablet (or even just a cellular tablet since many enable phone capability outside the US) can be both more useful and cheaper than an iPad + phone (let alone smartphone) combination. That seriously limits the iPad's addressable market in a way you don't see in the developed world (where more generous budget constraints and sometimes phone subsidies change the tradeoffs).
Some friends of mine in Vietnam run a shop, in Hoi An. They make a comfortable for local standards income, but after tax rates and costs they will have about $10k a year, not to be sniffed at, but still, not amazing income. A younger sister wanted an iPhone, it was a running joke that if she bought one, she would be sleeping out in the pig sty, the 'adults' (those over 20) consider such things excessive waste of money, but she being 17 decided to spend her 3 months wage on a second hand iPhone 4. This isn't un-common, her peer group all feel the need of it. She could have had something like a Nokia 620 which has all the apps she uses anyway, for a fraction of the price and it would have the benefit of new battery life performance.
Hell I've seen shoes with the Apple logo put on them[0] there is most definitely a lot of brand power and loyalty in Vietnam and China. If they can ensure that people end up with the 'correct' Apple and not a nock off, they could do quite well. The fact that kids know how to tell the real iPhone from the fact clones is enough, as they create peer pressure for the real thing.
So yes, I can see Apple benefiting from a bunch of people in the emerging markets feeling they've 'made it' when they can afford an iPad, they still are a long way of affording a car.
So then the question is - why have a separate OS for tablets as compared to laptops? The current reason is not so much to do with the UI but more to do with management of limited resources. OS's like iOS and Android are very aggressive about preserving memory and processor cycles as a way of squeezing extra life out of batteries.
On phones that different-OS resource advantage will probably continue. But on tablets, its less clear. As the intel chips get better at low power, a tablet running a 'full fat' operating system becomes more feasible.
This is what the Surface Pro 3 shows, whatever you think of it as a device: You _can_ run a full OS on a powerful processor in a fairly thin, fairly light tablet. Not the thinnest, and not the lightest, but still it raises the question: Why do tablets need a different OS?
Microsoft are tackling that question now, I think Apple will ultimately need to tackle it as well.
Honestly I think primary reason that iOS tablets have been successful is because they have a different OS. Fundamentally iOS is far less capable but also far less difficult to use and fragile than a full-fledged OS. A tablet is less PC and more consumer electronics. And that's not a hardware distinction, it's a software distinction.
It has a great deal to do with UI.
When you learn to write an app for iOS or Android, the first thing you learn is that your app needs to be ready to freeze and save state at a moments notice, and then re-hydrate itself later, also at a moments notice. This is the fundamental difference in the OS, not the touchscreen and widgets.
This is seen in OS X when an app window appears greyed out with a progress spinner in the center. The app may start out in this state if the machine was hibernated, or it may go into this state if it is open but it fits certain criteria, like all its windows being occluded by others. When this happens, the process is killed.
Where do they get the money from?
Unless... get its hands dirty by taking control of its refurbished and older generation products for developing markets.
The percentage of income spent on such gadgets (and cell phone plans) etc. is much higher for most customers in the non rich countries (essentially OECD) but those non-rich countries have over a billion people that are willing to spend a lot of money on gadgets.
And beyond those spending a lot of there money on gadgets in non-rich countries, there are hundreds of millions that are actually wealthy even in comparison to the USA in China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, Thailand etc.. The countries economies are changing amazingly quickly. Overall many are still extremely poor but many are also as rich enough to be above median income in the USA.
I am pretty sure there are way more people above median USA income outside the rich countries North America, Europe, Japan (and go ahead and include Korea, Australia and New Zealand) than live in those rich countries.
India also has an emerging middle class, though nothing like China yet.
- hardware cheaper
- software is cheaper
- cost of ownership is cheaper (time spent keeping it working, security costs, etc)
- tend to be cloud oriented, and cloud services are often free.
All of the above applies to Chromebooks, which are laptops of course.
Thus I think a slightly larger iPhone screen(given their higher resolutions compared to competitors) will be the sweet spot. It'll likely dominate older iPhone models pretty quickly and cannibalize iPad sales.
It will likely be cheaper but still retain it's appeal to the upper class as a status symbol(people can trot around with their new larger iPhone).
Desktop won't go away unless iOS and Android grow to encompass desktop functionality and flexibility.
And when the iPad first came out, it hurt iPhone sales a lot. Apple call this "cannibalization" and they've stated many, many times they don't care one bit about it.
Even a 5.5 inch iPhone would be closer in aspect ratio and size to a 16:9 4 inch iPhone than it would be to a 4:3 7.9 inch iPad Mini (let alone a full-size iPad). to me, that makes it obvious it would run scaled-up iPhone apps, not scaled-down iPad apps. In other words, a larger iPhone will clearly be on the "phone" side of the phone/tablet line.
If you want to argue that it is all a continuum and that the scope of touch-based computing hasn't changed, I'd agree with that. But in a thread that started by talking about iPhones, iPads and Windows 8, "tablet computing" is more specific than that.
I want a laptop with a detachable touch screen, not a consumer device.
Plus it is the only one that allows to target itself for software development, without any constraints or relying in a server stuck somewhere.
I imagine there will be multiple general types of tablets that apply to different needs.
I have an iPad and a Dell XPS 12 hybrid and they're both great for different things.
Aside from anything else that makes me ponder the wisdom of Microsoft's tablet-heavy focus on Windows 8.