"A smaller iPad ... is best seen as the company shoring up the defences of the most powerful ecosystem the consumer technology world has seen," he argues. "The iPhone, which turned the handset world upside down, and the 10-inch iPad, which is starting to eat into the PC industry, were game-changers. But a seven-inch iPad will be disruptive of precisely nothing.

"Rather, it is a symptom of Apple's need to round out its product set and ward off rivals," Waters says.

But he seems a bit confused or at least confusing. If these are truly "needs," then Apple is behaving rationally and even laudably in rounding out its product line and warding off rivals. Just because the small iPad is not disruptive, doesn't it make it a bad product or symptomatic of a mindset that's locked into defensiveness.

Waters persists in the widely shared view that Apple reacts to the actions of those companies deemed to be its competitors. The Rollup's view is that there's very little evidence that actually shows this to be the case.

Apple introduced the iPod music player in November 2001, and quickly dominated this market segment. Since then, it's created an array of iPod sub-brands, each in different models, as Apple refined and extended the product. There's nothing that indicates this was a defensive strategy: It enabled Apple to sell a whole lot of iPods and maintain its market dominance. Concluding that this doesn't represent innovation seems entirely arbitrary.