Apple's 2013 To-Do List

John Siricusa on Apple’s to-do list for the coming year, posted to his personal blog Hypercritical:

“I didn’t just lead Apple to a record quarterly profit of $13.1 billion on sales of $54.5 billion, so I don’t expect to be consulted. But were Tim to ask me, here’s what I would tell him Apple should do in 2013 — in broad strokes, and in no particular order.”

John’s third and seventh points, to diversify the iPhone product line and to improve iCloud, respectively, merit some discussion. A few weeks ago I wrote a post called The Problems with iCloud, in which I talked about Apple’s latest foray into cloud services and my problems with the product. It would be a huge step forward for Apple to finally offer a cloud service superior to the competition — superior to Dropbox. Underestimating the significance of those move would be a mistake.

And then we have the suggestion to diversify the iPhone product line. I first saw this idea from Marco Arment late last week, and the Internet has been abuzz since then. I am not qualified to speculate as to the probability of these rumors, nor would I even if I did possess the knowledge; my goal in publishing this website is not to become the next John Gruber or Mac Rumors. I will, however, say this: by “diversify the iPhone product line”, everyone means to say that Apple should ship a cheaper iPhone. Whether or not Apple chooses to do this, however, is not a matter of feasibility in production or difficulty selling this new, nuance device, but whether Apple wishes to support the low-end market they will capture with a low-end iPhone.