Apple's 'iPhone 5S Problem' Suggests Need to Be Less Predictable

[baryon]

I'm glad that Apple at least doesn't innovate just for the sake of surprising people. That's what everyone does, and while people are always hypnotized by new features and want them at all cost, they don't realize that most of these features either don't work well enough, aren't useful or aren't something they need or would use at any point in time.

I like the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" approach, if you have a great product that works perfectly and does everything that it should (but not all kinds of unnecessary things that may look cool but don't actually do much), then there's not much to innovate. There isn't regularly a need for new ideas, unless you're a bored rich kid.

The expectation of being constantly flooded by new features doesn't come from the need for new features. It comes from boredom and people not knowing what to do with themselves and their money.

Phones are now like computers, and need to keep getting faster to stay where they are, hence the "S" releases. It's necessary because software gets more demanding without boundaries. That leaves 2 years to come up with useful ideas which may then become things that actually make life better.

I'd rather Apple stay focused on making great products than trying to rival others who drown people in new features that most people won't ever use, yet it's the number one cause of them buying the thing in the first place. Just because people are stupid doesn't mean your product should be stupid too.


The world is accelerating and lately you can't buy anything that won't be obsolete and slow in 2-3 years. It's more pronounced with phones than anything, and I don't think making them obsolete even faster is a good idea.

 

[Rogifan]

Sorry I though it was a rambling post and he kept repeating himself without ever offering what he thinks Apple should do.

 

[BaldiMac]

The iPhone 5... is literally no different than the 4s.

I don't think that means what you think it means.

The 3GS and 4S may have sold more than past iPhones, but that's because the smartphone sector is still growing. Apple's market share has in fact been diminishing.

That's not true. iPhone market share increased significantly after the release of each of those products. Contrary to the popular story line, iPhone market share increased from 2011 to 2012.

 

[Raftysworld]

Why are we calling it the iPhone 5S? Is the name confirmed? It's technically the 7th generation iPhone

 

[Iamjhil]

The phones a phone.. It's all about the next iOS in my opinion.

Isn't there suppose to be an Apple event in March?

 

[ghettochris]

You neglect to mention that Apple's stock is half of what it was six months ago while the rest of the stock market has skyrocketed.

that just means it's a good time to buy

people love to hate apple, and think the last innovative successful thing they did was the last... ipod, iPhone, now ipad. maybe ipad was the last, but i doubt it. history has a way of repeating itself. apple haters make it possible to make $$ with AAPL

 

[daneoni]

The iPhone 5 design is the most pristine example of laziness. It is literally no different than the 4s.. mostly because developers don't have the incentive to utilize the extra processing power on the device due to limits of the OS. I could sell my 32GB 4s and pay roughly $100 for a 5s equivalent - but I have no desire to do that. The 5s isn't going to be worth $100 to me. Apple's stock is half of what it was 6 months ago, and it's because the company is no longer innovative, not that people can predict what they are doing.

That word doesn't mean what you think it means and you're using it lazily.

Also Apple's stock is half what it used to be because of analysts spewing bullcrap plus a trigger happy stock market that believes everything it hears. Nothing else.

Samsung is probably about to release a GSIV that is identical to the GSIII in terms of external design. Same curved plastic shell with fake metal accents. Yet no one will moan about that, in fact they will sell millions and most will hail it as the best smartphone in the market. But with Apple its "they're not innovating, they're boring" blah blah blah.

How about you guys come up with a revolutionary idea every 6 months and lets see how you fare.

I'm not saying Apple is perfect, far from it but a lot of people seem to be in over their heads and no longer recognise reality.

Personally i can't wait till Apple buys back their stock and all the complainers move to Android/Samsung. Then it'll be back to the specific segment of the market that Apple has always catered to from the start and everyone will move on.

 

[Bartboy919]

Not trying to toll, but I felt burned by the iPhone 4S, which is what led me to android. This is a problem, whether Apple wants to acknowledge it or not.

 

[BaldiMac]

Not trying to toll, but I felt burned by the iPhone 4S, which is what led me to android. This is a problem, whether Apple wants to acknowledge it or not.

Why? Are you Apple's biggest customer?

 

[jdoll021]

Maybe it's just me, but I like the predictability. I like being able to know when they'll release a new design or a refined design (I consider the S designs a refinement). I recently upgraded from the 4 to the 4S mostly because I wanted a phone that had a more refined design over a previous gen. I will get the 5S when it comes out because it will be more refined than the 5. I think that most people who like or love Apple and their products will appreciate the predictability and only folks who are a bit more flippant will want to leave for Android phones. After all, as has been pointed out, Apple is still the most profitable!

 

[paul4339]

... Apple's stock is half of what it was 6 months ago, and it's because the company is no longer innovative, not that people can predict what they are doing.

Regardless of whether one believes apple is innovative enough, I don't see how lack of innovation translate directly to stock price.
It would make more sense if lack of innovation drives Sales which is reflected in Earnings (or forecasted earnings) which drives Stock price. BUT, the sales and earnings have been doing well and steadily increasing.

Another explanation is the belief - 'I don't see new features in the product that I believe will increase sales so I fear that future products will not sell, and therefore I will not pay much for the stock'. That may be true, but it's unsubstantiated, since Apple's sales track record has shown that it's much more probable that it will do well than not.

It also shows that sell side analysts and pundits are not always qualified to determine what will or won't sell in the tech arena.

.

 

[Bartboy919]

Why? Are you Apple's biggest customer?

I'm still relatively young (22), but I have owned a Macbook, a Macbook Pro, a iPhone 3GS, and an iPhone 4S, not to mention the countless people I know personally that have come to me for tech advice, and pushed them towards Apple.

The iPhone 4S's absurd lack of LTE, and same small screen size, and just general sameness in the iOS when coming from the 3GS made me just feel like, why the hell did I buy this? Don't get me wrong, I love my 3GS, and I actually still use it as an iPod Touch in my car for Podcasts and Music, but everything I could do on my 4S, I could more or less do on the 3GS. Which is why I sold it on Ebay 4 months after owning it, and jumped onto a Galaxy Note.

I still use my MBP, and probably will continue to, but phone wise, that absurd release just left me feeling burned towards the whole iOS lineup.

EDIT: If you bring up Siri, well, lets just say, its the feature advertised the most, which is used the least. It became more a problem when I was in my college classes, with the damn device muted, it would continue to think I was putting the phone up to my ear, and make a bunch of noise.

 

[BaldiMac]

I'm still relatively young (22), but I have owned a Macbook, a Macbook Pro, a iPhone 3GS, and an iPhone 4S, not to mention the countless people I know personally that have come to me for tech advice, and pushed them towards Apple.

The iPhone 4S's absurd lack of LTE, and same small screen size, and just general sameness in the iOS when coming from the 3GS made me just feel like, why the hell did I buy this? Don't get me wrong, I love my 3GS, and I actually still use it as an iPod Touch in my car for Podcasts and Music, but everything I could do on my 4S, I could more or less do on the 3GS. Which is why I sold it on Ebay 4 months after owning it, and jumped onto a Galaxy Note.

I still use my MBP, and probably will continue to, but phone wise, that absurd release just left me feeling burned towards the whole iOS lineup.

Maybe you missed my point. That's a lovely personal anecdote, but it's not a significant problem for Apple. Believe it or not, I doubt Apple's goal is 100% market share in the smartphone market.

 

[iBug2]

but everything I could do on my 4S, I could more or less do on the 3GS.

Thanks to Apple supporting iOS 5 on 3GS. How is this bad?

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Maybe you missed my point. That's a lovely personal anecdote, but it's not a significant problem for Apple. Believe it or not, I doubt Apple's goal is 100% market share in the smartphone market.

It isn't. People tend to forget that Apple covers less than 10% of the PC marketshare, yet they are king of profits on that market as well. As long as Apple keeps selling phones like they do today, even if their marketshare diminishes from 40% to 10%, they will still be making more money than anyone else. Look at their cash income, more than 40 billion in 2012. If it goes like this, in less than 2 years they'll even have money to buy off Microsoft or Google let alone continue their day to day operations.

 

[KentuckyHouse]

Why are we calling it the iPhone 5S? Is the name confirmed? It's technically the 7th generation iPhone

Oh lord...

Folks, get ready for months of these types of posts. Jeez, I can't STAND "S" years.

 

[jdoll021]

Maybe you missed my point. That's a lovely personal anecdote, but it's not a significant problem for Apple. Believe it or not, I doubt Apple's goal is 100% market share in the smartphone market.

Couldn't have said it better myself. Why does anyone think Apple, or any company for that matter, needs to have 100% market share of a market? That is the antithesis of competition and the very definition of a monopoly.

 

[Bartboy919]

Maybe you missed my point. That's a lovely personal anecdote, but it's not a significant problem for Apple. Believe it or not, I doubt Apple's goal is 100% market share in the smartphone market.

My story may be an anecdote, but that doesn't mean I'm the only one who has jumped ship. Thinking otherwise would be detrimental for Apple.

Thanks to Apple supporting iOS 5 on 3GS. How is this bad?

My statement regarding the sameness of iOS has just been a general statement on the state of the Software. The look and feel hasn't even been refreshed since 2007. Mac OS X has had more UI revisions than iOS, and Android regularly refreshes its UI.

The OS updates were great, the problem was the OS itself.

 

[iGrip]

Apple's approach of maintaining the same external casing and largely unchanged internal components in its 'S' models limits the innovation that can be offered, making consumers far more likely to look around at competitor products in 'S' years, giving competitors a great opportunity to launch major new models.

I believe that the best selling iPhone EVER is an S model - the 4S.

I'm not sure if this analyst analyzed the actual sales numbers for S models as compared to the corresponding base models, but my guess is that each S model outsold the original by a wide margin.

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They can't win, if they break release cycle like they did with the iPad then people on here feel cheated because their latest shiny isn't the latest shiny.

A few fanatics feel that way. The vast majority of normal people (i.e., Apple's target demographic) don't have any idea of when the last one/next one came out/is coming out.

 

[bushido]

boring OS is boring

- sent from my 5th iPhone

 

[dampfnudel]

Do you think the average iPhone owner knows that though? I don't think so. All of us on this website (which is a tiny sliver of iPhone owners) do, but the average consumer has no idea. For an example, my wife and I jumped from the iPhone 4 to 4S the day it was launched. To this day (we now have iPhone 5's), she still doesn't know why we had to upgrade to the 4S.

Are you upgrading to the 5S?

 

[jayducharme]

The iPhone 5 design is the most pristine example of laziness.

The iPhone 4 and 4S were the biggest selling products in Apple's history. The form factor seemed to work for people. So why screw it up? The 5 is a bit different, but not enough to break with their successful formula. For me the biggest change is the weight and materials. It's much less prone to breakage now and has better functionality. I'm perfectly happy with it.

I think part of Apple's difficulty is that nearly every other company is imitating the look and functionality of the iPhone (something Apple seems unable to stop), but undercutting Apple on price. So many people are drifting toward the cheaper products thinking they're getting more for their money. Even so, Apple still seems to be doing okay.

 

[InYou101]

Competitors are catching up with the iPhone because there hasn't been anything new in a while other than an unattractive dark metal on a longer phone which is just as thick as the previous few years. I am not looking forward for an iPhone 5S with a better chip, camera, and battery lol.. For the first time since I bought my first iPhone I am starting to see what the competition is doing and maybe I might switch to Samsung or some other who are providing innovation. We can all agree there hasn't been a WOW factor in design or program with Apple in quite a while.

 

[baleensavage]

The phones a phone.. It's all about the next iOS in my opinion.

This is a big part of it that isn't mentioned in the article. The endless spec war that has taken over the Android phone market is only part of the equation. In reality, the biggest reason Android phones have taken off in the last couple years is because Google has slowly and steadily been improving Android itself, to the point where it is now a very polished OS and in some ways is better than iOS. Apple on the other hand has done very little to actually improve iOS with the exception of adding new features like Siri and adding apps like Maps.

Whether Apple releases an iPhone 5S or 6 is irrelevant if they don't do something revolutionary with iOS.

The other part of this is Apple screwed themselves when they used the "S" moniker the first time. They basically told the world that their phone was only half as cool as the last one. It's all psychological. They should just ditch the numbers like they did with the iPad and let each iteration stand on it's own. Imagine if they had called the iPad 4, the iPad 3S. People would have said Apple wasn't innovating because they didn't release a new iPad. Apple purposely lowered expectations. Maybe it was intentional and worked at the time, but they don't need to be lowering expectations at this point in the game.

 

[notabadname]

You neglect to mention that Apple's stock is half of what it was six months ago while the rest of the stock market has skyrocketed.

And you confuse stock value and fluctuations with a company's profitability.

Jan 4, 1013: During the Q1 2013 earnings call, which took place today in California, Tim Cook revealed that Apple has sold more iPhones and iPads than ever before, making September to December last year the most successful three-month period since the company started trading.

 

[SpyderBite]

TApple's stock is half of what it was 6 months ago, and it's because the company is no longer innovative, not that people can predict what they are doing.

You are the Golden Child example of somebody who has absolutely no idea how the stick market works. In fact, when I was at Schwab we used to call investors who shared your logic, Kamikazes.