[close04]

> The incumbent produces an innovative gadget. It may even be good, but its Sales Dept earn their quarterly bonus from the existing product line sold to the existing customers.

In a rare feat, Apple managed to do just that with the iPhone, which ate the iPod’s lunch. This at a time when the iPod was a core product, directly responsible for their revival and success, that could have been milked for years to come.

[NetMageSCW]

One of Apple’s founding philosophies from Steve Jobs made this explicit:

“One of Job's business rules was to never be afraid of cannibalizing yourself. " If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will," he said. So even though an Iphone might cannibalize sales of an IPod, or an IPad might cannibalize sales of a laptop, that did not deter him.” — Walter Isaacson

[mrheosuper]

and now we have ipad that perfectly capable of running MacOs but Apple refuse to do so.

[musicale]

iPads already outsell Macs. I imagine Apple is willing to accept lower margin overall for iPad hardware (vs. Mac) since it gets a cut of iPad software sales on the App Store. This is perhaps a business reason for why you want macOS on an iPad and Apple does not.

However, Jobs also believed in product differentiation and thought that having too many products in the same space was confusing. Arguably by making iPadOS more macOS-like Apple is reducing that differentiation and increasing confusion.

[kalleboo]

They also kind of did it with the Mac. For 4 years after the Mac was introduced, it was still the Apple II that was paying the bills, the Mac was flopping. It took stubborn management to keep investing in the Mac and not give up on it and try to evolve the Apple II instead (imagining a future based on the IIgs here)

[AngryData]

Ehh, im not sure they could have milked it for very long, if the iphone didn't come out somebody else would have made the same kind of device within a year or two and made ipods obsolete shortly after. PDAs were already a thing with many models and competitors, cell phone transceivers were getting far smaller and efficient, and solid state storage was getting reasonably cheap.

The most impressive thing about the iphone I didn't think has anything to do with the technology, and everything to do with timing the release of a mobile device to hit the sweet spot between the cost of the hardware and capability of the hardware.

[NetMageSCW]

I think you greatly underestimate the iPhone’s original impact and the reason that other very successful companies went out of business entirely due to it. It broke new ground in more than just technology e.g. also in the relationship between the phone manufacturer and the carrier, and advantage it kept for some time and in the software developed for it e.g. a full browser versus WAP.

[kalleboo]

Where I lived in Europe, by the time the iPhone came out, a lot of people (me included) were already using Sony Ericsson Walkman phones instead for music listening