If the shortfall is indeed almost entirely within China, then it is fair to say that all of the usual criticisms you see on the Internet at large, where people explain why Apple products are not good enough/too expensive/whatever for them personally, are irrelevant.
The issue here is entirely around Apple and China.
I don't know all of the details, but I recall working with something like that twenty-five years ago, and usually there are a lot of tax breaks and so forth, because most of what's getting manufactured is exported. Jobs stay, products go.
So if you then sell those products in the same country, they want some of the taxes and and so forth.
The alternative would be to charge all the taxes, then manufacturers would file paperwork to get a refund for the goods they exported.
This system streamlines that for the case where the intent is to export more than is sold domestically.
Oh very much so. That's why China is careful about starting a trade war with Apple. They want to get their own manufacturers up to speed to replace Apple, but they don't want to just kick Apple out of China in one stroke and penalize the Chinese businesses that depend upon Apple.
If it wasn't for that, Apple and their strong privacy approach would be Persona Non Grata, IM-uninformed-O.
Indeed, and that why Apple was actually cranking up their effort to get more "presence on the ground" in China.
Apple tries to be less public about them having HUUGE R&D and business units in China with lots of things being done here.
In 2016 they posted a tiny press release about them opening their "first" R&D centre in China in Shenzhen, and deliberately making an impression of it having no significant role.
In reality, it was their _third_ RnD centre in Shenzhen only. Besides their nominal "design centre" in Kerry plaza, they rent a whole building in Discovery park in Nanshan, and have own section in Foxconn campus. The rumor is that they also rent yet another office for their product/project management staff somewhere closer to Longhua.
Seems weird to me too that people in China pay duty on a Chinese made phone. You say it's not weird. I think it's weird, like the guy you responded to. Difference of opinion I guess.
Hey, it may seem weird, but here's one way it might work. Again, I know jack-shit about the specifics.
If some portion of the phone is imported, and that portion has duties, under normal circumstances Apple's subcontractor would import that thing, pay the duty on it, then export the phone and file for the duties to be refunded.
If the phone stays in China, the duty applies. So there may be duties involved if there are materials imported to China for assembly.
iPhones are made in special export zones, along with many other made in China products. SEZs don’t tarrif on inputs (components, raw material, factory machinery from Germany), so outputs are considered not made in China for the purpose of tariffing, even though they are technically made in China.
Apple was the first foreign company to price their computers and phones reasonably in China. Before the markup was around 50%, after Apple opened its first Apple stores in China that markup fell to 10-20%, which is about inline with tariffs.
I'm sure if you included the effective subsidies China-homed conglomerates enjoy, the ratio of COGS between e.g. Apple and Huawei could be as high as 4:1. Huawei can certainly afford to make phones cost 1/4th as much, although Apple could also afford to cut prices by 38 percentage points (as per their margins).
On the other hand, China-homed companies aren't responsible to public markets (Wall Street really) in the same way US-homed are. You could book a 1% margin, but your family owns the company, so the board isn't going to take away your private jet, let alone dump you as CEO.
In the US, the "family owned" (in the sense of being management controlled) mega-techs like Facebook and Snapchat are actually suffering greatly due to their poor accountability. It's truly bad for equities, even while Facebook and Snapchat book ever-growing revenues.
It will be an interesting reckoning. Not the change in consumer tastes in China, mind you, which doesn't really matter for share prices. It'll be an inevitable change in corporate culture.
After all, there are millions of extraordinarily talented people in China who will want the kinds of riches and glamor only a certain privileged minority get to experience. If the bottom line doesn't motivate public accountability, ambition will. That's healthy for everyone, but it will signal the end of sclerotic, state sponsored corporations in China.
So as always, the Chinese consumer is the victim. They get to enjoy phones that cost 1/4th as much as an iPhone. But in exchange, they forfeit a certain kind of life fulfillment that, in my opinion, they deserve.
Let's say that there are no external factors, like changes to China's economy. If this is just Chinese customers being price sensitive, I stick with what I said above.
Me sitting in Toronto saying, "iPhone is too expensive for me, I have a mortgage to pay" is still irrelevant, because Apple is hitting its targets in Canada, the US, and so forth. Maybe it is too expensive for me personally (I'm on an iPhone but it's a 6, not a 6s, not a 7, not an 8, not an X of any kind), but I don't speak for my economic zone.
If there is no subsidies in US from carriers, I would say that would be a better comparison. Consider that 40% US family had less than 400 in their bank account.
Interest free installments are all well and good, but as subsidies were phased out, there was really no decrease in overall plan price. So now we pay full freight on the handset and still have the same bill.
While Greater China and other emerging markets accounted for the vast majority of the year-over-year iPhone revenue decline, in some developed markets, iPhone upgrades also were not as strong as we thought they would be.
Sounds to me that it isn't just China. The new phones are even more expensive then the previous ones. It's kind of hard to imagine that those high prices have no impact on sales and I would have at least expected there to be a mention about pricing in the letter.
In fact, most of our revenue shortfall to our guidance, and over 100 percent of our year-over-year worldwide revenue decline, occurred in Greater China across iPhone, Mac and iPad.
I don’t think iPhones are the problem as it’s not just Apple that’s having sales issues in China. You can find articles like the one below for many tech luxury brands.
> then it is fair to say that all of the usual criticisms you see on the Internet at large, where people explain why Apple products are not good enough/too expensive/whatever for them personally, are irrelevant.
You could swap out Apple with pretty much anything and you'll be accurate. The person commenting on the internet all day isn't representative of the average person.
1) China, obviously, if luxury perceived items like Apple products are slowing then that is a real indicator of the economy truly slowing regardless what the government states.
2) Having to full develop an in store trade in program pretty much is admission they priced themselves out of the market
1. Possibly. It could also mean that apple is reaching saturation and evolving from growth sales to replacement-level sales as purchased products get old and wear out.
They played that Appel Status Symbol card for too long. In China, Yuan's depreciation should also be counted, so eventually Apple raised the price for local customer for about 30%, north to 10k in Chinese Yuan. In fact with 4 times that much money you can buy a budget car in China.
People chasing status symbol but they are not fools, and the local brands offer good enough quality with only 40% of the price, you know what to choose.
> People chasing status symbol but they are not fools
I think that is the real risk to Apple. Right now iPhones (esp. in China) are a status symbol, but public opinion is a fickle thing. It's possible rising nationalism in China could also lead to an atmosphere where buying an iPhone is looked down upon as an exercise in conspicuous consumption but paid to China's enemy (when home grown phones are "just as" good). When that happens, Apple really is in dire straits. Apple needs to ensure they can innovate faster than the competition, but with a lot of value shifting to AI-related services (not necessarily Apple's strong point - compare Siri to Alexa or Google Assistant), that's a tough battle for Apple.
Nationalism is one thing. My observation is that Chinese people generally hold favorable opinions towards Apple, it has a harmless image: selling good phones that happen to be really good looking.
But I would say the real reason that Apple is suffering now is that they stopped to innovate. Those touted innovations on their press conference is hardly convincing that they are essential to my user experience. Gimmicks, like Animojis are showcased and centred during the once a year event to communicate to their customers. It is embarrassing and laughable.
And I blame Apple itself 100% on this, they are setting on a largest pile of cash that mankind every entrusted to a private corporate and does nothing. Now comes the recoknining, and it is probably overdue.
I don't necessarily agree Apple stopped innovating, but I think that as the smartphone market has matured the places ripe for innovation are not in areas of Apple's strengths. For example, Apple's design and hardware/software integration excellence were absolutely perfectly aligned with the transitions from "phone" to "high powered computer in your pocket". But now most of the innovation is happening it data-related AI areas where Google and Amazon are much stronger. I mean, Apple Maps was released 6 years ago, and while it has improved by leaps and bounds I still don't see any reason to use it over Google Maps (and that is despite Google Maps becoming ever more annoying with more clutter every release).
> People [are] chasing [a] status symbol but they are not fools
I’m not an economist nor social scientist, but I don’t think a simple “fool” judgement necessarily explains what motivates. Mind the story below is from 2009 and of luxury automobiles, but my point stands... I feel like the “rationalization” for events is just post-hoc acknowledgement of “which way the wind blows”.
> then that is a real indicator of the economy truly slowing regardless what the government states
A bunch of prominent economic figures out of China in the last month or two have pointed to a near-recession there. They're outright lying about 6.5% growth (if it's more than 1/4 that I'd be surprised), their economy is getting close to contracting. Their manufacturing sector is about to tip into recession [1] (guaranteed with the worst of the tariff hit just starting now) and their consumption tax numbers [2] have imploded at a historic rate. The iPhone sales drop in China aligns with the drop in the consumption figures there. Their credit impulse is deeply negative, which is a particularly bad thing to have happening with all the other negative numbers. Their new export orders PMI is in deep contraction.[3] They've got a lot of banks that need recapitalized soon with a central government intent on constraining the growth of further debt. In the cities you're seeing a painful wave of deflationary pressure hitting their housing market, with their world-leading vacancy rates on housing units (epic overbuilding) only making it worse.
>We believe the economic environment in China has been further impacted by rising trade tensions with the United States. As the climate of mounting uncertainty weighed on financial markets, the effects appeared to reach consumers as well, with traffic to our retail stores and our channel partners in China declining as the quarter progressed. And market data has shown that the contraction in Greater China’s smartphone market has been particularly sharp.
How would fallout from Huawei have anything to do with fewer people walking into Apple stores and buying a new Apple product? Have the prices risen or something? Are people afraid of being kidnapped if they walk into an Apple store?
To me, it is just a lame hyperpolitical straw man excuse as to why they aren't selling more products. It has zero to do with China, imo. It has to do with people not NEEDING a new device, so they are upgrading (a lot) less frequently. Personally, I'm on about a 5 year upgrade cycle now. Apple will have a harder time going forward having increasing records year after year, because they mostly rely on new hardware sales. I think we're kind of coming to a Moores law type effect in terms of hardware perception (not design/capability). There just isn't enough of a perceivable or revolutionary innovative difference for the average person to justify purchasing a new multi $k machine year after year. For most people (non power users), they get no actual tangible benefit. An iPhone X will perform just as well for the vast majority of an average users applications as an iphone 8.
China is showing all kinds of evidence of an economic slowdown (not a contraction, just not growing as fast). I am sure that Apple has very specific projections on a per-country and per-region basis. If they say that the problem is their China projections, I'm quite sure that's true. They would be facing a huge shareholder lawsuit otherwise, given this letter.
What is worrying in addition to the global economy slowing down is the volatility and how the stock market closed 2018. I believe a new crash is imminent and I hope this time we have our seatbelts on.
>Third, we knew we had an unprecedented number of new products to ramp during the quarter and predicted that supply constraints would gate our sales of certain products during Q1.
> ... AirPods and MacBook Air were also constrained.
(emphasis mine) Interesting that Apple still can't manage to make AirPods, a 2 year old product, fast enough. I wonder why that is.
Tucking my Apple Admirer badge under the keyboard for a moment, they can't make the promised wireless charging pad at all.
Tim Cook is one of the finest CEOs of his generation, but he cannot walk on water, and neither can his company. They do some things well, and on others, their reach exceeds their grasp.
I am well aware of the difference, my point is that Apple is unevenly great. They have hits and misses, they do brilliant things with the supply chain... And they have some clunkers.
Also interesting that AirPods are still the new hotness with plenty of people. Usually the interest goes down after launch, but my anecdotal experience suggests that, at least where I live, the interest has certainly risen.
I bought a few AirPods as gifts this year. I think it comes down to iPhone user's not upgrading (due to cost) and instead looking towards accessories for their existing devices.
My wife should be due for a phone upgrade but instead she got the battery replacement a few months ago and AirPods for Christmas.
I think maybe it's something like the fashion adoption curve: first almost everyone thinks something looks radical and weird, but a few people adopt it; then a few more think it looks acceptable-enough, then it becomes slowly more mainstream, then it is mainsteam, then it looks old-fashioned, then no-one uses it anymore.
I know that in my own case I think that AirPods look ridiculous and stupid, and I can't believe anyone allows himself to be seen in public with them. But I think that less now than I did two years ago, and presumably in another two years I'll think that less still. No doubt in a decade I'll think that they don't look dumb at all, and maybe someday I'll have AirPods or something similar. And then one day I'll quit wearing them, because they're out of fashion again.
Heck, digital watches were popular for about 15–20 years, right? Maybe AirPods will someday be looked at as the digital watches of the early 2000s.
Airpods were arguably the best mobile innovation in the last few years but the tech media and commentariat were too busy griping about the headphone jack to really notice. So the spread has been steady instead of like the iPad where everyone got one the first couple years.
> we believe there are other factors broadly impacting our iPhone performance, including consumers adapting to a world with fewer carrier subsidies, US dollar strength-related price increases, and some customers taking advantage of significantly reduced pricing for iPhone battery replacements
Dropping the SE - the one affordable iPhone - is starting to look like a really bad move for Apple.
In late November 2017 no-contract SEs were going for $99 at some stores. A year later the price had dropped to $79. I bought one at $99 to use as an mp3 player and camera. Works great. I don't want a phone that's any larger because it won't fit comfortably into my pockets. Still using for day-to-day actual phone use a pretty great similar sized Android phone I bought for much less. I prefer it because it has an SD slot and replaceable battery and uses USB, all better AFAIAC than no SD slot, no replaceable battery and no USB. Phones are cheap and the cheap phones are very good.
Maybe in the US, but where I live (Eastern Europe) the cheapest 32GB iPhone7 is still about 200 euros more expensive compared to the iPhone SE I purchased about a year ago. 200 euros is a sum that matters for a lot of people, including myself.
Exactly. There are tons of people (like myself) who wanted a small smartphone that gets the job done and gets out of the way. Apple blew every bit of that market away for reasons I can't fathom.
And since everyone copies apple, get ready for massive slabs across the entire smartphone market.
The difference is that most phones were large due to limitations of miniaturization of the tech. Now it's mostly for aesthetic reasons, which is fine, as long as manufacturers make smaller form factors. Apple stopped doing that, so expect everyone else to follow suit and make phablets from now on.
This is definitely not true. I worked in the smartphone industry before and at the time Apple started making large phones. Rumor had it Apple stuck with small phones because Steve Jobs wanted them to stick with the same screen size to avoid apps looking different on different iphones. Regardless, everyone was making them large because it provided the best user experience and eventually Apple switched to it as well because it put them at a disadvantage in terms of user experience.
Even the term 'phablet' was coined before Apple switched to large phones.
We believe there are other factors broadly impacting our iPhone performance, including consumers adapting to a world with fewer carrier subsidies, US dollar strength-related price increases, and some customers taking advantage of significantly reduced pricing for iPhone battery replacements.
Why spend $1,449 on an XS Max when you could have replaced the battery on your phone for $29?
I’ve noticed that people like to spout the price for the highest tiered item as a reason for not buying a product. Like the original Apple Watch with the $10k Apple Watch Edition.
Yes please let me spend more on an "inferior product" (without a headphone jack) instead of replacing the battery
Funnily enough I got an email about availability of the new models for a discounted price "for a limited time only". Maybe their prices will be reviewed?
Once you lose that giant bezel it looks really jarring on phones that still have it. As for the headphone jack, for many, it doesn't make the phone inferior any more than the MacBook is inferior for not including an ethernet port.
We once waited until the tech matured before removing older legacy components. Last I checked, Bluetooth audio still sucks, and Apple knows it, which is why they supplied a dongle to get around the justified complaints.
I guess that depends on your definition of sucking. Between AirPods, random $10 BT speakers, my car, and a pair of Bose QC's, my phone (X) works well with BT, but I may not be a discerning audiophile.
It isn't even the clicks or stutters, though that can be annoying. It's the stickiness. I turn on my bluetooth speaker and ... it connects to a phone in the other room. So, now I have to walk through the house to find it and turn off bluetooth. Now I can connect to the speaker with my phone.
Headphones, same issue, phone wants to initially connect to any other bluetooth device except the headphones in my hand. So, now I have to dig into settings, etc... I don't have that issue with 3.5mm jacks.
Once you lose that giant bezel, you get it back immediately by putting that phone in a case.
And very few people won't do it to a phone that costs several hundred dollars to buy, and that will likely suffer considerable damage if you ever drop it on any hard surface without a case.
Just one anecdote, but I got my battery replaced and initially my phone was super-fast. After a few months though, it slowed down considerably, and is now as slow as it was before I replaced the battery.
The battery-protection performance throttling is either on or of, and you can check the status in iOS 12 (settings>battery>battery health). If it's off ("Peak performance mode") and your phone is slow, it's something else (bloated apps or web pages perhaps)
Not true - lithium cells see most 'wear' when used and stored above 90 percent charge and below 10 percent charge.
The effect is so dramatic that some manufacturers rescale the indicator so it isn't possible to reach those charge levels, and makers of electric cars won't charge above 90 percent by default.
Right but we're talking about the whole battery, not individual cells. I thought "prevent the cells from charging too high or dropping too low" was standard practice these days for everybody, and so at the battery level the "don't charge to 100%" advice is obsolete.
I don’t think you got that quite right. Most cellphone batteries are single cell (L shaped ones excluded). All cells have the property of degradation per cycle depending on range of charge/discharge (0-100 worse than 10-90 worse than 20-80). Standard cell phone BMS charges 0-100 because most manufacturers optimize for battery life per unit weight, not cycle count. Planned obsolescence and all that..
At the very least, the "battery" includes the circuitry protecting and mediating access to the cell(s), and that's the point where it would prevent the cell(s) from overcharging.
This site seems like a decently credible source on battery life, and they recommend setting devices into a mode to leave the charge at around 80% if its not going to be really used heavily as a mobile device.
"A laptop battery could be prolonged by lowering the charge voltage when connected to the AC grid. To make this feature user-friendly, a device should feature a “Long Life” mode that keeps the battery at 4.05V/cell and offers a SoC of about 80 percent."
I've had a lot of laptops with this kind of mode on them from several different manufacturers. I think Samsung, Lenovo, and HP have some knowledge of extending the life of their batteries.
https://support-us.samsung.com/cyber/popup/iframe/pop_troubl...
"...it is strongly recommended to select "Optimize for Battery Lifesapn mode" or Conservation Mode and keep AC adapter connected alll the time. This mode will enable the battery to be fully charged to 80% or 60% of its design capacity."
https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/solutions/ht069687
I have little reason to think a similar concept applies to phone batteries, as they're usually a similar chemistry these days.
Can you share why it's wrong? I learned the same thing as the OP and would love to learn more. As far as I learned, the more harmful part is discharging to very low levels, especially if you use it until it shuts off and then don't connect it to the charger for a long time. Is that also no longer the case?
I know that manufacturers sometimes gate off some of the capacity so that the battery doesn't actually reach extremely high or low levels of charge, but that would still imply that avoiding the very high and low ends of the reachable spectrum would still be helpful, just maybe not as much.
Common knowledge and from what I've read about batteries the last two decades. And from using AccuBattery.
Please do state why it is wrong, so we can sort it out :)
Both samsung and apple says that you should have at least 50% charge if you store the device long term and also avoid going too low and leave it empty.
I get that apple/samsung will not recommend not charging 100%, from using accubattery (play store) they say that a full charge uses about one charge cycle, but charging to 82% does not take any charge cycle.
From what I've read the best thing for the longevity of the battery would then be to have it between 20 and 80%. But if you will replace the battery or phone after 500 charging cycles you could just charge it to 100% as much as you like. But never go below 20%.
AccuBattery should really add a warning about the battery health when going under 20%.
I did not know that it's possible to monitor battery health in iphone settings nowadays, that's great!
That's one part. The other is that iOS 12 really did focus on speed improvements. For many (most?) people, an iPhone 7 with a new battery is still a great phone.
And ios 11 may have shifted sales forward. I was still doing ok on ios 10 on my iphone 6. Ios 11 slowed it down (even with a replaced battery) so I got an iphone 8.
Now on ios 12 my iphone 6 is fast again. But, I probably would have bought the iphone 8 by now anyway, just because of camera quality, etc. The speed trouble just pulled my purchase up by a year. (I even bought a stopgap SE in the summer of 2017)
I suspect others also upgraded early in 2011 due to ios 11. Of course this situation is better long run now that its fixed. I'm so pleased with ios 12.
I replaced an iPhone 6 or 6s with a 7. I also find $1,000 just obscene for a phone. I'm a person could have afforded the OLED versions and chose not to.
In an attempt to get more mileage from my iPhone 6S and prolong a future phone purchase, I recently did the $29 battery replacement. I hoping that I avoid getting a new phone for another 2 years.
My thoughts exactly. The iPhone 6S is still plenty fast, does everything I need it to, has a large screen, and a headphone jack.
I have used the latest models and don't see any improvements worth upgrading for. FaceID is cool, but not enough on its own to convince me to upgrade.
In previous cycles, my update from 3GS to 4S was a no-brainer (retina, massive speed improvement), as was the upgrade from 4S to 6S (lightning port, LTE, massive speed improvement, larger screen).
Once I got my battery swapped, the phone was as good as new.
Whether it’s $29 or $79 for a battery replacement for an iPhone 6S, it’s still a good value proposition to get more years out of it. I’m planning to do the same.
From someone having sweaty hands (Hyperhidrosis). FaceID is not only cool, but it’s a game changer! I always get frustrated when attempting to unlock my 6S plus 3 times, then ultimately being just asked for my passcode. With FaceID, everything just works smoothly/seamlessly as if there’s not even an authentication phase.
If I knew this earlier, I could’ve bought the X sooner. Couldn’t recommend it enough.
I'm in the same boat, I intend to keep my 7+ and X for quite a while - especially since there's nothing really interesting out on the market or any new killer feature on the horizon for now.
Having recently deleted all my timeline-based social media accounts, I'd even consider switching to a smart dumbphone like the Nokia 8110 if it had WhatsApp and Spotify (WhatsApp is rumoured to be at least coming soon to KaiOS) and just get rid of the distraction altogether.
Was just talking to the family the other day about this. Every phone up to the 6 I had in my hands the day it was available, and that’s including the original iPhone which wasn’t available in Australia. We imported them and had to wait for a jailbreak until we could do anything with them!
So yeah, iPhone nerd here.
I’ve been rocking an SE for a couple of years now. Love it. Works. Quick enough. Small, robust. No plans to update.
I think the novelty has worn off. They used to be these cool new toys. Now it’s just a phone. I want to spend less time with the thing as time goes on, not more.
I totally agree with you. This also does not make any sense to me:
> US dollar strength-related price increases
A weaker dollar (due to inflation, etc.) is the reason that consumer prices increase. A stronger dollar in theory should make the prices decrease.
EDIT: I understand that a stronger dollar means the prices in other currencies will increase, but I was referring to specifically the price in US markets. Pretty sure the iPhone prices in the United States increased as well.
The US price increases aren't being attributed to the strong dollar. The letter is referring to the reasons Chinese sales are weaker than predicted. The stronger dollar is one of those reasons.
But I'm still a bit confused on it. How is Foxconn being paid? In dollars or in yuan? If the dollar is strong, shouldn't the BOM and manufacturing costs decline in lockstep with the Chinese buyers' purchasing power (relative to USD)?
I imagine the BOM and manufacturing costs aren't as big as paying all of those employees at 1 Apple Park Way, their IP holding companies overseas, or all their construction costs on billion dollar campuses they're building, who are being paid in dollars.
They increase the price in US, they also increase the price in local currency ON top of that, to hedge the currency fluctuations. In the end, the oversea consumers pay much more even in terms of us dollars.
So US probably has the cheapest iPhone in the world.
A stronger dollar in theory should make the prices decrease.
But for whom? If you're outside the US, and I'll remind you that most of the world, including China, is, then goods effectively priced in US dollars will be more expensive.
>Why spend $1,449 on an XS Max when you could have replaced the battery on your phone for $29?
Just have to crack that digitally signed battery cable ;)
Jokes aside, Apple been deliberately reducing their products' repairability since at least iphone 3. I myself had a side business of selling factory refurbished phones when I was an exchange student in Singapore from 2007 to 2009. Malaysian refurbishers told me that in the middle of production run, Apple deliberately began gluing their front glass to the display with impossible to undo glue to nuke any chance of profitable refurbishment.
In contrast to "dumb" phones of Japanese brands, that were designed for extreme manufacturability, Apple's products are unique in that regard to be engineered with an opposite goal.
Hi, I was someone who traded my 64GB 6s in for a 256GB XS.
- $200 no questions asked buy-back
- Better camera
- Larger screen in a just about the same size form factor
I expect to have this phone for ~4 years with probably a battery refresh in ~2ish.
I went 4S -> 6S -> XS. I hadn't upgraded an iPhone in years, Apple has made the process extremely slick and painless. I was seriously impressed at picking up the new phone and being "good to go" in ~45 min when my apps downloaded.
One thing that makes me hesitant on changing my phone is Google Authenticator. I still have some services using that instead of Authy. I got my secret codes but it will be a hassle to use them when the time comes...
I actually just completed a migration from Authenticator to Authy. I don’t have much to say except that it was pretty seamless. Sync between multiple devices works very well. I’m not a fan of the Authy UI but it does what I need.
If you use a password manager that supports OTP tokens (lastpass with their authenticator app, 1password, bitwarden) you could just use that and remove Authy out of the picture.
You really shouldn't be storing OTP tokens in your password manager. Yes it's better than nothing, but if your password manager vault gets compromised your 2FA does nothing to stop it.
Jumping in to reply because I made the switch to Authy about two years ago and haven't looked back. You get the ability to sync MFA across devices and desktop without a hitch. Add in the backup (with encryption) and you can onboard a device quickly and it fits every use case I need.
I wonder if there's an equivalent on iOS for andOTP. It puts the backup responsibility on the user in which you can export all tokens to plaintext or password-secured encrypted text. You ultimately put trust in the app maintainers instead of a third party like Authy.
Checkout OTP Auth, which does all that. Very friendly, and very well written with excellent attention to usability details. No net connection unless you enable iCloud saving. No ads even in the free version. Well worth the tiny donation for premium!
I have no connection other than being a happy premium user for around 2 years. By far the best of those I found.
I don't understand the problem. I went from 100% Google Authenticator to 100% Authy. It's a pain to turn off 2FA, then turn it back on using Authy instead of Google, but it's 100% under your control. So you can do 2 or 3 a day until you're done or one long session.
Now I have 2 devices that I can use, which makes me much less fearful about losing (or more likely misplacing) my phone.
I replaced both Authy and Google Authenticator with 1Password; it is really nice to have OTPs all in one place and sync'd across mobile devices and laptops.
I use KeePassXC on a Linux desktop and store the 2FA codes in it. Every site that offers 2FA will let you use a code instead of scanning the QR image. As long as I have the underlying codes I can reuse them anywhere else.
I think I'm with you in that a better camera is really what incentivised me to switch. Modern phone cameras are simply stunning - the video on the X series and the photos on the Pixel devices are incredible for their form factors. To me it was never a question of "Do I want to spend $1k on a phone", it's always been a question of "would I spend $1k to have the majority of my photos from these 4 years be of much higher quality". That's what made me switch.
I agree. The camera is great. But I have to admit that I’m also a bit underwhelmed. The Apple keynote obviously shows the best pictures only.
In not-perfect-light scenarios (not necessarily by night), photos shot with the iOS stock camera App have noticeably grain or "patches". The portrait mode is nice, but has glitches occasionally such that some item in the background gets merged with the face in the foreground.
So, I’m not a professional photographer, I only use the camera of my iPhone XS Max. The results are good enough, but the improvement isn’t that big over the iPhone 7 or 8.
What I do like is the big screen, since I use my phone only a couple times per week to make a call. Most of the time is spend in apps.
I'm in the same boat, I like my headphone jack. And honestly the phone is fast enough.
But I'd like a better camera so I took a look:
The other thing that isn't helping apple is the went from a simple system to understand iphone 6, 7 8 (s for the bigger models (edit: whoops I meant plus.). To so iPhone Xr, X, Xs.. I can't tell it the iPhone 8 is the end of the line for the numbered iPhones with a front button. Basically I'll have to do some research.
They made a page to help, but when comparing phones, price is an important factor to compare...
> The other thing that isn't helping apple is the went from a simple system to understand iphone 6, 7 8 (s for the bigger models).
S has always been for second models with the same number (kind of like a minor version), they invariably are released one year after and are the same size (not bigger) as the corresponding non-S version (the XS Max is the only exception, there is no X Max, and XS Max is just a bigger same-year cousin of the XS, but the XS has the normal S-to-non-S relation to the X.)
This holds the whole way back to the first S, the 3GS.
"...customers taking advantage of significantly reduced pricing for iPhone battery replacements"
Very interesting that Apple included this as someone who took advantage of a $29 battery replacement for my 6S just last month. The chain of decisions that took place for this to happen should be a lesson for more companies.
I imagine it went something like this:
- Feedback that iPhones were shutting down unexpectedly due to degraded and/or defective batteries.
- Instead of shouldering the battery replacement immediately, the product team decides to change the performance envelope of the phone.
- The root issue is not addressed.
- Betterygate™ inevitably happens.
- Apple heavily subsidizes battery replacements for everyone
- Some people decide that they'll stick with their phone a bit longer than they otherwise would have, reducing iPhone sales.
- Apple misses their earnings target, likely costing them more in value than it would have cost them to address the root issue in the first place.
Of course there are other factors addressed in the letter, but this issue was notable enough to be included.
Anecdotal, but I am not a heavy phone user at all. Within a year of purchasing my brand new iPhone SE, the battery capacity dropped from 100% to 82%, causing it to begin to lag considerably doing even basic tasks and shut down randomly two or three times a week. This should not happen to a product that's only a year old.
That sounds like you have defective hardware. You're right in that you shouldn't experience significant battery degradation within a year. But beyond that, 82% battery capacity should not result in significant lag and really should not result in randomly shutting down two or three times a week.
If you had brought your phone in to an Apple Store during that first year I'm sure they would have replaced it for you under warranty.
My SE is slightly over a year old and I'm already at 90%. Not happy. Though unless Apple comes out with something similar, I will replace the battery at full cost before I replace the device.
Interesting, I know someone in that line of work. They've never had a problem with apples aggressive security measures. Phone is repaired and shipped out.
There was an issue in the past with the Secure Enclave and the verification between it and the TouchID sensor. Third parties who replaced the sensor didn't have the ability to reset the pairing and even if you did there was the infamous Error 53 problem.
All solved now and third party repairers can do most things.
>[Apple] will not allow me to replace batteries, because when I import batteries that are original they’ll tell me the they’re counterfeit and have them stolen from by [CBP].
There is no evidence from the article that Apple is working with Customs to block the imports of batteries or any other parts.
Customs in general prevents the importation of counterfeit goods. Which they determine by whether that item has a logo and if it came from a legitimate source.
The 6/6S were plagued with defective batteries, so phones under their 1 year warranty were affected. Only some phones manufactured during specific dates were covered by a free replacement; my phone was one of those.
Furthermore, the root issue could have been addressed not just by offering free replacements (They weren't), instead of slowing down phones and having customers believe their devices were obsolete much earlier than anticipated, they could have been transparent about the issue like they are now.
Instead, I ended up with 1 free battery replacement, and 1 heavily subsidized replacement, which certainly factored into my delayed upgrade cycle. Apple experienced this enough to warn their investors about it in this letter.
The point I am making is that NO manufacturer replaces naturally degraded batteries for free. Defective sure. And not just phone manufacturers but I haven't heard of any manufacturer doing that. Batteries are a consumable item.
I do agree however that Apple should have been upfront about their measures they were taking to mitigate battery degradation.
Correct and perhaps I could have been more clear, but as far as a consumer is concerned Apple did conflate the two issues.
Apple initially refused to replace my battery because they're consumable, even though they later admitted that some batteries were defective. They replaced some batteries for free [1], everyone else got an iOS 10.2.1 update with silent throttling [2]. Note that Apple did not admit to defective batteries until late 2016, and then announced an update with silent throttling in early 2017.
I am not implying that Apple should replace everyone's batteries for free, I am however under the impression that they attempted to keep warranty costs low by denying for as long as they could, and quickly following up with an update that hides the symptoms.
Apple heavily subsidizes battery replacements for everyone
I think the lesson should be to have your battery replacement prices be reasonable to start with and avoid inflating the market for your devices artificially.
$69 is pretty reasonable to me. The problem isn't that the battery replacement cost was too high, it's that Apple didn't clearly communicate that the problem was a battery issue in the first place. The phones just slowed down without telling you why. The cost subsidies were just a PR move to atone for that.
I bet even at 29$ Apple is making money on this replacement program. If I can buy an iPhone 7 battery for $15 shipped Apple probably pays <$10 each when buying them by the tens of thousands, even for higher quality units. Then add 10 minutes of replacement labor.
I’m not sure what you mean by “address the root issue”.
The root issue is that batteries degrade over time, for everyone, not just apple. iPhone’s did a good job hiding that away by degrading performance along with it.
The same thing still happens with new phones, but now apple just tells you when it happens. My X crashed in the cold and it said something like “your battery couldn’t provide peak power and your phone is now in degraded performance mode. Disable this setting in the settings app.”
I essentially was doing this on my own when I had a Galaxy. Battery started dying faster so I would leave the battery saver mode on.
Apple is good about doing things so the user doesn’t have to think about it. The media just ran with that shit and made it out to be way worse than it was.
The issue wasn't that the battery only lasted 3 hours instead of 5. A degraded battery literally couldn't provide a high enough voltage to keep the CPU running, so the phone crashed. Apple covered this up by always throttling the CPU.
What do you want them to do, make the device unusable?
Look they could have been more transparent about it and gave the user a heads up but I see it as a super reasonable response. I think people would rather have a phone that's slower than one that crashes at 29% battery.
No, I expect Apple to provide a large enough battery to ensure the device is still usable after a year.
This was a design flaw. Before the throttling update, there were ~1 year old iPhones that would reboot anytime you took a photo or opened a large app if the battery was below 90% charged.
Now I get why Apple did it, a recall would have been far more expensive, but nobody should be surprised by the media shitstorm and lawsuits that followed.
Thats a very cynical perspective. There's two ways to look at this:
(A) Apple's terrible because they should have released the device with a "better" battery. One that's not "defective". One that could allow the CPU to run at full-throttle all the time for the usable life of the device. They slowed the device secretly to match the capabilities of the battery because they're trying to cover up a manufacturing defect, and they dont want to foot the bill for repairing everyone's phones.
(B) Apple was trying to get the most performance possible out of the physical capabilities of the battery. Unfortunately, it turned out that as the battery aged, due to physical changes, the battery couldn't keep up with the demands of the CPU running as fast as they thought it could over time. To prevent devices from shutting down and forcing users to replace the battery/phone earlier, they scaled CPU performance with battery age and therefore capabilities. Because batteries are consumable and their performance characteristics change over time. This means that the phone always give you just as much performance as physically possible at any given age.
We constantly hear about phones that die before reaching 0%, or losing the last 20% very fast. Google Nexus 6P comes to mind.
I'm fairly confident that what apple did was the most logical thing. They should have been more informative about it, but it's better than a phone dying at 20%.
Filed in the US (a heavily litigious society) against what was recently the worlds largest company (so right or wrong if they lose they can definitely pay)? I'm shocked that they found only 60 groups who could be both cynical and litigious :P Put yourself in their shoes.
I always find it amazing how many ‘technical’ people have a warped view of reality and it’s physical limitations.
I guess the take away here is that for the X13, they should just clock it way down from the start and just maximise battery life. Which is not a bad idea.
> What do you want them to do, make the device unusable?
I want them to say (as you do mention) 'hey, your device has been slowed down because your battery is old. Get it replaced to restore full performance'.
I'd absolutely rather have a slow phone than one that arbitrarily dies at 29%, if and only if I'm given this heads up. At least with one that crashes at 29% battery, I might suspect the battery is dying and get it replaced. The average user has no reason to think that an old battery will slow their phone down, and just ends up with a super-frustrating user experience.
Apple does not "always throttle the CPU". Battery performance management only kicks in when the battery starts to get low. A fully charged iPhone battery, even an old one, can supply sufficient voltage for max performance. Peak voltage falls off only as the charge is depleted.
Apple is good about doing things so the user doesn’t have to think about it
There's a fine line between that approach and the approach of actively disregarding the user's need to control their own device. Apple too often falls on the latter side of the line, and "Batterygate" was a prime example. I certainly appreciate it when I don't have to think about something, but when I eventually do have to think about it, I need to be able to do something about it.
I do give them some credit for fixing the issue by making the phone work the way it should have all along.
I don’t mind the lack of knobs as much as I mind the lack of a notification. If Apple throttles my cpu because my battery is degraded I expect that of Apple. What I don’t expect is them doing so without telling me because I can fix the issue by replacing the battery. Since most people would understandably assume a performance degradation over time was software updates they stood to profit from this omission. That looks bad and that’s why they replaced batteries.
iPhone already has Battery-saver mode feature which kicks in at 20% battery.
Involuntary CPU throttling feature & voluntary battery-saver feature, is wrong comparison.
I'd have preferred to prevent the CPU throttle by replacing battery within the phone warranty period than having to know it(cpu throttling) afterwards, when my phone was already out of warranty.
The main difference is _consent_ and it should not require an explanation on why it is important. May be I am strange for wanting transparency? I do not want such facts to be hidden. Slowly degrading my user experience over time with no way of me knowing why is not a good way of handling battery degradation. And so I strongly disagree with you and the child comment, Apple did not do 'a good job' hiding it, and them now handling it as they should have in the first place does not deserve praise.
At the level of battery management, yes I think you are "weird" in the general population (like all of us here by the way).
I don't see this as any different than the thousands of other OS management decisions like how to manage memory of new tabs or apps when you have a dozen open. What if you want to keep the memory/bandwidth etc... going for one app and not the others? Where's the consent there? Same idea IMO
Because in most other examples the decisions it makes have a virtually hidden effect. However in the case of the battery issue, the performance degradation was _very_ noticeable, causing years of comments on Apple intentionally obseleting old devices by slowing them down.
Put this way - if your car suddenly refused to go above 30mph when previously you'd happilly race along the highway at 70mph, you'd wonder what the hell was wrong, and not think "Oh well, my car manufacturer is just trying to extend the life of my vehicle, it's fine."
Sure. Except the manufacturer is not trying to extend the life of your vehicle. They're trying to avoid you running out of gas at 70mph on the highway.
Exactly this happened to my father last fall with a Audi Q1. It finally turned out to be a electronics issue, but the car was limiting itself to very low max speeds (40 kmh or so, which legally disallowed my father from using the Autobahn).
With a car the obvious answer is: get the thing checked immidiately. He did, and he still had to drive around like this for 2 weeks till a replacement part arrived.
> the performance degradation was _very_ noticeable, causing years of comments on Apple intentionally obseleting old devices by slowing them down.
You just disproved your own point. This throttling was only implemented shortly before it got noticed and Apple announced it’s existence, like a couple of months at most. Apparently it wasn’t ‘very noticable’ and the perceived slowdowns were all in your head because for all those years you claim this was going on, it wasn’t.
modern cars retune their engines on the fly based on engine temperature, fuel quality, local air pressure, and other factors. this is to extend the life of the engine in general and to prevent catastrophic failure from knocking.
if you use your car as an appliance (the way most people use phones/computers), you will barely notice the fact that your car's performance is constantly varying other than a bit of sluggishness on a cold morning. to an enthusiast, it's almost impossible not to notice what the car is doing.
most apple customers just want their phone to not crash. if you offer them a performance/stability tradeoff they won't know what to pick anyway.
> The main difference is _consent_ and it should not require an explanation on why it is important.
What a copout. There is no good reason. Your phone already does a 1000 things that you don't know about. Do you also want access to how many cores are used, which ones, what speed they are running at, which frequency your phone is using, how the GPS is getting its location, etc...
Most of those examples don't directly impact user experience, create an increasing performance gap with new phones that would make an upgrade a bit more desirable or in cases where there are applications that push new hardware to the limit, make applications effectively incompatible with the hardware.
Why not? PC BIOS provides access to a ton of advanced settings on gaming motherboards. If you don't want to fiddle with things, don't, but don't tell others they cannot.
no, but if my phone is going to massively slow down I want to know why so that I can correct it, rather than being left in the dark and ending up buying a new phone for no good reason.
> Slowly degrading my user experience over time with no way of me knowing why is not a good way of handling battery degradation.
Your user experience will always degrade with battery age. This is an unavoidable consequence of using a rechargeable battery. It is physically impossible to run a Li-ion battery through hundreds of charge cycles and have it work just as well as it did the day it was new.
Without power management, the phone would turn off sooner, in some cases a lot sooner. That is also a bad user experience, especially if you need the phone to make an emergency call. This is one example of why using software code to prolong phone availability creates a better user experience, even if comes at the expense of peak performance.
> No, it is simply a maintenance issue. There are already plenty of those in motor vehicles, and people are well-trained to track and manage them.
In addition, car batteries have:
a) vastly better charge controllers than the cheap crap that's put in phones
b) better quality cells to start with, or at the very least higher QA standards
c) BETTER CHARGERS. Cheap cellphone chargers can kill the battery with their unclean power, especially when linked with cheap charge controllers in the phone.
d) better thermal management with cooling and (iirc) heating, compared with a cellphone battery that has to endure anything between double-degree negative temps in winter to +40 °C when it gets held by the user or the CPU gets active.
Not really, but its a fair question. An automotive application will degrade significantly over hundreds of cycles as well. As a result, the power output will decline a little (not quite as good 0-60 times as new) and range will decline as well.
The significance of this will vary, largely based upon the range of the car. Think about how many cycles the battery takes after 100,000 miles on a car with a 100 mile range vs one with a 300 mile range, for example.
You say degradation is inevitable, hence implying this kind of degradation is unavoidable.
But to draw an analogy: that's kind of like saying death is inevitable, so there's nothing we can do about infant mortality. It's absurd to suggest that some kind of physical inevitability caused the symptoms actually observed to any significant extent whatsoever.
Battery aging does not need to lead to any user experience degradation within the first few years at least, because you can overprovision a battery, and because such overprovisioning actually not only provides some runway, but also reduces even the relative rate of battery decay.
Not to mention there are a bunch of other things a manufacturer does that influence battery lifespan. Which design aspects are at fault here? Apple surely knows by now, but they're not saying.
But even if you do choose to allow slow degradation - entirely reasonable! - the rate of decay is largely a matter of choice for the manufacturer. You can sell em to last for at least a decade if not more, or you can push em to the limits and have em degrade in months. Sure, that might cost a few extra grams and cost a few percentage points of the maximum initial charge - but nothing a user would likely notice, let alone mind.
Apple simply sold near dumpster-level quality li-on battery integrations - whether by accident, or to save money, or to limit device lifespan - we can't really know.
That's not true; every manufacturer, including apple, does this. The question is simply to what degree. Battery chargers need to decide upto which voltage level to charge, and at which voltage level to consider a cell depleted; and similarly need to decide at which temperature to throttle during discharge - and at least as importantly - during charging. And it's not like it's got to cost and arm and a leg; even small amounts of additional headroom can likely prevent problems like apple's.
Basically: you can throttle after the battery is damaged or before. And if you throttle beforehand, you need to throttle a lot less.
Finally, you imply this is costly - but don't forget that apple's phones are amongst the most costly out there, and similar sized batteries are found in devices a small fraction of the cost. Clearly the bill of materials for the battery isn't a going to be a big deal for apple, compare to those competitors, which also happened to ship higher quality batteries.
Apple did not slowly degrade the user experiebnce over time, they throttled the cpu in order to prevent the phone crashing due to a old battery, do you think that a phone that crashes sporadically is a better user experience?
As you state it is an issue of consent to this throttling, if it was communicated effectively this wouldn’t have been a ‘Gate’.
A good way described in a podcast (think it was Rene Ritchie on the talk show) would be to let the phone crash then pop up a message with an explanation of what’s happened, that the phone is now dialled down to prevent future crashes, you can turn it off in settings etc..
a) It is perfectly possible to include a battery, that, even degraded over some time, can provide enough peak power.
b) They could have sold their approach as a feature. Or they could have included a warning: Slowed down, replace battery. Similar to what they do now. But no, they kept it secret. Ask yourself why.
Also, if you have that functionality, why crash and then display a message. Write: Crash prevented, but clocked down.
Look what a Raspberry PI does: It flashes an icon if the power supply is not keeping up.
Apple’s processors are significantly more energy-efficient than their counterparts’. They might be “more powerful” but are also competitive in terms of battery life.
Serious question, is it not possible to simply recalibrate the "battery remaining" readout to match the battery's reduced capacity? I feel like it shouldn't take many cycles of the phone suddenly shutting down at 10% for the system to realize that 10% is the new 1%.
The issue wasn't lowered overall capacity but lowered peak performance. During basic usage when the CPU is mostly idle (reading email and whatnot) the peak current draw was fine and the battery could handle it. But if the CPU suddenly peaks to full usage (load a heavy web page), the battery can't deliver the instant amount of current and the phone browns-out and shuts off.
Temperature also effects the performance of the battery so if you're out in the snow it could handle less than being indoors in the heat.
That's why the CPU throttling worked. It kept the CPU from pulling too much power in one instant, and then the battery lasted fine all they way down to 1%
> The root issue is that batteries degrade over time, for everyone, not just apple.
What? No.
First of all, battery degradation is a design parameter. You can easily verify from apple own pages that iPads are rated for twice the charging cycles of iPhones. Apple intentionally included a low rated battery to limit the product life.
> iPhone’s did a good job hiding that away by degrading performance along with it.
And no.
Apple did an awful job, lets not forget the phone where crashing before apple introduced massive throttling killing the device performances. Neither of which sounds like a "good job".
Here's what a good job would have looked like (since apple sells top of the line devices at peak pricing): from the processor minimum voltage and battery degradation metrics figure out a voltage margin that would satisfy the processor constraints after one or even better two years of degradation.
Or, second best, start of with a throttled processor to begin with, but that would have ruined marketing precious "x times faster than previous generation", so they decided to do the shady thing: selling something as fast and killing it's performance six month after purchase.
And of all this what amuse me most is people defending it.
These specific batteries were terrible, I had one replaced and the replacement went to unusable in a year. Apple stance is that that is normal. Unfortunately the law does not provide for warranties for parts that are replaced for free.
I never really understood the narrative of the "Batterygate"...
I absolutely agree, Apple should have alerted the user when the throttling was enabled (and given the user a choice) from the day this feature was implemented.
However, I actually prefer my phone being slower and usable rather than fast but randomly shutting down. But somehow this does not seem the general consensus?
Batteries do not all degrade alike; not even close. There are huge differences in the rate of decay, and those are significantly impacted by the way the battery is used in the device (particularly maximum charging level, temperature, discharging level, power draw, charging rate) and the quality of the battery.
Apple did NOT do a good job of degrading performance along with it; because if they had, they could have degraded performance before the battery became damaged. As a ballpark, I'd expect a life extension for the iphones in question by at least a factor 10 would be technically fairly simple and affordable; i.e. this isn't peanuts that apple left on the table here. A 10 year life expectancy is totally doable.
So a battery as old as the decaying iPhone batteries need not have decayed significantly, as should be obvious considering that not all phones (let alone other Li-On battery devices!) degrade to this extent. The fact that iPhones did decay like this is almost entirely due to choices that Apple made (even if they made those choices without considering the consequences). Apple is pretty competent, so I'm a little skeptical they didn't know they were pushing the edge of what's reasonable, but sure, maybe it was incompetence rather than intentional penny-pinching or planned obsolescence.
User choices can matter too, but given how locked down these devices are and how managed the environment and how technically nuanced the necessary user actions are to have an ameliorating effect it's unreasonable to assume users had any practical ability to avoid this outcome.
Sure: try to avoid the phone getting hot; don't charge the phone when it's hot; and definitely don't use the phone while it's charging if doing so causes it to become hot. Problematic phones are probably tuned to close to the physical limits; so "retune" manually: disconnect the charger before it reaches 100% (even a few percent matter). Never use quick charging on phones that are living near the edge like this (or accept that each time you do you're doing a little damage to the cells, so use it sparingly). Similarly, don't run the phone completely to 0% charge. But also don't recharge constantly after each tiny usage.
It's much harder for users to do this reliably than for the battery controller. Damage is maximized when all factors align; that's e.g. why controllers automatically turn of quick charge for the last few percent; similarly you can get away with violating a few rules without too much damage as long as you don't violate them all.
Finally, 0% and 100% charge are nebulous floating concepts. What you're really guessing at are the voltage levels in the cells - but again as a user it's kind of hard to guess those in a simplified UI. Is 95% worse than 5%? Typically high charge is worse but... who knows, without knowing what the controller actually interprets as those percentages.
I've never looked, but I'd be willing to bet you can find software to do most all of this automatically on a rooted android; to what degree you can automate care on other platforms - I'm not sure.
But again, the whole situation is mildly idiotic: all of these things the battery controller/OS can do too, and probably better that any user. There shouldn't be a need for much user handholding. The only thing the OS really can't do is choose for you when you're willing to accept a small amount of damage for a temporary dash of extra charge or quicker charging; a feature that by default kept your battery in "care mode", with a temporary toggle to charge more quickly or to a higher level.
>The root issue is that batteries degrade over time, for everyone, not just apple. iPhone’s did a good job hiding that away by degrading performance along with it.
Apple sacrificed battery capacity for size and weight. They built several generations of phone that had just barely enough capacity for a full day of use and could just barely deliver enough current for peak performance. Unlike their Android rivals, they failed to over-provision the battery to account for degradation over time.
The Xiaomi Mi 6 had a 3300mAh battery. The Samsung Galaxy S8 had a 3000mAh battery. The Huawei Mate 9 had a 4000mAh battery. The iPhone 8 has an 1800mAh battery. See the problem?
Isn't the iPhone more power-efficient than many Android counterparts? That would explain why they can afford a smaller battery (but may not explain all the gap).
This is exactly why people are scared away from the Apple community. Apple "true believers" ignore facts. For example, they pretended they had a "supercomputer" and the Intel was slow until the company almost died.
The iPhone 6 became practically unusable due to throttling. They were not hiding the issue effectively. But they didn't tell people that the issue was the battery. Affected users complained on forums, and tried all kinds of things like factory resets and uninstalling certain apps but couldn't find out why there phone was unusably slow. And Apple support didn't help either. They just suggested to install the latest update.
Only after Batterygate became public did people find out that they needed to swap the battery to fix their phone. I bet a lot of people threw away their phones becUse they didn't know. (why bother replacing the battery when your phone has become unusably slow?)
Just adding my voice to the crowd of people willing to seriously shell out for an updated SE. I have a tablet and a laptop, what I want out of my phone is portability and phone, in a one-handed form factor. For now I just replaced the SE battery and I’m waiting for trends to shift again.
I still CANNOT believe the amount of people that want these gigantic ass phones. How are we in the minority for wanting a phone that fits in one hand??
Having seen plenty of grown women using two hands to type on an iPhone 4s when those things were popular, I'd say we need accurate population data to truly confirm.
was so hoping for xr to be smaller. i mean prob wouldnt have switched anyway without my headphone wire antenna enabled built-in FM radio in moto phone, but was thinking about it.
Because a phone that fits in one hand has less screen real estate, which converts to either poor resolution or a ton of squinting?
I’m a huge fan of the Xs Max. The near-bezelless display gives you maximum screen size in a relatively slim form factor. Watching videos on this thing is just amazing tbh.
iPhone and Android sales numbers have proven time and again that the vast majority of people want a larger screen. Your best bet is probably the compact Sony Xperia Z series.
In my own friends and family circle, they want the larger phones because it has become their sole personal computing device. The calling function is not the primary use anymore.
small phone + laptop/desktop is becoming the tech equivalent of owning a 4x4 truck and a small compact. consumers on a budget just want to own a crossover.
I’m in the same boat and would rather have a small phone. Using 6 plus right now and holding phone against hip sitting down just to type with one hand. Far from ideal.
Because we largely don't carry multiple digital devices around and can work off the phone a lot of the time. I don't use any tablets and don't carry my laptop to meetings since OneNote on mobile works perfectly well. When I do need to do serious work, I use a souped up large screen high RAM, SSD i7 laptop.
I can comfortably type with one hand on my OnePlus 6 (6 inch phone). I use it to browse when and I'm out and about, so the extra real screen estate is very valuable.
I’d buy several. It was the most best way to give family members an affordable way to be part of Apple’s ecosystem and now I’m weighing Apple’s pricing vs disappointing them with an Android device when it’s time to upgrade.
I'd pay $1000 for an XS Mini should they ever decide to make one. Until then, I'm sticking with my SE, which is the best iPhone they've ever made regardless of price.
I got my 4 out the other day because I was having the $29 battery replacement done in my SE. The 4 feels a little heavy, but the size is juuuust right. I would gladly pay the same. Hopefully with a headphone jack.
Purely anecdotal, but how are you comfortable with the real estate the screen offers? I understand it feels amazing in your hand, but it wasn't until I actually picked up a working iPhone 4 that I realized I could read maybe only two message responses from a person I would be having a conversation with.
I'd imagine if they reduced the bezels on the size of the 6 product line, you'd really find the best of both worlds. Both small in the hand, but also enough space to get more screen real estate out of your applications.
For that kind of reading my iPad is right here in my bag. For quickly sending messages, playing music or arguing with Siri, the iPhone 4 or 5 were much easier to hold or pocket.
Apart from a better screen, faster processor, T2 and A-series chips with far better graphics performance, Touch ID, inductive charging … what have the Romans ever done for us?
The iPhone 4 is significantly thicker than the later models, somthere’s plenty of space for a battery. The backlight of the screen is a large power consumer too so smaller screen means less energy used for backlight, more energy available for power hungry extras.
There obviously are trade offs, but personally I would forego nicer screens, cameras, CPUs, and slimness to have a smaller phone. Obviously, Apple is betting that this isn't a sufficiently profitable market, but one can dream.
An iPhone XS phone doesn't even fit into most women's pockets. It'll be funny if pockets get bigger to accommodate phones.
The iPhone 4 has less real estate, so far fewer pixels, so less graphics processing required. Also less energy required for the same brightness. Also the case doesn’t have to be proportionally thicker, so the extra thickness is entirely for battery.
I’d be surprised if an iPhone 4 based on new power-sipping technology wasn’t within a few percent of the web browsing/movie watching time of the iPhone 8 or similar.
Hard to imagine many Apple people lined up for that opening day: "Here's an iPhone-4-shaped thing running Android!"
Even if they nailed the form factor, how many people are really willing to switch? You see some people swearing off a brand (on the internet, anyway) when something egregious happens but there's definitely inertia that keeps most people firmly in one ecosystem or the other.
The lock-in is real, especially when you’re younger and more vulnerable to peer pressure. I doubt my kids would appreciate being the cause of a downgrade from an iMessage group to MMS.
For me the lock-in is not iMsg, hell I don't even use it - no one uses it in my circle, it's the knowledge that Google is not getting to track my every shift, every breathe, every shake, every jump etc etc.
It's sad I will have to move back to Android within a year (I can neither buy big iPhones nor spend those amounts the way the new ones are priced). I wish there were fully functional privacy focussed ROMs that was shipped by Android OEMs.
> I wish there were fully functional privacy focussed ROMs that was shipped by Android OEMs.
I'm sure everyone on this discussion board knows why this will never be the case, unfortunately.
With that said, are there any regularly-updated aftermarket ROMs that are privacy-focused? I've had a rough look at LineageOS[1] - a continuation of CyanogenMod - and it seems to mostly fit the bill.
I'm aware of CopperheadOS, but they had a "touch" of infighting about half a year ago[2] and mostly dissolved.
I too am moving away from Apple products, for the same reason. They are reaching expense levels (especially in my country) that I simply can't justify when I can get a HP or Lenovo business-grade laptop with drastically better hardware specifications and install simply OpenSUSE on it. Without going all-in on the Apple ecosystem to fully reap the rewards, it's simply not worth it for me to use any of them.
The SE was my question too—and I just bought a new one in Q4 after breaking my old one. Is it not the case that the average hand in China is smaller than the average hand in the US? I'm surprised they didn't mention this at all. Do they have data finding that reluctance to upgrade to a bigger phone was not a factor in reluctance to upgrade?
Does Apple report enough data for us to attempt to make correlations between average height (as a proxy for hand size) per country and purchasing decisions?
Same. Went in the last day of 2018 and got the battery replaced on my SE even though it was only at 88%. Hoping it lasts for long enough that design trends change and apple issues another SE or even an original iPhone sized phone.
>- Apple heavily subsidizes battery replacements for everyone
> - Some people decide that they'll stick with their phone a bit longer than they otherwise would have, reducing iPhone sales.
> - Apple misses their earnings target
This is a gross misrepresentation of the report which clearly states "Greater China and other emerging markets accounted for the vast majority of the year-over-year iPhone revenue decline."
Battery replacements may have been notable, but it is incorrect to imply that they were the dominant factor.
Despite noting that the comment still implies that battery replacements were the dominant factor why “Apple misses their earnings target.” This is an invalid logical leap in its step by step reasoning.
Clearly that is not "only" what it says. It jumps directly from "stick with their phone a bit longer... reducing iPhone sales" to "Apple misses their earnings target, likely costing them more in value than it would have cost them to address the root issue." That is very clearly drawing a casual relationship between the two things, and underscores it by stating it "should be a lesson for more companies" on how to avoid such outcomes.
The last line is a dodge because, obviously, China's economy is actually the main culprit stated in the report. But I guess some people are going to hear what they want to hear.
The recent devices are more overpriced than ever and getting over the limit of what ordinary people are willing to pay for a phone.
I have an iPhone 6s and my wife had a 6 and needed a new phone. We bought a new Xr but it was a small fortune, even though we're both working in IT and having good income. The phone is a brick and I saw lots of slicker Android phones costing half the price and providing a very similar if not better experience.
OP did not say "mishandling batterygate screwed Apple's earnings", but instead pointed out that something that could have been better handled and would have cost significantly less was considered a big enough mistake to be mentioned.
OP not implying causation, they're calling something interesting out.
I fundamentally disagree with your analysis, as OP helpfully listed their entire thinking out:
> "It went something like this:"
> ....
>- Some people decide that they'll stick with their phone a bit ?longer than they otherwise would have, reducing iPhone sales.
>- Apple misses their earnings target, likely costing them more in value than it would have cost them to address the root issue in the first place.
OP using a list format is implying a causative link between battery issues and earnings targets. OP even suggests that their value would be safe had they simply corrected the battery issue earlier.
You’re misunderstanding the thread here. OP suggested batteries, a minor factor in the report, were the primary cause in the earnings drop. For whatever reason there are people who really badly want to believe this. swish_bob countered, inaccurately, that OP did not claim causation.
Now that we all can agree swish_bob is wrong, the problem remains that OP misrepresented the primacy of the factors stated in the report.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills considering how many people are completely ignoring the very obvious connotation here. It's like they're willfully ignoring the Chinese market issue entirely.
> There's an implicit "because of this" between the two bullet points.
Not about this being the most significant factor. You've decided to infer that from the list - most of us didn't because he _explicitly_ says so in his last sentence. They also had influence over this particular issue, unlike the macroeconomics of China.
That's not quite right, although yes WeChat rules in China. Having the new shiny does matter - source, my wife is Chinese and I have a Chinese sister-in-law and niece both which got the X last year.
They are absolutely typical Chinese consumers in this regard. As soon as iPhone because hard to distinguish from other phones they switched away. As soon as iPhones became clearly distinguishable again they switched back. This is not just an observation, they say this is why they did it.
I think there are actually three factors hitting Apple in China this year. One is that a disproportionate number of purchasers got the X when it came out because it was so distinctive bringing forward purchases from this year, then there are a lot of Android phones now that look like the X models and the new X models don't look enough different from the original X to look new, finally the economy in China is pretty soft right now and people there are worried about the future.
You missed the fourth, which is a trade war going on that is inducing a soft boycott of iPhones. Some of those users may be lost permanently to local alternatives.
Battery replacement scheme was available India. But, due to absence of Apple store, users have to go to Apple authorized service vendors where services take days.
It took me 5 days to replace the battery in Dec 2018 because battery had to be specially ordered.(I live in major Indian city.)
Cheap Android phones from Xiaomi etc are flooding the Indian market. If Apple doesn't ramp up the quality of experience in areas other than Hardware and OS, it's gonna lose whatever market share it has in India.
I can’t imagine Apple headquarters wanting to ignore a 100 million rich people market, but obviously it’s not worth the trade off of having to become business partners with someone they don’t want to be partners with.
Well Samsung, One Plus and others are thriving in India, they dont have their own stores. So clearly its not the stores. The major factor is price (Apple tax + Indian Tax = One very expensive phone.
yes it mentions the battery replacements and emerging markets as well.
I think he forgets to mention lack of innovation. It was the first year that I wasn't surprised from the new iPhone at all and none of my friends did. At this point I don't see much difference in having an X model vs XS.
You'll tell me that they had S models in the past and worked fine for them, sure... its not the same market anymore. There are very strong competitors using android which has also evolved and its doing really well as an OS vs what it was in the past at way cheaper prices.
At the price tag those iPhones are coming at plus the lack of innovation, I only see a constant drop in sales.
Personally I upgraded from an iPhone 7 to XS Max, my wife has an iPhone X and I don't see any difference between them, only the size. That plus the fact that I got my hands on some new android phones and got to use them made me think that I might change to android when my next upgrade is due. The apple ecosystem seems to be okish but I can't really say that it will keep me from changing.
And truth be told there are quite a few solutions out there for them to become innovative again like the new ipad pro... have it use OS instead of iOS, that will definitely make people switch over to that and what comes with its ecosystem e.g pairing your mobile phone etc. Also airpods 2, just make some airpods with water resistance etc maybe improve connectivity a bit. Its not like we are requesting crazy innovation here, just simple solutions that will make us stick with the apple ecosystem.
Disclaimer: I was an avid windows user and android phone user up till iphone 5s came out, I switched to 5s and the difference on iOS quality vs Android was massive. Due to work I also started working with a mac and so I joined the ecosystem and I can't say am very displeased apart from the price tag, but seeing how Android has progressed over the years and how stock Android can be even superior to iOS has made me thinking of changing back.
What do you expect of this "innovation?" Phones are a mature market now. How much innovation is there in word processors?
I'd like to think that Apple's regressions are finally costing it. Idiotic moves like the elimination of the headphone jack from devices that Apple wants us to consume Apple Music with SHOULD result in a market smackdown. As should astronomical prices for increasingly crippled products. Apple's physical design is now abysmal, with the removal of physical buttons from phones, the embarrassing emoji bar (and elimination of a dozen keys from an already pathetic keyboard) on the so-called MacBook "Pro"... not to mention that Apple computers are now glued-together schlock with soldered-in RAM and drives. Now, when your drive fails (and it WILL fail), you get to throw the whole $4000 computer away because Apple made it disposable junk.
Macs should be sold in blister packs hanging from pegs at Walgreens.
The real "innovation" here would be for Apple to admit its blunders, fire Jony Ive, and bring usefulness back with a vengeance. Their fear of it is just as irrational as Trump supporters.
I'd also point out that iOS 12 has made older devices significantly more usable. If it weren't for a battery replacement, combined with iOS 12, I would be looking to replace my iPhone 6.
What parts of the iPhone X cycle are less innovative than previous generations?
Which competitors are innovating better than Apple?
With AirPods, they mentioned yesterday that they were supply constrained throughout the holiday quarter. I'm not sure innovation on that product is an issue here if they can't keep the current version stocked enough to meet demand anyways.
I switched from a Nexus 5 to an IPhone 7 and I am extremely happy. I like the hardware and software integration. I like the better battery life. I like that I can turn off all notifications from a single menu. What I like most of all is the consistent interface. I do not like to learn how to use a new interface on every release. Nokia use to be great with this in the early days before touch screen phones.
I was one of the people with. 6S that replaced the battery at $29 recently. I can honestly say I did it because the battery life was getting worse but would have paid the normal price instead of get an XS. It’s just not that compelling over the 6S. Also, they keep making the phones bigger. No thanks.
Same here in every regard, except I did upgrade to the XS solely for the ability to have two phone lines. I still use the 6S as an at-work iPod. After a month as a light phone user, here are the changes I particularly notice:
—more attractive screen
—faster
—much better camera, which is not a big thing for me, but always nice to have
—size in pocket is fine, but the size is annoying for on-screen reachability
—FaceID is better than TouchID in two particular ways: in-app authentications and unlocking the phone with wet fingers (which is common because of my work)
—the swipe down for Control Center is far less convenient on the XS because there's a much smaller target area for beginning the gesture
—the XS can't by default show the battery percentage, and for long-term device life I preserve my battery (I always run in low-power mode, even), so this is information I like visible at a glance
There's no doubt the XS is a more capable device than the 6S, but for how I use a smartphone the gains are not particularly beneficial. Maybe after I add the second phone line to increase the telecommunications divide between myself and my business I'll appreciate the XS more, but for now I am regularly reminded how much I enjoy the 6S when I pick it up to use it as an iPod.
I don’t follow your logic. If Apple had handled the battery behavior as it does now, their iPhone sales would have been that much lower for many more years going back, as people would have opted for battery replacements over new phones.
There isn't a "root issue". People have gone over this ad infinitum. The "root issue" is iPhone batteries like most cell phone batteries do not last more than several hundred recharge cycles and especially when under high load the power will be insufficient to maintain full phone performance without the phone suddenly shutting off. On Android your phone simply shuts off on high load on old batteries. Apple gracefully fails rather than hard crashes. This is a good thing, not a bad thing. Apple gave out free upgrades because people perceived it as if Apple had done something wrong so out of good will they gave free upgrades. Current phones will do the exact same thing given time.
Anecdata: Happened to me with my last two phones, Nexus 6P and Pixel XL.
Unethical LPT: Always buy the extended 'protection plan' since this problem happens so reliably around the two year mark. Call complaining that your phone crashes when it's low on battery and get a new phone for like $100. Cheapest way to get 4-5 years out of a single phone purchase.
And since it's been two years since you bought the device they'll almost always give you a better phone as a replacement.
In Apple land all you’re getting is a battery replacement. Definitely no upgrades either. Not worth $100, as aftermarket battery replacements are cheaper, and you’re out of warranty anyway..
Yeah, not sure why this is such a hard concept for some people. I just replaced my two year old Pixel's battery as it started crashing at around 35% (as high as 50% with the camera on) and I'm not a heavy user at all.
Nobody is asking Apple to defy chemistry. Problem is iPhone bidding the fact. When your phone crashed at 35% and started working fine on charging you knew it was a battery problem because that's how all phones and batteries had been behaving since 3310.
Now someone at Apple thought instead of shutting the phone why not slow it down so that user can still make that urgent call. That's brilliant and all phones should emulate it. Apple's bad is the did it silently so user didn't know it was a battery problem, the blamed os updates, hardware, weather but not the battery, because degraded batteries never slowed down any phone including iPhone till now. So instead of getting battery replaced they bought a new phone which as a 'side-effect' was beneficial for Apple.
Now once people figured it out they were outraged, so as a PR measure Apple gave discounted battery replacement and once people did that phone was good enough again so delayed new phone purchase. Now as karma striking, all this news and discounted battery may have nudged users who otherwise chuck their phone every two years to get the battery replaced and the fact new device is costing 1000 fucking usd, some delayed for another year.
Do you remember when when phones had replaceable batteries?
If you noticed your battery would not last as long as it used to, you could just buy a new one and change it yourself, no tools or action by the manufacturer required.
I think it's unambiguously about revenue as the paragraph it's in is all about the factors affecting revenue and the containing sentence specifically says it's enumerating factors affecting the divisions performance which would never be measured in units in the context of a post on revenue.
I decided to take advantage of the offer for my SE at the end of the year, instead of replacing the battery they gave me a brand new SE for free. Apparently it shut down unexpectedly at some point in the past, there was literally nothing else wrong with it so I can only imagine they were so overworked replacing batteries that it was easier to just give me one of the discontinued phones?
So this means that 12 months ago I bought a 32GB SE for 100 pounds, sold my 16GB model for 95 pounds (SE prices seem to bottom out around there) and got a brand new model a year later for free. At an overall cost of five pounds I've gotten a phone (well, two phones) that's hopefully gonna last me a total of 3 years.
Beyond the inconvenience of catering for a 320px wide phone in the app store, it's not hard to see why Apple felt the need to kill it.
Exactly like my story. My battery life sucked and I had put off replacing it until two months ago, knowing that I would do that instead of buying a new phone.
I'd rather use an external battery pack than change from my 6S.
So this is not the first battergarte-like issue for apple. I've had my battery replaced when it was below spec twice. Once when it failed their diagnosis test, and another time when I had the "swollen" battery causing the screen to separate from the case.
However, when my MBP literally caught fire in my bed while I was asleep and melted the keyboard, apple refused to fix it as the warranty was two weeks out and they claimed that the "liquid sensors had been triggered at some point in the past - and while apple recognizes that the machine catching fire was a safety issue - they didnt find reason to justify fixing the machine. You can purchase a new MBP for $1,299 - or we can replace all the guts of your machine for $1,500"
> And that's not because of the battery, that's just because of the software updates. Like, the CPU didn't lose any MHz along the way.
The software changed its requirements. Within reasonable limits that's just the nature of technological advancement and availability of faster hardware. I don't know if the performance degradation of iOS 11 and 10 were reasonable, but judging by user feedback Apple seems to have increased performance with iOS 12, particularly for older devices. Of course that comes too late for the iPhone 5C, which isn't supported anymore.
Thank you for your response!! I actually didn't know that 5c didn't receive iOS 12. If iOS 11 was the last OS I was using before I left Apple, then it was definitely a problem. Even after switching out the battery, the camera took 15 seconds to open and web pages would freeze upon loading. I tested them side by side on my gigabit wifi even!
I don't want to hate on Apple. I have no allegiances to anyone in particular. I just am a cheapo user that values basic functionality, some speed, some longevity.
I don't put a premium on privacy or animojis or nice cameras or huge amounts of storage :)
Is subsidizes the correct word? Let along "Heavily" ?
You could get the exact same Apple Battery from China for about $7 including shipping. I would bet Apple have them for less than $5. Even at a reduced cost of $29, there is still $25 margin for Apple. Even if you subtract the operational cost involves, I doubt Apple ever subsidizes.
My understanding is the $29 is very much at- or below-cost. The all in cost is just not that cheap for anything involving a service that has labor, a warranty, etc. Not only is labor expensive, there's a chance that the customer's phone will be damaged in some way which they'd be on the hook to replace it, and it still costs money to ship to/from depot, operate the store where customers can drop it off, etc. Part cost /= total cost.
Also, a $7 battery from China is a gamble especially for something heavily used and physically next to your body a lot of the time. I'm sure you'd get a battery that had the same physical size and stated spec, but I'd be skeptical it'd have gone through the same QC. You could get one from a bum batch, or a relabeled one operating out of spec. You just don't know.
The Apple Store, Repairing Technician are all part of Apple ( As I stated Operational Cost ) whether they were doing the battery replacement programme or not. They just have more works to do. And it is a ~10 mins job following Apple standard procedure, less than 5 min if you don't.
Not to mention Apple outsource a lot of these Battery replacement programme to Registered Third Parties.
A better Spec battery cost less than $7 from LG Chem. BOM cost on battery are not expensive at all, and it is not a secret.
I think the big question is is this an issue for Apple alone?
They explicitly write about a sharp turndown in China.
The guidances drops from 89-93 to 84 (about 8%). From what they are writing that all can be accounted for by the drop of revenue in China. Since China accounts for around 1/5 of Apple's revenue - the drop must have been around 40%-50%.
Which is a lot for a single quarter.
Also notice the reaction in the forex market. That certainly indicates that this is a broader issue.
It's a broader issue but Apple is more exposed to it, because [large percentage] of recent growth has been in China.
In the bigger picture Trump has decided that a trade war with China is a good idea, so of course there are going to be unpleasant consequences.
Cook's reign has been rather miserly - pay more for less. It's been an effective short-term strategy for investor returns, but it hasn't created a solid foundation for future expansion, and has also given users very little to be proud of.
Where does Apple want to be five years from now? iPhone XIIIS? MacBook Hydrogen? Mac Pro Gold Professional Edition? There's only so far you can push that boat before the lustre fades.
> Emerging markets; China, India, Africa can still grow for Apple.
Indian market for Apple has been shrinking because of the ridiculous prices for Apple charges in India. Samsung, One Plus and others now dominate there.
Just a point on this, in the two UK apple stores I went into recently, they were literally crammed with people getting replacement batteries. At least three people’s battery change didn’t work (including the screen repair I was getting done due to a white spot on the display) and they handed over brand new iPhones to those people. This has a significant cost to it which multiplies the original problem somewhat!
It’s extremely obvious they weren’t ready for this quantity of repairs.
If they hadn't been chasing thinness so aggressively they could have avoided some of the negative side effects of battery degradation by just increasing capacity.
or worse, battery replacement were unavailable in Japan. Even though it's on the Japanese site, at the start of November I tried to schudule an appointment for replacement. It would tell me no appointments available within the next week. same for various stores around Tokyo. I set an alarm to check every night just after midnight. Same thing every night. It's easy to believe either it was impossible to make the appointment or the number of actual appointments available was very small basically letting them claim to giving cheap replacements but in reality offer very few
This seems to be a worldwide problem with the Genius Bar reservation systems; happens to me all the time, even for "I just need someone to run a hardware test on this" appointments.
Or people simply aren’t buying new iPhones because the price has pretty much doubled in the last 2 years (while functionality/performance improvements are less noticeable than ever to the average user)
I think the long term question for Apple is whether or not they can pull off another category-creating move at the level of the iPhone. I believe they will in the next 3-5 years therefore I am glad for the opportunity to put more money into AAPL less expensively.
I'm surprised by your optimism here. Over the last 5-10 years, Apple seemed to have receded in to the clunky monolith of its former mid-90s self. While their supply and distribution chain is amazingly streamlined, they're still dining out on the cachet of their innovative product line from 10-15 years ago.
I just cannot understand how an increasingly risk-averse, profit-driven company will summon the chutzpah to again create category-creating products once more.
AirPods, Apple Watch, Apple Music, Apple Pay, FaceID, huge strides in mapping, Privacy-aware services and much more were all created in the past couple of years and have tremendous category-defining value.
I don't think you can overlook those things and take them for granted.
There's still not great alternatives to AirPods or Apple Watch to this day. Music streaming is pretty much just Apple and Spotify at this point. Also, few companies have been able to align privacy and embed it into their business models.
Apple has also quietly built one of the best chip design teams in the industry - pumping out various custom silicon that is powering FaceID, ML, Photography, and AR among other things. The # of custom chips Apple uses in their products grows every year.
So they've done a ton of innovative things over the past couple of years, it's just that you're not going to get another product like the iPhone which is perhaps one of the best businesses of all time.
We may never see another business like it anytime soon, from anyone. So I think it's a bit unfair to grade everything Apple does on the "iPhone Curve".
The actual product is the Apple ecosystem and that's the bet Apple is making.
Right now, the ecosystem is tied together by iOS whose most popular incarnation is iPhone. But iOS was so successful that it has an install base of over 1 billion users.
That's nothing less than an incredible user-base - a hell of a foundation. If they can sustain that install base while strengthening their ecosystem through value-add products like Apple Watch, AirPods, HomePod and Apple Music, then they have potentially many cash cows with dramatically high ceilings and reach.
This is a good bet for them because it plays to their strengths and they've earned incredibly loyal customers over the years.
iPhone may not be the future of Apple, but it is the core from which many futures will emerge. It'll still be a critical product for Apple, but no longer a key top-line growth driver. And that's OK, that's how innovation cycles go. iPhone made it possible for them to start on 3rd base for the next cycle.
iOS adoption of new versions is extremely strong and has typically always been that way. Rate of adoption is fast as well. From release of a new version to 50% adoption is often just a few weeks.
Sure, tremendous innovation on componentry and services. But I think it's being a bit generous putting the Apple Watch or the Airpod anywhere near the game-changing legacy products of the 2000s.
I still can't see how Apple will surge again. The brand equity is based upon Ramsian aesthetics (which have been mimicked to point of being passè in 2019), coupled with category-defining products that became cultural phenonenas (nope: the Apple Watch is hardly holds a candle to those). Not to mention they've all but deserted the power-users with lacklustre notebooks and having 6 year silences between Mac Pro's.
I want to be wrong, by the way. I really do. But you are mainly describing features and not products when you talk about their strides.
Apple's fate in China is very similar to German premium car brands – despite being a definite good sell elsewhere, they have no real alternative to actually double down their stakes and investment into China, if not making it their primary focus.
BMW, Audi (WW premium brand) and Mercedes all committed to gigantic investments into growing their presence here in last hew years, and so now has Apple.
In the past, American companies were some of the most passive players in China. It seems that they finally started to notice that China is a no joke market.
I think if I want to invest in AAPL today I'd rather focus on this: "Services generated over $10.8 billion in revenue during the quarter, growing to a new quarterly record in every geographic segment, and we are on track to achieve our goal of doubling the size of this business from 2016 to 2020." Apple is definitely trying (successfully IMO) to diversify its business to services-centric and that is exciting to me!
The services business includes the app store fees like the one that Netflix is getting out of, so that revenue stream might have some challenges of it's own.
Yes - I think that will become a bigger trend among apps that have hit mass scale, which are probably the exact apps that make up the bulk of those fees.
Services also includes Apple’s anticipated video / TV offering, which will be 100% additive vs 30% (15% recurring) from Netflix customers willing to pay the upcharge.
Looking at the increase in Apple's services revenue ($8.5B, Q1 '18 -> $10.8B Q1 '19 -> $2.3B YoY increase) vs. increase in service revenue due to Google sharing ($9B - $3B = $6B / 4 quarters = $1.5B), we get that approximately 65% of Apple's incremental services revenue is due to increased revenue sharing from Google. IMO, this doesn't seem like a long term sustainable source of revenue growth for Apple.
The actual numbers are in Google's quarterly reports as "traffic acquisition costs".
That figure bundles in the costs paid to Dell and hp to have Google the default search engine on those machines, but I think we can be pretty sure that is dwarfed by the amount paid to Apple...
Based on Q1-Q3 earnings, TAC to all distribution partners in Google's reports is approximately $13B in 2018. This is approximate since Q4 results are not released yet.
As an investor what you would be betting on is that services revenue growth will be enough to compensate for the negative iPhone revenue growth. For the previous quarter, iPhone revenue was ~3.7x the services revenue. So if the iPhone revenue drops by ~30% in the next 2 years and the services revenue hits the goal of doubling since 2016(~12B), you would essentially see a flat overall revenue which is problematic.
I think they are generally selling fewer phones because people are sticking to their iPhone 6 or 7 rather than switch to a $1500 XS. They are not switching to Android.
Here's what I posted elsewhere in this thread that addresses it:
"The actual product is the Apple ecosystem and that's the bet Apple is making.
Right now, the ecosystem is tied together by iOS whose most popular incarnation is iPhone. But iOS was so successful that it has an install base of over 1 billion users.
That's nothing less than an incredible user-base - a hell of a foundation. If they can sustain that install base with iterative iPhones while strengthening their ecosystem through value-add products like Apple Watch, AirPods, HomePod and Apple Music, then they have potentially many cash cows with dramatically high ceilings and reach.
This is a good bet for them because it plays to their strengths and they've earned incredibly loyal customers over the years.
iPhone may not be the future of Apple, but it is the core from which many futures will emerge. It'll still be a critical product for Apple, but no longer a key top-line growth driver. And that's OK, that's how innovation cycles go. iPhone made it possible for them to start on 3rd base for the next cycle."
Apple needs balls. They need to show the world they can innovate where nobody has gone before. An Apple TV with screen and game controllers for $2k would sell like hot cakes. A stackable 'Mac Nano' the size of current Apple TV 4k for under $500. An 'iPhone Y' aimed at the lower end for under $300 so everybody can use Apple Pay, Facetime, etc and get immersed in the Apple ecosystem.
You can't survive in a competitive world with just 10% of the market share since interconnectedness is crucial for the dominance of any platform and that's why you need cheaper macs and phones without losing the appeal of high end products for those who have the money in times of economic duress like the ones to come.
I tend to agree with the sentiment that Apple just hasn't innovated off late like it did in the past. I'm an Apple user and am constantly fighting off the urge to switch to Android given just terrific some of the phone experiences are, over on that side.
I've heard from Youtubers who have maxed out the RAM on their Mac Pros that its absolute garbage at even handling mundane video editing tasks. This was two years ago.
Nonetheless, I won't switch to Android only because of the privacy promises Apple has made & doubled down on. Whereas Google doesn't seem to care so much. The forced auto-login into Chrome browser (desktop) when you login to your Gmail on the browser, was the last straw for me.
However I just don't get just why Apple doesn't loosen those purse strings and spend massively on re-capturing the imagination of the user like it once did.
Is it Tim Cook and the board?
Does the ROI simply not exist in this space anymore no matter the capital spend?
Where - if at all - does Apple see a justifiable spend in the near future - tvs? cars?
Remember, China is the second largest economy in the world. There was a HN article awhile back arguing that China is taxed as an emerging market (low tax), but is dollar size of a mature market. So, two questions:
Is China considered a maturing market?
Is China considered a mature market?
I don’t think just positive growth counts as maturing (even the US still grows), so I think the answers have to be mutually exclusive. Maybe you could argue the rate of growth makes it maturing, but I would love to compare it to the rate of US growth from 1950's-60's (was the considered US maturing or mature during that period?).
It's big but still has a lot of structural problems like any emerging market (e.g. very high unemployment, poor statistical data, only quasi-free markets, very high poverty rates, low per capita gdp, poor judicial system, et al). So it's pretty clearly an "emerging" market, i.e. non-OECD.
There's an unrelated question as to whether OECD and non-OECD countries should be treated differently.
They used to, at least in the case of Macintosh. Once it started to show weakness (lack of YoY growth), they rolled it into other measurements. Now, unless all of them flail, they can declare success without you knowing the real story about any one of them.
Apple is extremely hostile to users. I'm going in to get a single K key replaced. Maxed out MacBook Pro (around ~$4,500) with the ridiculously overpriced AppleCare+ (another $450), and if they try to pull shenanigans with "full unibody replacement" to fix the moronically designed butterfly clip that's basically DOA in terms of usage, for a $5000 computer, I'm literally never going to buy another Apple product again.
Good luck trying to excise people's money through "Services" when everyone jumps ship after realizing they ship dumbed down products without any regard for people's need for workstations and not expensive toys that break trivially.
Just to share an anecdote from my experience in China. I was in Beijing over the holidays and met up with a handful of friends who live there, surprisingly they all switched to Huawei within the past year, three of them even in the past 2 months. The Huawei phones they use are flagship models and not cheaper than iPhones and they have all been Apple users for years (like myself) and who still use Macs today.
I asked each one of them if patriotism or the recent Huawei/US kerfuffle influenced their decision. They all resoundingly said no. When I asked why they chose Huawei after being in the Apple ecosystem for a decade, all of them said "camera". They said camera quality isn't about DXO scores or 4k60 but being able to take "beautiful" photos out of the box for some definition of beautiful. To them, iPhoneXS is the same if not worse than a 6, because the iPhone camera doesn't take more "beautiful" photos, only more "realistic" ones.
Obviously anecdotes are meaningless and all that, but I want to note that China is a very homogeneous society given its population, so even a brief first-person glimpse into people's everyday lives can be pretty telling. I would not be comfortable making similar conclusions about any other cluster of 1.3B people.
TL,DR: I don't buy that the economic downturn in China and the Huawei/US situation are the sole perpetrators of Apple's problem in China. Apple is missing opportunities due not innovating in certain crucial areas.
>> because the iPhone camera doesn't take more "beautiful" photos, only more "realistic" ones.
I hear this all the time from friends and family. Such and such camera is so much better.
Most of the time the images really aren't. The brightness is just cranked up or something, the image doesn't look that great. I'm not sure why the iPhone doesn't have better low-light settings, even my 8 Plus doesn't take very good pictures indoors if I don't use a different camera app.
A lot of Apple fan here are in denial that iPhone is a boring product, probably for some time now. Huawei P20 had 6 cameras and take super high-resolution lossless photos. At least that is something consumer is willing to buy.
> When I asked why they chose Huawei after being in the Apple ecosystem for a decade, all of them said "camera". They said camera quality isn't about DXO scores or 4k60 but being able to take "beautiful" photos out of the box for some definition of beautiful. To them, iPhoneXS is the same if not worse than a 6, because the iPhone camera doesn't take more "beautiful" photos, only more "realistic" ones.
By "beautiful," do they mean those auto-Photoshopped images that are popular in China; where they eyes are made bigger, chin pointier, and skin lighter?
> Popular smartphones like the Samsung Galaxy S8, the Galaxy S7, the Huawei P9, and many others often feature something called "Beauty" or "Beauty mode" when you turn on the front camera to take a selfie.
> Theoretically, it does what it says on the tin: airbrushing magic to make you look prettier in photos. Usually, it makes your skin look smoother and your eyes brighter.
Personal anecdote: I broke my iPhone and have been using Android for a bit, and I must admit: at first I thought I'd switch back but nowadays Android is pretty good.
Hardware at a comparable price-point is solid, the UI is smooth and better-looking than it was before, the app ecosystem isn't quite as good, but is very very close, and there's features I would actually miss on iOS (a calendar widget on my homescreen, unlocking my device without touching the screen and Google's Night Sight).
I miss my to do app and my email app, both of which are not on Android (Things and Spark). But overall, I personally can't think of a single aspect where iOS "miles ahead" anymore, from an end-user perspective.
For me, this is the #1 reason. Sure the Apple ecosystem is fantastic (lastpass on my iphone can prefill passwords on my apple TV!) and the level of polish and quality is high, but the one single solitary thing that would truly prevent me from moving to Chromebook or a pixel is the privacy aspect.
Apple has done well to make privacy one of their prime offerings.
If you are willing to take total control of your mobile environment, Android can give you very good privacy. Arguably better than Apple.
Simply buy a Pixel (or any other device that supports AOSP). Build your own AOSP image (which is quite easy). And you are ready to go. Use applications from F-Droid only.
Admittedly it's not as straightforward as running your favorite Linux distro, and there are some caveats, but it's quite close.
Both of those apply to iPhones as well. The only difference is that on iOS, you cannot turn off AGPS location collection, while on Android, not only can you turn it off, it's opt in.
And it will be their undoing, since now that people are not upgrading their iPhones continued growth will depend on how well they can transition to become a services company, which, for the most part, you can only do phoning home the way Google and Facebook do. The only reason Apple touts privacy today is because they suck at services, and they figured they might as well sell it as a feature. But that won't last if Apple is to grow.
> transition to become a services company, which, for the most part, you can only do phoning home the way Google and Facebook do
I really hope this is untrue. My instinct is that you perhaps can't be a big behemoth of a company if you don't behave like Google and Facebook, but Apple occupied that middle territory successfully for a long time.
I don't think so. They did a bunch of extra engineering work to do machine learning on photos in a way that respected people's privacy. iCloud Photo Library has been working great for me, and the photos are encrypted on my devices before they land in iCloud. The current implementation has the drawback that all of my devices need to do the ML work independently as a result, but it still works okay.
As a fairly heavy iCloud user, I wouldn't say they "suck" at services. They're not as good as Google at it, to be sure, but most things work pretty well for me.
> As a fairly heavy iCloud user, I wouldn't say they "suck" at services. They're not as good as Google at it, to be sure, but most things work pretty well for me.
I would also add that Apple is actively working to close the gap. Look at last years hire of Giannandrea from Google.
For state-sponsored privacy, sure. But for ad-tracking privacy, I don't think you can do comprehensive ad-blocking in browsers on iPhones, right? It's still either VPN-based or the capped blocklist api, right?
I would love to switch, but Firefox+uBlock on Android is soooo nice for a fast mobile browsing experience. The moment I can do what uBlock does on an iPhone, I'll switch.
I believe 1blocker X made a new app with more categories so they could get around the cap. Like the cap was category based, but not hard to circumvent.
A few days ago my friend complained that her phone had randomly started popping up ads on its screen as she was just using it. She had to dig through the play store and find the 'recently used apps' to identify the culprit, which was a random app she'd downloaded that after a few days updated itself to start pumping out ads.
That is a distinctly android problem, and is an example of one I'm glad to avoid by sticking to iOS.
Perhaps she should be more selective with apps she installs? Also, how would this be exclusive to Android? iOS apps can have ads on them. Even if the feature is added with an update.
The ads weren't only displaying in the app, they were appearing over other apps. This is something that simply can't happen in iOS.
How does a standard user know whether a small app to e.g. manipulate photos (as in this instance) is going to be updated a few days later to show ads when it's not running? Shouldn't an end user be able to trust Google's app marketplace to not feed them junk like this?
> Firefox+uBlock on Android is soooo nice for a fast mobile browsing experience
I use BlockBear on safari. Any speed gains you may have because of uBlock are offset by the cpu speed gains on iPhone XS. Hell, hacker news loads faster(less than a blink of my eye) on my iPhone than 2017 MacBook Pro.
> Any speed gains you may have because of uBlock are offset by the cpu speed gains on iPhone XS.
Depends on network performance, how heavy your typical sites visited are, and what type of configuration you're running on uBlock.
Anecdotally, I find my Snapdragon 835 phone with Firefox/Ublock Origin to feel somewhat faster than my A10 with Safari/1 Blocker X. (Plus Firefox/uBlock gives various QOL improvements over Safari, like customizably removing cruft from various sites, and not autoplaying video.) My biggest complaint with Firefox/uBlock Origin is that the UI isn't very nice for whitelisting scripts on mobile.
That ignores the privacy threat Google itself poses. There's a lot of things I don't like about Apple, but using a phone whose operating system contains unlimited amounts if closed source Google code is really scary to me, simply due to their business model and their disrespect of privacy.
> I don’t care about privacy. What I do care about is being manipulated.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but those two sentences contradict each other. ;)
The main publicly visible application of personal data is advertising, so if you don’t want ads or manipulation, then you actually do care about privacy.
And are you certain you don’t care about privacy outside of ads? If so, why? Many people who’ve said things like that just didn’t even think at all about what happens or could happen to their personal information. Would it surprise you if you found out that insurance companies were purchasing personal information in order to increase their denial rates on claims? Would it bother you if your personal information was used to support a politcal party you oppose? Would it concern you if your personal habits were used to advertise to your neighbors or co-workers or friends or family instead of you personally?
> You need to work on your argument a bit I think. I get what you are saying, but your points are a little weak.
Okay, sure. I asked you why you don’t care about privacy, and you haven’t bothered to answer. I don’t really mind if my argument is weak, but yes I could certainly work on it and improve it if I had a reason to. I can’t read your mind, though. Do you want to provide any reasoning for your case or counter-argument at all?
Two things to think about. 1- I wasn’t attacking you, in case you felt like I was criticizing, and were just trying to criticize me back. 2- None of the examples I gave are made up, they are all real things that have happened.
IMO I just reviewed all the phones and the iPhone XR is the best phone for the price (~$750). Battery life is great, security is a plus, waterproof, great CPU, etc.
I rotated through the pixel, iPhone XS, Samsung Galaxy, and 4 or 5 other flagship phones (was able to get amazing two week return policies)
Ended up with the XR simply because it was an excellent solid phone, cheaper than the other flagship phones. Admittedly I didn’t checkout the Xiaomi phone.
For reference, I had to replace my nexus 6p because the battery was so bad it was dying at 50% randomly. Plus google was no longer pushing updates.
If you want a top flagship, I agree Apple is a solid choice. What Xiaomi and Android does well in general is midrange. I've got a ~$150 phone (Xiaomi Redmi Note 4, now superseded) that has fantastic performance (never had any issues with tens of tabs in browsers, multitasking, games, etc), fingerprint sensor, battery lasts for 2/3 days, etc. You can tell it's not a flagship: the camera is just tolerable, it's got a plastic back (which doesn't break after repeated falls); but overall it's insane value/cost.
It's nice to surf the wonders of billion-scale device mass-manufacturing if you don't need the latest and greatest.
Xiomi phones are horrid in terms of privacy. Their MIUI sucks, constantly pestering me to use their app store. Privacy policy of their other stock apps like file manager, galary etc includes sending filename and other data to chineese servers. Not to mention some of their misterious 'analytics' apps always running in background.
> But overall, I personally can't think of a single aspect where iOS "miles ahead" anymore, from an end-user perspective.
There's one place that iOS is miles behind though, and that's file handling. Having to go through a desktop and iTunes to receive music from a friend is a pain in the arse.
Unbelievable! In all of my searching and asking around for exactly this I was unable to find a suitable app. Thank you for sharing—and, to the author who may be browsing this, thank you for sticking up for us digital dinosaurs who refuse to integrate into the “library as a service” dystopia. Let me know if you ever need a helping hand.
My last two phones were Samsung Galaxys. Samsung only updates your phone for two years. I'm not about to have an internet connected device that doesn't get security updates any more, that just seems crazy to me. My new phone is an iPhone, which apple updates for five years.
I switched the other way around and was mostly surprised that iOs had barely an edge over Android. In a few places downright inferior to it (e.g. keyboard).
I can at least trust iOs to provide software updates for my device until 5 years of age. But I find it hard to see that many people value this remotely close to the price difference.
> the app ecosystem isn't quite as good, but is very very close,
It's interesting you say that. I've been looking at de-googling myself and getting off Android, but I cannot find a decent replacement in the App store for my password manager of choice (KeePass2Android, cos I use KeePass everywhere).
Other Apple owning friends of mine say I should be using whatever it is that iPhone supplies by default, but the problem is I want to de-google myself, not move entirely into Apple land, so having something which only works on the phone isn't going to fly. I've got Windows and Linux machines all over the place that I want my password manager to sync with.
There are a few keepass clients for iOS, but most of them are pretty serious abandonware and don’t support newer features like autofill integration. https://keepassium.com/ is supposed to come out soonish, and will probably take the crown when it does. For now, your best option is probably https://strongboxsafe.com/. No affiliation or experience with either, but strongbox seems to be the favorite for now and keepassium looks like it’ll be better when it’s out.
Just a quick comment: I use MiniKeePass on iOS. It is not that nicely intergrated etc., but you can at least keep using your files etc. You will have to manage the file on your "cloud server" though, two-way-sync is not there yet.
Yes, this is more or less what I found - a reasonable number of implementations of apps which can read/write a keepass database, but sorely lacking in all the nice bells and whistles features that I like in the Android app.
It's not ideal to suggest wholesale replacing your trusted system, but I can recommend Bitwarden. It's open source, free with a premium option and has clients for iOS, Android, Linux, Windows, Mac as well as CLI options and browser integration.
My main complaint for Android is that they are obsessed with copying Apple so they are always one generation behind. If Apple removed headphone jack, next year you can expect most Android phone to do same. Same goes for all good and bad features Apple introduces like notch, Touch ID, FaceId, slow-mo, memory capacity, AI selfies etc etc. Other way around also happens but much less often and is typically fragmented in niche devices instead of one all rounder. So buying Android always felt like buying last year’s iPhone. But last year’s iPhone usually cost same as this year’s Android. So what’s the point?
Not everyone copies Apple. Samsung and LG still have headphone jacks. If anything they had fingerprint sensors before Apple. Notches are the in-between bezels and full screen phones. LG experimented with fake notches on the V10 and V20, branded as a second screen rather than a notch.
This is exactly the issue. In Android world innovations are fragmented and there is no one package that has all of these combined. If you want Samsung features then you lose out on LG features.
An iPhone that's Slightly fatter (fill the space with a larger battery), headphone jack, and a "smaller" screen. Of course, have all of the latest hardware (camera, soc, etc.).
Or, a MacBook Pro, again slightly fatter (larger battery), with a great keyboard, actual ports (no dongles), and no touch bar. Give us the option for a matte screen to totally blow our socks off.
I'd buy those two devices tomorrow if Apple introduced them.
Tim probably gave a video interview of some sort too but Apple should be glad the open web still exists and they are able to communicate such crucial information in a timely manner to investors. Nothing beats writing a blog on the internet which can be read by everyone with a browser.
This might not be popular, but here goes:
I wonder if knowing that he will have to share this news with his investors is why he came up with that semi-religious cult-like speech about exercising corporate censorship at the ADL not that long ago (https://www.macrumors.com/2018/12/03/tim-cook-adl-keynote-sp...), if that was his way of pandering to an audience in hopes of getting some additional sales...
I might be wrong but it's happened several times before where companies were trying to drum up some support by suddenly being extremely "woke" just before having to come out with some bad news.
I really doubt that “woke” speeches do much to drive sales, but I’d wager his speech to the privacy commissioners had a larger effect than the ADL one.
693 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 335 ms ] threadThe issue here is entirely around Apple and China.
I don't know all of the details, but I recall working with something like that twenty-five years ago, and usually there are a lot of tax breaks and so forth, because most of what's getting manufactured is exported. Jobs stay, products go.
So if you then sell those products in the same country, they want some of the taxes and and so forth.
The alternative would be to charge all the taxes, then manufacturers would file paperwork to get a refund for the goods they exported.
This system streamlines that for the case where the intent is to export more than is sold domestically.
But more than 50% of iPhone value is Chinese made.
Materials, labour, machine time, big part of ICs, batteries, passives, cabling, etc.
So, China actually double taxes own manufacturers aside from Apple itself.
The meme that "only $20" of iPhones value stays in China" is completely wrong. China makes tons of money from Apple.
Oh very much so. That's why China is careful about starting a trade war with Apple. They want to get their own manufacturers up to speed to replace Apple, but they don't want to just kick Apple out of China in one stroke and penalize the Chinese businesses that depend upon Apple.
If it wasn't for that, Apple and their strong privacy approach would be Persona Non Grata, IM-uninformed-O.
Apple tries to be less public about them having HUUGE R&D and business units in China with lots of things being done here.
In 2016 they posted a tiny press release about them opening their "first" R&D centre in China in Shenzhen, and deliberately making an impression of it having no significant role.
In reality, it was their _third_ RnD centre in Shenzhen only. Besides their nominal "design centre" in Kerry plaza, they rent a whole building in Discovery park in Nanshan, and have own section in Foxconn campus. The rumor is that they also rent yet another office for their product/project management staff somewhere closer to Longhua.
If some portion of the phone is imported, and that portion has duties, under normal circumstances Apple's subcontractor would import that thing, pay the duty on it, then export the phone and file for the duties to be refunded.
If the phone stays in China, the duty applies. So there may be duties involved if there are materials imported to China for assembly.
Apple was the first foreign company to price their computers and phones reasonably in China. Before the markup was around 50%, after Apple opened its first Apple stores in China that markup fell to 10-20%, which is about inline with tariffs.
I'm sure if you included the effective subsidies China-homed conglomerates enjoy, the ratio of COGS between e.g. Apple and Huawei could be as high as 4:1. Huawei can certainly afford to make phones cost 1/4th as much, although Apple could also afford to cut prices by 38 percentage points (as per their margins).
On the other hand, China-homed companies aren't responsible to public markets (Wall Street really) in the same way US-homed are. You could book a 1% margin, but your family owns the company, so the board isn't going to take away your private jet, let alone dump you as CEO.
In the US, the "family owned" (in the sense of being management controlled) mega-techs like Facebook and Snapchat are actually suffering greatly due to their poor accountability. It's truly bad for equities, even while Facebook and Snapchat book ever-growing revenues.
It will be an interesting reckoning. Not the change in consumer tastes in China, mind you, which doesn't really matter for share prices. It'll be an inevitable change in corporate culture.
After all, there are millions of extraordinarily talented people in China who will want the kinds of riches and glamor only a certain privileged minority get to experience. If the bottom line doesn't motivate public accountability, ambition will. That's healthy for everyone, but it will signal the end of sclerotic, state sponsored corporations in China.
So as always, the Chinese consumer is the victim. They get to enjoy phones that cost 1/4th as much as an iPhone. But in exchange, they forfeit a certain kind of life fulfillment that, in my opinion, they deserve.
Me sitting in Toronto saying, "iPhone is too expensive for me, I have a mortgage to pay" is still irrelevant, because Apple is hitting its targets in Canada, the US, and so forth. Maybe it is too expensive for me personally (I'm on an iPhone but it's a 6, not a 6s, not a 7, not an 8, not an X of any kind), but I don't speak for my economic zone.
Sounds to me that it isn't just China. The new phones are even more expensive then the previous ones. It's kind of hard to imagine that those high prices have no impact on sales and I would have at least expected there to be a mention about pricing in the letter.
They don’t break it down.
In fact, most of our revenue shortfall to our guidance, and over 100 percent of our year-over-year worldwide revenue decline, occurred in Greater China across iPhone, Mac and iPad.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/observer.com/2018/12/tesla-chin...
And even non-tech luxury brands
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/luxury...
You could swap out Apple with pretty much anything and you'll be accurate. The person commenting on the internet all day isn't representative of the average person.
You can boost that several orders of magnitude when it comes to this site, too.
1) China, obviously, if luxury perceived items like Apple products are slowing then that is a real indicator of the economy truly slowing regardless what the government states.
2) Having to full develop an in store trade in program pretty much is admission they priced themselves out of the market
People chasing status symbol but they are not fools, and the local brands offer good enough quality with only 40% of the price, you know what to choose.
I think that is the real risk to Apple. Right now iPhones (esp. in China) are a status symbol, but public opinion is a fickle thing. It's possible rising nationalism in China could also lead to an atmosphere where buying an iPhone is looked down upon as an exercise in conspicuous consumption but paid to China's enemy (when home grown phones are "just as" good). When that happens, Apple really is in dire straits. Apple needs to ensure they can innovate faster than the competition, but with a lot of value shifting to AI-related services (not necessarily Apple's strong point - compare Siri to Alexa or Google Assistant), that's a tough battle for Apple.
But I would say the real reason that Apple is suffering now is that they stopped to innovate. Those touted innovations on their press conference is hardly convincing that they are essential to my user experience. Gimmicks, like Animojis are showcased and centred during the once a year event to communicate to their customers. It is embarrassing and laughable.
And I blame Apple itself 100% on this, they are setting on a largest pile of cash that mankind every entrusted to a private corporate and does nothing. Now comes the recoknining, and it is probably overdue.
I’m not an economist nor social scientist, but I don’t think a simple “fool” judgement necessarily explains what motivates. Mind the story below is from 2009 and of luxury automobiles, but my point stands... I feel like the “rationalization” for events is just post-hoc acknowledgement of “which way the wind blows”.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/porsche-i...
A bunch of prominent economic figures out of China in the last month or two have pointed to a near-recession there. They're outright lying about 6.5% growth (if it's more than 1/4 that I'd be surprised), their economy is getting close to contracting. Their manufacturing sector is about to tip into recession [1] (guaranteed with the worst of the tariff hit just starting now) and their consumption tax numbers [2] have imploded at a historic rate. The iPhone sales drop in China aligns with the drop in the consumption figures there. Their credit impulse is deeply negative, which is a particularly bad thing to have happening with all the other negative numbers. Their new export orders PMI is in deep contraction.[3] They've got a lot of banks that need recapitalized soon with a central government intent on constraining the growth of further debt. In the cities you're seeing a painful wave of deflationary pressure hitting their housing market, with their world-leading vacancy rates on housing units (epic overbuilding) only making it worse.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/02/china-reports-december-caixi...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-12-31/china-...
[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-31/china-slo...
That sounds like Huawei fallout.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18760120
How would fallout from Huawei have anything to do with fewer people walking into Apple stores and buying a new Apple product? Have the prices risen or something? Are people afraid of being kidnapped if they walk into an Apple store?
To me, it is just a lame hyperpolitical straw man excuse as to why they aren't selling more products. It has zero to do with China, imo. It has to do with people not NEEDING a new device, so they are upgrading (a lot) less frequently. Personally, I'm on about a 5 year upgrade cycle now. Apple will have a harder time going forward having increasing records year after year, because they mostly rely on new hardware sales. I think we're kind of coming to a Moores law type effect in terms of hardware perception (not design/capability). There just isn't enough of a perceivable or revolutionary innovative difference for the average person to justify purchasing a new multi $k machine year after year. For most people (non power users), they get no actual tangible benefit. An iPhone X will perform just as well for the vast majority of an average users applications as an iphone 8.
Some Chinese people and organizations are reportedly boycotting US phones (which is mostly Apple phones) and purchasing Huawei phones instead.
US Dollar crisis coming to a market near you
> ... AirPods and MacBook Air were also constrained.
(emphasis mine) Interesting that Apple still can't manage to make AirPods, a 2 year old product, fast enough. I wonder why that is.
Tim Cook is one of the finest CEOs of his generation, but he cannot walk on water, and neither can his company. They do some things well, and on others, their reach exceeds their grasp.
It’s not JUST AirPods.
My wife should be due for a phone upgrade but instead she got the battery replacement a few months ago and AirPods for Christmas.
I know that in my own case I think that AirPods look ridiculous and stupid, and I can't believe anyone allows himself to be seen in public with them. But I think that less now than I did two years ago, and presumably in another two years I'll think that less still. No doubt in a decade I'll think that they don't look dumb at all, and maybe someday I'll have AirPods or something similar. And then one day I'll quit wearing them, because they're out of fashion again.
Heck, digital watches were popular for about 15–20 years, right? Maybe AirPods will someday be looked at as the digital watches of the early 2000s.
> Apple boss Tim Cook has blamed the US-China trade war as he warned of lower than expected quarterly sales for the iPhone maker.
Seems like the US-China trade war is taking its toll on Chinese economy, particularly on the high end.
[1] https://news.sky.com/story/apple-cuts-sales-forecast-as-chin...
Dropping the SE - the one affordable iPhone - is starting to look like a really bad move for Apple.
In late November 2017 no-contract SEs were going for $99 at some stores. A year later the price had dropped to $79. I bought one at $99 to use as an mp3 player and camera. Works great. I don't want a phone that's any larger because it won't fit comfortably into my pockets. Still using for day-to-day actual phone use a pretty great similar sized Android phone I bought for much less. I prefer it because it has an SD slot and replaceable battery and uses USB, all better AFAIAC than no SD slot, no replaceable battery and no USB. Phones are cheap and the cheap phones are very good.
And since everyone copies apple, get ready for massive slabs across the entire smartphone market.
Why spend $1,449 on an XS Max when you could have replaced the battery on your phone for $29?
Funnily enough I got an email about availability of the new models for a discounted price "for a limited time only". Maybe their prices will be reviewed?
Headphones, same issue, phone wants to initially connect to any other bluetooth device except the headphones in my hand. So, now I have to dig into settings, etc... I don't have that issue with 3.5mm jacks.
And now the Iphone XR has brought the side-bezel back! It almost looks like a rubber case.
And very few people won't do it to a phone that costs several hundred dollars to buy, and that will likely suffer considerable damage if you ever drop it on any hard surface without a case.
The effect is so dramatic that some manufacturers rescale the indicator so it isn't possible to reach those charge levels, and makers of electric cars won't charge above 90 percent by default.
https://batteryuniversity.com/index.php/learn/article/how_to...
"A laptop battery could be prolonged by lowering the charge voltage when connected to the AC grid. To make this feature user-friendly, a device should feature a “Long Life” mode that keeps the battery at 4.05V/cell and offers a SoC of about 80 percent."
I've had a lot of laptops with this kind of mode on them from several different manufacturers. I think Samsung, Lenovo, and HP have some knowledge of extending the life of their batteries. https://support-us.samsung.com/cyber/popup/iframe/pop_troubl...
"...it is strongly recommended to select "Optimize for Battery Lifesapn mode" or Conservation Mode and keep AC adapter connected alll the time. This mode will enable the battery to be fully charged to 80% or 60% of its design capacity." https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/solutions/ht069687
I have little reason to think a similar concept applies to phone batteries, as they're usually a similar chemistry these days.
I know that manufacturers sometimes gate off some of the capacity so that the battery doesn't actually reach extremely high or low levels of charge, but that would still imply that avoiding the very high and low ends of the reachable spectrum would still be helpful, just maybe not as much.
Samsung recommmends not going under 20% charge, but nothing about going over 80% https://www.samsung.com/uk/support/mobile-devices/how-can-i-...
gadgethacks thinks that we should avoid going over 80% https://android.gadgethacks.com/how-to/set-charging-limit-yo...
Apple has fantastic information: Don't charge past 80%, if it's too hot! https://www.apple.com/batteries/maximizing-performance/ The expected battery cycles are around 500 and then you have at least 80% capacity left on the battery. https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT208387
Both samsung and apple says that you should have at least 50% charge if you store the device long term and also avoid going too low and leave it empty.
I get that apple/samsung will not recommend not charging 100%, from using accubattery (play store) they say that a full charge uses about one charge cycle, but charging to 82% does not take any charge cycle.
From what I've read the best thing for the longevity of the battery would then be to have it between 20 and 80%. But if you will replace the battery or phone after 500 charging cycles you could just charge it to 100% as much as you like. But never go below 20%.
AccuBattery should really add a warning about the battery health when going under 20%.
I did not know that it's possible to monitor battery health in iphone settings nowadays, that's great!
Now on ios 12 my iphone 6 is fast again. But, I probably would have bought the iphone 8 by now anyway, just because of camera quality, etc. The speed trouble just pulled my purchase up by a year. (I even bought a stopgap SE in the summer of 2017)
I suspect others also upgraded early in 2011 due to ios 11. Of course this situation is better long run now that its fixed. I'm so pleased with ios 12.
I have used the latest models and don't see any improvements worth upgrading for. FaceID is cool, but not enough on its own to convince me to upgrade.
In previous cycles, my update from 3GS to 4S was a no-brainer (retina, massive speed improvement), as was the upgrade from 4S to 6S (lightning port, LTE, massive speed improvement, larger screen).
Once I got my battery swapped, the phone was as good as new.
And I still have a headphone jack.
If I knew this earlier, I could’ve bought the X sooner. Couldn’t recommend it enough.
Having recently deleted all my timeline-based social media accounts, I'd even consider switching to a smart dumbphone like the Nokia 8110 if it had WhatsApp and Spotify (WhatsApp is rumoured to be at least coming soon to KaiOS) and just get rid of the distraction altogether.
So yeah, iPhone nerd here.
I’ve been rocking an SE for a couple of years now. Love it. Works. Quick enough. Small, robust. No plans to update.
I think the novelty has worn off. They used to be these cool new toys. Now it’s just a phone. I want to spend less time with the thing as time goes on, not more.
> US dollar strength-related price increases
A weaker dollar (due to inflation, etc.) is the reason that consumer prices increase. A stronger dollar in theory should make the prices decrease.
EDIT: I understand that a stronger dollar means the prices in other currencies will increase, but I was referring to specifically the price in US markets. Pretty sure the iPhone prices in the United States increased as well.
But I'm still a bit confused on it. How is Foxconn being paid? In dollars or in yuan? If the dollar is strong, shouldn't the BOM and manufacturing costs decline in lockstep with the Chinese buyers' purchasing power (relative to USD)?
So US probably has the cheapest iPhone in the world.
But for whom? If you're outside the US, and I'll remind you that most of the world, including China, is, then goods effectively priced in US dollars will be more expensive.
This is what I think 99% of business people don't get when they are confused by counterintuitive price dynamics of the industry.
strength-related price increases can be ambiguously read, whether the U.S. dollar strength increased or decreased, it led to price increases.
Just have to crack that digitally signed battery cable ;)
Jokes aside, Apple been deliberately reducing their products' repairability since at least iphone 3. I myself had a side business of selling factory refurbished phones when I was an exchange student in Singapore from 2007 to 2009. Malaysian refurbishers told me that in the middle of production run, Apple deliberately began gluing their front glass to the display with impossible to undo glue to nuke any chance of profitable refurbishment.
In contrast to "dumb" phones of Japanese brands, that were designed for extreme manufacturability, Apple's products are unique in that regard to be engineered with an opposite goal.
That’s true for most modern high end phones and has been since 2012.
https://ifixsmartphone.com/2012/11/16/smartphones-with-glass...
- $200 no questions asked buy-back - Better camera - Larger screen in a just about the same size form factor
I expect to have this phone for ~4 years with probably a battery refresh in ~2ish.
I went 4S -> 6S -> XS. I hadn't upgraded an iPhone in years, Apple has made the process extremely slick and painless. I was seriously impressed at picking up the new phone and being "good to go" in ~45 min when my apps downloaded.
I'm sure I'm an outlier
If you use a password manager that supports OTP tokens (lastpass with their authenticator app, 1password, bitwarden) you could just use that and remove Authy out of the picture.
I have no connection other than being a happy premium user for around 2 years. By far the best of those I found.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/otp-auth/id659877384
Now I have 2 devices that I can use, which makes me much less fearful about losing (or more likely misplacing) my phone.
In iOS I use 'Authenticator' - https://github.com/mattrubin/Authenticator. It's open source.
In not-perfect-light scenarios (not necessarily by night), photos shot with the iOS stock camera App have noticeably grain or "patches". The portrait mode is nice, but has glitches occasionally such that some item in the background gets merged with the face in the foreground.
So, I’m not a professional photographer, I only use the camera of my iPhone XS Max. The results are good enough, but the improvement isn’t that big over the iPhone 7 or 8.
What I do like is the big screen, since I use my phone only a couple times per week to make a call. Most of the time is spend in apps.
> Why spend $1,449 on an XS Max?
Period.
This is the cost of what an entry level macbook was...
But I'd like a better camera so I took a look:
The other thing that isn't helping apple is the went from a simple system to understand iphone 6, 7 8 (s for the bigger models (edit: whoops I meant plus.). To so iPhone Xr, X, Xs.. I can't tell it the iPhone 8 is the end of the line for the numbered iPhones with a front button. Basically I'll have to do some research.
They made a page to help, but when comparing phones, price is an important factor to compare...
https://www.apple.com/iphone/compare/
S has always been for second models with the same number (kind of like a minor version), they invariably are released one year after and are the same size (not bigger) as the corresponding non-S version (the XS Max is the only exception, there is no X Max, and XS Max is just a bigger same-year cousin of the XS, but the XS has the normal S-to-non-S relation to the X.)
This holds the whole way back to the first S, the 3GS.
Very interesting that Apple included this as someone who took advantage of a $29 battery replacement for my 6S just last month. The chain of decisions that took place for this to happen should be a lesson for more companies.
I imagine it went something like this:
- Feedback that iPhones were shutting down unexpectedly due to degraded and/or defective batteries.
- Instead of shouldering the battery replacement immediately, the product team decides to change the performance envelope of the phone.
- The root issue is not addressed.
- Betterygate™ inevitably happens.
- Apple heavily subsidizes battery replacements for everyone
- Some people decide that they'll stick with their phone a bit longer than they otherwise would have, reducing iPhone sales.
- Apple misses their earnings target, likely costing them more in value than it would have cost them to address the root issue in the first place.
Of course there are other factors addressed in the letter, but this issue was notable enough to be included.
Because Apple shouldn’t offer something they don’t want people to use that phrase being very poorly chosen.
No manufacturer gives free battery replacements to 3 year old, out of warranty phones.
And even if they did the issue would still be wide spread because most people wouldn't necessarily come in to have it replaced.
If you had brought your phone in to an Apple Store during that first year I'm sure they would have replaced it for you under warranty.
Repair shops have simply been victims of Apple's aggressive approach to security.
All solved now and third party repairers can do most things.
Meanwhile, Apple does something like https://boingboing.net/2018/10/20/louis-rossman.html
Customs seized it. Not Apple.
> Apple is working with the government
And from the source article
>[Apple] will not allow me to replace batteries, because when I import batteries that are original they’ll tell me the they’re counterfeit and have them stolen from by [CBP].
Customs in general prevents the importation of counterfeit goods. Which they determine by whether that item has a logo and if it came from a legitimate source.
Furthermore, the root issue could have been addressed not just by offering free replacements (They weren't), instead of slowing down phones and having customers believe their devices were obsolete much earlier than anticipated, they could have been transparent about the issue like they are now.
Instead, I ended up with 1 free battery replacement, and 1 heavily subsidized replacement, which certainly factored into my delayed upgrade cycle. Apple experienced this enough to warn their investors about it in this letter.
The point I am making is that NO manufacturer replaces naturally degraded batteries for free. Defective sure. And not just phone manufacturers but I haven't heard of any manufacturer doing that. Batteries are a consumable item.
I do agree however that Apple should have been upfront about their measures they were taking to mitigate battery degradation.
Apple initially refused to replace my battery because they're consumable, even though they later admitted that some batteries were defective. They replaced some batteries for free [1], everyone else got an iOS 10.2.1 update with silent throttling [2]. Note that Apple did not admit to defective batteries until late 2016, and then announced an update with silent throttling in early 2017.
I am not implying that Apple should replace everyone's batteries for free, I am however under the impression that they attempted to keep warranty costs low by denying for as long as they could, and quickly following up with an update that hides the symptoms.
[1] https://www.apple.com/support/iphone6s-unexpectedshutdown/ [2] https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/23/apple-says-ios-10-2-1-has-...
I think the lesson should be to have your battery replacement prices be reasonable to start with and avoid inflating the market for your devices artificially.
https://www.ifixit.com/Store/iPhone/iPhone-X-Replacement-Bat...
The root issue is that batteries degrade over time, for everyone, not just apple. iPhone’s did a good job hiding that away by degrading performance along with it.
The same thing still happens with new phones, but now apple just tells you when it happens. My X crashed in the cold and it said something like “your battery couldn’t provide peak power and your phone is now in degraded performance mode. Disable this setting in the settings app.”
Apple is good about doing things so the user doesn’t have to think about it. The media just ran with that shit and made it out to be way worse than it was.
Look they could have been more transparent about it and gave the user a heads up but I see it as a super reasonable response. I think people would rather have a phone that's slower than one that crashes at 29% battery.
This was a design flaw. Before the throttling update, there were ~1 year old iPhones that would reboot anytime you took a photo or opened a large app if the battery was below 90% charged.
Now I get why Apple did it, a recall would have been far more expensive, but nobody should be surprised by the media shitstorm and lawsuits that followed.
(A) Apple's terrible because they should have released the device with a "better" battery. One that's not "defective". One that could allow the CPU to run at full-throttle all the time for the usable life of the device. They slowed the device secretly to match the capabilities of the battery because they're trying to cover up a manufacturing defect, and they dont want to foot the bill for repairing everyone's phones.
(B) Apple was trying to get the most performance possible out of the physical capabilities of the battery. Unfortunately, it turned out that as the battery aged, due to physical changes, the battery couldn't keep up with the demands of the CPU running as fast as they thought it could over time. To prevent devices from shutting down and forcing users to replace the battery/phone earlier, they scaled CPU performance with battery age and therefore capabilities. Because batteries are consumable and their performance characteristics change over time. This means that the phone always give you just as much performance as physically possible at any given age.
IMO (B) is way, way more likely than (A).
If this was normal behavior, we would see similar throttling on previous iPhones, Android's and laptops.
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2018/02/26/iphone-slowdown-class-a...
I'm fairly confident that what apple did was the most logical thing. They should have been more informative about it, but it's better than a phone dying at 20%.
This is a limitation of Li-Ion battery technology. It has nothing to do with OS or phone manufacturering like you keep trying to imply.
This isn’t really up for debate.
What is up for debate is how a manufacturer should handle this limitation and communicate it to customers.
Your expectation is entirely unrealistic and emotional. This has nothing to do with the size of the battery.
I guess the take away here is that for the X13, they should just clock it way down from the start and just maximise battery life. Which is not a bad idea.
I want them to say (as you do mention) 'hey, your device has been slowed down because your battery is old. Get it replaced to restore full performance'.
I'd absolutely rather have a slow phone than one that arbitrarily dies at 29%, if and only if I'm given this heads up. At least with one that crashes at 29% battery, I might suspect the battery is dying and get it replaced. The average user has no reason to think that an old battery will slow their phone down, and just ends up with a super-frustrating user experience.
There's a fine line between that approach and the approach of actively disregarding the user's need to control their own device. Apple too often falls on the latter side of the line, and "Batterygate" was a prime example. I certainly appreciate it when I don't have to think about something, but when I eventually do have to think about it, I need to be able to do something about it.
I do give them some credit for fixing the issue by making the phone work the way it should have all along.
I'd have preferred to prevent the CPU throttle by replacing battery within the phone warranty period than having to know it(cpu throttling) afterwards, when my phone was already out of warranty.
I don't see this as any different than the thousands of other OS management decisions like how to manage memory of new tabs or apps when you have a dozen open. What if you want to keep the memory/bandwidth etc... going for one app and not the others? Where's the consent there? Same idea IMO
Put this way - if your car suddenly refused to go above 30mph when previously you'd happilly race along the highway at 70mph, you'd wonder what the hell was wrong, and not think "Oh well, my car manufacturer is just trying to extend the life of my vehicle, it's fine."
The analogy is not quite right though. It’s more like they are forcibly reducing max speed to prevent a high speed stall.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/azdailysun.com/news/local/state...
https://www.autoblog.com/2010/11/11/hybrid-run-out-of-gas/
With a car the obvious answer is: get the thing checked immidiately. He did, and he still had to drive around like this for 2 weeks till a replacement part arrived.
You just disproved your own point. This throttling was only implemented shortly before it got noticed and Apple announced it’s existence, like a couple of months at most. Apparently it wasn’t ‘very noticable’ and the perceived slowdowns were all in your head because for all those years you claim this was going on, it wasn’t.
modern cars retune their engines on the fly based on engine temperature, fuel quality, local air pressure, and other factors. this is to extend the life of the engine in general and to prevent catastrophic failure from knocking.
if you use your car as an appliance (the way most people use phones/computers), you will barely notice the fact that your car's performance is constantly varying other than a bit of sluggishness on a cold morning. to an enthusiast, it's almost impossible not to notice what the car is doing.
most apple customers just want their phone to not crash. if you offer them a performance/stability tradeoff they won't know what to pick anyway.
What a copout. There is no good reason. Your phone already does a 1000 things that you don't know about. Do you also want access to how many cores are used, which ones, what speed they are running at, which frequency your phone is using, how the GPS is getting its location, etc...
Your user experience will always degrade with battery age. This is an unavoidable consequence of using a rechargeable battery. It is physically impossible to run a Li-ion battery through hundreds of charge cycles and have it work just as well as it did the day it was new.
Without power management, the phone would turn off sooner, in some cases a lot sooner. That is also a bad user experience, especially if you need the phone to make an emergency call. This is one example of why using software code to prolong phone availability creates a better user experience, even if comes at the expense of peak performance.
In addition, car batteries have:
a) vastly better charge controllers than the cheap crap that's put in phones
b) better quality cells to start with, or at the very least higher QA standards
c) BETTER CHARGERS. Cheap cellphone chargers can kill the battery with their unclean power, especially when linked with cheap charge controllers in the phone.
d) better thermal management with cooling and (iirc) heating, compared with a cellphone battery that has to endure anything between double-degree negative temps in winter to +40 °C when it gets held by the user or the CPU gets active.
The significance of this will vary, largely based upon the range of the car. Think about how many cycles the battery takes after 100,000 miles on a car with a 100 mile range vs one with a 300 mile range, for example.
But to draw an analogy: that's kind of like saying death is inevitable, so there's nothing we can do about infant mortality. It's absurd to suggest that some kind of physical inevitability caused the symptoms actually observed to any significant extent whatsoever.
Battery aging does not need to lead to any user experience degradation within the first few years at least, because you can overprovision a battery, and because such overprovisioning actually not only provides some runway, but also reduces even the relative rate of battery decay.
Not to mention there are a bunch of other things a manufacturer does that influence battery lifespan. Which design aspects are at fault here? Apple surely knows by now, but they're not saying.
But even if you do choose to allow slow degradation - entirely reasonable! - the rate of decay is largely a matter of choice for the manufacturer. You can sell em to last for at least a decade if not more, or you can push em to the limits and have em degrade in months. Sure, that might cost a few extra grams and cost a few percentage points of the maximum initial charge - but nothing a user would likely notice, let alone mind.
Apple simply sold near dumpster-level quality li-on battery integrations - whether by accident, or to save money, or to limit device lifespan - we can't really know.
Which comes at a cost, in dollars, size and weight. Which is why it's probable no phone manufacturers actually do this.
Basically: you can throttle after the battery is damaged or before. And if you throttle beforehand, you need to throttle a lot less.
Finally, you imply this is costly - but don't forget that apple's phones are amongst the most costly out there, and similar sized batteries are found in devices a small fraction of the cost. Clearly the bill of materials for the battery isn't a going to be a big deal for apple, compare to those competitors, which also happened to ship higher quality batteries.
As you state it is an issue of consent to this throttling, if it was communicated effectively this wouldn’t have been a ‘Gate’.
A good way described in a podcast (think it was Rene Ritchie on the talk show) would be to let the phone crash then pop up a message with an explanation of what’s happened, that the phone is now dialled down to prevent future crashes, you can turn it off in settings etc..
Also, if you have that functionality, why crash and then display a message. Write: Crash prevented, but clocked down. Look what a Raspberry PI does: It flashes an icon if the power supply is not keeping up.
a) replace the battery.
b) opt-in to degraded performance.
c) upgrade my device.
Rather than (in effect) tricking me into an upgrade before it was really needed.
Temperature also effects the performance of the battery so if you're out in the snow it could handle less than being indoors in the heat.
That's why the CPU throttling worked. It kept the CPU from pulling too much power in one instant, and then the battery lasted fine all they way down to 1%
What? No.
First of all, battery degradation is a design parameter. You can easily verify from apple own pages that iPads are rated for twice the charging cycles of iPhones. Apple intentionally included a low rated battery to limit the product life.
> iPhone’s did a good job hiding that away by degrading performance along with it.
And no.
Apple did an awful job, lets not forget the phone where crashing before apple introduced massive throttling killing the device performances. Neither of which sounds like a "good job".
Here's what a good job would have looked like (since apple sells top of the line devices at peak pricing): from the processor minimum voltage and battery degradation metrics figure out a voltage margin that would satisfy the processor constraints after one or even better two years of degradation.
Or, second best, start of with a throttled processor to begin with, but that would have ruined marketing precious "x times faster than previous generation", so they decided to do the shady thing: selling something as fast and killing it's performance six month after purchase.
And of all this what amuse me most is people defending it.
I absolutely agree, Apple should have alerted the user when the throttling was enabled (and given the user a choice) from the day this feature was implemented.
However, I actually prefer my phone being slower and usable rather than fast but randomly shutting down. But somehow this does not seem the general consensus?
Batteries do not all degrade alike; not even close. There are huge differences in the rate of decay, and those are significantly impacted by the way the battery is used in the device (particularly maximum charging level, temperature, discharging level, power draw, charging rate) and the quality of the battery.
Apple did NOT do a good job of degrading performance along with it; because if they had, they could have degraded performance before the battery became damaged. As a ballpark, I'd expect a life extension for the iphones in question by at least a factor 10 would be technically fairly simple and affordable; i.e. this isn't peanuts that apple left on the table here. A 10 year life expectancy is totally doable.
So a battery as old as the decaying iPhone batteries need not have decayed significantly, as should be obvious considering that not all phones (let alone other Li-On battery devices!) degrade to this extent. The fact that iPhones did decay like this is almost entirely due to choices that Apple made (even if they made those choices without considering the consequences). Apple is pretty competent, so I'm a little skeptical they didn't know they were pushing the edge of what's reasonable, but sure, maybe it was incompetence rather than intentional penny-pinching or planned obsolescence.
User choices can matter too, but given how locked down these devices are and how managed the environment and how technically nuanced the necessary user actions are to have an ameliorating effect it's unreasonable to assume users had any practical ability to avoid this outcome.
It's much harder for users to do this reliably than for the battery controller. Damage is maximized when all factors align; that's e.g. why controllers automatically turn of quick charge for the last few percent; similarly you can get away with violating a few rules without too much damage as long as you don't violate them all.
Finally, 0% and 100% charge are nebulous floating concepts. What you're really guessing at are the voltage levels in the cells - but again as a user it's kind of hard to guess those in a simplified UI. Is 95% worse than 5%? Typically high charge is worse but... who knows, without knowing what the controller actually interprets as those percentages.
I've never looked, but I'd be willing to bet you can find software to do most all of this automatically on a rooted android; to what degree you can automate care on other platforms - I'm not sure.
But again, the whole situation is mildly idiotic: all of these things the battery controller/OS can do too, and probably better that any user. There shouldn't be a need for much user handholding. The only thing the OS really can't do is choose for you when you're willing to accept a small amount of damage for a temporary dash of extra charge or quicker charging; a feature that by default kept your battery in "care mode", with a temporary toggle to charge more quickly or to a higher level.
A quick google find stuff like https://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_l... and research articles such as https://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/english/binary/pdf/corporate/tec... and http://publications.lib.chalmers.se/records/fulltext/249356/... and https://res.mdpi.com/batteries/batteries-02-00013/article_de... - and I'm sure there are hundreds more. It's not too hard to find info on Li-ion battery degradation, but it's a little much to expect even expert users to actually do much about it (IMHO).
Apple sacrificed battery capacity for size and weight. They built several generations of phone that had just barely enough capacity for a full day of use and could just barely deliver enough current for peak performance. Unlike their Android rivals, they failed to over-provision the battery to account for degradation over time.
The Xiaomi Mi 6 had a 3300mAh battery. The Samsung Galaxy S8 had a 3000mAh battery. The Huawei Mate 9 had a 4000mAh battery. The iPhone 8 has an 1800mAh battery. See the problem?
The iPhone 6 became practically unusable due to throttling. They were not hiding the issue effectively. But they didn't tell people that the issue was the battery. Affected users complained on forums, and tried all kinds of things like factory resets and uninstalling certain apps but couldn't find out why there phone was unusably slow. And Apple support didn't help either. They just suggested to install the latest update.
Only after Batterygate became public did people find out that they needed to swap the battery to fix their phone. I bet a lot of people threw away their phones becUse they didn't know. (why bother replacing the battery when your phone has become unusably slow?)
Similar story on the Mac side.
Current phone lineup (not just Apple) sucks IMO. An untouched SE with latest radio and faster CPU would be worth the upgrade for me.
Maybe 4" is just too small for most, even for one-handed use?
I’m a huge fan of the Xs Max. The near-bezelless display gives you maximum screen size in a relatively slim form factor. Watching videos on this thing is just amazing tbh.
iPhone and Android sales numbers have proven time and again that the vast majority of people want a larger screen. Your best bet is probably the compact Sony Xperia Z series.
(Owner of a huge phone, but not as primary computer)
> gigantic ass-phones.
I'd imagine if they reduced the bezels on the size of the 6 product line, you'd really find the best of both worlds. Both small in the hand, but also enough space to get more screen real estate out of your applications.
An iPhone XS phone doesn't even fit into most women's pockets. It'll be funny if pockets get bigger to accommodate phones.
I’d be surprised if an iPhone 4 based on new power-sipping technology wasn’t within a few percent of the web browsing/movie watching time of the iPhone 8 or similar.
Even if they nailed the form factor, how many people are really willing to switch? You see some people swearing off a brand (on the internet, anyway) when something egregious happens but there's definitely inertia that keeps most people firmly in one ecosystem or the other.
It's sad I will have to move back to Android within a year (I can neither buy big iPhones nor spend those amounts the way the new ones are priced). I wish there were fully functional privacy focussed ROMs that was shipped by Android OEMs.
I'm sure everyone on this discussion board knows why this will never be the case, unfortunately.
With that said, are there any regularly-updated aftermarket ROMs that are privacy-focused? I've had a rough look at LineageOS[1] - a continuation of CyanogenMod - and it seems to mostly fit the bill.
I'm aware of CopperheadOS, but they had a "touch" of infighting about half a year ago[2] and mostly dissolved.
I too am moving away from Apple products, for the same reason. They are reaching expense levels (especially in my country) that I simply can't justify when I can get a HP or Lenovo business-grade laptop with drastically better hardware specifications and install simply OpenSUSE on it. Without going all-in on the Apple ecosystem to fully reap the rewards, it's simply not worth it for me to use any of them.
1. https://lineageos.org/
2. https://www.reddit.com/r/copperheados
Does Apple report enough data for us to attempt to make correlations between average height (as a proxy for hand size) per country and purchasing decisions?
>- Apple heavily subsidizes battery replacements for everyone
> - Some people decide that they'll stick with their phone a bit longer than they otherwise would have, reducing iPhone sales.
> - Apple misses their earnings target
This is a gross misrepresentation of the report which clearly states "Greater China and other emerging markets accounted for the vast majority of the year-over-year iPhone revenue decline."
Battery replacements may have been notable, but it is incorrect to imply that they were the dominant factor.
No it doesn't, only that it was "notable enough".
The last line is a dodge because, obviously, China's economy is actually the main culprit stated in the report. But I guess some people are going to hear what they want to hear.
I have an iPhone 6s and my wife had a 6 and needed a new phone. We bought a new Xr but it was a small fortune, even though we're both working in IT and having good income. The phone is a brick and I saw lots of slicker Android phones costing half the price and providing a very similar if not better experience.
My next phone is very unlikely to be an iPhone.
Like what you're doing with these replies and your focus on something the OP didn't say?
OP is attempting to place causation on the battery problem for the earnings miss or the valuation loss.
That is not supported by the evidence, which clearly shows that the primary cause had nothing to do with the Western market at all.
It's fair criticism, OP is discussing 5% of the problem and presenting it as if it's 100%.
OP not implying causation, they're calling something interesting out.
It's an extremely clear post they made, IMO
There's is a causative link, which is why Apple included it in this report. How is it possible to miss that connection?
Now that we all can agree swish_bob is wrong, the problem remains that OP misrepresented the primacy of the factors stated in the report.
I don't get that in the least little bit from what he wrote. Nothing in his post even references the earnings drop.
“- Some people decide that they'll stick with their phone a bit longer...
- Apple misses their earnings target”
Direct quote.
No he didn't, stop making stuff up. Apple would not have bothered to mention the battery issue if it didn't have a material impact on their business.
> - Some people decide that they'll stick with their phone a bit longer than they otherwise would have, reducing iPhone sales.
> - Apple misses their earnings target, likely costing them more in value than it would have cost them to address the root issue in the first place.
There's an implicit "because of this" between the two bullet points.
Again, it's painting a problem that is 5% of the issue as if it's 100%.
China was the vast majority of this decline, as the earnings reports show.
I have no earthly idea why people are ignoring this fact so badly.
Not about this being the most significant factor. You've decided to infer that from the list - most of us didn't because he _explicitly_ says so in his last sentence. They also had influence over this particular issue, unlike the macroeconomics of China.
It absolutely is suggested, if not implicitly then by omission.
> They also had influence over this particular issue, unlike the macroeconomics of China.
Right, but the more it's discussed, the more it feels like people don't want to talk about the slowing economy in China.
What phone you've got matters little as a result. So Apple doesn't enjoy its usual iOS-stickiness factor.
They are absolutely typical Chinese consumers in this regard. As soon as iPhone because hard to distinguish from other phones they switched away. As soon as iPhones became clearly distinguishable again they switched back. This is not just an observation, they say this is why they did it.
I think there are actually three factors hitting Apple in China this year. One is that a disproportionate number of purchasers got the X when it came out because it was so distinctive bringing forward purchases from this year, then there are a lot of Android phones now that look like the X models and the new X models don't look enough different from the original X to look new, finally the economy in China is pretty soft right now and people there are worried about the future.
https://www.quora.com/Why-is-there-no-Apple-store-in-India-1
I can’t imagine Apple headquarters wanting to ignore a 100 million rich people market, but obviously it’s not worth the trade off of having to become business partners with someone they don’t want to be partners with.
I think he forgets to mention lack of innovation. It was the first year that I wasn't surprised from the new iPhone at all and none of my friends did. At this point I don't see much difference in having an X model vs XS.
You'll tell me that they had S models in the past and worked fine for them, sure... its not the same market anymore. There are very strong competitors using android which has also evolved and its doing really well as an OS vs what it was in the past at way cheaper prices.
At the price tag those iPhones are coming at plus the lack of innovation, I only see a constant drop in sales.
Personally I upgraded from an iPhone 7 to XS Max, my wife has an iPhone X and I don't see any difference between them, only the size. That plus the fact that I got my hands on some new android phones and got to use them made me think that I might change to android when my next upgrade is due. The apple ecosystem seems to be okish but I can't really say that it will keep me from changing. And truth be told there are quite a few solutions out there for them to become innovative again like the new ipad pro... have it use OS instead of iOS, that will definitely make people switch over to that and what comes with its ecosystem e.g pairing your mobile phone etc. Also airpods 2, just make some airpods with water resistance etc maybe improve connectivity a bit. Its not like we are requesting crazy innovation here, just simple solutions that will make us stick with the apple ecosystem.
Disclaimer: I was an avid windows user and android phone user up till iphone 5s came out, I switched to 5s and the difference on iOS quality vs Android was massive. Due to work I also started working with a mac and so I joined the ecosystem and I can't say am very displeased apart from the price tag, but seeing how Android has progressed over the years and how stock Android can be even superior to iOS has made me thinking of changing back.
I'd like to think that Apple's regressions are finally costing it. Idiotic moves like the elimination of the headphone jack from devices that Apple wants us to consume Apple Music with SHOULD result in a market smackdown. As should astronomical prices for increasingly crippled products. Apple's physical design is now abysmal, with the removal of physical buttons from phones, the embarrassing emoji bar (and elimination of a dozen keys from an already pathetic keyboard) on the so-called MacBook "Pro"... not to mention that Apple computers are now glued-together schlock with soldered-in RAM and drives. Now, when your drive fails (and it WILL fail), you get to throw the whole $4000 computer away because Apple made it disposable junk.
Macs should be sold in blister packs hanging from pegs at Walgreens.
The real "innovation" here would be for Apple to admit its blunders, fire Jony Ive, and bring usefulness back with a vengeance. Their fear of it is just as irrational as Trump supporters.
Which competitors are innovating better than Apple?
With AirPods, they mentioned yesterday that they were supply constrained throughout the holiday quarter. I'm not sure innovation on that product is an issue here if they can't keep the current version stocked enough to meet demand anyways.
https://theweek.com/speedreads/815565/data-reportedly-signal...
It would seem that this issue is far broader than simply Apple's strategy alone.
—more attractive screen
—faster
—much better camera, which is not a big thing for me, but always nice to have
—size in pocket is fine, but the size is annoying for on-screen reachability
—FaceID is better than TouchID in two particular ways: in-app authentications and unlocking the phone with wet fingers (which is common because of my work)
—the swipe down for Control Center is far less convenient on the XS because there's a much smaller target area for beginning the gesture
—the XS can't by default show the battery percentage, and for long-term device life I preserve my battery (I always run in low-power mode, even), so this is information I like visible at a glance
There's no doubt the XS is a more capable device than the 6S, but for how I use a smartphone the gains are not particularly beneficial. Maybe after I add the second phone line to increase the telecommunications divide between myself and my business I'll appreciate the XS more, but for now I am regularly reminded how much I enjoy the 6S when I pick it up to use it as an iPod.
Except, no, it doesn't.
Unethical LPT: Always buy the extended 'protection plan' since this problem happens so reliably around the two year mark. Call complaining that your phone crashes when it's low on battery and get a new phone for like $100. Cheapest way to get 4-5 years out of a single phone purchase.
And since it's been two years since you bought the device they'll almost always give you a better phone as a replacement.
Now someone at Apple thought instead of shutting the phone why not slow it down so that user can still make that urgent call. That's brilliant and all phones should emulate it. Apple's bad is the did it silently so user didn't know it was a battery problem, the blamed os updates, hardware, weather but not the battery, because degraded batteries never slowed down any phone including iPhone till now. So instead of getting battery replaced they bought a new phone which as a 'side-effect' was beneficial for Apple.
Now once people figured it out they were outraged, so as a PR measure Apple gave discounted battery replacement and once people did that phone was good enough again so delayed new phone purchase. Now as karma striking, all this news and discounted battery may have nudged users who otherwise chuck their phone every two years to get the battery replaced and the fact new device is costing 1000 fucking usd, some delayed for another year.
So this means that 12 months ago I bought a 32GB SE for 100 pounds, sold my 16GB model for 95 pounds (SE prices seem to bottom out around there) and got a brand new model a year later for free. At an overall cost of five pounds I've gotten a phone (well, two phones) that's hopefully gonna last me a total of 3 years. Beyond the inconvenience of catering for a 320px wide phone in the app store, it's not hard to see why Apple felt the need to kill it.
I'd rather use an external battery pack than change from my 6S.
However, when my MBP literally caught fire in my bed while I was asleep and melted the keyboard, apple refused to fix it as the warranty was two weeks out and they claimed that the "liquid sensors had been triggered at some point in the past - and while apple recognizes that the machine catching fire was a safety issue - they didnt find reason to justify fixing the machine. You can purchase a new MBP for $1,299 - or we can replace all the guts of your machine for $1,500"
Bullshit.
iPhone 5c was a cheap and performant phone with a good ecosystem.
Apple made everything worse through updates, bloat, and price increases.
My phone became so impossibly slow that I bought the cheapest but also nicest walmart phone I could on a whim (LG Zone4).
It's been so amazingly performant for just $100 that I would never, ever consider buying an expensive phone again, ESPECIALLY not one from Apple!!
And that's not because of the battery, that's just because of the software updates. Like, the CPU didn't lose any MHz along the way.
If Android doesn't follow the same path then I will be good-- if they do, then onto the next idea!
The software changed its requirements. Within reasonable limits that's just the nature of technological advancement and availability of faster hardware. I don't know if the performance degradation of iOS 11 and 10 were reasonable, but judging by user feedback Apple seems to have increased performance with iOS 12, particularly for older devices. Of course that comes too late for the iPhone 5C, which isn't supported anymore.
I don't want to hate on Apple. I have no allegiances to anyone in particular. I just am a cheapo user that values basic functionality, some speed, some longevity.
I don't put a premium on privacy or animojis or nice cameras or huge amounts of storage :)
And phones are not like cars, even in the post Moore’s Law world, silicone improves quite a bit.
You could get the exact same Apple Battery from China for about $7 including shipping. I would bet Apple have them for less than $5. Even at a reduced cost of $29, there is still $25 margin for Apple. Even if you subtract the operational cost involves, I doubt Apple ever subsidizes.
Also, a $7 battery from China is a gamble especially for something heavily used and physically next to your body a lot of the time. I'm sure you'd get a battery that had the same physical size and stated spec, but I'd be skeptical it'd have gone through the same QC. You could get one from a bum batch, or a relabeled one operating out of spec. You just don't know.
Not to mention Apple outsource a lot of these Battery replacement programme to Registered Third Parties.
A better Spec battery cost less than $7 from LG Chem. BOM cost on battery are not expensive at all, and it is not a secret.
>Apple outsource a lot of these Battery replacement programme to Registered Third Parties
Congratulations, you played yourself.
Just in case you did't know.
They explicitly write about a sharp turndown in China.
The guidances drops from 89-93 to 84 (about 8%). From what they are writing that all can be accounted for by the drop of revenue in China. Since China accounts for around 1/5 of Apple's revenue - the drop must have been around 40%-50%.
Which is a lot for a single quarter.
Also notice the reaction in the forex market. That certainly indicates that this is a broader issue.
In the bigger picture Trump has decided that a trade war with China is a good idea, so of course there are going to be unpleasant consequences.
Cook's reign has been rather miserly - pay more for less. It's been an effective short-term strategy for investor returns, but it hasn't created a solid foundation for future expansion, and has also given users very little to be proud of.
Where does Apple want to be five years from now? iPhone XIIIS? MacBook Hydrogen? Mac Pro Gold Professional Edition? There's only so far you can push that boat before the lustre fades.
Apple market share can still grow in established markets (what percentage of laptops are macs, what percentage of phones are ios).
Emerging markets; China, India, Africa can still grow for Apple.
And then of course they can innovate; find new product categories, services ...
Indian market for Apple has been shrinking because of the ridiculous prices for Apple charges in India. Samsung, One Plus and others now dominate there.
There is also a massive slowdown of the Chinese economy that doesn't seem to have anything to do with the trade war.
https://theweek.com/speedreads/815565/data-reportedly-signal...
It’s extremely obvious they weren’t ready for this quantity of repairs.
I just cannot understand how an increasingly risk-averse, profit-driven company will summon the chutzpah to again create category-creating products once more.
I don't think you can overlook those things and take them for granted.
There's still not great alternatives to AirPods or Apple Watch to this day. Music streaming is pretty much just Apple and Spotify at this point. Also, few companies have been able to align privacy and embed it into their business models.
Apple has also quietly built one of the best chip design teams in the industry - pumping out various custom silicon that is powering FaceID, ML, Photography, and AR among other things. The # of custom chips Apple uses in their products grows every year.
So they've done a ton of innovative things over the past couple of years, it's just that you're not going to get another product like the iPhone which is perhaps one of the best businesses of all time.
We may never see another business like it anytime soon, from anyone. So I think it's a bit unfair to grade everything Apple does on the "iPhone Curve".
Right now, the ecosystem is tied together by iOS whose most popular incarnation is iPhone. But iOS was so successful that it has an install base of over 1 billion users.
That's nothing less than an incredible user-base - a hell of a foundation. If they can sustain that install base while strengthening their ecosystem through value-add products like Apple Watch, AirPods, HomePod and Apple Music, then they have potentially many cash cows with dramatically high ceilings and reach.
This is a good bet for them because it plays to their strengths and they've earned incredibly loyal customers over the years.
iPhone may not be the future of Apple, but it is the core from which many futures will emerge. It'll still be a critical product for Apple, but no longer a key top-line growth driver. And that's OK, that's how innovation cycles go. iPhone made it possible for them to start on 3rd base for the next cycle.
Kind of useless if you can no longer install any new apps.
That probably includes obsolete iPads too.
iOS adoption of new versions is extremely strong and has typically always been that way. Rate of adoption is fast as well. From release of a new version to 50% adoption is often just a few weeks.
I still can't see how Apple will surge again. The brand equity is based upon Ramsian aesthetics (which have been mimicked to point of being passè in 2019), coupled with category-defining products that became cultural phenonenas (nope: the Apple Watch is hardly holds a candle to those). Not to mention they've all but deserted the power-users with lacklustre notebooks and having 6 year silences between Mac Pro's.
I want to be wrong, by the way. I really do. But you are mainly describing features and not products when you talk about their strides.
BMW, Audi (WW premium brand) and Mercedes all committed to gigantic investments into growing their presence here in last hew years, and so now has Apple.
In the past, American companies were some of the most passive players in China. It seems that they finally started to notice that China is a no joke market.
From looking at a few news articles, looks like revenue sharing increased from: $1B ('14) -> $3B ('17) -> $9B ('18) -> $12B ('19)
Example article: http://fortune.com/2018/09/29/google-apple-safari-search-eng...
Looking at the increase in Apple's services revenue ($8.5B, Q1 '18 -> $10.8B Q1 '19 -> $2.3B YoY increase) vs. increase in service revenue due to Google sharing ($9B - $3B = $6B / 4 quarters = $1.5B), we get that approximately 65% of Apple's incremental services revenue is due to increased revenue sharing from Google. IMO, this doesn't seem like a long term sustainable source of revenue growth for Apple.
That figure bundles in the costs paid to Dell and hp to have Google the default search engine on those machines, but I think we can be pretty sure that is dwarfed by the amount paid to Apple...
Comparatively, TAC in 2017 was $9B.
Here's what I posted elsewhere in this thread that addresses it:
"The actual product is the Apple ecosystem and that's the bet Apple is making.
Right now, the ecosystem is tied together by iOS whose most popular incarnation is iPhone. But iOS was so successful that it has an install base of over 1 billion users.
That's nothing less than an incredible user-base - a hell of a foundation. If they can sustain that install base with iterative iPhones while strengthening their ecosystem through value-add products like Apple Watch, AirPods, HomePod and Apple Music, then they have potentially many cash cows with dramatically high ceilings and reach.
This is a good bet for them because it plays to their strengths and they've earned incredibly loyal customers over the years.
iPhone may not be the future of Apple, but it is the core from which many futures will emerge. It'll still be a critical product for Apple, but no longer a key top-line growth driver. And that's OK, that's how innovation cycles go. iPhone made it possible for them to start on 3rd base for the next cycle."
You can't survive in a competitive world with just 10% of the market share since interconnectedness is crucial for the dominance of any platform and that's why you need cheaper macs and phones without losing the appeal of high end products for those who have the money in times of economic duress like the ones to come.
I've heard from Youtubers who have maxed out the RAM on their Mac Pros that its absolute garbage at even handling mundane video editing tasks. This was two years ago.
Nonetheless, I won't switch to Android only because of the privacy promises Apple has made & doubled down on. Whereas Google doesn't seem to care so much. The forced auto-login into Chrome browser (desktop) when you login to your Gmail on the browser, was the last straw for me.
However I just don't get just why Apple doesn't loosen those purse strings and spend massively on re-capturing the imagination of the user like it once did.
Is it Tim Cook and the board?
Does the ROI simply not exist in this space anymore no matter the capital spend?
Where - if at all - does Apple see a justifiable spend in the near future - tvs? cars?
>China
pick one
Remember, China is the second largest economy in the world. There was a HN article awhile back arguing that China is taxed as an emerging market (low tax), but is dollar size of a mature market. So, two questions:
Is China considered a maturing market?
Is China considered a mature market?
I don’t think just positive growth counts as maturing (even the US still grows), so I think the answers have to be mutually exclusive. Maybe you could argue the rate of growth makes it maturing, but I would love to compare it to the rate of US growth from 1950's-60's (was the considered US maturing or mature during that period?).
There's an unrelated question as to whether OECD and non-OECD countries should be treated differently.
America is on another hand is a developed country on average, but double digit of population is officially below the official poverty line....
Which one is better you think? In reality, that is Apples to Oranges comparison. China is not a market economy to begin with...
Wonder why they never break out these products in these sales forecasts.
Good luck trying to excise people's money through "Services" when everyone jumps ship after realizing they ship dumbed down products without any regard for people's need for workstations and not expensive toys that break trivially.
I asked each one of them if patriotism or the recent Huawei/US kerfuffle influenced their decision. They all resoundingly said no. When I asked why they chose Huawei after being in the Apple ecosystem for a decade, all of them said "camera". They said camera quality isn't about DXO scores or 4k60 but being able to take "beautiful" photos out of the box for some definition of beautiful. To them, iPhoneXS is the same if not worse than a 6, because the iPhone camera doesn't take more "beautiful" photos, only more "realistic" ones.
Obviously anecdotes are meaningless and all that, but I want to note that China is a very homogeneous society given its population, so even a brief first-person glimpse into people's everyday lives can be pretty telling. I would not be comfortable making similar conclusions about any other cluster of 1.3B people.
TL,DR: I don't buy that the economic downturn in China and the Huawei/US situation are the sole perpetrators of Apple's problem in China. Apple is missing opportunities due not innovating in certain crucial areas.
I hear this all the time from friends and family. Such and such camera is so much better.
Most of the time the images really aren't. The brightness is just cranked up or something, the image doesn't look that great. I'm not sure why the iPhone doesn't have better low-light settings, even my 8 Plus doesn't take very good pictures indoors if I don't use a different camera app.
By "beautiful," do they mean those auto-Photoshopped images that are popular in China; where they eyes are made bigger, chin pointier, and skin lighter?
https://www.businessinsider.com/samsung-huawei-smartphone-be...
> Popular smartphones like the Samsung Galaxy S8, the Galaxy S7, the Huawei P9, and many others often feature something called "Beauty" or "Beauty mode" when you turn on the front camera to take a selfie.
> Theoretically, it does what it says on the tin: airbrushing magic to make you look prettier in photos. Usually, it makes your skin look smoother and your eyes brighter.
Personal anecdote: I broke my iPhone and have been using Android for a bit, and I must admit: at first I thought I'd switch back but nowadays Android is pretty good.
Hardware at a comparable price-point is solid, the UI is smooth and better-looking than it was before, the app ecosystem isn't quite as good, but is very very close, and there's features I would actually miss on iOS (a calendar widget on my homescreen, unlocking my device without touching the screen and Google's Night Sight).
I miss my to do app and my email app, both of which are not on Android (Things and Spark). But overall, I personally can't think of a single aspect where iOS "miles ahead" anymore, from an end-user perspective.
Apple has done well to make privacy one of their prime offerings.
Simply buy a Pixel (or any other device that supports AOSP). Build your own AOSP image (which is quite easy). And you are ready to go. Use applications from F-Droid only.
Admittedly it's not as straightforward as running your favorite Linux distro, and there are some caveats, but it's quite close.
https://www.apnews.com/828aefab64d4411bac257a07c1af0ecb
https://qz.com/1131515/google-collects-android-users-locatio...
I really hope this is untrue. My instinct is that you perhaps can't be a big behemoth of a company if you don't behave like Google and Facebook, but Apple occupied that middle territory successfully for a long time.
As a fairly heavy iCloud user, I wouldn't say they "suck" at services. They're not as good as Google at it, to be sure, but most things work pretty well for me.
I would also add that Apple is actively working to close the gap. Look at last years hire of Giannandrea from Google.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/03/business/apple-hires-goog...
According to recent tests, Siri has already improved a lot.
I would love to switch, but Firefox+uBlock on Android is soooo nice for a fast mobile browsing experience. The moment I can do what uBlock does on an iPhone, I'll switch.
Which is perfectly fine for me but if you have a lot of subscribed lists it is possible to go over it.
Sure, part of them aren't domain/URL based (they are CSS/XPath based) so I might not actually be disproving what you said.
That is a distinctly android problem, and is an example of one I'm glad to avoid by sticking to iOS.
Perhaps she should be more selective with apps she installs? Also, how would this be exclusive to Android? iOS apps can have ads on them. Even if the feature is added with an update.
How does a standard user know whether a small app to e.g. manipulate photos (as in this instance) is going to be updated a few days later to show ads when it's not running? Shouldn't an end user be able to trust Google's app marketplace to not feed them junk like this?
I use BlockBear on safari. Any speed gains you may have because of uBlock are offset by the cpu speed gains on iPhone XS. Hell, hacker news loads faster(less than a blink of my eye) on my iPhone than 2017 MacBook Pro.
Depends on network performance, how heavy your typical sites visited are, and what type of configuration you're running on uBlock.
Anecdotally, I find my Snapdragon 835 phone with Firefox/Ublock Origin to feel somewhat faster than my A10 with Safari/1 Blocker X. (Plus Firefox/uBlock gives various QOL improvements over Safari, like customizably removing cruft from various sites, and not autoplaying video.) My biggest complaint with Firefox/uBlock Origin is that the UI isn't very nice for whitelisting scripts on mobile.
For example a turnkey business service is https://ba.net/adblockvpn
What I do care about is being manipulated. I don't want to be persuaded to buy stuff I don't want or need.
Google can know everything about me, but I don't want the ads thanks very much.
Oh, and I want a news feed of things that are actually important, not what some algorithm thinks I want to see.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but those two sentences contradict each other. ;)
The main publicly visible application of personal data is advertising, so if you don’t want ads or manipulation, then you actually do care about privacy.
And are you certain you don’t care about privacy outside of ads? If so, why? Many people who’ve said things like that just didn’t even think at all about what happens or could happen to their personal information. Would it surprise you if you found out that insurance companies were purchasing personal information in order to increase their denial rates on claims? Would it bother you if your personal information was used to support a politcal party you oppose? Would it concern you if your personal habits were used to advertise to your neighbors or co-workers or friends or family instead of you personally?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument
And I was being a little flippant, of course I care if somebody used my identity to commit crimes, that's a total pain in the butt for me.
Okay, sure. I asked you why you don’t care about privacy, and you haven’t bothered to answer. I don’t really mind if my argument is weak, but yes I could certainly work on it and improve it if I had a reason to. I can’t read your mind, though. Do you want to provide any reasoning for your case or counter-argument at all?
Two things to think about. 1- I wasn’t attacking you, in case you felt like I was criticizing, and were just trying to criticize me back. 2- None of the examples I gave are made up, they are all real things that have happened.
I like Apple stance on privacy, but the price of iPhone XR is not serious.
I rotated through the pixel, iPhone XS, Samsung Galaxy, and 4 or 5 other flagship phones (was able to get amazing two week return policies)
Ended up with the XR simply because it was an excellent solid phone, cheaper than the other flagship phones. Admittedly I didn’t checkout the Xiaomi phone.
For reference, I had to replace my nexus 6p because the battery was so bad it was dying at 50% randomly. Plus google was no longer pushing updates.
It's nice to surf the wonders of billion-scale device mass-manufacturing if you don't need the latest and greatest.
This may be right, but have you used fdroid yet? There are a bunch of great free apps on there as well. NewPipe comes to mind.
There's one place that iOS is miles behind though, and that's file handling. Having to go through a desktop and iTunes to receive music from a friend is a pain in the arse.
https://www.decoupled.app
I've also noticed Apple supports their devices for a long time. But does Apple guarantee that five years anywhere?
I bought it a year after release and it was less than half the price of a similar iPhone.
I can at least trust iOs to provide software updates for my device until 5 years of age. But I find it hard to see that many people value this remotely close to the price difference.
iPhones win in the security department. That's my biggest draw to switching.
It's interesting you say that. I've been looking at de-googling myself and getting off Android, but I cannot find a decent replacement in the App store for my password manager of choice (KeePass2Android, cos I use KeePass everywhere).
Other Apple owning friends of mine say I should be using whatever it is that iPhone supplies by default, but the problem is I want to de-google myself, not move entirely into Apple land, so having something which only works on the phone isn't going to fly. I've got Windows and Linux machines all over the place that I want my password manager to sync with.
Edit - spelling.
https://www.bitwarden.com
I’m hoping for a refreshed SE. I like the button. I like the headphone jack. I don’t like FaceId.
But it ain't gonna happen.
An iPhone that's Slightly fatter (fill the space with a larger battery), headphone jack, and a "smaller" screen. Of course, have all of the latest hardware (camera, soc, etc.).
Or, a MacBook Pro, again slightly fatter (larger battery), with a great keyboard, actual ports (no dongles), and no touch bar. Give us the option for a matte screen to totally blow our socks off.
I'd buy those two devices tomorrow if Apple introduced them.
I might be wrong but it's happened several times before where companies were trying to drum up some support by suddenly being extremely "woke" just before having to come out with some bad news.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/24/18017842/tim-cook-data-p...