“I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the various hardware product categories in the consumer technology market, how each of them is faring, and the common trends and differences between them,” Jan Dawson writes for Tech.pinions. “It’s occurred to me that – if viewed from a certain angle – adoption cycles for major product categories seem to be shortening. I want to use Apple’s last four major products to illustrate this but also to pull out some broader trends about what’s happening in the hardware industry.”
“What I’ve done here is take trailing 4-quarter sales for each product from the quarter it was launched as far as we have data and then superimpose those four data sets on each other so we can compare them,” Dawson writes. “The scale is obviously not consistent between charts and that’s important, but it’s the pattern we’re looking at here, not the absolute size:”
“What changed between those first two products and the last two? It might be partly a question of scale – the iPhone has found a much larger addressable market than the iPad and, as such, it took longer to reach a peak. Maybe, but the iPad found a larger addressable market than the iPod, peaking at around 75 million shipments a year versus the iPod’s peak of around 55 million, so that can’t be the whole answer,” Dawson writes. “I’d argue that what really changed were the fact those first two products existed when the second two launched.
Much more in the full article – highly recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: We agree that Apple Watch certainly has not peaked. The first-gen was approaching 17 months old before the next-gen Apple Watch models were released (April 24, 2015 vs. September 16, 2016). That’s a long time in tech years. The new Apple Watch Series 2 is a significant leap forward. There’s much, much more to come with Apple Watch.
And, Apple Watch is here to stay, backed by the world’s most valuable company and with OS releases that dramatically improve the value of the hardware over time. Those stuck on other platforms, as they stagnate, run out of money, and die, will be moving to the only smartwatch with a real future. As those who made the mistake of wasting their money on a Microsoft Band or a Pebble recently discovered.