Apple Says It Could Miss $9 Billion In iPhone Sales Due To Weak Demand (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Apple CEO Tim Cook published a letter to investors today warning of weaker than expected first-quarter earnings, citing "fewer iPhone upgrades than we had anticipated." The weakened demand came primarily from China, although Cook notes that "in some developed markets, iPhone upgrades also were not as strong as we thought they would be." In his letter, Cook offers several explanations for the lower earnings guidance: earlier launch timing of the iPhone XS and XS Max compared to the iPhone X, the strength of the US dollar, supply constraints due to the number of new products Apple released in the fall, and overall economic weakness in some markets. But the core issue remains simple: people just aren't buying as many new iPhones as Apple hoped. All in all, Apple's revised Q1 guidance forecast is dropping by up to $9 billion in revenue compared to its original estimate.

Comments

Another Example of Missing the Boat

[X!0mbarg]

People are Content with their current phones.
After all, they paid Through the Nose for their current iPhone, and are not willing to drop even more their hard-earned cash for yet another upgrade that isn't really a substantial improvement over what they have. Sure, it's a status symbol and all that, but people don't all have the same level of disposable income as they used to.
Didn't the PC market go through this a while back?
Isn't Microsoft going through this yet again over Windows 7 vs Windows 10, and won't they be feeling same "loss of profits" bite when it comes to the next iteration of Windows?
You can certainly tell that Microsoft holds a substantial share of Apple by the way they make the same mistakes.

Re:Apple is eating it's own tail

[TheRaven64]

I'm typing this on a late 2013 MacBook Pro, with a 2.6GH quad-core (Haswell) i7, 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. I got this machine just after it was released, five years ago. They only released a noticeably faster model a few months ago. The starting price for the new model is £2,349, which gives you 16GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD (seriously, in 2019! The older one that this machine replaced had an SSD that big!) and a 2.2GHz (6-core) processor. If I want the 2.6GHz model, it's £2,699. Upgrading to 32GB of RAM is another £360. Upgrading the SSD to 2TB is a whopping £1080! 2TB of NVMe costs less than that retail! This brings the price for a machine that's a bit better than my current one to £4,139. Sorry Apple, I'm not willing to pay £4K for a slight upgrade. Especially not when this machine has quite a nice keyboard and the newer ones have absolutely horrible ones. The same specs two years earlier, and I'd have jumped at it. Now? It's just not competitive.

If I max out the specs (bigger GPU, 4TB SSD on top of what I listed above), it's £6,254. That's a silly amount of money for what you actually get.