“As if a plunging stock price, slowing earnings growth, and customer-service woes in China weren’t enough, Apple hasn’t released a new product since October, when it released the iPad Mini,” Kurt Wagner reports for Fortune. “In three of the past four years, Apple has held a signature new-product event in March, but not this year. Were the company to wait until June, when it typically unveils new gadgets at its annual conference for developers, it would mark an eight-month gap in major releases, the longest wait Apple has inflicted on its customers in 13 years.”
“The March event has seen a grab-bag of product releases, from a new iPod Shuffle in 2009 to the significantly improved iPad 2 in 2011 and a “new” iPad in 2012. (In 2010, the last year Apple didn’t hold an event in March, it unveiled the first iPad in January and a redesigned iPhone 4 in June.),” Wagner reports. “This year, March came and went without a peep from Cupertino, causing concern among avid Apple watchers. ‘It was a surprise. We had expected them to do something in March like they typically do,’ says analyst Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray. ‘We weren’t expecting a ton of fireworks, but the fact that it wasn’t there was incrementally disappointing.'”
Read more in the full article here.