Apple Product Release: Is Apple Releasing Products At The Wrong Time?

Apple Product Release: There has been a lot of talk lately about when Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) is going to announce its “next big thing” to the public. People want to see an iWatch. People want to see an Apple TV. People just want to see something.

Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL), however, has not made it a habit of releasing products before it is good and ready to do so. The company strongly believes in holding out until the time is right.

While there is nothing wrong with this, it is safe to say that Apple has made mistakes in this area in the past. And if you don’t believe that to be true, we don’t have to look any further than  yesterday’s second quarter conference call.

On the call (transcript courtesy of Seeking Alpha), Mark A. Moskowitz of JPMorgan Securities LLC asked the following question:

“Tim, earlier you talked about how the December quarter had a very big and broad product refresh, were there any learning points from that experience in terms of maybe it’s better to stage or kind of stagger out launches over multi-quarters versus one quarter. How should we think about that going forward?”

If you have been paying attention to past product launches, you probably have an idea of where this is going.

Here is what Cook had to say:

“It’s a good question. I don’t spend a lot of time looking back except to learn from it, and if we could run it over frankly, I would have announced the iMac after the turn of the year, because we felt our customers had to wait too long for that specific product; or the iPad mini was in shortage in the December quarter I would not have done that differently, because we were able to get the iPad mini out to many millions of customers who really wanted that product for their holiday. And so, yes, we did do a lot, our teams fortunately can do a lot, but in retrospect that one, yeah, I sort of wish it were after the turn of the year, because our customers would not have had to wait as long as they did.”

Any learning experience is a good experience, especially since Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) will be able to use this moving forward. That being said, this is big news since Apple does not typically disclose this type of information.

Obviously, Cook is referring to the fact that the iMac was released at the wrong time, which led to some delays experienced by consumers after ordering.

In this case, Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) definitely pushed its product to the public at the wrong time. This is not speculation, as it is coming direct from the CEO’s mouth.

The question is: will Cupertino be able to avoid a similar fate in the future? There is no reason to believe this is a problem that will continue to plague Apple, but it is definitely something to keep an eye on.

Check out one of our latest articles, The Apple 2.0 Blog’s ‘Apple-Samsung’ Drama: What Journalists Can Learn From It

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