Apple’s a bit slow. The iPhone has been followed up, twice now, with incremental upgrades. The iPhone 3GS and the iPhone 4S were both relatively minor tweaks on the previous model. Bloggers complain, customers barely notice, but one group is absolutely thrilled: developers.

I work with an Apple developer and it turns out, that despite all the hoops and regulations they have to jump through to even sell something related to the Apple an Apple platform, it’s all worth it because Apple has made the big picture much easier. The write-once-deploy-anywhere notion is sort of true in Apple-land in a way that Andriod can’t even dream of. Once a piece of software or hardware is developed for an Apple product, it will plug into the same port, in the same location and have the same application hooks on iPods, a range of iPhones, and a couple of different iPads. That’s a pretty big deal when compared to developing an accessory for an Andriod-based phone or tablet. In that world, it’s develop once, and then try try again for nearly every phone or tablet on the market.

Apple will release an iPad “3” in March, but, like their other incremental upgrades, it isn’t the time to expect much. Rumors are starting to shake out that there won’t even be an all new A6 quad-core processor, for example. As if anyone but the technorati even cares. The iPad is firmly in the lead among tablets; there is little reason to rock this particular boat. I could, for example, imagine that the real feature of the new iPad will be its price: cheaper than the last ones. Such a move would be devastating to the competition who are making compelling products but struggling to make them as inexpensively as Apple has (with the obvious exception of Amazon).

A cheaper iPad could be decimating to the only real competitor: Amazon’s Fire. Seeing as the iPad already runs Amazon’s Kindle app, a cheap iPad would fill a visible niche. Not to mention how happy developers would be. They wouldn’t have to re-design accessories for this new product. Keeping developers happy is critical in these days when your product isn’t just a shrink-wrapped device, but rather that whole eco-system of market channels, accessories, and add-ons.

Still, I’ve taken up this prediction thing, lately, so, I’ll predict that, in spite of my hopes and dreams, Apple will not be lowering their iPad 3 price. They can always (and likely will) sell last year’s model for cheaper, but really, why would they want to cannibalize their own margins to sell a few extra units? The Kindle has proven no real threat and there is little point in being both the performance and low-cost leader.