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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.
If Apple is releasing both a 7S model in incremental fashion and a higher-end model, how does scarcity of parts become a problem for Apple?
They can probably already jack up the price of the 7S and get away with it, and presumably the 8 (or whatever it will be called) can be priced wherever their economists/MBAs/wonks think it needs to be priced to limit demand to what their suppliers can provide.
IMHO, their larger challenge is create an "8" that has enough appeal to attract enough buyers at this price point without creating "Apple iPhone 8 FAIL" headlines through weak demand. Haven't upgrade purchases already slowed, as even 2-3 revision behind models are still good performers? It's hard to see too many people thinking they need a $1500 phone when the $900 one is already a marginal upgrade.
Revert to including headphone jack.
People do not care and the AirPods are the most beloved bluetooth headset ever sold. Even Android owning friends I have love them (I don't have them myself as I still preferred wired headphones, and just use the adaptor that comes with the phone).
For the love of storage include a MicroSD slot.
99.9999999999% of phone users do not use those, so they are basically just a giant security hole waiting to bite you in the ass.
Please revise / update iTunes, it's horrible.
Well yes, it's horrible, but why does that matter in relation to the iPhone? I've not connected to iTunes in years, all backup is handled via iCloud and all app purchases are made on the device.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
Apple has used up almost al the Steve Jobs karma it had. They are being more and more just another Dell,IBM,Sony, etc.
The Vision is gone. Look for the product lines to dry up and turn into just another dreary corporate marketing exercise.
Chicklet Keyboard mentality.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
lmao I own an iphone 6 plus and I'm doing everything humanly possible to PREVENT updates. Because Apple really really wants you to upgrade your OS to the latest version, the phone will automatically download a 2 GB update, by itself, with no warning. And there's nothing you can do to prevent this, no amount of fiddling in settings will prevent this auto-update. Only thing that can stop it is jailbreaking, but currently there is no jailbreak for iOS 9 (which my phone is on).
Since there is no way to prevent it from the phone itself, you have to stop it on the network level. Which I did, by blocking the Apple update server on my Linksys router (it has a rudimentary firewall function). Here are the URLs you need to block if you don't want your phone auto-updating:
appldnld.apple.com
mesu.apple.com
Why would I want to prevent auto updating, you ask? Because after a certain point (usually 2 number versions later) your old(der) phone will choke on the bloated new OS and run like complete shit. I've had iphones and ipads that came with iOS 4 from the factory. Ran beautifully, very smooth and snappy. A year later iOS 5 comes out and you upgrade to it. You get some new features but you notice some jittery-ness and slower response and longer loading times for the browser and so on. Still usable, but definitely slower than before.
Then another year later (it's been 2 years now since you bought the phone) you upgrade to iOS 6. Now is when shit hits the fan, your phone runs like complete utter garbage to the point where you don't wanna use it for anything except taking phone calls.
It seems like iOS 6 was a particularly bad version. Apparently Safari got a major upgrade with a new rendering engine or something, so older hardware really struggled with it. There were lots of complaints, people asking how to revert to the older iOS version 5 (you can't). So Apple said they addressed the issue a year later when iOS 7 came out. I upgraded, hoping it would be better. Turned out iOS 7 was slightly better in app loading times, but still just as bad in terms of response and navigating (slow slow slow). At this point I just said fuck it, you win Apple, I'll sell my old iphone and ipad on Ebay for pennies on the dollar and pony up for new shiny Apple shit. And I bent over and spread wide.
Anyways my current iphone 6 came with iOS 8 from the factory. I upgraded to 9, and as expected noticed some slowing but still quite usable. But now I know better than to upgrade to 10 or 11 or whatever the fuck they're on. So my phone will stay on 9 until the day it dies.
I fear we've reached peak-iPhone. Just like Windows 10's biggest competition was Windows 7 and XP, iPhone 8's biggest competition is the phone people have now.
If I know that the new phone will have a bigger price tag, a more cluttered interface (dare I say very un-apple-like), and in some cases missing basic features I know and love (headphone jack, anyone?) - that makes for a hard sell.
The features that are getting touted leave me going... meh.
- Denser pixels? Dude, I'm scaling up the text size so I can read even with my glasses.
- Faster processor? Can't say I'm doing anything that needs more.
- Better camera? That's nice- but I have no complaints about the current one. My dedicated camera hasn't seen daylight in years as it is.
- Thinner? Couldn't care less. I never complained about the original iPhone's thickness. I'd rather have a double-thick battery, but ain't holding my breath.
In short, I'm having trouble seeing that's so awesome about the next phone. Or what even could be awesome. Something's going to have to come out of left field, and I just don't see a post-Jobs Apple pulling that off.
It downloads the 2GB update on its own? Very annoying...
On a related note, iOS has options to be frugal with data usage on cellular connections (as they're often metered and expensive), but always seems to treat wifi as a free for all... There's no option to declare a wifi network as being metered and prevent background activity from happening short of disabling all background activity in several places...
I thought i'd disabled all of this when i connected to an in flight wifi service, but it proceeded to download all my email automatically, and quickly burning through the 5mb data allowance i was given.
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Updates are a big reason I stick with IOS.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Wtf? 99.99999% of what is made up bullshit from an iBot on a blog??
Headphone jacks are so quaint. I suppose you still have manual windows in your car. Or are you more of a horse and buggy man?
Excepting that most state of the art headphones have that 3.5mm jack. Similarly, if one wants to connect the iPhone 7 to an otherwise perfectly good non-Bluetooth speaker (another quaint relic, I suppose), one would have to use the dongle along w/ the aux connector. If headphone jacks are so quaint, why did Apple leave it alone on the iPad Mini 4, as well as all their iPods? In fact, on the iPod nano, it's next to impossible to connect that to anything via bluetooth: I connect it in my car via USB to the iPod player in the navigation system
Apple needs to figure out its overall strategy, instead of forcing people to use lightning connectors on one thing and headphone jacks on others.