asymco

I’m typing this on my iPhone partly to make a point: It is somewhat slower than the iPad, but not much slower – for me. The key phrase there is “for me”. I don’t use my thumbs to type with on my iPhone; I use my index fingers. In part, that’s because I have large hands. But in part that’s because I orient the phone differently. As a result, I get more facility out of my phone than others.

But even that is going away. My wife no longer types into her iPhone at all. She dictates. And that’s really the point: Computers are evolving, and simultaneously they are opening up possibilities for many who never had those opportunities before.

So this is one of those rare occasions, Walt, when I am forced to disagree with you.

I agree very much with this point — people will use the tool that makes the most sense. Right now I see something of a macho attitude where (some) people feel they need to make some sort of point about using an iPad to construct a spreadsheet or something, but I expect that to pass in a few years.

A more persistent issue, I think, is the white goods issue.
For a long time people have talked about what happens when computers become “good enough” for most people; and we really have hit that point. The most recent round of devices with USB3 and Thunderbolt killed the last nagging and constants sources of slowdown. We now have truly magnificent screens, IO we don’t have to wait for, CPUs that are almost instantaneous, enough RAM that we don’t have to swap, etc etc. We even have this in light laptops with long battery lives.

The point of all this is that there is now very little reason to upgrade a computer until it dies. And with the end of the hard drive, there is very little in a computer that is likely to die (it seems like the cooling fan is the last commonly problematic part). This switches the market from one where we were all upgrading every two years to one where we will replace perhaps every ten years. It’s hardly surprising that growth has halted.

So what’s a company to do? The developing world is not that great a possibility. They’re able to cobble together adequate computing power from the castoffs of the developed world, so Apple (and even HP, Lenovo, etc) have little hope there. (And this is not just imaginary — I have a friend whose business consists of rounding up cast off PCs in Thailand, cleaning them up, and shipping them to Vietnam — beautiful and moving in a way that everyone gets a chance at cheap computing.)
Instead the business does become white goods — the best you can do is hope that your next sale comes at the expense of his next sale.

It’s also a singularly problematic time trying to extrapolate forward. On the one hand we have MS’ Great Leap Forward, and who knows how that will turn out; on the other hand it is quite possible that phones and tablets have recapitulated the business history of PCs in six years or so, that the iPhone LTE and iPad new are again close enough to good enough that we’ll soon switch to a white goods market here. (There do remain obvious improvements that can be made with both; and there is a large pool of unserved customers; but both of those may be history as soon as four years from now.) We have one more boost in store with Smart Watches, and then again with Project Glass headsets.
Point of all this is: when all your devices are good enough, even your phone and your smart watch, it becomes the ecological system that matters, not the devices. Apple clearly has a great story here, better than the competition. Which suggests that (once Win8 settles out) a slow growth in their market share at the expense of Windows, but nothing spectacular — just a persistent accumulation of purchasers whose Windows PCs die buying a Mac replacement to work better with the rest of their Apple eco-system.
While this story does position Apple as way ahead of everyone else, it also suggests that skepticism about Apple’s ability to keep massively growing its profits, beyond a few years in the future, is warranted. Being in a stable business is fine — GE isn’t hurting — but it’s going to hurt like hell if you bought Apple on an expectation of 50% annual growth forever.

That’s what I did (wait) and no regrets. Just bought a retina display MacBook Pro and it’s the best upgrade yet. The impact of the display resolution is difficult to convey. I avoid Microsoft Office applications because they are not retinized. The difference in visual usability is so vivid. If Apple follows up with aggressive introductions of the retina display on 11″ and 13″ models, they’ll see both upgrades and new sales. Windows 8 also supports hiDPi displays but the incremental cost of a HiRes display added to a mainstream Windows laptop will cause more sticker shock (in the same manner that ultrabooks have failed to take off at $1000).