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Apple's Risky Balancing Act With the Next iPhone (macworld.com)
Long time columnist Jason Snell: As there always are at this time of year, there are lots of rumors out there about what the next iPhone will be. This year we're hearing that Apple is going to release a high-priced, next-generation phone in addition to the expected iPhone 7s and iPhone 7s Plus models. [...] By most accounts, Apple's next-generation iPhone will offer a similar design. But also, by many accounts, Apple is struggling to create that product -- and when it arrives, it may be expensive, late to ship, and supply constrained. This is one of those areas where Apple may be the victim of its own success. The iPhone is so popular a product that Apple can't include any technology or source any part if it can't be made more than 200 million times a year. If the supplier of a cutting-edge part Apple wants can only provide the company with 50 million per year, it simply can't be used in the iPhone. Apple sells too many, too fast. Contrast that to Apple's competition. On the smaller end, former Android chief Andy Rubin announced the Essential phone, but even Rubin admitted that he'd only be able to sell in thousands, not millions. Same for the RED Hydrogen One -- groundbreaking phone, hardly likely to sell in any volume. The Google Pixel looks like it's in the one million range. Apple's biggest competitor, Samsung, has to deal with a scale more similar to Apple's -- but it's still only expected to sell 50 or 60 million units of the flagship Galaxy S8.
If they want to make something exclusive, they have done it before and priced it accordingly. See the Apple Watches that had list prices of $10-17K. Who knows how well they actually sold, but Apple doesn't have a hard time putting a large price tag on something exclusive. I'm also intentionally omitting the diamond studded phone cases and so on sold by high end designers. Evidently there's a market for this stuff, and you have to imagine the margins on a 10K iPhone are going to be huge when it (likely) repurposes most of the guts the run of the mill models.
As is well known, Intel's toughest competition ain't AMD: it's Intel's own, previous CPUs, which w/ multiple cores, is still more than adequate for anything thrown at it. Very different from the 90s where every MHz bump resulted in a major performance improvement. Same for Microsoft: Windows 7 was good enough, and people have had to be dragged kicking & screaming to 8 & 10.
Previously, I had an iPhone 5s and an iPad mini, both w/ 16GB storage. I just upgraded both over the last few months to iPhone 7 and iPad mini 4, both w/ 128GB of storage primarily b'cos I had hit the limit on those. But I don't anticipate getting even close to 128GB on these 2 new toys. While iPhone 7 gave me Apple Pay, which 5s didn't have, there is nothing missing in the iPhone 7 that I'll want in iPhone 8. If anything, the loss of the home button will be a bummer: I like the fingerprint detection way of logging in, buying things and authentication. Essentially, what stops me from buying future Apple toys is that these new ones of mine are good enough for the foreseeable future. I do see myself buying a Macbook sometime just to avoid getting into an annual Windows subscription.
The fundamental problem Apple has is that Samsung has the key display technology that Apple needs to do much more innovation with its hardware. LCD panels are a dead end for mobile devices, if thinness and efficiency is the goal. Apple needs to get away from LCD, but to do so right now requires becoming dependent on Samsung again.
This is why we had the whole Tim Cook spin about OLED having terrible colors a few years back. Apple needed to down play the tech that it didn't have. In the end though, it looks like Apple is going to throw the kitchen sink at getting micro LED going, which looks like a technology that could easily surpass OLED in a lot of areas. If they can pull that off before their entire product line becomes dependent on Samsung AMOLED, then they'll be good to go for another 5 years.
In the end though we must keep in mind that all OLED or AMOLED is going to ultimately allow is thinner devices. You could imagine that the next big step will be semi-flexible displays so that we can avoid another bend-gate situations as devices get even thinner. It's cool to see how far the tech is going, but since almost everyone I see puts their thin new iPhone into a big bumper case, it does all feel pretty pointless.