Apple troubles…?

Interesting article by Seth Fiegerman and presented on CNN.com:

Apple faces Wall Street ‘panic’ over iPhone

The key line from the article is this one:

Apple stock fell this month after one of its key chip suppliers warned of “continued weak demand” (for the iPhone).

Which, of course, brings me back to something I’ve talked about several times:  The silly need for tech companies to look successful by selling “new” versions of their products when they get to the point that their current product is so good that people no longer need to make that upgrade.

Once again: I lived through the rise of the desktop/personal computer golden age.  We went from the 8086 processors to the 286 processors to the 386 to the 486 to the Pentiums and, for the most part, each new iteration was much, MUCH better than the previous one, and if you were into using your desktop computer, it made plenty of sense to toss the old version away and buy the newer one.

It was that good.

A very similar thing, IMHO, happened with the iPhone.  Each new version was a hell of a lot better in ways both large and small to the previous version.

But…

There came a point, perhaps with the 6th version or so, that the iPhone seemed to hit the same wall the desktop/personal computer folks did: The phone had reached something of a peak, and subsequent versions merely tweaked things here and there and the changed were nowhere near as “exciting” as previous changes.

Thus, people were suddenly not quite as eager to line up around the block (remember when that happened?) to get the latest version of the iPhone.

So when with much fanfare Apple releases their iPhone X, and its priced extremely high and its features are a little better than the previous phone yet people don’t feel this difference is worth pursuing, especially for $999, it shouldn’t be too big a surprise.

Yet that’s the stuff that makes people in the business community suddenly think a company is in “trouble”.

No, people probably still love their Apple iPhones.  The problem lies in the fact that the company has refined the product to the point where people don’t need to toss their last version to get a new one.