The Phone That’s Failing Apple: iPhone XR

1- Pricing not only says who can afford your product but also establishes a brand, determines channel, & more.

2- The first key to having low priced offerings is that you have to have a set of partners who are willing to compete on thin margins in order to bring the product to market.

3- When people say Apple needs a cheaper phone there are many questions to answer beyond the get over yourself luxury brand issue.

4- What is distribution constraint? What partner absorbs some cost to leave margin? What is the branding?

5-Easy question — would a cheap phone be sold and supported in Apple stores side by side? How would the rest of the customers feel about more crowds and tougher appointments competing with people who paid half as much? Sell one phone against another—how?

6- Anyone that thinks Apple is unaware of the challenge and has not sketched out ideas, tested them, and thought about them immensely is crazy.

7- What does all this mean? Apple may or may not have a “pricing” or “price point” or “structural” / secular challenge. For sure just releasing a cheap phone doesn’t make all better.

All takes place in context of lots of cheap/bad competitive phones.

(1): https://mobile.twitter.com/stevesi/status/108117488690147328...

Apple, here are some free ideas. Some of these ideas go beyond the phone and into cell networks. If Google can do that ( https://fi.google.com ) why can't Apple?

- Improve cellular reception. We are now heavily reliant on our cell phones, yet half the time our cell phones don't work because we are inside a building or not close to a tower and so on. This needs to be fixed ASAP. Apple has the resources to do something about this. Here are some ideas: https://www.wired.com/2014/02/steve-perlman-pcell/ and https://www.artemis.com Quote: "pCell delivers 5G performance to standard LTE devices"

- Improve cell plans. Why are we paying for voice, text and data separately? The only thing we should be paying for is data. Voice and text should go over data. Apple needs to disrupt.

- Improve user experience. Here are some really cool ideas from Microsoft: https://www.theverge.com/2016/5/5/11595564/microsoft-3d-touc...

- Improve TV. There is a TV app on my iOS, but it doesn't seem to do anything interesting. This needs to be more like tv.youtube.com

- Fix design. Fire Jony Ive's a$$ and hire some real designers. Apple used to be insanely great at design. Now they are a nobody. Take a look at HomePod. It is an amorphous blob. Every single Bose speaker looks better than HomePod.

- Get rid of flat design, it is an unusable mess (see http://uxcritique.tumblr.com/ ). You don't need to bring back leather and stitches, but you absolutely need to bring physicality back into UI design in order to improve usability.

I'm not a designer, but wasn't Jony Ive largely responsible for leading many of the great designs at Apple, including the iPhone? Or do you think he's stagnated, or perhaps is unfit in his current managerial role, or something else?

There's an obvious difference between "a cheaper phone" and making the range as affordable as it was five years ago - instead of relying on so-called luxury branding while offering very little extra and annoying customers with product issues (missing headphone jack, BatteryGate, etc) and mediocre software updates.

Apple doesn't have an iPhone problem. Apple has an Apple problem.

It's at least possible (who knows for sure...?) that if Jobs were still alive Apple would have opened up at least a couple of innovative new product lines by now - not just gimmicks like Watch, but new "I didn't know I wanted that, but now I see it I obviously do" products, with supporting services and industry partners, all pitched at the affordable-at-a-push level that Apple products originally lived in.

This is where Cook has failed. There's nothing new on the table. Putting up prices is a short-term tactic. So is "a cheap phone".

What Apple needs is a coherent and impressive long-term strategy, and investors aren't seeing that.