iPhone 5c
apple.com
apple.com
At least this time around, the MBAs didn't get to name it "iPhone Performa 551c".
I do think it's priced a bit high. I'm surprised it's not $50-100 cheaper. Maybe they have iPhone 4S inventory to get rid of (I don't understand why they're keeping an old phone with obsolete cables and screen format around otherwise).
Look at the iPod nano. When it came out, it replaced the very popular iPod mini with a completely different design and internals, and the price was part of the surprise. It certainly didn't leave room for comments like "same old tech sold at higher margin, safe design borrowed from Samsung, twice the price of the Samsung Yepp."
Also, Nexus 4 pricing is the exception, not the rule.
I also wonder if Steve Jobs would ever put a fingerprint scanner in an iPhone, make a "Gold" iPhone or keep the same hardware design for 3 consecutive iphones.
http://d35lb3dl296zwu.cloudfront.net/uploads/photo/image/139...
With this product alone, Apple has lost it's claim to good design.
We can also tell, from this hardware release, that Ive's redesigned IOS 7 was intended from the start to match the hideousness of the iPhone 5C as closely as possible.
The White iPhone 5C is OK (It's ridiculously expensive though), but the rest of those colors, and especially the cases, are bafflingly ugly.
I'm sure Apple will be successful as always, but if the world were just, the 5C would be a bigger flop than Microsoft's Surface RT.
The disappointment is that I usually look to Apple for inspiration, and lately, I don't feel it. I have been looking at other companies. Google and Tesla are increasingly inspiring me more often.
Lately, I feel more inspired by Nokia, than Apple, which is depressing to say the least.
Give one idea which you'd consider more innovative. Go on. Just one.
But to be fair it is innovative because of the size and form factor. But I expected more from Apple.
Innovation is a difficult thing to quantify, there wasn't likely to be an innovative step on these iPhones anymore than there was an innovative step to occur on the MacBook Air. The product line is now about absolute refinement. What's innovation? Having a 64bit processor in a phone is a new leap, but expected, but a massively improved motion tracker is innovative in it's own way.
Apple comes into new market segments/product rethinks on a very stretched out basis, from the iPod to the iPhone was a long period of time, they used that time to develop a product that was 'revolutionary' as it hit the market. They've not been in a hurry before, so why rush now? It wins them nothing, but could cost them everything.
My biggest problem with the latest form Cupertino is that I have not been able to find inspiration from their products. When I am looking for inspiration, Apple is simply not there anymore for me. It might for other people.
I guess the feeling that I am looking for when I am talking about "Innovation" is "Awe", "Inspiration", "Excitement". That is not there anymore when looking at Apple products.
This doesn't mean that these phone will be less successful, or worse than their previous counterparts. What it does mean, is that I will not be looking to Apple for inspiration in the future. I'll looking more to Google and Tesla.
And Apple didn't use to iterate over existing concepts. They were actually innovative. The iPhone for one. It created a pocket sized computer that can also make calls. Some people might think that There were others doing that before, but they weren't. Every other "Smartphone" before the iPhone was a Super Phone.
But I do acknowledge that there is no real innovation out of thin air. All innovations stand on the shoulders of others. This is all a matter of distance. How much distance is there between a Palm Treo and the iPhone? That is where innovations hits.
The new iPhone 5S has a very small distance compared to the Galaxy 4 for example. Apple is a company that has been really good at releasing innovations that are far from current technologies. Lately that gap is very very small.
The iPhone was innovative because it packaged existing concepts in a way that was inntuitive to use, previous smartphones (and I had many) were often the opposite of that. Apple still doesn't radically enter a product category on that regular a basis, I imagine next year or after we may see them do it again.
Apple doesn't talk about their r&d until it's a real project. It's really hard to compare the two.
What else needs to be redesigned to make it better? What other markets need disrupting? That's what Appe should be asking.
http://cdn.cnet.com.au/story_media/339291893/apple_ipod_2008... http://images.apple.com/ipod-shuffle/images/hero1.jpg http://cdn.slashgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/iPod_tou...
1) Crayola got there before Apple did.
2) Rounded corners patent.
With that in mind, would he have approved of holes in cases that only partially obscured the logo?
Nexus 4 is still a great device overall (especially for the price), but the iPhone build quality is seemingly worth the premium.
The front glass is fine, but the back is crap.
I owned an N4 for a year. I replaced the back and front glass on it. I have two kids, and my iPhones have suffered no end of abuse - with very little damage. The Nexus on the other hand - I barely knocked it against a table and the back shattered. I dropped it a few inches onto my work desk, and the front shattered. Taking it apart, I could see firsthand how flimsy and thin the case and glass are, especially the back. This is well documented on the web.
Granted it's my own little anecdote. I still think it's a great device otherwise - Android flies on it, and I far prefer Android to iOS. I doubt I'll buy another iPhone again no matter how nice the hardware is.
Regardless, very disappointing price point they have for all their phones. Apple apparently sees no need to compete on price.
Apple has never really put competing on price at the top of their priority list, whether it was phones, laptops, tablets, etc. It's important to them, but ultimately they make premium devices. They're at the top end of price, and that's where they want to be. Consumers have proven that they will pay for the Apple experience/infrastructure, so until that changes, I'm not sure why they'd change.
Not to mention that from an investor's standpoint, the price point has been great so far: people have spent money hand-over-fist on Apple products. There hasn't really been a need for aggressive cost-cutting yet.
They have basically introduced a cheaper alternative to old customers.
Apple's M.O. has been good/better/best, with increasingly older models making up the cheaper slots. Without a 5C, everyone would have expected 5S/5/4S. So with a 5C in the 'good' slot, that would imply 5S/5/5C -- but who would buy a 5 for $100 more, if it's barely distinguishable from the 5C?
And they couldn't have stripped a 5C down much further to build more separation -- at its core a 5 needs the internals it has to drive its display with the performance and battery life Apple aims for and advertises.
So as soon as we saw the screen dimensions and assumed 5C (vs 4SC), people really ought to have expected 5S/5C/4S.
Further, Apple's finally landed a few highly-sought-after carriers in the East, which will bring a ton of sales all by itself. So why would anyone expect them to take a margin hit pitching a more attractive $450 model (and at the expense of having any clear $550 offering) when they haven't soaked the early adopters yet?
Next year, the 5C will flow down naturally to the 'good' slot: 6/5S/5C. And its construction likely allows Apple to shoot even lower than the 4Ss $450 slot. That's when I'd expect to see Apple make a price play.
Perhaps even sliding everything down the scale a little, to make room for the rumored larger-screen iPhone at the new premium price point.
In any event, it will be interesting to see how they move forward from that. 6/5S/5C -> 6S/6/... 5SC?
Would the larger-screen variant flow down the way the larger screen of the 5 is simply becoming 'standard'? Or would it remain an essentially separate product that simply got refreshed at its existing price point and didn't have a deep bench of older models, ala iPod Touch?
Win7/FF23
Ok. It's quite jerky on my 4S.
The 5C doesn't make much sense to me beyond people that really want more choice in the color of their phone.
It's really hard to get the average smartphone buyer to understand the price isn't $100 vs $200, but really $2500 vs $2600 over two years.
If people spend that much, it is totally unnecessary. If you are going to budget $2500 for every two years, you could get an unlimited talk plan for $40/mo. and buy a $1540 phone every two years.
If you put it to most people that they should buy a phone for $1500 every two years, they would think it was excessive.
For example, the Galaxy S4 is $99.99 up front, and $21/month for 20 months totaling $519.99. At the end of 20 months your bill will be reduced by $21.
It will be too bad if people get their first smartphone because it is $100 instead of $200, but fail to realize that they are changing their 2-year mobile phone expenses from ~$1200 to ~$2400.
Illogically though, I suspect I would have less of a problem with what they are doing if they priced the 5s starting at $300.
The monthly plans cost the same, so the 5S versus 5C will cost you roughly $2300 versus $2400 over two years.
I think he means from a feature-phone plan to a smartphone plan.
I.e. people are more likely to get an iPhone 5C because it's cheaper and thus "only" $99 more than the free phone they'd get otherwise. But this is not specific to the 5C, since the same scenario was in place as soon as Apple started offering two kinds of iPhones at the same time.
The marketing angle is not cynical on the scale of, say, BlueHippo[1][2], or pay day loans, but it is different for Apple to be creating bad value proposition that will have to be dismissed as the customers' fault for not doing their research.
And sure, it actually is customers' fault, but I don't think Apple customers have had to watch out for being tricked by Apple as much in the past.
While, it is simple to say: you can use this phone for two years for $2500, or this phone for two years for $2400, and it will be obvious that you'd only choose the plastic one with half as powerful a CPU if you really like the colors, I don't think salespeople will be saying this in stores to potential customers.
The idea of a "budget" iPhone that looks like it starts at half the price, but actually only represents a 4% discount on the TCO, just seems like a departure from their past, and towards becoming a slimier company. (again, unless you just really like the colors)
[1] http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2007-05-20/the-poverty-b... OR http://web.archive.org/web/20070811233934/http://www.busines...
I will agree with the general premise that smartphone pricing in the US is fairly deceptive, with huge emphasis given to the up-front price of ~$200, and almost no attention paid at all to the whole-contract cost of ~$2,500. This is certainly intentional and intentionally deceptive. But, alas, it's not new, not even for Apple.
The industry seems ripe for disruption from someone, whether it's someone like T-Mobile or Apple/Google/Facebook buying itself a network and advertising in terms of the annual cost of ownership, perhaps even bundling the service with the device, like Amazon's Whispernet on a larger scale.
The biggest problem for me with what T-Mobile is doing is simply that their network coverage is not that great. Seems like it's kind of inherent when it comes to attempting to disrupt the industry: the smaller players will necessarily be those with the worst networks, and the large players with good networks have no incentive to make any changes.
Mostly I see this targeting precisely the US customers that would buy the old iPhone in years past - people that aren't interested in the latest and greatest features very well might be induced to upgrade by a fun color that stands out from their friends's iPhones.
Not worth it for you
I really don't think having fast, hassle-free internet access on the go is an edge case. Isn't that one of the main reasons people buy smartphones?
ha - I had 6mb dl on 4g w/ AT&T iPhone 4S and moving to the iPhone 5 w/ LTE made it 24mb dl. Overrated? Maybe for you but, whenever a company triples my service and doesn't charge me more money, I'm happy to take that deal.
[1] http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-19736_7-57602923-251/straight-t...
I am disappointed that the 5C isn't the free (subsidized) version though. The iPhone 4S is sticking around for that.
I'll bet as 5C production ramps, the 4S goes away in X months. Its in Apple's long term best interests to get everyone on the same screen anyway...
A fingerprint sensor, which will almost certainly replace passwords on every application once the API is exposed seems pretty innovative.
A chip dedicated to tracking movement for health / fitbit apps seems innovative.
A dual flash and other camera improvements is solid.
Smartphones are maturing. We might expect a holographic displays, non-touch 3d manipulation, tactile feedback, amorphous shapes, projectors, etc. in future versions. However the technology and battery life are not there yet.
Apple is somewhat behind in OS usability - particularly around notifications and inter-app communication.
Everyone wants to be wowed, and is bitching and moaning about the lack of innovation - yet has no ideas or suggestions for what Apple could do.
Personally I don't want much more out of my iPhone other than solidifying the hardware and interface improvements.
I guess it makes sense, profit margin-wise. But I was really hoping for a ~400 euro iPhone. That would have been something man... Instant panic at Samsung/Google/Microsoft. Too bad.
I doubt Apple will want to compete in the bottom of the market as there are too many phone manufacturers that are willing to sell phones at a loss.
According to who? I find never-ending post-launch criticism of Apple products that fail to live up to random Internet rumors tiresome.
I think iphone 5c was never intended to match prices of android phones, it was created to allow Apple to expand its market share in Chinese market. From what is suggested in media, one of the reason Apple had a hard time getting China Mobile on board, was the high cost of subsidizing flag ship iphones. By creating a mid tier phone Apple may have been able to convince China Mobile to carry iphone.
Tim Cook has been very bullish about Chinese market, and this move may turn out very well.
http://mashable.com/2013/09/10/things-iphone-5c-looks-like/?...
The fingerprint sensor seems like a very nice touch but I still don't see any NFC features (I guess apple isn't betting on this tech) which I love with the android phones. No wireless charging.
I just really don't see a killer feature in this phone that makes me want to upgrade. Am I missing something?
Then again, the phoneless-smartphone (pocket tablets? Media/app players?) market seems to have been eaten by tablets and cheaper smartphones, in spite of its popularity with the kids.
549 is not cheap just cheaper. Btw that's more the fault of the tech journalists and sites, not Apple.
I recall talk of purely internal, reprogrammable "SIM cards", so maybe that's the next step for Apple.
(IIRC this was the phone with the full size sim card)
It’s the iPhone 5 in a new case for €100/$100 less. That’s it.
Not to mention the Nokia 620, which is cheap (1700 RMB) but lacks the high res screen.
It will be interesting to see what the imminent Nexus 4/5 is going to bring. I suspect that it will dramatically improve on the terrible camera in the original Nexus 4.
I personally think it’s a completely appropriate price. All I wanted to make clear is that this is not a cheap phone. Doesn’t mean it’s an overpriced phone or somehow worse than the S4. I wanted to make its place in the market clear, that’s all.
The new Nexus 5 will likely start at $300 as the Nexus 4or5 did when it first went on sale a year ago. I'm not sure what market the iPhone 5C is targeting. On contract, you might as well buy the 5S.
I'm excited about the Nexus 5, but if the rumors are true that it'll be based off the LG G2, I have a hard time seeing how it'll be offered for $300 when the G2 is the fastest phone on the market.
Google presumably only dropped the price to clear out the inventory before the new Nexus phone is announced.
It's a fantastic device, but the new iPhone is a fair bit stronger. I'm curious to see what the N5 has in store, though.