BlackBerry Classic Discontinued to Pave the Way for 'State of the Art Devices'

[Dr. Freeman]

I don't think we should argue whether BlackBerry phones are good or crap or dated or whatnot, BlackBerry's problem is that their brand has become a synonym for uncool, outdated and slow. And for good reasons. Samsung keeps churning out new phones on a weekly basis and Apple makes people notice their yearly iPhone lineup upgrades, and in the meantime all BlackBerry could do was pray so their engineers could finally release BBOS10 within that year. And when it finally did in 2013, everyone and their grandmother had already moved over to iOS and Android.

And that's what ultimately led them to their demise. Their enterprise-oriented marketing that set them apart came back to bite them in the rear.

 

[MH01]

Looking forward to see what they bring out. Probably thier last chance, hope it's a great device, competition is a good thing.

 

[MacBH928]

Blackberry is like VHS in 2004. Although I must say, a low cost Android with a physical keyboard could have a niche market.

 

[Pilgrim1099]

The iPhone isn't even a phone. It's a complete misnomer. Our personal devices do many things and they do so almost exclusively as a data service. The phone call minutes model is a relic that is disappearing. Apple tends to leave hints of where they're headed by small seemingly unimportant features introduced gradually. Giving IP calls visual parity with phone calls in iOS 10 is one such hint.

Another hint was when Apple introduced voice messages in iMessage ahead of the introduction of the AppleWatch. Continuous voice calls are just another type of message supported by data, not traditional cellular calls.

Finally, the fact that the Watch is not only capable of playing Bluetooth audio but relies on it to play music is another hint that the other shoe has yet to drop. AirPods paired with an AppleWatch and Siri enabled apps brings us on to a path where the Watch will indeed be a complete personal computing device capable of performing tasks via Siri requests. This isn't future stuff. It's already in iOS 10.

Even if these are hints, it probably might not mean much. Or prove that Apple is going in the right direction. Maybe they will. Maybe not. But the point is that line of thinking that the Watch as a stand alone computer from the iPhone is counter-productive or goes against the original purpose of the mobile device.

If this insinuates that the iPhone would be phased out in favor of the Watch as a complete computing experience, then it would be the dumbest thing Apple would do. The Watch CANNOT replace a smartphone. It's not meant to nor is it supposed to.

If you were to cram ALL the phone features into the smartwatch, it would destroy the UI experience. A screen size that small is not appropriate for general mobile computing. Seriously. Watches are meant to notify with quick glances and respond with short messages. That's it. If one wants to snap a photo or shoot an email, that's what the smartphone is for ( that goes for any PC, laptop and tablet ).

You probably know this, but a Canadian got busted and pulled over for fiddling around with his Apple Watch not too long ago. And yes, he got ticketed. It was on the news, I think, over a year ago. This is the behavior that Apple is fomenting. Social engineered spoiled behavior. If Apple is such a good responsible samaritan of a company, why didn't they put a warning label to users not to use it while driving? They should've known better.

But this topic is about Blackberry and people are quick to say they're giving up. They're not. I suspect they dropped the Classic because they have something else up their sleeves. Sacrifice one line, introduce something else new.

 

[TallManNY]

Had RIM not underestimated Apple entering the phone business and had the company acted like Google and like all of us instantly realized the future of smartphones the second Steve Jobs walked off the stage that day in 2007, RIM could have taken their massive installed user base of loyal BlackBerry users and grabbed this market.
I still think that Android and iOS would emerge the dominant operating systems but there's a chance that RIM could have worked out an arrangement with Microsoft with which they already had a comfy relationship and built a phone that could find a place in the market. They had yet another opportunity when Android cemented itself as the OEM operating system of choice. Still, they remained stubborn that somehow BlackBerry would come from behind.
They've finally figured out the inevitable, but without years of lost time, billions of lost stock value and all but their most crackberry addicted user base remaining.
The BlackBerry case study will be written about in business books for generations to come on how to keep your mind open to disruptions in an industry and how to not cling to old conventions simply because they were popular at some point — specially if your company's very existence depends on it.

Yes RIM missed the ball here. But RIM never actually had a massive installed user base of loyal Blackberry users. Even in their best days they weren't selling smartphones in anything approaching iPhone and Android sales. I think they were doing 20 million units per year when the iPhone came out. And they got up to 50 million units per year in 2010, but that was about their peak. RIM focused on battery life, data compression, and limited but effective email utility. Apple focused on making a mini-computer and then allowing software that ran on that computer to create an entirely new market that didn't exist; which was mainstream smartphone usage.
[doublepost=1467818483][/doublepost]

I thought Blackberry ceased to exist a few years ago? They went bankrupt, laid off everyone, sold off their patents... how are they still existing?

Nope. They have well north of a billion dollars in cash (after debt) and they've been cash flow positive for the last two years. They sell some services at high margins to businesses. And they still sell handsets to high security sensitive organizations like government and military.

But yeah every handset they've made in the last four years has flopped in the consumer market.

 

[circatee]

I'm surprised this wasn't announced months ago. About 4 months ago, I sold ALL my BlackBerry devices (Z10, Z30 & Priv), and moved to iOS. I do have a Note 5 (not used it in ages), and currently using all things Apple.

Oh, I even bought an iMac a month ago, too.

 

[rdlink]

BlackBerry actually has a good chance of thriving as a niche Android phone for business. I don't know what took them this long to figure it out.

They have absolutely no chance of thriving. Might they continue wheezing and coughing their way through the day? Yes. But they will never again thrive.

Businesses can offer an easy to deploy, easy to support device such as an iPhone, and their users can be more productive and more secure, without having to maintain a BES. There is not an IT department in the world that wants to continue to support BB.

Blackberry was never a great smart phone. Really it was never a good smartphone. It had one killer app that nobody else had when they were dominant: Secure push email. That's it. Their interface and hardware were always second rate. RIM stood on the tracks while the consumerized smart phone train ran them over. If they think they can get up, catch the train and jump on the caboose as it rolls down the tracks they're living in a fantasy world.

 

[gimikinc]

Bye Felicia.

Maybe they were sampling too much product!

 

[JohnGrey]

Most people here have no clue about the more recent BlackBerry history and portfolio. But that's not surprising as we are on MacRumors and not CrackBerry.

B2T: The Classic was a badly marketed device imho... It was aimed at the die-hard BB users of old times, but the device -despite being of top-notch quality- is not the fastest. It's more or less just a replacement for an old BB Bold. It can technically run apps, even Android Apps, but imho lacks the performance to do so. So, I can understand why they discontinue it first. That said, the Classic is a great mail-machine. And for that purpose, in that size, I doubt there is any better device on the market.

I'm afraid, this the beginning of the end of BB10. It's a great plattform and the Passport and the Leap are still great devices, and I would say the best for their purpose, but suffered from probably the worst marketing.

I've been there with BlackBerry since the 7290, and had both a Z10 and a Passport until very recently, and the current situation has nothing to do with marketing and everything to do with corporate inertia and arrogance. Balsillie was a brilliant salesman that unfortunately relied on Mike Lazaridis, whose mistaken conceptions and prejudices about what was and wasn't feasible in the smartphone market permitted him to sit on his well-cushioned behind from the launch of the iPhone in 2007, through the launch of two expensive, under-powered Blackberry phones whose displays were giant physical buttons and whose catastrophic failure lost them the largest mobile provider and their largest market, up until they released their first modern smartphone in 2013, six years after the party had started and the duopoly was firmly entrenched, and in the process of creating the new OS spent billions on acquiring QNX and alienated nearly their entire development community in the bargain. So don't prattle about bad marketing; BB10 and BlackBerry's handset division were doomed the moment Jobs took that stage in 2007.

 

[circatee]

Wow. Boom! @JohnGrey just went off. LOL

 

[Michael Scrip]

BB10 and BlackBerry's handset division were doomed the moment Jobs took that stage in 2007.

I also feel bad for Palm who announced yet another Treo smartphone just two days before the iPhone. And they already had a few more Treos and Centros in the pipeline for the following year.

Palm attempted a pivot and scrapped their entire product line to start over with the Palm Pre and Pixie... but it was too late. They didn't have enough cash to survive.

They were already hurting in the 2 years since the iPhone was released... and in the 3rd year they were forced to sell themselves.

And they had been in business for 18 years prior.

 

[JohnGrey]

I also feel bad for Palm who announced yet another Treo smartphone just two days before the iPhone. And they already had a few more Treos and Centros in the pipeline for the following year.

Palm attempted a pivot and scrapped their entire product line to start over with the Palm Pre and Pixie... but it was too late. They didn't have a enough cash to survive.

They were already hurting in the 2 years since the iPhone was released... and in the 3rd year they were forced to sell themselves.

And they had been in business for 18 years prior.

That's the reality of the tech business. Every company has a finite number of products, number of flush years, number of glowing articles before some hungry young lion pivots on the right idea or sparks the right paradigm shift that puts the proverbial wind up Julius Caesar. Apple has succeeded, though at times narrowly, because it was eccentric (schizophrenic) enough internally to allow those changes to come from within rather than from a competitor. BlackBerry, and Palm for that matter, were the traditional monoliths that completely embraced the myth that a name is 75% of a successful product.

Unfortunately, it remains to be seen if Apple, under the Mosaic wandering tenure of Tim bloody Cook, has enough pirate iconoclasm left to reignite a cooling star.

 

[circatee]

You'd think to help keep Apple and iOS at the forefront, Tim Cook and Co. would loosen iOS a little. Well at least let me, THE OWNER of said iOS device, have my task bar as transparent. Yes, I know it is cosmetic, but...

 

[Makosuke]

You misunderstood. I don't expect screens to go away. There will always be iPads to pick up and sit back to read or browse through news, photos, videos, etc. There will also be devices on which we do our work on a screen. But our phones as communication devices, personal assistants and our link to the internet can be largely replaced by having it miniaturized on to our wrists [...]

My point is that Apple is not standing still taking the iPhone's success for granted. The people who think so today are of the kind who doubted Apple could keep the success of their company grounded on an mp3 player forever. Again, Apple has never stood still.

I see what you're getting at now, and I agree that real-time health monitoring seems most to be the "killer app" of a watch or some other future shift toward wearable computing. And, in a more general sense, that the efficiency and immediacy of an agent-heavy wearable at least has a chance of making them more prominent.

What I'm not convinced of is that the "small" size in the tiny-small-medium-large-huge (watch-phone-tablet-computer-TV) continuum of device screen sizes will fade away.

Looking at the way people use mobile computing devices today, and what seems realistic use cases for the foreseeable future, there seems to be a very definite gap between "tiny" (watch-sized) and "medium" (tablet sized) for walk around use.

Now, this could end up being a flexible display built into the sleeve of your coat, some sort of sci-fi looking wrist-wrap thing, an HUD built into glasses, or something that projects an image toward your retina. In much less realistic sci-fi-movie terms, this is the role of the hovering holographic screen that a person's watch or bracelet projects or the neural interface that brings up text and images in your field of vision.

But whatever form it takes, I'm pretty confident that there's going to be a substantial desire for something highly portable with a screen large enough to read longer-form text on, view photos or video on, and play games on. A watch-sized screen can't fill that niche no matter how powerful it is, and a tablet-sized device is too large to pocket when walking around without a bag.

Regardless, Apple is smart to be experimenting with wearables, and they're playing the long game, so I don't see the deficiencies of an Apple Watch today as any more disastrous than the deficiencies of a 1st gen iPhone or a 1st gen iPod.

 

[Flynnstone]

BB or RIM is not dead. They own QNX. QNX is often found in the "entertainment " system on newer cars & trucks.
Ford recently dumped Microsoft Sync for QNX

 

[Michael Scrip]

BB or RIM is not dead. They own QNX. QNX is often found in the "entertainment " system on newer cars & trucks. Ford recently dumped Microsoft Sync for QNX

Very true. There is a big business for them in licensing QNX.

The question is... how long can they remain in the handset market? That's where they are having troubles.

 

[JohnGrey]

BB or RIM is not dead. They own QNX. QNX is often found in the "entertainment " system on newer cars & trucks.
Ford recently dumped Microsoft Sync for QNX

And no one said otherwise; BlackBerry has a lucrative future in licensing QNX for IoT.

Very true. There is a big business for them in licensing QNX.

The question is... how long can they remain in the handset market? That's where they are having troubles.

The issue facing Chen, and the one that he's having difficulty navigating, is walking the line decoupling the BlackBerry brand as a whole from BlackBerry's legacy as a mobile handset manufacturer. I have absolutely no doubt that Chen would dump the hardware division tomorrow if he could do so without cratering the stock price. His task in the next two quarters will be convincing investors that the firm's future is in embedded systems and secure EMM sales divorced from the classical end-to-end security solution of BBOS/BB10/BES. The entire point of the Good acquisition was to keep secure EMM on the table whilst removing overhead by having a EMM platform tailored to Android and iOS.

 

[Michael Scrip]

His task in the next two quarters will be convincing investors that the firm's future is in embedded systems and secure EMM sales divorced from the classical end-to-end security solution of BBOS/BB10/BES.

Surely the investors must know that their handset division is a boat anchor holding them down, right?

It might not take much convincing at all!