Apple released a whole slew of new, highly-polished laptops and tablets. But once again, the changes were iterative, not innovative — and, like with the iPhone, more competition is starting to emerge.
Robert Galbraith / Reuters
As expected, Apple unveiled a highly-polished new iteration of the iPad at an event in San Francisco today, along with an update to the smaller iPad Mini.
They also rolled out new, highly-polished updates to their MacBook Pro laptops and a street date for its $3,000 superuser-skewed Mac Pro desktop. A month ago, Apple unveiled a new, highly-polished update to its iPhone with the iPhone 5S, along with a plastic highly-polished update to its mid-range iPhone.
It's basically been the play book for Apple since the launch of the original iPad. Apple, once known for creating category-defining products, hasn't done so since it launched the original iPad three and a half years ago. Even the iPad Mini, a smaller companion to the 9.7-inch iPad, was a follow-up in response to a smattering of 7-inch Android tablets flooding the market.
Now, Apple still has a considerable lead in terms of mind share and market share when it comes to tablets, and there is little debate that the iPad Air will be one of the best, if not the best, tablet on the market when it comes out next month. But Apple, sticking with its cheapest tablet still costing $300, has shown no indication it wants to compete on price with new rival tablets from Google and Amazon costing around $200.
It's reminiscent of when the iPhone began to cede its lead position in the smartphone ecosystem. The iPhone defined a category and was a clear leader for years after its launch, and Apple rode that to adding hundreds of billions to its market value. Then, rivals running Google's Android operating system, and other smartphones with a different market proposition, began to chip away from that lead.
Fast forward to 2013 and there are several competent competitors for the iPhone, particularly Samsung in terms of phones — which has quickly leapt to be the top Android smartphone manufacturer and led Android to have the largest share of smartphone operating systems in the market.
Source: ComScore data
Again, Apple has a clear lead in terms of tablet usage — which makes sense, because Apple again basically defined the category. "Regardless of what you read, about what's sold and activated, the iPad is still used more," Apple CEO Tim Cook said at the event today. "No one else is close to this."
