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Apple to slice iPhone production 10% due to sluggish sales

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Re: Apple to slice iPhone production 10% due to sluggish sales

#51

Post by TheCapn »

matwood wrote: post #26
lvspiff wrote: post #18

For someone who waited nearly a month to get my iphone7 (as an upgrade from a galaxy s3) due to inventory being unavailable I'm going WTF - sluggish sales? then why did i have to wait so long? But then at the same time I compare my iphone 7 to friends iphone 6S models and realize...oh the only difference is the headphone jack if you dont do x,y,z...no wonder they aren't selling too many

Better screen, better camera, better external speakers, added waterproofing, and faster. I'm not sure what people were expecting when they say nothing has changed.

Incremental changes are less noticeable. Sure they show up on spec sheets but unless you've got both models side by side for direct comparison smartphones have generally reached a level of "good enough".

I don't really think my Pixel is amazingly faster compared to my old Nexus 5, most apps I use on a frequent basis were instant on both phones. I think the screen is arguably worse on the Pixel but unless I go find a Nexus to compare with, they're essentially identical.

Re: Apple to slice iPhone production 10% due to sluggish sales

#52

Post by walterbell »

mirekrusin wrote: post #29
itg wrote: post #7

The numbers coming out of Apple next quarter will be interesting. iPhone 7 has been underwhelming and reception to the latest MacBooks Pros has been mostly negative. And if sales are on a downhill trajectory, I wonder what the response inside of Apple will be.

I wonder if, and if then how much, sales of MacBook pros are corellated to sales of iPhones. I suspect the correlation exists and it's stronger than we'd think.

The de-prioritization of MacOS could cause defections from all-Apple customers. Even though MacOS device revenue is a small percentage of iOS device revenue, MacOS defections break the all-Apple halo and open the door for other devices to be recommended by former advocates of Apple's ecosystem.

Re: Apple to slice iPhone production 10% due to sluggish sales

#54

Post by maverick_iceman »

matwood wrote: post #35
narrator wrote: post #12

Are we at the end of an era computing wise or is it just Apple? I wonder if computing technologies great transformation of our society is coming to an end. I also thought this in about 1993 and then again in the mid 2000s, so I'm probably wrong again. Maybe AI will be the new killer app that drives the next wave of upgrades.

I don't think we are at the end of anything, much less Apple. AI looks like the next big thing, and Apple needs to be careful not to miss it. Siri is just is not as good as what Google and Alexa are doing, and Apple appears doing nothing to satisfy the home demand. If they somehow completely miss the home AI front then I might get onboard the Apple is dying train. There is still time right now though.

They kinda shot themselves in the foot with their positioning on privacy. You can't get good at AI assistants without huge amount of training data.

Re: Apple to slice iPhone production 10% due to sluggish sales

#55

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

microtonal wrote: post #34
shmerl wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, there is simply more competition today, and market balances things out. Also, Apple grew too comfortable and stopped pushing forward. It was only a matter of time for this to happen.

Also, more in general, all the obvious improvements to the current smartphone form factor/concept have been made now: capacitive touch screen (iPhone), retina display (iPhone 4), fingerprint unlock/secure element (iPhone 5s), always listening Siri + Force Touch (iPhone 6s), plus huge improvements in CPU/GPU speed with all models. Where force touch was already quite a marginal improvement. I have an iPhone 5S and my p…

My thoughts exactly. Push forward in to where? And I think this is great for users. In the same way that my Core 2 Duo ThinkPad running Windows 7 (with SSD) does everything I need, I don't want to have to upgrade my phone every 12 months due to planned obsolescence.

I think one of the glaring areas for improvement is battery life. Won't someone give us the option of a 10+mm thick phone with a huge battery in it. Please.

Re: Apple to slice iPhone production 10% due to sluggish sales

#56

Post by SEJeff »

bearcobra wrote: post #21
fuayenah wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that happened, Google would stop letting you install those.

And you'd likely see a fork with support of the major handset makers and companies like Amazon. Google has a lot of control thru Play Services, but something that hostile would be a recipe for a split.

Oh right, something like Cyanogenmod, right? ducks

Re: Apple to slice iPhone production 10% due to sluggish sales

#58

Post by shmerl »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #55
microtonal wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, more in general, all the obvious improvements to the current smartphone form factor/concept have been made now: capacitive touch screen (iPhone), retina display (iPhone 4), fingerprint unlock/secure element (iPhone 5s), always listening Siri + Force Touch (iPhone 6s), plus huge improvements in CPU/GPU speed with all models. Where force touch was already quite a marginal improvement. I have an iPhone 5S and my p…

My thoughts exactly. Push forward in to where? And I think this is great for users. In the same way that my Core 2 Duo ThinkPad running Windows 7 (with SSD) does everything I need, I don't want to have to upgrade my phone every 12 months due to planned obsolescence. I think one of the glaring areas for improvement is battery life. Won't someone give us the option of a 10+mm thick phone with a huge battery in it. Plea…

> Push forward in to where?

In software. Apple's lock-in / NIH mentality combined with their slowness to innovate because they grew too comfortable bites them now (browsers is a clear example). And the trend will continue until Apple will wake up.

Re: Apple to slice iPhone production 10% due to sluggish sales

#59

Post by erikb »

jodrellblank wrote: post #16
erikb wrote: post #8

I have an iPhone 6S since its first month. Just thought, you know, test it once. But I always look jealously at my friends who run Android phones for half the price. You can just do more with Androids, it's more efficient, the keyboard is more efficient, apps can run concurrently, and to my surprise even the cameras seem to be way better. Besides the brand I really don't know what reason there is to buy iPhones. So t…

it's more efficient, It would need to be to run on the slower processors available to non-Apple companies. You can just do more with Androids What more, specifically?

My biggest examples are:

Notifications. You can react immediately to notifications on Android (e.g. respond to a chat message without opening the app). You have them at the front and they are not gone after seeing them once hidden somewhere in a back menu (whcih is kind of important for reminders).

Keyboard. I have this phone for a year now? It still doesn't know sh*t about guessing my words. And you can't just slide words, you always need to type them. Combining bad guesses with wild, error prone typing makes typing on the iPhone really, really slow. Afaik you can't even change the keybord if you hate the stock one, right?

Interface control. You can't really control the interface as much. Like on my Android I always had side menus with widgets and app overviews (e.g. last few mails)..

Background processes. There seem to be a few apps that have background notifications like chat apps. But most of them don't do anything if they are not the front app (e.g. my photo backup app). I even had personal hotspot shut down if it's not the "active" app after some time.

Re: Apple to slice iPhone production 10% due to sluggish sales

#60

Post by bcuzitsppl8383 »

narrator wrote: post #12

Are we at the end of an era computing wise or is it just Apple? I wonder if computing technologies great transformation of our society is coming to an end. I also thought this in about 1993 and then again in the mid 2000s, so I'm probably wrong again. Maybe AI will be the new killer app that drives the next wave of upgrades.

What has historically pushed consumer computing is new UX

We're in a lull with no new UX paradigms with mass appeal

VR/AR are still too expensive and inadequate. Plus a lot of people think they're plain silly

AI assistants seem to be the obvious choice but are still pretty meh. And one doesn't need to upgrade a handset each year to use the latest cloud based AI

Apple doesn't do well with services. They make hardware. Which is in a "good enough" state for many users

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