They are lagging behind the Asian companies on the actual equipment: Chinese phones have far better battery capacity, camera sensors and screens are both sourced from competitors, Mediatek has caught up to them on the SoC side of thing. People here are musing the Air might be a foldable prototype, something Asian brands have been releasing and improving for, what, five years now.
On top of that, they have been struggling on the software side of things for quite some time. Stability is so-so. AI features don't really work. Plus, they pretty much stopped delivering new features in the EU.
To me it looks like the only thing Apple has going for it is their brand image in the USA and their locked down ecosystem. Might be fine to keep revenue steady but doesn't bod well for growth.
I personally went back to Android this generation when my iPhone 13 became unusable. I doubt I will be the only one making the switch.
I think Apple users are in denial regarding the current state of the market. Your comment is the second one apparently unaware of where Mediatek and Qualcomm currently stand compared to Apple.
"I personally went back to Android this generation when my iPhone 13 became unusable." - perhaps you're letting your situation affect your bias...
The Dimensity 9500 scores above the A19 Pro in AnTuTu 10 and Multicore GeekBench 6. A19 Pro has better Single Core Geekbench 6 results but that only around 10%. The Dimensity 9500 GPU scores are also better but that was already the case for the previous generation.
Apple used to have a significant lead on the SoC side of things. That's over. Both Mediatek and Qualcomm are competitive nowadays.
And before people come back explaining to me that it hardly matters because the A19 Pro is more power efficient, my current Chinese phone battery is 1.5 times larger than the one in the Iphone 19 Pro Max and I have more than two full days of use between charges, which are obviously significantly faster than on the iPhone.
[1] https://nanoreview.net/en/soc-compare/mediatek-dimensity-950...
Stability is fine, iOS dev is pleasant which is important, AI stuff is meh (notification summaries are great though) and Siri is getting Gemini. And the thing about the EU isn’t remotely true. Opposite if anything, since EU brought us usb-c and alternative app stores.
And the lock-in thing isn’t to be discounted. Emotional and practical as well. Once your files are on iCloud, photos as well, universal clipboard built in, AirPods automatic transfers, instant MFA fill, some apps lack android versions, the devices just geling… switching would for me mean dropping my watch as well, and losing out on a bunch of Mac side features. Androids can’t merely be “as good” or even slightly better, they would need to utterly kick iPhone's ass for years and years to even get me contemplating a switch.
If phones had gotten a Magnuson Moss style intervention 10 years ago, the platform dynamics would be totally different today.