iPhone was and is more expensive than an iPod. That's not cannibalization, it's upselling.

As to iPads, to the extent that buying a tablet instead of a computer was appealing, it was always going to overwhelmingly bring people from PCs to iPads more than from Macs to iPads. They did deal with a certain amount of cannibalization there, but their tolerance of that was far from a general comfort with any cannibalization possible.

I think that Apple would be uncomfortable with the idea of a $400 watch cannibalizing a $700+ phone. That said, I think that the idea that the watch would significantly cannibalize the phone is silly. Whenever we discuss the watch, it's like everyone suddenly forgets that people fucking love their phones and have consistently demanded larger and larger screens. The idea that suddenly people are going to be all, "No, it's cool, I don't want a screen larger than 1" diagonal" in any substantial quantity is silly.

I disagree that just because the phone is more expensive than the ipod it is not cannibalization. The phone literally destroyed the market for the standalone MP3 player, and the price point was doesn't change this.

If you listen to the Jobs official autobiography the iPhone resulted from Jobs / Apples concerns that the phone would become good enough for most people as an MP3 player, and thus would 'cannibalize' the iPod product, and that Job/Apple decided all the phones out at the time sucked and that they could do it better.

The technology for the capacitive screen etc was already in development but for the device that would eventually become the iPad!

Look, I've used the term "cannibalize" in deep in strategy sessions about how much marginal benefit we'll get from a higher-price sku given that a certain number of people will be getting it instead of our lower-priced sku. I'm not going to say it's completely ridiculous to describe that as cannibalization in the right context.

But from a high level, nobody in the entire world could be sad if their customers choose a higher-price, higher-margin product over a lower-price, lower-margin product. And suggesting that it's some kind of brave stance to say, "Yes, we'll introduce a higher-price, higher-margin product even though our customers may prefer it to our lower-price, lower-margin product" is absurd, and anyone who tries to sell that line with a straight face should be ashamed of themselves.

I'm really not sure what point you are trying to make.

My point is that the iPhone took the iPods market from it. Apple had to release a phone to do this, or someone else would have eventually done it.

They did not do it to 'up sell' people, ie the thought process was never, 'lets sell the iPod for 5 years then hit those suckers with the iPhone and up sell them' it was 'lets make the best music player' then 'soon every ones music will be on their phones, we better make a phone, actually the phones we currently use are terrible, we have this interesting touch screen tech from a tablet we're developing, oh shit we can make an awesome phone...'

I'm not saying Apple are brave, I'm saying they are logical, they will release a product that will take sales from another of their product lines, as if they don't someone else will, and any sale is better than no sale. I think they would do this even if the product that was doing the cannibalization was cheaper, eg the iPad is definitely eating some of the Macs potential sales, and I think Apple are very happy about this.

This is just not right.

Apple didn't cannibalize iPod with iPhone: it recognized that people wanted it to build a phone and did just that.

Apple didn't cannibalize Mac for iPad: it recognized that people were buying tablets in lieu of PC's and thus invested heavily in making iPad's more user friendly.

Having spoken to many Apple engineers, the company is now as corporat-ey as any other BigCo and will NOT actively cannibalize a product unless it sees an expanding/new market.

>it recognized that people were buying tablets in lieu of PC's and thus invested heavily in making iPad's more user friendly.

Who was doing that? Before the iPad came out I saw tablets used in exactly one place, and it was a university research project on construction management and coordination between building trades.

Even after the iPad came out, the people using them as PC replacements were using them mostly for the same set of tasks like email and web browsing, and (flat iOS 7 redesign aside) the experience for those is basically the same as always.

EDIT - I suppose there have been major additions to iOS since then (like multitasking), but I'd argue it's less because they're threatened by users buying a Surface (or whatever crappy HP tablet existed at the time) instead of a Mac, and more because it's the obvious direction that iOS devices have been steadily improving in regardless of the competition. Apple's perfectly happy to eat the Mac's market with it if there are Mac users who can get by on better iPads.

Maybe some selection bias? Tablets have been in use since at least early Windows XP days. I'm not sure I'd call them common, back then, but they were hardly unique. We used them in the field when collecting data.

>Tablets have been in use since at least early Windows XP days. I'm not sure I'd call them common, back then, but they were hardly unique. We used them in the field when collecting data.

People collecting "data in the field" is not the hundreds million unit market it is post iPad.

Tablets existed for 10+ years before the iPad, Microsoft especially pushed various monstrosities -- nobody really used them though.

I did mention they weren't common, but I'm not a nobody and I really used them. They had a whole Tablet Edition, for XP. They were used in quite a few industries, by real people who were doing real work.

So, no, not common - but not nobody, either.

>but I'm not a nobody and I really used them

Yeah, "nobody used them" in casual speech just means very few people. Obviously since they were made some people bought and used them. But the numbers were not worth writing home about -- and one would be hard-pressed to see random people using them in the wild (exceptions by field workers, some kinds of researchers, etc, mostly professional/factory/etc uses).

And my response only pertained to them having only seen them in one place and how that might be selection bias. While not common, they were certainly in use outside of research labs.

Motion did pretty well with them and made great hardware.

>Apple didn't cannibalize Mac for iPad: it recognized that people were buying tablets in lieu of PC's and thus invested heavily in making iPad's more user friendly.

Nobody was "buying tablets in lieu of PCs" before the iPad.

And by nobody I obviously mean "so few the market didn't matter at all".

Pretty clear in the Jobs autobiography that Apple/Jobs thought that the if people could get 5000 songs on their phone they wouldn't want to carry an iPod around.

Nobody was buying tablets before the iPad.... So I'm not sure what your getting at.

The way I see it now is that many people who now buy iPads would have bought Macs previously, and Apple are happy for this to happen.

Its not really hard to see Apples vision that iPads are the future of computing for maybe 70/80/90% of people, and the remaining 10/20/30% can buy Macs.

Your last statement perfectly represents Apple cannibalizing the iPod with the iPhone.