Apple’s Tim Cook vows to reveal new product categories this year

Chief executive officer of Apple, Tim Cook, said in an interview that this year the company would finally introduce new product categories that could trigger further growth of the firm. As usually, the head of Apple remained tight-lipped about those devices and did not reveal when the company plans to launch them.

The fourth quarter of 2013 revealed clearly that while Apple can increase its revenue, its growth is slowing down. Historically, the company revived growth by launching new categories of products and services. Unfortunately, Apple has not introduced a single new major product category since the launch of the iPad in 2010. Naturally, the investors are worried about the future of one of the most expensive high-tech companies on the globe.

“There will be new categories,” said Tim Cook in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. “We are not ready to talk about it, but we are working on some really great stuff.”

The head of Apple is reported to have said that anyone “reasonable” would consider what Apple is working on as new categories.

The market in general is waiting for Apple to introduce two major products: iWatch smart-watch device as well as iTV television. The rumours about both have been floating around for years now, but so far the products have not materialized. This does not mean that Apple is not working on something that the general public has not thought of.

Based on reports from financial analysts, Apple is also going to introduce iPad designed for business customers with a larger display. While formally this could be counted as a new category, in reality this will be an expansion of the iPad.

In addition, it is logical to expect Apple to finally roll-out a 4K display this year; now that it has a new high-end Mac Pro workstation with the latest graphics processing units, a monitor with 3840*2160 resolution is just what the doctor ordered to the professionals.

KitGuru Says: New product categories emerge pretty rare. In many cases they emerge and fail to gain any market acceptance because they arrive too early or contain fundamental limitations, which is what happened to Apple’s Newton device, Microsoft Windows XP-based tablets and many other products. It is hard to imagine an Apple television with major limitations, but smartwatches should probably feature a lot of technologies that will catalyse people to wear them. Not all of such technologies may be here at the moment…

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