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Did Apple Retail Prices Get Too High in 2018? Consumers Say Yes. (usatoday.com)
Apple has for years been a premium brand that rarely, if ever discounted products. Every year, the company could raise prices on products, and consumers would not only happily pay, but stand in long lines for the privilege of doing so. From a report: So when Apple started putting misleading, but seemingly consumer-friendly posters in front of Apple Stores at the end of 2018 offering a new iPhone model for $300 off (with trade-in of your current phone), you know something different happened for the company this year. Consumers fought back. Many analysts have reported that in the wake of poorer-than-expected sales for this year's crop of iPhones, Apple cut back on production, including on the $1,100 iPhone XS Max, the $999 iPhone XS and the XR, the "budget" model that replaced the previous entry-level new phone, the $349 SE. The price for the XR (the one Apple is hawking discounts for): $749.
"This should be a wakeup call for Apple," says Daniel Ives, an analyst with Wedbush Securities. "They swung, and they really missed." The prices on the new phones are "far too high," says Terry Walton, a tourist from Auckland, New Zealand. He has an iPhone 7 and didn't even consider any of the X-series iPhones because it still works just fine. Upgrading "didn't enter my mind at all," he says. It wasn't just iPhones that got price hikes. Apple also upped the cost of the top-of-the-line iPad to $1,000 as well (or over $2,800 for a loaded model) and added $300 to the cost of the Mac Mini and new MacBook Air computers.
"This should be a wakeup call for Apple," says Daniel Ives, an analyst with Wedbush Securities. "They swung, and they really missed." The prices on the new phones are "far too high," says Terry Walton, a tourist from Auckland, New Zealand. He has an iPhone 7 and didn't even consider any of the X-series iPhones because it still works just fine. Upgrading "didn't enter my mind at all," he says. It wasn't just iPhones that got price hikes. Apple also upped the cost of the top-of-the-line iPad to $1,000 as well (or over $2,800 for a loaded model) and added $300 to the cost of the Mac Mini and new MacBook Air computers.
Apple was on a winner selling their phones, because they were expensive. Clearly their brand is losing its power.
I thought the poor value XR was priced so third party sellers got a larger cut, not so they could undercut them.
Who is that man?
Thatâ(TM)s Homer Simpson sir
At the prices they charge, I would expect a superior product and build quality.
You can take your $2800 loaded iPad and bend it easily with your hands, among other flaws. I wouldn't even expect that from a $100 tablet.
Glad people are starting to wake up to Apple's price gouging and downward slide in quality.
While I have no doubt that lowering prices would significantly increase demand, I wonder how much raising prices even more would decrease demand. Many many people are completely committed to iPhones, and will be willing to pay much more than the current prices to not have to switch to Android. I wonder if Apple would actually make the biggest profit by fleecing these people instead of going after people who are more price sensitive and are willing to switch or already have switched to Android.
The problems are becoming aggravating enough that I'm reviewing my options for the next upgrade.
My music library doesn't completely load. I have playlists that show all the songs but when you click to play, it grays out as unavailable. If I plug the phone or tablet in and sync, it'll sync up a couple of thousand different songs but other songs will then gray out. This is with about 50G of "free space" per iTunes.
The spacebar issue. For some reason, in more recent versions of IOS, I keep missing the spacebar and have posts with concatenated words. I don't know why it's doing it all of a sudden but it's damned annoying.
The music thing pisses me off the most though. Go through the trouble to create a playlist, go to listen to music during my commute and half the songs are missing.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
There is a big selection of Android phones from the Low End cheap sub $100 phones to the high end phones that are a fraction of a dollar less then what Apple sells, which are arguably just as nice or for some people much better.
However people are still paying more of the Apple phones. So why would lower its prices until it really has too.
Apple rarely gets suckered to the race to the bottom game, even it costs them market share. ...
Here is how the race to the bottom game works.
Company A offers a product at a high price.
Company B offers a similar product at a lower Price (often with some minor quality issues that is barely noticed).
Company A offers a product at a lower cost then B, however to meet the cost they have to cut its quality down.
Company B then goes makes an even crappier product to compete against A.
What we end up with is 2 products that no one really wants to buy because they are so poor.
We have seen this with Gateway 2000. Back in the mid 1990's gateway actually sold quality custom built PC's they were more expensive, but people gladly paid for them because they used good components. Then by the late 1990's they were competing against the lower end system to dominate the market, and end up with system that were Crap. In which Dell took over.
Apples approach is to maximize profit, not market share, if they can do both great, but they will error on the side of profit. So when company B makes a lower cost competitor Apple then tries to make a much better unit and charge more for it.
Now did they hit the limit? This article says yes, but we will see. Consumers always say the prices are too high.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I'm an iOS developer and a longtime Apple fan, but I'm having trouble finding a reason to upgrade from my iPhone 6S (even though Apple's offering me $200 in trade-in value for it).
Honestly, the lack of a headphone jack is a big thing for me. I listen to music all day at the office with my iPhone and an expensive set of headphones. It's a simple use case. No reason why I should have to bother with dongles or batteries.
Their sales start dropping and they simply start increasing prices to keep increasing profits. Their beyond-reason loyal fanbase enabled that for a while, but this is getting ridiculous, goes against any logic so could not possibly be sustained for long.
They have to be careful - I mean their 30% cut on all content makes a big chunk of their revenue (second only to the aforementioned ridiculously marked-up iphones), not offering an affordable way to hook people into that revenue stream will have severe long-term consequences. Other companies would give away hardware at cost for the chance of hooking people into that 30% content revenue deal, but Apple is trying to sell $300 worth of hardware for over $1000 based only on their name and gimmick-level innovations, in the anti-capitalist notion of increasing income simply by increasing prices.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
I've been a long time Apple fan. Switched everything over to Macs in the early 2000's.
Currently, I have an 11 year old Mac Pro I'm using and a 2007 iMac. Was hoping to upgrade the iMac before Christmas. But new ones didn't show.
The Mac Pro drives me crazy. Every time I start Word, it yells at me to upgrade my OS. I can't upgrade my OS. I have to get a new machine. The current Mac Pro is garbage. The new Mac Pro probably will be as well. And supremely over priced.
I don't mind spending a ton of money on a computer. As long as I know it will last. I don't like upgrading my hardware very often.
I'm not excited about getting off the platform. But I think it's about time to make it happen.
In their grand hunt for more profits, Apple is killing the golden goose. The blunder of the latest iPhone rollouts, their continued irrelevance of their iPad/Book/Pro lines with similarly high prices and underperformance, combined with their entire abandonment of anything desktop related, Apple will, unless there is a huge shakeup, fade back into the backwaters of computing history.
While there will always be people gullible enough to shell out $1,000 for a phone which plays music, the inflection point of people waking up to the reality of how much money they're wasting on phones is coming due. With only incremental "improvements", justifying exorbitant costs for meager gains will and is starting to come into play.
At this point, there isn't a good justification to buy an Apple phone other than its supposed exclusivity and for its fanboys. There isn't even a reason to buy their overpriced laptops which require multiple adapters to get it to work.
Apple needs to get its act together, and soon. The goose is getting long in the tooth and its ability to continue laying golden eggs is becoming doubtful. There is a huge market for people who are tired of Microsoft's crap, yet Apple seems vowed and determined to ignore those tens of millions of potential customers, all because they can make a few bucks now on a phone.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
In that past Apple's hardware on their laptops and phones have held up well, much better than the competition. And running unix was a huge plus. A premium price, and their annoying decisions, have been worth it. But the cumulative effect has put me over the edge:
The notch and rounded display corners
Camera bump, won't lay flat on desk
No headphone jack
proprietary cable
No expandable storage
Non-replaceable battery
iTunes doesn't run on linux
Phone hardware no more reliable than the competition
Fake sapphire camera lens
In particular I've had trouble with pocket lint clogging up the lightning jack after a year or two. Mid and lower range hardware is now good enough, unless you want the best camera. So there's no real reason to buy Apple any more other than brand name.
It's not like they ever were great bang for buck, at any price, or in any category. Like with all other luxury brands, you pay 200-300% profit margins.
mac pro 2019 starting at $5999 with a high base that people really don't need.
When you call a product excess, many customers are going to get a message that you did not intend to send.
That's it. No more Apple for me.
There was a theme in 1950s science fiction about degraded societies who could use technology but after a disaster could no longer manufacture or even properly understand it. This is how I look at Apple today. I look at the two Mac Pro 5,1s in front of me right now and see no replacement for them, and no replacement for them on the horizon.
There's not even a hint of embarrassment about it. Saying you want pro level workstations is like talking a foreign language in the Apple world. Look, a laptop with an E-GPU is not substitute for a workstation and in the case of a desktop, needing to add an E-GPU is an idiotic solution when the video cards are literally designed to pop into card slots, so no, a Mac mini is not a solution.
They've become a company of telephones. And, barring an course correction, my next computers will be Hackintoshes.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
Apple rarely gets suckered to the race to the bottom game, even it costs them market share.
They had a pretty large share of the market. Simply not raising their prices and being a familiar OS would have let them hold that market for a long time. A small number of high margin devices is their old business model. They had moved to moderate margin and a huge number of units is what they've been doing ever since the runaway success of the iPhone. Their real problem is that their older phones are still good enough and they should have always expected sales to slow to the replacement level once they owned the market.
This basically is starting to remind me of the cycle Apple went through back in the late 80's to early 90's. Back then Apples were seen as very high quality and the easiest most user friendly computers to own. They costed a lot, but if you had the money it was the way to go.
PCs kept getting built better though, and Windows started becoming a viable work GUI in the 90's after the 3.0 release. Eventually even if you preferred Apple it made little sense when a PC that worked just as good was 1/3 to 1/2 the cost. Even now after the company's rebound their traditional computer market share is a mere fraction of standard PC's.
Now, the same thing is happening with phones. For a long time Apple was the clear winner if you wanted a phone that "just worked". You paid a little extra but it was great. Now though, Android devices have pretty much caught up completely in hardware and software, while still being priced less. If you want a dirt cheap phone sure there are the sub-$100 options out there, but even at the premium level you can go Android and save a few hundred dollars vs Apple.
Particularly without Jobs at the helm, I see Apple's market share as continuing to drop within the next couple years. In a decade I'd wager Apple's marketshare on the phone market will be at or below 15%.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Since I hate phoning I went for an iPad mini instead, a tablet instead of a phablet.
Much bigger screen and much cheaper for people like me who use only messengers, imessages, whatsapp and facetime.
Nice way to generate web traffic without acknowledging the source. I think it's from The Wall Street Journal...
It's just a totally unnecessary change. It's clearly not about space at all.
I'm not paying more for a device fractionally faster, without a convenient thumb unlock or headphone jack.
And yes. I've owned 4 of the last top end iPads in a row. I'm done.
At several million dollars each. That will certainly ensure your elite hipster starus.
...my 2012 era laptop costs me about $400/year for its lifecycle (to-date because it's still usable), and it was underpowered at the time but still humming along... I just dropped $3k on new MBP which has the same $400/year if I can get 8+ years out of it, and the specs are good enough that it's possible... I looked at every other option, including Dell 5530 running Ubuntu... while shopping, I had to edit a PDF... no software on Linux (and I'm a decades-long user with a lot installed) could do it... so that was the decision maker for me - the 5530 was slightly cheaper, but ... the MBP runs tax software (can't do that on Linux unless you store your personal information on a company's web servers), lets me edit PDFs, and I imported my photos from the old laptop and synced to an iPad very quickly... that's value to me... everything still works together... sure, the Dell was slightly cheaper, but I would be starting over from scratch, buying some kind of Android tablet, trying to move photos to it, trying to get it to work with Linux (that's a pain), and so on... Apple gets away with their prices because the options are so bad that even today's Apple is better than Linux or ... Windows 10 ... I wouldn't even consider a Windows 10 computer for any reason after the privacy debacles of the past few years...
rather than go to anything that has anything whatsoever to do with Google and their mining. I use an iPhone, but I don't have an Apple ID. I don't need or have any apps that didn't ship with iOS. I'm in IT, but I use only texting, messages, maps, and an occasional phone call. iPhones get regular updates, even years away from release, something no Android phone does, not even the Pixel (3 years per Google). A modern, well-made mobile phone should easily last 3-4 years if treated well.
I see other children in my kid's school, most of them with high-end iPhones, and almost all the screens are cracked. It's ridiculous. Most adults walk around with damaged phones and I don't get it. For something that has effectively replaced your laptop or desktop for most non-IT people, they should do a better job at taking care of it. I don't let my kids near my tech. They have their own. If they break it, it's on them.
One of the most outrageous parts of Apple's pricing strategy can be found in the way that they differentiate between models in the same range that differ only based on storage capacity.
For example, consider the new (no Home button) iPad. In the UK, there are 4 models offered in the range:-
64Gb - £769
256Gb - £919
512Gb - £1,119
1Tb - £1,519
Yes, that's £1,519 or approximately £1950 for the *starting point* in price for a 1Tb iPad. Now, on the one hand, if you really want a terabyte tablet, expect to pay for that. On the other hand, look at the difference in price between the 512Gb and 1Tb versions - no less than £400.
However, if you go to say Amazon and check the price of a 512Gb Samsung 970 Pro M2 PCI Express SSD (close to if not the fastest-performing drive at that capacity), you'll pay £176.78 for a boxed, retail part.
In other words, Apple (a company that bought a memory/storage manufacturing business and which manufactures a significant portion of the RAM they use in-house) are charging comfortably more than twice as much for RAM packaged in one of their products (i.e. with the addition of one or two more chips on a standard circuit board) than a company offering a stand-alone, retail part.
The reason they're doing this is because they can. However, there's a slim chance that, as the markets saturate and as Chump's trade practices continue to bite, Apple will be left with a choice between cutting prices or slashing profits.
And/or we can just move to a different vendor or significantly reduce the replacement cycle of existing Apple kit.
"Apple is a Social Justice Warrior Company!" -- Tim Cook
Marketing:"Will someone please shut that guy up?"
CFO: "He's the CEO"
Marketing: "I don't care! Shut him up!"
though I now suspect that was due to a failing battery. Her 8 I'm gonna make her get a new battery for when the time comes :).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Here's the reality: Apple hasn't increased any iPhone prices whatsoever.
The cheapest models are gone. The iPhone 7 to iPhone 8s+ have all become cheaper, without exception. The iPhone X has been replaced with an improved model for the same price. And there are two new models, one at a top end price, one considerably lower.
The highest prices are all for storage options that were not available before.
Duh, Inc.
Apples approach is to maximize profit, not market share, if they can do both great, but they will error on the side of profit.
They'll certainly error on the side of profit margin, but that's not what brought Apple to be one of the world's most profitable companies. The iPod/iPhone/iPad was by no means cheap, but it could sell to a normal middle class market like BMW to use a car analogy. Now I feel like Apple is retreating back into Ferrari market, sure there has been and will be a market for luxury sports cars but it's not huge. That Apple is taking away the low-end options like the SE and the small Mini is a clear sign they were cannibalizing the market as people look for cheaper ways to stay in/get in the Apple ecosystem. So they raise the bar and say you must be this rich to buy Apple, it can work as long as people are tied up in iTunes purchases and iCloud and whatnot... but if they make the switch it's bye-bye Apple.
They can survive some skew in that the people with the most money to buy phones are also those who spend the most money buying apps, but 9 out of 10 times the mainstream end up crushing niche applications. Think like the workstation market, mainframe market or what Blackberry was like. What I don't like is that it's Google taking over, our lead data miner. Even with Microsoft trying to be a mini-Google they're nothing to the Big Daddy of tracking. But I think Apple will find that as they're retreating back into the high end, they'll find it terribly hard to stop when they want to stop.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
So far increased prices have kept revenues up as sales have declined. That train is now running out of steam.
I have a 6 year old MacBook Pro that needs to be upgraded. There's nothing available from Apple that I can buy. I do consulting work that requires me to be able to remove the SSD. I can't do that with any current Apple models, although competitors like Dell seem perfectly capable of offering removable storage.
Ditto for my aging Mac Pro. What is there to replace it with? The latest Mac Mini refresh is a joke, and the iMac Pro is ridiculously overpriced, again with soldered SSDs.
I have an iPhone 8 that I'll keep until it falls apart, for no other reason than I refuse to buy a phone with a larger screen. If I wanted to carry something as big as the XR or XS, I'd buy a Samsung.
To be fair, the Apple Watch is still a good product, as are the AirPods. Not everything has turned to crap in the Apple product line, but far too much has. The only thing that keeps Apple going (in my opinion) is that the competition is even worse. Every competitor who could possibly upend Apple seems bound and determined to copy Apple's worst impulses instead.
But any way you look at it, Apple is headed straight for a brick wall with the iPhone monoculture. Apple will have nothing to fall back on except for its services.
I expect that Tim Cook will be gone within five years, but what if his replacement is just another John Sculley? It is depressing to see what has happened to a once-great company.
The problem is there are getting too many competitors in the middle class market. Where it use to be just Samsung, we have Google, Ericson, LG... All jumping into that market too.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Maybe this is the cost of having "courage".
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Here's my 2 cents, FWIW.
I have a 5S that I bought when it was the top-of-the-line flagship iPhone. It's served me really well.
Every time a new model has been released, I have evaluated whether it was worth the cost of upgrading given the amount of improvement I would see. With the 6 and 7 series, the only real difference in terms of how I would use it would be the addition of Apple Pay. The technical performance isn't enough better to be worth the price tag (at least to me) and Apple Pay isn't available in the stores that I would use it most if it were an option. So, those are out.
I have no real interest in the X because I don't want FaceID. Let me stick with using my thumb with TouchID. I might have considered the 8, but the loss of the headphones port (something I use often) represents a loss in functionality in a very real way. In other words, for me the 8 is actually a downgrade from the 5s for my use case.
Aside from that, I prefer the form factor of the 5s. I know that the SE would be an upgrade, but it's a case of not being a big enough upgrade to justify the price tag (plus they don't even make those anymore).
As it stands right now, the 5s still runs the latest iOS. I don't know how much longer that will continue, but as long as it does I see no reason to upgrade, and some compelling reasons to stay where I am. I'm not sure what I'll do when the 5s gets obsoleted. I'm hoping for an updated SE that still has a headphone port, but I'm not holding my breath. It's going to be a tough decision.
Intelligent responses welcome, flames will be met with marshmallows.
There are also some who aren't upgrading due to the lack of an audio port on all the new models. The iPhone 6 and 6s models still work fine, and "upgrading" to refurbished ones is preferable for many to switching to something that'll require a handful of extra clunky connectors just to interface with one's car.
That strikes as me as an odd way to describe declining sales. Consumers can choose not to buy something without being in a battle with the supplier. The current products don't (in the consumers' estimation) offer a good value proposition for them. They aren't fighting with Apple. They're just acting in their own self interest. That's what we expected, right?
-Dave
I mean, Apple had record profits in 2018. Maybe they moved fewer units than stock analysts wanted them to. But they made more revenue than ever (+16%) and more profit than ever (+30%). Lowering the number of units sold, and raising the profit per unit, is something that's useful a good portion of the time.
Further, their share of smartphones is growing with respect to Android. So their 30% commission isn't in danger.
But this stupid article quotes stock market analysts and a random tourist. No evidence that Apple is messing up. Just opinions unconnected to data, and instead the analysts are just comparing to some ideal that they imagine.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
I just pad $1,000 for a Samsung Galaxy Note 9 and love it, and I happily paid that price (yes, financed over the 2 year contract, but whatever). The Note 9 is awesome though, as I use it at work to take pictures of something I need to ask someone a question on, break out the stylus to modify the picture, and then text it over and get my answer in a few minutes. Solid battery life, great processing speed, etc. It's a great phone.
iPhones just aren't interesting. They haven't added any new features that are compelling.
But most importantly, it's that Tim Cook is not Steve Jobs. Jobs new how to sell people on the vision and potential and get people to dream about what their life would be like using Apple products, and they could charge a premium for what was essentially a decently engineered copy of someone else's product. He could spin new things like Siri as though it's something innovative, even though my Motorola Droid could do everything Siri could do 2 years before Siri was even announced.
People mention, even in this thread, that the Apple products now aren't what people want. What most don't realize is what you wanted was what Jobs was able to socially engineer you into thinking you wanted it. Tim Cook can't do that; he's a solid engineer and Apple products are quite well designed these days, but Cook is not giving people a reason to believe, and their premium brand is suffering for it.
They already bend.
Why do you think your statements are in the least acceptable to spout? Democrats.
"misleading, but seemingly consumer-friendly posters in front of Apple Stores"
Who is running marketing? What changed?
So much negativity in these comments.
* Apple made an incremental upgrade to their phones which offered little new over the prior generation which was well purchased (the X and 8/8Plus)
* at a time when the overall phone purchasing market shrunk due to saturation
* at a time when consumer debt is the highest and consumer spending is on a decline due to uncertainty (partly created by media)
They saw the same decline everyone else did this year, but had a fantastic last-year. They also sold a ton of Apple Watches, iPads, iPad Pros. and iMacs.
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
Nobody cares about the audio port anymore. Apple saw the writing on the wall for Bluetooth headsets and connected devices (ie: spotify plays to Alexa, my amp, etc directly). They saw that it was the thickest item on the phone and a giant hole which you can't waterproof due to its springy internal design. They created a cheap dongle (in case you need extras) which they included one in the box for free to ease compatibility for those with old speaker sets.
Google who has now followed suit. The long term is that the antiquated phone jack designed in 1877 and made slightly smaller in the 1950s is too big to make a phone thinner, takes up too much internal space in the phone, and corrodes due to moisture in the pocket.
Let it go. The headphone jack was always on its way out.
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
No buy
A 2010...2012 Mac Pro was (even is) actually pretty damned great.
Before the dark times.
Before the trashcan.
"He has an iPhone 7 and didn't even consider any of the X-series iPhones because it still works just fine."
Well, that's the problem right there. Apple should do something about that.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Whether some of Apple's products have gotten too expensive is a fair question, but I'm not going to waste my time on article with zero fact-checking:
" the XR, the "budget" model that replaced the previous entry-level new phone, the $349 SE. "
Nope.
My phone, a Galaxy S9, has 24bit/192kHz capability. Pretty sure that's better than I can hear. Or you can hear. Or anyone can hear. At that level of reproduction, it's down to the quality of the recording / [compression / decompression] schemes and the headphone system.
I suggest you take a look at EBay. You can pick up a 2012 mac pro, 12/24 core, lots of ram, etc., for a (comparative) song. It'll still run the latest OS (so far.) A 2010 is even less expensive with nearly the same specs, and it'll go to OS X 10.12.6 without problems, which covers most needs, though not all — some developers have (quite unwisely, IMHO) opted to depend on features only available in the Very Latest.
Though at this point, I'd at least wait and see what Apple comes up with for the new Mac Pro. They've actually done (a little) mea culpa for the trashcan, so one can at least hope they'll go back to a decent design. I wouldn't bet on it, but a delay in purchasing an older unit isn't really that kind of bet: and in fact, it may see a further drop in resale prices.
I've already invested in one of these older, nicely designed units; I'm interested to see what Apple does here anyway. If they really hit it out of the park, I'll buy in. Otherwise... really, this will do.
If you want the best camera, a phone isn't the place to look. Buy a cheap phone and a great DSLR and you are so far ahead in image quality it's not even funny.
All this talk of Apple having sales issues has been nonsense in the past and it is nonsense still.
We'll see the truth of the matter in the next earnings report.
The XR is a really nice phone, I would have upgraded to that myself if the X I got last year had not been holding up so well...
It also seems strange to me fact that Apple themselves have stated they are seeking longer upgrade cycles, so if that is happening it's pretty much expected.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I've been willing to pay the Mac premium in past, but I bought the Macbook Air 2018 and it's a swindle.
They're just pricing in the fact that very few people will upgrade from X and XS phones in the next 4 years. Moore's law is over on mobile now, too, and there are few bells and whistles remaining that they could conceivably add to make an upgrade worthwhile. A triple camera (as opposed to double) ain't gonna cut it. Speed is good enough as is (up to 3x the fastest Android phone in benchmarks). I think we might see iPhone go to a bi-yearly update cycle at some point as well as an even more aggressive push for subscription services and the like.
The good news is, Watch has a lot of room for improvement. Make it thinner, add more of the traditional "phone" features, make the battery last longer, add even more biometric sensors, smarter activity tracking, etc. And there Apple doesn't have _any_ competition at all: Watch 4 is by far the best device in this product category, and nobody has the resources (and/or balls) to spend a cool billion dollars to catch up.
I completely respect this reading of the events of this year, but for people who closely observe the company, this narrative is incorrect in several ways.
The decision to focus on premium-price phones was influenced by the durability and power of the phones released over the past 10 years. There are tens of millions of iPhones 6, 6s, 7, and so on available at every price point. They work well and they can still be supported with updates. The cycle of upgrading frequently is fascinating for pundits but not actually a priority for Apple executives.
It is possible that sales were a bit lower than expected, but it's incredibly speculative to argue that the difference was large. If production schedules were altered, that was more likely adjustment of the highest-sales scenario. Again, Apple is in no hurry, and they don't want their business to be overly seasonal or cyclic.
This headline is almost right, except it wasn't consumers who said the prices were too high, it was just bloggers.
It is a rare occasion when I pay for current generation or full price for Apple products. They are my ecosystem of choice but they charge too much. The iMac I'm currently typing on is the first full price machine I've bought from them in a long time. The wife and I are using iPhone 7s that were purchases when the X came out. My iPad pro is a refurb. My wife's MacBook Air is a refurb. My MBP from 2011 was purchased on sale for $200 off and was the base model. So I give them plenty of money, but I won't pay their shiny new object premium.
Because it depends on your value of the word "people"
if "people" in 2015 is substantially more than "people" in 2018 when the majority of your users are on a 2-year upgrade cycle, then you've got real problems and you are very bad at business if you don't try to figure out why.
Yeah, I get the whole "you don't need to be #1 in the market to be a viable business" but you do need to show *some* growth or you are dying. Any business that sells products to a retail market lives and dies by identical sales growth, and if it goes negative you aren't long for the world unless you get it positive again. And Apple only has a few levers to yank on to make move positive:
- revolutionary product features that competitors don't have: haven't really seen this in a while, so no reason to think they're going to launch something that will have this soon, or they would have put it into the double-flusher of a product line they're selling right now
- market expansion: they're already selling globally so until SETI pays off they're about as expanded as they're going to be.
- pricing cuts: Looks like this is the direction they're going. See: the article we're all commenting on. QED.
Apple's hardware used to be good, but they've ruined it, removing ports, shrinking sizes, etc.
License Mac OS for PCs and watch it take off.
So much Apple-love on Slashdot. I wonder what you all do for a living?
Personally, I have never, and probably will never, buy an Apple product. Because of the pricing, yes, but also because I've never found a single redeeming feature in any Apple product.
I manage *thousands* of the damn things, phones, Macs and iPads. But I honestly wouldn't ever buy one or use one myself. My "work" iPad sits doing CCTV all day (and falls over with alarming regularity - there is obviously no application controls and one program sucking up RAM can easily cause it to fall over and "restart" the entire iPad once every 24 hours at least. It also can't manage four simultaneous H264 HD-level streams as it runs out of RAM on the fourth and kills the app).
I finally convinced my employers to stop using them for anything when I proved that they're not compliant with UK consumer, company or data protection laws. By literally failing to get them to acknowledge a letter of complaint to their head office (Ireland), and then them refusing to do ANYTHING - even reply to questions requesting statutory complaint / data retention information. I strongly suspect that they are not GDPR compliant, as they weren't ever DPA compliant. They make noises to suggest such, but they have never given a statement to that effect, and refuse when asked.
(And that's because iCloud is nothing more than AWS, Azure etc. cloud instances in random regions... The Register published an article on it earlier this year).
I haven't found a single redeeming feature in any product, service, or business process that they use. Those people who have rejected my concerns have - to a person - gone back on their assertions that Apple are "so wonderful" within a matter of months, after whatever-I-predicted happened.
Honestly... what do you use Apple for that you couldn't use anyone else for, and do so cheaper?
As the old saying goes, "If you have to ask the price, you can't afford it!"
The biggest 'weapon' Apple have in their arsenal, is loyalty to the OS.
It's hard to convince users to switch to Android, even in the same household.
The battle is on though, there's so many high quality flagship phones far cheaper than iPhones, users will eventually vote with their wallets.
When you can get the same level of quality for almost half the price, I'm pretty sure users could stomach a move from iOS to Android.
I picked up the Galaxy S9 for $500 with discounts and whilst I'm no big fan of touchwiz, I don't like iOS either, with it's walled garden.
These predictions based on the supply chain come out every year, and they've been wrong every year. It would be too late to cut orders for the XR or XS; what Apple is probably doing is cutting supply for next year's phones from certain suppliers for various reasons. Maybe the supplier didnâ(TM)t live up to expectations or the prices were too high. Apple's supply chain works a long way in advance.
It may be that all this is true, just don't take it for granted that it is. Like Apple or hate them, making bad predictions about them is all these analysts have done for years because it pays the bills. I won't be surprised if Apple has a mediocre year (I bought an iPhone 7 last year and had no intention of upgrading, but I got a XR as a gift; the old phones are so good now that upgrading is pointless until the phone falls apart), but I won't be surprised if they also have a really great year. Nobody knows but Apple right now.
Were notorious for problems with their disk drive mechanisms and overheating.
So no, since Wozniak left, the caliber of Apple Products has been questionable.
Furthermore they have continually deprecated their hardware designs every 2-4 years, causing users to have to buy expensive interface devices, or stay on legacy platforms to keep their specialty equipment running, not unlike Microsoft and its windows versions.
Apple makes all of their products in China for pennies and they're charging premium top dollar for it. Suckers.
Because we spent 8 years watching Republicans become apoplectic over everything from someoneâ(TM)s birth certificate to a former government officialâ(TM)s emails, then suddenly get amnesia when their own side does it.
Considering 99% of consumers will never get close to maxing out the processor speed (no, I'm not talking about people on /. or tech blogs), any processor within the last few years is "fast enough".
Consumers are stupid, per se. Just look at the price of a pickup truck or SUV. 60-100k?
MOST smartphones, including the iPhones, have build costs of around 200-400 dollars, minus marketing &
advertising, but "command" $1,000-1500 bucks? I read somewhere that the markup on iPhones is around 60%
from cost. Yeah, if you can get away with it, good for business, but, I think consumers are finally saying enough is
enough, considering the "what you get for your money" aspect. Most of these phones in the last few years are
gimmick updates. Flashy colors, notch/no notch, bezel, no bezel, 2,3,4 or more camera lenses. And, does it
REALLY improve the user experience? NOPE
> Their sales start dropping and they simply start increasing prices to keep increasing profits.
Ahh yes, the cable company model, as they respond to a declining subscriber base.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
Transfer pricing gets busted. It will go down if the IRS and various tax authorities did their job properly. Cost of making the things has gone down. Pretend inflated cost price to their own vertical non arms lengh franchise. As transfer pricing is more than the cost per unit of production, and actually increased, the tax authorities need to slap them with reasonable fines.
In other news, China has started to churn out near top end phones so it is in place for 5G rollout - which may make consumers buy. Helped along with a trade boycott.
I recently purchased the 2018 MacBook Pro. The fact that they do not allow you to upgrade the HDD and RAM is practically criminal. You basically have to shell out extra money for something you may not need just in case you need it. Either that or dispose of the current model just to buy another model when you need the added resources. We are a wasteful society and Apple is leading the way.
By the way, the 2018 MacBook Pro was running way too hot. As a fix, Apple came out with an update that cripples the CPU so that it does not run at the speed it is supposed to be running at. So, now I get a laptop that is not burning my lap (as much), but the CPU is crippled. I paid big bucks to get the extra processor speed too and now feel even more ripped off.
Maybe their poor sales are due to people wanting an iPhone SE-like phone with a 4" screen. Not everyone wants a phone that requires 2 hands (so you can't use it while driving) and can't fit in your pocket.
You guys seriously need a third party.
The problem is there are getting too many competitors in the middle class market. Where it use to be just Samsung, we have Google, Ericson, LG... All jumping into that market too.
Back in 2014 I would cringe at Android phones imitating Apple and by pricing themselves at 450 to 600 without necessarily being high end.
Now they're almost double the price and missing some key features while gimmicks are added... and no public backlash occurred against those market leaders in the US, sadly.
Lots of value brands sell overseas in the third world, but there's evidence that unneeded 6"+ screens, notches and other garbage are starting to taint them too
I find this article a bit odd saying how clearly the $300 shows they made a mistake. It acts as if they are hurting badly.... but haven't people said numerous times that they are still making a large profit in sales?
Or is that just random people defending Apple at any question of how amazing the company is?
Then again I should also remember/realize companies also do the "We only made 10 millions... we wanted 10 BILLION!" at times as well.
You can get a deal on the website or from resellers...not at the shiny apple store at the mall. I've just spent a day or so getting Windows 10 updated for a relative. W10 sucks balls so bad that it is the best ad for Apple OS...updates don't take, the browser is slow, etc. Now, my use case is for writing, so it is open...save...print. I don't game on the Apple or write software. For a normal user, the time spent NOT effing with windows 10 is worth the Apple Tax. System 7 is still there, under two shells and layers of crap....and it's a game to find the panel you are looking for....moving the family to Apple gave me back months of my life not trying to remove junk installed by "friends" and malware from some jerkoff in Romania....
What else do you need?
If you convinced your employer to drop Apple, I hope you moved the employer to something better than Apple such as Linux.
Anything but Microsoft.
Over the years, Apple went from innovative robust hardware to overpriced junk.
aaaaaaa
Because my freedom of speech need not come with a stamp of Republican approval.
They still need some significant marketshare otherwise app developers are going to leave and never come back. That would be the end of the iOS platform.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Selling new units at the same level isn't required to hold market share. Keeping users with older hardware from jumping to Android should be their main concern. The fact that their current line is too expensive means that consumers are already thinking 2-3 years out and thinking they may not want to buy another iPhone. Still, they aren't going to but this year no matter the brand.
I am admitting to being a more recent Apple convert, and I do really like their products (I have watches, tablets, macbooks, Apple TV, etc.) but damn, they are expensive. I have and use an iPhone 7 Plus now and really like it), but I am worried about the day when Iâ(TM)ll HAVE to upgrade to a model without the home button and the stupid notch. I absolutely hate my wifeâ(TM)s iPhone X, and may be considering different manufacturers in the future.
Of course the problem with that is youâ(TM)re then outside of their ecosystem. So in a sense, I am locked in. In the end, Iâ(TM)ll probably just give in and buy what I have to because the value of being able to share resources across devices is more than my desire to give them the middle finger. I am not loyal to Apple because of their lofty principles or virtues, rather, they have a decent system that my family and I have dedicated to. This is the genius of their business model.