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iPhone Sales Drop, and Apple’s 13-Year Surge Ebbs

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Re: iPhone Sales Drop, and Apple’s 13-Year Surge Ebbs

#501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. 6 and 6S. Hold them both in hands and the 6 is noticeable nicer.

Unless you are holding heavily used 6s with scratches against brand new 6 but if they are two new units there is no difference between them and your perception of niceness is probably totally subjective without reflection in reality.

Are American 6s different? There is definitely a significant difference between a 6 and a 6s here (Europe). It cannot be missed.

Re: iPhone Sales Drop, and Apple’s 13-Year Surge Ebbs

#502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Steam gamepad and the Macbook's new touchpads can simulate tactile borders and shapes on the surface with controlled vibration. Combine with pressure detection and you can make Swype / SwiftKey provide a sense of where you're dragging your finger when swipe typing, plus that you can put emphasis on the right letters easily when swiping across groups of letters that would make for different words, making for bette…

What you say doesn't change anything significantly, which means it doesn't change the way we type on mobile phones--you still need to look at the screen. Also it's a bit of a stretch thinking because it works on a game controller with limited number of inputs, it will work on a keyboard with way more keys, isn't it? As I mentioned above, I explored into building a mobile device that you can type into without looking,…

When you type in hardware keyboards, do you need to look at them? I hardly look at the SwiftKey keyboard except occasionally to confirm what keys I'm hitting.

A surface that can "project" arbitary tactile shapes with different strengths of feedback can let you orientate without looking. In fact it can even do Braille for the blind if the resolution was high enough!

Re: iPhone Sales Drop, and Apple’s 13-Year Surge Ebbs

#503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i'm always dubious whenever a company says that.

Earnings calls are, in theory at least, bound by SEC laws to be truthful.

It's probably true... I've been wanting to buy an unlocked Sprint version of iPhone SE 64gb and have been monitoring all the stores through their website frequently. It's not been available for the last 2 weeks and they have extra protectional measures to make sure iPhone SEs make it safely to the store.

Re: iPhone Sales Drop, and Apple’s 13-Year Surge Ebbs

#504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Steam gamepad and the Macbook's new touchpads can simulate tactile borders and shapes on the surface with controlled vibration. Combine with pressure detection and you can make Swype / SwiftKey provide a sense of where you're dragging your finger when swipe typing, plus that you can put emphasis on the right letters easily when swiping across groups of letters that would make for different words, making for bette…

What you say doesn't change anything significantly, which means it doesn't change the way we type on mobile phones--you still need to look at the screen. Also it's a bit of a stretch thinking because it works on a game controller with limited number of inputs, it will work on a keyboard with way more keys, isn't it? As I mentioned above, I explored into building a mobile device that you can type into without looking,…

Like you said, you still need look at the screen to see if you're typing in correctly. I am not sure if you read my original comment, but this is one thing I learned while experimenting that's obvious in hindsight. On your computer, you can type completely without looking at your keyboard because you are looking at the monitor/screen which is a separate device from the keyboard. On a mobile device, they are a single screen. Which means you still have to look at the screen portion of the "screen" even when you don't need to look at the "keyboard" portion. Which is why it doesn't make any groundbreaking improvements even if implemented. At best it's just some minor add-on convenience. Your steam controllers example is exactly the same as computer keyboards because you're looking at a large screen (which is again a separate device from your gamepad) when you're playing games.

Re: iPhone Sales Drop, and Apple’s 13-Year Surge Ebbs

#505
post #441

I wonder if Apple is going to find a new market with the potential for massive growth any time soon. So far smartwatches don't seem to be such a market.

The Apple watch outsold the iPhone in it's first year, so a bit premature to write it off.

Re: iPhone Sales Drop, and Apple’s 13-Year Surge Ebbs

#506
post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about widgets isn't enough for you?

Only a minority of the apps have them (and even fewer of those are remotely good/configurable), absolutely no consistency in the design between widgets and how they're a mix of background and icon. WP just had fantastic design patterns all around.

That's my problem with widgets too, coming from someone who loved his Lumia 920. Widgets are ugly. Like seriously ugly. And why do some of them take up 4x4 and others only let me pick 1x4 or 2x4, and some are other stupid sizes... all I want is 2x2 tiles that match the theme of my phone.

What's the point in getting a really nice theme and then ruining it with AccuWeather's horrible widget and a calendar that looks like an HTML iframe?

Re: iPhone Sales Drop, and Apple’s 13-Year Surge Ebbs

#507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends. They're the quality leader of the hardware market, but that means they'll need to be present in new hardware markets. This includes VR/AR, less someone else gets to the the brand reputation throne first (like HTC or Microsoft).

> This includes VR/AR, less someone else gets to the the brand reputation throne first (like HTC or Microsoft). I think HTC's got it for at least a year. It may continue longer. They'd need to do something wrong to lose the lead. MS Hololens is too expensive at the moment to get much reach. And I could make many comments about how Oculus/FB messed up a bit recently. However, I think everyone, including HTC, hopes tha…

Don't you think you're projecting? It's easy to romance competition, but I seriously doubt HTC hopes the OR finds it's feet. Just as its easy for Gates and Jobs to reminisce after the PC boom after the dust has settled, I doubt they were so romantic during.

Re: iPhone Sales Drop, and Apple’s 13-Year Surge Ebbs

#508

It probably doesn't help that the subsidy model has completely changed. But personally, I think iPhone performance has hit a point where one doesn't really feel the need to upgrade right away. I was so ready to upgrade when the contract on my 4 expired. It was really a pain to use after a couple of years. But my 5S has now lasted me two and a half years and other than wishing I had more storage capacity, there's real…

> I think iPhone performance has hit a point where one doesn't really feel the need to upgrade right away I have a cheap 2014 Motorola Moto G and I have the same "problem". Yes, there are hundreds of modern phones out there which are several times faster and have way better hardware but the Moto G is fast enough for me. I usually just browse the web, type a few messages in Whatsapp, take a few pictures, ... and the p…

I just upgraded to an iPhone 6s and now I have the opposite problem: the hardware is too fast, so fast that it replaced an ages-old pattern ingrained in my usage. I used to be able to tap the home button to turn on the screen, so I didn't have to go to the top of the phone for the power button. I could click the home button and move my finger before TouchID had a chance to notice. Now TouchID is so fast, it's unlocked the phone before the screen even turns on.

It sounds like a minor complaint and I guess it is, but when I'm fumbling around in the dark and I want my flashlight, or when I'm trying to quickly take a picture, I don't want my phone to be unlocked. I just want my damn flashlight or camera, which are easier to access if the phone is locked.

I'm actually considering going back to the 6 instead of the 6s just because I like that little delay in recognizing my fingerprint.

Re: iPhone Sales Drop, and Apple’s 13-Year Surge Ebbs

#509
post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buy their way out of it? How? They obviously don't have anything profitable to invest their excess cash in, since it is either sitting in the bank or going to stock buybacks or dividend increases.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/apple-hints-at-big-acquisit...

Yeah, because Beats has been working out so well for them.

If they could get something to improve their cloud services competitiveness vs Google, maybe something like Dropbox, I could see that helping them long-term. Otherwise I don't think anything they could acquire would be anything more than a play at becoming a conglomerate ala GE at this point, there simply aren't many companies with a proven core product out there that can help Apple get out of this mess, except by expanding outward.

Not that there is anything wrong with being a conglomerate, Alphabet/Google is basically on its way to becoming one too, and GE is wildly profitable, I just don't see Apple playing well in that space. They need to concentrate on something.

Re: iPhone Sales Drop, and Apple’s 13-Year Surge Ebbs

#510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

growth for the sake of growth Working at a small shop now, and seeing this same behavior, it's a little frightening. In our case, and from my perspective coming from a couple of startups more recently, and large enterprises prior to that: terrifyingly frustrating for a number of reasons. I'm in a great spot to make suggestions from my accumulated past, but the team and management seem terrified to make the jump and h…

Wow, are you me? Every morning we have a company wide meeting where capturing more market share is a recurring theme. And immediately after that meeting yesterday in a developers only meeting, an inordinately large amount of time was spent on discussing how we can introduce new features yet still accommodate those of our customers who don't have internet access . Because, as you know, if you want to capture more mark…

That was a theme at a place I used to work a few years ago, but it was internally. How can we accommodate employees who don't have Internet access at home. Mainly focused on truck drivers who live a hundred miles away from their distribution center and park their truck at home at night, with the question being "how can they log their miles". So we needed a VPN that could support dial-up, and a trucker logging tool that supported dial-up, but also the helpdesk support tools needed to be able to be used on dial-up so the helpdesk could walk them through any issues interactively. But we didn't want to spend any money supporting it, so we kept a Windows 3.1 server running so we could run the Novell system that truckers used to log into the dial-up VPN with.

We finally put Internet access in all of the warehouses and told the truckers they had to end their night at the warehouse and log their hours there. Several drivers quit because it was too much of a burden to drive that far every day. But then we finally got to upgrade the software to support showing customers where the trucks were at and how long it would take to get to their locations.

It would be awesome if technological progress was more evenly distributed across the population.

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