Apple Reports Record First Quarter Results, Slowing Growth in iPhone Sales
apple.com
apple.com
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-sells-fewer-iphones-exp...
That makes quite a difference (and illustrates that it can be pretty hard to figure out growth numbers for a multinational corporation, even one that has a super-simple product line like Apple's).
Year on year revenue was only up 2%, but look at the "in constant currency" section. If there was no currency change, it would have been up 8%.
Free click-through-Google link to read: https://www.google.com/search?q=Apple+iPhone+Sales+Grow+at+S...
iPhone sales are basically flat from last year, growing at about 0.4%. This isn't just an Apple phenomenon either. As with desktops/laptops several years ago, and tablets over the last couple years, we're getting to the point that it doesn't make sense to upgrade your phone every year or two. As long as your phone still works and does what you need it to, anyway.
If you move 3-4 million phones for China launch from prior quarter to holiday and suddenly growth in the holiday quarter doesn't look all that anemic (or the previous quarter as spectacular).
The revenue growth for the two quarters combined is 9.2%.
The biggest reason for this (in the US at least) is the decline of 2-year mobile phone contracts over the last year. Many people are rethinking their upgrade cycle now that cellphones are a direct expense instead of being subsidized by the carrier.
Even back into the turn of the century, if you bought an unlocked phone off eBay, you were paying full whack for your rate plan, even though you didn't use a subsidy. I even had Cingular once try to tell me I was under contract, simply because I had signed up less than 2 years ago -- even though there was no contract (I paid for my own phone).
Then a couple of years ago, they started offering "BYOD" pricing plans, so I paid my $300ish ETF, got my iPhone unlocked, and "saved" $15/mo. It was roughly breakeven.
Now I just pay full price for my phone if and when I want a new one. It helps me recognize the full cost of what I'm buying, and it means I'm not tied to a carrier.
http://www.apple.com/shop/iphone/iphone-upgrade-program
(Oh yeah, with free AppleCare+ insurance)
It sure looks like Apple is planning for a future where everyone is paying $25/mo forever to lease the latest handset that tickles their fancy, with the carrier being a swappable option.
I wouldn't expect a huge number of people to go back to "dumb phones" though. Even if their carrier won't subsidise it or provide a payment plan, people will buy new smart phones, because they're use to having the features. Upgrades will just be less frequent.
No ones going back to dump phones
I dont understand why you would think smart phones would make a comeback.
I'd be surprised to find there was no carrier profit built into this.
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/feb/10/business/la-fi-iphon...
This has been the case for T-Mobile and Sprint, at least in the scenarios that I have looked at.
Add mild economic slowdown and strong dollar, result: flat growth.
I've never been an iPhone guy because I largely prefer Android-style notifications and deep Google integration and that is a major selling point to me. Right now the Nexus 5x is looking pretty nice.
A friend of mine that works at Google -- and received a free Nexus 5x for Christmas -- told me the n5x is a pretty lousy phone.
I Googled around, and sure enough, it looks like a lemon.
And I can reach all of the corners with the thumb while holding it, it just doesn't feel comfortable.
And twice the RAM (1 GB iPhone 6 vs. 2 GB iPhone 6s) and a faster CPU and other goodies.
I bought a 6s and love it (since I upgraded from a 5) but if I already had a 6 I wouldn't have upgraded.
This is what happens when you turn over leadership of a company to a supply chain guy from a creative genius. Sure they can make bigger, better, fast, more and make record money, but the creative soul of the company is gone. RIP Steve.
I keep wondering when the desktop/laptop form factor is finally going to die. I thought tablets would do it but that's obviously wrong. Phones, surprisingly, seem to be continuing to eat away at the desktop use cases, which is expected, but I wasn't expecting them to be carrying the brunt of it, and there are ergonomic limits to how far that can go.
VR is the obvious candidate to take out desktops. The solitary nature of desktop activities fits VR well. That's my new operating hypothesis: in 10 years it will basically be phones+VR, probably with TVs still strong.
VR will eat some of TV, but it can't really compete with TV's ambient nature. AR could, and will eventually kill TV, but I am skeptical it will make a dent in the home in this decade, because that's how long it will take to get miniaturization where it needs to be for home use.
Besides, as far as programming goes, I'm happy I got all the power I can find to iterate quickly, and tablet != power.
If you need more power, you remotely connect to a server that has as much power as you need.
(I say this as I'm currently on my laptop ssh'd into a Unix server to run cadence)
I’ll bet a sandwich that Xcode for iPad is coming within two years. That won't mean anything to the consumer market, of course, but it will be remembered as the point where tablet computing got Real.
Who is asking for it?
Also wake me up when iOS isn't an absolutely fascist walled garden.
I'm curious as to how the ergonomics of extended coding sessions on an iPad would work out. Hunching over a touch screen for eight hours a day seems like it could get horribly uncomfortable.
Is anyone out there using an Android tablet for full time coding work?
It's only surprising if we look at smartphones as phones... really they're just PCs, personal computers, the most portable version.
All other computing is either enterprise computers (in my experience, veeeery low-frequency, low-value business. Most people in offices are on computers with $150 of hardware that's years old and more than good enough for internet, email, office and basic database/administrative packages) and gaming (mostly separated into a console industry).
What's left really are students and some professionals who work from home. But I've got plenty of working friends who simply don't use computers anymore at home.
It's no surprise that mobile is eating consumption use cases as it means people can consume wherever they find themselves. But for the most part tablet UIs are just scaled up versions of phone UIs, even though individual apps may show more content laid out better with the additional real estate, multitasking and input don't work quite as well as laptops.
That demands a clarification because I write computer programs, which I consider to be 'productive', and I hardly need a pointing device. I wonder if people were equally sceptical of mice catching on.
> Any work involving accumulation of material from multiple sources (e.g. research) i.e. multitasking, is going to benefit from a larger screen form factor.
Give me multitasking, sure, but I very, very rarely have multiple windows of separate applications showing; I might just have a weird workflow, but it just doesn't demand it, and I like having individual windows maximised. Maybe I (think I) find it less distracting.
Whether the result will usurp mouse+keyboard remains to be seen, but I suspect it will. Body tracking just has more bandwidth.
Hindsight is 20/20: I remember a time (2012-ish) when a lot of people were banging on the "post-PC world" drum and anointed the iPad as the harbinger.
I fully believe a photorealistic experience can be had, and I fully believe that that experience will be able to exist at a reasonable price point, but I don't believe normal people will be interested in such an experience.
As a medium, it's not nice to use with other people, which is a huge part of the way we consume our media. I don't believe that normal people are going to ever socialize by looking at each others avatars. If you consider interacting with someone's avatar socializing, you should understand that is why people make jokes at the expense of World of Warcraft players. Once the novelty wears off, people aren't going to find it interesting.
It's not great for text either, and I don't think it will ever be better than a 4k monitor for text... Always bet on text. http://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/193447.html
I agree that AR could be huge. But VR gets way too much hype.
I was just discussing with my wife how noticeable it is that we loathe calling people except for a select few individuals. It is widely recognized younger generations prefer to text. However if their friends could have a visible presence next to them, I think there's something to be said for experiencing something and having that person "next to" you, even if virtually.
A recent A16Z podcast touched on this with telepresence/VR at a basketball game, and how even just having a basic VR representation of someone you were watching with seated next to you helped dramatically to improve immersion.
International tourism is available to only a very small percentage of the world's population. VR could be an interesting substitute that gives a travel-like experience to millions/billions of people.
Still, reading on an ipad is the best electronic reading experience imo. Kindle would beat it if you could display pdfs or math books reasonably. But an ipad beats the crap out of android for battery life; not necessarily screen-on time, but the silent drain when you leave it shut in your bag. When I leave my ipad in my backpack for a week, 1-2% battery is gone. My android tablet would drain in a week.
Desktop/laptop is disappearing from marginal computer users, and the slowdown in technology drove a product with a 33 month service life in 2000 to a 60-72 month life today.
It's not dead, just not growing in sales.
The grand piano didn't die when the keytar was invented, I don't think laptop/desktop machine form factors are in terrible danger either.
I don't have a position but was hoping for a big win this quarter. AAPL exemplifies a lot of the issues many companies are having because of exchange rates and I do not expect the broader market to do much better for awhile.
Especially with so much foreign debt in USD, a lot of companies are going to have a hard time paying off bonds and loans, hurting their ability to grow.
The largest quarterly profit ever recorded by any company wasn't enough of a big win? I don't want to soapbox too much, but there is something deeply wrong with capitalism when you can be more profitable than any corporation that has ever existed and it seems like a letdown.
> Especially with so much foreign debt in USD, a lot of companies are going to have a hard time paying off bonds and loans, hurting their ability to grow.
All the tech companies that have had big bond issues recently (Apple, Microsoft, etc.) are doing it because it's literally cheaper than repatriating their actual foreign earnings to the United States. As long as those foreign earnings continue to exist, borrowing money is arguably a better way to finance their day-to-day operations, especially when interest rates don't seem likely to climb much in the intermediate future.
As for bonds, I meant by foreign companies. Many bonds have been written with USD which are now becoming painful to payoff as their own currencies are not valued well against the USD.
Ah, I'm sorry, I misunderstood your post. But even so I'm not clear on why the indebtedness of foreign companies affects Apple all that much, except that it's a signal of the health of the global economy.
Estimation of ROI potential decreases, usually dramatically, when a company is suspected of having plateaued...
Of course it can. They didn't meet revenue estimates and advised that the current quarter is going to be much worse than expected. Wall Street [typically] values companies based on future expected earnings and there is constant pressure to increase growth. The same compound math that gives quickly growing companies lofty valuations works in reverse when your revenues are declining.
Apple continues to do the smart thing given the situation: buy AAPL.
As opposed to investing in more R&D? Or, perhaps acquiring start ups with exciting new products or technologies?
When you have $200 billion dollars lying around and your business is dramatically undervalued, it would be practically criminal not to buy some of it back, to save on dividend payments if for no other reason.
Who's to say Apple is undervalued? It's one of the most widely held companies and they have been so for several years. Tim Cook doesn't know what's going to happen in China. Their US sales were down in Q4 2015 and they are forecasting global sales to be down in Q1 2016. They may have been spending billions buying back shares at an all time high.
People value what Apple offers. A global depression could hurt the company badly. Anything short of that should allow them to keep making money. A bad Apple quarter is still lots and lots of money.
It's not that hard, their largest growth market (by far) is a huge question mark. It's tough to rely on a single product that is expected to be replaced every year. There will be a ton of pressure on the iPhone 7.
It was reported that the average selling price of iPhones was up by $3 and would have been up by $80 if it weren't for currency fluctuations.
You must know something that millions of other sophisticated people don't.
Relying on the stock price as a valid indicator of the value of a company is a fool's errand, regardless of the "sophisticated people" trading it.
I really wish someone enlighten me why, why spend 183 billion on share buyback and dividends when it has nearly no use for the stock price, and no real use for the company long term etc.
GE, for example, has been busy making itself smaller over the past couple of years. Google split itself up to become more focused and Sony just announced the creation of a separate PlayStation division.
Buybacks may or may not be smart. They bought a ton of stock last year when the shares were 20% higher than today. That's a rather expensive way to make your EPS.
I put faith in their meaning because Apple is valued based on them.
I do find it fascinating how the market works to adjust to new knowledge. The expectation or estimates of someone may not even have a bearing on what actually will happen.
You could almost see it as a delusion suffered by someone to have an estimate/expectation - as it will never be exactly reality - but it turns into an actual market event.
I used to think the same thing, but realized I was looking at it incorrectly.
A companies stock prices has a certain level of earnings growth built in. If future sales don't hit those assumptions, then stock falls.
Yes, the biggest quarterly profit is great, but that's yesterday's news. The market is always looking forward.
Why is this a surprise, let alone a knock against capitalism?
Share price at any given moment is based on available information, meaning the current price is based on expected phone sales, exchange rates, revenue, profits, etc. Those expectations were high going into earnings.
Really?
Current stock prices reflect the expected future cash flows and the cost of capital.
When new information changes the expectation of future cash flows -- like, say, a quarterly report that indicates growth is slower than estimated -- you'd expect the price to drop.
No one is saying that Apple didn't make a lot of money. No one said they aren't a great company. They're saying "the picture of the future just changed a bit."
So, what's wrong with capitalism? What's irrational here?
The entire price difference is VAT.
Since sales tax is applied on both state and local government levels it also simplifies pricing both nation wide and even state wide.
Walmart for example sets a price for product A that price is the same across all states (for this example I don't know if Walmart has regional prices to adjust for cost of living but I don't think so).
45 states have sales taxes these come at different rates, about 40 states also allow for local sale taxes meaning that local county can set up it's own additional sales tax this means that the end price is different between states and even within states with local sales tax collection.
As a consumer you know exactly what you are paying if the product costs 100$ then you pay 100$ for that product and you pay additional tax for the sale when you know your state taxes you 8% and your local county taxes you additional 4% you can hold them responsible for what your taxes are being used for, you can lobby for lower sale taxes and you can always move to a jurisdiction with lower sales tax.
The way the sales tax is collected also allows for more convenient exemption from sales tax especially in non B2B purchases a sales tax exemption certificate can be filled at any purchase and they will not charge you sales tax.
You can literally go online print the exemption certificate for your state e.g. http://www.tax.ohio.gov/portals/0/forms/fill-in/sales_and_us... go to a shop pay the sticker price and fill it out and the store will not collect the sales tax on that sale. Compared to how annoying it is to get VAT refunded and just how many caveats there are for getting your VAT back it's 100 times better.
In countries, where sales tax is federal and it's a flat 10% everywhere, I'm eternally grateful that I don't have to do mental gymnastics to figure how how much something will actually cost.
VAT is added to the price of the goods and is an intrinsic part of their price which means when they are resold VAT affects the final resell price even tho it's only collected on the initial sale. Say a car costs 50K, US uses sales tax Atlantia uses VAT both countries tax at 10% in the US one buys a car pays 50K for the car and 5K in additional sales taxes, a person in Atlantia pays 55K "sticker price" which includes VAT both paid 55K.
Both of them decide to sell the car after 2 years the resell price in both countries is calculated based on 50% of the original sticker price so in the US the car is sold for 25K and in Atlantia the car is sold for 27.5K.
Additionally since sales tax in most us states (iirc all but like 2 or 3) is only applied to tangible goods this means that most services tend also be considerably cheaper to the end consumer than in countries with VAT/GST.
But when I'm reselling something, I'm looking to capture as much as my cost (how much I paid for it) as possible, including the GST. You could even consider this that I'm just a middleman who is passing on the GST to the 'end consumer'.
The watch is still an iPhone accessory. That's going to take time to mature, and will eventually be a mass market product (or more likely the non-Apple equivalents if Apple don't figure it out). Too many technical problems for the time being, but things will improve.
In the meantime, Apple desperately need their next big thing, and it seemed incredibly obvious to me even years ago that a full TV was a no-brainer. TV interfaces suck, I mean they are just _awful_, have you used a modern TV? If you don't own one, try out the controls next time you're at a friend's house. Be prepared to feel alternating waves of anger and despair. It's so so bad, if modern TVs were websites they'd have flashing GIFs and a sign saying "Welcome to our homepage!" Actually, it's worse than that. It's like using a broken flash animation over a dial-up connection with the latency of relayed semaphore.
The fact that Apple _haven't_ yet launched a full TV makes me think they have completely lost the plot. Steve talked about it on many occasions, and he was absolutely spot-on (as usual) in his analysis of current products, so where the heck is it? The market is there, the disruption potential is unbelievably huge, the timing is perfect. Tim had it right when he predicted "apps" (interactive channels) would be the future of TV, but not in the ludicrous form of a mac mini intruding into my living room with cables hanging out the back of a TV, especially if it's wall-mounted. If there's one thing the consumer world does not need, it's more stupid third-party boxes plugged into the back of TVs.
Modern TV UIs are utter, utter, garbage. They're the dumb phones of the contemporary consumer electronics landscape. This is exactly the type of market Apple usually walk into and completely monopolise. How on earth have they not done this yet? Who doesn't want control of the biggest screens in the house? That are increasingly going to integrate with mobiles? That connect to Games Consoles, which you could... replace. I mean, for the love of god, the potential is ludicrous, what on earth is wrong with them?
Seems Apple didn't quite get their way this round, and as a result there are a lot of stale products out there.
[1]http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-is-frustrated-with-its-...
Why 'desperately'? They have a product line that generates a billion dollars in profit every five days. They have over $200 billion of cash on hand. That doesn't sound like a desperate situation.
Not Nicholas Carr, btw?
They have the biggest AppStore out there and yet they waited many years to let people playing with it on tv in a indecent way!
I'm not saying that a powerful AppleTV an improved AppStore market can replace PS/XBONE but has a great potential to compete with WII as iPhone did with Gamboy.
Talking about Nintendo. I don't yet understand why they bought Beats.
I would bought Nintendo or steal a contract from them to license their titles (Mario, Zelda etc... will run perfectly on a iOS TV device)!
Beats was a profitable, high margin business, the gaming industry - not so much. But with gaming moving toward mobile, why risk actually going into the gaming industry where success or failure is based on luck when they get a 30% cut of all money spent on iOS without any risk?
Imagine the money to be made when you can exclusively license major releases to specific brands of equipment in specific countries. The mechanism is there in HDMI to say "this Blu-Ray only works on Samsung TVs that are less than 6 months old." Imagine what Samsung would pay a studio for that! The mechanism is there to use computer vision to make sure you are actually watching ads. The networks must be salivating. Every copyright owner wants their own subscription service and player and geographical exclusive deals.
Apple would serve its customers, the consumers. The MPAA's members know that. Apple TV may be allowed to exist now, but not for long.
Imagine what I and probably several other potential viewers would pay for that. Not a cent.
The current movie and film situation already is pretty bad, unlike music which I can buy anywhere without DRM. I happily pay for things I enjoy and usually buy 10-20 albums monthly + streaming for preview purposes. With movies these days, I mostly can't buy them.
Furthermore I don't see how the end of DRM has been any problem for the music industry. If they made a mistake it was probably the shift to streaming.
The other issue is content. Would make sense for them to partner up with Netflix. Netflix has streaming rights (don't know how precisely streaming is defined in their contracts), and Apple knows how to make consumer devices that users want and will pay for.
Would be good to see an improved version of the Apple TV box (sans wires).
Once you get a HDTV, you keep it until it breaks - hence the failure of every new TV technology since HD.
The panel manufacturers are now building computers into all their panels. Unfortunately, they suck at software and do not have any services.
The service providers are also building computers into their service boxes. They are much better at software, and obviously have services.
Apple is a computer maker who is trying to become a service provider. Unfortunately for Apple, the existing service providers are not as dumb as the music industry was and will not give Apple their lunch.
Panels are a commodity with low margins and slow replacement rates. Which is why neither Apple nor service providers are trying to sell panels.
An important metric to note from there release however is that 66% of sales came from international markets.
Maybe sales were over-stated in the decade prior due to weakness in the US dollar? I don't understand the meaning of picking a favourable exchange rate to normalize the earnings.
For all we know, it's high dollar from here to eternity.
The reason for this is that, while Apple gets incrementally better, it at least does not tend to get worse. Compare with Windows 10.
Superficially, Apple tech is also a status symbol, especially among the young--but that is not to say that the cool kids do not buy Android phones, Kindles or Chromebooks. Less superficially, the target market of Apple is the luxury/privileged--and this segment of society does not consider advantages of upgrading and neither do they consider cost. It is the same segment of society (or at least significantly overlaps with the same segment) that will order avant-garde splats of "exotic modern art" food for exorbitant prices where others would consider frugality or nutritional benefit. It is the same market that all marketing targets: the clueless and impressionable.
I am not saying Apple devices are bad, I am saying they are heavily marked up far beyond the value that OS X and its exclusive applications add, and ergo the majority of its buyers are sufficiently well-off that they can afford to have the most fashionable computer. There is very little fashionable about having something from the previous season, let alone 2012 (despite the fact that a MBP from this year will probably still be sufficient for a web developer in a typical situation).
Of course, I am going to get lambasted if I do not also mention that OS X is (arguably) well-designed in terms of user interface. I say arguably because, personally, I do not see this glistening advantage--but I'm a developer, I want a command line and a modern web browser. What I do see is more effort put into the actual polish of the UI than Microsoft seems to invest in their OS.
It's no different to Chrome vs Firefox. Chrome is building up quite an impressive market share, despite the fact that its peers (excluding IE, as always, because apparently implementing the flexible box model was too difficult) can do most of the same things that Chrome can do.
In a similar vein, Chromium (FOSS Chrome) is readily available to use (yes, yes, dev builds, but they are remarkably stable and I've yet to experience an issue with a Chromium dev build) yet nobody uses it. While obviously discoverability is an issue (since Chromium does not advertise that it can be easily installed) I imagine that if you offered Apple hardware at a lower price without branding, it would sit in the branded Apple hardware's shadow. Especially given the angst already present among cool kids about phones which seem to imitate the iPhone's physical product design)
Well, this has been thoroughly anecdotal and I don't usually like to do that, but hey ho. If it's of value for someone to read and expand upon or criticise, why not post it
[0]: http://www.phonearena.com/news/Apples-iOS-eats-into-Androids...
> It is the same segment of society (or at least significantly overlaps with the same segment) that will order avant-garde splats of "exotic modern art" food for exorbitant prices
Those are unaffordable luxuries.
Jeep is a good comparison. Jeep's vehicles are probably not much different than other car makers, but there is a huge and well established aftermarket parts business. Jeeps hold value well in the used market.
I would be interested in the used value of Apple vs comparable Android products.
I find a dumb phone meets my personal needs, so I have little interaction with either product.
Edit: I agree that people in general upgrade their devices more often than they need to based on their use case. It would be interesting to know if Apple owners do so more often than Android owners.
They nailed the product planning, they just missed the collapse of oil and the high dollar.
Then again i can't help but wonder if he got help by Apple computers being a de-facto standard in media production.
I seem to recall that the first time i heard about iPod was because some artist or actor was seen with some white wires dangling from his ears. And that was back when you needed a Firewire card and third party software to get it working on anything but a Mac.
And as best i recall it was not in the tech section or some such.
No one else did that. Every other computer company allowed other motivations to trump human factors.
These days it's standard practice... although, few people know how to tell a good designer from a bad one, so they hire bad ones who do crap work and the institution never really trusts them and project managers end up running the show, mostly by allowing powerful employees to put their pork barrel projects on the schedule.
Steve Jobs could tell good designers from bad ones, he provided a wall of protection and power around them, and he fought like hell to keep the company solvent until the rest of the organization started to trust them. That's why they have devices people want to re-purchase year after year.
Apple manages to provide a complete and round packet. Sure, some aspects are better or more pronounced than others, but it’s not very uneven.
http://images.apple.com/pr/pdf/q1fy16supplementalmaterial.pd...
Japan has the biggest in percentage drop. China and Europe are up.
> Investors have long relied on Apple to deliver one crucial attribute: growth. Now they are beginning to wonder whether Apple’s days as a growth stock are coming to an end.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/25/technology/looking-for-sig...
$74.6 billion ---> $75.9 billion is not huge but it's noteworthy they've maintained positive numbers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/27/technology/apple-earnings-...
Yes, and they just advised that the current quarter is going to be less than Q1 2015. The NYT was correct.
I think the biggest thing Apple could do here is to change their app store policies to (re-)motivate existing developers and attract new ones. Letting prospective buyers test-drive apps, upgrade pricing, and better discovery come to mind. I have both a Mini and a Pro with Pencil and I love the hardware. The software is the problem though. Few apps make use of all the possibilities; existing apps will also have to be (re)written and possibly reconceived for the different form factors. It's a good sign that Phil Schiller is overseeing the app stores now, hopefully something will change this year.
Re: iPhone
Here, the obvious thing to do seems to produce a new 5S-sized model. 60 percent of 5S or older install base have not upgraded? Maybe there is a reason… Also, they could always try to go "down-market" and produce a greater variety like with the iPod to take further share from Google. I don't see the end of growth in this market, by far.
Re: currency effect
True, stronger dollar affects revenue or unit sales (where prices have been adapted) relative to previous years. But one could also argue that the years 2009-2014 were special in that the US weakened the dollar through QE, and perhaps Apple (and other US companies) enjoyed "backwinds" then rather than "headwinds" now. It looks whiny to me to say "look ma, 100 then is only 85 now". As someone said, "if my aunt had balls, she'd be my uncle". Macro gives and macro takes.
Also, the 214bn cash bandied about should be posed against the debt they took on to pay for the buybacks. So enterprise value not quite as low as suggested but I agree it's an undervalued company.
The price point for a device that works for those users is heading south of $100, while iPad has a 3x entry price.
My wife happily uses our iPad 2. I have about 3,000 users of iPad 3's at work who aren't clamor I for new stuff -- it's almost like a thin client lifecycle.
Some of my favorites:
* https://twitter.com/asymco/status/692106160376303616
Every person in the world that wants iPhone - already has one. With lack of killer apps in the last 2-3 years we are in mature market already.
Well not really. India is still an untapped market although most Indians cannot afford one right now but they will in the future.
Apple is going to open its exclusive stores in India this year.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-india-retail-idUSKCN...
> Luca Maestri, Apple’s chief financial officer, said the company is feeling the effects of a "very different" economic environment around the world. Apple is beginning to see "softness" in China, particularly in Hong Kong, he said.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-26/apple-fore...
I own a Moto G 3rd Gen. Swift, waterproof, stong-glass, bloat-free, removable battery, memory-upgradable, £150. Does the job I need it to do and, I'd imagine, the job most others need also. (I don't work for Moto, nor even remotely related to them).
I've been wondering what on earth iPhone and Sammy users are doing with their £400-£600 modern icon-ophones
Are people just in a trance?
(This from a renowned gadget freak who used to trade in smartphones every 3 months)
I've owned every model of the iPhone (some twice for loss/damage) up until the 6. The battery life just isn't acceptable for me (i'm a heavy user, granted, but apple hasn't made any improvements in that area for a long time - whatever power savings they've done has been put into making the device thinner).
And, the phone does exactly what I need for 1/3rd the cost. Plus I don't have to pay another £100+ for a decent amount of storage.
I think Apple (and other high end smartphones) are going to be really stuck with this. Even if they don't switch to Android, people just aren't going to switch phones as much as they did before. They don't offer anything compelling.
Same problem has happened with PC/Mac/iPad.
I wonder how planned obsolescence plays into this though. If every two years your phone is going to become dog slow or is not getting updates anymore you will have to upgrade. Good old days of Windows where you could run the same hardware for 3 different OS releases and upgrade the CPU/GPU for the 4th one! :(
I don't think, though, that it's an example of "planned obsolescence"... I suspect that phone performance multiple years out just isn't a design consideration, overlooked in a way similar to what was going on in the stylized "real estate prices can't drop" belief model.
When it's not considered, it's pretty likely to be terrible. When people start keeping their phones for several years, they'll get upset about aging issues, and graceful aging will become a design consideration.
Still leaves open the part about software updates and slowdowns due to updates. Apple for e.g. has better hardware quality than most but the slow downs due to major OS updates and withholding features from older devices definitely helps them with people upgrading every two years.
Nothing much but the camera was a nice upgrade from my moto g 2nd gen.
I stopped and looked at her and she had the new Macbook Air -- and she was holding the charging cord and she was pissed off because "apple changed the fucking charger AGAIN!!!" and was lamenting that the lew cable isnt a standard USB connector and she was in a lurch with no ability to charge her machine because the new cable was not compatible with anything her or her friends had on hand.
"I think it's dumb that Apple made my $999 pair of Beats useless when they removed my headphone jack, but... iPhone 7, man, gotta have it."