'17seconds said:
Apple has been at the end of a creative cycle for over a year. It was a good run. I wonder how long they can milk upgrades to this product portfolio. It's aging.
Their biggest burst of creativity created the iPhone. That was huge.For a while, they resisted apps on it, but then caved and created an SDK and opened up the app store, and that was huge.
Many other updates have been fairly incremental. iCloud was another big step, but more of a big picture, apple ecosystem, step.
Since then, they've been making it smaller, faster, better batter life, more specs, and improving the ability for developers to develop, and for people to share stuff.
Siri was kinda a toy, and may turn into something much more useful.
NFC is still on the horizon, but is still a bleeding edge technology in mobile, and apple's history shows they don't do bleeding edge...they wait until the chips are energy efficient and a strong case can be made for integrating the functionality with their product.
I think that in the future, it'll be hard to see too many more innovations as huge as they ones they've done previously. I think they'll primarily be what was mentioned above, software improvements, which are far more important.
NFC will be nice to have, but without a killer-app for it, and some behind the scenes negotiations with key players, won't be terribly useful.
I think the next big leap will come external to the iphone, and will be a host of new products that the iphone will and can control. If Apple were smart, and of course they are, they'd see the iphone as a mobile communciation device, a gaming center, a music center, but also a "life remote control" such that it can be used to do all sorts of things in your life.
It can already do your schedule, make phone calls, send emails and texts, tweet, facebook, game...but can it control your air conditioner at home? (Yes, mine does). Can it be a remote control for your TV? Yes, but not mainstream. Can it control your home locks, start your car, control your lighting in the house, schedule tv programs to be recorded, place orders for food at the grocery stores?
To me, that's the future innovations that the iphone will be used for, in competition of course with the Droid phones...but it will be apple's unique vision guiding its implementation of the above concepts that makes it unique.
From an investment point of view, however, I think that the growth opportunities are more for outside companies now than Apple. Apple has to continue to innovate and work with other industries to maintain their sales and expand...but moving into new territories is much harder now. It's the related companies creating related goods that work with iphones and droids and other mobile devices that are poised to take over our lives, like the iphone and subsequent clones have.