Changes to Apple’s Device Launch Patterns

This past week’s Apple event was notable for all kinds of reasons, many of which we’ve already covered here on Tech.pinions. But I wanted to pick up on a couple of details that were easy to miss, related to the way Apple launches new devices, because with some of the new products it announced last week made some interesting changes.

No October iPad event

One of the most obvious changes from the last several years was Apple collapsed what has been two fall events into one. Instead of an iPhone-centric September event and an iPad-centric October one, Apple has apparently foregone the latter and instead moved everything noteworthy into one September announcement. That included two new iPads (the brand new iPad Pro and the updated iPad Mini) but it also trumped the usual October release of a new version of OS X with a subtle and indirect reference to the El Capitan launch on September 30 (the reference was on screen for a split second as part of a Craig Federighi demo). Essentially, Apple seems to have decided one big bang event makes more sense than having one high-profile event and a smaller, less noteworthy one. That makes a ton of sense. The last couple of years, releasing new iOS and OS X a month or so apart has caused some interesting problems, especially with the introduction of Handoff features. Collapsing the timeline allows Apple to release the products that work together in interesting ways in much closer succession. It also focuses attention on a single event, rather than diluting it, with the iPad event often feeling like a sideshow.

The shortest SDK-to-product cycle in Apple’s history

Since the introduction of the iPhone in 2007, Apple has introduced brand new SDKs for four products: the iPhone itself (in 2008), the iPad (in 2010), the Apple Watch (in 2014), and now the Apple TV. What’s interesting is the Apple TV has the shortest time between the release of the SDK and the availability of the product itself. The SDK was released last week but the product will be available in “late October”. Even if we push it to October 31, that’s still only 51 days, the shortest of any Apple SDK release:

The closest previous product to this timeline was the iPad but, of course, that heavily leveraged an existing OS and largely introduced new screen sizes and a tiny bit of additional functionality. Though the Apple TV and tvOS are based on iOS, this is a much bigger form factor change and requires rethinking interaction models and other elements which the iPad didn’t. I’m very curious to see how developers manage this rapid ramp up in activity, especially coming so close on the heels of iOS 9, El Capitan, and watchOS 2.

Fewer days on sale for iPhones in calendar Q3

The last thing that’s changed is the release date for the new iPhones, which has been pushed back by a full week. Starting with the iPhone 5, the previous three years saw new iPhones released on the second-to-last Friday of September, providing around 10 days of sales in calendar Q3, thereby partially offsetting what is otherwise a very quiet quarter. However, this year the new iPhones will go on sale on September 25th, the last Friday of the month and the quarter, which allows just six days of sales rather than the twelve days the new models were on sale last year:

This may mean slightly lower sales from brand-new devices in calendar Q3 than last year, although it’s worth noting China is part of the first wave of launch countries this time around, whereas the launch was delayed in China last year. Actual sales will, of course, depend on supply levels meeting demand, so this may not matter enormously – indeed, Apple may be pushing back the launch an extra week in part to allow production to ramp further before availability begins. With the huge upgrade cycle from the 6 and 6 Plus continuing, Apple’s revenue guidance for the quarter was between 16% and 21% up on last year, so it doesn’t seem to be expecting a significant downward impact from this pushed-back launch.

Apple is predictable, until it isn’t

All in all, this fall event was a useful reminder that, even though Apple regularly sets patterns which seem utterly predictable, they all get disrupted eventually. The timing of the event itself fell into the pattern established over the last several years, but it’s now changed three other elements of its usual fall device announcements. The Apple Watch already sits outside the usual pattern, as a device first announced in the fall, but released the following spring. Apple ultimately sticks to these patterns only until either they stop serving it well, or other factors become more important – the Apple Watch likely simply wasn’t ready to launch in the fall last year, but Apple didn’t want to wait until this fall. The Apple TV, too, seems to have been in development for quite some time before launch – something alluded to slyly in the keynote. For all of us watching, these occasional disruptions to Apple’s patterns serve to keep us on our toes and not to take anything for granted.