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

nytimes.com

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

#511

Post by lgieron »

simonh wrote: post #464
lgieron wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe that's the issue - I don't do OS updates on iOS devices, so my 5s is still on iOS 7.1 - and it's still blazing fast after 18 months of use. My suspicion is that the iOSes getting slower with every release is a planned obsolescence strategy.

I don't buy it. Each revision of the OS adds functionality and expands the code base, that's plenty enough to explain the issue. Long term, progressively bogging down the OS deliberately will just make it look unnecessarily slower compared to Android. That's a much bigger risk than any possible effect getting people to upgrade. Also there are ways to disable some of the newer features and reclaim some responsiveness,…

I was thinking it may not be an official agenda ("plans for Q4: let's make iOS 10% slower"), but instead, the higher ups don't actively fight the general performance athrophy.

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

#512

Post by BFatts »

rrggrr wrote: post #119
nugget wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More likely mobile is headed quietly down the path of the PC - fewer generational improvements means people keep devices longer and there isn't as much of a reason to buy new hardware so sales flatline. Great business still but Wall Street hates that narrative. They want the next hot growth market -- VR perhaps when its killer app moment arrives.

I'll say this: Amazon Echo cut Apple's growth balls right off. That's a $2b revenue business Siri can kiss goodbye.

I'll agree that the sale of Echo caught both Apple and Google with their pants down, but I don't think it's going to last long. Apple could, quite easily, make a Siri standalone (and so could Google). Tying it to the phone was a great idea, but the implementations of both weren't the greatest. Plus, with Apple keeping Siri as a closed environment for so long probably hurt it as well.

But all that said, Echo is a neat device but not unique. It can be easily outpaced by either company if they choose. Amazon's "Skill Store" for Alexa is piss-poor and the ability to add skills is horrendous. Getting a skill approved is a nightmare, and they basically have to be "free" skills to have any potential.

If Amazon can figure out how to monetize skills, they may be able to pull ahead. But as it stands, right now, Echo is a novelty device that appeals (mostly) to kids.

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

#513

Post by tjl »

mgbmtl wrote: post #207
2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Australia you always had to disclose the phone cost in a contract. People still keep upgrading phones.

Does it show as a line item on the monthly invoice, or in the fine print of the contract? Here in QC/Canada it's basically "90$/month for the 2 year upgrade" or "65$/month for BYOD".

I spent a lot of time researching cell phone providers here in Ontario as I was just getting a cell for the first time. All the plans are pretty universally terrible. I ended up with Wind Mobile for $40/month for BYOD. Unfortunately, they're 3G only but it's 5GB data vs. 100MB for similarly priced plans on other carriers.

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

#514

Post by Natanael_L »

galistoca wrote: post #504
galistoca wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your assumption is that they only help accuracy. Instead they can allow you to visually hide important UX elements and yet keep them discoverable.

I'll have to think a bit longer to come up with good examples.

Edit: non-scrolling swipe gestures are where this is the most valuable.

Improved Google Photos app image selection: a hard press would start selection, and as you continously to drag to select it would provide tactile feedback for where the image borders are, making accidental selection less likely and quicker to detect. Selection would stop on release (to make scrolling easy). Hard press and swipe again to continue the selection.

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

#515

Post by BFatts »

melvinmt wrote: post #130
c-slice wrote: post #22

I think we just reached peak smartphone. What's next?

According to all the VCs in my Twitter feed: chatbots.

Chatbots are a novelty. They will come and go faster than Pepsi Clear. I don't see them being big headlines next year, and at most, two years from now.

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

#516

Post by fluxquanta »

freehunter wrote: post #510
fluxquanta wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

My argument in the meeting was that our company has over 15,000 clients who are businesses themselves, and maybe 100 of them don't have internet access. Most of these clients intentionally keep their computers disconnected because "the internet causes viruses".

I understand that any good company wants to provide quality service to all of their existing customers, but dedicating resources and devising workarounds for that small percentage of disconnected customers (to the detriment of the thousands of others) while our mission statement is to "capture market share" seems counter intuitive to me.

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

#517

Post by Eric_WVGG »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #196
oxide wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apologies in advance if this is a dumb question. What is Apple's next move once it saturates the market? Or, more generally, what is the next move once you've saturated a market?

Define your market more broadly. The iPhone itself is an example of this. Desktop computers don't have much growth? Well, what else could a computer be besides a desktop?

It’s safe to say that the whole Internet of Things is still in its “feature phone” stage, if not the infancy of that.

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

#518

Post by Eric_WVGG »

ktRolster wrote: post #56
venomsnake wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The PC have not dropped significantly in price. High end gaming PC (that you build yourself) always costed about 1500-2000$. It is just that the majority of tasks could be done in lower and lower segments of the market.

High end gaming PC (that you build yourself) always costed about 1500-2000$ In real terms, that means the cost of a PC has been reduced quite a bit (because of inflation: http://www.dollartimes.com/inflation/inflation.php?amount=10... )

Mac SE w/ HD in 1987 — $3900, $8,175 adjusted for inflation. Makes the head spin, remarkable that I even got to see computers like that during my childhood.

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

#519

Post by mark_l_watson »

I have been a happy Android user for years but was planning on switching to an iPhone next time for compatibility with my iPads.

I changed my mind because of the Google Fi service. I can get a compatible phone for $200, and I project my monthly service plan would be less than half than my Verizon plan, given my usage patterns. I do worry that Google might drop the Fi service, or change the features/cost in the future though.

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

#520

Post by brianwawok »

s3bast0m wrote: post #419
brianwawok wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

T-Mobile changed so others had to to keep up. Basically most cell phone contract innovation in the last 5 years has been through T-Mobile.

You do realize that US and T-Mobile was one of the last holdouts with this "bundled"system and in Europe we had this "new" system in place for at least 5 years.

I don't think it matters to a US consumer what Europe did first.

US had a crappy system. TMobile innovated. Even if that innovation was to copy a system from another country, to our market it was an innovation.

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