Apple Release Patterns

Apple Release Patterns is a new personal project of mine, and you can find the full-size original versions on a new, dedicated landing page on the InfoNewt.com site.  Every few months Apple releases a new product update or redesign, and the rumors start flying about what the upcoming product will be during the preceding weeks.  For better or worse, those speculations are often based on what was released in the same timeframe the prior year.

This data visualization lines up vertical columns for each year, starting with 2007.  I decided that anything further back wasn’t really relevant to Apple’s current practices.  Each product release is then mapped onto the calendar, showing a pattern (or lack of pattern) to the product releases.  If the product announcement was separate from the actual release date, I mapped that date as well.

This data was ripe for a visualization.  When I tried to look at the historical dates of product releases, the information was scattered across multiple sites, confusing and difficult to gather.  Some information was contradictory, which required further investigation.  So, the data topic itself was a good target for a clear, easy-to-understand visualization.  However, the design with all of the products was too complicated visually to perceive any defining patterns.  So, I created separate versions that break out the products into 3 categories, and those are much easier for readers to see the patterns.

For iOS devices (iPod, iPad, iPhone and AppleTV) you can see the pattern shift in 2011 for most of the products to a Fall timeframe.  You can also see a recently consistent announcement date with the product release the following Friday.

For Apple’s laptop line, the MacBooks, you can see the MacBook Air has become a regular release during the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June, and the MacBook Pro gets fairly regular updates twice a year, usually just to update the internal specifications.

The desktop Mac line doesn’t seem to show much pattern at all.  They might get an update each year, but the timing is erratic.  Sometimes they are part of WWDC, sometimes part of the Fall iOS events, and sometimes completely on their own.

I’m going to keep updating these on the landing page as Apple releases new products in the future (upcoming iPad Mini 2 Retina and Mac Pro still need to start shipping this year).  I want these to become a valuable resource every time the Apple rumor mill heats up about the next product announcement.  If you use the embed code on the Apple Release Patterns landing page, your site will also display the updates automatically as they become available.

This is version 1.0.  I have some ideas and improvements I want to make in future versions, but I would love to hear your thoughts as well.  Post any suggestions or feedback in the comments below.

10 Things You Probably Didn't Know About the iPhone

10 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About the iPhone from NextWorth takes a look at some of the amazing stats and facts about Apple’s flagship product.

Designed by InfoNewt, this infographic is a good case study in topic selection and release timing.  September was a month full of Apple iPhone news and hysteria surrounding the release of the new iPhone 5S, the iPhone 5C and the major upgrade to iOS 7.  There were a bunch of infographics released about the rumors surrounding the new phones, but as soon as the new iPhones were officially announced all of the rumor designs became obsolete.

The topic choice and data visualized in this design has a much longer online lifespan.  The content about the history and growth of the iPhone will be relevant for at least a year, maybe longer.  The infographic will continue to drive traffic and links to the NextWorth site.

A #Sworcery Infographic

Two years ago Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP was one of the first great games released that was designed specifically for the Apple iPad. Designed by Capybara Games, the game was also later released on iPhone, Android, Windows PC, Linux and Mac based on the huge success of the iPad version.

To celebrate the 2nd anniversary, Capybara Games released the Sword and Sworcery Infographic, and that’s cooler than a Trigon Trifecta!  (Also available on the SwordAndSworcery.com site)

From the Capybara Games site:

On March 24th, 2011 Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP launched on iPad. The first hours after its release were exciting, stressful, celebratory and even terrifying (as game-centric twitter feeds exploded). We watched as the game hit the top 10 paid games chart before we were even featured. Leading up to launch we knew we had made something cool. After launch we knew there was an audience that appreciated it.

Over the next 2+ years, we brought the game to PC, Mac & Linux. We collaborated with the amazing folks from 8-4 to create a version specifically for Japan. With the help of Apportable, we brought the game to Android. We joined our close friends in the most successful Humble Indie Bundle of all time, and joined a great Android Bundle as well.

With over 1.5 million copies sold, it’s pretty obvious that #Sworcery has been a resounding success. And we’d like to share a few details of that success with you. There’s not that many titles out there that began on iOS and made their way to this many other platforms over time, so we hope that this info is helpful in some way/shape/form.

From such a visual game design, I would have liked to see the chart labels as icons of the companies instead of just text labels. Even better as 8-bit icons similar to the design of the game.

As I mention about many infographic designs, the URL to the original infographic landing page should be included in the footer of the design so readers can find the full-size version of the infographic. I had to shrink the infographic image to fit on the blog, like many people, and I always try to link back to the original source. Not everyone is good about linking, and you want the readers to be able to find their way back.

As a bonus mini-infographic, they also released some of the stats behind the music by rockstar & critically acclaimed composer Jim Guthrie soundtrack, Sword & Sworcery LP - The Ballad of the Space Babies, also available on the iTunes store.

Found on The Verge and Daring Fireball.

Apple's Infographic Timeline Poster

Apple just released the infographic timeline poster, Apple Celebrates 5 Years of the App Store.  Copies of this poster were sent to various members of the press.  The above photo is from Lauren Goode from All Things D.

If anyone has a copy they don’t want, I would love to get a copy!

Sadly, no high-resolution versions of the poster are available online, but the data is available to view from within the iTunes Store.  You can see the images, icons and events, but they aren’t laid out like the poster timeline.  You can view the events in iTunes by following this link.

Found on All Things D 

How Apple Are You?

Do you think you’re Apple’s number one fan? Take the test on the How Apple Are You? infographic from mackeeper.com to see how you match up! Fancy a new tattoo soon? How about an Apple?

You think you know everything about Apple? Would you call yourself an Apple Fan? How about checking the level of Apple in your blood, would you be up for that? Check out our awesome info-graphics and find out how Apple you are! Make sure you share this with your buddies!

I’ll admit I scored a 155, so I’m a fairly hardcore Apple fan.

Where’s the URL to the original infographic landing page?!?

Thanks to Shelli for sending in the link!

Just How BIG Is Apple?

Watch out New York! There’s a new Big Apple in town! The Just How BIG Is Apple? infographic from bestcomputersciencedegrees.com illustrates how important Apple really is to us.  Pardon me while I check a text on my iphone and post this with my Mac…

It is the first company to successfully pivot from computer maker to device maker. And its devices are now ubiquitous, its annual new product releases are among the most anticipated in the world and it recently announced it would begin issuing a dividend to its stock owners expected to generate $10 billion in the first year alone. There is also speculation that Apple will enter into the payments market in the near future (allowing its handheld products to serve in the same fashion as a credit card). This alone would turn them into a trillion dollar company.

Love this clean, easy-to-read design.  I understand the sized red bars surrounding the world map, but the GDP values are so close to each other that this visualization makes it very hard to compare between countries.  A rose diagram behind the world map might have worked much better.

I love the use of the company logos to make the bar chart more visual.  The work “billion” could have been removed from each of the values, and made into the chart scale.  There’s one bar between Google and P&G that is missing it’s company logo.  The bar chart makes this very easy for the reader to compare values between the companies, and it should identify the date these market capitalizations were gathered since these values change every day.  It also needs a copyright statement, and the URL of the origianl infographic post so readers can get back to the original high-resolution infographic. 

Found on Infographic Journal

Client Infographic: Streamlining your Digital Life with the new iPad

With the Apple event last week announcing the release of the new iPad, the Streamlining your Digital Life with the new iPad infographic from NextWorth takes a look at the history of the electronic devices that the iPad has replaced in our lives.  A true multifunctional device, the iPad has replaced many of our separate gadgets.

The digital world is converging on a revolutionary all-in-one device, the powerful, brand-new iPad. These are the iconic portable devices that led to (and are to some extent being replaced by) Apple’s innovation.

The lines are color coded to connect the types of devices in the timeline, and show any devices that had multiple functions of their own (like the Eee PC 701).  Using a treemap in the iPad image, it also shows the amount of time spent using the different functions on the iPad from average consumers.  The use of illustrations instead of photographs of all these devices keeps the design simple and focused on communicating the data.

Finally, using their own internal data, an assortment of prices are shown of the current maximum values that consumers can get by trading in their now-obsolete gadgets.  With a handful of the right gadgets, you could easily get enough money back to pay for a brand new iPad!

All of the essential information is included in the design: data sources, brand logo, URL of the original high-resolution infographic landing page, company logo, copyright statement and even a mention of the designer (nice job Jeremy!).

This was an infographic design from my own company, InfoNewt, and of course, the team at NextWorth was fantastic to work with!

iPad3: USA in anticipation of the new iPad

Anticipation is building strong momentum expecting the release of the next iPad from Apple in the near future.  Ask You Target Market (AYTM.com) is an online survey service, and they gathered data from a couple of their own surveys to compile the iPad3: USA in anticipation of the new iPad infographic.

The rumor is that the iPad 3 announcement will come in the first week of March, but doesn’t specify when it will be released. For reference, the iPad 2 was announced on March 2nd of last year, and available on the 11th.

There are some significant changes expected and to gain a better understanding on the current state of the American consumers’ current iPad usage and anticipation of the iPad 3, AYTM conducted DIY market research utilizing our online consumer panel and survey tool. The highlights of our discoveries are encapsulated in this infographic:

This Infographic is based on a survey of 2000 Americans who don’t own an iPad (request full stats report by e-mailing us: support [at) aytm.com) and another survey of 500 iPad owners (open full stats report) that we’ve collected for you on aytm.com in February 2012.

A few thoughts about the design:

• I like the idea to that each fingerprint on the iPad to represents 100,000 people, but because it’s a data visualization, the different sizes of the fingerprints makes you think that the size has meaning when it really doesn’t.  It was so subtle, I initially missed the number 3 reversed in the fingerprints.
• In the “What could Apple do” section, the illustrations do help give meaning to each of the statistics, but because the numbers are all in the text, their impact is lost.  These values should have been visualized.
• The model distribution is clear, and easy to understand.  For the Models breakdown, I really like the use of the pie chart to represent two levels of data.  Primary is the size, and the secondary level is the WiFi vs. 3G split.
• I really like the 3G satisfaction breakdown.  Very easy to understand.
• Great use of the logos and colors in the Carrier split data.  Orange isn’t in the AT&T logo, but is a very dominant color on their website, and Verizon got a red bar to match their logo and primary website color.
• The Family trees are hard to understand and the 1.7x visualization isn’t clear.
• I’m not sure why they picked area charts for the apps visualizations.  That’s really the wrong type of visualization for the data since these are all supposed to add up to 100% of users.
• The male vs. female bar charts work well, and are easy to understand.  I appreciate that they were consistent with the female number always first, and of course the color-coding work perfectly.
• “Where iPads are used” is really just an illustration, and doesn’t visualize the percentages at all.  I simple stacked bar under the illustrations (like the carriers above) would have worked nicely.
• Surpirisingly, I really like the use of word clouds here.  You don’t need the specific numbers, and the word cloud visualization makes the point well because the top responses are so overwhelming.
• I love that they gave credit to the designer, Lev Mazin!  It doesn’t hurt that he’s the CEO and Co-founder of AYTM.com, but happens to also be a graphic designer.

Only one thing missing at the bottom: the URL to find the original infographic.

Found on Mashable

Update on Wednesday, February 29, 2012 at 7:20AM by Randy

After some discussion with the designer, Lev, in the comments section, he redesigned the area charts into two half-circle pie charts, shown here:

I think this works much better to accurately show the data as portions of a whole 100%, and still effectively show the inverse comparison between high numbers of Free Apps, and low number of Paid Apps.

What do you think of the design changes?

Tablet Adoption at Work

The State of Tablet Adoption at Work is a new infographic from VentureBeat.com.  It’s interesting that the infographic itself was sponsored by Lenovo and Qualcomm, but included as part of a VentureBeat article.  You can find the original version here at TabletsAtWork.com

Since the debut of Apple’s iPad in Jan. 2010, the integration of tablet devices into our lives and work has progressed rapidly — so fast that it’s sometimes hard to put in perspective how quickly got here.  The exclusively obtained infographic below breaks down how far workforce adoption of tablet technology has come — and where it’s headed. (The graphic was sponsored by Lenovo and Qualcomm.)

I love the clean, professional design look.  I really like the color scheme and the mixed bag of visualization styles; grid of icons, treemap, stacked bar, line chart, etc.

Only a couple of design issues about this one I would improve.

• I’m willing to let 16 tablet icons represent 16.1 Million tablets shipped in 2010 (rounding), but why only 144 tablets shown to represent 147.2 Million?  That was just the designer wanting a clean, square visual that breaks the actual data visualization.
• The line chart showing 134% increase in shipments powered by Android and Windows is way out of scale.  It’s visualizing something close to a 900% increase.
• At the bottom there should be a copyright statement and the URL to the original infographic landing page so people can find the full high-resolution version.

Found on the Inside Flipboard feed in Flipboard for iPad.

The Insanely Great History of Apple

The Insanely Great History of Apple is a cool new poster from PopChartLabs.com, where you can purchase the $25, 18”x24” poster for yourself (and many other great ones).

The world’s most comprehensive mapping of Apple products, this print shows every computer released by Apple in the last thirty years, from the original Mac through the MacBook Air. Products are sorted according to type, including the connections between various form factors which have arisen as Apple has invented—and reinvented—insanely great products.

Found on VisualNews

Update on Tuesday, November 22, 2011 at 8:18AM by Randy

There’s a great behind-the-scenes article on Fast Company Design by PopChart Labs about the effort that went into designing the poster:  How Pop Chart Lab Made That Amazing Apple Infographic

I don’t think they realized it would have been easy to stay in OmniGraffle to finish it up.  I don’t think there was any reason to move over to Adobe Illustrator to finish the design.