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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.
Guess they should have realized they were pricing themselves out of the market earlier.
I bet if they added headphone jacks again, the new phones would sell like hotcakes. Who wants to upgrade when there's a huge decrease in functionality?
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They have lost their momentum. They used to make great products that just worked. Perfectly. They have been living on that reputation and it's about over.
Corporatism != Free Market
In his letter, Cook offers several explanations for the lower earnings guidance
And he never once mentioned the jacked up prices of the new Apple offerings nor the lack of innovation that has led to Apple's quality being par with competitors'.
Cook has neither the vision nor the control that Jobs had. The latest phones have Lightning ports instead of the industry-standard USB-C, dropping the headphone jack, but the Mac lines all offer USB-C. A competent CEO with control over his various divisions, as Jobs was, would have standardized on USB-C for all products. Cook simply does not wield enough power within his own house to make that happen. Jobs moved Apple to eschew the PS/2, serial, and parallel ports in favor of a single standard, USB, and that took vision and control: Cook has neither.
Cook wastes Apple's time and resources on content creation, bogus iTunes adventures like music streaming, and so forth. Apple needs to recenter itself around its core competencies: hardware and software. Forget "thinner" and remember what "pro" used to mean. Revive the 2012 MacBook Pro design with its thick but accessible, repairable, tough-as-a-tank system.
My 2012 MBP has a massive dent in one corner from being dropped onto Frankfurt Airport's hard, stone floor: the aluminum deformed, but neither the screen nor any other component was harmed. I've spilled an embarrassing amount of beer, water, and champagne onto the keyboard and drained each out the optical drive; it still keeps on ticking. Why would I buy a Cook-era MBP whose useless touch-bar will fail due to heat issues? How would I deal with all the dongles?
People are rejecting Apple products because of Apple's insistence on not allowing users of tbeir products to fix their own stuff after they have bought and own it.
Louis Rossman exposes this regularly. A high school kid saves up enough money to by an Apple laptop as their first one, believing it to be the best option for them at the time with its ease of jse for newbies. Fast forward to where a solder joint breaks and the laptop no longer boots and the kid takes it in to a Genius Bar to get jt fixed. Apple will charge the kid for an entire new motherboard and refuse to allow its store staff to fix the old. Kid is out $1200 dollars (on purpose, Apple's goal is to get the kid to just buy a new laptop and throw tbe old in their trash) instead of $35 parts plus labor combined at a competent laptop repair shop.
People who use Apple products are increasingly seeing the light. That type of behavior is profit driven and in no way consumer positive. It's a shame as Apple do seem to see the light with regards to protecting privacy of its consumers, when other companies flat out don't care.
But therin lies the rub. Apple makes bank based on their no repair policy whereas everyone else subsidises their stuff through collecting and selling user metrics and serving them ads. The entire culture is a racket and people getting rich off it don't give a flying fig if it all comes crashing down when justice finally catches up with them (Google is a hack away from being sued into oblivion for the amount of interconnected data it has managed to collect and actively store. Once the data gets released to the light of day, practically no one will be able to prove they are who they say they are in legal settings, and any criminal can electronically become any other person they want as many times as they want).
I bet if they added headphone jacks again, the new phones would sell like hotcakes. Who wants to upgrade when there's a huge decrease in functionality?
@yorgasor nailed it.
The iPhone was an iPod that could make phone calls first and foremost. Somehow that was forgotten and those Audiophiles among us have slowly become increasingly annoyed with Apple as they have:
- Taken away the Headphone jack
- Destroyed the usability of iTunes as a Jukebox (I mean seriously it turned into an App Store Device management system)
- Caused Massive AppleID Identity Crisis As Apple tried to conflate iCloud with Me.com/Mac.com and iTunes DRM Log ins
- Arbitrarily and without my authorization erased all my local music from my iPhone in a Vain attempt to get me to Stream from the Cloud Driving my Data Rates into the Sky while simultaneously putting all my music into buffer-hell
- Artificially Kept Storage capacity behind the curve of progress, We should have Terrabytes of local storage by now, But NOOOOOOO That goes against their motivation for a cloud ($Subscription)
Sigh..... Stallman was right..... I should just chunk my iPhone 6s and just go back to a moto Razr.....
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.
Apple should be very concerned about who is making negative statements about Apple products today.
In the past it was mostly hate-anything-Apple-trolls, but today many of the 'Apple has lost it's way',"Apple is crap', ' Apple is way overpriced' complaints are now coming from past Apple customers who do not see any valid reason to spend $2000+ to upgrade their old 2010 iMac or 2012 Macbook Pro to an inferior product that has no function keys, a mouse that has a charging port on the bottom, fewer ports, and keyboards that feel like you are typing on jello. For that much money you expect something that stands out from the rest, but their repeat customers just don't see Apple as having those products or the perception of having those stand-out products anymore.
Look at their greed: they release looooong overdue Macbook Air and macMinis with mediocre upgraded specs and less ports in late 2018, then jack up those prices by $300. Pure blatant greed.
I bet if they added headphone jacks again
The iPhone has been jack-less since the 7. The iPhone jumped the shark with the X - when Apple decided to go fucking nuts with the "flagship" model starting at $1k, and they haven't looked back.
Dare I say it, the other problem with the X and later models, is that the iPhone has ceased to be intuitive to operate. You have to just know where/how you're supposed to swipe to make stuff happen, and Steve Jobs is probably spinning in his grave. I'm sure this has put off a lot of the older generations from upgrading.
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DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
since users found that apple was secretly throttling their phones causing problems on purpose it was bound to happened. getting the battery replace is just so much cheaper for a perfectly good phone. besides iphones are just too expensive to replace yearly now.
At $1,100 and $1,200 USD for an iPhone X (what ever), I just kept my iPhone 7. Still working. I guess for their next trick, Apple will start bricking phone 3 versions or older. At which point, Android, here I come.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Lots of people care.
EVERY Mac I have owned (except for the 512KE) I upgraded the RAM and the storage.
I can buy a 2TB SSD for about the cost to upgrade from 256GB to 512GB at Apple prices, I do NOT want to pay Apples extra 400% markup.
Apples biggest issue is that they can no longer be trusted to make choices that are consumer friendly.
I would have bought the bottom end 15" MBP and upgraded it like I did the last time, but I can't.
I wold have upgraded my iPhone SE, but they don't make a phone the size of the SE anymore
I would upgrade my Final Cut Pro software, but I don't think Apple is in it for the long haul, better to jump ship before it gets harder to do
Apple does not sell the HomePod in New Zealand, I am moving away from iTunes.
I get a free 1TB cloud storage from MS and from Adobe, there is no way I am paying Apple anything.
OSX server is so deprecated that I need to move to Linux now
Apple has become all glitz, and no function.
Steve is NOT coming back this time to Save Apple from its self.
It's not necessarily all the new issues that have come along. And it's not that the current iPhones are so good people don't want to upgrade. It's the issues they have had from the beginning that are biting them in the ass:
* No replaceable battery
* No MicroSD card slot
* A texting app that won't actually send an SMS to a non-iPhone by default, and which diverts every text you do send to another iPhone through their servers
* Updates that intentionally drain your battery on older models
* Updates that make simple things like your charger stop working, or which intentionally disable phones with third-party repairs
This is all stuff Apple has done from the beginning. They treated the phones as disposable, and the on-phone storage as some sort of precious commodity, like we were back in the 90's and there are severe silicon shortages. Their institutional arrogance was through the roof - iPhones will only work well out of the box with Apple services or Apple servers and getting them to import or export information elsewhere is just painful. People looked the other way and forgave them that because, at least with Apple stuff, iPhones mostly just worked.
Every one of those issues, though, is a goodwill sink. When iPhones were priced less and, at least with their own gear, just worked, then the sinks on goodwill were less than the features you got, and they had sales growth. However, when you add removing the headphone jack, back-to-back updates which have disabled some sort of third party charger or device, and successive generations that have gotten more expensive for what... a further reduction in dot pitch you need a microscope to discern, with all that people ask themselves if iPhone is worth the aggravation. And once it stops being a bit thick everywhere you go with Apple hype, people start to realize they bought into something that's not so shiny after all.
All Apple knows is fewer people are upgrading. What they don't (can't) fully know is how many previous iPhone users are actually not just not upgrading but jumping ship to a more open platform. I suspect it's a lot more than you think. I don't think the slowdown in sales is the west dissing Huawei and China getting all national pride about phones. I suspect what we are seeing is Apple starting to reap the results of a lot of anti-customer policies they have had from the beginning. Hype can plaster over treating your customers like shit for a little while. Not forever.
Yes, they do. If you run a business, the repair policies are insane. Dell will have parts or visit onsite within 24 hours. Apple make you go do a store (in a different city, we didn't have one), or send it off through an authorised repair company, and it will take two weeks to turn it around. I worked in a university in a group which was primarily Mac-based. A couple of years ago, the funding bodies who fund academic research banned the purchase of Mac hardware with their funds, the justification being that it wasn't cost effective and it was wasting valuable money which could be spent better on alternatives. And to be honest, they aren't wrong, are they. If I have a laptop like a Dell, HP or Thinkpad, I can replace the keyboard using a vendor-supplied replacement in just a few minutes. Apple now rivet the keyboard to the case, requiring both to be replaced. It's not even screwed on. That's unreasonable. If I need to replace the screen, I can get replacement screen parts. But Apple require the whole lid assembly to be replaced in its entirely because it's all glued together. That's equally unreasonable and wasteful of materials. That's just two points. But the entire systems made by Apple are like that. It all adds up to expensive hardware which is not repairable or manageable at the scale of a medium or large organisation. We used to have one full-time staff member who dealt solely with Mac imaging and facilitating hardware repairs. If you're wanting to use a computer as a business system, rather than a personal toy, you need better than what Apple can offer. They have never really made much effort to cater for this type of use in their entire history. This stuff ends up costing companies a lot of money they could spend more productively on other things.