Yum! Brands, Inc. (YUM): Why Can’t Apple Inc. (AAPL) Be More Like Taco Bell?

Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) doesn’t need to look hard to find tech companies that falsely assumed they would be on top forever following what worked in the past. There are too many companies that naively figured that they would always be worth a market premium, and Apple probably doesn’t even realize the damage that it’s doing to its reputation by continuing to market older iPhones and iPads to achieve lower price points.

Apple needs to not only innovate, but it needs to innovate faster.

Why can’t Apple be more like Taco Bell? The chain took a year between the first and second Doritos Locos Tacos introductions, but it wasn’t afraid to hit the market a few months later with the third incarnation. How cool would it be if Apple offered iPhone and iPad updates every few months?

The argument here is that the debuts wouldn’t be the events that they are now — or that the enhancements would be minor — but let’s pull up a stock chart. As well as Apple has fared in recent weeks, the stock is still trading nearly 30% below its peak from September of last year. That all-time high, by the way, happened the morning the iPhone 5 hit the market.

If Apple could pick up the pace of introductions, it would give it more time to respond to Android enhancements and market conditions. One can argue that the headier pace of rollouts will also encourage Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) to raise the bar at a quicker pace. If it wasn’t for Apple’s pace of annual refreshes, we would have probably had the cheaper iPhone that we may get next month and the larger iPhone that we probably won’t get next month by now.

Apple needs more flavor, and the market’s getting hungry.

The article Why Can’t Apple Be More Like Taco Bell? originally appeared on Fool.com and is written by Rick Munarriz.

Longtime Fool contributor Rick Munarriz has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool recommends and owns shares of Apple and Chipotle Mexican Grill.

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