Yesterday Apple announced some amazing quarterly results. Peter Oppenheimer, the company’s COO, mentioned there will be a lot going on around autumn time and hinted the company had a “future product transition” on the way.
Another thing that came from the conference is that the iPad business is booming. iPad sales are surpassing Macs in both numbers shipped and in revenue. Apple has a intensely hot product on their hands and it makes you wonder – why don’t they expand it even further? People love Apple’s tablets.
Now, we’ve been hearing those persistent rumours about Apple preparing a new iPhone/iPad for this Autumn season. It really sounds a bit crazy – introducing a new product when the past generation device has only been around for less than half a year and when you’ve only just been able to meet the demand for the product.
The iPad 2 is a gold mine – it is an amazing piece of business for Apple and it will continue to be for a while to come. Why throw it away releasing an entirely new product that beats it in every way? There is only one way to do this that makes business sense – and it’s introducing a product of the same family but targeted at a completely different market.
Unlike most Apple products, the iPad is reasonably priced. So much so, that competitors have a hard time beating its price tag even though they are using an open-source OS (Android) for free. That certainly leaves only one option for a potentially new iPad and it’s a higher tier than the current one.
If you didn’t know, Apple finally released their latest version of Mac OS X yesterday. They have called it Mac OS X Lion and amongst the most intriguing changes it brings is the Launchpad – an iPad-like way of displaying all your app icons. Most early reviews of the Mac OS X Lion suggest this new Launchpad is surplus to requirements unless you actually have a touch screen on your Mac (which no Mac has).
Mac OS X Lion even comes with support for multi-touch gestures, which again…have been seen demoed experimentally on the iPad. The multitouch gestures within Lion are primarly for use on the touchpad of a Macbook or with the touchpad accessory for iMac and Macbook.
So Apple are planning a big change for the autumn with one of their products and after having a look at all these facts it’s not hard to imagine Apple releasing a higher spec iPad with OS X Lion running on it.
It could be another master stroke, as long as the price isn’t hiked up too much, as that seems to be the reason for the success of the iPad and iPad 2.