Apple is just buying time until its next big imitative leap:
Samsung debuted its first, much maligned and hugely successful Galaxy Note — the first phone with a bigger-than-5-inch screen — in September, 2011. For two years afterwards, Apple was content to present incremental improvements to the iPhone. Compared with the iPhone 5, the iPhone 5s just added a fingerprint sensor and an improved camera (plus a few other features that most consumers didn’t care about).
Meanwhile Apple carefully observed the “phablet” market, watched other handset makers follow Samsung’s example and erode its market share, and experimented with ways to make a big phone easier to navigate one-handed. It struck just when Samsung started posting lower profits, because of the increased competitive pressure.
It was a perfectly-timed attack and, after setting a first-weekend record — 10 million iPhones sold — iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus are continuing their rampage. Apple chief executive Tim Cook said yesterday that the first sales month for the two new phones was the company’s best ever “by a lot. A whole lot.”
The iPad Air 2′s most important improvements on last year’s device are, again, a fingerprint sensor and a better camera. As with iPhone 5s in 2013, it may appear as if Apple is stuck in a rut of timid, incremental innovation. My bet, however, is that it’s watching another innovator collect bumps, get bad reviews, then get things right. Once that innovator’s success is assured, Apple will pounce.
This time it isn’t a Samsung product Apple is watching, but Microsoft’s Surface Pro.
Microsoft hit on the idea of producing a tablet-laptop cross in 2012, incurring losses and writing off inventory as it refined the concept. This year, it finally produced a device that reviewers liked — the Surface Pro 3. It’s reasonably convincing both as a laptop and as a tablet, albeit a large and heavy one. Microsoft has not released numbers, saying only that the Pro 3 was its fastest-selling tablet yet — the company underestimated demand, creating shortages in some markets.
The analysis company Gartner puts the Surface Pro in the same category — “premium ultra-mobile” computers — as Apple’s MacBook Air laptops.