There comes a moment, a tipping point, when you realize that the competition has been vanquished and the good times are rolling. That seems to be what is happening right now with Apple (AAPL).
Last year at this time we started worrying about a pad glut, that way too many of them were about to hit the pipeline from all sorts of different companies. That meant to me that pricing discipline might be lost and that Apple could be caught in a price war that could crimp Apple's amazing gross margins.
Now it looks like game, set, match -- we are in iTunes/iPod mode. The iPad initiated and now the iPad has won.
What's amazing is that it looks like at the exact same time that the iPad has won its category, the iPhone 4S may be doing the exact same thing. That's how I read yesterday's Verizon (VZ) news, that Verizon's selling a ton of them and willing to make less money doing so. In other words, the subsidies continue from Verizon on this phone -- in order to take share from AT&T (T) -- and that means you have the two biggest carriers pushing it. Given that the iPhone 4S is about to roll out in China, we may have reached the tipping point there, too.
Apple's got it going for a real reason -- dominance. Dominance because of the ecosystem. And the seeds planted in ecosystem by Steve Jobs before he passed away.
