If this is about Apple and its prices how do you all explain Samsung, LG and all the other big the companies that make big money in China revising their guidance, notifying their investors sales will be less than forecasted and so on? Some of them even more than Apple, despite the lower prices! I am curious.
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If this is about Apple and its prices how do you all explain Samsung, LG and all the other big the companies that make big money in China revising their guidance, notifying their investors sales will be less than forecasted and so on? Some of them even more than Apple, despite the lower prices! I am curious.
Fair observation. So, perhaps the issue is that (1) customers don't see the added value in the innovation, and/or (2) customers don't see the value in certain features.
Case in point: FaceID
I don't have a FaceID phone but have played with one enough to know that it is indeed very cool. However, the price point required versus TouchID is not acceptable.
What Apple needs to do is to have a phone option for those of us who don't give a crap what it's made from because it sits in a case all it's life. I would love to have the guts of an XR in a case made of plastic, for $200 less. I'd slap it in a case and be happy as a pig in you know what. A lot of the iPhone cost is in the expensive casing.
What's the point of a glass back if its gonna sit in a case? What's the point of stainless steel sides if it's gonna sit in a case and none of it is seen?
Make the expensive glass/glossy devices for those who want them, and also love dropping and breaking them.
Apple is NOT innovating. It is just barely upgrading.
Technology prices actually go down with time. Look at LED TVs. Even in the past every new Apple product used to be at the same price of the old one. Now, Phones have gone up 100% in the period of 3 years.
Considering that the upgrades were not that innovative, the price gauging is quite obscene. Especially considering that it is as expensive as a Macbook Pro.
And you can see that users that use to upgrade every 1-2 years are voting with their wallets and are not upgrading anymore. It has nothing to do with market saturation. It has to do with the ridiculous pricing.
The problem is Apple greed.
My understanding is that no other company had brand fidelity as much as Apple, and no other brand in the smartphone field had so much status symbol value. That's why it's worrying for Apple.
Apple thinks having a CPU with 5 billion (or whatever) instruction executions per second actually means anything to a normal user. The CPU must have upgraded by maybe 500% since my iPhone 4S/6, but realistically, did I need that much processing power to do the same thing I've always done? E-mails, browser, chat clients, maybe a few social media apps.
These "huge" processing power upgrades are redundant - things that would actually benefit the average user are things like much more superior battery life, perhaps larger iCloud storage, technology which finds a work around to the notch and advances so we no longer have a camera bump.
Perhaps more focus on a competent Siri and iOS updates that make it more feature rich like Android is what they need to focus on. I really won't care if iPhone 11 has a 35% more powerful CPU.
You are correct, but I'll counter with a question.
What is the year-over-year objective? Is it to maintain profit margins, or to keep selling new product? The reality is that both objectives (and many others) come into play here.
My personal take on this is that the entire SmartPhone market is overpriced compared to the perceived customer value. Doesn't matter how great the phones are if a customer can't see the value for the price. I think we're going to see an entire industry shakeup of some kind that will result in a price reset (versus a discount) to something the market will tolerate. Basic economics 101 covers price elasticity, and this one is just about broke.
Wow. Thank you for sharing. That's even more poignant, and tragic, than the sedentary screen addicts in WALL-E.
Of course, the difference today is that there are thousands of talented engineers at Apple that do have a clue how to make great computers but, sadly, that is not longer a priority for Tim, Eddie, Jony, and Phil.
It's also crushing that 50,000 blue collar workers lost their jobs earlier than expected because of Cook's hubris.
My only hope is that the board steps in, and takes action.
Perhaps not, but you WILL care if the new Siri, Camera and other wiz-bang features don't work quickly. I see this as a chicken-and-egg concern. Fast processing enables new features... not the other way around.
Actually the guy in charge of innovation at Apple has taken a 6-foot (under) sabbatical
Kinda ironic that, after the Sculley experience, he picked again a profile like Cook.
But Siri sucking isn't due to the CPU. Other providers have managed to do a better job with a far inferior CPU. Siri has underlying issues from original implementation which Apple are too scared to start from scratch from, even under the advice of leadership who have taken over the project.
It is an issue of will, not means.
Also, the use of "AI" had actually made the camera in some cases objectively worse. These new "AI" notifications I get also are simplistic and of low value, I don't like them calling it "AI" to be honest, iOS 12 has a pretty crappy implementation. My 3 year old Samsung was far better at providing insight, like knowing what team I support so it would randomly remind me that the team was playing tonight etc.
It's amazing how prescient Jobs was in these videos. It's like everything he railed about Scully's term is going on right now.
The Jobs -> Cook transition/era (innovation stopping, the Apple "magic" disappearing, more variants of products with pricing and other financial engineering taking the place of innovative engineering) seems spookily the same as the Jobs -> Scully transition/era (with one being a "marketing genius" the other a "supply chain genius")... wonder what Tim's Knowledge Navigator video and Newton equivalents will be... thought the video now will be produced as a mega-budget Hollywood blockbuster (and thinking his "Newton" will be AR?)
...because they offload it to their servers to collect ever more information on you. It's a different approach to an assistant.
I don't really use Siri for much other than making calls, but I really do respect Apple's approach to doing as much processing on-device vs. the Amazon and Google model.
That is one limitation, but they had methods to bypass that to some degree without going all Google mode to improve machine learning. But as stated previously, the architecture of Siri, nobody likes, not the engineers and not the leadership.
Siri is just not a priority right now for Apple and that is why it is stagnating, not because they don't offload info to servers etc.
This gave an alright overview imo.
To give you an example, just ask Siri and Google Assistant some random question which it needs to reseearch the internet for (so nothing to do with user data) - you'll get a much better experience with GA. Also, try asking follow up questions, you can't on Siri. You can manipulate GA to do a lot more. None of this is to do with data, just implementation. Apple could do what GA does without compromising user data at all in this regards 100%.