iPhone SE and the Commodification of the Pocket Computer
nadim.computer
nadim.computer
My $150 Moto G7 is much slower but I don't really notice. It has a taller screen that's better for reading websites, emails, books, etc, a headphone jack, and SD storage for my music/videos.
So as far as "commoditized pocket computers" go, welcome to the party, I guess.
In other words, the market is working as intended, allowing consumers to optimize for the factors that matter to them :)
I bought the XS and immediately returned it due to the size (too big for one hand only texting) and no Touch ID (now Face ID while wearing a mask seems an even worse UX).
I've kept and been happy with my iPhone 8 Since September 2017. Previously I bought a new iPhone each year! Though finally replacing it with the new SE in a week or two.
Maybe the difference matters to some people in some environments, but for what I use a phone for, it was borderline indistinguishable.
It's about on par with the iPhone.
Why are you expecting Android phones to come with a 4-5 year warranty? The iPhone comes with a 1 year warranty
I just wanna be able to read a message while I'm outdoors. Older LCD's would really struggle here.
So improved CPU which most people do not car about, old design and not great camera.
And many of the same people who don’t give a shit about the CPU don’t care about the design and not-great camera either.
I'm definitely not aware of many Android phones at this price point that one can expect to get security updates, much less feature updates, 4-5 years into the future.
Since the iPhone 4s, every major iPhone has received at least five years of support.
The sole exception was the first attempt at a budget iPhone, the 2013 iPhone 5c, which only got four years of updates.
A lot of the attack surface (the Play store itself, messaging apps, browser, system webview, ...) keeps getting updates for many years after the end of system upgrades delivered by the OEM.
The camera is best in class. It's a single less system, but a remarkable one.
And judging from Apple's past experience and strategy, they are unlikely to lower the price any further. The iPhone SE was $399 in 2016, $399 in 2020, and likely still be $399 in 2024.
The true commodity Smartphone segment still has a long way to go before reaching iPhone SE quality. And unlike Cars which has comparatively minimal advance, you can still use your car from 2000s, your 3G phone will likely not be getting much bandwidth due to Spectrum reframing.
But there are plenty of other developing countries other than china/india, which means the number is still being dragged down. You'd need to get ASP for android phones in US or western europe only.
But there are a substantial and growing market of non-contract and prepaid that are under $300.
I dont have Data from Western Europe, but in terms of iPhone usage it is considered to be low compared to US, and they have official access to Chinese Brands from Huawei, Xiaomi, BBK. Would not be surprised if the actual distribution ( excluding tax ) would be even lower.
As someone who hasn't cared at all about any of the iphone tech advances of the recent past, a relatively cheap phone with 64GB of space and a hand held size is great.
I have started thinking pretty strongly about buying an SE (2020) and trading back my 11 Pro Max based solely on Touch ID. I've missed having Touch ID for a while but I like the much better screen and cameras on my 11...but considering masks in public are very likely to be a thing in North America for a while, it's worth my considering.
My hope is that Apple figures out how to do multiple faces on Face ID, like fingerprints on Touch ID, so I can tell it "this is me" and "this is me with a mask."
Additionally, would it lower the amount of information the sensor can gather to the point where someone else's face with a mask would trick it into unlocking?
(Before anyone says winter, you can get gloves that work on touch screens and therefore would allow you to enter your passcode).
2. Yes, because glancing at my unlocked phone will show me if anyone tried to contact me via any of the various messaging apps (ugh). Then I know if I should take my gloves off to read and respond.
Seriously though, we long ago reached the limits of audio and stopped innovating there. We're close to that for 2d screen visuals (8K, full visible colour spectrum, etc).
It is neat to think about what being able to reproduce media at the limits of perception might be.
One thing which I think might happen in the next 30 years is advanced cochlear implants or maybe something that directly stimulates the auditory nerve, while disabling the borne with hearing machinery. This sounds a bit cruel, but think of it: running everything through a digital layer of noise filtering would make so many things easier. Society wouldn't have to care how loud something is. The people not opting for the technology will have a hard time enduring all the noise...
The stapediuus regulation capacities are quite limited, and we already constantly wear headphones.
If we had such technology such that humans wouldn’t care, the environment surely would. Noise pollution is a problem for the animal kingdom: communication and noise levels of whales, birds, bats, etc.
I arrived at this view because humans are a visual species. Even if you can build a digital camera that's as good as the eye or better (currently you can't, at least not at the size of the eye), the task of processing the data so that it can be used for nerve stimulation would be beyond any computers at reasonable sizes. On the other hand, we can build really good microphones that are more sensitive than human ears and can do a ton of processing that makes such a device worthwhile.
The optic nerve has 770k-1.5M axons while the cochlear nerve has only 30k. Over a magnitude of a difference.
So I believe that a augmented reality kind of experience with devices built under your skin will be limited to ears first, simply because it's easier to pull off technically. Everything else would still have to travel through your pupils in some fashion. 2OEH8eoCRo0 was talking about technology under your skin. Google glass, vr glasses, or even lcd screen contact lenses wouldn't fall under that definition.
iphone 6s vs xs speed comparison is only about 5% slower in actual usage and often is actually faster. Not very compelling.
The only difference between the devices is that the 6S does not have cellular service. Other than that distinction, all apps and settings on the devices are identical.
The only exception I see whereby the 6S is faster is with the Box.com app when it syncs the files I've marked for offline use. I have no idea if that's because of differences between the phones or something with the app.
Think about that for a second. The 6s has a slower cpu, gpu, disk, wifi than the xs, yet it often performs faster? Maybe this means there's something wrong with the benchmark. Does 6s some sort of secret sauce that they forgot to add in the xs? Maybe there's something that they're not accounting for? Maybe the 6s running with a hot cache and not the xs? Maybe the xs was recently used and was hot?
Also, I don't get the popularity of this style of benchmarks. They're not representative of actual usage. Cold app launches account for maybe 1% of my smartphone time.
What do you spend time waiting for on your phone? I dont spend much time waiting fo my phone on my SE daily driver, do you? App loading time is still the most common thing I can think of. What else would you suggest they test?
That's not surprising as 80% of the time the phone's waiting for the network, so the benchmark basically turns into a latency/speed test and any performance difference gets buried.
>What do you spend time waiting for on your phone? I dont spend much time waiting fo my phone on my SE daily driver, do you? App loading time is still the most common thing I can think of. What else would you suggest they test?
Maybe it isn't an area that we should be concerned about? I mean, you don't see this type of benchmarks in laptop/desktop reviews. You might see it in SSD reviews, but that's because there's literally nothing else to test in terms of real life workloads. Of all the reasons to pick one phone over the other, shaving 15s off each day isn't one of them.
the hardware is commoditized and sold at lower price points specifically so that the addressable market for services is expanded and revenue can be harvested from those offerings.
note that services and secondary devices are the parts of apple’s business that’s driving its growth, not hardware.
It’s a model only Apple can really pull off right now with their wide product range, vertical integration of services, etc.
I'm not sure this is what Apple's going for. What I've heard from family and friends about the SE is that they'd buy it in order to save some money while still getting modern hardware with long-term software support. I kind of doubt that the market of people looking for a $400 phone are too interested in spending another few hundred on an Apple Watch or an iPad.
Apple doesn't like to create confusion around which product is right for users. The clear iPhone SE buyer is the lagging customer who, when buying the iPhone SE is seeing a technology upgrade given how far back they are. They don't want to pay the extra $$$ to skip too far forward into the future.
The camera is not as good as the 11 or 11 Pro. Very good, yes — and even better using third-party camera apps that let you bokeh non-faces. But still not the latest and greatest.
Plus, is it really a computer if you don't get to install and manipulate the file system however you want?
My impression is that the opposite is actually the case. Google has about 4x the users but the App Store takes in almost twice as much revenue.
I don't have any good sources to cite, that's just my impression. The first few google results for "ios vs android software revenue" seem to support it.
edit: maybe you meant Google captures the majority of Android software revenue. I forgot there were alternative Android app stores.
On Android, Google makes money on the apps, and some in-app-purchases, but the OEM makes money on the device.
I think that, in addition to underlying architectural flaws, helps explain why OEMs are so disinterested in supporting phones for more than 1-2 years. LG only makes money when you upgrade, whereas Google and Apple make money every time you buy an app. It’s in LG’s interest to sell you a $300 phone every two years, whereas it may be in Apple’s interest to sell a $400 phone every 5 years and make up the difference on software and services, and hope enough people are enticed by the new shiny to upgrade more often.
https://www.counterpointresearch.com/apple-continues-lead-gl...
Apple takes most of the profit in the sector, but the other companies are profitable, at lower levels. Eg, even the low end Chinese manufactures: Chinese smartphone brands operate at low-profit margins, but better than in previous years, even though they are expanding outside China and also penetrating high-tier price bands.
Apple also lowered the price to $349 at some point in order to continue enticing new purchases, partially compensating for the lack of spec bumps.
But, I don't think a lack of spec bumps indicates they aren't serious about a given market. The iPhone SE appears to be a way to reuse the manufacturing and tooling that was developed for a given multigenerational style for a few more years, further amortizing the cost and providing a value-oriented phone for customers that want this.
If you watch some videos[0], you'll see that the original 2016 iPhone SE is still surprisingly usable in 2020, and it is rumored to get iOS 14 as its last major update.
If they were "not serious" about that market, the original iPhone SE would've been unusuable a year ago, with no clear upgrade path for its users, leading to user pain and confusion. This is not the case at all. Users got along just fine, and the new iPhone SE has launched with plenty of time to spare before things become either painful or unsupported.
[0] example of one video that shows how the new iPhone SE is measurably faster, but the old one is still perfectly usable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgwtGmyTDiY
As a "not a phone person", I think even $400 for a phone is nuts. The (first) iPhone SE is still perfectly usable (why would that be surprising?), and doesn't lag on anything I do. I don't see why I'd need to upgrade. That video seems to confirm that newer phones are really only faster at things I never do (games, video encoding, benchmarks).
It's incredibly how performant the old iPhone SE still seems to be.
The real “clear upgrade path” is to a more expensive phone. Or as you said, not upgrading for 4ish years.
I interpret it as a shift more towards software and services and away from hardware. They are realizing that phones get better and better and once they are this good people will keep them for longer (while still buying software and services like iCloud).
It’s musical chairs and Apple knows the music is about to stop and want to expand before it does.
I wonder if Apple has given thought to something like VoiceID. You see this in Star Trek when an officer gives an access code, and in many other sci-fi shows.
Or, RetinaID which goes based on a scan of your eyeball.
Or even some combination of these in case one is obstructed.
Edit:
Dumbfounded that people don’t think the most valuable company in the world doesn’t have a plan for economic downturns. This model reuses parts already made. Somehow it’s coincidental it shows up right as the downturn does?
The iPhone SE seems to be a way for Apple to make the most out of the existing supply chains from older devices (same body as the iPhone 6S, 7, and 8 for the most part). They did it for the previous SE (iPhone 4, 4s, 5, 5s models were very similar). They just slap some updated components from the newer models into it and it's a perfectly capable smartphone. It is also probably relatively cheap for them to create an iPhone using older parts compared to the R&D involved for entirely new devices and components.
It just so happened that the release of a budget iPhone coincided with a global crisis impacting the economy.
iPhone SE: $399/$449/$549
iPhone 11: $699/$749/$849
iPhone 11 Pro: $999/$1149/$1349
iPhone 11 Pro Max: $1099/$1249/$1449
That’s four models from $399–$1449 with 8 price points within that $1050 range. If a customer is set on some feature that’s at an undesirable price with current models, prior generations of phones are there to offer alternative compromises.
The whole production line, capacity and forecasting started way earlier than the "downturn". Reusing component doesn't mean it can be done within weeks especially when you are talking about tens of millions of additional units.
Not to mention the iPhone SE 2020 has been known to be in the work for a very very long time, and it is the exactly same strategy used in the previous iPhone SE in 2016.
The only surprise for me was that they continue to use Intel modem and not Qualcomm X16.
https://newsroom.intel.com/news-releases/intel-completes-sal...
I bought it and later discovered it has wireless charging. I thought, wow, this is quite the play. This phone is way underpriced.
My pet theory is that business customers loved the original SE even more than consumers did. I hope I'm right, because then we might see an SE 3 as soon as the SE 2 nears its end-of-life.
So, you think Apple predicted the pandemic (and thus the economic downturn)? Come on. This phone has been rumored for a long time.