Apple: the problem for decreased sales is Chinese problems!
Also Apple: Removes headphone jacks, quadruples prices, sues people fixing their phones, removes fingerprint reader, nerfs nfc, replaces screws with pentalobes
Also Apple: Removes headphone jacks, quadruples prices, sues people fixing their phones, removes fingerprint reader, nerfs nfc, replaces screws with pentalobes
As a show of solidarity with Huawei, or because they felt that Apple had something to do with it?
If you buy the XS Max with 512 GB of storage, unlocked (which happens to be $1,449.00, by the way). iPhone XS starts at $999.
Edit: Yes in case Apple is ridiculously expensive in many part of the world.
I was given prices in dollars, so I assumed that the poster was talking about the US.
And it is not like this is the first time Apple has been under attack anyway. If you are carrying out Business in China with any sort of Government involvement ( which is pretty much 90%+ ) you need to use a phone from Chinese brand to prove your loyalty.
That's an absurd price for a phone. A brand new OnePlus 6T is a third of the price.
Their new laptops are also insanely priced. The 2018 Macbook Air is more than 2x the price of the 2017 Macbook Air.
I don't know what kind of pricing strategy this is, but it has turned me completely off the company's lineup.
The 2018 MacBook Air isn’t 2x the price of a 2017 Air in the United States. First of all, the 2017 MacBook Air was actually a 2015 MacBook Air with a tiny bump in clock speed. Retail price in 2017 was $999. Retail price in 2018? $1199. The 2018 has Touch ID and retina which the 2017 version didn’t. That’s not even close to “2x the price.)” The tariffs pre-2018 were 15% on computers, now they are over 17%. Then there is an 18% sales tax on top of that! So 35% of the MacBook Air cost in India is just taxes. That means the government of India makes as much “profit” on a laptop as Apple does for making the damned things. Perhaps have a chat with your government about those high tariffs? Apple didn’t double the price, your taxes went up.
I've been using a OnePlus 5T and honestly can't fathom any reason why I would want a faster processor any time soon. And the OnePlus 6T is even faster.
I'm just saying that charging people $1500 for a phone and then wondering why they're not buying any is a dumb strategy.
The extra $400 - 40% more - just makes it unaffordable.
I have no idea what the price is in India, but a 2017 MacBook Air is $999 in the US, while the 2018 model is $1199. Not quite "2x the price".
I believe this tax is actually decided by the Indian government?
Previous gen Macbook Air is INR 65,000 (~$920)
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> removes fingerprint reader
…and replaces with Face ID. It's not like they just completely removed biometric authentication.
> nerfs nfc
As far as I'm aware, they've only improved their NFC support as time goes on.
> replaces screws with pentalobes
iPhone has had the same screws for years.
…that's not Face ID?
With my phone I want to unlock it without taking my eyes off the road so I can use voice recognition to map my destination or make a voice call. The absolute last thing I want to screw around with while driving is looking at my phone.
This isn't remotely close to being true. Face ID and Window Hello (I think that's what it's called?) are quite different, technically.
> Quite frankly the face unlock on the Surface makes more sense than on a phone due to nature of the device. It's larger, more likely to be used at a desk while sitting that type of thing.
Again, I urge you to actually use the thing rather than trying to come up with a mental model of why it's horrible because of your experience with the Surface.
> With my phone I want to unlock it without taking my eyes off the road so I can use voice recognition to map my destination or make a voice call.
1. You don't need to unlock your phone to do this.
2. You can disable the setting to require looking at your phone to unlock it.
2. Not looking at the phone does not change that my face has to be within view of the phone. Honestly, this comment makes me wonder if you have used the Surface face recognition. You never have to look at it; it's actually pretty good, but it is still my personal preference to use a pin. Touch ID is more convenient than facial recognition IMHO.
To be clear, I never said it was horrible, I was stating that it is not an improvement FOR ME. I love the fingerprint reader. This whole topic is about Apple's sales declining. Quite frankly, I wouldn't have upgraded from the 7 to 8 series if my iPhone 7 hadn't broken. The 7 was "good enough". At this stage the "improvements" to the iPhone are incremental and not enough of an improvement to be worth the cost of upgrading; clearly, others agree with me or iPhone sales wouldn't be on the decline.
I haven’t used wired headphones in over four years and nothing will make me want to go back to them.
I don’t miss the headphone jack at all.
I've argued this point before, and wasn't particularly in the mood to discuss it again. There are multiple reasons I didn't bring it up:
1. I use an iPhone SE, so I'm not really qualified discuss this. I do exclusively use AirPods now, though, so I have the feeling that I wouldn't mind the lack of a headphone jack now.
2. The removal of the headphone jack was not done in a vacuum; it's pretty obvious that if there was no drawbacks, it would be great to have a headphone jack in my iPhone. But we live in a world where tradeoffs exist–otherwise, my phone would have every port that ever existed in the last thirty years.
That said, removing or not including certain features does make it less of a general purpose device that is less useful to more people. Apple has been ragged on from day one for not including some form of SD card support, an FM tuner and a removable battery. To this day there are people that will refuse to buy a phone without those features.
They might not be strictly necessary features, but they still sell phones, or at least make them viable to the kind of person that demands them, but Apple still sold hundreds of millions of iOS devices without those features.
Then they removed the headphone jack too. To a group of people that were never concerned about the lack of removable media, a radio tuner, and a removable battery and bought iPhones for years, they suddenly lost one feature they actually used and were told to buy a single instead.
I mean if your car’s Bluetooth radio sucks, or you have a very nice pair of wired headphones you like using, or you simply want to be able to plug your phone into a random audio source at some party, being told to buy a dongle instead sucks. It’s just one more tiny little $10 widget which will get lost or worn out or rendered useless in a laundry mishap.
Apple made a trade off, but in this instance, it does not seem like a worthwhile trade off and it does hurt their image when they make some seemingly anti-customer choice like this. Even people that weren’t personally affected and didn’t mind shelling out for a set of AirPods or W1 Beats might change their perception when enough shit hits the fan and is flung in the face of those around them.
Interestingly, my AirPods seem to be defective and this is something that mine won't do ;)
> Apple made a trade off, but in this instance, it does not seem like a worthwhile trade off and it does hurt their image when they make some seemingly anti-customer choice like this.
Every Apple device is a tradeoff. It just so happens that the removal of the headphone jack was a trade off that a larger-than-usual number seem to have taken issue with, though it's not clear that this is a perspective shared by the majority of iPhone users.
Ah! Of course! Sadly there is no warranty replacement for your problem. ;(
Kidding aside, Siri required some work to understand and shape into a useful tool, but it was worth it to me to make sure I never pulled out my phone without the intention of doing the specific task I pulled it out to do, and only those tasks that require me to look at the screen. Phone calls, playing podcasts, audiobooks and music, and setting alarms, timers and reminders basically work. Haven’t found a way to do Calendar appointments in the level of detail and granularity I prefer though, so I just continued doing that mostly on my laptop.
Not for everyone, but once I figured out how to make Siri useful after years of not using it at all, it was the killer app for AirPods. Still won’t tick nearly all the boxes on anyone’s Butler-in-a-Box wishlist though.
> Every Apple device is a tradeoff. It just so happens that the removal of the headphone jack was a trade off that a larger-than-usual number seem to have taken issue with, though it's not clear that this is a perspective shared by the majority of iPhone users.
I’m not at all disagreeing that every Apple device is a tradeoff. I don’t think I even implied that it wasn’t, what I’m getting at is that on top of the other trade offs they have already made, that this additional trade off, for the reasons they did it, may not have actually been a good one, and I don’t think it has to affect a majority of users to still be a bad tradeoff.
If, and I’m pulling this number from my ass, but if 20% of your existing install base is unhappy with a decision you made on a model they would otherwise have no problem purchasing, but 80% are at worse indifferent, then you’ve still pissed off 20% of your customers.
It might be 15%, or 10%, or 5% or something even lower, but with a customer base as large as Apple’s, that is still a lot of people that may not be buying iPhones the next time they do, or might but will be dissatisfied, and express this dissatisfaction to their social groups. It still tarnishes the brand. If this were the only thing that tarnished Apple’s brand in recent years it might be fine, but it’s not and the removal of the headphone jack didn’t happen in a vacuum.
I’m not saying it isn’t an acceptable loss, but it doesn’t look great when you’re removing additional features on top of the ones you just never had.
Or to put it another way, just because you and I don’t care about something in our corner of the world doesn’t mean there isn’t a whole world out there that Apple is, theoretically at least, trying to sell phones to.
This is some very US thing.
Here is my story: i left my cruise cabin in the middle of the night and went to the bow. In shock I discovered it was almost as bright as a daylight - oh my the full moon looks beautiful. I was alone and played the titanic scene for a monent. Imagine me alone, warm summer night, carribeans, full moon and cruise ship gliding through quiet ocean. Perfect moment hard to repeat with all these circumstances. I immediately reach out to my pocket to put headsets on just to listen to some Leonard Cohen’s songs. Imagine my shock when I realized I forgot the iphone’s jack adapter ;(
Cleaning up crumbs?
Almost every other company has followed Apple’s move and removed the headphone jack. This really isn’t much of an issue, especially as wireless becomes more ubiquitous.
Do you actually think the average Apple consumer gives any thought into the type of screws? Really?
Also when laying on the couch your face is often squished making it not recognize you. I also like to use my devices in landscape orientation meaning that the camera used for FaceID is obstructed. Landscape orientation with TouchID put your thumb right where it needed to be to unlock the device!
With TouchID I basically never reverted to using a passcode, and now with FaceID I’d estimate it’s 20% of the time I use a passcode and another 20% of the time I have to reposition my face or my hands after it fails in order to get it to work.
The only benefit of the new mechanism for me is eliminating bezel space require for the fingerprint sensor. That’s a big benefit, but it comes with very annoying first world problems, which are especially annoying since prices for these devices have gone up so much recently.
As someone with two pairs of AirPods, the lack of a headphone jack also annoys me. Most commonly when in a car with and aux jack and no Bluetooth. Bluetooth devices also require charging one more battery. High end earbuds and IEMs also require a 3.5mm jack and IIRC it might not even be possible to do high end audio via BT due to how it works for audio(something about the audio getting recompressed).