A friend of mine once purchased an expensive Ferrari. He boasted that it had a top speed of more than 170 mph. As much as he loved that car, it didn't come with its own speed limit. He still had to abide by the rules of the road. According to the law, on a public highway, that Ferrari had the same top speed as a Ford Fiesta.
Apple's (AAPL) products are like that Ferrari; what can the company do in the near term to make products that are vastly superior to what they have already produced? What new product or innovation will be so incredibly superior to what already exists that you'll just have to stand in line for hours to possess it?
Apple has reached a point where merely improving its existing products will produce diminished returns and now it needs to blow our minds with something completely new and out-of-the-box. What will be the catalyst to jumpstart Apple?
Are you excited about mobile payments? Rumor has it that the next iteration of the iPhone will turn mobile payments into part of our everyday lives, but does anyone else see a potential problem here? I can envision confused consumers accidently paying for things they never intended to purchase. I'd prefer that mobile payments go mainstream in the U.S. before participating. There will be plenty of time to jump on that bandwagon later.
Are you psyched about the possible introduction of an iWatch? The concept of a wearable computing device is interesting, but keep in mind that many young people grew up with cell phones, which tell time accurately. Consequently, they never felt the need to own a watch, so the concept of wearing a device on the wrist would be foreign.
I'm sure the iWatch will be cool, I'm just not sure that I need one. I'm sure mobile payments will be fine eventually, but I see no hurry. The best opportunity for Apple lies in the much-rumored iTV.
Face it, Americans love television. Everything about television -- flat screens, high-definition, VCRs, DVRs -- has dramatically improved over the past 10 years. The average American home has more televisions than people, with 2.93 sets per household as of 2010, according to Nielsen.
Yet the vast majority of those televisions have no meaningful integration with Internet technology. That's the promise of the iTV: to take everything that we love about TV and technology and merge them into one. The result would be something that transcends our current perception of television.
Once upon a time, Apple sold zero phones; then it changed the world's perception of what a phone should be. Tuesday, the company announced that it sold 37.4 million phones over the past three months.
Right now, Apple sells zero televisions. If it can change the world's perception of TV by integrating it into their impressive ecosystem, Apple will sell millions of televisions. It will dominate the space and thrash TV manufacturers in the same way that the company pummeled competitors in the computer and cell phone arenas.
Apple became a giant because it changed people's lives in dramatic and beneficial ways, but can it do that again? By changing the way we define television to the same degree that the company changed the way that we define a telephone. The iTV represents Apple's best shot at regaining its luster.
At the time of publication, Ponsi had no positions in the stocks mentioned.