Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth
Apple?
They bring out products when others have proved there is a market.
MP3 player
Phone
Tablet
Watch
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A funny thing about this list is it misses a lot of things Apple tried when there wasn't a market: Newton, the iPod Phone (first device integrating music player with mobile phone, predating the iPhone), the G4 Cube (first modern fanless desktop computer), Vision Pro, etc.
But then, another funny thing about this list, everything here was a niche market when Apple got into it. There was a market for portable MP3 players (witness Creative Nomad and Microsoft Zune), but it was a niche market until Apple released a hard-drive based unit that was 1/4 the size of the Nomad Jukebox, with 3-4 times the storage capacity, Firewire instead of USB 2.0, and a superior user interface.
(Yes, I had a Nomad Jukebox, modified to replace the 6GB hard drive with a 20GB drive. And a 20GB iPod. The iPod was the better product in every way.)
Plus the iTunes Music Store made buying music easy. No ripping CDs and transcoding and copying files around using cumbersome applications. Click, click, boom, there's your music.
iPhone was a flop, a complete failure, until Apple convinced the mobile carriers to let them apply the iTunes Music Store model to native apps. That's what sold iPhone, not the device itself. iPad would have been a similar flop if it didn't have an established app store, but it helps that iPads have generally been superior products to the Android-based competition.
I'm not sure where Apple Watch and smart watches in general are going. They're still niche and I think will remain that way until someone stumbles across the "universal" killer app for these things.