Apple successfully builds new products from the bones of old ones

“Whoever said ‘out with the old, in with the new’ clearly wasn’t talking about Apple’s playbook,” Dan Moren writes for Macworld.
“The company may have its fair share of new and updated devices, but it’s also made a habit of building off of its existing devices — and not just in terms of spec bumps and speed boosts, but in actively finding ways to use old products as launching points for brand new devices,” Moren writes. “It’s a move that most companies probably couldn’t pull off, but one with which Apple has had great success—and which it will probably continue to use in the future.”
“The iPhone SE is, of course, the poster child for this kind of maneuver. Its body is essentially an iPhone 5s with minor tweaks, which was in turn, an iPhone 5 with minor tweaks,” Moren writes. “As such, the company was able to probably keep its production line much the same and churn out almost identical models of phones (with, admittedly, different internals) for close to five years, probably saving a lot of money in both research and development as well as retooling existing assembly procedures.”
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Would that Apple would repurpose the “cheese grater” Mac Pro that many people initially denigrated only to find themselves dreaming of a modern one nearly 13 years later. Yes, some more astute observers did praise its design from the get-go.