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The Phone That’s Failing Apple: iPhone XR

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Re: The Phone That’s Failing Apple: iPhone XR

#181

Post by simonh »

interlocutor wrote: post #173

Apple's problem is that their rate of innovation has slowed down. iPhone generates over a 100 Billion dollars in revenue. Per year. If any company has the resources to innovate it is Apple. 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…

Yep, apart from the latest iPhones having the best screens ever, the quickest most convenient and most secure unlock mechanism ever, the best computational photography ever, the fastest mobile CPUs ever released and overall being 2+ years ahead of their nearest competition, that was all a few months ago. Old news. What have Apple done for us just now?

Re: The Phone That’s Failing Apple: iPhone XR

#182

Post by avar »

allenleee wrote: post #171
protomyth wrote: post #5

I cannot help but think that an iPhone XR mini would have been a great seller if it hit the $450 range. I just don't understand Apple these days, its like they have reverted to the early 90's where they kept jacking the price until even the loyal customers had to exit the ship. I had so believed they would repeat the iPod strategy and start at the top end and slowly squeeze the market by introducing models that fille…

Summary of the tweets of Steven Sinofsky(1): 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…

Re #5: You can already walk into an Apple store and buy an iPhone that costs 3-4x as much as another iPhone they sell in the same store.

Re: The Phone That’s Failing Apple: iPhone XR

#183

Post by geocar »

m0zg wrote: post #134

Only Apple can name their phone "excess" and price it at $1k+ and still nobody catches on. For those able to count, that's _five times_ what a decent Android Pie handset costs (Nokia 6.1, $200) for nowhere near 5x difference in anything. In fact the Nokia has a phone jack and standard USB-C power. I've been iPhone user since iPhone 1, and I currently have iPhone 8, but even I am contemplating a switch.

I don't know. I keep trying Android; I have a few Android devices (around the $600 point) and it just seems too much of a hassle. A lot of it can probably be chalked up to be how fragmented Android has, and how the handset vendors block/break things like updates, but I'm not interested in trying to research my best fit, or fight my way through online resources. There's a handful of features that I'd definitely love seeing, but I don't feel strongly enough about them that I'd deal with that kind of disruption to my life.

Re: The Phone That’s Failing Apple: iPhone XR

#184

Post by simonh »

GeekyBear wrote: post #107

I don't think the Chinese market slowing down is news for anyone who was paying attention last year. >The global smartphone market has suffered a drop of 6 percent in overall sale numbers, according to a report on the third quarter of 2018 from the International Data Corporation (IDC). Similar to the drop in smartphone sales in the first quarter of the year, the IDC points at a slowdown in the Chinese market as being…

The XR this year in China is also having exactly the same problem the 6s had when it came out. The 6 (with it's big screen) and X were so attractive that many people upgraded a year early. That means there's a smaller potential market for the XR, just as there was for the 6s. This is disproportionately true in China where distinctive looks are more important than in other markets. Add that in to the economic picture and it's a bit of a perfect storm for Apple. The XR has done fine in other markets.

Re: The Phone That’s Failing Apple: iPhone XR

#185

Post by jpatokal »

simonh wrote: post #181
interlocutor wrote: post #173

Apple's problem is that their rate of innovation has slowed down. iPhone generates over a 100 Billion dollars in revenue. Per year. If any company has the resources to innovate it is Apple. 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…

Yep, apart from the latest iPhones having the best screens ever, the quickest most convenient and most secure unlock mechanism ever, the best computational photography ever, the fastest mobile CPUs ever released and overall being 2+ years ahead of their nearest competition, that was all a few months ago. Old news. What have Apple done for us just now?

Those are all incremental improvements. Nobody's saying Apple's phones are bad, just that they lack compelling differentiators to other phones, including older iPhones.

Re: The Phone That’s Failing Apple: iPhone XR

#186

Post by addicted »

lostlogin wrote: post #13
throw0u1t wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I don't want an iPhone 7 or an 8. And it makes no sense that Apple sell both the 7 and the 8. Apple should make a phone like the SE which is made for the low-mid market, not just discount its old models.

I’d take a high spec small phone. This is apparently an unusual thing to want.

I haven’t understood why Apple doesn’t simply do this. They know from the laptop market that people are more than willing to pay different prices for different t sizes.

Instead of differentiating their phones based on features, they should simply differentiate them based on screen size. That would allow them to meet several price points without making their customers feel like they’re cheap.

Re: The Phone That’s Failing Apple: iPhone XR

#187

Post by mwilcox »

beezischillin wrote: post #114

Personally, these last two iPhone generations were a bit overwhelming, confusing and strange. I did upgrade to the X but I honestly say, I didn't even look at this years' offering with any interest. I like the X. I'm happy with it but here's just simply not enough interesting things going on to make the new ones worth checking out. Maybe it's just these two generations -- but this constant push to raise the prices on…

The price increase and subsequent quality increase of the X made the purchase make sense given that it would be a longer-lasting phone.. on the 3-4 year timeframe rather than a 1-2 year timeframe. If they didn't refresh the X (kept the name) and just released the larger and cheaper versions, it would have made sense. Given the diminishing returns and higher prices, they should put more time in to make sure they have breakthrough releases. Even Jobs did this with the tick-tock of the 4/4S. The naming scheme is all messed up

Re: The Phone That’s Failing Apple: iPhone XR

#188

Post by ubercow13 »

dman wrote: post #131
wwweston wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How often do people find in practice they have to think about specs at all? I'm typing this on an SE. It is, of course, literally last year's phone (two years) but both when I bought it and now, there's nothing except the camera that doesn't feel well above adequate (and the camera, while missing some neat low light features, is adequate) and there's a few things that feel optimal about it that simply aren't availabl…

Your question reminds me of a humorous quote - "I use Gentoo because I'm a speed freak - I can't stand the thought that some of my packages might not be running as fast as they could be.". PS: The above quote is just one of the gems from https://funroll-loops.teurasporsaat.org/ - a humorous portal to a lost world from the 90s - 2000s (ie the gentoo subculture).

Fun page, I remember those times. Some of the quotes aren't so ridiculous, like:

>"I notice that my disk does a whole lot of thrashing when I boot up. I have a lot of stuff that gets loaded into memory every time I boot, like X11, ion2, Firefox, Eterm, Thunderbird, etc. It seems to me that putting all of the files necessary to those apps in a contiguous section on the disk and loading that into memory in one shot would be a whole lot faster. Is there a way to do this? Is it stupid?"

That's a good idea! It's kind of what Windows Prefetch feature does.

Re: The Phone That’s Failing Apple: iPhone XR

#189

Post by NeedMoreTea »

Judgmentality wrote: post #175
interlocutor wrote: post #173

Apple's problem is that their rate of innovation has slowed down. iPhone generates over a 100 Billion dollars in revenue. Per year. If any company has the resources to innovate it is Apple. 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…

> 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. 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…

Not so much. Most of his iconic designs are actually pretty direct copies of the looks Dieter Rams of Braun created a decade or three earlier. That includes a fair selection of the original iPhone apps and icons. Surprising perhaps considering the brouhaha over rounded corners.

That doesn't make them bad, but Ive seems to take mostly the look not the design philosophy. Meanwhile he pursues the cult of thinness.

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