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Apple CEO Tim Cook Calls Reports That iPhone XR is a Flop 'Bologna'
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Or maybe their products have been so good in the Cook era that I haven't need service? The last issue I had was my Thunderbolt Display crapping out on me and they fixed it for free. I can't remember if that was Jobs or Cook era, though. I haven't needed service on any Apple product in years.
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I am a little surprised that you can't afford the XR, which is a new offering in the line-up. The base iPhone 6 with 16GB storage retailed for $650 at launch. The 6+ with the same storage retailed for $750. The base XR with 64 GB retails for the same $750 with a larger display and more storage than the 6+. I don't really see a huge price increase that would significantly impact affordability if you were able to buy new iPhones in the past.
Even if you compare the XR to the iPhone 6, with a much smaller display and much less storage, the XR is only $100 more. If you keep the XR for 3 years, that's about $30 per year, or about $2.5 per month......a cup of coffee at Starbucks every month.
In fact, the 16GB of storage on the iPhone 6 was almost unusable even 3-4 years ago, so you would have had to shell-out at least another $100 to get to 32GB.....which would put the 6 and XR at the same price.
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Well you would notice the speed bumps every year until now, and there was always some new killer feature like Touch ID that was desirable. I would just sell the last phone and pay a little out of pocket in the long run but that isn’t as feasible anymore.
If I use my Xr for five years, that is .30 CHF per day for me.
If I buy a MacMini for 2500 and use it ten years, that's about 0.68 per day.
In both cases, the assumption is that the device does not break before that point.
Same with the display. A 1300 CHF display, used for ten years is 0.35 per day. For each display.
Repairs etc. not factored in.
It adds up. It's not a 2nd rent or what you pay for leasing a car (or the deprecation of a purchased car). But you don't want this sum to go up indefinitely.
If I buy a MacMini for 2500 and use it ten years, that's about 0.68 per day.
In both cases, the assumption is that the device does not break before that point.
Same with the display. A 1300 CHF display, used for ten years is 0.35 per day. For each display.
Repairs etc. not factored in.
It adds up. It's not a 2nd rent or what you pay for leasing a car (or the deprecation of a purchased car). But you don't want this sum to go up indefinitely.
And a dozen other factors that you conveniently ignore to advance your baseless agenda.
I was just comparing the introductory retail prices at launch for new offerings. There are always going to be deals for either device during the holidays and later in the year as you get closer to the launch of the next year's phone.
Said another way; The issue is not with Apple's retail pricing when compared with prior new offerings. The issue is that you found better deals on the 6 after launch.......this must have been some time after launch or with trade-in because there was significant demand for the larger screen 6 and 6+ when they were first released.
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So Apple will get right on apologizing and replacing all the new iPads that got bent, shortly after purchasing them, right?
The iPhone XR looks like a great phone. Between that and the Plus i find little to justify the extra cost. Mind you if you halved the price Apple would still turn an obnoxiously large profit. I cant justify Apple anymore. Not untill Apple has a wake up call on their price gouging.
I don’t know anyone an Xr but I’ve seen a few Xrs on my commute. Difficult to tell the Xr, Xs, X, Xs Max apart on a packed train unless you see the colour. I’ve seen 2 red a blue and a coral for definite. I see a lot of the notched iPhones every day though.
If you cut the price of the XR in half, Apple would still be making a huge profit? Really? How did you come to that conclusion? The typical margin on Apple products is about 35%. Please don't reference sites that try to estimate the Bill of Material costs.....that is not how profit is calculated. The truth is you and I have no idea what the profit margin is on the XR because it is proprietary information.
I’m not a camera person by any means but I do notice the quality is better than the X. Sorry not too keen on the details but I do indeed notice better highlights and shadows, but I’m not sure if can tell if it’s a major improvement or not.
First of all, Jobs didn't leave. He was fired. He would have bankrupted the company back then. Second, Apple leadership is most definitely NOT following the same strategy. Back when Jobs was fired, he wanted to kill the Apple II and go all in on the Mac. He was crazy clueless about business. Cook is the opposite. I'm not going to argue that prices have gotten too high, but the Scully/Spindler/Amelio years were all about stagnation and a lack of innovation. You can't say that about today's Apple. Their A-series chips are the envy of the mobile world. No one has anything close to FaceID.
Frankly, I don't think most people, even self-professed "supporters" acknowledge all of the little innovations that make the Apple ecosystem so compelling. And when these so-called "supporters" complain about Apple's "lack of innovation", and one asks them to point out another company, ANY OTHER COMPANY, that offers more innovation, well, they can't. It's a bunch of spoiled brat tech addicts who aren't getting the same fix from their iPhone upgrades every year, so that must mean Apple can't innovate! Never mind the fact that it took several DECADES to get us from GUI to Touch, but no one cares. All these so-called "supporters" want their minds blown every single year and when that doesn't happen, they trash Apple.
Get real. Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy when Jobs returned. Today Apple is pulling in hundreds of billions of dollars a year. They overpriced this round of iPhones, no doubt, and the Mac hardware has gotten a bit stale, but you can't begin to compare the condition of the company today with the Apple of the mid 90s. That's just absurd.
So tell me, Mr. "Supporter", what "technological success" should Apple be building off? What are they not doing? Please enlighten us as to what technology motherlode Jobs left behind that Cook is willfully ignoring while Jobs' widow and Lucas roll around in piles of money? Ridiculous.
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Bologna is a big city in Norther Italy, and a finely ground pork sausage named for it. In the US, it’s a similarly-named hotdog-like meat paste made of a slurry of mostly pig throwaway scraps, cartilage, lips & snouts & anuses, octopus parts & kelp, horse hooves, mild industrial lubricants, really whatever junk you want to shove down the insatiable, indiscriminate gullets of Americans. They’ll buy anything, and eat it up.
And that is the difference between Italian Bologna and American Baloney.
The bottom-line is that the iPhone XR is not more expensive than the iPhone 6/6+ of 4 years ago. This doesn't even include the fact that most people were forced to buy more storage for the 6/6+ because the starting prices $650/$750 came with an almost unusable 16 GB of storage.
So, when someone says they could afford a new iPhone 6 but can't afford a new XR, I am skeptical.
Clearly, I am referring to Apples retail pricing structure only.....so, does not include special deals, trade-in offers, corporate discounts......or, other personal issues that could impact your ability to pay (loss of job etc.).
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Then you don't understand the business. Unit sales was an AWFUL metric for Apple to disclose for about the last 3 years, maybe more. Analysts completely ignored Apple's other business and wrung their hands about a 90 day period where Apple sold 55M iPhones instead of the 56M they made up by some analyst that Apple should sell. Apple never projected unit sales.
As Apple grows its services business, the unit sales became a red herring and the wrong metric to emphasize. Are iPhone sales flat now? Yes, but investors have known that for 4 years.
This is purely a long term play to get investors to focus on the business instead of the units.
This actually makes sense. Apple sells iPhones ranging from about $450 to $1500. Units start to be misleading when the prices vary this widely.
Most phones today have fast enough CPU's. A12 is the best, yes, but it doesn't matter to most ordinary users.
Huawei already has the same type of 3D face recognition as Apple, in the Mate 20 pro.
Apple hasn't innovated enough where it mattered for years, yet raised prices, in a world where the competition has exploded the last 2-3 years. Not a good combination.
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Where I live, the XR cost 48% more than the 6 did on release. That's a huge increase. And that's from a former flagship iPhone, to the current budget offering to boot. Just incredible.
16 was enough and is enough even today if you use iCloud properly. When I switched to Android a bit over 2 years ago, it was from a 16GB iphone and I hade plenty of room to spare, with proper use of the cloud.
I sold my last iPhone a fortnight ago. 16GB 6 and it sold in a hearbeat as it's still very usable, despite your views on the matter.
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First off, drop the hostile tone. I'm on your side.
I wrote several grafs pointing out how I agree with you, there are too many toxic people on this site. I was trying to appeal to you to not give in to those folks and stay civil, even if we disagree. I especially agreed with you about the homophobic comments that are rampant on these forums that need to be cleaned up. But the admins deleted all that from my original response, so I'm now even more sympathetic to your level of frustration. But I didn't come at you, or anybody else, with any hostility, so I would appreciate it if you didn't vent your legit frustration on me. I learned BASIC on an Apple II Plus, and have bought at least 1 Mac computer for every decade they have been in existence, so there's no need to question my level of support for Apple.
Apple had great products post-Jobs leaving in 1986. My PowerBook 180c was super fast, reliable, and never gave me issues. The Newton was a lot better than most people (and the writing staff at the Simpsons) perceived it to be. The problem was basically similar to the HomePod's: it was too expensive when you could get cheaper alternatives that were close enough to the Newton. As for the Mac lineup, heh: ask a college student who bought a Mac in the early 90s what a crumb-bum experience that was. Good machines, but basically all the same and not different enough to justify the wide range in prices and model varieties (sound familiar?).
They didn't get to the nadir of 1997 in an instant moment, they got there by consistently sticking to needlessly high prices for hardware that didn't justify it, and endlessly re-iterating the Mac into multiple, not quite great versions that were confusing to users to buy. Windows 95 was a near knockout that they should have seen coming and were completely unprepared for.
Yes, I know Jobs was fired. No, I don't think he would have bankrupted the company. The Apple II line was effectively done by 1986; I remember because my middle class grade school's computer lab switched out the 4 Apple II machines we had for 4 Macintosh computers in the fall of 1987. And the Apple II platform could never have supported software like Microsoft Office or even the first version of PageMaker, so he was right to end development.
I never claimed Apple had some other technological innovation they should be building off of instead of what they are now (although judging by iPhone sales, the AW's development is probably stagnant until it becomes an independent device). But that might also be why a lot of long time Apple supporters are worried. I don't see the innovation coming from Cook. The loss of the education market happened on his watch, and his response was: an even more expensive iPad. And yes, the iPad is definitely the best tablet out there. But it doesn't appear to be a market that is going to supplant MacBooks/iPhones so that is not going much farther either. Or at least not much farther at a productive pace.
I think making TV shows is a fools errand. As Harvey Weinstein showed, there is no secret technological sauce to producing great content. Just a lot of good taste, good timing and luck. There's nothing Apple could ever do that would inherently give them a leg up on producing good tv shows over anyone else. Amazon just trotted out a show starring Julia Roberts to great fanfare... and no one watched. It could happen to Apple too.
IMHO, from a tech standpoint, acquiring Musk's companies makes total sense for both companies, with Musk serving as CTO under Tim Cook. Apple would gain valuable, industry-leading tech in two industries that would seem natural fits with the personal computer/device/wearable/ecosystem they built: your car and your home's tech controls. Imagine: the greatest electric car with Apple's trademark modern user interface and design, which would also sync perfectly with your iPhone/iPad/AW, which you can charge at your own home with your Apple home power cell and EV charging system. You might even be able to tell Siri via your HomePod to map a trip somewhere and to start the car at some point.
And Musk would get in Tim Cook someone who knows how to lock down an efficient, smoothly running production line like a professional. It is somewhat satisfying to see the pee taken out of someone like Musk–who seems to give off a rich, douche-y vibe–when he doesn't understand normal humans enough to properly manage auto assembly (something pretty much figured out in the 90s).
It wasn't just Jobs coming back in 1997 that saved Apple; acquiring his NeXT platform gave Apple the code base to make our modern X-based OS. Acquiring Musk's companies could be the 21st century version of that forward-looking move.
But then again, Musk is a real jerk and would probably get himself fired.
PS: If Apple had given us TouchID under the screen on the iPhone X (like Android now has) instead of FaceID, would anyone have complained about still having to use TouchID? Does anyone want to replace the TouchID on their MBP with FaceID? I think the answers to both are no.
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Let's see. Retail price for iPhone 6 64GB was $750 at launch. They were back ordered because everyone wanted the new bigger screen iPhones. Limited supply. So, how did you buy it for $399 on launch day? Was there a trade-in? Was there a payment schedule? Was it a buy one get one half price? Was it a special promotion to add an additional line? There has to be some explanation. Apple doesn't just sell a phone to a customer for $350 below retail on launch day, so this must have been a trade-in or some type of third party promotion.
The point is that the iPhone 6 and iPhone XR with the same storage are priced the same. As another benchmark, the iPhone 6+ with 16GB was priced the same as the XR with 64 GB. Apple didn't suddenly make it unaffordable to own a new iPhone offering.
There are third party deals on the XR too. But, I can't really attribute third party pricing structures to Apple when evaluating if the new XR is affordable in comparison to older models. Besides, it would be very complicated to do because there are so many variations.
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I wonder if this has less to do with changes to Apple's pricing structure and more to do with Nordic currency devaluation. I mean you can't hold Apple responsible for global currency fluctuations.
As I pointed out, at launch in the US, you can buy an XR with 64 GB for the same price as a 6+ with 16 GB. Yes the 6+ was the "flagship", but that is a meaningless label. The XS/XS max are far superior top of the line products. You just can't compare the iPhone 6 with the XS. Apple would have to sell the XS for $650. That's 35% off the base price....which is basically their average margin across product lines. That is not what for profit companies do. Apple could not stay in business and sell products with no profit margin.
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Part of it is the strong dollar, yes, but not all. The Chinese brands have also adjusted to the reality and set relatively affordable prices up here. As I've written many times, the XR and Mate 20 Pro are priced virtually the same.
Apple could've done something proactively when they sat down to set the prices for this market. $1700 for the XS Max 512 is ridiculous. Samsung is offering their Note 512 for within $50 of the 64GB XR, and about the same as the Mate 20 Pro. Come on Apple! Do you want to shove us out into the cold?