Growth in every category: employees, lines in the code base, customer usage statistics and more.

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They discovered innovations were handed off to traditional market category teams and included in existing product lines.

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Understandably, it would be difficult to create a new category each year yet Apple did update all product lines in 2012.

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Convinced that its success had come by focusing on engineering, the company continued to invest in each of these lines of business as if they each had to be the next big thing in their category, instead of turning these devices into a platform on which consumers could build their lives and on which digital partners could create and deliver new value.

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The short-term bump created by a couple of completely new feature phone lines with novel designs and aggressive pricing could improve 1Q12 prospects even as the overall feature phone category continues its secular decline globally.

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While unit sales of most of Apple's computer lines were down in the fourth quarter of 2002, sales in its "peripheral and other hardware" category, into which the iPod falls, grew by more than 50% versus the year-ago quarter.

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