I run a repair shop. We've repaired over 3,000 Apple devices for customers. We are always chatting with our customers, so we get a ton of feedback from them about what they're doing with their phones.
We hear a few things consistently:
1) Providers have switched from "free upgrades every 2 years" to a plan cost and a monthly phone cost, so people now really know how much their phone costs--and many would rather save the $30 a month than upgrade their phone. This started with T-Mobile a few years ago and now is how most phone plans work. This is having a huge impact on people's desire to buy new phones.
2) iPhone 5/5C/5S users have no desire to upgrade to a larger phone. The SE is going to solve some of this, but it'll more likely be a scenario of "I dropped my 5S in the toilet and it's completely dead, so I'll upgrade to a SE instead of dealing with the hassle of finding a legit used 5S." I don't expect to see a huge push toward the SE from current iPhone 5 users.
3) Repairs are so cheap, so easy and so effective. It's $79 for us to fix an iPhone 5/5C/5S screen right now, and we can fix it in less than 30 minutes typically. No reason to upgrade when your old one works just fine and you can get it fixed cheaply.
Interestingly, the SE screen is 1:1 compatible with the 5S screen, so the SE is coming out of the gate being cheap and easy to repair as well. I'm typically recommending the SE if people really want a new phone.
We also ask customers about 3D Touch (the new feature on the 6S/6S+) and if they're using it if they have a 6S. 99% of people have no idea what it is or how to use it. They bought a 6S/6S+ because it was pink. Yep, most of the 6S phones we see are rose gold, and that seems to be the #1 factor driving sales of that line. If they don't care about the pink and ask me what phone I recommend, I recommend buying a refurbished 6 over any of the 6S line. (We don't sell phones, so I have no horse in that race at all.)
3D Force Touch was one of those features I feel would have only caught on, if it was one of the original iPhone features. Tacking it on later, with little to no support in apps, makes it forgetware. I actually really like the functionality, and I completely forget it exists. There needs to be some type of small indicator reminder that a button HAS 3D touch.
To me its real problem is that it's almost indistinct from long-press. Combine that with Apple's poor UX discoverability (I'm looking at you, swipe-from-the-side-to-see-iMessage-timestamps!) and 3D Touch is basically useless.
Yeah, Force Touch has really compounded their problems of overloaded and undiscoverable UX. I realized this recently when trying to tell a family member how to rearrange their home screen icons. It used to be "hold down an icon until it wiggles, then drag it". Now it's "hold down an icon, but not too hard, until it starts wiggling. What do you mean there's a popup?! Oh you pressed too hard. Tap somewhere else to close the popup and try holding down an icon again."
3D Touch should've replaced long press. I hate that I have to wait, I don't care that it's 0.4 of a second. A long press is a concession to the fact that there's no physical button, and 3D Touch should've solved this problem.
But instead I end up triggering a 3D Touch when I want to delete an app.
That sounds like emulating for the sake of emulating. I'm sure even you would hate it if you actually saw it in production. Typing on keyboard is shitty as it is. By making it force touch, it will be much slower to finish a sentence. When people use physical keyboards their fingers are by default resting on the keys. When most users type on mobile, they're not. It's easier to NOT rest fingers on the keys than resting for so many reasons, such as you not being able to see the keys if your finger is covering them.
the keyboard is of a known layout, and by marking by feel when you move from one key to the next you know where you are.
This allows the keyboard to be operated without looking, much like how most people use a ordinary keyboard today once they are past the hunt-and-peck stage.
A big reason for touch screens being a problem in many situations is that you have to actually look at it to operate it. Physical buttons, switches and knobs can be operated by touch alone.
Frankly way too much of modern computing relies on sight and sight alone.
Also, allowing someone to rest on the keyboard is why long typing sessions are not such a strain on the hands. Without it, the writs has to carry the weight of the fingers continually.
I'm guessing you downvoted me because you disagree with my point of view. I'll just tell you this: I have been thinking a lot about the stuff you talk about here and even prototyped a hardware device to try out the idea. I had the same point of view (It would be nice to have an input device I can use without even looking) but after experimenting I realized this isn't the case.
Also this "vibration" thing you're talking about--it's obvious you haven't thought deeply about this because if you took at least a couple of hours thinking more about how this would work you would realize vibration itself has nothing to do with this". I have had a phone that gave you nice tactile feedback using vibration (Prada phone), and while it does feel nice, it doesn't do anything in terms of letting me know my input was correct.
Anyway this all doesn't mean anything if you don't really believe me. So let me ask you a rhetorical question: Do you think you will be able to type into a blackberry absolutely without looking at the keyboard? Also, when exactly would you be typing while NOT looking at a mobile screen? Even on a blackberry people have to look at the screen to make sure they didn't mistype something (Even with all that tactile feedback). On a desktop computer typing without looking makes sense because that's the mode in which people use the device (whereas on a mobile phone the screen and the keyboard are attached so looking at the screen means also looking at the keyboard)
Anyway if you really believe in these ideas, you should at least try an MVP or any simple experiment (or maybe even some thought experiment) before being so sure about it.
The Steam gamepad and the Macbook's new touchpads can simulate tactile borders and shapes on the surface with controlled vibration.
Combine with pressure detection and you can make Swype / SwiftKey provide a sense of where you're dragging your finger when swipe typing, plus that you can put emphasis on the right letters easily when swiping across groups of letters that would make for different words, making for better precision in the word suggestions.
It would also be much easier to implement gesture support by having areas much easier to target that you start gestures from or end them in. You'd also instantly get tactile feedback telling you if you made the gesture right or not, like for switching character sets or for moving the cursor.
Lots of gestures could be supported, where you'd essentially be "asked" with tactile feedback to push harder after making the gesture to activate the particular action. Suddenly you solved both accessibility, discoverability and precision, while reducing the error rate.
What you say doesn't change anything significantly, which means it doesn't change the way we type on mobile phones--you still need to look at the screen. Also it's a bit of a stretch thinking because it works on a game controller with limited number of inputs, it will work on a keyboard with way more keys, isn't it?
As I mentioned above, I explored into building a mobile device that you can type into without looking, and my first hypothesis was "tactile feedback is key". And turns out there are many many other factors at play. Even if Apple built something like you say, that won't make more people buy iPhones, it's just an incremental innovation that doesn't significantly change any user behavior for the better.
Like you said, you still need look at the screen to see if you're typing in correctly. I am not sure if you read my original comment, but this is one thing I learned while experimenting that's obvious in hindsight. On your computer, you can type completely without looking at your keyboard because you are looking at the monitor/screen which is a separate device from the keyboard. On a mobile device, they are a single screen. Which means you still have to look at the screen portion of the "screen" even when you don't need to look at the "keyboard" portion. Which is why it doesn't make any groundbreaking improvements even if implemented. At best it's just some minor add-on convenience. Your steam controllers example is exactly the same as computer keyboards because you're looking at a large screen (which is again a separate device from your gamepad) when you're playing games.
Your assumption is that they only help accuracy. Instead they can allow you to visually hide important UX elements and yet keep them discoverable.
I'll have to think a bit longer to come up with good examples.
Edit: non-scrolling swipe gestures are where this is the most valuable.
Improved Google Photos app image selection: a hard press would start selection, and as you continously to drag to select it would provide tactile feedback for where the image borders are, making accidental selection less likely and quicker to detect. Selection would stop on release (to make scrolling easy). Hard press and swipe again to continue the selection.
If you trace this thread all the way back to its root, the guy said having tactile feedback will solve the problem of not being able to type without looking, and I said I have tried and it doesn't. Of course there are many ways tactile feedback can improve experience. But in any case, I don't think it's a significant change. Even if you could do all you mentioned it's just an incremental innovation. When iPhone first came out it changed everything by getting rid of physical keyboards because a "soft" keyboard that adapts to its container app is much more flexible than a physical keyboard. That started this entire app ecosystem. But I don't think these nifty little touch UI innovations will change anything further as far as iPhone is concerned. As an example 3d touch is an interesting and sometimes even magical technology but it hardly makes any difference in purchase decisions.
When you type in hardware keyboards, do you need to look at them? I hardly look at the SwiftKey keyboard except occasionally to confirm what keys I'm hitting.
A surface that can "project" arbitary tactile shapes with different strengths of feedback can let you orientate without looking. In fact it can even do Braille for the blind if the resolution was high enough!
Back when I used blackberry phones I absolutely could use the keyboard without looking. They used slightly different shapes/intersections for each key and it was all muscle memory and little looking.
The touch screen keyboards are more practical in many ways but they can never truly replicate a physical keyboard.
(I long ago traded the fidelity of the actual keyboard for the convenience of a touch keyboard.)
"little looking". Yeah you looked. There's a huge difference between 0% and 1%. I'm saying it's a nice to have feature but that doesn't make you ditch one for another--it's just an incremental innovation. Just like you moved away from it.
> This allows the keyboard to be operated without looking, much like how most people use a ordinary keyboard today once they are past the hunt-and-peck stage.
'Most people'? I must have had really bad luck in a number of financial/tech companies, as a disturbing majority don't touch type.
Note, my experience is with people aged 30-50. It's possible that this doesn't apply to millennials, but they certainly aren't the majority still.
I wonder if the pressure detection is localised enough to allow that to work without being annoying? If I'm resting my right thumb on a letter, but pressing with my left thumb on another letter, I don't think the tech is necessarily there to accurately detect which letter got pressed. And I think that's needed to make typing feel good, since in using my regular keyboard while one finger is pressing a key the next finger is on or hovering over the next key.
The problem with converting the keyboard to 3d presses, is that goes against almost 10 years of user expectations. If I had to press harder to type a letter, I'd think something was wrong.
Your not kidding, I've had iPhones since they came to Australia (Gen 2, Gen 1 iPhones were imported but not properly available via local channels) and I heavily use the iMessage app since my plan has had "unlimited" SMS pretty much the whole time I've had an iPhone... And I NEVER saw this until I tried it 60 seconds ago.
I've got one that might blow your mind. You can SEARCH pages in Safari, by typing in the top url/search bar, then scrolling all the way to the bottom. It will show you how many instances it's found, and you can touch to go to them!
Don't hit enter, just type out what you want, then scroll down to the very bottom. The top results will be google search, then bookmarks and history, THEN "On this Page". It's totally not intuitive.
>> "To me its real problem is that it's almost indistinct from long-press."
Are you saying this as someone who actually uses the feature? Because in my experience a long press and 3D are very distinct. In fact 3D touch makes it quite difficult to long press on home screen icons to delete them.
As a Windows phone refugee living in Androidland (seriously MS, was it so hard to make a worthy successor for the 930 along with not completely abandoning the rest of the range?) live tiles is the feature I miss the most :(
Only a minority of the apps have them (and even fewer of those are remotely good/configurable), absolutely no consistency in the design between widgets and how they're a mix of background and icon. WP just had fantastic design patterns all around.
That's my problem with widgets too, coming from someone who loved his Lumia 920. Widgets are ugly. Like seriously ugly. And why do some of them take up 4x4 and others only let me pick 1x4 or 2x4, and some are other stupid sizes... all I want is 2x2 tiles that match the theme of my phone.
What's the point in getting a really nice theme and then ruining it with AccuWeather's horrible widget and a calendar that looks like an HTML iframe?
Weird. I kind of always expected it to be there and found it forever ago. Maybe because I was developing on iOS and knew it was a table/list view, and expected it to have a left-swipe something?
The best 3D touch feature is the trackpad keyboard. It's also very not discoverable (who thinks to force touch the keyboard?)
Having said that, 3D touch is far from the only improvement on the 6S. If it didn't have 3D touch I'd still recommend the extra $100 to get MUCH better internals (processor, cameras, touch ID sensor) and a stronger body too.
The trackpad keyboard is huge. It greatly ameliorates how horrible touch keyboards are, and makes editing text not too much of a chore. I'm afraid no one will use it and the feature will get axed.
"In the early betas of iOS 9, Apple had activated this feature for older iPhones. Users would just place both their thumbs on the keyboard and it will act as a trackpad. However, Apple removed this feature for unknown reasons. Right now, no other iPhone other than the 6s and 6s Plus can perform this feature which is really annoying."
I forget that 3D Touch exists because I own an iPad, which does not have it. After using the iPad for a while, I stopped trying to use 3D Touch on my phone, because I got conditioned to the idea that it isn't there.
That's funny because i got used to the force touch application switching gesture of swiping from the left side. When I got handed an ipad, I found myself making the gesture and then remembering that I need the double press on the home button.
I mainly use press down on the screen's left side to invoke the app switcher, so that I can switch apps without using the home button. It's nicer for one-handed use. Apart from that I haven't seen a compelling reason to use it -- even within first-party apps for example.
EDIT -- I also use the keyboard trackpad thing. Not often though.
I wholeheartedly agree. I find 3D touch very helpful. But it really begs the question if you consider that unless I am consciously aware of 3D touch every time I interact with my phone, I am very likely to forget that it exists and go back to performing actions the way I am used to.
Providers have switched from "free upgrades every 2 years" to a plan cost and a monthly phone cost, so people now really know how much their phone costs--and many would rather save the $30 a month than upgrade their phone.
Wasn't this why Apple was quietly introducting the "iPhone Upgrade Program"?
Seems like Apple realized the future will be a place where everyone just leases their equipment on a monthly basis and switches stuff in-and-out as they need to...including the carrier (gasp!)
The future won't be a place like that by default. As phones mature and features stabilize, we're seeing the same trend that we saw with desktop PCs five years ago: Away from "must update every 18 months" and towards "my old one is still good and I like it, so why upgrade?"
This reduction in churn and corresponding reduction in new device sales is great for consumers, which is why all of the large companies (MS, Apple) are trying to push the subscription model, to try and safeguard their revenue streams.
That program is really only appealing to the people who upgrade their phone ever year, which has got to be a small part of the market. Lucrative to Apple, I'm sure.
Even if you don't upgrade every year, it's still a 24 month installment loan at 0% interest. Since the phone is unlocked and the financing is not tied to a carrier, you're also free to switch carriers without having to buy the financing out.
Meaning you could actually pay effectively less, if you put 750$ in a savings account you'd earn an interest rate - paying off your 0% loan while earning some small percentage on the money you woudlve otherwise paid up front.
Obviously it would be a very small amount, but still overall superior to paying cash, definitely better than using credit.
In the UK it's changed and it's not so much that they disclose it as that you can buy them separately. In my case it's like £37/month for iPhone, data and minutes for a 2 year contract or £15 a month if you use your old handset. The latter option wasn't always there.
Often it is a bit more complicated. The last one I did it had say a $30 monthly phone charge with a $15 rebate. I guess so they could make the pone look cheaper while just building the rest of the phone cost into the service cost.
I spent a lot of time researching cell phone providers here in Ontario as I was just getting a cell for the first time. All the plans are pretty universally terrible. I ended up with Wind Mobile for $40/month for BYOD. Unfortunately, they're 3G only but it's 5GB data vs. 100MB for similarly priced plans on other carriers.
It's not exactly front-and-center, though. There's some miniscule print that says how much the phone is, whereas the overall monthly cost is in giant numbers.
> It's $79 for us to fix an iPhone 5/5C/5S screen right now
Interesting, since I have a 5s with a broken screen glass that I haven't bothered getting fixed yet. :)
It used to be quite a bit more, I think? Have you figured out how to separate the glass (etc) from the actual display, or have replacement display+glass packages just gotten cheaper?
(If you are replacing the display - is there any significant performance difference between the stock display and the replacement display?)
All depends on the cost of parts. Part cost is very low right now...I advise people to get it fixed ASAP if they have the money! You never know what it will do--part cost bounces around like the stock market. Last year it bounced really high there for a bit, and now it's come back down.
The backlight, LCD, digitizer (touch "web"), and top glass are all one piece. They come bonded from the factory. I never recommend glass-only repairs, and they're nearly impossible to do yourself. Some shops will do them, but realistically, with the 5 series screen cost so low right now, there's no reason to risk digitizer issues with a glass-only repair. (It's very difficult to replace only the glass without breaking the delicate digitizer "web" right below it.)
From what we can tell, there is very little difference between an OEM display and the ones repair shops sell. The 6 model is slightly thicker. On a 5, you probably won't notice it.
It is all about the warranty if you choose to get it replaced from a shop--some percentage of the screens are just going to have issues, and you want a shop that stands behind their work. (No repair shop warranty will cover if you drop or break the screen, though!)
"there is very little difference between an OEM display and the ones repair shops sell."
I burned by this, all was looking good till I try to used with my polarized sunglasses, it was probably cheap screen, with wrong polarization, which you see nothing with glasses.
Where do you source parts from? Does Apple sell these like a car manufacturer would?
The whole electronics repair business seems rather immature and shady compared to something like car repair. For a car make, you can easily get the software manufacturers give to repair shops which has all sorts of exploded assembly views, instructions and part lists.
No, Apple doesn't sell parts, though it would be nice if they did.
The main way screens appear in the repair business is from companies in China that buy back screens with broken glass but functional LCD. They then replace the glass with new glass. Most of the screen is OEM, but not the top glass. They then ship these to repair shops and distributors, who use them to replace screens.
That's why I mentioned in a previous comment that it's all about the warranty with a repair shop. No shop will warranty a cracked or broken screen, but most decent shops will warranty digitizer (touch) issues as long as there's no physical damage to the screen. That type of warranty is a must-have--there are only a small percentage of screens that go bad after a few days or weeks of use, but it really sucks if you get one and the shop refuses to replace it.
> The whole electronics repair business seems rather immature and shady compared to something like car repair.
Well, both are shady (plenty of YouTube exposes on oil change places that upsell services, charge for them, and don't perform them.) Honestly, one of the reasons I came into this industry was I was aware of the huge need for a non-shady repair shop in Austin, TX (where I live.) We're the highest-rated independent repair shop in Austin, and we take that pretty seriously, since there are so many horror stories of bad computer/game console/phone repair shops out there. We do our best to do right by our customers.
> The main way screens appear in the repair business is from companies in China that buy back screens with broken glass but functional LCD.
That's really interesting. I had assumed these were being manufactured somewhere to fit into apple devices, but instead there're huge operations that are buying tons of broken screens and essentially refurbishing them? Is that for legal reasons or cost reasons or other?
I'm curious: what does the supply chain look like?
A) Person breaks their screen, how much do they get from one of those shops that buy broken phones? Does that firm then break it down and sell the parts? Like a smart phone chop shop?
B) If so, who are they selling to? Surely not the refurb factories themselves, the factories wouldn't want to deal with that many individual people. So are people aggregating these and then selling in bulk to manufacturers? Any idea on the pricing around that? Does there seem to be a dominant player in the market or are there many people doing this?
C) After refurb, how much does the new screen then go for? You mentioned it's like a market--what's the range been in the last few years vs today?
Thank you for all the information. This explains the volatile prices: it depends on the supply of broken screens. I assume when you replace a display assembly, you sell the old one?
Do you calibrate the screen because I have seen uncalibrated repairs and the image quality is terrible. Though that could also be caused by bum screens.
Heh, whenever I hear "calibrate the screen" I assume you either work at an Apple Store or have been to one recently, as that seems to be their favorite line.
Calibration is only necessary on a glass-only repair; it realigns the digitizer "touch web" with the top glass that you're actually touching. That's why we don't perform nor recommend glass-only repairs.
When we repair a screen, we test every part of the digitizer before giving it back to the customer. We type on the keyboard, open apps, etc. If we find a dead spot, we replace it on-site. If by chance there's something we missed on our test, that's why our warranty exists.
If a customer finds a dead spot or the digitizer starts glitching, that's covered under our warranty. And that's why I recommend you find a shop with a good warranty. Most of them don't test as thoroughly as we do, but even with testing, a small percentage of digitizers will still have issues a few days to a few weeks after the repair. A warranty will get you a no-hassle replacement as long as you haven't cracked the screen.
I meant color calibration. I don't work for Apple. I had a non-Apple iPhone 4 screen replacement and the colors were washed out, lacking saturation - it's impossible for me to say whether that is due to display quality or lack of calibration. However it makes sense to me that color calibration is required for consistent display performance especially when displays are sourced from different manufacturers.
Repair shop owner here as well. Couldn't agree more people are just continuing to use their old phones. We have big companies even asking to continue to repair iPhone 4S phones to date.
aren't your customers a pretty small niche compared to the most of the Apple users in the US? Most of the people will go to apple store if they need a fix for their device instead of going to a local repair shop which will void their warranty. So the argument about people wanting/or not to upgrade to a new device a pretty subjective to your specific customer type, no?
> "I recommend buying a refurbished 6 over any of the 6S line"
I would not, upgrading to "S" was the biggest performance boost I've had, compared to regular 6 - it's blazing fast and on top of that I can't imagine myself without 3D touch app switching, live photos and text navigation, those do help a lot at least to me and most of the people I know.
> Most of the people will go to apple store if they need a fix for their device instead of going to a local repair shop which will void their warranty.
It really depends on the location of the shop. There are a ton of people who don't live anywhere close to an Apple Store.
I would add this to this as well to the new "forever leasing a phone" model, you have to get insurance which makes sense. However the monthly insurance premium can go up at any time. This just just happened to me. I received a letter from the insurance company the carrier uses - not the carrier informing me that the insurance is going up $2.00 more a month(it was $8.00 its now $10.00.) Thats not an insignificant percentage. This is despite never having to have made a claim for any damages or replacement to the phone.
I think the reason most 6S's are rose gold is that it's the new latest color - i.e. you want the latest, and also to message that to everyone else? Get a rose-gold phone.
Also, considering probably the vast majority of servicing of iPhones happens at an Apple genius bar, I'd say your (very informative) views of the population have some selection bias.
There are still states in the US that don't have a single Apple store, lots with very few. Then there are ~180 countries with none and a handful of countries with very few. iPhone 6S is officially available in over 130 countries.
Exactly. Apple is taking a leaf from the automotive industry's book, and starting to sell new phones explicitly as status symbols rather than based on new features. Expect new generations of iPhone to be much more visually distinct than the relatively subtle changes up til now.
I'd also wonder if there's something that skews more people who have rose gold phones to break them? Maybe they're less likely to use a case because they want to show off the color? Or maybe rose gold skews younger (and therefore possibly less responsible with electronics)? Total guesses, but I'm pretty confident that rose gold is not the best selling color of iPhone currently, so it seems like something else must be going on.
Also, considering probably the vast majority of servicing of iPhones happens at an Apple genius bar
That may not be the case for display replacements. From what I've seen, the Geniuses won't attempt to replace a screen if the phone's chassis is even slightly deformed. But the local fixit shops will.
The question then becomes, "How random is the subset of people who get thrown out of the Genius Bar for screwing up their phone really badly?" The wealthiest of those will just buy a new phone, so that's one potential source of bias, I suppose.
Hey Erica, hope you've been well!!! Do you have any thoughts on the software side of things?
Personally, I think Steve Jobs rolls in his grave every time yet another crappy iOS update gets issued. It's led to a general distrust of anything "forward-moving", and that's led to a distrust in the newer phones too.
From what I can tell, our customers generally fall into 2 camps: 1) Upgrade software whenever it's available and their phone prompts them or 2) Have been burned by an update or don't trust them for some reason, and almost never upgrade. Their computers follow a similar pattern.
I don't have much to say about the software side, though one of the biggest problems we see is that people constantly run out of space on the lower-end 16GB phones, and the way Apple handles that is completely unintuitive.
If Apple is going to continue to sell phones with such limited storage, they really need a better way to manage that storage and allow people to move items to the cloud or delete them more easily than just scrolling through a seemingly-infinite list of photos and videos.
Dont worry, Apple will force the upgrade the same way they always have. Make the next version of iOS so freaking slow on older devices that its unbearable to use. People that stay on iOS[789] will eventually be forced to upgrade in order to get their necessary app updates.
My poor iPad 2 is so slow on iOS9 that its unbearable to use for any length of time. A5's are unbearable, A6's are not far behind.
It's not just Apple - it's the developers who release updates to their apps which, because they have the latest gear, are optimised for the latest hardware. I have an iPad2 and only recently upgraded it to iOS9 after 6? (I think, the one where they introduced the wobbly effect) - it got slow before I upgraded it because I updated all the software on it incrementally. It started lagging before I upgraded, indeed it was the reason why I upgraded the operating system. It didn't make any difference.
3D Force Touch has one really useful use, which is to go back to the previous app on the backstack. I use that constantly. But I use almost nothing each with 3D Touch.
I really hope #2 gets traction. It's been disappointing to see the SE not do as well as I wanted it to. I'm not an iPhone owner myself but I'm hoping the SE popularizes the "small" form factor phone again.
It's probably true... I've been wanting to buy an unlocked Sprint version of iPhone SE 64gb and have been monitoring all the stores through their website frequently. It's not been available for the last 2 weeks and they have extra protectional measures to make sure iPhone SEs make it safely to the store.
In your experience what's the usual time between battery replacements?
That's been the only "killer" for phones for me. With a decent case I feel like they otherwise last forever.
My personal upgrade cycle usually involves someone else's (ex: spouse or parent) phone breaking, giving them mine, and buying a new one. Otherwise I'd probably still be on an iPhone 4.
2-3 years is average, depending on how much you use your phone. Battery replacements are cheap (we charge $49 for the 5 series right now) and quick to do.
Easiest way to know you need a battery replacement: Your phone gets to 40% or 20% and suddenly just dies on you. That means at least one cell in your battery is dead, and it's time to replace the whole battery.
Also, if your screen is edging up on the left side but isn't cracked or broken, that's a sign of an exploded or "puffy" battery. Usually people have the first issue for a while, don't realize what's happening, and then eventually it goes puffy and explodes. It can even break the screen when it does that.
As with other repairs, if you get a battery replacement at a repair shop, ask about the warranty. Replacement batteries can have real issues, and some runs of them have high defect rates. No big deal if the shop you work with has a good warranty and will just swap it out if it stops working.
Wow thanks! The top left corner of my iPhone 5 is kind of pushed up. I can press it down but it doesn't stay. I thought it was a problem with the glue. Also battery life has been terrible recently.
I had an iPhone 3GS with the puffy battery issue, I replaced the battery and the replacement did the same thing. It puffs up almost like a bag of microwave popcorn. Very odd.
Nah, Apple will replace it for you - $79, last I heard. If you open up the phone, the battery says "Replacement by Authorized Service Provider Only" (or something similar--I'm quoting from memory here.)
My parents only replaced their iPhone 5 when the battery wasn't holding a charge as well as they'd liked. So, they replaced it with a 5S (this was before the SE, but it was free with a contract anyway). They use it for calls and directions, but not much else so the 5S is more than adequate.
If they still have that 5, it's pretty cheap and quick to do a battery replacement (we charge $49 -- many shops charge similarly.) Should bring it back to life just like new. if nothing else, I think it would be worth doing just to have it as a backup phone.
I have the iPhone 5 now. Until getting this phone, I've never had a cell phone (I don't really get that many phone calls so I haven't bothered). To be honest, the battery life isn't great, but I just bought a small external battery to charge it when necessary. It was cheaper than a replacement and I didn't want to risk making a mistake in the swap. I have more than enough technical skill to do it, but since it's now my only phone I decided not to take the chance. I might do it if the battery life gets too bad.
Yeah, I own a 5S and I have almost no desire to replace it other than to upgrade storage to 128 Gb. Even after 3 major iOS upgrades, all of my most used apps open close enough to instantly. - the time it takes to pull the phone out of my pocket is the biggest bottleneck at this point.
If I'm going to spend > $600, I expect my life to improve a little bit. I'll probably upgrade to the 7, mostly because I've gone without a case and have had some dings that do impact functionality, but I hope to go 4 or even 5 years with my next phone.
The CPUs are already impressively fast, they just suck tons of power to do it. There are a few games I won't play on my phone anymore because they absolutely kill the battery. (Same with the Facebook app.)
If there was any way to dramatically increase power efficiency or battery capacity it would be a huge draw for consumers.
Sure :) http://www.1uprepairs.com - we are based out of Austin, TX. Email is in my profile if you need to reach me, or you can call our store during business hours.
I don't think buyers had much choice in colors. We're a dev shop and we couldn't get basic silver / grey devices with the specs we wanted. All they had was gold or pink.
When we need a device, we just walk into the store. We don't order online and wait around. To be fair, it was ATT & Best Buy where I ran into the limited colors, but that doesn't change the validity of my experience.
It doesn't change your experience but it might change the applicability - it could just as easily be an indicator of ATT & Best Buy's inventory policy.
iPad Air 1 is $120 to fix; newer ones are $260. The reason for the jump is that Apple moved to bonded technology (backlight, LCD, digitizer, glass is all one piece bonded from the factory) in the newer iPad Airs, so the parts are more expensive. The older iPads have separate glass/digitizer and LCD/backlight.
Feel free to email me if you want more info--my contact info is in my profile.
Anecdotal evidence also suggests that people like the 6 more than the 6S. It's nicer to hold in hands and it's quite a bit cheaper for basically the same phone.
Unless you are holding heavily used 6s with scratches against brand new 6 but if they are two new units there is no difference between them and your perception of niceness is probably totally subjective without reflection in reality.
It probably doesn't help that the subsidy model has completely changed. But personally, I think iPhone performance has hit a point where one doesn't really feel the need to upgrade right away. I was so ready to upgrade when the contract on my 4 expired. It was really a pain to use after a couple of years. But my 5S has now lasted me two and a half years and other than wishing I had more storage capacity, there's really nothing compelling in the new models for me to want to upgrade. The build quality and battery are so good that I don't feel like it's even getting worn out. The better cameras would be nice, but otherwise? I just can't justify the cost, much as I'd like to, so long as my 5S keeps performing.
I do think Apple needs to focus their money and efforts on improving their services and software integration. There's a lot to like in Apple services, but there's a lot of rough edges and weird gaps, and too often I feel like apps get written and then abandoned. If you bundle an app, it should have a dedicated team that keeps making it better, faster, easier to use all the time.
I also feel like Apple has a real chance to make a mark on the home automation market if they chose to do so. The best stuff out there is still pretty bad, and pretty much all of it spies on you. Based on how they've been adding context-aware features to iPhone in a very privacy-conscious way, Apple is the one company I would still trust to actually try to do home automation in a way that respects my privacy. And they have the money to invest in making it happen. But while I'm sure their hardware would be well-made, can they raise their software polish to the same level?
> I think iPhone performance has hit a point where one doesn't really feel the need to upgrade right away
I have a cheap 2014 Motorola Moto G and I have the same "problem". Yes, there are hundreds of modern phones out there which are several times faster and have way better hardware but the Moto G is fast enough for me.
I usually just browse the web, type a few messages in Whatsapp, take a few pictures, ... and the phone does all of this well enough so that I just don't have any reason to invest 500+ Euro in a new phone.
Another bonus is that if I accidentally drop my phone I can just buy a new one (or two) and it will still be cheaper than an iPhone or other similar phones.
You might not even get a perceptual performance boost at all. I recently upgraded from a 2013 Moto G to a current-gen Nexus 5x and it feels about the same, maybe even slightly slower, in terms of latency for common tasks and how often it gets bogged down. I think part of the problem is that the new phone has a higher-res screen, which some apps (like Facebook) adapt to by shipping much larger icon sets, loading higher-res images and video, etc., which negates any performance improvements. The camera is definitely nicer, though.
I think that's a problem with the 5x though. I moved to an S7 edge recently and it is quite frankly so fast that I'm unable to use my old Moto G due to the excruciating slowness of the UI.
Typing this on a 3rd gen Moto G, it's also stock Android, cheap, fast and the "right" size. As in, big display, but I can still (just) hold it and type with one hand.
Agreed, this is the exact reason I went with a Moto G. It was under $200 and I tend to be very clumsy. It runs the latest nearly stock Andriod and is a very smooth experience. The only fault I can find is it's camera. So for someone who finds that very important this may not be an option.
I had one - great phone for the price but I found the 1GB mem to be a real limitation - websites would reload if I switched to a dif app then back. I now have an Asus with 4GB - great phone too and also relatively cheap (about a yr old now)
The 16GB version of the current generation has 2GB memory. I got the 8GB (with 1GB memory) originally and ended up selling it and buying the higher-spec version. 2GB is just a much better experience under Android.
Fellow Moto G user, and I completely agree with this sentiment (along with the camera being meh). Remarkably the battery has held up very well with two years of use, part of me wonders if that's due to performance improvements in Android offsetting the natural wear (though every update seems to make the stock apps slower, with Maps being a particularly noticeable example).
Yeah, I had a 1st gen Moto G, I think it had comparable value to expensive high-end phones (for people who're not int big screens).
Now I have Nexus 5X, it costs less than half as much as top phones but I think it's actually better, at least for me - clean Android with timely updates, everything is smooth and fast, USB-C, good camera...
I just upgraded to an iPhone 6s and now I have the opposite problem: the hardware is too fast, so fast that it replaced an ages-old pattern ingrained in my usage. I used to be able to tap the home button to turn on the screen, so I didn't have to go to the top of the phone for the power button. I could click the home button and move my finger before TouchID had a chance to notice. Now TouchID is so fast, it's unlocked the phone before the screen even turns on.
It sounds like a minor complaint and I guess it is, but when I'm fumbling around in the dark and I want my flashlight, or when I'm trying to quickly take a picture, I don't want my phone to be unlocked. I just want my damn flashlight or camera, which are easier to access if the phone is locked.
I'm actually considering going back to the 6 instead of the 6s just because I like that little delay in recognizing my fingerprint.
heh, I've got a really cheap android phone ($30~40 flat out, no contract, no plan). It doesn't have great specs, but after rooting it and installing a clean Cyanogen install on it, it feels faster then many $600 phones. I wish phones would stop coming with so much bloatware installed.
Can anyone shed some light on why the subsidy model is going/has gone away? It seems to me cell providers would not want to stop essentially requiring 2-year contracts, so why have they? Fear of government action, or market competition? Or was the subsidy model actually bad for the networks somehow?
Someone had to blink, especially as basic Android phones got better and cheaper.
Pre-iPhone, most contracts were one-year, and typical expensive phones cost $3-400 unlocked. Post-iPhone, phone costs go up, so contracts get longer, but now the carriers are in a position where they're treating expensive iPhones the same as the same as less-expensive base-model Androids. Sure, they can make a killing on the less-expensive phones in that model - since the subsidy amount is greater than the cost of the phone - but it gave T-Mobile incentive to ditch the model and pass on some of the savings to budget-conscious consumers.
And ultimately, that's not such a bad thing for the carriers, but it is a bad thing if almost all the phones you sell are on the "more expensive" side, since you're now competing more directly on price.
I speculate that it's a couple of things. First, carriers are putting out big capital outlays to the phone manufacturers to get customers on new phones either under a contract with a subsidy or a payment plan.
Second, the carriers are smart enough to realize that even with relatively old phones data usage is still pretty high. The carriers now make their money on metered data so they want to avoid the capital outlay required to subsidize a phone if they don't need to for customers to stay data hogs. T-Mobile provided a real world experiment that likely found attrition to be low enough even with contracts gone that it was worth removing the subsidy.
Tl;dr
The carriers are cheap and don't want to lend you money for a new phone when you still pay them a lot to use your old one.
You do realize that US and T-Mobile was one of the last holdouts with this "bundled"system and in Europe we had this "new" system in place for at least 5 years.
I'd love to know why these went away too -- not that I liked them, but they seemed well suited to the ignorance level of most people that I know. Even though they've been replaced with ATT Next/Verizon Edge/... plans that are appealing to technophiles, as well as easy 3rd-party financing (just not through the provider), I'd like to know the "illuminati" reason that the market shifted.
Carriers want diversity so that they can do better bargaining with the phone makers. ex: My HTC M7 phone came with lots of preloaded shitty apps made by AT&T which i can't delete, Apple will not allow AT&T to twist their arm like that. Similarly they want diversity in the chip makers as well. If the phones are subsidised most people will go with iPhone.
Apples service revenues are still growing 20% YoY.
Apple can and does generate a steady stream of revenue from existing devices. App Store revenue increased 35 percent year-over-year, and iCloud is also continuing to grow. Apple pay is adding 1 million new users per week. and they just announced the Apple Music has 13 million subscribers.
Apple's services unit is now the company's second largest category during the recent quarter, ahead of Mac and iPad sales
The only iDevice that's not still in use in my family is my first, an iPhone 3G. My youngest has my 3GS. The 4 is with my father in law, etc. My first iPad, a v2, is with my sister in law in China, she uses it to Skype to us. These things just keep on going.
I have an iPhone 5 (not S) and the performance is starting to get on the frustrating side. But it's only now getting to the point where that is an issue.
Maybe that's the issue - I don't do OS updates on iOS devices, so my 5s is still on iOS 7.1 - and it's still blazing fast after 18 months of use. My suspicion is that the iOSes getting slower with every release is a planned obsolescence strategy.
I don't buy it. Each revision of the OS adds functionality and expands the code base, that's plenty enough to explain the issue. Long term, progressively bogging down the OS deliberately will just make it look unnecessarily slower compared to Android. That's a much bigger risk than any possible effect getting people to upgrade.
Also there are ways to disable some of the newer features and reclaim some responsiveness, such as General->Accessibility->Reduce Motion.
I was thinking it may not be an official agenda ("plans for Q4: let's make iOS 10% slower"), but instead, the higher ups don't actively fight the general performance athrophy.
Incredible that this is the first time in 13 years that Apple hasn't posted quarterly growth. I'm sure there will be lots of "Apple has lost its ability to innovate" articles based on this, but growing for the last ~52 straight quarters is insane.
And I don't think one quarter without growth is enough evidence to conclude "Apple may be reaching the saturation point among potential customers in some countries" or "other smartphone makers using Google’s Android operating system continue to challenge the company with powerful, lower-price devices."
There is something fundamentally wrong with our system that "growth" is used as the main metric for assessing business success. It's growth for the sake of growth (and more $), and not deploying business to solve hard customer problems and to make the world a little bit better.
Working at a small shop now, and seeing this same behavior, it's a little frightening. In our case, and from my perspective coming from a couple of startups more recently, and large enterprises prior to that: terrifyingly frustrating for a number of reasons.
I'm in a great spot to make suggestions from my accumulated past, but the team and management seem terrified to make the jump and have nestled themselves nicely in the niche of "let's just do what's easy for now" while still telling themselves they want to grow grow grow, but I don't think management is quite aware of what this growth is going to mean internally for our ability to solve problems with the toolsets we have (both for support and project management).
Every morning we have a company wide meeting where capturing more market share is a recurring theme. And immediately after that meeting yesterday in a developers only meeting, an inordinately large amount of time was spent on discussing how we can introduce new features yet still accommodate those of our customers who don't have internet access.
Because, as you know, if you want to capture more market share with software in 2016, you want to focus on people who don't have internet.
That was a theme at a place I used to work a few years ago, but it was internally. How can we accommodate employees who don't have Internet access at home. Mainly focused on truck drivers who live a hundred miles away from their distribution center and park their truck at home at night, with the question being "how can they log their miles". So we needed a VPN that could support dial-up, and a trucker logging tool that supported dial-up, but also the helpdesk support tools needed to be able to be used on dial-up so the helpdesk could walk them through any issues interactively. But we didn't want to spend any money supporting it, so we kept a Windows 3.1 server running so we could run the Novell system that truckers used to log into the dial-up VPN with.
We finally put Internet access in all of the warehouses and told the truckers they had to end their night at the warehouse and log their hours there. Several drivers quit because it was too much of a burden to drive that far every day. But then we finally got to upgrade the software to support showing customers where the trucks were at and how long it would take to get to their locations.
It would be awesome if technological progress was more evenly distributed across the population.
My argument in the meeting was that our company has over 15,000 clients who are businesses themselves, and maybe 100 of them don't have internet access. Most of these clients intentionally keep their computers disconnected because "the internet causes viruses".
I understand that any good company wants to provide quality service to all of their existing customers, but dedicating resources and devising workarounds for that small percentage of disconnected customers (to the detriment of the thousands of others) while our mission statement is to "capture market share" seems counter intuitive to me.
That's a big reason why private businesses are better than public ones. There's no need to push for unsustainable growth at the behest of busybody investors.
Don't know about secretly (they could probably set up a stealth LLC and file it under "strategic investment"), but they've had a stock buyback program for a while.
The problem is that a lot of "investors" actually aren't investors; they are traders or speculators. They demand immediate growth and are unwilling to allow the company to eat losses in order to invest in long term, ultimately more profitable R&D / projects.
>They demand immediate growth and are unwilling to allow the company to eat losses
Or...they are unwilling to allow the company to eat losses to pretend to invest in the long term, but are in reality on their way to failure (for example). Let's not act like companies, in general, have this figured out and know what's best. Lots of them fail.
If you want long term growth, you're free to invest that way. But don't impose your preferences on others, or assume their method is wrong. The only way speculators, or anyone, can buy shares is by someone else deciding to sell, uncoerced.
that pressure comes from shareholders who want to make money on their ownership stake, whether the company is traded on public markets or not. it's not carl icahn pushing 5-year exit strategies on startups.
It's growth for the sake of growth (and more $), and not deploying business to solve hard customer problems and to make the world a little bit better.
Not sure I understand. How do you grow revenue unless you're producing something that someone wants, presumably because it solves a problem and makes the world better?
If I were a company I'd pay a lot of money to find other ways to grow!
Yes, if you presume growth results from problem solving, then it's trivial to argue that it must. But it's also fairly trivial to show growth that results from causing problems, too. Like certain kinds of monopolistic behavior.
For example, if my ISP charges my $10 more a month, they aren't necessarily solving any problems, but it's still growth for them.
> There is something fundamentally wrong with our system that "growth" is used as the main metric for assessing business success.
Not only that, if there is no growth in the next few quarters Apple will be considered to be in "bad shape" which is insane when you consider the size of the company and its revenues.
Even at that, it isn't just about making a profit, it is about making more profit (or often just revenue) each quarter. Your business could be operating at a 40% profit margin that but be called a failure and run against on the stock market when that doesn't become a 41% margin next quarter.
This is not complicated. You buy with the expectations of future profits X. If the stocks fails to meet those expectations, you reallocate your capital by selling to someone else who is happy with <X.
There is nothing nefarious about it. Nobody is a failure. The system isn't broken. This is the free market.
The point is that the free market may not be good for long term R&D because a lot of buyers/sellers are speculators with expectations not aligned with long term company viability.
It isn't really lack of growth that's a problem, there are tons of companies out there that post a very consistent profit quarter after quarter that are doing just fine - negative growth, especially in a few of a company's core segments, is just as unsustainable as positive growth year over year is. If you have enough quarters of negative growth, very soon you have nothing. It is a warning sign to investors that things might not be going so well. Is one or two quarters of negative growth bad? Probably not in Apple's case, probably yes in something like AMD's case. The context matters, but there is a reason growth is used as a metric, the market is not stupid.
hm, there is a valid criticism to be had but "wrong" isn't the word I would use.
there isn't anything wrong with Apple's stock selling off violently, as much as there was anything wrong with people bidding the shares up so high under the idea of selling it to someone else at a higher price.
there are plenty of companies that are content with steady or even cyclical growth/earnings. in many other countries were local stock markets are not popular venues for speculation and capital formation, it is quite respected to have steady earnings without a drive to quarterly growth.
that being said, many places that are low growth envy the high growth areas, especially how it has been achieved in the US markets.
Every time you buy a stock in the anticipation that its price will rise, or, for that matter, buy VFINX with the expectation that the total value of the S&P 500 will rise, you are putting money on a bet that companies will grow.
The stock price doesn't just reflect the amount of money the company has. The stock price reflects the "fully loaded" expected value of that stock. That means it prices in ALL expectations.
If the company you buy performs exactly as expected, then you don't actually make any money because you paid the price that reflected those expectations, so whatever dividends the company issues will only compensate you for the premium you paid. So the stock has to outperform expectations before it's worth buying.
The "expected value" of the company actually discounts dividends and the like, because the value of money in the future is less than the value of money today.
There's an amusing side point to this, which is that a perpetual annuity actually has a finite value [1].
I think you're mis-applying the theory here and confusing Return on Risk? No matter what you say, if I buy a stock that expects to earn dividends, and I do earn those dividends, and I've realized a 5% dividend yield, I certainly have made a profit. Now, whether I'm getting return on risk is another thing and very well the answer may be no.
Don't think -so- that I've made a mistake. I can eliminate risk and make the same point:
Suppose you buy a perpetuity, granting $X every year. After 100 years, you'll have 100 times $X more dollars, but you will be worth exactly the same as you were worth before the perpetuity. (This assumes that the market correctly prices the perpetuity so that the expected value of purchasing it is $0).
EDIT:
I'm not talking about "profit" because it's not really a super useful concept here. Having a larger quantity of dollar bills after a period of time does not mean that I've got more value. Trivially, if I have $100 in 1950, and $101 in 2016, I have made a "profit" of $1 but lost a substantial amount in real terms.
I should cite sources and use correct terminology.
Wikipedia provides the following [0]
> The dividend discount model (DDM) is a method of valuing a company's stock price based on the theory that its stock is worth the sum of all of its future dividend payments, discounted back to their present value.[1] In other words, it is used to value stocks based on the net present value of the future dividends.
I still think you may be misapplying some theory. The points of discounted future cash flows, time value of money, and ev are not lost on me. But pointing out that an arbitrary profit figure irrespective of inflation is a "profit" is meaningless.
It's a nice Econ lecture but markets do not actually behave by a manner of collective estimate of dfcf. I would say it's more accurately described as a random walk with an upward inflationary bias.
Using that logic you could say it's never worth buying anything. A loaf of bread costs the fully-loaded expected value of that loaf, so it's never worth buying a loaf of bread because it's always going to be worth exactly what you paid for it. But actually trade is a wealth creation mechanism because different people put different value on things: to you the loaf is worth more than the money you paid for it, while to the shopkeeper the money is worth more than the loaf.
The stock will cost a fair market-clearing price for its expected return, risk-adjusted. But often a stock, or a perpetuity, is a good purchase for one or other market participant - no different from a loaf of bread bought at a fair market-clearing price.
You are missing something: the discount rate used in a DCF model is not the "risk free" rate so if everything goes "as expected" you are still making more money than you would buying government bonds.
One can say that this "risk premium" actually reflects the expectation that things don't go as well as expected. But the fact is that in the aggregate and in the long term equity investors are still doing "better than expected" and there is no agreement on why it is so (this has been called the "equity premium puzzle").
Well there's also the effect that new money flowing into the stock market as a whole ends up chasing a finite set of stocks thus tending to raise prices.
I concede, however what I was mainly getting at was that this meme of "you only make money when the company grows" is also false.
I believe you would agree with me that a company could exceed expectations while at the same time not growing (by giving out a bigger dividend, or buying up its own shares with its profits).
You create new product lines. They've done the Apple Watch, Apple TV, Apple Pay, etc..
There's plenty of more options available in both the short (<5yrs) and long term (>5yrs). They've previously had consumer product lines that included cameras, game consoles, laser printers, TVs, etc.. They could revisit those markets again, or push into business markets.
Define your market more broadly. The iPhone itself is an example of this. Desktop computers don't have much growth? Well, what else could a computer be besides a desktop?
I was at a NASA workshop in Mountain View. An informational placard outside had two plots of growth, one with an unchecked exponential curve, and one with a curve that comes up to a peak and goes down. It asked which made more sense as a growth curve.
My idealized mathematical self thought, naturally, the exponential growth curve, because it expresses what happens when y-dot equals alpha y.
But I asked a passing Caltech astrophysicist, who (not surprisingly) gave a better reply. The curve that flattens out and goes down, he said, because exponential growth is impossible to sustain. Physical limits on some aspect of the system must intervene and impose a new law.
> Physical limits on some aspect of the system must intervene and impose a new law.
Just because Apple didn't become the first trillion dollar public company by marketcap (lets assume that chinese bank ipo for a brief second didn't count), doesn't mean that it would have broken a physical limit on the system.
There was a time not long ago when 100 billion companies didn't exist
and there was a time when private venture capital didn't value new businesses at 1 billion dollars
although I don't see the fundamentals to support such large companies, apple, or another company, isn't breaking anything if it does achieve the ability to grow larger
Partially, Apple's metrics aren't that outlandish though. You could just use the age old price to earnings ratio and see it isn't wildly inflated, they make bank and speculators value it at 11 times said bank right now
The higher valuations of private companies IMO has little to do with quantitative easing. Despite any bubble talk, very little funding actually goes into these private companies. The S&P 500 returns nearly 1 trillion a year to shareholders via dividends, VCs put like 50 billion into these high growth startups.
Low interest rates from quantitative easing might contribute greatly, but I wouldn't say the inflation targets have much to do with it.
The inflation rate for the last 12 months was 0.9%, and has varied from 0.1% to 3.2% over the past 5 years. [1] So, no, inflation is not responsible for the higher valuations.
Higher valuations come partly from businesses having more cash because they are not spending money expanding, and because the low interest rates encourage companies to borrow money to buy back stock, which increases EPS and dividends, which increases share prices. Of course, there has been some legitimate growth over the past years, too.
Consumer price inflation is not responsible for the increase in equity valuations, but quantitative easing and bond buybacks certainly do. QE reduces the yield of bonds, making stocks look more attractive and hence resulting in more money flowing into stocks.
It additionally devalues the dollar, which leads to assets to be worth bigger numbers. QE has been mainly flowing to investors and the financial sector, and ts been staying there, hence not translating to consumer price inflation.
So yes QE is responsible and QE caused inflation and inflation is also responsible. This inflation is confined to investment assets.
Inflation should be considered, but for what it's worth, inflation rates, while still positive, have been decreasing (overall) for several decades now - including the most recent, which featured quantitative easing. See: http://inflationdata.com/Inflation/Inflation/AnnualInflation...
OK, let me frame the question as, "continual positive growth in revenue relative to the rest of the market", i.e. outperforming the market, and then either Apple becomes the market in goods, or the rules change.
A chart of growth rate might have a peak, but a chart of the thing that is growing is more simply modeled as a sigmoid that has an initial exponential growth portion, then a logarithmic portion which ends in a plateau.
I tried and failed before I posted. It was a metal sign placed outside "Building 3" (the Spanish-style place) here: http://naccenter.arc.nasa.gov
It's not readily accessible, and there seems to be no street-view coverage there. The photos listed nearby on google maps have a location that is far enough off to be useless.
>I'm sure there will be lots of "Apple has lost its ability to innovate" articles based on this
Given that people have already been writing those articles for a couple years, i'm sure a drop in their revenue and missed estimates won't make them stop.
>Incredible that this is the first time in 13 years that Apple hasn't posted quarterly growth. I'm sure there will be lots of "Apple has lost its ability to innovate" articles based on this, but growing for the last ~52 straight quarters is insane.
Not to mention that all the other companies (Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook) have much worse ups and downs (and are also 1/3 or less the revenue and much much less the profits of Apple, Amazon comically less) but you never see "X is doomed" for them...
IMHO biggest Android advantage is being open. Hardware and software is obviously better on iOS, but being closed platform I keep getting disappointed every week because I can't do x or y.
I doubt that many people base their purchasing decisions on this though.
Ignoring of course the fact that the most important parts of Android is not open source (Google Play Services, which is at the centre of a very misguided EU anti trust case), just because Android is 'open' it doesn't mean you can do more things on it. If something is possible on Android that's because of a design decision that Google took. Besides, what happens when you run iNot someone that you can't so on Android? You going to download the source code and make a change and flash it to your decide? I doubt it.
huh I think the poster was referring to just using the platform. Its one of the major reasons I use Android over iOS. You have a huge amount of freedom. There are several key apps I use constantly throughout the day that could not exist on iOS. This is also coming from a Mac fan that grew up using and loving Apple computers.
Also thats not true. Most important parts of Android are open source, for whatever thats worth. Its the parts that communicate with Googles cloud that are closed as well as Google's branded suite of apps.
Yea exactly its one of the reasons why I love Android so much.
Also the argument that Android isn't actually OSS argument is dumb. If it was closed source how have other companies forked it and successfully released their own variants? It doesn't make sense.
"Forked it and successfully released their own variants" is a stretch (Amazon Fire Phone), especially when Google specifically prohibits vendors that get access to Google Play to fork Android.
The fire tablets are very successful. There are a few successful forks in China. There are tons of fan built versions. Thats not a stretch.
Google restrict OEMs from forking, is certainly shitty. But its also a smart business tactic and I hope Google gets more restrictive around letting OEMs use their flavor of Android. Since it leads to a more cohesive experience surrounding Android.
I think that the importance of being able to do X of Y depends on what you are lookimg for in a device.
This is my first iPhone as at previous occasions I always used Android (nexus) devices and I found the fact I don't need to tweak it, a positive thing. That and the fact that at it is longer supported than some Android flagship devices.
Ten years ago I had the time (and needs) to tweak my phone, nowedays I just want a good (out of the box) smartphone with long support.
Apple doesn't innovate terribly much, there were smart phones before the iPhone, the iPhone was just a better one. There were tablets before the iPad and the iPad was just a better tablet.
Apple's strength isn't in coming up with NEW things, I would say quite the opposite as they're usually very late into any given market. Apple's strength is coming up with products that are better than the ones that came before, in their Apple-y way.
The options prior were half-dead PalmOS, Windows CE devices like the iPaq, and the Blackberry.
The blackberry was the ultimate pager, but didn't have a functional web browser. The Windows device was pretty much awful, and PalmOS was waiting for euthanasia.
In the past this has been true because their exceptional design skills. But companies learned that skill, it's not unique to Apple anymore. So for example, the Apple watch isn't objectively significantly better than Google's Watch OS.
But Apple still has a lot of resources and capabilities it can deploy to make something a sucsess, like any other big company, so maybe that's what we should except from the current Apple - altough considering the circumstances - this can be very lucrative.
> Google’s Android operating system continue to challenge the company with powerful, lower-price devices."
Apples customers barely complained on slow iPhones, and even less at their pricing level, where many knew apple margin is 40%. "Normal" company cannot withstand such high margins because of competition. Jobs achieved opposite where many people just said "oh screw it - it will cost me plenty, but I really want it!"
As of the lack of growth, I agree with you. It doesn't mean they are in serious troubles, just like a light caught doesn't mean you have a throat cancer. But the truth is that their products lost plenty with Job's departure.
Apple growth barely been done due to progress, but rather because of evolution! First mass-scale touch device, first mass-storage music device (I know, there been Palm and others; but ask 10 people - who ever heard of Palm?). Those were steps of evolution. Before you couldn't type with a finger. Before you couldn't store 160GB of your music in your pocket. Etc etc.
Now Apple is all about growth. There is no more evolution! There is faster CPU, if you really needed it. There is lighter phone, if you really needed it. There is faster GPU, if you really needed it. There is more fancy front-facing camera.... BUT none of those things are evolution; its just a progress. And that won't catapult Apple sales into previous levels. It simply can't.
Would we see the same "disappointing" sales numbers had Jobs still be here? Most likely not. By now we would steer the "i" devices with our eyeballs, and mind control that really works and is friendly to a customer would be just around the corner...
As of today under current management... it's funny, but my i device doesn't even have an FM radio built-in.
The expectation was $2.00 EPS, Apple reported $1.90. AAPL is down in after-hours trading right now, at 95.91 from 104.35 at market close (as of 5:20 PM).
This is a significant earnings report as it's the first to break 13 years of continuous growth. Revenue was down 13%.
• Q2 EPS: $1.90, down 22% YoY, versus expectations of $1.99
• Q2 revenue: $50.6 billion, down 13% YoY, versus expectations of $52 billion
• Gross margin: 39.4% versus 40.8% last year and expectations of 39.47%
• iPhone unit sales: 51.2 million, down 17% YoY, versus expectations of 50.7 million
• iPhone ASP: $644.25, down 2% YoY, versus $651 expected
• iPad unit sales: 10.2 million, down 19% YoY, versus expectations of 9.4 million
• Mac unit sales: 4.03 million, down 11% YoY, versus expectations of 4.6 million
• Q3 revenue guidance: $41 billion and $43 billion, versus expectations of $47.35 billion
I don't think anyone was surprised though, around 2014 we saw the writing on the wall. I mean take the Nexus 5, I have plenty of friends who have one and it's basically like they bought a microwave. It just works, it's fine, and they're expressing 0, and I really mean 0 interest in upgrading their microwave. They'll keep it for as long as the battery lasts and they don't break it. And that's really a last-generation phenomenon, before two years ago I was looking forward to new mobile tech. Now the changes aren't meaningful anymore.
And now people are openly expressing it, too. Like the CEO of sony, who spoke about the end of innovation in smartphones a few months ago. I mean take my dad, he just bought an LG G3 for $8 a month on a 2 year contract. Now this phone is 2 years old, not top of the line... but it's $8 a month and it comes with a nice screen that's almost double the PPI of the latest iphone, 3gb of ram, a nice snapdragon 801 chip, 3000 mAh battery, it just works fine and it's just really cheap. In two years, the latest G5 will be $200 too, and you'll buy G3 like phones for $100. What can we innovate in smartphones that's worth $700 to most people? That used to buy you a magical device that could do things nothing else could, in your pocket just a few years ago.
Anyway, I wonder what's next for Apple. There's no rumours of anything happening except its car. Wearables will expand. But they're all late or super late to market in these product categories. That's not a bad thing, they'll obviously make money, but it's not comparable to creating a real smartphone industry.
Nexus 5 was phenomenally good though for the price point/no-crapware bundle. Coupled with Android finally being good enough to at least rival iOS, it was the start of a new era. Certainly in the UK, since buying my Nexus 5, android has gone from like 6% to 40% of mobiles hitting the websites I manage (the EU market has always been heavily iOS skewed compared to America).
My battery crapped out rather quickly, but a replacement has extended its life.
Call quality, screen resolution, responsiveness of the UI, material design, size, lack of crapware...Google really got it right. I've had this phone for 2 years and I have zero interest in upgrading to iOS. Sure, the display is nicer, the battery life is marginally better, but really, I just don't care.
Actually, Apple's pattern is to be late to market. They let other companies feel out the market, inform the consumers, work with pricing, etc. and then they come in with a great product and dominate the domain completely. Apple does this over and over again. Computers, MP3 players, cell phones, etc.
In this thread: lots of people making unfounded assumuptions and drawing dumb conclusions when anyone who has been paying attention knew this was coming as Apple even said so last quarter.
The last year quarter was buoyed by previous quarter supply constraints causing a lot more sales in many categories and products.
It's not that this quarter was bad (it was fine) it's that last years quarter was SO GOOD and last quarter had no major supply constraints that we see this.
Basically - Apple has got so good at the supply chain it's hurting their numbers for quarters with no new releases.
But sure, start speculating about [insert your favorite phone] and writing screeds about phone subsidies/performance/innovation/whatever. It won't be right... but you'll feel better I guess.
As someone who basically looked at this as confirming what I believed about the iPhone 6/+ (ie: that it is too big and no one likes it and Apple's sales are going to fall), thanks for this post. Changed my view.
50.6b net income on 39.4% gross margins. A bit early to be writing Apple's obituary or anything even close. Retail is suffering nationwide and I suspect Apple is caught up in this decline.
More likely mobile is headed quietly down the path of the PC - fewer generational improvements means people keep devices longer and there isn't as much of a reason to buy new hardware so sales flatline. Great business still but Wall Street hates that narrative. They want the next hot growth market -- VR perhaps when its killer app moment arrives.
>I'll say this: Amazon Echo cut Apple's growth balls right off. That's a $2b revenue business Siri can kiss goodbye.
$2b is spare change for Apple -- I don't see Echo going places anyway, it will end more or less like the Kindle is now.
In fact, Amazon's whole profit was around $100 million last year -- and it's the first year it ever had any profit IIRC. I don't see those $100 million profit per year threatening the $18 BILLION profit per QUARTER anytime soon.
If you're talking about "threats," I don't see what retained earnings have to do with anything. Amazon's revenue is roughly half of what Apple's is -- Amazon is significantly smaller, but it's in same ballpark as Apple, not orders of magnitude smaller.
Amazon prices its products for thin margins and aggressively moves into new product spaces (sometimes with spectacular failures). Apple prices its products for thick margins and returns a lot of money to investors with stock buybacks. Using profits as a metric to compare these two companies holistically is specious.
>Amazon prices its products for thin margins and aggressively moves into new product spaces (sometimes with spectacular failures). Apple prices its products for thick margins and returns a lot of money to investors with stock buybacks. Using profits as a metric to compare these two companies holistically is specious.
I thought capitalism was a for-profit endeavour. Unless Amazon runs as a non-profit, it's just people investing in perpetuity based on pure belief/speculation of imagined future profit (and of course, on actual stock-based profits). Not that different from any pyramid scheme, which is why historically the stock market has periodical bubbles and crashes.
Those kind of rewards for the kind of actual prospects the company has are more or less a speculative bubble, with little basis on objective reality. $600 billion in "cash" on the other hand, that's something to keep you going and to talk about.
Apple could even get to be privately owned company with their buybacks -- Amazon wouldn't even stand a year as one at their churn rate.
>Amazon prices its products for thin margins and aggressively moves into new product spaces
Walmart does thin margins too -- but with huge revenues and profits compared to Amazon.
I'll agree that the sale of Echo caught both Apple and Google with their pants down, but I don't think it's going to last long. Apple could, quite easily, make a Siri standalone (and so could Google). Tying it to the phone was a great idea, but the implementations of both weren't the greatest. Plus, with Apple keeping Siri as a closed environment for so long probably hurt it as well.
But all that said, Echo is a neat device but not unique. It can be easily outpaced by either company if they choose. Amazon's "Skill Store" for Alexa is piss-poor and the ability to add skills is horrendous. Getting a skill approved is a nightmare, and they basically have to be "free" skills to have any potential.
If Amazon can figure out how to monetize skills, they may be able to pull ahead. But as it stands, right now, Echo is a novelty device that appeals (mostly) to kids.
Apple has no one to blame but themselves (history may be rhyming here) if they lose that market. Apple had many, many quarters where they sat on Siri and did not open it up to developers via an API, and could have killed Echo in the cradle.
They still can, and that's the truth - Echo may have momentum but Apple has a 1 billion device installed base. Any opening up of Siri via API would suck the air out of the market.
Yep and as I read in another thread here, Echo is US only basically because it's localization features are based on a US zipcode. The US only market is not very big while the richer part of China in cities like Suzhou, Hangzhou and ofcourse Shanghai and Hongkong have sold a lot of iPhones which you can see on the streets. The subsidy plan is still in place there. In the EU people with money got iPhones as well : in my friend group I am the only one with an Android phone (p8 max because of the battery life and my huge dutch hands can type with one hand on it) and everyone is waiting for the 7. I think Echo is an easy kill for Apple if done right and timely aka now.
Offtopicish: I think the first to offer the battery life my phone has in an iPhone like package will sell a lot: even my mother got an iPhone because the battery life on her Samsung was too miserable and in her head this equals 'Android' so no more Android... work to do this reunion'
Yeah, but "50.6b net income on 39.4% gross margins" doesn't get those juicy clicks like "Apple is DOOOOMED!!1!" does. These journalists gotta put food on the table somehow.
The government has decided to keep inflating the bubbles with capital injections that wind up temporarily keeping stocks afloat and ultimately wind up feeding insane real estate bubbles. This has gone on more or less for the last few years, starting with stimulus in 2008. Retail is already taking a huge hit on the ground (not just iPhone sales have dropped off), and once those bubbles pop...well, the government will do anything it can to keep that from happening, including inflating them higher (which can't work forever, right?).
>The government has decided to keep inflating the bubbles with capital injections that wind up temporarily keeping stocks afloat and ultimately wind up feeding insane real estate bubbles
Ya, just imagine if the US, instead of crashing in 2008, decided to feed their bubbles with way more debt-fueled stimulus than they did. That is basically where China is today.
More than $1.5 trillion to Detroit and $1 trillion to Wall Street (plus the usual subsidies to all other sectors, including some trillions of military spending).
Besides, at least China has actual manufacturing jobs and exports instead of tons of service jobs...
That was all paid back, however. And it is all accounted for on the books vs. shoved away in some local government/SOE joint venture.
Anyways, America has actual IP jobs and a relatively transparent financial system to compensate. We just have wild guesses about what is going down on the ground here.
The era where cell phone companies offered phone subsidies as trade for a customer's long term commitment has ended. The impact this is having and will continue to have on smartphone sales is profound. It is much more likely that customers will upgrade their devices less frequently. We are already beginning to see the impact in Apple and Samsung earnings.
I don't really buy that. Can you point to any evidence people are updating devices less frequently? Apple sold more iPhones in Q1 of 2016 then they did in Q1 of 2015 so are you extrapolating from a single down quarter?
This report[0] (from 2014, but the trends cited seem to have continued from other places) have cited the end of 2-year upgrade incentives (or rather, cheaper monthly fees after 2 years) as a primary reason for a drop in cellphone sales.
In particular, in 2013 40% of respondants would upgrade phones after 2 years... in 2014 that number dropped to 15%.
At the same time, the number of people who said they would upgrade at "obsolesence" went from 15% to 35%.
There's a decent amount of evidence that 2-year contracts trigger a lot of phone upgrading. The end of that whole cycle is going to continue to cause pain to anyone selling cells.
I personally did not upgrade from the 4s because the subsidy ended. Relatively the iPhone 6 vs 5 was an unusually big jump for Apple which confuses the issue.
Woosh. Sure, and the laws of supply and demand change when your talking about a phone. Cost up, demand down.
The point was in most peoples minds the iPhone 4 vs 5 jump was smaller than the 5 vs 6. And the 5 needed a new connector. So, we are stuck with an apples to apples to oranges comparison.
Samsung sales also dropped that's significant and they lack a stark A vs B model year comparison due to massive numbers of phones being regularly released. http://www.gsmarena.com/samsung-phones-9.php
>Its newest smartphone, the four-inch iPhone SE, went on sale in late March, too late to affect the most recent quarterly results, but analysts hope to get more insight into how it is selling.
Went to the Apple Store in my large metro and they were out of almost every model. The associate searched other stores and there wasn't much within 1500 miles. Anecdotal, but it looks like the demand is outpacing the supply of the iPhone SE. It'll be interesting to see the sales numbers.
Two to three weeks from the Apple Store when I checked this morning. I don't know if it's heavier-than-expected demand, or if they just don't keep that many in the pipeline (which I guess amounts to the same thing). My wife just broke hers (yes, again), so the plan is to at some point give her my 6S and I get a new 5SE, because I want my smaller screen back. It would seem that perhaps I'm not the only one.
On the conference call, Cook mentioned that they are still supply constrained on the SE - they are still selling all they can build as fast as they build them.
For me, the main reason to upgrade phones is to get a better camera, so I can take better pictures of my kids. Other than that, most of the features are "nice to have". Don't get me wrong, I like Touch ID, I like the big screen of the plus (but not the size and slipperiness of the phone), but nothing has been a compelling upgrade, other than camera improvements.
In many ways, this is a credit to Apple doing a great job. On the other hand, the real challenge with driving iOS upgrades is software. There's no killer app that requires the latest hardware, unless you care about games and maybe a few drawing apps on the iPad.
Dunno about you, but TouchID is indispensable to me. I would not buy another phone without it (or something as secure).
With TouchID + strong alphanumeric password, I can be secure in my person. My data is far more valuable than just the hunk of metal and glass it resides on.
I think Apple should do an expansion of their 2008 iFund, but writ bigger (and maybe focused on the watch and apple TV).
Out of curiosity, in what way do you feel TouchID makes your phone more secure than just a password? Someone could steal a glass you've touched along with your phone and unlock it with a bit of effort. From a technical standpoint, the only thing TouchID adds in terms of security is preventing someone from peering over your shoulder at a passcode as you enter it, but a would-be thief is more probably far more concerned with selling the hardware than ransoming your data. And if they want your data, iCloud and other services are the real weakpoint.
>Out of curiosity, in what way do you feel TouchID makes your phone more secure than just a password? Someone could steal a glass you've touched along with your phone and unlock it with a bit of effort.
Well, quite a lot more effort.
I don't want my data/photos/etc to fell pray to a phone thief -- or a guy that finds the phone after I dropped in a cafe. And Touch ID does that fine.
The "fingerprint on glass" scenario you mention concerns dedicated people targeting my data especially -- which is not something I realistically care about. If such people were after my data, they could also use a crowbar and beat me till I tell them my secrets...
>but a would-be thief is more probably far more concerned with selling the hardware than ransoming your data.
Yes, and I am more concerned about my data than about the hardware -- after all at that point it is already in the thief's hands.
It's actually less effort, though. It's basically impossible at this point to brute force an iPhone password, and even if you use TouchID a thief could theoretically still try and break in using the backup numeric password. Also it's been shown that depending on how you use your phone, usable fingerprints can be lifted right off the screen (you touch it all the time after all), so someone who is after your data doesn't even need a separate fingerprint source. To me, TouchID is a convenience feature, not a security one.
Where has that been demo'd using anything like a realistic scenario? Every iPhone since the 3GS had oleophobic glass - combine with cloth pockets and any fingerprints are not going to be high-quality enough to survive for long.
TouchID isn't to make you a better international spy, but rather to deal with realistic threats.
The average person is much more likely to have their password stolen by somebody watching them enter it over and over every time they look at their phone than somebody who is going to go through the trouble to replicate fingerprints.
Completely agree. My point was that if you get your phone stolen, it's pretty much guaranteed to be a random thief who just picked it up and doesn't care about your data, so the security method makes no difference. If you actually want true security, though, TouchID is no better than (and arguably worse than) a passcode against someone who is actually after your data.
So anyone thinking planned obsolesce might move itself up the Apple priority list? Their per quarter revenue is still massive, but Wall Street always expects more. At its current rate of stock buy back, Apple could buy back all of its stocks and go private in a few years. They could rid themselves of market fluctuations in regard to stock and pump out products while continuing making the ridiculous amounts or revenue and overcome the need to take shortcuts for the sake of Wall Streets obsession with non-stop growth.
This was inevitable for Apple; their stratospheric valuation has expected growth priced in. Given the company's inability to foster the same ambition Steve Jobs instilled in it, they can only ride on their existing product line for so long.
I do find their lack of acquisitions strange given how much capital they are sitting on. There are a lot of markets w/high barriers to entry they'd have no trouble getting their foot in the door(Gaming, On Demand Streaming, etc...).
I am not sure about the valuation having a lot of growth priced in, given that Apple's current P/E ratio is 11. In comparison, Google's is 30, Facebook's 84. Even Berkshire Hathaway's is 15.
> The Company also announced that its Board of Directors has authorized an increase of $50 billion to the Company’s program to return capital to shareholders. Under the expanded program, Apple plans to spend a cumulative total of $250 billion of cash by the end of March 2018.
My god, that $50 billion expansion is 7% of the company at the current market cap.
It's actually an even more astounding 8.65% of the current market cap ($578 billion).
I'm glad to see them returning capital to shareholders. However I worry about the debt they're taking on in order to do so, due to most of their cash being overseas. If things continue to slide for them, for whatever reason (iPhone loses favor, smartphone sales keep contracting globally, something replaces the smartphone, etc), it will pin them into a disastrous situation of extremely high debt and crashing sales (while having committed to very large payouts to shareholders).
Well, they can always bring their cash back right? (it will be taxed, but it's still a formidable warchest) Or somehow pay back debt through some overseas shenanigans....
Not a great situation to be in but I can't imagine it getting big enough to where Apple could no longer handle it. Maybe I'm underestimating interest rates
Or it's just gadget saturation in general. My MBP from a few years ago works great. Some of the older iPads I have at work are just fine. The iPhone 6/6+ also works just great. At some point, the marginal utility of a new device just isn't there. It is what happens as markets mature.
Smartphones in general have reached a point where we are barely wowed anymore.
I got myself a cheap xiaomi phone as a stop gap after my high end phone died. A year later, I'm still using it and have no energy to even bother looking at what else is out there.
Heh, I'm going to get myself the new CAT S60 phone (650€ at the moment, hope it goes down to 550-600 in two months). I already have an (aged) B15Q... but holy cow, a FLIR camera in a phone?!
Only downsides:
1) no MediaTek CPU any more, only Qualcomm shit => no more easy rooting, firmware reflashing etc.
I'm not surprised. I think Apple underestimated the demand for the iphone SE 64 GB. Its been out of stock in most stores since it was released. Apple's shareholders should be asking why can't anyone buy it in a store? Also many people don't want wait two weeks to receive their phone when they buy it online.
People can't buy it in a store, because like pretty much every model that came before it, they're massively supply constrained.
They've gotten better about it, but there's only so much you can do when you're producing a high-tech item being purchased tens of millions of times per week globally.
Looks like the SE didn't matter. Interesting note from Apple conference call. "2:11 pm iPhone SE not included in these results, as it launched after the end of the quarter, but demand has been very strong. Demand exceeds supply, but we're working hard to meet demand. iPhone SE puts us in strategic plan to attract new customers."
The key numbers from the Press Release:
The Company posted quarterly revenue of $50.6 billion and
quarterly net income of $10.5 billion, or $1.90 per diluted
share. These results compare to revenue of $58 billion and
net income of $13.6 billion, or $2.33 per diluted share, in
the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 39.4 percent compared
to 40.8 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales
accounted for 67 percent of the quarter’s revenue.
So not really a surprise from what they announced at previous quarter.
I love my iPhone 6+ but while overall the ecosystem is getting better, the device is more laggy and glitchy than previous models.
Apple Pay always gets triggered by accident when I try to unlock using the fingerprint, and once in a while random apps seem to heat up the phone and drain the battery before I realize what is going on.
I think small things like the minor points of perceived quality that I'm describing can have a big impact on sales. When a phone costs $800 people expect a very solid experience with no glitches.
Absolutely on point. There are numerous points where the polish is missing. For smartphones at Apple's preferred high-end price point, if the user experience doesn't feel like the designers anticipated user needs, then an Android will look "good enough". The gap between "good enough" and "just works" is gigantic, and is only breached by psychotic amounts of attention to detail:
1. Create an appointment, set the geographic destination, start setting alarms and about half the time Calendar crashes.
2. No gesture to make a copy of an appointment in Calendar.
3. No API for Siri.
4. Dial into a conference call with a passcode. Start a second call, and try to dial into another phone number with a passcode from Contacts or Calendar. It dials the number but not the passcode (iOS ignores everything after the phone number for the second call).
5. Come back into cell range from a long absence and receive a barrage of voicemail notifications about voicemails you've previously been notified about.
6. Add a field in Contacts, and the cursor and focus stay in the "add field" area of the record, while the actual field is above that area. You have to scroll up, find the field as the keyboard appears, then key in the field. Older versions of iOS had the behavior correct: adding a field moves the focus to the field in the record.
These and more warts arguably should not exist in a high-end, premium smartphone.
Sales faltering...just wait until the margins dip. Hardware margins the size Apple has enjoyed are incredibly rare and never have lasted with any company, period. Their hardware margins are on par, or even above many software vendors, which is just unsustainable. It's a great product, but the upgrade cycle is lengthening, and margins are going to fall. Same happened to the PC, same started to happen with the tablet, and the same will happen to the phone market.
Also, i'm hoping my future glasses have some kind of mechanism built in that will let me text with my mind... even if that means thinking about moving shapes or colors or something to do it.
VR is still about 10 years away before it moves into the mainstream. Currently it's just looking like a gaming accessory and has a long way to go before it's much more
But VR/augmented reality is still the next big thing. The demand in commerce and advertising is for more and more invasive media, I'd say any prediction towards this goal is dead on. It's just a matter of finding well priced, socially acceptable gear.
Chatbots are a novelty. They will come and go faster than Pepsi Clear. I don't see them being big headlines next year, and at most, two years from now.
Some combination of wearables, AR/VR, IoT, and consumer 3D printing.
The thing is a) those are all a few years out, b) they're interconnected. VR will happen first because it's got an obvious path to a large consumer base. That will lay groundwork for AR, which is probably the actual Next Big Thing. Wearables/IoT/3D printing are really an extension of the miniaturization/customization of longstanding technologies, but are all experiencing severe growing pains (wearables : size/batteries, IoT : cost, 3D Printing : materials).
As for the rest: wearables hadn't had a really strong use case - so it's either a niche or a fashion/status object - and maybe that's what will limit growth even when size/batteries gets solved ?
IOT: cost is definitely a huge barrier, but will it be that huge deal ? or just another feature in the stuff we already buy - sold to us through the same big companies, with a few specialized products ?
And 3D printing - don't you think a 1-day Amazon 3 printing with the most optimal processes will win, for most consumers ?
I'm with you on wearables - I've been trying to think of mass-market use cases for at least a year now, but I just can't find anything that's appealing outside of niche markets like disabilities and medical monitoring.
As for 3D printing, the biggest problem in my opinion is modeling, not printing itself. The cost of stereolithography printers is finally dropping, and extrusion printers are getting easier to use, but actually printing things is useless unless you have a model you can print. Most people just don't want to spend the time or effort to create a model, especially when you can walk into a store and get a higher quality item that's professionally designed and manufactured for dirt cheap.
What happens if there's a pause between the next big thing and now? What if technology effecting people's lives starts to slow? Interesting (for me at least) to think about.
Funny enough, most VR projection models use gaming consoles as the low point of estimating units a few years from now.
I want to bet on sunglass sized AR, but it seems like we'll need some material science revolutions to shrink down the requisite hardware to have the kind of useful experience is imagine
now that phones are quite fast and have good cameras, what is the main driver towards upgrading? so that you go from 300ppi to 500ppi? not going to make much of a difference and for most people not worth the upgrade costs.
The only issue is that phone manufacturers have even more of an incentive to bloat the OS more and more (and make it slower and slower on old models) and to deprecate it faster (on older models) so they can sell more hardware if people want to get the latest security fixes / software
in general, hardware improvements will drive new swanky software, and make computing on smartphones closer to a first class citizen (remember motorola's laptop+phone dock, where the phone powers the laptop?).
another big pain point is battery (and battery consumption). still waiting on hardware (and software in conjunction) to get more efficient. you'll remember how power hungry PCs were in the beginning and how much better they are now (laptops notably).
feels to me like we still have many years to go, and many more "big" technology investments.
yet for the most part PCs dropped significantly in price but smartphones seem to be holding the 400+ range which is still woefully overpriced for most of the phone buying populace because not only are you putting out 400 bucks but usually under obligation to send forty to eighty more a month. That is a good chunk of the the lower and middle classes.
The PC have not dropped significantly in price. High end gaming PC (that you build yourself) always costed about 1500-2000$. It is just that the majority of tasks could be done in lower and lower segments of the market.
Mac SE w/ HD in 1987 — $3900, $8,175 adjusted for inflation. Makes the head spin, remarkable that I even got to see computers like that during my childhood.
I guess your opinion and mine greatly differ on the history of high end gaming pcs.. (building highend pc's since riva tnt and diamond monster 3d days..)
High-end PCs at that time were Compaq computers. Not cheap knockoffs that were made by no-name brands. The Compaq 386 had a launch price of $6500 to $10,000+
The "Jade" PC you see in that image is probably more comparable to "Gateway" brand now-a-days.
Computers are a hell-of-a-lot cheaper today than in the past.
EDIT: I looked it up, and I can't believe I forgot about this. Back then, every mom-and-pop store was able to build their own brand of PCs. The clone wars were unstoppable I tell you! Jade Computers was apparently a small business with just a few retail locations running out of California.
Compaq's pricing was clever. If you bought one, everyone knew you bought it because it was better, not because it was cheaper than the IBM model. (And it was better because Compaq was shipping 386 machines when the IBM PC AT still had a crappy 286.)
Except inflation... "The same price as it has always been" over a long period (like, say, the 90s) is actually a substantial price drop.
$1500 in 1995 is about $2300 today. A $1500 computer today is ~35% cheaper than the "same price" computer from before.
Having been a gaming rig builder since around that time, high-end performance desktops have gotten way cheaper, with more realistic performance tiers to boot.
Sweet, time to buy more. I was holding off since it was obvious that prices over 100$/share without any new products to excite the imagination of traders with no technology background wasn't going to last forever. It' always interesting to me how wall street lacks any depth in their analysis. Direct sales and revenues are basically the only metrics they look at. Which is fine for a small company but when you are looking at a 700B company, spending 8B a year in R&D being that shortsighted is almost funny.
For any exponential function comes time when its growth cannot be sustained. Smartphones are boring and mature, we haven't had killer app in ages - welcome to the PC market of 2007.
I've been a "mobile is the future of everything" skeptic since the iPhone first came out. Lately I'm feeling slightly vindicated. These things are awesome for navigation and rapid interactions with services and of course chatting. But the totally jailed OS and tiny screen and the rest limits mobile to those kinds of interactions.
Well besides the obvious about the decline in phone sales I think the primary reasons is Apple's steadfast refusal to get in lower margin markets. Sorry, but a four hundred dollar phone is still not cheap enough especially when you consider the monthly usage fees following the purchase.
Then we see tablets and all Apple has done is release newer models with higher price points and worse more expensive add ons.
Finally, their cheapest desktop is eleven hundred and cheapest laptop is nine hundred for a low powered system, the first realistic laptops start at thirteen hundred. No I don't really count the Mac Mini because it never seems to register on people's radar and by the time you add on the monitor and such its up close to eight and nine hundred.
I won't even touch that Watch, its price or the silliness of that is the price of just the bands.
Apple's failure is that it won't go low. They don't have to go rock bottom but they damn well need to push "LE" models or the like. Redo the first Air with a few minor upgrades as the Air LE, 299... get an iMac out for the public nearer seven hundred. Get the rest of the iMac line back into realistic pricing especially for SSD upgrades. Please update the Mac Pro, really how long are they going to ignore it?
tl;dr Apple simply priced them out of too many markets, either out of ignorance or arrogance.
I just upgraded from being a long time iPhone user to a nexus6p and an delighted. Most of the UI makes more sense to me. The camera is amazing and the integration with Google apps as first class apps is a positive. Being able to voice command the device without a power cord plugged in is an added benefit. I can't imagine going back to iPhones.
My wife has an iPhone 4. She's not a technical person; she just wants a phone and some apps. She has no interest in upgrading.
Moreover, her iPhone 4 was the first smartphone in our family. Since she got her phone (and stuck with it), I've gone through at least four or five phones -- always because they broke, not because I was interested in upgrading.
So I'm guessing that while there are lots of Apple gotta-have-the-latest people out there, most people just want a phone that works. And if Apple's hardware and software quality are good (or even half-good), then people will just keep using their old phones.
Which means that Apple will continue to sell phones, but the number of people who will buy or upgrade each year will shrink, at least to some degree.
It should also be noted that Apple is still very profitable! It's just less profitable than it was last year.
Apple is not doomed, but I think they've taken their eyes off the ball a bit. Watch and iPad Pro are me-too products, and the switch to flat interfaces cost them a lot of differentiation IMHO. They've cheapened their brand and they don't seem to know what market they should really disrupt.
Personally I'm not interested in the watch, but the iPad Pro is far from me-too. The display on the 9.7" is outstanding, the pencil is top notch, it's light, powerful, sounds great. At this point Apple is just knocking it out of the park in tablets on every front. Nobody else makes anything that comes close.
Maybe (Surface etc), but in any case these marvelous products are just not selling enough. They are nowhere near being an alternative anchor product should the iPhone tank for good; they are just another branch of the iPhone world, in the way MacBooks and iMacs are branches of the classic Mac product line.
The iPhone was a completely post-Mac product; now Apple needs a post-iPhone product, and they don't seem to know exactly what that could be. They are swinging wildly at fashionable fads from competitors (watches after Samsung, pro tablets after MS, cars after Tesla, etc etc), with little end result. But Apple is at its best when it disrupts mediocre and stalling markets (grey PCs, crappy mp3 players, stupid phones), not running after fashionable fads. They should leave "fire and motion" to the rabble and come up with new panzer designs instead.
It depends what you mean by 'enough'. Enough to maintain continuous rapid growth forever? No. Enough to be sustainable profitable businesses in the long term? I'd say that was plenty.
I think tablets have reached market maturity surprisingly fast. At some point it has to become more about profitability, ecosystem strength and market dominance than growth.
The iPad Pro is actually really awesome for artists. Pro + Pencil is a better experience than a Wacom Cintiq display, and it's a whole tablet for about the same price point, not just a display.
It was alright to use when they were putting in the Wacom digitizers. The N-Trig ones just aren't up to snuff. All my artist friends now just want an iPad Pro that runs full-blown Photoshop.
Yes and no (am an artist and have both). The hardware profile is exactly what you would want, but the software isn't there. You'd need something like the equivalent of the brush engine in Photoshop in order for it to be viable for most artists, but Adobe seems all in on their paired down and unintuitive mobile apps. Procreate comes close, but their brush system is kludgy.
And this is why when they raised the price of the iPad Air 3, I mean iPad Pro 9", they should have included the pencil. I like Apple products and want to try out an IPP with the pencil, but it's not priced to try out at all.
I've said this before but I think it's because my socks are most definitely still on my feet, and have been for the last several years. Apple used to come up with new, distinctive, products that had me gasping for air and figuratively knocking my socks off. Not anymore. I don't want to say it's because of the loss of Jobs but it sure seems that way. I really like Tim but he seems like a production guy instead of a product guy.
Come on Apple, where are the revolutionary products of yesteryear? 3D displays? AR/VR technology? Home automation? iPod headphones? Voice recognition (ala Alexa)? I used to look to Apple for a glimpse of the future; not anymore. :(
The concerning part of this is how little Apple did to get ahead of the market saturation problem before it started impacting sales. They had plenty of warning. Analysts have been predicting this for years. They waited way too long to release iPhones with larger displays. Then it takes more than a year to update the 4" model and when they do it gets released with a nearly identical enclosure to a 3 year old phone. Current rumors suggest the iPhone 7 may share a very similar design to the iPhone 6/S which is just baffling to me if true. When market saturation is a problem it seems like the absolute worst thing you could do is keep recycling 2-3 year old designs.
More competitive pricing would reduce margins. Apple has chosen to pursue high margins and high profits rather than market share. That's how it accumulated roughly $200 billion in cash.
In theory, yes, but Apple sells premium products at premium prices and many people actually like paying more.
There's inevitably a show-off element to it, but I think there's psychological research to show that people appreciate products more when they pay more for them. (But I can't find any evidence from a quick google....)
I'm curious what other people think about the ecosystem as a catalyst, in particular Apple Pay. It seems to be that squeezing between iPhone owners and everyday purchases would be very lucrative.
When Apple Pay came out I was astonished. It's a brilliant move to act as a middleman between a device that almost everyone possesses and currency. After all, what is more profitable than a financial institution?
It seems to be that squeezing between iPhone owners and everyday
purchases would be very lucrative
And something that Banks will very strongly oppose. How many places can you use Apple Pay right now? I love Android Pay, but the only store I can use it at is Walgreens -- no where else I go takes it. Banks still hold a huge amount of power at the point-of-sale market, and they will not give up their margins to Apple.
US here… my pharmacy, grocery, gasoline station, and computer hardware store all take it. It's not like I spend money anywhere else. (Also three of those four have negligently compromised my credit card numbers in the past, so I appreciate giving them as little data as possible.)
Only one restaurant I go to takes it, the one that has little terminals at each table. I'm not sure how the mechanics will play out for restaurant payment. Personally I don't like the table terminal, but maybe someone will come up with a bill carrier that can take payment.
Here in Canada, we have mobile debit/credit terminals that the waitstaff bring to the tables. They currently support swipe, chip & pin, and tap, so I assume that they'd support Apple Pay without too much trouble.
This is different in the rest of the world that has NFC card terminals rather than mag stripe, and it will change in the US as the new EMV readers roll out.
I was at a small bookstore in Palo Alto and they accepted Apple Pay without even knowing it themselves. It really depends on the retailer and if they upgraded their POS terminals.
That being said I use it at trader joes and sprouts, and when Starbucks finishes rolling out Apple Pay I'll use it there too.
It's just very convenient and fast. It makes chip and pin cards seem like five steps backwards.
Doesn't Apple Pay work anywhere standard NFC (PayWave etc) works? AFAIK retailers don't have to do anything special to work with Apple Pay aside from have a POS with NFC support.
If it becomes successful it has potential to dwarf the historical growth in smartphones. But the question is if other players in the field can prevent Apple from getting traction to enough extent.
This is a small anecdote, but: I'm happy with my current iPhone and the current models aren't additionally compelling enough to me to upgrade.
I have an iPhone 5S and don't want a larger one. When the iPhone SE came out, I was excited until I found out it didn't have force touch, which was the main interesting feature to me about the new lineup. Other than Apple Pay it seems I have very little reason to upgrade until this one dies or breaks. I don't see being satisfied with their product as a black mark against them.
I have a 6s and I'd really like to go back to my 5s, for me that was "peak phone", did everything I wanted, in a good form factor, great battery life, was the perfect size.
I originally upgraded because I wanted NFC and "it was time", but nothing is using the NFC chip in my phone so why bother?
I'm considering buying the SE but my girlfriend is hampering me, she says a 6s is a status symbol. I guess for a lot of people they'll just upgrade anyway.
I only see it as a matter of time before brands like Xiaomi make cheaper and better products for sale beyond their current dominance in 'developing countries'. We need to catch up.
There was recently a story saying $400 smartphones are almost as good as flagships. Also huawei is attacking the american market with a great $200 phone.
I got a phone in Taiwan 1 year ago which was a third of the price of a recent laptop/tablet I purchased in England. The phone had far better specs.
Check out the Redmi Note 3, on sale in India for about £100:
The Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 is available in two RAM and storage versions - one including 2GB of RAM and 16GB of inbuilt storage, and other 3GB of RAM and 32GB of inbuilt storage. The 2GB variant is priced at Rs. 9,999, while the 3GB variant is priced at Rs. 11,999.
The highlight of the new Redmi Note 3 is it packs a hexa-core Snapdragon 650 processor (four Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1.4GHz and two Cortex-A72 cores clocked at 1.8GHz). Other specifications of the smartphone are identical with the original, including a 5.5-inch full-HD 1080x1920 pixels IPS display and offers 178-degree viewing angle. It runs MIUI 7 based on Android Lollipop and supports dual 4G SIM cards (Micro + Nano).
The Redmi Note 3 packs a 4050mAh battery with fast charging support that can charge up to 50 percent in 1 hour. On the camera front, the Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 sports a 16-megapixel rear camera with phase detection autofocus (PDAF) and two-tone flash. It also houses a 5-megapixel front camera. It measures 150x76x8.65mm and weighs 164 grams.
For connectivity, the handset supports 4G LTE (compatible with Indian LTE bands), VoLTE, Bluetooth, 3G, GPRS/ EDGE, GPS, Glonass, Wi-Fi, and Micro-USB options.
I have been a happy Android user for years but was planning on switching to an iPhone next time for compatibility with my iPads.
I changed my mind because of the Google Fi service. I can get a compatible phone for $200, and I project my monthly service plan would be less than half than my Verizon plan, given my usage patterns. I do worry that Google might drop the Fi service, or change the features/cost in the future though.
Apple's probably just biding its time with the iPhone while it works to soup-up the Apple Watch - add cellular, more power, more battery, smaller package.
I reckon the iPhone (and maybe iPad) will transition into just a dumb accessory screens.
My thinking is that this follows the trend: Desktop (power on your desk) -> Laptop (power in your bag) -> Smartphone (power in your pocket) -> Watch? (power on your person)
It is probably end of the era moment, like the end of PC back in 2005. Personal Computer is nothing special and even status/luxury brands does not make real difference. PC is mere cheap commodity.
Now there is moment when smartphone is just a phone. Apple or any other brand - does not make real difference.
Some, say, MicroMax or Huawey Android stuff is about $150, and it gives you everything, except 3D.
The 6S and 6S plus didn't offer a ton of new features really besides being faster. The 3D-touch screen is nice for quick shortcuts but not a killer feature.
Basically, the only reason why I would personally want to upgrade is for the bigger screen on the plus model and the battery life that comes with it.
I'm not surprised at all. I don't get why people are. Anyone who wants one, pretty much has one at this point. Those who have them within the past few years are most likely happy with them. The bubble won't exactly burst but it will decrease.
Ah, thanks. Kind of a hard to parse sentence; I read it as buying back $175bn this quarter. Which would be 30% of their market cap and represent all their cash on hand.
They do not have that much cash on hand. Apple already has over $100B in common and exotic debt that has been used to pay for both dividends and this buy back program. So that pile of cash sitting overseas? On its way to being mostly spent. And if the Congress critters start pressing companies to repatriate, a big tax bill looms too.
Apple is doing just fine. But there's been no Next Big Thing since Jobs. Apple's watch is a dud. Nest's products don't work well. It's like Sony after Akio Moreta died; the company plugs on, but the light has gone out.
Not sure how Nest's products are relevant here; they are owned by Google, not Apple. Unless you are saying that there has been no interesting Next Big Thing in the entire consumer hardware/device space? In which case I'm not sure how the reference to Sony is relevant?
The watch is interesting. I think you can argue that the whole idea is fundamentally flawed (operating a miniscule touchscreen with your greasy paws), but you can also argue that incremental improvements could change a lot of minds.
A faster CPU, a thinner device (the first gen Apple Watch is huge), and more useful software are clear areas of potential improvement. I think there's a hypothetical wrist-mounted computer which could be really great, but the Watch obviously isn't there yet.
I think that Apple would be wise to invest a few billion in solving the fundamental problem of batter life. That is the key missing ingredient for everything else we want in the future for mobile tech.
I hope the lack of growth in hardware sales makes the company improve their services and lower their hardware prices instead of trying to increase hardware replacement rates via shorter life cycles.
The most innovative thing Apple can do now to reverse the course of things is to decrease their outrageously high prices (especially in Europe) and phase out these ridiculous 16GB models.
So, does this mean we shall start seeing "the iPhone is dead" click-bait articles like we see with other similar tech products when their sales slump for various reasons?
I'm glad Apple has some competition with Android. I made the switch to Android after I got multiple "dud" iPhone 6's which stopped working after a few days.
In weird analogies, I think the 5S is the Apple's playstation 2 ( good enough for everything and really really no incentive to upgrade except for the enthusiasts ).
Buy their way out of it? How? They obviously don't have anything profitable to invest their excess cash in, since it is either sitting in the bank or going to stock buybacks or dividend increases.
Yeah, because Beats has been working out so well for them.
If they could get something to improve their cloud services competitiveness vs Google, maybe something like Dropbox, I could see that helping them long-term. Otherwise I don't think anything they could acquire would be anything more than a play at becoming a conglomerate ala GE at this point, there simply aren't many companies with a proven core product out there that can help Apple get out of this mess, except by expanding outward.
Not that there is anything wrong with being a conglomerate, Alphabet/Google is basically on its way to becoming one too, and GE is wildly profitable, I just don't see Apple playing well in that space. They need to concentrate on something.
I think Apple have no where to go than to buy companies. In fact most of their revolutionary products were products or technologies they bought.
It's typical apple strategy, they are just worth so much now that it's hard to see their acquisitions as anything but a drop in the water. Until now I guess.
They could buy Twitter, they could buy Box (or dropbox) or some other cloud solution, they could buy Stripe, they could buy Slack, they could buy so many companies and use their size to leverage those into something truly groundbreaking.
False. There is enough press about this - Apple has already spent a large chunk of that by issuing debt to pay for current buybacks and dividends (and avoid US taxes).
Until some months ago, I had a factory unlocked iPhone 5 which I used for 2+ years. I had no reason to switch to a more recent model, other than the (at times) nagging need for the finger-print lock. Then, out of the blue, the battery on my iPhone began to malfunction, in that, it would only let the phone stay on for a couple of minutes unless it was plugged constantly to a power source.
I bought an iPhone 6S, space gray, factory unlocked at around $650 (excluding tax). I sent my iPhone 5 back to Apple for a recycle. They gave me $200 in iTunes gift money. So, all in all, I got a new iPhone 6S for $450 (excluding tax).
I wonder if Apple is going to find a new market with the potential for massive growth any time soon. So far smartwatches don't seem to be such a market.
Apple is the Ford of smartphones. As the auto industry currently stands, the top selling model each year doesn't earn more than 1% of the industry's total revenue. The question is whether smartphones will eventually become similarly fragmented, or if the ecosystem network effect will maintain a "winner take most" effect.
Every year I see a similar post over hyped a few months before a new major model is released. Then it won't be long before I see a post stating Apple's sales and stock are at an all time high. I swear this happens every year.
Because under Steve Jobs they would have continued to increase revenue and profit by the same margins every year until they owned the entire planet, and then continued to grow by colonizing Mars with Elon Musk. Or something.
Tim Cook has stated there is huge room for growth in China. I believe their inflated currency and recent market issues/corruption plays a big role on why the guidance isn't stronger. The emergence of cheap Xiaomi dominance doesn't help, either.
$175 billion in buy backs?! Wow, its expensive propping up the share price to keep Wall Street happy...
There is only so much hardware innovation, there are only so many people on the planet with $600 to spend on a mobile phone.
Apple should really move whole heartedly into services (as evidenced by revenue up 20%); build a gmail / dropbox competitor - stop thinking of itself as a consumer hardware maker, that era is over.
The stone age didn't end because we ran out of stones. Isn't google still not a search company, but its moved past its 'search' era and now its focus on other things. Apple will always sell hardware, but it needs to orient to its next phase of growth, and that ain't hardware.
Yeah. This doesn't seem so bad to me. Search has improved tremendously over the years. Things are easier to find. Google is making more content discoverable.
Advertising is arguably the biggest revenue generator for internet tools. Everyone can use things that are free, and companies want to reach everyone. So long as Google is the most frequently visited site in the world, they remain in control of the biggest revenue stream.
One could argue Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat etc. are making up ground by giving people access to more readers than the likes of Blogger or WordPress. These isolated worlds feel a little like AOL's heydays to me. There ought to be an easy way to publish somewhere, then take your content and network and move to another service if you want. At the moment, it's possible but not easy.
I think anyone who makes such an open social network, with easily exportable contacts and content, would find a lot of success. But it's a really hard problem to solve and I understand why this doesn't exist yet.
I enjoy Facebook. I just see opportunity for something next-generation. Also, I disagree with the notion that Facebook will be fine forever as the dominant player in social networking. They are better off with more competition. Gates and Jobs are quoted saying that Microsoft and Apple's existence helped each other become better companies [1] [2], and helped get more useful computers into people's homes and businesses faster.
Gmail offers an export feature of its emails and contacts in formats that are importable by other tools.
Facebook could do this for your friends list. They don't because they've never had competition that provides such a feature.
When internet explorer became free for everyone, Netscape was forced to become free for everyone.
> I'm curious about where you see the demand?
Demand doesn't make or break a new product. There wasn't demand for cars or iPods before they came out.
That's the best I can explain it. If you don't agree that's fine.
I don't agree, but I am open to understanding more.
I liked your examples of cars or iPods. I agree that as specific solutions there was not demand before the existed, however there was clearly demand for personal transportation and portable music players.
> however there was clearly demand for personal transportation and portable music players.
I think that makes my point further. There is demand for social networks
I'll concede that portability may or may not be the next big thing for social networks. Let's speak more generally.
People want better social networks. They want to connect with friends more easily. To be honest, my Facebook feed is improving bit by bit, but it's still not as good or interesting as it could be. My perception is that Facebook is 100% focused on improving the feed, but without competition, we'll never have anyone thinking outside the Facebook box. Mark has the final say on certain strategies, and I think his vision is great, but his company would be even greater if there were another Mark.
Jobs and Gates fed off each other. Their efforts to market computers to the world helped each other's businesses grow faster than they would've grown alone. By borrowing each other's ideas, we got better products. And their employees were constantly on their toes. Google and Facebook are amazing companies and provide more services to their employees today than Apple and MS in the 90s.
However, the same energy isn't there to improve their core products. Google could be much better at machine translation across all languages, which is part of search, for example. In the future, I think they will be. Without another real competitor, they're free to work on whatever side projects please their employees. The core products miss out on advancements that may otherwise arrive sooner.
All of this is fine and I think tech will thrive regardless. The reason I write all that is I believe in churning up ideas from the bottom that might not otherwise find support. I don't think I'm the only one with this idea.
I think most people know competition is good for the consumer. I'm saying, competition is also good for the companies themselves. Often in tech you see one company, its employees, or its users lambasting the competition. It is self defeating to wish away all your competition. It is a rare company who can continue to innovate in the face of having no competition. Right now FB doesn't have much competition in the US for its core product -- helping people connect with their friends
Perhaps this is just a recent revelation for me, and talking about it helps form my thoughts. And maybe I'm wrong about FB. I don't use Snapchat or Instagram etc. My sense is that FB is far ahead.
I don't think everyone realizes the benefits of competition for the companies but many of us do, a and it wasn't clear that this was really the point you were making.
I sometimes like to think of it as not so much a benefit of competition as a risk for monopoly holders.
> I sometimes like to think of it as not so much a benefit of competition as a risk for monopoly holders.
For sure. It is also a risk for state-favored companies that hold monopolies inside authoritarian regimes. Their growth will probably be limited to their own country. Without local competition, it may be difficult to make the leap to global competitiveness. This is very theoretical as I have no experience. But I think you can draw some parallels to the way politicians cut their teeth. They begin at the local level and work their way up.
As a company that has a huge grip on higher end hardware sales, I definitely think they will stay in the space. That being said, product innovation certainly needs to happen for them to retain their dominance.
> This includes VR/AR, less someone else gets to the the brand reputation throne first (like HTC or Microsoft).
I think HTC's got it for at least a year. It may continue longer. They'd need to do something wrong to lose the lead. MS Hololens is too expensive at the moment to get much reach. And I could make many comments about how Oculus/FB messed up a bit recently. However, I think everyone, including HTC, hopes that Oculus finds its stride again. More competition is better for everyone and will advance VR tech and the market reach faster. Gates and Jobs are on record saying Microsoft, Apple, and the world wouldn't have been as good without each other.
Don't you think you're projecting? It's easy to romance competition, but I seriously doubt HTC hopes the OR finds it's feet. Just as its easy for Gates and Jobs to reminisce after the PC boom after the dust has settled, I doubt they were so romantic during.
> Don't you think you're projecting? It's easy to romance competition, but I seriously doubt HTC hopes the OR finds it's feet.
Sure, this is my opinion on the internet. I've no idea if the HTC and Facebook CEOs feel the same way about competition helping each other as Jobs [1] and Gates [2] said. But I imagine those at the top of massive organizations know a few things about being successful that might not be obvious to the rest of us. What Jobs and Gates said does ring true about their history.
Jobs explicitly pointed out that there was a toxic anti-Microsoft attitude at Apple when he returned, and getting rid of that was critical to their success [1].
> Just as its easy for Gates and Jobs to reminisce after the PC boom after the dust has settled, I doubt they were so romantic during.
That's also discussed in the Jobs/Gates interview. There were good and bad times, and historically speaking, they were not always so against each other. MS invested in Apple several times, and Apple took some risk partnering with them. Jobs pointed out Apple (really, himself) wasn't good at partnering with people, but Gates was, and he admired that [3].
Apple is amazing when it puts its mind to hardware for which there is an "ideal" Form; the macbook is the "perfect" form for a laptop, the iPhone is the "perfect" form for a smartphone.
Take watches however, there is no one perfect form - different needs demand different forms. Or cars, or fridges or planes.
So yes it may not be computers, phones or tablets, but the number of multi-billion dollar aspirational hardware products that Apple will be good at is not by any means a large number.
> the iPhone is the "perfect" form for a smartphone
Heh, I remember time when a 4-inch screen was declared was the "perfect" size for a phone (with intentionally malformed Photoshopped thumb-reachability evidence to buttress the argument) and "no one would buy 'the hummers' of phones"
Buybacks decrease outstanding shares, and increase earnings per share, which drives up share price. But its not a great way to increase EPS, as opposed to increasing EPS via operational means.
I don't know. My iPhone 5s recently died. I went to the Apple store. I looked at the new models. I looked at the version they have that looks like the 5s with better mechanics. I paid $269US for a replacement iPhone 5s. I just couldn't figure out a reason to upgrade. I have the same problem with the iPad. I'll probably upgrade at some point, but the battery life isn't better (and in fact I'd have to repurchase all of the extra phone-sleeve type batteries I have to buy due to Apple's inability to comprehend there are customers that care more about convenience than slimness and weight), and of course storage capacity (which hasn't really changed).
I can't be that unusual a customer. I think a lot of people are just done upgrading. For a while there in 2009/11/13 (or was it 10/12/14?) every time you upgraded it really did make a difference... a "quantum leap" in technology. Now, I feel like upgrading just changed the style (and unfortunately accessories) of my phone. Rumor is the 7 is going to do away with standard headsets. That would be a deal breaker for me. I am fatigued of not only replacing the phone, but the $300 in accessories it takes to power/add accessories/run the phone every 2 years.
This whole subject around quarterly earnings at Apple always makes me think about this larger trend here called peak stuff. Material consumption is falling in Western countries. Steve Howard did that great interview on the subject on NPR: http://www.npr.org/2016/01/22/464013718/ikea-executive-on-wh...
Apple's products were the pinnacle of aspirations besides a car or home in much of the world, and now... well... they're less so. Still popular, still great products, but maybe there is starting to be some fatigue. It's probably good. Anyone who things unlimited growth as a model on a planet with finite resources is still living in the 20th century anyways.
We hear a few things consistently:
1) Providers have switched from "free upgrades every 2 years" to a plan cost and a monthly phone cost, so people now really know how much their phone costs--and many would rather save the $30 a month than upgrade their phone. This started with T-Mobile a few years ago and now is how most phone plans work. This is having a huge impact on people's desire to buy new phones.
2) iPhone 5/5C/5S users have no desire to upgrade to a larger phone. The SE is going to solve some of this, but it'll more likely be a scenario of "I dropped my 5S in the toilet and it's completely dead, so I'll upgrade to a SE instead of dealing with the hassle of finding a legit used 5S." I don't expect to see a huge push toward the SE from current iPhone 5 users.
3) Repairs are so cheap, so easy and so effective. It's $79 for us to fix an iPhone 5/5C/5S screen right now, and we can fix it in less than 30 minutes typically. No reason to upgrade when your old one works just fine and you can get it fixed cheaply.
Interestingly, the SE screen is 1:1 compatible with the 5S screen, so the SE is coming out of the gate being cheap and easy to repair as well. I'm typically recommending the SE if people really want a new phone.
We also ask customers about 3D Touch (the new feature on the 6S/6S+) and if they're using it if they have a 6S. 99% of people have no idea what it is or how to use it. They bought a 6S/6S+ because it was pink. Yep, most of the 6S phones we see are rose gold, and that seems to be the #1 factor driving sales of that line. If they don't care about the pink and ask me what phone I recommend, I recommend buying a refurbished 6 over any of the 6S line. (We don't sell phones, so I have no horse in that race at all.)