> there's little difference between an iPhone 6 plus and the current model
Upgraded to XS after wading into a pool with my 6. Biggest hidden feature is the electronic SIM card. I can buy international data with GigSky for much cheaper than AT&T would let me.
The dual electronic SIM is awesome, I agree. I haven't used GigSky before, but their prices are super cheap in comparison. Definitely using that on my next trip overseas. How do you differentiate which data plan you'll use though?
> How do you differentiate which data plan you'll use though?
I was in Iceland for a week, so 2GB for 15 days and $30 worked well. (I was on the fence about 5GB for 30 days and $50, but in the end didn’t need it.)
I don't think that is going to happen. FaceId is so good on my X, I forget I have phone locking turned on at all. Now that they have it working in all orientations on the iPad, I assume the next iPhone will also work that way. Supposedly the iPad also unlocks in a wider field of view. Both of those items are the main complaints I see about FaceId.
After using FaceId for over a year, going back to TouchId really does feel like a step backward anytime I have to use it on test devices or my iPad.
Doesn't seem likely, but expect FaceID to get faster and more reliable. The recent version of TouchID was much better than when it was first introduced.
> My hope is that now other phones have introduced touch sensors under their screens, that Apple will add that back in.
Apple could have been first to support an in-screen fingerprint reader but stopped development when FaceID was greenlit. It's doubtful they would follow others in including a redundant, inferior technology (their perception).
iPhones without headphone jacks still come with a pair of earbuds; they just have a Lightning connector on the end of the cable instead of a 3.5mm audio plug.
There are a lot of differences (improved camera, edge-to-edge display, Face ID, much better SoC). However, SoCs and cameras are already so good that the average consumer does not notice the gaps as they did with e.g iPhone 3G -> iPhone 5.
This will be a term problem for many phone manufacturers, the market does not grow as fast anymore + people keep their phones for more cycles. Anecdotically, many of my friends and family members would upgrade their iPhones every two years. Now most of them are still using the 6s, SE or even 5s.
Not sure why you're being downvoted for something that is very possibly going to happen. People hate hearing crony capitalist reality on HN and trust too much in large corporations that are solely there for profit to shareholders and will do so at any cost.
Look at the dongle nonsense Apple has pulled on customers for profit. Look at their genius bar overcharing and lying to people about their broken devices (see: Louis Rossman https://youtu.be/o2_SZ4tfLns).
What's even worse, every time I went to the Apple store in Italy there were customers complaining about their phone being slower, and the "genius" would always say something like "well, if you'd like to consider a newer model, we have..." like it was the only solution to the problem, taking advantage of the fact that some people think electronics wear down with use like tires.
I bought used iPhone 4 phones 2-3 times, replaced the battery, and it was brand new.
And all those industrialists are going to clean up their act. That politician is really sorry about that thing they did and will never do it again. The financial sector pinky swears to never crash the economy again.
No reason to trust what apple is saying. They are a company. If it becomes financially viable to play those tricks again they will do it.
Apple has fallen short once when they sold an older model for a bit too long, and didn't support it with OS upgrades for more than a year or so, but compared to 90% of Android devices over the years that's not terrible.
Apple is a Rorschach test. You see what you want to see.
To be honest, the disappearing headphone jack might be what finally helps me convince my wife to let me upgrade our car stereo to something with bluetooth support.
You'll be disappointed when you notice the degradation in sound quality. Anecdata: My Kenwood car stereo has both and the difference is immediately noticeable.
Not having a headphone jack isn't enough reason for someone to stop using their preferred device, but it seems overwhelmingly the userbase would prefer it.
Trying to argue about demand when we're boiling frogs is pointless.
John Gruber thinks Apple probably refuses to allow those cases:
"But Apple wields its MFI control in other ways too. In a Twitter thread Wednesday, Nilay Patel pointed out there has never been an MFI-certified battery case with a headphone jack. This almost certainly is not because no one thought to make one, but rather that Apple will not approve them. Apple clearly thinks external battery packs (connected to iPhones via a cable) are a better solution than cases with integrated batteries. With Lightning, they can effectively control this. If the iPhone were to switch to USB-C, I don’t think they could stop anyone from making USB-C battery cases. I do not think Apple will cede this control."
Maybe it's because most people still use phones with 3.5mm therefore no "roaring trade"? Plus, how would a phone case reintroduce 3.5mm without bulging out like crazy...
You can do it if you open the phone and insert enough chinesium guts, there is a youtuber that did it but it's certainly nothing covered by warranty.
You'd need something no more than 8mm (an iphone SE has a jack and is 7.6mm thick - thinner than an X). It would add 8mm to the length of the case too (you'd insert sideways)
All iphones are 7-8mm thick, so any case is going to be thick enough to support a jack, which means adding 8mm to the length, and the mophie cases I've seen do just that.
However if apple refuse to allow it, that's obviously a problem, but it's not a technical problem.
You don't even need that, there are people who retrofit 3.5mm jacks into jack-less iPhones. Ie, the iPhones that were designed to be without audio jack still have enough space to accommodate a hub to switch the lightning port and a DAC for audio output AND a 3.5mm port.
- You can use the included adapter instead of a headphone jack. I do this every day to plug my phone into the car and it's no big deal. If I had a newer car stereo it'd be bluetooth anyway, and wireless headphones are pretty cheap now.
- What would a normal user use NFC for other than Apple Pay?
- Most people couldn't care less if the port is Lightning, USB-C, or micro USB so long as it charges their phone.
- iMessage works flawlessly, and the standard (at least here in the UK) is WhatsApp rather than MMS now to communicate across the iOS/Android void.
Yes, for each of these, many people do not care about them. And yes, there are people who don't care about all of these things at the same time. But that might be a smaller group.
For anecdata, I want a headphone jack and wireless charging. USB-C is nice-to-have. I switched from Google devices to S8 for that reason.
> - You can use the included adapter instead of a headphone jack. I do this every day to plug my phone into the car and it's no big deal. If I had a newer car stereo it'd be bluetooth anyway, and wireless headphones are pretty cheap now.
Bad wireless headphones are pretty cheap. Even the expensive Apple AirPods can barely keep up with a $20 wired pair of Xiaomi or VSonic IEMs on the quality front.
I can go through a pair every 6 months and still come out ahead before the batteries fail in the AirPods.
Yeah, that is honestly my main reason, I often forget to charge my watch even, having to go through a bus ride with nothing to stick in my ears would be rather brutal.
It's hard for me to imagine a person who has used Apple's AirPods preferring anything else. They are game-changing. They're the Apple product that's most delighted and surprised me since I first got an iPhone. I've owned and used other Bluetooth headphones. There's no comparison.
I looked at the objective sound quality data on them and well, it's less than positive, I'm used to Sennheiser HD650s at home, which score quite well on such metrics, so I'm quite doubtful I'd like them much.
My first and only experience with Apple products was not a good one and I don't intend to repeat it. Macbook - ran extremely hot, many of the supposedly amazing Apple UIs were trash (Alt+O to open a file? Why can't I maximize a window like a normal person? How about the need to use 3rd party tools to do Super+Left/Super+Right that works out of the box on Windows and KDE), battery is glued in with some of the strongest glue I've ever seen so when I had to replace it after 2 years it was not a fun experience. I did learn lipo cells can take far more abuse than I expected though. I wound up running Windows on it and eventually just deleting the OS X partition.
You've provided no reasons except "There's no comparison", "They are game-changing" - shit like that is why I don't buy much Apple stuff. It's hype that fails to deliver.
The reason is that they've completely fixed Bluetooth. They just work. My Bluetooth mouse sometimes fails to connect. The Bluetooth in my old car was always flaky. The Bluetooth in my non-Apple headphones sometimes connects and sometimes refuses. I don't own a Bluetooth device that works like the Airpods do.
The Airpods always just work.
They've completely integrated it. You open the case and you see that they've connected with a nice image right on screen. You want to switch them from your phone to your iPad? You select them on the iPad and they just connect. Every single time. Without exception.
No other Bluetooth device even enters into the conversation for me until they just work like the Airpods do. Nothing outweighs that for me. Sound quality doesn't. Shape or comfort in-ear doesn't outweigh it. The price of entry is that you have to make the Bluetooth just work.
The reason Apple gets the kind of praise that you seem to despise is that they figure out how to make things just work. And for a certain type of customer, that outweighs literally any other concern. You can respond all day about this spec or that spec or this or that performance test or "objective sound quality data."
You know what else "just works"? Wired headphones. We're talking wired vs wireless not wireless vs non-apple wireless here, so this is a pretty silly angle to discuss.
That's great for you! But it is a real phenomenon in the world that people have a lot of trouble with Bluetooth. And the Airpods don't have those problems. That's why they're "game-changing."
Edit: the comment I’m responding to here has been edited to make my response appear like a non sequitur. I’m sorry I responded again below before noticing such a blatant act of bad faith.
Wired: no pairing issues, no battery issues, great audio quality for less money. How "game-changing" is that?
Why buy AirPods again? Because Apple decided you don't get a 3.5mm jack anymore. Nothing else. They've scammed you into it and convinced you they did you a service.
I preferred wireless headphones when iPhones still had a headphone jack, so you might be right, in general, that I’m a pea-brained sucker, but this particular hypothesis is easily falsified.
- Dongles are annoying, 3.5mm is delightfully simple and universally supported across the audio industry. It's not hard to implement and can carry a fairly high quality signal if your DAC is good enough. If you want digital, a normal 3.5mm jack plus cable should be able to carry enough bandwidth and still remain backwards compatible. I would see that as an improvement over simply-analog-3.5.
- The normal end user wouldn't care about the difference in NFC but banks would be thankful for not having to pay Apple for the privilege of having their customer use an iPhone.
- True but people care about not having to care and a universal charging port is good for that. Then people can just plug chargers into things and it works. No thinking required. And less waste too because vendors might not have to package chargers with every device and people won't have to buy new chargers every new iPhone release.
Looks like they charge banks and payment networks for the transaction. I suppose it's possible that the networks pass that fee back to the retailer at some point. Can't find great sources for any of that though.
Apple demands transaction fees from the card-issuing banks. From media reports, that's one of the reasons Apple Pay took so long to get to e.g. Germany.
So what. I'd prefer to not have to carry around any adapter
> - What would a normal user use NFC for ..
Off the top of my head, I can use it for topping up my travel card. Or at least I could if I had an android device ...
> - Most people couldn't care less if the port ..
Yeah that's why the EU ruled that a standard port must be used. Also why a significant selling point for Nokia handsets for years was availability of chargers.
Why is it so hard to grasp that I might be caught out from time to time without my own proprietary charger?
> - iMessage works flawlessly..
AHHHHHHH HA HA HAH HAH HA ahem HAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHA HA HA HA
HA HA HA
HA
I really loved iMessage around 2011 to the point that I didn't even see the sense in Whatsapp cause all my Friends and Family had iPhones.
- travel cards/apps (afaik Apple supports at least emulating some cards through iPhones)
- quickly connecting consumer devices to the phone (be it to establish a data transfer, connect an app to a device, ...). NFC can skip most of the discovery/network join dance you otherwise have to do.
That's the thing - to me at least it's not a given that the 3.5mm jack will disappear. There have been various failed attempts in the place to replace existing standards which have failed - things like Firewire and HD-DVD come to mind.
I have a motherboard from 2016 that has USB 3.0 ports and get this, PS/2 ports. It's nice having choice. I use the PS/2 port for my keyboard, leaving 1 extra USB slot free.
In my phone I have Bluetooth and a headphone jack. I love the choice there too.
Point being, it doesn't have to be one or the other. You can have both. And 3.5 headphone jack is not even comparable to PS/2
$1000+ phones are not sustainable when the average pay in the US is actually falling in real terms. Buying power and disposable income are being eaten up by taxes and high cost of healthcare.
In the UK a new iPhone is ~£1250 there are so many more things I would rather spend that money on.
I spend so much time with my phone, I use it all day rely on it so much, it's the epicentre of my digital life.
But still, I think it's too expensive. I think once you touch the £1,000 mark you have to start proving far more worth than polished marketing. My work thankfully proved an iPhone 8, otherwise, I was going to buy an iPhone 6 or 7 [0]. I just cannot justify the extra money for the difference in the product.
Also in the UK, and I can't remember the last time I actually bought a phone outright. I resigned myself years ago to paying ~£40/mo for a contract and insurance. Every 2 years I get an upgrade to the latest iPhone.
I'm in the UK and I buy my phones outright, through my company.
I pay about £15 pcm for unlimited data and more of everything else than I can use. I buy a phone when I feel like it, usually about every 18 months to two years. Currently very happy with my P20 Pro. Advantages (to me) are that I can switch network whenever I feel like it, and I own the phone from day 1.
Errr.... It might be £17. It's a Three business contract that's been running for two or three years now.
I put the unlimited part to the test as well, using it as our home broadband for a few months. 100GB+ and they didn't squeal.
(--edit-- looking at the invoice it's a mess of charges, bonuses and weird discounts, starting at a base price of £34 plus vat, brought down to £17 plus vat, not quite as cheap as I thought and a lot weirder)
How do you get the discount? I opted to keep my personal plan instead of choosing a business plan because it was 34£+VAT, but if with a discount is just 17£+VAT then it’s very interesting.
I wonder if I just called up on a day when the sales guy needed to make up a quota or something.
Looking at what I have on my invoice -
£34 - Business 900
£4.167 - Landline 1000 (this on is weird, I have no landline from anyone)
£4.255 - Broadband Plus (I also don't have broadband from them)
-£8.511 - '25% Recurring discount'
-£16.667 - 'Loyalty discount'
Coming out at £17.286 for the lot before VAT, I'm assuming the guy put on some basic charges for the lowest level landline and broadband connections, which were never to be provisioned, to unlock the discounts ... !
I bought an S7 (1 year old) off ebay for ~£300, and I pay £10/month for service (with giffgaff so I can adjust the plan monthly if I need more or less data for a given month).
I don't get an iphone, but it's a fair bit cheaper...
S7 is a solid phone. It launched with a great camera, slim design, great battery life and decent speed.
Sure there is stuff that's better now for games or really pushing it. But for taking some pictures, navigating, podcasts, notetaking, general admin, youtube, messaging etc etc it's still absolutely fine.
I've actually just bought a Moto G6 Play and that's an extraordinary device for the money (£129.99).
4000mAh battery, bigger screen (though not 'better') and can do all the S7 does above without trouble. Camera isn't as good but man it's cheap for what you get.
I have a S7 as well. What phone would you suggest to be better for games? I travel quite a bit for work and while I admit I was quite skeptical of games on the go I now find in them quite a bit of enjoyment.
It would just be my assumption that the latest generation with the fastest processors would be best for games I guess. I'm not sure, I actually acted in another thread what the latest phones with the new fastest processors do with all that power as I'm just a 'typical' user that doesn't really push things. I assume games would take advantage of this extra power.
I can't speak for Denmark, but at least in Canada it's often hard to tell— the advertised prices all assume you're on contract and paying down a device. So the BYOD price generally is something you have to ask about, or get through the retention department by calling and threatening to cancel.
This is the funniest thing I've read in a while. I remember the rest of the world mocking the American model for cell phone plans (contract lock-in with high monthly rates in exchange for cheap uogrades) and praising the model used in the UK and most of the EU (no contract, incredibly cheap rates but phones are purchases outright). American carriers finally came around to adopting the UK/EU model in the past few years as people began to become more accepting of the idea that the latest smartphone is worth keeping for more than 2 years if it means halving their monthly service payment and now you're telling me the UK has adopted the old American business model?
I find this to be hilarious for reasons I can't quite articulate but going from a model where service is decoupled from hardware to a model where you're contractually obligated to pay a set bundled fee is a 180 degree switch too inexplicable to ignore.
Australia had the USA's model, and to a certain degree, still has. But it used to be that if you wanted a reasonable amount of data (back in the days where 2 up to 8GB was "reasonable"), you'd be best off to get one of the expensive phones on a plan (say $80-100/mo).
But these days, those expensive plans have 20-30GB a month, whereas I'm still only using the data I was back then, and you can get plans for $20/mo for 4-6GB. So I've now gone to buying the phone outright and getting a cheap plan, and save a ton of $.
I suspect a lot of people are still under the mentality that they need the amount of data included in the more expensive plans, without ever checking that to be the case.
Of course, if you're streaming YouTube/Netflix/music at the high bandwidth rates and not even doing the bare minimum to pull down that data while on WiFi, all bets are off.
The UK hasn't "now adopted" that model. It has existed in european countries for basically forever, it just wasn't/isn't the only choice, and less popular.
The price of their flagship is ever increasing though. Pointing out that their 'budget' model is now at the same price as their old flagships isn't really making a good case for the affordability of iPhones.
Increasing the highest possible price is kind of meaningless. You can look at the most expensive iPhone and max out the memory on that to reach an even higher price. For a better comparison US inflation has been ~25% since the iPhone's so:
The cheapest new iPhone is $449.99 which works out to 360$ in 2007 dollars. The cheapest original iPhone was $599 in 2007 dollars or the equivalent to ~750$ today, making them far more affordable.
What really changed is cellphone companies stopped baking in heavy phones subsidies. Now you can still pay next to nothing at purchase, you just see a separate monthly fee on every cellphone bill.
I paid US$500 for my current iPhone, which is about half that price, and just about the top of what I'd be willing to pay for a device with a useful life as short as that of your average smartphone. Should I seriously expect to be coughing up 100% more to replace my current phone if it craps out?
No thanks. Those sorts of hijinks make Nokia's bananaphone look more and more attractive.
That's why I switched to Android. iOS is great and had no complaints about the platform. It was lovely. But the price hikes became ridiculous and as a symbolic protest I am now an Android user. I can't accept the prices anymore.
Android isn't an equivalent replacement, but I can adapt.
That's a fantastic list and reflects my sentiment about Apple's price hikes very well.
iPhones to me always started at around $700ish. Only with the larger plus sized models people started accepting $800+.
Then boom - suddenly the jump to $1000+ with the X (which was deemed a 'special' device based on it's 'advanced' features), so I think many expected prices to come down again. But instead we now have an XS Max with starts at $1100.
Compared to the $700 usual starting price we are up 58% and innovation has decreased not increased since.
That's amazing to me, actually. Compare what 3Gs can do vs an Xr, and that's only $50 more in real dollars? Incredible. Shows the rapid rate of progress in mobile technologies.
That is assuming your wages / salary increases with inflation. Which is not true for majority of people, hence it felt expensive. Not to mention consumers got used to Tech being cheaper with Moores Law, which is no longer true.
I use my iPhone for personal use and business, as a replacement for a camera (completely stopped using a DSLR) and to provide navigational assistance on the ~1 day a week I spend in the mountains.
When I think about the devices my iPhone has replaced, it is still an incredible value. My P&S camera (not my DSLR yet, but getting better), video camera, music device, book reader, hand held gaming device, navigation system, oh and my phone/communication device.
The less expensive devices can do some of those well, but I don't think all yet. Video seems to be where other devices still fall down.
But, I also agree that not everyone needs a device to do all of those things. I have friends who do not take pictures, or video, or use nav. A $200 phone is the right choice for them.
Sounds like there's a few of us in the same boat, where our priority is the photo+video quality.
Coming from a previous life as a pro-photographer who has since sold all his gear, I almost always default to the "telephoto" lens (which is really a 'normal' lens in old-school photographer speak ;) ) on the 6+, 7 and now X, and am still astonished at the quality that you can get out of a smartphone.
The HDR on the photos+video of the newest models is very tempting... but I can wait out the year and either get one 2nd hand or whatever model replaces it.
I use all those nav assistance features too (offline topo maps yay!).
I can't quite get across the hump of selling my gear. I have cut way back though. The only lenses I use anymore are my 300mm zoom and my 50mm. Obviously, the reach with the first is great, and the 50mm just takes amazing pictures.
I sold mine so I couldn't take any more jobs. Otherwise it would be too tempting.
But agreed, I wish I had more versatility in focal lengths. Sad to see none of the "external sensor body that uses the phone as main UI" devices (Olympus Air, Sony QX) really took off.
It's almost £800 in Denmark. I really do prefer iOS for smartphone, but I'd never buy an iPhone with my own money. Of cause I think a fair price for a phone is closer to $50, but that's just a reflection of my usage.
Fair as in: The price is justified by the usage. I only need text and phone calls, so the majority of the smartphone features aren't proving me with any real value, it just drives up the purchase price.
I'm a bit surprised by that definition of "fair". If you were buying a phone for yourself, would you get a flip phone, then? Or something with a physical keyboard? Both of these are available for $50 or less, I think.
Realistically I suppose I would pay up to around $150 for a phone with a touch screen, a nice phone book app, iMessage support (or similar), five year guaranteed live span, and and OS other than Android (or a completely de-google OS, with non assistant features at all)... And an OTP app.
I could use a feature phone, and I have, but I would like a better phone book.
For $150, in the US, you could probably get three iPhone 4S plus accessories, or maybe two iPhone 4S (or 5) plus a couple battery swaps. This sounds like it would meet your requirement. Personally I’m all for buying used equipment. The drawback would be that your app store purchases would be somewhat limited, and you’re rolling the dice with used hardware.
Even if you use your phone for everything, an iPhone 6 or 7 will still be a very good phone. Those who own the 6 or 7 simply have no need to upgrade yet and there isn't a large number of people left that are in the marked for their first smartphone. My employer offered to upgrade my two year old iPhone 7 to either an 8 or XR, but there's simply no reason to, it still a good phone and I still get 3 or 4 days of battery life.
Rather than cramming more stuff into the iPhone, Apple could use the next iteration to reduce cost. There's a large number of Android users that could be convince to switch, if the price is low enough and the quality is preserved. Currently the cheapest iPhone is $610 in Denmark, that's the iPhone 7 and the iPhone XR is $1020. I'm not sure who Apple is targeting with those prices, other than people who can't or won't pay the $1350+ for the iPhone Xs. Apples desire to continually increase prices simply has to scare some customers way.
The price of a new, unlocked iPhone XR in the US right now appears to match the price of a new, unlocked iPhone 8 at this time last year.
It is generally the case that the standard current-year iPhone model takes over roughly the previous model's price point at release, and the now-previous-year model undergoes a price drop.
The introduction of a new tier (the higher-end, occupied last year by the X and this year by the XS) is a change, but has not done away with the iterations of "this year's model" and "last year's model" in the tiers below it.
> I think once you touch the £1,000 mark you have to start proving far more worth than polished marketing. My work thankfully proved an iPhone 8, otherwise, I was going to buy an iPhone 6 or 7 [0]
Fraser Spiers (famous in certain circles as an ‘iPad in schools’/productivity tools proselytizer) recently faced the same dilemma and made the switch to Android/Chromebook instead:
You can always tell what people really believe when it’s their own money on the line. I hope those schools take note the next time a snake oil salesman comes calling!
If you look at the performance testing between SOCs in the Apple and Android ecosystems, you'll see that the Apple cores from two years ago are still on par with the newest performance cores in the Android ecosystem and way ahead of Qualcomm's best.
Does this mean that if someone already owns an iPhone 7 and does not want to upgrade to the newest iPhone XS or XR, the most frugal thing to do is keep using it and maybe replace the battery rather than buy a new Android phone?
They already own a device that is just as fast as a new Android device and has at least as many years of support coming to it.
The reasons to upgrade would be increased performance and the battery life improvements you would pick up from moving to an iPhone XR.
>The contrast to the best Android SoCs have to offer is extremely stark – both in terms of performance as well as in power efficiency. Apple’s SoCs have better energy efficiency than all recent Android SoCs while having a nearly 2x performance advantage. I wouldn’t be surprised that if we were to normalise for energy used, Apple would have a 3x performance lead.
Exactly. It is not that I or We cant afford £1250 or $1300 Phones. It is that we cant justify it. I cant accept my iPhone has worst antenna performance and reception compared to Android CounterParts. All using Qualcomm. Dual Sim in this year iPhone as well as Next year will still not have Dual LTE ( DSDV ), i.e Being able to call someone while using LTE on another SIM card, Standard since 2017 Qualcomm modem. Not available to Intel modem until (may be) 2020. Camera no longer the best for two consecutive year. Still no 10W charging when others are into 15W+ already. ( And even worst they actively made all the newer Lightning Cable incapable of supporting Fast Charge ) And the TCO of owning Apple devices is going up as well.
Battery Swap after Two years? $100
Camera Lens not working? $200
Screen Break or Back Glass broke? $700
Losing the Phone and don't have Backup?
Helpless.
There is something money cant buy, for everything else there is AppleCare+ with Theft Protection. ( Ad for Apple )
If they are going to charge so much for repair they might as well extend the coverage to 2 years standard.
We used to be frustrated with Apple, but every year we will see what they have been working on and thought "That is what they have been up to", forgive them for ignoring lots of small things and embrace their New innovation. The past three years I have not been exactly please with their pace. At least not when they have 10-100x the resources of Apple Pre iPhone era.
I think the reason has nothing to do with the iPhone 8, 8 Plus, X, XR or XS. I think the reason has to do with 2 back-to-back iOS updates that didn't hugely slow down my iPhone 7 Plus.
I'm used to really wanting the newer iPhone when I update iOS 12 months after buying but the last 2 updates haven't fit that mold.
There is also just a general kind of burn out. In phones, in social media, etc. Maginal utility from consumer tech is now so marginal that people are starting to not upgrade every year. It was bound to happen. I’m sure someone will come up with a more creative name for this when it starts to impact stock prices.
iPhones and the iOS speed focused updates are really showing the longevity of the device. My wife has the 7+ she got when it came out. I got her the battery change out for $30, and the device is great. It got faster with iOS 12. She has no need for a better device. Upgrades now really are incremental, with much of the technology 'good enough'.
I have the X. It works great. Nothing in the XS makes me want to upgrade. I would like the XS Max, but I'll just wait for next year. And next year, my wife will get my X which further extends its usefulness.
Basically, the delta in speed and functionality gains for new models isn't what it used to be, so people hang onto old phones longer. Personally, I buy ~$150 androids because I tend to drop them, and a $1k phone would be a bad idea for me.
The end of "phone subsidies" probably also plays into this.
Near everybody who is going to have a smartphone already has one of some sort. That combined with people getting bored with the marginal increase of capabilities has killed hype for unnecessary upgrades.
Just good old "Market Saturation" I'd say. Phones became about as good as people needed them to be in the last 5 years. Everything that's been added recently is just fluff and I'd say most people are just sticking with what they've got, or replacing with an established model where possible.
That might be true but most phones are not running application that leverage that performance. The apps are more often than not optimised for lower performance and if you spend most of your time in Safari/Messenger/Instagram/Whatsapp A12 wont give you a lot of performance bump as compared to A11
For mobile devices, it isn't just about having apps leverage performance - it is also getting work over and done with so components can go back to sleep and save battery.
For tasks that will legitimately use every ounce of performance thrown at them or which have to run continuously or on a high interval, Apple tends to add custom silicon. See video encoding/decoding, crypto, use of machine learning models, non-homogenous core performance.
I'm genuinely curious - what apps use/need all this power?
And this is a genuine question, my usage is probably 'typical' and not pushing the device so I don't know what people do with their phones that takes advantage of this processing power.
Web browsing certainly benefits in almost every phone. There are loads of pages that will crush old phones now. You won't see HN perform better, but sites that are loaded with cruft and ads will render smoother. Another benefit of faster/more efficient processors is battery life.
Notably, the A12 added a specific CPU numeric instruction that is aimed directly at Javascript. But apparently it's not even being used yet, and the phones still beat desktop machines at JS benchmarks.
There's a ton of computation going on in the Photos app these days, both computational photography to create the image itself, along with things like face and object recognition. The newest phones do HDR video, which is quite intensive. Then there's AR.
For me it is because they’ve become too large. Last year I got an 8 as I really needed a new device and the size is pushing it. The X models are larger still
Maybe it's because I can get a modern Android One phone for $150 that will day-to-day perform right with an iPhone in normal use cases, with a headphone jack, notched IPS screen, IR blaster, FM radio, dual removable sim with SD storage to 256GB, 4000mAh battery that lasts 12 hours screen-on-time, camera that will compete with any modern mid range ~$400 phone, with full metal construction except for where RF needs to escape.
Most people aren't playing PUBG or running CPU intensive tasks on their phones, they're texting, reading the news, watching twitch/youtube, or looking at instagram/facebook/slack/discord.
$1000+ is absolute insanity. $749 for the XR is blatantly ripping you off.
I'm guessing next year's refresh will feature a much lower price. I think Apple is finding out the hard way that increasing prices means lower volumes. They might even pull off a mid year price reduction. They've done that before.
Despite not owning one, I believe Apple can easily fix most of their issues by simply reducing the price and growing volumes again. They are about to lose the teenage market. That's mostly a cost problem. For the past few years they've cashed in on their popularity by squeezing the high end of the market. Now that that is running dry, they need to pay attention to their bottom line again or they risk permanently alienating a new generation of users.
My guess is that a 500$ base model that doesn't suck, would be quite popular. Of course their problem is that they have little to differentiate the 1200 $ model from that and that most of their competition is selling quite nice phones at or below that price.
Not an economics expert at all, but what happens if profit per unit is still more significant? Maybe Apple is targeting something like:
Total Profit = Volume * Profit Per Unit
So even though Volume is smaller because units are more expensive, the increased markup increases the total profit and that's the reason why they are getting ~90% of the profits in the industry. This idea makes more sense to me considering guidance for the next quarter won't include volumes.
Is there any reasoning behind only targeting volume that I am unaware of? Genuine question.
Apple also makes money from ecosystem software services where I assume profit margins are even richer. So there is incentive to increase the user base.
Having less but more profitable customers is a boneheaded move. Developers may increase their prices to account for the reduced number of users, sure, but the niche target market that the developer is targeting may not exist any more.
If you look at history of game consoles, the ones with the higher quality hardware and software usually lost because of the high prices.
What was wrong with the 5c? Was it too cheap to be worth it to the bottom line? I thought it was a nice phone for the price. Referbs of it typically cost less than $100.
I wonder if Apple is purposely trying to financially destabilize their suppliers in order to gain leverage over them.
I have a 6S and I'd love a new phone, but at the end of the day the trade off for getting to work on my startup is that I need to prioritize spending money on things that will actually contribute to my happiness or well being in some way. And since I know a new phone isn't going to improve my life in any way, that just makes it really easy to dump the money into crypto or whatever instead.
> They are about to lose the teenage market. That's mostly a cost problem.
What, do teenagers suddenly stop wanting things just because they can't afford them? When did that start?
I think it's easy to confuse "sales volumes are dropping among teens because of price" with "teens don't want iPhones anymore." Those are not the same things at all.
> I think Apple is finding out the hard way that increasing prices means lower volumes
IMHO this is getting the causation backwards.
I think Apple saw the stagnation in unit sales happening anyway as people no longer see newer features and tech improvements as 'must-haves' and are keeping their phones for longer for that reason. As opposed to people keeping their phones longer because new ones cost too much.
This is surely part of the reasoning behind their open pivot to an emphasis on devices lasting longer and optimising iOS for older devices, ie they know people are keeping their devices longer, therefore they're marketing: if you want a phone to last longer then Apple is the vendor for you.
Of course to maintain profit levels they have to take the gamble that people then are prepared to pay more initially for a phone. Hence the differentiation between the Xr (new 'regular' model) and the Xs premium models. And the increase in ASP during 2018 due to the introduction of the X at the high end would have shown the gamble to be the right one.
Once certain demographics consider their phones to be "good enough", they are going to use them until they break or apps stop working.
Apple wants such people to feel to feel comfortable spending more money once they do upgrade their phone.
A percentage of this higher cost is put into newer, more expensive hardware; this allows Apple to focus on differentiating technology on the higher end models (edge to edge retina screens! stupid-good cameras! no home button! facial recognition! you can video conference with your coworkers looking like animated poop!)
Apple has always (quite successfully) focused on total profit, not total revenue or volume.
As the upgrade cycle slows, they are cramming more technology into the phone to justify upgrades, increasing the base price and thus increasing the profit per replacement phone.
They'll continue to sell models with a reduced cost (such as the iPhone 7, still for sale), but they will likely continue to not have "cheap" phones.
For people who are on longer upgrade cycles, I tell them that phones are historically supported by Apple in OS updates for 5 years after initial release. So while that iPhone 7 may be nearly half the cost of the XR on sale, it also likely has half the remaining supported life. This usually gets them thinking about the pricing as an ongoing cost (of the device, replacements, and likely repairs over time) which IMHO is a healthier way of reasoning about such expenses than just shininess or upfront cost.
My iPhone 7s Plus with a LifeProof case is still going strong in nearly mint condition (despite the battery at about 85% capacity). Apple's building phones that last longer.
Also, I can't think of too many new apps I've installed lately or performance issues with my current ones. Hopefully at some point, the market will reward Apple for building reliable phones (I say that knowing about all the repair bulletins they've released these past few months...)
Apple’s competition doesn’t provide phones with many years of official software updates. This may be just fine for many people, but if you care about security, features... then it’s not reliable enough.
2 years OS, 3 years monthly security, 4 years quarterly security. Plus, app updates are not tied to OS updates, so vulnerabilities in the browser and other built-in apps can be more easily patched.
Would 5 years of OS updates be appreciated? Of course! But 4 years of security updates isn't so bad.
You should get your battery replaced before the end of the year! They have been running a special to do that swap for $29. I bought an iPhone 7 used last month and immediately went to an Apple store to have the battery swapped out. Went from a battery with 86% to 100%. Hopefully the phone itself will last 3-4 years.
I’m disappointed by the discontinuation of the iPhone SE, and I’m not the only one.
Frankly, all of Apple’s recently-introduces hardware options have a bad combination of being too expensive and simply not appealing enough, the lack of upgradeability on MacBook Pros being a major example.
As someone who switched from a Pixel XL to XR, I have to partially disagree. I don't have the telephoto camera nor the 4GB RAM (3GB on XR) of the XS line and the screen is not OLED. Having seen the screen quality first hand in store, I cancelled by Pixel 3 XL pre-order and got a XR, my first iPhone since 3GS. For me, the differences between XR and XS was not worth the extra 250$.
There was a YouTube video comparison with a 'blind' test comparing the XR screen to higher specced screens and the large majority of those tested picked the XR screen. The other thing the XR has is the longest battery life of all of the new iPhones.
Sure, but the listed stats are better. So you're saying that stats do not mean much if they are also cheap? It shows there are screen qualities that make it better that are beyond spec sheets.
We're on HackerNews. We know that anything has a long list of stats and vendors will optimize for the stats that are actually shown on a spec sheet, at the expense of others.
And how is it in any way fair for reasonable people to compare a $300 phone with a $750 one? Put the XR next to Samsung S9 and have the XR cry (and by the way, the S9 is around $600 on Amazon now!).
So for 859 I can buy an XR that doesn’t even include 3D-Touch (A feature standard since the 6S). For 450 I can buy an iPhone 7 with 3D-touch. Doesn’t rly impress me.
Mmm, I know someone who purchased one of those, and it seemed to be totally fine – basically the same experience as the X, but with slightly cut-down specs to reduce the cost. Presumably for all the people who complained about the cost of the X last year, no?
I got the XR. Better camera for one, nice upgrade to my 6s. Cheaper, has the full screen look. Who am I? I'm an iPhone developer and I needed the notched screen for testing my apps.
I recently upgraded to my wife's hand-me-down 5S and I've been very happy with it— it's definitely a "just right" size for me, especially compared with the borderline phablet-size 6+/7+/8+.
I was surprised they didn't refresh it and even discontinued it. I work at a phone repair/resell store and I come across a lot of people who prefer that size. whether it's enough to make the r/d of another SE I have no clue - admittedly most of these people are part of the "older group" and most won't want to change over to Android (mostly because change is bad) so they'll be using an iPhone no matter what
I was really looking forward to an new SE phone, that was my upgrade plan (currently on 6). Now my upgrade plan is to transition to Andriod, or I am seriously considering going back to a "dumb phone". The cost of phones is out of control (including data plan prices), honestly not sure it is really worth it for me anymore.
The only features I want in a "smart" phone, are podcasts, camera, music, GPS/directions. I don't really even need a web browser, and I don't need any social media at all. And I certainly don't need any gaming capabilities (I still don't "get" mobile gaming, if I want to play a game I will do it on my desktop, with a mouse and keyboard, and large screen).
I might go back to carrying 2 devices, a MP3 (podcast/music player) and a dumb phone. Should cut my phone bill down significantly.
I'm largely in the same boat. Have you considered a pay-as-you-go plan with an MVNO? I use H20 wireless [0], with an iPhone SE, and it can be pretty cheap.
I live in a remote area, and so far have found the only carrier that has any signal at all at my house is Verizon. So I am pretty much stuck with them, unless I get at network extender/signal booster for another carrier and install it in my house, which I am not too keen on doing.
I wouldn't say that, there's just a wide range. You can spend four digits on a brand-new flagship model, or you can get a decent phone for under $150. And if you have WiFi where you spend the day, a data plan is mostly redundant.
A smart phone? If so please provide a link. The "cheap" smart phones I have found are $300 ish, which ins't terrible, but this general trend towards a $1,000 smart phone is insane. I am not spending more for a phone than the cost of a decent laptop.
My kids are almost ready for phones. We've already got one 2nd hand SE, and once they start actually using data we'll put them on our mobile providers "tablet" data-only yearly plan, 24GB for $100. At ~$8/mo that's pretty reasonable, and plenty for basic text/image usage. If they start streaming and burning through the data, they can pay for that themselves.
Talking about the iPhones (I'm not much of a apple guy but I use an iPhone 7+) I totally agree about the new phones.
However I heard the iPhone 7 now sells for 450$ new. Given the 8s weren't a huge performance improvement, I wish tech reviewers would re-evaluate it at its current price.
I wholeheartedly recommend the iPhone 7 (or 7+), especially when you consider it's 450$ vs 1200$. As a bonus the screens are cheaper the amoled (I work in phone repair) and IMO 95% of non-hacker-news users don't benefit from the more expensive screens (either can't tell a difference or don't really care)
I just paid off my iPhone 7 through the upgrade program. And I didn’t upgrade at the end. I still have the 7. It’s a great phone and works perfectly fine. Seriously, not a single flaw.
I want the iPhone X because I want the iPhone X. There is nothing groundbreaking in the X that changes my daily life. Maybe I’m growing older and more financially conscience but it makes no sense for me to go to iPhone X.
The major downer is the lack of a quality small screen phone that supports current-day phone networks.
If the SE was updated with the latest modem, it would be wonderful. A CPU/RAM bump would be welcome but not strictly necessary. Leave the headphone jack alone, or if you must remove it at least replace lightning with usb-c for consistency's sake.
I'd pay whatever it costs for the equivalent XR - being larger is an anti-feature IMO.
I want to buy a new iPhone, but I refuse to buy a phone that cannot use the same headphones as I use on my laptop. Apple either need to bring back the headphone jack, or adopt USB-C. Until then I'll continue to use my iPhone 6S.
It's possible that this turns out to be a real sign, and I think other commenters have some good reasons why it could be. That said, I have been an AAPL stock owner and watcher for a few years and have noticed a pattern. Every September, Apple introduces new iPhones. Later in the fall, the articles come out citing weak demand.
Note that there were articles in those years also suggesting high demand. My point being that articles suggesting soft demand happen every year. Except 2014 when the iPhone 6 came out. Everyone was in total agreement then that demand was insane (and that quarter proved to be very hot indeed for Apple).
My point is that we won't truly know what demand looked like for the new iPhones until late January when Apple announces earnings.
I see this as a strategy from Apple. Unfortunately for their supplier's Apple's strategy to destroy Android seems to be somewhat counterintuitive, it involves selling fewer iPhones. It involves doubling down on premium and having these older phones last far longer. By definition that will mean a bigger used market which Apple seems to be embracing especially with the recent iOS update to actually, for probably the first time, make older phones faster for a change rather than slow them down. I think they have realized that their eco-system is far more valuable and having android owners switch to older iphones which seem to be holding up almost as well as new android devices not only does not cheapen their brand but brings in droves to the eco-system which is the thing with the real value at the end of the day.
May sound far-fetched but every step they have taken lately points to this strategy, dont be surprised when they post more record profits.
I would be really surprised that Apple has any intent to destroy Android as they would quickly fall into antitrust regulations. Those would hit Apple really hard.
They are much better off Google having most of the market share and having to deal with those issues
Intent to "destroy Android" is always rephrased in some form like "we want to provide value to customers" and "reach key demographics". I can guarantee you that everyone at Apple (for some convenient definition of "everyone") goes through mandatory training every year on how they should not talk about how they are going to destroy the competition.
That, and all the current big tech players spend equally big money on government lobbying, so absent a smoking gun, I don't think US antitrust action against any of the tech giants is likely in the next 10 years. Microsoft, you might recall, did not have government lobbyists and the lesson that everyone in industry took away was "monopolies are fine, but you'll get in trouble if you don't have any lobbyists".
So Apple's strategy is to make expensive, high-end phones and capture the bottom end with used phones and older generations. You can phrase this as "destroying Android" or you can phrase it as "providing good value to consumers". The strategy can be the same either way, just be careful when you write that email.
If Apple cared about destroying Android, they would simply release an affordable phone.
They have one of the most optimized supply chains in the industry, they have a massive cash war chest to use to subsidize R&D. Apple clearly chooses high margins and profit over "destroying Android".
Why don't they just make a cheaper phone that can compete with cheaper android phones, which make up the majority of phones in the (larger, fastest growing) 3rd world market? And only sell them in those markets so they don't dilute their profits in premium markets? How would they capture any revenue from a "used market?" Force people to sell their used phones through Apple, kind of like what they're doing to customer options to have their devices repaired?
Revenue generated from older devices would be in peripherals and services.
They don’t even need to sell devices to Android users. The diets of people that tend to use hand-me-down iPhones are quite likely to get an Android instead. If iPhones last longer, these people will stay in the iPhone ecosystem longer and there will be more of them.
Apple is a luxury product. It is the best. If they started selling not-the-best, it would tarnish their (well-earned, in my opinion) reputation for always making the best.
I use an Android phone and will freely admit that Apple phones are just better. They have better battery life, brighter and larger displays, better manufacturing (no seams, better materials), much better cameras, faster and better-engineered CPUs, a better app ecosystem, and a whole lot of other stuff (better buying experience, better advertising that contributes to the perception of quality, better post-sale support) that combine for a holistic experience of "better" for users.
The way they make money on used is their 30% cut of all app store revenue. You sell any sort of digital goods, whether Candy crush items, digital music, etc., Apple takes ONE THIRD of that. When you consider the size of Apple's installed base of devices, that ends up being a pretty big number.
Also, Google pays Apple a non-trivial amount of money (widely rumored to be hundreds of millions/year) to be the default search engine on iOS. This amount is so large, it's starting to drag down Google's operating margin (read about "traffic acquisition cost" for google). Yet more money from a bigger base of iPhones.
A lot of people also refuse to acknowledge that SE is meant to stand for "special edition", in which the name itself implies it was an aberration on the product lineup.
The SE only existed because the SE wasn't difficult to design and had a high profit margin. Now the SE is gone because integrating the newer technology like Face ID is harder. Come a smaller camera assembly and reduced part costs, we could have another SE show up.
I think it's actually more than that, but regardless, it's interesting (and disingenuous) for Apple to market themselves to the public as being so privacy conscious, all while making quite a hefty profit by selling their customers data via GOOGLE search, albeit not directly. It's probably the most bang for the buck and most profitable thing in history. I mean, making $3-9B profit for literally a few minutes of work (a default setting in an existing app) is pretty lucrative. No RnD necessary. They are making a LOT money by selling their users data.
Yes, totally true. Apple did face a relative drop in the iPhone 6s year (2015) because iPhone 6 demand was so insane. It's possible that this year's results will be soft.
Apple went on record as making their next environmental push for longer lived devices, now that they hit the 100% renewable energy goal. Given that goal and the performance boost that iOS 12 brought for older devices, lower unit sales are inevitable.
On the plus side, we might get a break from the annual IS APPLE DELIBERATELY MAKING IOS SLOW SO YOU'LL BUY A NEW PHONE??? stories, so it's a trade-off.
Their plan seems to be making it up on services and pushing app subscriptions over 1-time purchases.
> * Apple announces it will no longer report unit sales. This is a clear shift in strategy.
Yeah, this is interesting. I wonder if higher prices (to increase device ASP) for better devices (breaking the two year upgrade cycle) mean that we have now seen peak iPhone growth. For the first time in years, I have recommended old/used iPhones to multiple people over new phones.
On the other hand, Apple has increasingly emphasized services and complimentary devices in recent years. AirPods, Apple Watch, and Apple Music (to name a few) lock folks into the ecosystem and replace non-Apple alternatives.
Apple announces it will no longer report unit sales. This is a clear shift in strategy.
I thought that at first, too. Then I read that Apple was an outlier in reporting these figures. I'm OK with Apple not reporting these kinds of numbers if it allows the company to focus on quality of product instead of satiating the salivating stockholders (of which I am one).
Orders have been cut not once, but twice.
We don't actually know this as a fact. It is pure conjecture.
It is what a bunch of so-called supply chain "analysts" say, but they say it all the time, and are almost always wrong.
I wish I could be wrong as often as these Wall Street types and still keep my job.
The only people who whiff more often than Wall Street supply chain analysts are five-year-old softball players.
> I'm OK with Apple not reporting these kinds of numbers if it allows the company to focus on quality of product instead of satiating the salivating stockholders
There's no possibility of any kind that not reporting these numbers will do anything to the quality of the product.
They still are doing all the exact same amount of work to actually gather the numbers, since they internally need to know. They are only skipping the last step of putting that number in the report they give to investors. Nothing changes about how Apple is operating by not reporting that number.
That doesn't automatically mean it was a bad number, either, it could have just been a shift to avoid providing more information than necessary similar to the rest of their industry. But it's not going to do squat for anyone's day job at Apple, either. The people that would actually worry about that number still have that number.
The point is that by not reporting the number, they can let the number slip without pissing off investors. I am not sure how letting that number slip will lead to higher quality though.
My speculation is that Apple believes that people are lengthening their purchase interval on new phones not primarily because of cost but because they don't see the value. So, Apple is focusing on higher cost "1st year" phones which provide more differentiation on value to the old phones.
They also may stop just discounting the phones as they become "2nd year" phones, similar to the setup they have with the iPad and iPad Pros.
This both means more profit per phone to account for the decrease in sales due to lengthening time between phone purchases, and a bit more motivation to update to the next sexy 1st year phone rather than the cheaper models due to explicit feature differentiation.
Which is exactly what I was talking about, and it is 100% true that they missed unit sales virtually every quarter this year. They weren't "unattainable numbers." They had beaten those numbers consistently over the years, but now somehow it's "unattainable." Ok. Despite what you think analysts don't pull these numbers out of thin air. They talk to insiders, they talk to suppliers.
Don't let EPS beats fool you, some of that comes from share buybacks or write-offs. Apple is/was buying $100B in shares back. For every share not in float, that raises EPS. Generally analysts account for this, but if a company has been aggressive one quarter on the buy back desk, they could get it wrong.
Apple is a great company, I don't get why people are so in denial that sales are slowing (that doesn't mean they aren't growing.) It's a natural part of the cycle. Get over it, it's something Microsoft went through too. There always reaches a point of market saturation. No need to fan boy over it.
It's not "their" numbers. Apple never provided unit sale guidance. Why is it their problem if analysts were bad at unit number forecasting? They beat EPS and Revenue projections 4 out of 4 quarters.
The problem is that AAPL is a major component of nearly all mutual funds that track large caps. It's crazy when I looked across 20-30 funds and saw AAPL as the #1 or near the top in holdings!
> Apple announces it will no longer report unit sales. This is a clear shift in strategy.
It's literally the shift every analyst has been clamoring for - revenue from something other than the iPhone. So while that is slowly happening, all anyone seems to look at is the top line iPhone unit number. A number that has become less and less meaningful over time because of the growing range of iPhone models.
Apple's guidance is always conservative, and their guidance next quarter is 89-93B in revenue. If you're keeping score at home, that would be another record quarter.
That said, I have been an AAPL stock owner and watcher for a few years and have noticed a pattern.
Yup, it's what I told my wife when she asked, "something, something, decreased demand?" and I told her, "welcome to being an AAPL shareholder." We've owned AAPL for, I dunno, fifteen years and in at least the last ten the pattern continually repeats.
That said, there do seem to be convincing arguments this time. Then I go look at the 14.8 P/E, and go back to reading Hacker News.
I haven't been following Apples sales for as long or in much detail, but the last two years those predictions have basically come true, right? The thing saving AAPL is increased unit prices, which seems unlikely to be a good long term strategy.
I guess it depends on the meaning of "saving"? iPhone unit sales have been essentially flat but revenue has been rising because of unit prices and increases in services revenue. Six Colors has a great set of charts to show the trends: https://sixcolors.com/post/2018/11/reminder-apple-financial-...
I'm pretty sure "just keep raising prices" is not Apple's long term strategy. They'll keep releasing a mix of products, and push the high end with more refined features.
AAPL right now is at $172.82, giving it a PE ratio of 14.57. Apple is currently valued way below the S&P 500's PE ratio (21.58), so it's like people expect Apple's forward earnings to tank despite having had 20% revenue growth last quarter and 31% profit growth. It's not clear to me that Apple's future prospects are that bleak.
The increased pricing changed how I perceive replacing my X with a new one. I used to routinely upgrade yearly up to the SE. Now, I'll keep I plan to keep using it until it no longer functions. Similar to my laptop upgrade cycle which is every 3 years now.
I think Apple is biting themselves in the foot with the increased pricing. I think it is significantly slowing down the replacement cycle. My dad typically buys my old phone and then his phone goes to my mom. Now, he replaced the batteries since no phone is coming his way through me.
Apple fully expects the replacement cycle to slow. They said that they are trying to make phones last longer. They are focusing on service revenue and accessories like the Watch.
The mobile phone cycle is just a redux of what happened with PCs until around 2007. Computers were getting a lot faster and software coming out actually demanded better computers.
Honestly, around 2009 and the introduction of the Core 2 Duo, computers became good enough for most people.
I just retired a circa 2009 Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz Dell laptop with 8GB of RAM running Windows 10 with one of the last great 15 inch 1920x1200 displays (as opposed to the 1920x1080) as my Plex Server about two months ago.
In day to day use, I couldn’t tell the difference between that and newer computers besides the spinning hard drive vs SSD. It has a gigabit Ethernet port and was wired into my network. It had just as much of RAM as most computers sold today, the hard drive was the same size (but much slower), the screen was better than what comes in many consumer laptops and most computers today don’t come with gigabit Ethernet.
Mobile processors are now getting that way. While an iPhone 5S from 2013 is perfectly usable running iOS 13, there is no way that an iPhone 3G from 2008 would have been something you wanted to use in 2013.
I tell people the 6S is when phones became fast enough. It doubled the RAM and speed of the 6. It opens apps nearly as fast as any of the new phones[0].
The only reason I upgraded from my 6s to 8 plus was the massive battery. I gave my son my old 6s - with a newish battery and the Apple battery case and he loves it.
A 2 year replacement cycle of iphone+apple watch is better for apple than a 1 year replacement cycle of just iphone, because it means people are more invested in the ecosystem.
For the same reason this happens every year, Apple gets clicks.
I don't think we have good Pixel 3 estimates yet, but earlier this year Apple was selling as many iPhones in a week as Google sold Pixel 2s all year. Outside of stock analysts, no one cares how many phones Google or Samsung sell. So if you want to generate clicks, you have to link it to Apple. Remember the compromised server article from not long ago?
Here's something I received in my inbox a couple of days ago. (copied and pasted).
---
October can be an unforgiving month.
The terrible stock market crash that signaled the beginning of the Great Depression was in October of 1929.
The stock market crash known as Black Monday was in October of 1987.
In 1997, the Asian financial crisis sparked another stock market crash in… you guessed it—October.
And back in 2007 at the height of the giant bubble that almost brought down the entire financial system, the stock market peaked once again in… October.
It’s not that October is particular cursed. Maybe it’s just a coincidence. But I do find it strangely ominous that asset prices seemed to have peaked last month (October) and have been in decline ever since.
Real estate prices are starting to show signs of strain; more than one-third of homes for sale had a large price cut in October-- the most discounting in the past eight years.
Corporate and government bonds are falling.
The S&P 500 is down 7%, and the big popular technology stocks that have been fueling the boom in stock prices for the past several years have been violently declining.
Facebook is down 36% from its peak. Apple is down 18% (and down more today on news of production cuts for iPhones). Semiconductor giant NVIDIA is down 45%.
Oh, it’s not just in the US either.
Deutsche Bank says 89% of all asset classes it tracks are negative this year – the worst year since 1901.
This is often how a big downturn begins: gradually, then suddenly. Asset prices stew and fester, slowly grinding downward for months while people maintain hope that prices will recover.
I remember spending time in Florida back in 2007 when property prices had already started declining.
All the real estate agents I met kept telling themselves ridiculous affirmations about how the market was going to come roaring back soon, and the good times would return.
Less than a year later the worst financial panic since the Great Depression had set in. And it would be years before prices would finally recover.
Remember—asset prices peaked in October 2007. But the giant financial crisis didn’t kick off for nearly a year, in September 2008.
We might be in a similar situation today; it’s possible that markets peaked last month. And we’re now in the “stew and fester” phase where prices gradually decline while people keep hope that the boom times are coming just around the corner.
And then, within a year or so, something sets off another huge crisis that pops the bubble once and for all… just like the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers did back in 2008.
We won’t know what that event will be until after it happens.
But what we do know for sure is that the last financial crisis was caused by too much idiotic debt in the system.
Banks were lending money to legions of borrowers who had a history of not paying their debts… and then actually pretended like these toxic loans were great investments.
Today, we’re seeing the same stupid debt work its way into the corporate and government sectors.
Instead of giving million-dollar mortgages to unemployed borrowers with a history of default, investors are loaning billions of dollars to money-losing zombie businesses, or to governments that are already in debt up to their eyeballs, all while pretending these are safe, credible investments.
Total global debt back in 2008 was about $173 trillion, worth about 280% of GDP.
Today total global debt is $250 trillion, worth about 320% of GDP. It’s only gotten worse.
This is the sequel of the same movie we saw ten years ago… and it would be pretty foolish to not expect the same ending."
Since people seem to be talking about what this means for Apple stock...
Apple's PE ratio is 15. For any given company this is a very good number. Add to this that Apple has the growth potential of a tech stock (e.g. Google has PE ratio of 40, people pay a premium for the stock because they expect it to grow).
It used to be the P/E was low because people were nervous about Apple's future. Now people are nervous because they can't figure out how to evaluate the growth potential of a $1 tril+ company.
To my limited sophistication as an investor (who owns some AAPL), it seems to me Cook has tried several things to increase stock stability. One is to make it look a bit more like a utility stock for those who wish to see it as one, such as by paying dividends. Another is to signal to the market they consider the stock to be undervalued via a their stock buyback program.
I'm under the impression at least part of Apple's unusual behaviour this year (e.g. no longer reporting sales) is down to the XR.
From what I can see, the XR (or its successors) are to occupy the role the SE previously had, and the iPhone 7 has now. It's a long game that plays out two years from now (by which point they couldn't abruptly introduce a one camera, 720p LCD screen without it looking very very much like the 5C).
With a selling price of $800, I can't imagine they expected many people to buy it over (1) keeping their current phone or (2) paying a few hundred more for a flagship model. Once you go that high in price the difference makes less and less.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 274 ms ] threadUpgraded to XS after wading into a pool with my 6. Biggest hidden feature is the electronic SIM card. I can buy international data with GigSky for much cheaper than AT&T would let me.
I was in Iceland for a week, so 2GB for 15 days and $30 worked well. (I was on the fence about 5GB for 30 days and $50, but in the end didn’t need it.)
My hope is that now other phones have introduced touch sensors under their screens, that Apple will add that back in.
After using FaceId for over a year, going back to TouchId really does feel like a step backward anytime I have to use it on test devices or my iPad.
Apple could have been first to support an in-screen fingerprint reader but stopped development when FaceID was greenlit. It's doubtful they would follow others in including a redundant, inferior technology (their perception).
They said 4 inch was the perfect screen size. And now? They shunned wireless charging, dual sim, multi-tasking and many other things.
Give it time. Apple will soon invent in-display finger print.
What they took away from iphone 6 is interesting however. The home button, headphone jack, earpods, and rectangular display.
This will be a term problem for many phone manufacturers, the market does not grow as fast anymore + people keep their phones for more cycles. Anecdotically, many of my friends and family members would upgrade their iPhones every two years. Now most of them are still using the 6s, SE or even 5s.
Lumentum etc. are also some of Apple's largest parts suppliers.
Edit: Downvote all you want. Apple did this before, it is not hard to imagine that they would do it again. I am hardly crying wolf with my comment.
Look at the dongle nonsense Apple has pulled on customers for profit. Look at their genius bar overcharing and lying to people about their broken devices (see: Louis Rossman https://youtu.be/o2_SZ4tfLns).
I bought used iPhone 4 phones 2-3 times, replaced the battery, and it was brand new.
Since someone else decided who am I allowed to talk to (rather NOT to talk to) I have no choice than to really consider why am I still around here.
That's why you're being downvoted.
No reason to trust what apple is saying. They are a company. If it becomes financially viable to play those tricks again they will do it.
Apple is a Rorschach test. You see what you want to see.
* Headphone jack * De-nerf NFC * Switch to usb-c * Send high res mms to non iPhones (this will also avoid regulatory trouble)
I'm fed up with Google and Facebook and am ready to move, but the fact they can't get these simple things right is mind blowing.
To be honest, the disappearing headphone jack might be what finally helps me convince my wife to let me upgrade our car stereo to something with bluetooth support.
Trying to argue about demand when we're boiling frogs is pointless.
"But Apple wields its MFI control in other ways too. In a Twitter thread Wednesday, Nilay Patel pointed out there has never been an MFI-certified battery case with a headphone jack. This almost certainly is not because no one thought to make one, but rather that Apple will not approve them. Apple clearly thinks external battery packs (connected to iPhones via a cable) are a better solution than cases with integrated batteries. With Lightning, they can effectively control this. If the iPhone were to switch to USB-C, I don’t think they could stop anyone from making USB-C battery cases. I do not think Apple will cede this control."
https://daringfireball.net/2018/11/third_party_usb-c_to_ligh...
You can do it if you open the phone and insert enough chinesium guts, there is a youtuber that did it but it's certainly nothing covered by warranty.
All iphones are 7-8mm thick, so any case is going to be thick enough to support a jack, which means adding 8mm to the length, and the mophie cases I've seen do just that.
However if apple refuse to allow it, that's obviously a problem, but it's not a technical problem.
- You can use the included adapter instead of a headphone jack. I do this every day to plug my phone into the car and it's no big deal. If I had a newer car stereo it'd be bluetooth anyway, and wireless headphones are pretty cheap now.
- What would a normal user use NFC for other than Apple Pay?
- Most people couldn't care less if the port is Lightning, USB-C, or micro USB so long as it charges their phone.
- iMessage works flawlessly, and the standard (at least here in the UK) is WhatsApp rather than MMS now to communicate across the iOS/Android void.
For anecdata, I want a headphone jack and wireless charging. USB-C is nice-to-have. I switched from Google devices to S8 for that reason.
Bad wireless headphones are pretty cheap. Even the expensive Apple AirPods can barely keep up with a $20 wired pair of Xiaomi or VSonic IEMs on the quality front.
I can go through a pair every 6 months and still come out ahead before the batteries fail in the AirPods.
I want smart devices that reduce my cognitive load, not increase it.
For my commuting experience this is nearly a health & safety requirement, like wearing a hard hat on a building site. Not taking any chances.
My first and only experience with Apple products was not a good one and I don't intend to repeat it. Macbook - ran extremely hot, many of the supposedly amazing Apple UIs were trash (Alt+O to open a file? Why can't I maximize a window like a normal person? How about the need to use 3rd party tools to do Super+Left/Super+Right that works out of the box on Windows and KDE), battery is glued in with some of the strongest glue I've ever seen so when I had to replace it after 2 years it was not a fun experience. I did learn lipo cells can take far more abuse than I expected though. I wound up running Windows on it and eventually just deleting the OS X partition.
You've provided no reasons except "There's no comparison", "They are game-changing" - shit like that is why I don't buy much Apple stuff. It's hype that fails to deliver.
The Airpods always just work.
They've completely integrated it. You open the case and you see that they've connected with a nice image right on screen. You want to switch them from your phone to your iPad? You select them on the iPad and they just connect. Every single time. Without exception.
No other Bluetooth device even enters into the conversation for me until they just work like the Airpods do. Nothing outweighs that for me. Sound quality doesn't. Shape or comfort in-ear doesn't outweigh it. The price of entry is that you have to make the Bluetooth just work.
The reason Apple gets the kind of praise that you seem to despise is that they figure out how to make things just work. And for a certain type of customer, that outweighs literally any other concern. You can respond all day about this spec or that spec or this or that performance test or "objective sound quality data."
But it has to just work.
Edit: the comment I’m responding to here has been edited to make my response appear like a non sequitur. I’m sorry I responded again below before noticing such a blatant act of bad faith.
Why buy AirPods again? Because Apple decided you don't get a 3.5mm jack anymore. Nothing else. They've scammed you into it and convinced you they did you a service.
- The normal end user wouldn't care about the difference in NFC but banks would be thankful for not having to pay Apple for the privilege of having their customer use an iPhone.
- True but people care about not having to care and a universal charging port is good for that. Then people can just plug chargers into things and it works. No thinking required. And less waste too because vendors might not have to package chargers with every device and people won't have to buy new chargers every new iPhone release.
Could you expand on this? I’m not aware of banks having to pay Apple.
I could see Apple Pay on the Web.
The source I found [0] indicates otherwise:
> Are there additional fees to accept Apple Pay?
> Apple does not charge users, merchants or developers to use Apple Pay for payments.
[0] - https://developer.apple.com/apple-pay/get-started/
Edit:
Looks like they charge banks and payment networks for the transaction. I suppose it's possible that the networks pass that fee back to the retailer at some point. Can't find great sources for any of that though.
Me: > Apple takes a cut of every ApplePay transaction.
Your comment: > Looks like they charge banks and payment networks for the transaction.
Details: https://www.macrumors.com/roundup/apple-pay/
> - You can use the included adapter ..
So what. I'd prefer to not have to carry around any adapter
> - What would a normal user use NFC for ..
Off the top of my head, I can use it for topping up my travel card. Or at least I could if I had an android device ...
> - Most people couldn't care less if the port ..
Yeah that's why the EU ruled that a standard port must be used. Also why a significant selling point for Nokia handsets for years was availability of chargers.
Why is it so hard to grasp that I might be caught out from time to time without my own proprietary charger?
> - iMessage works flawlessly..
AHHHHHHH HA HA HAH HAH HA ahem HAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHA HA HA HA
HA HA HA
HA
I really loved iMessage around 2011 to the point that I didn't even see the sense in Whatsapp cause all my Friends and Family had iPhones.
They've lost that race big-time.
- travel cards/apps (afaik Apple supports at least emulating some cards through iPhones)
- quickly connecting consumer devices to the phone (be it to establish a data transfer, connect an app to a device, ...). NFC can skip most of the discovery/network join dance you otherwise have to do.
- games
In my phone I have Bluetooth and a headphone jack. I love the choice there too.
Point being, it doesn't have to be one or the other. You can have both. And 3.5 headphone jack is not even comparable to PS/2
You would also get that with an extra USB slot instead of the PS/2.
I spend so much time with my phone, I use it all day rely on it so much, it's the epicentre of my digital life.
But still, I think it's too expensive. I think once you touch the £1,000 mark you have to start proving far more worth than polished marketing. My work thankfully proved an iPhone 8, otherwise, I was going to buy an iPhone 6 or 7 [0]. I just cannot justify the extra money for the difference in the product.
[0] https://www.johnlewis.com/browse/electricals/mobile-phones-a...
I pay about £15 pcm for unlimited data and more of everything else than I can use. I buy a phone when I feel like it, usually about every 18 months to two years. Currently very happy with my P20 Pro. Advantages (to me) are that I can switch network whenever I feel like it, and I own the phone from day 1.
I put the unlimited part to the test as well, using it as our home broadband for a few months. 100GB+ and they didn't squeal.
(--edit-- looking at the invoice it's a mess of charges, bonuses and weird discounts, starting at a base price of £34 plus vat, brought down to £17 plus vat, not quite as cheap as I thought and a lot weirder)
Looking at what I have on my invoice -
Coming out at £17.286 for the lot before VAT, I'm assuming the guy put on some basic charges for the lowest level landline and broadband connections, which were never to be provisioned, to unlock the discounts ... !I don't get an iphone, but it's a fair bit cheaper...
Sure there is stuff that's better now for games or really pushing it. But for taking some pictures, navigating, podcasts, notetaking, general admin, youtube, messaging etc etc it's still absolutely fine.
I've actually just bought a Moto G6 Play and that's an extraordinary device for the money (£129.99).
4000mAh battery, bigger screen (though not 'better') and can do all the S7 does above without trouble. Camera isn't as good but man it's cheap for what you get.
I find this to be hilarious for reasons I can't quite articulate but going from a model where service is decoupled from hardware to a model where you're contractually obligated to pay a set bundled fee is a 180 degree switch too inexplicable to ignore.
But these days, those expensive plans have 20-30GB a month, whereas I'm still only using the data I was back then, and you can get plans for $20/mo for 4-6GB. So I've now gone to buying the phone outright and getting a cheap plan, and save a ton of $.
I suspect a lot of people are still under the mentality that they need the amount of data included in the more expensive plans, without ever checking that to be the case.
Of course, if you're streaming YouTube/Netflix/music at the high bandwidth rates and not even doing the bare minimum to pull down that data while on WiFi, all bets are off.
The cheapest new iPhone is $449.99 which works out to 360$ in 2007 dollars. The cheapest original iPhone was $599 in 2007 dollars or the equivalent to ~750$ today, making them far more affordable.
What really changed is cellphone companies stopped baking in heavy phones subsidies. Now you can still pay next to nothing at purchase, you just see a separate monthly fee on every cellphone bill.
I paid US$500 for my current iPhone, which is about half that price, and just about the top of what I'd be willing to pay for a device with a useful life as short as that of your average smartphone. Should I seriously expect to be coughing up 100% more to replace my current phone if it craps out?
No thanks. Those sorts of hijinks make Nokia's bananaphone look more and more attractive.
It's the middle end by average sales price -- about half of people pay less than that, about half pay more. Check out https://twitter.com/asymco/status/1040240778860146688 for the whole picture.
Android isn't an equivalent replacement, but I can adapt.
https://i.redd.it/jclu70hbjzw11.png
Pretty much a bargain as far as I am concerned.
The less expensive devices can do some of those well, but I don't think all yet. Video seems to be where other devices still fall down.
But, I also agree that not everyone needs a device to do all of those things. I have friends who do not take pictures, or video, or use nav. A $200 phone is the right choice for them.
Coming from a previous life as a pro-photographer who has since sold all his gear, I almost always default to the "telephoto" lens (which is really a 'normal' lens in old-school photographer speak ;) ) on the 6+, 7 and now X, and am still astonished at the quality that you can get out of a smartphone.
The HDR on the photos+video of the newest models is very tempting... but I can wait out the year and either get one 2nd hand or whatever model replaces it.
I use all those nav assistance features too (offline topo maps yay!).
But agreed, I wish I had more versatility in focal lengths. Sad to see none of the "external sensor body that uses the phone as main UI" devices (Olympus Air, Sony QX) really took off.
I could use a feature phone, and I have, but I would like a better phone book.
Rather than cramming more stuff into the iPhone, Apple could use the next iteration to reduce cost. There's a large number of Android users that could be convince to switch, if the price is low enough and the quality is preserved. Currently the cheapest iPhone is $610 in Denmark, that's the iPhone 7 and the iPhone XR is $1020. I'm not sure who Apple is targeting with those prices, other than people who can't or won't pay the $1350+ for the iPhone Xs. Apples desire to continually increase prices simply has to scare some customers way.
They're already doing this, while flogging the decreased functionality as "improvements".
It is generally the case that the standard current-year iPhone model takes over roughly the previous model's price point at release, and the now-previous-year model undergoes a price drop.
The introduction of a new tier (the higher-end, occupied last year by the X and this year by the XS) is a change, but has not done away with the iterations of "this year's model" and "last year's model" in the tiers below it.
Fraser Spiers (famous in certain circles as an ‘iPad in schools’/productivity tools proselytizer) recently faced the same dilemma and made the switch to Android/Chromebook instead:
http://www.speirs.org/blog/2018/11/18/on-switching-from-ios-...
https://www.relay.fm/canvas/72
https://www.anandtech.com/show/13614/arm-delivers-on-cortex-...
If you buy an older iPhone, you're still going to get performance that is equivalent to a $1000 dollar Android flagship without the premium price.
Given that buying a brand new Pixel phone only gets you two years of OS updates, you're also going to get at least that much support after the sale.
They already own a device that is just as fast as a new Android device and has at least as many years of support coming to it.
The reasons to upgrade would be increased performance and the battery life improvements you would pick up from moving to an iPhone XR.
>The contrast to the best Android SoCs have to offer is extremely stark – both in terms of performance as well as in power efficiency. Apple’s SoCs have better energy efficiency than all recent Android SoCs while having a nearly 2x performance advantage. I wouldn’t be surprised that if we were to normalise for energy used, Apple would have a 3x performance lead.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/13392/the-iphone-xs-xs-max-re...
Perhaps that is worth the puchase price to you and perhaps it is not.
Battery Swap after Two years? $100 Camera Lens not working? $200 Screen Break or Back Glass broke? $700 Losing the Phone and don't have Backup?
Helpless.
There is something money cant buy, for everything else there is AppleCare+ with Theft Protection. ( Ad for Apple )
If they are going to charge so much for repair they might as well extend the coverage to 2 years standard.
We used to be frustrated with Apple, but every year we will see what they have been working on and thought "That is what they have been up to", forgive them for ignoring lots of small things and embrace their New innovation. The past three years I have not been exactly please with their pace. At least not when they have 10-100x the resources of Apple Pre iPhone era.
I'm used to really wanting the newer iPhone when I update iOS 12 months after buying but the last 2 updates haven't fit that mold.
I have the X. It works great. Nothing in the XS makes me want to upgrade. I would like the XS Max, but I'll just wait for next year. And next year, my wife will get my X which further extends its usefulness.
Basically, the delta in speed and functionality gains for new models isn't what it used to be, so people hang onto old phones longer. Personally, I buy ~$150 androids because I tend to drop them, and a $1k phone would be a bad idea for me.
The end of "phone subsidies" probably also plays into this.
The iPhone 6 to iPhone 7 single core boost looks like ~40% for comparison.
For tasks that will legitimately use every ounce of performance thrown at them or which have to run continuously or on a high interval, Apple tends to add custom silicon. See video encoding/decoding, crypto, use of machine learning models, non-homogenous core performance.
And this is a genuine question, my usage is probably 'typical' and not pushing the device so I don't know what people do with their phones that takes advantage of this processing power.
[0] https://daringfireball.net/linked/2018/10/11/arm-v83-javascr...
Most people aren't playing PUBG or running CPU intensive tasks on their phones, they're texting, reading the news, watching twitch/youtube, or looking at instagram/facebook/slack/discord.
$1000+ is absolute insanity. $749 for the XR is blatantly ripping you off.
Despite not owning one, I believe Apple can easily fix most of their issues by simply reducing the price and growing volumes again. They are about to lose the teenage market. That's mostly a cost problem. For the past few years they've cashed in on their popularity by squeezing the high end of the market. Now that that is running dry, they need to pay attention to their bottom line again or they risk permanently alienating a new generation of users.
My guess is that a 500$ base model that doesn't suck, would be quite popular. Of course their problem is that they have little to differentiate the 1200 $ model from that and that most of their competition is selling quite nice phones at or below that price.
That they didn't actually discontinue the 5s at the time is incidental.
The point is, that they do release things out of cycle so just because they didn't do it at the usual time doesn't mean they won't.
Total Profit = Volume * Profit Per Unit
So even though Volume is smaller because units are more expensive, the increased markup increases the total profit and that's the reason why they are getting ~90% of the profits in the industry. This idea makes more sense to me considering guidance for the next quarter won't include volumes.
Is there any reasoning behind only targeting volume that I am unaware of? Genuine question.
If you look at history of game consoles, the ones with the higher quality hardware and software usually lost because of the high prices.
Exclusivity works up to a point.
I have a 6S and I'd love a new phone, but at the end of the day the trade off for getting to work on my startup is that I need to prioritize spending money on things that will actually contribute to my happiness or well being in some way. And since I know a new phone isn't going to improve my life in any way, that just makes it really easy to dump the money into crypto or whatever instead.
You mean like the iPhone 7, which retails for $449?
What, do teenagers suddenly stop wanting things just because they can't afford them? When did that start?
I think it's easy to confuse "sales volumes are dropping among teens because of price" with "teens don't want iPhones anymore." Those are not the same things at all.
IMHO this is getting the causation backwards.
I think Apple saw the stagnation in unit sales happening anyway as people no longer see newer features and tech improvements as 'must-haves' and are keeping their phones for longer for that reason. As opposed to people keeping their phones longer because new ones cost too much.
This is surely part of the reasoning behind their open pivot to an emphasis on devices lasting longer and optimising iOS for older devices, ie they know people are keeping their devices longer, therefore they're marketing: if you want a phone to last longer then Apple is the vendor for you.
Of course to maintain profit levels they have to take the gamble that people then are prepared to pay more initially for a phone. Hence the differentiation between the Xr (new 'regular' model) and the Xs premium models. And the increase in ASP during 2018 due to the introduction of the X at the high end would have shown the gamble to be the right one.
Once certain demographics consider their phones to be "good enough", they are going to use them until they break or apps stop working.
Apple wants such people to feel to feel comfortable spending more money once they do upgrade their phone.
A percentage of this higher cost is put into newer, more expensive hardware; this allows Apple to focus on differentiating technology on the higher end models (edge to edge retina screens! stupid-good cameras! no home button! facial recognition! you can video conference with your coworkers looking like animated poop!)
As the upgrade cycle slows, they are cramming more technology into the phone to justify upgrades, increasing the base price and thus increasing the profit per replacement phone.
They'll continue to sell models with a reduced cost (such as the iPhone 7, still for sale), but they will likely continue to not have "cheap" phones.
For people who are on longer upgrade cycles, I tell them that phones are historically supported by Apple in OS updates for 5 years after initial release. So while that iPhone 7 may be nearly half the cost of the XR on sale, it also likely has half the remaining supported life. This usually gets them thinking about the pricing as an ongoing cost (of the device, replacements, and likely repairs over time) which IMHO is a healthier way of reasoning about such expenses than just shininess or upfront cost.
Also, I can't think of too many new apps I've installed lately or performance issues with my current ones. Hopefully at some point, the market will reward Apple for building reliable phones (I say that knowing about all the repair bulletins they've released these past few months...)
Would 5 years of OS updates be appreciated? Of course! But 4 years of security updates isn't so bad.
Frankly, all of Apple’s recently-introduces hardware options have a bad combination of being too expensive and simply not appealing enough, the lack of upgradeability on MacBook Pros being a major example.
The XR is honestly a huge misstep, IMO. It's bigger, heavier and dramatically more feature-less than its 2018 counterparts. Who is this phone for?
And how is it in any way fair for reasonable people to compare a $300 phone with a $750 one? Put the XR next to Samsung S9 and have the XR cry (and by the way, the S9 is around $600 on Amazon now!).
How about "can't justify"?
Not an Apple fan myself, but everyone I've heard has praised the XR for basically being an XS with a cheaper screen.
Personally, I think the price points for these phones have become irrational. Supposedly their entry level model, the XR starts at €859.
Hopefully they'll bring back something like it.
The only features I want in a "smart" phone, are podcasts, camera, music, GPS/directions. I don't really even need a web browser, and I don't need any social media at all. And I certainly don't need any gaming capabilities (I still don't "get" mobile gaming, if I want to play a game I will do it on my desktop, with a mouse and keyboard, and large screen).
I might go back to carrying 2 devices, a MP3 (podcast/music player) and a dumb phone. Should cut my phone bill down significantly.
[0] https://www.h2owirelessnow.com/mainControl.php?page=planMin
I wouldn't say that, there's just a wide range. You can spend four digits on a brand-new flagship model, or you can get a decent phone for under $150. And if you have WiFi where you spend the day, a data plan is mostly redundant.
A smart phone? If so please provide a link. The "cheap" smart phones I have found are $300 ish, which ins't terrible, but this general trend towards a $1,000 smart phone is insane. I am not spending more for a phone than the cost of a decent laptop.
(I got the 3GB version for €119 thanks to a sale, but the 2GB should be more than enough for what you're planning)
However I heard the iPhone 7 now sells for 450$ new. Given the 8s weren't a huge performance improvement, I wish tech reviewers would re-evaluate it at its current price.
I wholeheartedly recommend the iPhone 7 (or 7+), especially when you consider it's 450$ vs 1200$. As a bonus the screens are cheaper the amoled (I work in phone repair) and IMO 95% of non-hacker-news users don't benefit from the more expensive screens (either can't tell a difference or don't really care)
I want the iPhone X because I want the iPhone X. There is nothing groundbreaking in the X that changes my daily life. Maybe I’m growing older and more financially conscience but it makes no sense for me to go to iPhone X.
7 is still a gem.
If the SE was updated with the latest modem, it would be wonderful. A CPU/RAM bump would be welcome but not strictly necessary. Leave the headphone jack alone, or if you must remove it at least replace lightning with usb-c for consistency's sake.
I'd pay whatever it costs for the equivalent XR - being larger is an anti-feature IMO.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/11/19/poor-news-curatio...
2017: "'Anemic' iPhone 8 demand drags Apple shares lower", https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-iphone/anemic-iphon...
2016: "Apple may be cutting iPhone 7 orders as demand falls", https://www.cultofmac.com/456431/apple-may-cutting-iphone-7-...
2015: "Apple stock slides on claims of slashed iPhone component orders, weak iPhone 6s demand", https://appleinsider.com/articles/15/12/01/apple-stock-slide...
Note that there were articles in those years also suggesting high demand. My point being that articles suggesting soft demand happen every year. Except 2014 when the iPhone 6 came out. Everyone was in total agreement then that demand was insane (and that quarter proved to be very hot indeed for Apple).
My point is that we won't truly know what demand looked like for the new iPhones until late January when Apple announces earnings.
I see this as a strategy from Apple. Unfortunately for their supplier's Apple's strategy to destroy Android seems to be somewhat counterintuitive, it involves selling fewer iPhones. It involves doubling down on premium and having these older phones last far longer. By definition that will mean a bigger used market which Apple seems to be embracing especially with the recent iOS update to actually, for probably the first time, make older phones faster for a change rather than slow them down. I think they have realized that their eco-system is far more valuable and having android owners switch to older iphones which seem to be holding up almost as well as new android devices not only does not cheapen their brand but brings in droves to the eco-system which is the thing with the real value at the end of the day.
May sound far-fetched but every step they have taken lately points to this strategy, dont be surprised when they post more record profits.
That, and all the current big tech players spend equally big money on government lobbying, so absent a smoking gun, I don't think US antitrust action against any of the tech giants is likely in the next 10 years. Microsoft, you might recall, did not have government lobbyists and the lesson that everyone in industry took away was "monopolies are fine, but you'll get in trouble if you don't have any lobbyists".
So Apple's strategy is to make expensive, high-end phones and capture the bottom end with used phones and older generations. You can phrase this as "destroying Android" or you can phrase it as "providing good value to consumers". The strategy can be the same either way, just be careful when you write that email.
They have one of the most optimized supply chains in the industry, they have a massive cash war chest to use to subsidize R&D. Apple clearly chooses high margins and profit over "destroying Android".
They don’t even need to sell devices to Android users. The diets of people that tend to use hand-me-down iPhones are quite likely to get an Android instead. If iPhones last longer, these people will stay in the iPhone ecosystem longer and there will be more of them.
Apple is a luxury product. It is the best. If they started selling not-the-best, it would tarnish their (well-earned, in my opinion) reputation for always making the best.
I use an Android phone and will freely admit that Apple phones are just better. They have better battery life, brighter and larger displays, better manufacturing (no seams, better materials), much better cameras, faster and better-engineered CPUs, a better app ecosystem, and a whole lot of other stuff (better buying experience, better advertising that contributes to the perception of quality, better post-sale support) that combine for a holistic experience of "better" for users.
The way they make money on used is their 30% cut of all app store revenue. You sell any sort of digital goods, whether Candy crush items, digital music, etc., Apple takes ONE THIRD of that. When you consider the size of Apple's installed base of devices, that ends up being a pretty big number.
Also, Google pays Apple a non-trivial amount of money (widely rumored to be hundreds of millions/year) to be the default search engine on iOS. This amount is so large, it's starting to drag down Google's operating margin (read about "traffic acquisition cost" for google). Yet more money from a bigger base of iPhones.
A lot of people are asking why the got rid of the SE model and I think this is exactly why it doesn't actually help with their positioning.
The SE only existed because the SE wasn't difficult to design and had a high profit margin. Now the SE is gone because integrating the newer technology like Face ID is harder. Come a smaller camera assembly and reduced part costs, we could have another SE show up.
I thought it was known to be $3B?
http://fortune.com/2018/09/29/google-apple-safari-search-eng...
* Apple announces it will no longer report unit sales. This is a clear shift in strategy.
* Orders have been cut not once, but twice.
* Suppliers have been slaughtered in earnings reports.
* Suppliers have cut staff and are trying to control costs.
I agree there is a "cry wolf" element to this, but sometimes the wolf really does show up.
On the plus side, we might get a break from the annual IS APPLE DELIBERATELY MAKING IOS SLOW SO YOU'LL BUY A NEW PHONE??? stories, so it's a trade-off.
Their plan seems to be making it up on services and pushing app subscriptions over 1-time purchases.
Yeah, this is interesting. I wonder if higher prices (to increase device ASP) for better devices (breaking the two year upgrade cycle) mean that we have now seen peak iPhone growth. For the first time in years, I have recommended old/used iPhones to multiple people over new phones.
On the other hand, Apple has increasingly emphasized services and complimentary devices in recent years. AirPods, Apple Watch, and Apple Music (to name a few) lock folks into the ecosystem and replace non-Apple alternatives.
https://stratechery.com/2017/apple-at-its-best/
I thought that at first, too. Then I read that Apple was an outlier in reporting these figures. I'm OK with Apple not reporting these kinds of numbers if it allows the company to focus on quality of product instead of satiating the salivating stockholders (of which I am one).
Orders have been cut not once, but twice.
We don't actually know this as a fact. It is pure conjecture.
It is what a bunch of so-called supply chain "analysts" say, but they say it all the time, and are almost always wrong.
I wish I could be wrong as often as these Wall Street types and still keep my job.
The only people who whiff more often than Wall Street supply chain analysts are five-year-old softball players.
There's no possibility of any kind that not reporting these numbers will do anything to the quality of the product.
They still are doing all the exact same amount of work to actually gather the numbers, since they internally need to know. They are only skipping the last step of putting that number in the report they give to investors. Nothing changes about how Apple is operating by not reporting that number.
That doesn't automatically mean it was a bad number, either, it could have just been a shift to avoid providing more information than necessary similar to the rest of their industry. But it's not going to do squat for anyone's day job at Apple, either. The people that would actually worry about that number still have that number.
They also may stop just discounting the phones as they become "2nd year" phones, similar to the setup they have with the iPad and iPad Pros.
This both means more profit per phone to account for the decrease in sales due to lengthening time between phone purchases, and a bit more motivation to update to the next sexy 1st year phone rather than the cheaper models due to explicit feature differentiation.
What they does miss sometimes are Wall Street unreachable predictions. But Apple always reach they’re own guidance range for years now.
Don't let EPS beats fool you, some of that comes from share buybacks or write-offs. Apple is/was buying $100B in shares back. For every share not in float, that raises EPS. Generally analysts account for this, but if a company has been aggressive one quarter on the buy back desk, they could get it wrong.
Apple is a great company, I don't get why people are so in denial that sales are slowing (that doesn't mean they aren't growing.) It's a natural part of the cycle. Get over it, it's something Microsoft went through too. There always reaches a point of market saturation. No need to fan boy over it.
It's literally the shift every analyst has been clamoring for - revenue from something other than the iPhone. So while that is slowly happening, all anyone seems to look at is the top line iPhone unit number. A number that has become less and less meaningful over time because of the growing range of iPhone models.
Apple's guidance is always conservative, and their guidance next quarter is 89-93B in revenue. If you're keeping score at home, that would be another record quarter.
Yup, it's what I told my wife when she asked, "something, something, decreased demand?" and I told her, "welcome to being an AAPL shareholder." We've owned AAPL for, I dunno, fifteen years and in at least the last ten the pattern continually repeats.
That said, there do seem to be convincing arguments this time. Then I go look at the 14.8 P/E, and go back to reading Hacker News.
I'm pretty sure "just keep raising prices" is not Apple's long term strategy. They'll keep releasing a mix of products, and push the high end with more refined features.
AAPL right now is at $172.82, giving it a PE ratio of 14.57. Apple is currently valued way below the S&P 500's PE ratio (21.58), so it's like people expect Apple's forward earnings to tank despite having had 20% revenue growth last quarter and 31% profit growth. It's not clear to me that Apple's future prospects are that bleak.
I think Apple is biting themselves in the foot with the increased pricing. I think it is significantly slowing down the replacement cycle. My dad typically buys my old phone and then his phone goes to my mom. Now, he replaced the batteries since no phone is coming his way through me.
On the upside, it's better for the environment.
Honestly, around 2009 and the introduction of the Core 2 Duo, computers became good enough for most people.
I just retired a circa 2009 Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz Dell laptop with 8GB of RAM running Windows 10 with one of the last great 15 inch 1920x1200 displays (as opposed to the 1920x1080) as my Plex Server about two months ago.
In day to day use, I couldn’t tell the difference between that and newer computers besides the spinning hard drive vs SSD. It has a gigabit Ethernet port and was wired into my network. It had just as much of RAM as most computers sold today, the hard drive was the same size (but much slower), the screen was better than what comes in many consumer laptops and most computers today don’t come with gigabit Ethernet.
In 2009, a computer from 2000 would have been unusable. (http://www.topdesignmag.com/top-performance-computer-looked-...)
Mobile processors are now getting that way. While an iPhone 5S from 2013 is perfectly usable running iOS 13, there is no way that an iPhone 3G from 2008 would have been something you wanted to use in 2013.
[0] Day to Day apps. Not heavy games and such.
I don't think we have good Pixel 3 estimates yet, but earlier this year Apple was selling as many iPhones in a week as Google sold Pixel 2s all year. Outside of stock analysts, no one cares how many phones Google or Samsung sell. So if you want to generate clicks, you have to link it to Apple. Remember the compromised server article from not long ago?
---
October can be an unforgiving month.
The terrible stock market crash that signaled the beginning of the Great Depression was in October of 1929.
The stock market crash known as Black Monday was in October of 1987.
In 1997, the Asian financial crisis sparked another stock market crash in… you guessed it—October.
And back in 2007 at the height of the giant bubble that almost brought down the entire financial system, the stock market peaked once again in… October.
It’s not that October is particular cursed. Maybe it’s just a coincidence. But I do find it strangely ominous that asset prices seemed to have peaked last month (October) and have been in decline ever since.
Real estate prices are starting to show signs of strain; more than one-third of homes for sale had a large price cut in October-- the most discounting in the past eight years.
Corporate and government bonds are falling.
The S&P 500 is down 7%, and the big popular technology stocks that have been fueling the boom in stock prices for the past several years have been violently declining.
Facebook is down 36% from its peak. Apple is down 18% (and down more today on news of production cuts for iPhones). Semiconductor giant NVIDIA is down 45%.
Oh, it’s not just in the US either.
Deutsche Bank says 89% of all asset classes it tracks are negative this year – the worst year since 1901.
This is often how a big downturn begins: gradually, then suddenly. Asset prices stew and fester, slowly grinding downward for months while people maintain hope that prices will recover.
I remember spending time in Florida back in 2007 when property prices had already started declining.
All the real estate agents I met kept telling themselves ridiculous affirmations about how the market was going to come roaring back soon, and the good times would return.
Less than a year later the worst financial panic since the Great Depression had set in. And it would be years before prices would finally recover.
Remember—asset prices peaked in October 2007. But the giant financial crisis didn’t kick off for nearly a year, in September 2008.
We might be in a similar situation today; it’s possible that markets peaked last month. And we’re now in the “stew and fester” phase where prices gradually decline while people keep hope that the boom times are coming just around the corner.
And then, within a year or so, something sets off another huge crisis that pops the bubble once and for all… just like the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers did back in 2008.
We won’t know what that event will be until after it happens.
But what we do know for sure is that the last financial crisis was caused by too much idiotic debt in the system.
Banks were lending money to legions of borrowers who had a history of not paying their debts… and then actually pretended like these toxic loans were great investments.
Today, we’re seeing the same stupid debt work its way into the corporate and government sectors.
Instead of giving million-dollar mortgages to unemployed borrowers with a history of default, investors are loaning billions of dollars to money-losing zombie businesses, or to governments that are already in debt up to their eyeballs, all while pretending these are safe, credible investments.
Total global debt back in 2008 was about $173 trillion, worth about 280% of GDP.
Today total global debt is $250 trillion, worth about 320% of GDP. It’s only gotten worse.
This is the sequel of the same movie we saw ten years ago… and it would be pretty foolish to not expect the same ending."
Proper preparation....
Apple's PE ratio is 15. For any given company this is a very good number. Add to this that Apple has the growth potential of a tech stock (e.g. Google has PE ratio of 40, people pay a premium for the stock because they expect it to grow).
Certainly Apple is very undervalued?
To my limited sophistication as an investor (who owns some AAPL), it seems to me Cook has tried several things to increase stock stability. One is to make it look a bit more like a utility stock for those who wish to see it as one, such as by paying dividends. Another is to signal to the market they consider the stock to be undervalued via a their stock buyback program.
From what I can see, the XR (or its successors) are to occupy the role the SE previously had, and the iPhone 7 has now. It's a long game that plays out two years from now (by which point they couldn't abruptly introduce a one camera, 720p LCD screen without it looking very very much like the 5C).
With a selling price of $800, I can't imagine they expected many people to buy it over (1) keeping their current phone or (2) paying a few hundred more for a flagship model. Once you go that high in price the difference makes less and less.