Glow-up
The newest iPhones remind us that innovation isn't just about keeping up with trends – it's about setting them and redefining the future of technology.
Seventeen years after Apple ($AAPL) first unveiled the iPhone, millions of people across the world are still tuning in to watch every product launch event by the firm. The most recent one was dubbed ‘Glowtime’ and attracted 19 million live viewers last week.
Among other updates, Apple introduced us to the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro, which CEO Tim Cook said had been designed ‘from the ground up.’ The new lineup will be powered by an A18 processor and feature a customisable action button, a new camera control button and a 48-megapixel camera.
Meanwhile, some of the highly-anticipated Apple Intelligence AI features will be rolled out across iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1 as early as next month. This includes what they call Visual Intelligence, allowing users to simply point their phone camera at something and, for example, identify which particular brand made a t-shirt, potentially diagnose injuries or redesign images based on any reference.
Apple shares might have seen only a meagre 0.04% gain after the event, but this actually bucks a trend of falling after product announcements.
Maybe the iPhone’s evolution into an AI phone was inevitable, but there are a few companies that have radically transformed their business models after recognising a need to better suit the market’s demand.
For instance, tech titan Samsung started out as a grocery trading business in Taegu, Korea. In 1969, the firm established itself in the electronics sector after exporting black-and-white TVs. IBM ($IBM) began as the Computing, Tabulating & Recording Company and their first major contract was to provide tabulation equipment for the 1890 U.S. census.
Play-Doh is one of Hasbro’s ($HAS) most iconic and successful brands, but the non-toxic modelling compound was originally intended to be a wallpaper cleaner when it was created in the 1930s.
YouTube launched on Valentine's Day in 2005 with the slogan ‘Tune In, Hook Up’ – it was meant to be an online dating service where users could upload videos of themselves describing the partner of their dreams. A successful pivot to video broadcasting in general resulted in a US$1.6b acquisition by Google – now Alphabet ($GOOG) – in 2006.
And we might know Netflix ($NFLX) disrupted Blockbuster’s market, but often forget it did that by offering a DVD-by-mail service at first. Shifting to a video on-demand subscription model helped the company go from US$1m to US$500m in revenue in just five years (it hit US$1b three years later).
Whether it's an outright pivot or a shift in brand strategy, these moves have the potential to define the pace of growth and revenue generation. These companies have one thing in common: the foresight to adapt to a changing market. Investors might want to do the same, and periodically give their portfolios that much-needed glow-up.
