And he goes on to talk about the iPhone 4s and the iPhone 5. Apple, as usual, keeps everyone on the edge of their seats.
My personal take is that Apple should just do the iPhone 4s. In head to head sales, the iPhone 4 still kills everyone else. I'd let it get a little staler -- and then drop the iPhone 5 say in June of next year.
They can do the tick-tock, like Intel. One year, new design, next year use better components. And they can have the iPad and iPhone tick/tock on opposing years.
If they plan to ship one or two phone models and upgrade them every two years, they had better have lots of patents, because they certainly won't be able to compete in a fair marketplace.
"The problem here is that while Apple can play the fashion game as well as any company, there is no evidence that it can play it fast enough. These phones go in and out of style so fast that unless Apple has half a dozen variants in the pipeline, its phone, even if immediately successful, will be passé within 3 months."
"And its survival in the computer business relies on good margins. Those margins cannot exist in the mobile handset business for more than 15 minutes."
Dvorak is basically a guy who gets press because his name is similar to a keyboard layout, but actually unrelated to him in all ways.
He's basically a nonsense generator, and always has been. I feel he'll someday retire and write a autobiography about how he was trolling us all for his entire career then start a second act as a comedy writer.
I don't see that the design of other popular SmartPhones has radically changed much in the last year or so either. We're at the point where the SmartPhone is pretty much a finished product. There will be spec bumps, software improvements, and some small arbitrary design changes but it can't get much bigger or smaller, it can't get much thinner before holding the device in your hands becomes difficult, and it's unlikely it will get radically lighter due to the weight of the battery. What else is left? We're really talking about very small changes that probably don't have much, if any, impact on the market. The 14 month old iPhone 4 is still the single best selling model of SmartPhone with the 26 month old 3GS coming in at number two.
What Apple does need is a competitor to the 4-4.5" Android devices. According to the rumors that's what the iPhone 5 was supposed to be. If they have to go another 12 months without a competitor they will probably continue to lose more marketshare. If you look at the sales of Android phones they are almost all 4-4.5" devices so you could say it's the fastest growing segment of the SmartPhone market. Hard to say if people are buying them because they are increasingly the only option for an Android phone or if they prefer the bigger size. Either way it's probably safe to say a significant chunk of the SmartPhone market wants the bigger size.
Apple had been releasing new iPhones like clockwork every 11-13 months, but this model is late. The iPhone 4S/5 hardware is rumored to have been completed months ago, but held up by iOS 5 bug fixing. I would expect Apple to try hard to get back on schedule for 2012.
* iPhone 1 @ June 2007
* iPhone 3G @ July 2008 (13 months)
* iPhone 3GS @ June 2009 (11 months)
* iPhone 4 @ June 2010 (12 months)
* iPhone 4S/5 @ October 2011 (16 months)
