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June 04, 2014

Apple's Faithful Becoming Restless

Apple's developer conference has come and gone without a single good flash of new hardware. The fanboys are starting to grumble louder about the company's direction, its leadership in the Post-Jobs era.  Expect the masses to become more unruly in the buildup to this fall and unsated when the iPhone 6 appears.  Only totally new hardware will quell the boiling revolt.

WWDC 14 turned into a software love fest with some services on the side.  Unveiled were iOS 8, Mac OS X Yosemite for the faithful and the Swift programming language.  Yup, what the world needs now is Yet Another non-standard language locked into a platform.  

Similarly, updating iCloud to better handle photos is nice, but not the sort of thing to woo the faithful.  The faithful want to be wowed, to gasp, to truly believe that every product coming out of Apple is worth every overpriced penny they shell out in order to remain cooler than “The Rest of Us”.

The iPhone 6 will not sate them.  Anticipated to come out this fall, the i6 family is expected to have one or more models with larger screen of 4.7 inches and 5.5 inches, faster and more power efficient silicon, maybe thinner, maybe substituting sapphire for Gorilla Glass, and maybe a better way to manage battery power—features that could just as easily be attributed to all the Android phones scheduled to come out between now and the end of the year.

Fanboys will not get a huge thrill out of the iPhone 6. New, fresh meat will be required. 

An iWatch might meet the bill.  No company has established a dominant smartwatch footprint.  Apple designers could provide a combination of fashion elegance and technical functionality to make the iWatch the next iPod in terms of must-have technology gadgets.  With some careful integration, the iWatch could drive iPhone sale because you'd need/want to have the two together.

But will it be enough? There is evidence Apple will extend its iTentacles into home automation devices by announcing HomeKit at WWDC 14.  Smart home territory is still a developing market and a good partnership with cable companies could be a big win when compared to Google's Nest and a raft of third-party bits and pieces that haven't caught fire.

A strong Apple push into the smart home space could be a big win.  Seamless integration of all the pieces is the key.

The company's demonstration of proximity awareness for the iPhone rolls right into the use of the device (and the likely iWatch) as a combination of key and home environment adjustment trigger. Image if the iWatch sensed you were overheated from a long summer day and/or a long run.  It could send a message to a HomeKit device to turn down the thermostat a bit.  When you get to the front door, it could automatically turn off the alarm and unlock the door if you have the iHomeWatch and the iLock installed.

Smart home could be one of Apple's big next plays, but I'm not ruling out a bigger TV play as well. Apple could make waves with a large screen TV combine with an integrated viewing experience if it ever sets its mind to it. We'll see this fall.




Edited by Maurice Nagle


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