Is criticizing Apple heresy? I think not.

As you all know, the iPhone 4s was just an incremental improvement on the iPhone 4. Was Apple right in doing this and can they replicate this success forever?  Yes and no.

Apple has relied on a very successful formula. They've done it really well and washed, rinsed, and repeated it several times. Read past the jump for more details.






The iPhone 4s brought Siri, a better camera, and the same processor that's in the iPad 2. These were all incremental improvements, the same design as its predecessor remained while the masses were expecting the iPhone 5. Was this the right move? I'll answer with a chart:

Taken from SplatF

Including pre-sales, it had an opening weekend that surpassed the 3 previous models combined. Pretty impressive. I can't say whether Steve's passing affected these figures positively or negatively, but in my opinion it's the most successful incremental improvement in history (in terms of profitability). Yes I'm saying it will surpass the Playstation 2 (17 million+ units, highly profitable), it will generate more profit than the recently released Kindle Touch can dream of, and *gasp* it's even better than sliced bread.

I've hinted very strongly that Apple might not be able to do these shenanigans forever. Why not? Not because Steve is gone, may he RIP, but because someone can deliver a large blow to their phones. Who could ever do this to this magical company? Market disruptors. I'll illustrate with an example.

The desktop PC world was ruled by incremental improvements. Then came the disruptors. 1st wave disruptor, notebooks. 2nd wave, iMac started taking some significant market share. 3rd wave, mobile phones. 4th wave, netbooks. 5th wave, tablets. Now we're in the "post-PC era" and traditional incremental improvement PC makers might not survive without entering these related markets. In fact, most of the serious players are now in 3 or more of these industries. How could any serious player get by just selling desktops? What will happen to their brand recognition and image?

Now, I could also make the opposite argument. Apple has been a genius when it comes to delivering incremental improvements and sporadic "quantum leaps". The iMac, iPod, Macbook, and iPhone all followed this same formula. When the market started getting tired of the first iPod, the iPod mini came along, then the nano, the color iPod, iPod video, iPod shuffle, iPod touch, and finally the iPhone. All of these versions had at least 2 incremental improvements before a strong evolution. It costs very little to do this; a design is recycled and that produces a lot of revenue.

The landscape has changed a lot for Apple to change nothing. Android is taking the phone market by storm and Google is now a music retailer. Microsoft's platform is also available. They're all somewhat similar quality offerings and they innovate at a higher rate than Apple. The perceived quality of the competition can surpass what an incremental improvement will bring to the table.

When Apple releases the iPhone 5, can it really expect the market to accept an iPhone 5s that is "the same but better" released several months after the iPhone 5? They can't count on it. The highly profitable incremental improvement every year or so might soon be over in the phone market. The competition brings new models every month. Apple must put its innovative cap on.

The answer may not be giving people what they want—Steve Jobs himself once said, "You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new"—but you certainly can't become too predictable. Apple risks losing market share by giving competitors and edge and boring customers.