Jobs may be ready to step away from Apple, but not before completing a tablet as his magnum opus.
On smartphones, Apple was late to the market, but if there is another vendor doing a better job of currently defining what a smartphone is, I don’t know who they are. With smartbooks, a new class of product based on smartphone technology that looks like a netbook computer, the market hasn’t even really launched, and already Apple appears to be moving to define it.
Word is they are rushing to try to have a product into the market in the fourth quarter. Were this anyone else, I’d say they had a snowball’s chance in hell of making it, but this is Apple, which likely has a patent on hell snowballs, so let’s chat about the Apple iPad this week.
iPod Sales Slowing
In what was a stellar quarter last quarter from Apple, the one really troubling mark was that iPod sales were slowing. Now, part of this was Apple drawing down inventories in advance of what will likely be a broad product refresh in August or early September, but I think it reflects on the fact that people are focusing more and more on smartphones, and not as excited about MP3 players as they once were. This suggests that Apple needs to move to the next big thing after the iPod, and while they are partially hedging this decline with the iPhone, it will probably be a long time (if ever) before iPhones will ever replace iPods.
