Apple's PR strategy revolves around scarcity of information—the company makes so few official announcements or even comments on news stories that people pay attention when it speaks. Its product announcements are day-long events revolving around hour-long keynotes that completely consume the tech news cycle whenever they happen. It's a different approach from, say, Google, which has so many things going on at any given time that it feels like the company is announcing some small news basically every day.
For the first half of 2014, Apple just didn't have much to say. Its big product announcements in the first half of the year involved the resurrection of the iPad 4 in place of the $399 iPad 2 (it has since been re-discontinued) and a small spec bump and price drop for the 2013 MacBook Air. WWDC in June brought a flood of software and developer announcements, but none of those products actually started shipping until September.
But Apple didn't have a quiet year—all of its big announcements just came in a flood between June and October. This is the year we got iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite, our first look at the Apple Watch, a long-awaited boost in screen size for the iPhone, a new iPad Air with a really speedy new chip, a mobile payments system in Apple Pay, and a brand-new iMac with a 5K Retina display. Let's look at how each of Apple's major product lines fared in 2014 and what we have to look forward to 2015.
iPhone
It's an even-numbered year, so in 2014 we got not one but two fully redesigned iPhones. They came with new cameras and chips and rounded aluminum bodies, but the most important thing about them was their screen size: 4.7 inches for the iPhone 6 and 5.5 inches for the iPhone 6 Plus.
The bump in screen size went a long way toward making the iPhone more useful. The smaller model could display more content, and the larger one can actually do a few iPad-like tricks to make better use of the space in landscape mode. Even more importantly, these screens are giving app developers a reason to embrace resolution independence in iOS, which in turn will allow Apple to experiment more freely with different sizes, aspect ratios, and pixel densities in future products.
The other part of the iPhone's year was iOS 8, a big update that made steps toward opening the platform up to third-party developers. Extensions allow apps to share data with other apps more freely, and they let users enable third-party software keyboards for the first time. That's not to say it was all perfect—the update has slowed some older devices down, and Apple is using App Store rejections to artificially limit some things that Extensions are technically able to do.
It's a step in the right direction, though. Phones have gone from being slow, low-power devices to fast computers with performance and specs approaching those of low-end PCs. Limitations once imposed by the hardware are becoming limitations imposed by the software, and iOS is still trying to find a balance between controlling its platform and giving its users and developers more freedom. Expect iOS 9 to continue looking for that balance.
As for the next-generation iPhones, Apple's past behavior suggests that 2015 will bring us an "iPhone 6S" series that keeps the look and feel the same while improving the camera and specs. The current 5S, 6, and 6 Plus could get a $100 price cut and continue on as lower-end models, or Apple could pull an iPhone 5C and introduce a redesigned version of one or more of them specifically for the middle- or low-end. In any event, expect Apple to stay focused on just a few models that keep prices hovering right around where they've been for the last few years.
iPad
Apple's tablet business is still huge. Nearly 68 million iPads were sold in fiscal 2014, bringing in over $30 billion in revenue. What's less rosy for Apple is that iPad sales appear to have hit a ceiling. Sales have been down from last year for three quarters in a row, and 2014's iPad sales were lower than 2013's by a total of three million tablets (if you exclude the first quarter of fiscal 2014, the only one in which iPad sales increased from last year, the difference is closer to six million).
Apple's default PR story for iPhones and iPads is that they're always getting more popular and selling in greater numbers, but with these numbers the company has changed tack. In both presentations and conversations with press, Apple says that the iPad has sold more in its first four years than any other Apple product line sold in its first four years. CEO Tim Cook refers to the sales slump as a "speed bump," and he points to Apple's enterprise partnership with IBM and to sales in developing markets as examples that will drive future growth.
It may just be that iPad replacement cycles are longer than iPhone replacement cycles—every three to four years, rather than every two to three years. It's certainly true that new iPads aren't doing a whole lot that older iPads can't do; the iPad Air is incredibly fast for a tablet, for instance, but iOS 8 does little to take advantage of the power under the hood. Functionally, the iPad Air 2 doesn't do much that the two-year-old iPad 4 can't do, and even the nearly four-year-old iPad 2 is still getting software updates (speed is a problem, but perhaps not enough of one to drive people to new tablets in droves). The iPad Mini 3, on the other hand, only differs from last year's iPad Mini 2 in that it has a fingerprint sensor and costs $100 more.
Rumors point to Apple making the iPad more useful and more interesting in 2015. Reports of some kind of split screen multitasking mode persist, and the work developers have put in to make their iOS apps resolution-independent could pay off here. Whisperings about a new, even larger iPad have also persisted—in both cases, signs point to Apple shaking up the iPad lineup in a way that widens the functionality gap between iPad and iPhone while narrowing the gap between iPads and the Mac.
As for the current iPad sizes, in 2015 we'd expect fairly modest and predictable updates in line with what we've gotten over the last couple of years. A theoretical iPad Mini 4 is likely to include more substantial internal upgrades than the iPad Mini 3 received, and it's probable that an iPad Air 3 will pile up a whole bunch of "slightly"s—slightly faster, slightly lighter, slightly better. Whether that will be enough to goose sales is anyone's guess, but this year's results suggest it won't.
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