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.
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.
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.