Comment by kergonath

> Apple waited on smartphones?

They were not waiting for smartphones, but they did wait for the technology to enable them. They had been working on prototypes for a couple of years before releasing the first iPhone, and smartphones were not really a new thing at that point. What made it possible is improvements in digitisers and batteries (and they were not the first users of the capacitive digitisers in the first iPhones, they were the first to use it at that scale for a full screen), as well as progress on the software side, which took some effort.

It was the same for the first iPod. They jumped when they got a hard drive they thought was small enough to fit in a product they believed was good.

So yeah, they tend to wait and see, but they consider technologies, not only final products.