Apple losing its supply chain mojo is a major threat
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
But please get iOS 11 back to iOS 10 in terms of battery performance because I'm afraid the .1 release this year is not even the one you should go for if you're conservative with upgrades.
We don't need a yearly release anymore, we need solid upgrades for both macOS and the mobile OS's. Just release when it's ready.
Who wants Air Pods and can’t get them? I decided to buy mine and they are amazing.
And I say that while I had a pretty bad time with previous betas…
It also doesn't matter if "we" don't need yearly releases (and I don't agree with the premise at all). The product needs them and therefore Apple needs them. If they're planning on releasing a new iPhone every year (they are) then there needs to be an accompanying OS release to make use of whatever the hardware features are. It also needs to be for all their platforms because so much of it uses shared technologies.
They had to offer an expensive phone to get new technology out the door at a reduced scale from a usual iPhone release, but now they're stuck with only one supplier who can make quality displays (and of course that supplier is also their main competition in phone hardware), and if the rumblings about the Face ID hardware being hard to make reliably in quantities are true, this could be an epic supply problem (for a company that knows well how painful epic supply problems are).
And if people really are holding off on an iPhone 8 in hopes of an X, whew. The good news for Apple is it's highly unlikely someone would go to Android just because the X is hard to find.
In fact, I got so used to these things that I have not noticed until this thread that my audio jack disappeared.
The only thing that I semi-regret, lacking the usual earbuds, is being able to use the clicker to take photos when I wanted a steady shot.
Did they, though? Is there a real replacement that people might have purchased instead?
Do you think someone else at Apple would have done a better job at getting 3rd party companies to manufacturer their parts faster? Sometimes, things take a while because they take a while, and burning through managers looking for someone who can roll out babies in 6 months instead of 9 just means you burned through all of your good managers.
Anyone who is willing to spend $1000 on an iPhone X, probably really wants an iPhone. They aren't going to shrug their shoulders and go buy an Android phone. They are going to wait until it's available.
The only people that care about delayed revenue are short term investors. It's not like Apple doesn't have enough money in the bank to meet payroll while supply catches up with demand.
The "but it makes the iPhone water resistant" is weak argument that even if true, could've had a simple manufacturing solution (ie. no need to have the bore go straight into body of phone where electronics are, have the bore cylinder sealed with only wiring running to logic board).
Tim Cook, much like Steve Balmer, is a brilliant operations guy that can make minute adjustments to product lineup to produce all sorts of incremental once-off sales. However, they both lacked a fundamental "product vision" that resulted in tactical gains and strategic losses. Apple once again needs a product visionary.
Right now on apple.com you can buy the SE, 6, 7, 8, and X from their website. Talk about a cluttered, friction inducing decision.
It's a good lesson to the rest of us.
The iPhone is already a expensive premium phone, why bother with incremental changes of the 8 when the cool and shiny X is right around the corner.
It's also strange to me how they offer two new phones with different feature sets. Usually when Apple introduces a new device with a controversial change (e.g. USB-C only on the 2016 MacBook Pro), they don't offer a updated device without that change. It can be perceived as a lack of faith in the new product.
The base model of the MacBook Pro is about the same price as the one in 2016, but it has 128GB rather than 256GB of storage. The 256GB model is now a couple hundred dollars more expensive than last years.
Who else is able to increase prices in technology? In spite of the complaints about their products, for people who think they are good enough and don’t think what competitors have to offer is good enough (in terms of frustrations rather than in terms of features/price) there aren’t alternatives, and Apple has a lot of pricing power.
SE: only small choice, starts at $349
6S: 449 7: 549 8: 699
6S+: 549 7+: 669 8+: 799
So each "normal" size is available at 3 price points. Horace Dediu has talked a lot about price segmentation and umbrellas in the past; this seems like a perfectly reasonable strategy, and I doubt people are all that confused about what they want. Pick a size, pick a price point, buy.
What size phone do I like - 4, 4.7, or 5.5?
How much money do I want to spend?
So it's hard to compare.
Also it's hard to know how much of the iPhone's sucsess is Steve Jobs, and how much of it this is a manufactured legend(and there's no doubt, there is one) - and the iPhone's greatness was due to many great people.And Apple is exceptionally good at hiding those details.
But one part of the legend is true though: he was a visionary - insisting on building a company around good design where a rare few did so. That paid of huge. With the iPod. And the iPod is a very important reason in the success of the iPhone.
Not really, because many of us remember the golden age of LCs before everything went downhill.
But also, my point is: if you put someone as skilled as Jobs, but without the track record, could he say no to investors wanting growth ? Could he give up such a huge opportunity as wireless ear buds ?
And even if, could he create amazing new features/products out of thin air ? on his own ? when the whole world have learned how be great at design ? IDK.
This is a LC, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_LC
After Jobs was forced to leave, Apple wandered into creating A/UX, Taligent, Copland, allowing clones and getting ready to close shop.
It was Jobs' return that placed some order into the whole Spindler and Amelio mess.
People always bring up the Magic Mouse 2 for instance. I think it's mainly a misunderstood design. But anyway: do people really think Jobs would have compromised the visual design of the mouse to put a charging port on the front of the mouse, all just to facilitate the 0.1% of time that someone needs to use the mouse while charging it? Have people completely forgotten about the hockey puck mouse, a design where Jobs was willing to give people carpal tunnel syndrome just to have it be totally round and cool looking?
You mention iCloud.. Do you remember MobileMe? A service that failed so spectacularly, under Jobs, that they just scrapped the whole thing and replaced it with iCloud?
Jobs also was actively against having multiple phones, specifically because of the confusion it causes in the customer. Apple now sells the SE, the 6s, the 6s Plus, the 7, the 7 Plus, the 8, the 8 Plus, and the X will be available soon. Jobs would've never allowed that, the SE would probably stay because it's a different size, but then it would be the 8, and the X and that's it.
Software quality especially, iCloud especially especially, has become abysmal. We're up to 11.0.3 now for patch releases, 3 patch releases after a major OS update is unheard of for Apple.
And all of those issues isn't even getting into the Mac line which has been brutalized under Cook.
I don't hate Cook, he's a fantastic businessman, but he has no vision whatsoever.
That’s some revisionist history there! That couldn’t be further from the truth!
First let’s take the obvious contradiction and look at iOS7. There was 7.0.3, 7.0.4, 7.0.5, heck, even 7.0.6!
Pretty much every major release had a X.0.2, so an X.0.3 is not that crazy.
While not a “major OS update” technically, the iOS 4.2 release got patched all the way up to 4.2.10. 10 patch releases, surely that’s when we should’ve said the end was nigh?
While 7.0.X and 4.2.X saw a large number of patch releases, all X.0 and pretty much all X.Y releases had a few patch releases so iOS11 is not an outlier in any way so far.
In reality, bugs will always exist, no matter how good the QA or engineering discipline. Personally, I’d rather see them fix early and often, as long as the patch release doesn’t introduce worse behavior.
As to 4.2, that was before my time. Not an excuse, just an explanation.
10.3.3
10.0.3
9.3.5
9.0.2
8.1.3
8.0.2
7.1.2
7.0.6
6.1.6
6.0.2
As you can see, going back to 6.x days, being at a X.Y.2 or higher patch release is really not that uncommon.
Along the same line, the 8, 7, and 6 are the same three generation of phones that Apple sold under the jobs era. The only difference is that the market demanded larger phones but still some people like really small phones (the SE), what are now considered regular size phones (6s,7, and 8) and their "phablet" equivalents.
Also, Jobs was also well aware of the "price umbrella". They are able to get in the midrange market with the perfectly capable 6s line.
And don't forget, under Jobs, they went from one model iPod to four - the shuffle, the Nano, the "classic" and the Touch.
IMHO, the thing that folks are not seeing here is that there's value in "making stuff" in having actual FABS, factories and manufacturing. Apple and other "fab-less" companies have been training their competition for decades now. There will someday be a comeuppance.
Samsung could, at some point in the future, decide to "fire" or at least throttle-down Apple as a customer at the worst possible time. What would you expect if you come to depend on your competitor as a key supplier?
There's no way this hasn't been planned / analysed before with risks understood by both sides.
A typical "operations guy" would never remove functionality from a product for forward-looking reasons.
Apple's never been shy about pushing forward and leaving legacy tech behind. If they hadn't made AirPods, I'd be similarly less-than-gruntled, but my AirPods are so much easier to deal with than a wired solution.
In both cases, the No. 2's were natural shoe-ins by the board, and in both cases the operations guys tinkered their way into a mess.
A decision to simply make the already fully working (32-bit) apps not working on iOS 11 made me keeping my current iPhone on iOS 10. Some apps I've paid and which do work simply don't have a 64-bit equivalent. Apple tries to force me to update the iOS with the prompts, with an automatic download of the update, but I still fight. I also see the 11 has battery problems. It took a while for 10 to stop draining it.
I think the workaround you propose might have the same effect because you're killing apps that could be using location and network in the background. Not sure how it works these days for apps that can access your location at any time. Do they at least have to be "running" to do that?
Despite the glowing reviews from friends it still bothers me that it seems like a push for AirPods though.
I would happily have a slightly thicker iPhone (or non-waterproof, or whatever the reason was) to be able to listen to music for more than a few hours at a time again (among many other daily conveniences that I'd lose by upgrading).
- Anyone who already has a 6S or later can save money by not buying a new phone. Before this year, the way phone contracts worked is that you were paying for a new phone whether you bought one or not, so it would never make sense not to buy one.
- No B71 or 4x4 MIMO support, meaning that next year's phones are going to be the ones you actually want, whereas these phones don't really offer any advantages over the 6S.
So unless you dropped your phone or something anyway, I don't really see any compelling reason to upgrade.
I'm not sure a statistically relevant number of people care or even know about those technologies.
Just wait until next year, we’ll see more sales after these features are added.
Shortage of OLED has been a known variable for a long time. Back in 2010, I bought a cheap ZTE phone released in UK as Orange San Francisco. Because of the OLED shortage, the phone had two variations in UK - the OLED one and TFT one. People had to look for special serial numbers to get the OLED model.