“For the first half of 2014, Apple just didn’t have much to say. Its big product announcements in the first half of the year involved the resurrection of the iPad 4 in place of the $399 iPad 2 (it has since been re-discontinued) and a small spec bump and price drop for the 2013 MacBook Air,” Andrew Cunningham writes for Ars Technica. “WWDC in June brought a flood of software and developer announcements, but none of those products actually started shipping until September.”
“But Apple didn’t have a quiet year—all of its big announcements just came in a flood between June and October,” Cunningham writes. “This is the year we got iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite, our first look at the Apple Watch, a long-awaited boost in screen size for the iPhone, a new iPad Air with a really speedy new chip, a mobile payments system in Apple Pay, and a brand-new iMac with a 5K Retina display.”
Cunningham writes, “Let’s look at how each of Apple’s major product lines fared in 2014 and what we have to look forward to 2015.”
Read more in the full article here.
One of the biggest “product” introductions will prove to be ApplePay. Once tens of millions of US (and Chinese?) iPhone 6 users enjoy the security, privacy, and convenience of ApplePay through trillions of hack-free transactions, going into “mandated” POS NFC readers in the US by the Fall of 2015, it will be hard for Google/Android to respond due to lack of a dependable fingerprint ID reader and secure enclave enabled by 64-bit advanced processing power.
There seem to be a number of analysts who claim Apple Pay won’t do anything to move Apple’s already massive revenue numbers despite transactions likely adding up to in billions of transactions over a years period. The same analysts claim Apple’s hardware has no advantage because Touch ID isn’t that big of a deal so Android devices will fare just as well if not better.
I don’t see much happening right away with Apple Pay but there will certainly be a steady inflow of cash from each transaction and in time all those individual transactions has to add up to something relatively significant. I hope Apple can figure a way through marketing to leverage Touch ID as being very secure and get consumers to buy more Apple devices with Touch ID included which would mean iPod Touch, iPads and MacBook/MBPros also offering the feature.
I agree.
One somewhat overlooked aspect of ApplePay that should prove increasingly popular is using it for ONLINE purchasing. With ApplePay, the purchaser doesn’t have to run the risk of sending his credit card number, expiration date, or security code over the internet and/or possibly land into the hands of a possibly unscrupulous vendor. (One also can usually bypass the laborious billing and shipping address input/typing steps.) That’s a key reason why Fingerprint ID has been added onto the newest iPads.
Additionally, throughout 2015, as more merchants, banks, and especially national chains (e.g., the Safeways, Krogers, and Targets type companies), adopt ApplePay, to tap into business from tens of millions, higher-quality iPhone 6 owners, FREE PUBLICITY about the newest vendors and the ApplePay product should ensue. Also, if any of the current competing (DOA) “CurrentC” merchants (“hello tone-deaf Best Buy!”) break ranks and adopt ApplePay, this will be HUGE news and more free publicity for Apple.
The key to the ApplePay benefit is not the relatively paltry associated transaction fee generation potential, but rather the unique stickiness into the Apple eco system. It will be very hard for Google/Android to avoid Apple/AuthenTec’s proprietary fingerprint ID patent trove, secure enclave feature, and create any mass adoption onto cheaper Android phones.
I hope we see more ads promoting ApplePay like the joint commercials with WellsFargo and Citi. (I have randomly polled many iPhone 6 owners I see around town and have asked if they have even used ApplePay, and it seems to me (around Seattle), that most iPhone 6 owners scarcely seem to even know about it!