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.

Comments

As much as I'm not an Apple fan

[enjar]

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.

Apple's getting to Intel's/Microsoft's problem

[unixisc]

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.

Re:Apple's getting to Intel's/Microsoft's problem

[swb]

If anything, the loss of the home button will be a bummer:

They've reached the point where they're just making "courageous" changes which benefit their own assembly & engineering but lack significant user value and don't solve obvious consumer problems with the device. Case in point, the headphone jack.

My guess is they are on the cusp of a "Windows 8 Start Menu" kind of change where the fuck up the design enough to seriously damage their user base.

Re:Apple's getting to Intel's/Microsoft's problem

[TheFakeTimCook]

If anything, the loss of the home button will be a bummer:

They've reached the point where they're just making "courageous" changes which benefit their own assembly & engineering but lack significant user value and don't solve obvious consumer problems with the device. Case in point, the headphone jack.

My guess is they are on the cusp of a "Windows 8 Start Menu" kind of change where the fuck up the design enough to seriously damage their user base.

Very doubtful. Unlike MS and Linux/Android, Apple moves VERY slowly and carefully with UI paradigm shifts.

For example, In the computer world, a user familiar with a 1984 Mac would have less difficulty acclimating to macOS 10.12 than a Windows 7 User would have with Windows 8. And in the mobile world, a person familiar with iPhone OS 1.0 for the most part would feel right at home with iOS 10.3. I can't speak for Android, but I think they have far too many "customizations" to say anything close to the same thing.

Re:Apple's getting to Intel's/Microsoft's problem

[jittles]

Yes, yes, I know. Everything Apple does is one big Conspiracy.

The double tap on the home button to turn on the device and then go to the PIN entry adds exactly what functionality? None! At least let me swipe to get to the lock screen instead of wearing out a mechanical button on the device. And since the home button is the #1 thing to fail on an iPhone (besides cracked glass), how can you not claim it to be malicious on Apple's part? One of the first mods ever added by the jailbreak community was a soft home button so that you could use a device without replacing the button. That's how common of a problem it is and Apple did something that makes the problem worse.

You're kidding, right? The swipe left vs. right went completely unnoticed by me. I don't use that feature often enough to remember which way to swpie anyway!

I sometimes write software for Apple devices and have hardware that cannot be upgraded to the latest iOS. So some of my devices scroll through apps one way, and some of them scroll through the other. It's incredibly irritating when you switch devices. Sure, if you've only got one device you get used to it pretty quickly but again it was an arbitrary change for no real reason.

But if that's the best you can come up with, that's pretty minor stuff in the overall scheme of things for an OS.

I can think of dozens of changes that Apple makes to the UI every single time they roll out a new version of iOS. But you made the claim that everything they did was deliberate and well studied and I just don't think that's the case. Jon Ive does whatever the hell he wants now that Jobs is gone, and most of it is just because he decides it looks better this week than it did last week.

LCD vs OLED vs MicroLED

[monkeyxpress]

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.

Re:Android updates sold me on IOS

[Spy Handler]

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.