You're the Pundit: Should Apple shift its focus away from new products?

upgrading to snow leopard totally annihilated my computer. lion hasnt been as bad but it runs god awful slow on a 2008 imac. imessage isnt working on my ipod and ipad. im afraid to upgrade my iphone to ios5 . we pay more for apple because we expect more. they have higher standards. when they under achieve, it is disappointing

For those griping about FCPX.... remember what happened with iMovie. The rewrite set the foundation for what it is now.

IMHO it would be nice if Apple could:
- make iCloud work before MobileMe is shut down (it currently loses 60 of my 650 addresses every time I try to sync)
- make iOS5 less eager of battery (or at least give me the possibility to roll back to iOS4)
- separate Lion and iOS5

Need to take continuity and support for previous versions a little more seriously. Too many things including new features (for iOS mobile devices, even) they're pushing require bleeding-edge, half-baked Lion. I shouldn't need Lion for iCloud or App Store. Too many things break each year with each new OSX version. We shouldn't need to worry that core apps like Adobe's will have problems with OS upgrades.

On the 'new & shiny' front, things that we might have thought would get attention a little sooner sometimes seem stagnant. I thought by now there would be Apple TV 3 or even better, an app store for Apple TV 2.

They need to do new things, now more than ever with Steve gone. I'd love to see them rethink some of his decisions actually. There is no damn reason why Mac Pros and especially iMacs should not have Blu-ray drives in them. Telling a college kid he can't watch Blu-rays on his iMac is just retarded. They need to do something about the Mac Pro too. While I love mine and actually need all those drive bays, making Apple user pay a tax then not giving them Thunderbolt or SATA III is also retarded. And my new Macbook Pro is faster than the Mac Pro (2009) in all respects.

Apple said 10 years ago what their plan was. With the exception of the iPhone, there really shouldn't have been any surprises regarding new products. I do find it hard to believe that Apple will ship a TV, I just can't think of any compelling features that would require a whole new $1000+ TV as opposed to a $100 box. I think after they establish their position in the TV market, we won't see any (brand) new hardware for a while. We will start to s ee major shifts in distribution in things like, television content, text books, books/periodicals, and others. It's pretty clear Apple has been slowly creating an infrastructure to do things they've described many years ago. Once that is complete the only thing left is to allow anyone to be able to afford content to educate and entertain, the former being something Apple has focused on since the beginning.

The way it works in the real world is that we focus on all problem areas. If that seems confusing consider 6 Hat Think Different: focus on one aspect of one problem at a time for 2 or 3 minutes each one. Go work on those and reconsider at regular intervals. Each success is an opportunity to catch 3 deep breaths and move on to remaining problems; including what was not perfect about the recent success AND some more that have not been thought over yet. Real life is a moving target and moving set of goals.

Some perfections are to match the way the market place changes as it learns about new products, including how upgrades are working out.

So we strengthen the depth of new products as they roll out: setting some solutions as new products in their own right. And keep prefecting old products while they are still alive: some of those perfections, too, will become part of or all of new products.

We all send out beta products, just about. It depends on the person who understands the product they have just recieved or if you know what to look for. There is always help for the product if any one needs it.

Over the past 10 years, Apple has defined themselves as a market creator or framer - a leader in innovation, especially in user experience (they may not create the basic product area, but they make it usable and desirable). To maintain their mindshare and cachet, they need to continue to do this. Of course, they also defined themselves (and are viewed as) proponents of polish (as opposed to many of their competitors) and they must maintain and/or re-emphasize this. As others have said, with the resources that Apple can bring to bear, they should be able to do both.

They shouldn't release a new product if it's going to be something as ludicrous as an Apple television. A major update to Apple TV might be nice, though.