When you are the richest company in the world with all of your key product line sales volume ramped up pretty vertically and yet nothing in the form of a new product line to roll out and help maintain the momentum (should any of those lines start leveling off), a common tactic is to nickel & dime on accessories at very high profit margins so that if revenue growth vs. expectations ever disappoints, margin & profit can save the day.
It's been a while since Apple rolled out a genuine new product line (rather than just updates to existing lines). It's hard for a very large company to keep making ever-growing targets without new lines to add to total revenues & profits. There is great risk when existing lines are showing steep vertical angles of growth, as growth can only achieve so much vertical before it feels the pull of gravity and levels off.
What Apple needs is to roll out something very new... that is not a new iDevice or a new Mac. Some thinks that's a television but it's hard to imagine that one being the next iPad in terms of blowout sales. Maybe something else? But Apple's growth curve really needs that something else- whatever it is- soon. No growth can be steep vertical growth for sustained periods of time on a finite group of products.
If you think about iPod (2001), iPhone (2007), iPad (2010), there needs to be "next big thing" (2012) and next-next-big-thing (2014, maybe 2013). In other words, to feed the expectations with actual revenue accomplishments the pace of innovative new home runs must speed up. You can only go back to the same wells so many times before revenues will start falling short of targets.
