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Apple to slice iPhone production 10% due to sluggish sales

asia.nikkei.com

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

#281

Post by rimantas »

legodt wrote: post #263
ihuman wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just keep mine connected to my headphones, since I use them more with my iPhone than a computer. Also someone made a cool keychain to attach it to if that works better for you. [1] > expensive spare dongles They're only $10 USD. [1] https://uncourage.com/

Why are people so desperate to defend this clearly user hostile move? A dongle is a poor user experience and continues to degrade user experience over time. The fact that there was a market demand for a "cool" keychain shows how unnecessary the removal of the jack was. Believe it or not, people enjoy using things without unnecessary accessories that you have to keep track of and swap around

Believe or not only few care about that lousy jack. Most will use earbuds that come with the phone, others will permanently have dongle attached to their headphones. And those who go AirPods way will forget jack ever existed.

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

#282

Post by Too »

spronkey wrote: post #237
fsloth wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll have to inject a bit of criticism to this particular rant. If one is using several applications on Windows and being productive about it - You don't switch applications in Windows by clicking then with mouse. You order them on the task bar and then switch between them using windows button - number (where number is the order on the task bar.).

Depends on what you're doing. Direct visual manipulation is best if you're using the mouse. Winkeys can be better if you're primarily trying to stay on the keyboard. I actually researched this back many years ago, and at the time, clicking on windows Exposé style won out reasonably convincingly over keyboard techniques, including winkey+#.

"best" and "won out" how? Certainly not in speed. Win+# is O(1) in complexity and I already have my left hand in position to press the 2 buttons required to instantly get to the window I want.

Compared to expose which is first a hotkey to initiate(note that already here you lost the race in number of keys to press), wait 300ms for the animation to complete, find the window you want which is more like O(n), move hand to mouse, move mouse around to find the cursor, move cursor to desired window, click, wait another 300ms for animation.

Even if I happen to already have my hand on the mouse and know where the cursor is the best case will take you at least one second, this is much inferior to just pressing 2 keyboard buttons which is essentially instantaneous, even with faster animations you will not save much time as you need that time to find the window. With more than 5 windows open finding the right one can be a true challenge as they get very small and there will be a lot of them to scan.

For grandma who don't care about speed maybe expose is easier to understand and remember but for intense task switching by experienced users it is just in the way.

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

#283

Post by snovv_crash »

wildmusings wrote: post #246
matwood wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree. I made a comment on the original MBP thread that Apple dropped the ball here by not releasing the iPhone 7 also as usb-c. I'll be shocked, and really wonder WTF, if the next iPhone is not usb-c.

They're kind of in a tough spot there, having licensed so many lightning port accessories and headphones, that many of their customers have since spent so much money on. And to their credit, they created the lightning port before USB type-C even existed.

Then why not a dongle? After all, that seems to be the solution for everything else...

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

#284

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

legodt wrote: post #263
ihuman wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just keep mine connected to my headphones, since I use them more with my iPhone than a computer. Also someone made a cool keychain to attach it to if that works better for you. [1] > expensive spare dongles They're only $10 USD. [1] https://uncourage.com/

Why are people so desperate to defend this clearly user hostile move? A dongle is a poor user experience and continues to degrade user experience over time. The fact that there was a market demand for a "cool" keychain shows how unnecessary the removal of the jack was. Believe it or not, people enjoy using things without unnecessary accessories that you have to keep track of and swap around

I will not upgrade to a phone that does not have a 3.5mm jack.

But arguing this is a poor user experience is probably wrong for most people. Apple is correct in that this is the way things are going. I bet all the Flagship Android phones will be jackless too soon.

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

#285

Post by pg314 »

erdevs wrote: post #185
pg314 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are being very charitable to the WSJ. The WSJ article in question said in the second paragraph [1]: Apple's orders for iPhone 5 screens for the first quarter, for example, have dropped to roughly half of what the company had planned to order, the people said . In the three first months of 2014 Apple sold 37.4 million iPhones, compared to 35.1 million in the three first months of 2013 [2]. Unless you believe that…

I hear what you're saying, but I am not sure you're interpreting the supply chain order implications correctly. You are assuming a 1 to 1 ratio of expected vs actual component supply order volumes and subsequent net sales. That is not at all how it typically works, and while I agree the WSJ could have and should have been more clear on this: the point of the article wasn't that the iPhone would sell half as much as A…

You are right that you can construct a scenario where e.g. screen components could have been cut by half. Thanks for typing it out. The WSJ article, though, attributes the cuts in component orders to weaker iPhone demand: 'because of weaker-than-expected demand'. That's my beef with their reporting. If they had just stated 'one of Apple's suppliers has got its order reduced by half', I would have no problem with the article. Trying to tie it to iPhone demand is just conjecture.

Just like you said in your conclusion: don't overextrapolate from (potentially faulty) supply chain sources. Which seems to be exactly what the Nikkei article is doing again. There is very little info in it: 'Apple will trim production of its iPhone family around 10% on the year in the first quarter of 2017, according to calculations by The Nikkei based on data from suppliers'. So, they have some information from suppliers (all of them?), and they have some model (how accurate is that model?) that points to an iPhone production cut. To me that seems like overextrapolation again... And I agree with you that this is not 'fake news', but it is also not good reporting either.

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

#286

Post by flamedoge »

doomlaser wrote: post #228
saurik wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They need to get rid of 3D touch, get rid of double-tap one-hand accessibility mode whatever it's called, get rid of weird swipes from the edge, fix the horrible inconsistencies in the way autocorrect works... This is the same bullshit Apple has been doing with Mac OS X. I'm typing away in the terminal, doing something extremely productive, and suddenly my UI locks up for a second and I realize "shit, I must have a…

It's one of the critical flaws of Apple's modern design philosophy: Having a right mouse button would be too complicated, but hiding layers of complicated functionality through opaque multi-finger gestures, taps, and keyboard modifiers is A-OK. And it's absolutely true that when Apple adds a new feature, it must have an accompanying slow animation tween to sell it. Frustrating.

is this the beginning of the end of Apple domination?

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

#287

Post by spronkey »

Too wrote: post #282
spronkey wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on what you're doing. Direct visual manipulation is best if you're using the mouse. Winkeys can be better if you're primarily trying to stay on the keyboard. I actually researched this back many years ago, and at the time, clicking on windows Exposé style won out reasonably convincingly over keyboard techniques, including winkey+#.

"best" and "won out" how? Certainly not in speed. Win+# is O(1) in complexity and I already have my left hand in position to press the 2 buttons required to instantly get to the window I want. Compared to expose which is first a hotkey to initiate(note that already here you lost the race in number of keys to press), wait 300ms for the animation to complete, find the window you want which is more like O(n), move hand…

An Expose-style interface with short animation beat all other interfaces (taskbar click (window), dock click (app), winkey+#, alt-tab) in mean task switching time over a series of controlled scenarios (not the user's normal workflow - just simulated scenarios). Expose style interface was invoked with a side button on the mouse.

From memory, Expose was around ~1.0s, taskbar click around ~1.2s, winkey around 1.5s, with other methods slower.

The physical action of flicking your wrist and clicking is actually surprisingly fast, possibly even faster mechanically than a two-key keyboard shortcut - think how fast twitch gamers are.

Decision time was the main component. Expose's decision time was the lowest mean, and the most stable. Alt-tab had the lowest decision time, but far greater stdev. Yeah this is a controlled test that may not represent a real user's workflow, hence my 'depends'. "Find the window" is actually an interesting one - as long as the interface is reasonably spatially stable, you actually don't need to find it because your spatial memory takes care of that for you.

In my experience, while I might have a few 'primary' windows that suit the ordered taskbar well, I've often got a number of other things that come and go. I'm never going to remember what place they are. So, while winkey+# is fast for a select few windows, it's really slow for others. I don't find it appreciably faster than an Expose interface, and it's easier and faster for me in my workflow to use one main task switching interface.

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

#288

Post by flamedoge »

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #284
legodt wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are people so desperate to defend this clearly user hostile move? A dongle is a poor user experience and continues to degrade user experience over time. The fact that there was a market demand for a "cool" keychain shows how unnecessary the removal of the jack was. Believe it or not, people enjoy using things without unnecessary accessories that you have to keep track of and swap around

I will not upgrade to a phone that does not have a 3.5mm jack. But arguing this is a poor user experience is probably wrong for most people. Apple is correct in that this is the way things are going. I bet all the Flagship Android phones will be jackless too soon.

I am hoping they are not as apple-copying

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

#289

Post by flamedoge »

_Codemonkeyism wrote: post #217
ryao wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the removal was to recycle the space while making waterproofing easier.

The removal is to introduce a way to control which headphones are connected and to get license payments in the future.

The removal is to sell dongles

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

#290

Post by geon »

jblow wrote: post #93

Usually I have upgraded, but I currently have no intention of buying an iPhone 7 or later, unless they fix something! For me it's a double whammy. I don't like the lack of headphone jack, and whereas I feel like I could manage grumpily ... for me it kills the excitement of buying the new device, and I think that is important. (My standard listening headphones are Etymotic ER-4Ps; there is no way I am going to downgra…

> please, offer a system that just underlines words-thought-to-be-wrong without changing them

Ios have had that for at least a year. Two years?

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