[epistasis]

If we're going to go on history, it's quite likely that whatever Apple pivots to, lots of people will say "yeah, whatever Apple, that's a tiny market and there are already like four players in there and they're all more serious than you." Then within three years Apple will have taken what seemed not so consequential, completely dominated, expanded the market by several orders of magnitude, and left everybody in their dust.

That's what a successful Apple pivot looks like.

VR, electric cars?! Maybe, but extremely unlikely. Those are obvious things that everybody in Silicon Valley is thinking about and has overhyped to death. Apple would probably take some smaller category that people hadn't thought could hit the big time. IMHO, it's obviously not going to be VR, that's been completely overhyped, sounds cool to nerds but completely impractical and practically useless, and will have basically no impact on the majority of lives out there.

[petra]

This mythic story was true in the past, but with the Apple watch, they didn't introduce something that different from the competition - most of their win there was because of their brand, their loyal customers and the watch being a fashion item.

[rahoulb]

I'd say the watch is similar to the iPod; there was competition out there but the general public didn't really care. Then the iPod was released and commentators complained it was less capable and more expensive than its rivals (insert famous slashdot quote here). But the people who bought it loved it and Apple iterated on the design. (With the watch there are a number of studies that say that tech people don't like it but non-tech people love it - personally I sold mine and won't get another till the screen is on constantly and its thinner).

The question is whether the watch repeats the iPod trick of dominating and expanding the market two iterations on. With the iPod this happened when it was no longer tied to the Mac, maybe with the watch that will happen when it's no longer tied to the iPhone?