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Christina Bonnington reports that the public is not gobbling up iPads like they used to. Analysts had projected iPad sales would reach 19.7 million but Apple's financial results for the second quarter of its fiscal 2014 show they sold 16.35 million iPads, a drop of roughly 16.4 percent since last year. "For many, the iPad they have is good enough unlike a phone, with significant new features like Touch ID, or a better camera, the iPad's improvements over the past few years have been more subtle," writes Bonnington. "The latest iterations feature a better Retina display, a slimmer design, and faster processing. Improvements, yes, but enough to justify a near thousand dollar purchase? Others seem to be finding that their smartphone can do the job that their tablet used to do just as well, especially on those larger screened phablets."
According to Andrew Cunningham the takeaway from Apple's sales drop in iPads is that Apple's past growth has been driven mostly by entering entirely new product categories, like it did when it introduced the iPod in 2001, the iPhone in 2007, and the iPad in 2010 and that Apple needs an entirely new category to fuel future growth. "The most persistent rumors [of a new product category] involve TV (whether a new Apple TV set-top box or an entire television set) and wearable computing devices (the perennially imminent "iWatch"), but calls for larger and cheaper iPhones also continue."
(Score: 3, Informative) by Foobar Bazbot on Saturday April 26 2014, @02:02AM
I agree that both standalone and phone-slaved smart watches have mass-market potential. And I say that as someone who fairly recently started wearing a standalone smart watch*, and is all too aware of its limitations.
*a MOTOACTV, which runs Android from the factory, with a custom launcher that only supports the integrated apps. Running a normal launcher, as I do, makes it function like any Gingerbread tablet.
However, the big hurdle, and the reason Apple's next big seller won't be iWatch (IMO of course), is battery tech.
The Pebble works around the deficiencies of current batteries by having e-ink, no sound, no WiFi, etc., and gets a claimed 1-week battery life, which is quite good. (I'm not sure where that claim lies on a scale of engineering to marketing, but the point is, you don't have to charge it every night, much less during the day.) I think the feature set is a bit limited for mass market, though being phone-slaved makes it much more palatable.
OTOH, my MOTOACTV plays videos, surfs the web (over WiFi, bluetooth, or USB connection), and is my main audio player, but the price is an offline battery life of 5-6 hours, playing music and reading ebooks with the brightness dialed down. (Reading with no music, it lasts much longer, but still on the order of a day rather than a week; watching video at full brightness, I get just about 2 hours, and turning WiFi on makes it worse.) And the worst part, from a mass-market perspective, is that it's at the very upper limit of big clunky sports watches -- a more mass-market-friendly size means serious sacrifices in battery life.
I think a successful smart watch will need to be between the Pebble and the MOTOACTV in functionality (e.g. video playback is superfluous, and e-ink may be enough, but I think music and a touchscreen* will be important), but close to the Pebble in size, and have battery life of at least two full days in "normal" use, whatever that is. Advances in processor performance/power will help, but IMO it needs batteries with at least 50% more energy density to happen.
*I generally prefer hardware buttons to touchscreen interfaces, but the general public doesn't seem to agree. For a watch, specifically, I think a good choice would be buttons and touch, but rather than using the touchscreen as a virtual mouse, or to press on-screen buttons, apps would only receive tap (with no information as to where on the screen the tap occurred) and swipe (again with no position info, the angle being the only salient information) events. I'm afraid that such a thing may be too abstract for mass-market "iWatch" or equivalent, and too different from the UI of their other touchscreen products.