How Successful Will A New Apple Product Need to be to Considered Successful?

The iPod, iPhone, and iPad are unequivocally considered to be profound and world-changing technological breakthroughs that forever changed the world we live in. They sell by the millions and account for staggering quarterly revenues.

The funny thing is, none of them really sold well on the first generation. The first iPod is barely a blip on the sales radar coming in well under a quarter million units.

Image credit: Wikipedia

Okay, so what about the iPhone? Nope - 270,000 units in their first quarter. Sales did pick up a bit for a total first year sales of a little over 5M, but they sell that on opening weekend now.

Image credit: Wikipedia

Fine, but surely the iPad was a grand slam, right? Comparatively, yes (at 3.27M units the first quarter). But by today's standards? Not so much.

Image credit: Wikipedia

So what exactly are "today's standards"? Every time there is a new sales record, that seems to become the new standard. If a company returns to their previous normal revenue, normal sales, or normal product volumes it is usually viewed as the end of days for that company. Growth is important, don't get me wrong, but Apple's repeatedly mind-boggling quarterly revenues are dismissed because some of the growth numbers are flat.

I've written about the flat iPad growth and so has Ben Thompson, so I won't rehash it, but suffice it to say they're selling a lot of iPads. The speculation for their next product is, well, creative to put it nicely. Many things are products that could certainly be interesting, but often many don't address a real problem like these iDevices did. This tweet from Benedict Evans hits the nail on the head.

Before the iPhone and iPod we knew the problem but not the solution. With smart watches we don't know the problem

— Benedict Evans (@BenedictEvans) April 19, 2014

Apple's next product could be a health wearable where the total addressable market is technically every human, but realistically far, far smaller. It could be a watch. It could be television. Each of these has inherent problems, but did many of their past breakthrough products, all of which were overcome.

Suppose Apple does the Apple thing and overcomes the battery life or content delivery or whatever hurdles stand in their way. Suppose they introduce the next leg of their product stool at WWDC in a few weeks. What happens then? Is there any sales number that would draw a positive result from the masses? They sell 50M iPhones per quarter, so do they have to beat that? It sounds insane, but after seeing the 50M number, 1M doesn't sound so good to those that are so hungry for something, for anything new, that they live with blinders on and won't stop writing about how innovation is dead at big companies like Apple.

If it isn't the sales number that gets people, perhaps it'll be the revenue. As Ben Bajarin has pointed out several times, for any product to even show up on their revenue pie chart it would have to make many billions of dollars. That's a stretch, even for Apple.

I certainly hope a new product is met with new (and realistic) sales volume expectations, but I'm not holding my breath. News agencies are pushing this sense of urgency that a monumental breakthrough is absolutely required for Apple as we know it to stay relevant. Once the stimulus bar has been raised, it (apparently) can never go back down.

What is the magic number of unit sales or revenue they've got to hit? Will it even matter, or will the next round of pessimists start immediately beating their tired drum? Only time will tell.

Additional Considerations for Gassée's Conclusion for Declining iPad Growth

To proclaim understanding of such a young tablet market is a fool's errand, but I think there are some additional considerations to be made beyond Gassée's article where he concludes that the iPad is a tease and it cannot fulfill the duties it promised to fulfill.

To evaluate the tablet, it is worthwhile to consider smartphones. Smartphones replaced their predecessors entirely, and with ease. It wasn't a "good enough" solution and the way we use phones didn't have to change. Sure we got all sorts of new ways to use phones, but the same old ability to make calls and send SMS usage was fundamentally still there. All of the things people needed to do, they could do.

The same cannot be said for tablets right now when you measure them as PC replacements. Tablets enable us to do a lot of work, a lot of the same work, and a lot of new work, but it doesn't allow us to do all of the work we can do on a PC. If there is even one critical task you must accomplish that isn't possible or realistic on a tablet, you suddenly need a computer. One tiny little thing can throw a wrench in the gears that easily. Sure a new piece of software with a unique way of interacting with or producing data to fulfill the same need is possible, but it might not be adopted at your company or it might have shortcomings.

So why this massive difference in how things turned out? For starters, the phone industry was an infant when smartphones replaced them. Okay not technically an infant but they never really added usage-changing features, for all intents and purposes people just needed their phones to make calls and send messages. The computer industry is a lot older and has some extremely entrenched workflows. It is much easier to dethrone something so young (dumb phones), especially if you (smartphones) are vastly superior in every single way. Computers aren't young, they aren't dumb, and they are absolutely critical in just about everyone's job, if not their life.

The other thing that complicates this discussion is that tablets are being framed as needing to replace traditional PCs to be successful. I think that is a misguided notion. There is certainly a lot of overlap between the two, but surely it isn't realistic to expect tablets to eliminate the PC industry. It isn't clear where this will all end up. Even though iPad sales growth is declining with no obvious explanation, the tablet market is nicely establishing itself in peoples' lives and won't be going away any time soon. 

(My thanks to Jordan Hendry for a thought provoking discussion that lead to this train of thought.)

UPDATE: Updated the title to reflect the tone of the article more, I'll leave the URL to keep links live.

iPad Pro Plans Shelved - I Hate to Say "I Told You So..." →

Just like I, and most tech writers/bloggers with dignity that seek content quality over clicks, have been saying all along - the iPad Pro that was so highly reported as "certainly" coming out in 2014 has been shelved. Apple works with a plethora of screen sizes, always has. There might be a bigger iPad one day, but that day is not soon.

Shame on You, Microsoft; Outlook for iPad is a Mess

I'm a slave to Outlook and OWA for work, no way around it. I use the native iOS email app on my (work-issued) iPhone. On my personal iPad, which is rarely used for work, I use the official Microsoft OWA (Outlook Web Access) app. I launch the app 0-4 times per day, usually 1 or 2. Approximately 10-25% of app launches result in this update state where I cannot do anything, I must wait (look at the banner along the bottom):

So I wait. Usually about 60-90 seconds. When it finishes? You guessed it, the good ol' fashion Windows-style reboot.

It is a shame. The app is fairly well designed, though there are some glaring usability flaws. This isn't new, and this isn't temporary. I've used this app since October 2013, here we are 6 months later with no fix or update.

If you're at Microsoft, you've got to ask who is signing off on this quality of work.

Analysts Backpedaling on a 2014 iPad Pro... Shocker... →

No surprises here. The rumors of the 2014 iPad Pro were unfounded when they started, and I called them out as such. Now, only a few months later and half a year before the originally projected launch, analysts (in this case Kuo, but he hasn't been the only one barking up this tree) are backing off of the notion that Apple will be releasing a 12" iPad this year.

It is well known that Apple tries a huge number of technologies, sizes, and materials as part of their standard R&D. It is certain Apple has experimented with a larger iPad, probably even has some pretty late-stage devices., but that doesn't mean they're releasing one soon.

File this one under "Dear Analysts, I told you so." It is just a shame that these obviously false reports get them the clicks that fuel the fire.