You may have read this news article from Bloomberg on how Apple is planning to address the challenge with declining iPad Pro sales. However, are these product revamps the best strategy to address declining sales in the markets Apple operates in?

The markets for Apple’s products have taken an interesting turn in the last few years. During its early years, Apple’s products were purely innovative.

They still are….but the degree of innovation has reduced for Apple and most of its competitors (like Samsung). Retention and differentiation are becoming a challenge. A few years ago, a revamp would have two characteristics:

1. A significant enhancement over the last version
2. Enhancements that would stick for a while

Both of these are no longer the case. With technology evolving so fast, there is this pressure to offer something “new” every year to keep pace with technology. If you do not, the competitor will.

However, opportunities to do so on a sustainable basis, year after year, are limited, even in the context of the iPad. Unlike MacBooks, computing power is not what iPad users may drool over, even if the product is iPad Pro.

You have to remember that most apps designed for iPadOS do not even have the capability to gain from the power Apple has been infusing into its iPads through its M series chips. Product revamps may give temporary nudges to sales but will not address the broader issue. And major revamps are not feasible and sustainable on an annual basis.

Apple products were and are experiences. Apple does not sell phones, tablets, and computers. It sells experiences.  These experiences were unique in the early days. Unless you are a fanboy who will never waiver from an Apple product, many different products are in the market now to deliver that experience. 

The first thing that Apple needs to do is portfolio rationalization. 

We typically talk about portfolio rationalization when the product portfolio is large, and there are products in the portfolio that are “sick”. That is not the case with Apple, nor are its products non-profitable. 

But the purpose of a product portfolio is not just to be profitable but to maximize profits. For example, there can be a smaller line-up of iPads, yet Apple can increase the total revenue from iPad sales.

Pretty sure that Apple has all the data about attributes analysis of the entire iPad product line. It can use that data as one of the inputs to develop a model to help understand experience cannibalization across the line-up (among additional data points).

The same model can be tweaked to incorporate subscriptions and data product optimization. This “experience” aspect can also be quantified and built into the model. The resulting model can provide solid insights to their product owners to devise the next ten years of their product strategy.