Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then they shouldn't release one every year.
Why? We don’t force software to not ship non-major versions. Why does hardware have to be that way?
Shareholders’ expectations I suspect.
iPhone 16 demand is so weak that employees can already buy it on discount
71–80 of 102 posts
Re: iPhone 16 demand is so weak that employees can already buy it on discount
#72If they made a 16 mini I might buy one, but as it is my 13 mini still works fine and anything larger will be an inherent downgrade for me.
I would trade my left kidney for an iPhone 16 Pro mini.
Re: iPhone 16 demand is so weak that employees can already buy it on discount
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree! People also criticize Apple harshly for not massively redesigning the iPhone every year. That's a positive in my view.
Then they shouldn't release one every year.
Think of the poor shareholders.
Plus US has this strange thing where shareholders can sue the CEO if they think not enough is being done.
Re: iPhone 16 demand is so weak that employees can already buy it on discount
#74I wish that this was seen as a good thing, not a bad thing. Everyone who wants an iPhone already has one, Apple makes good products that last, and new phones these days are incremental updates rather than revolutionary new products, so there’s not a large incentive to upgrade.
The iPhone, and really, most phones today, are pretty amazing pieces of technology in a glass slab. Expecting phenomenal changes between versions at this point might be asking for too much. Apple stuck itself in a corner with "stock" driven development.
Re: iPhone 16 demand is so weak that employees can already buy it on discount
#75This article is bunk and misinformation . Employees almost always get a single personal discount on launch day. I’ve managed to score many a launch day product from friends there. What they don’t get on launch day is their lower tier discount for friends which (unless my friends are uncharacteristically holding out) they don’t have yet either.
Interestingly Reddit saw through the click bait, but HN didn't. 1. The analysts quote is false: EPP purchases have been available for launch day for several years. (And he should know that, but analysts are part of the principal/agent problem.) 2. Analyst's sales figures are based on hot air. Apple don't publish them and, while this same claim is falsely made every year, the main data gathering metric for tracking sa…
My two thoughts:
1. HN on average loves Apple doom and gloom stories. So I’m not surprised nobody questions the premise of the article.
2. Kuo (the analyst in question here) has had a very poor track record in the last couple years. His strength has always been supply chain and manufacturing numbers but I think he’s been struggling as Apple has diversified outside of China. Beyond that, his conjecture has always been full of head scratchers because he’s never been good at putting a story to the numbers.
Re: iPhone 16 demand is so weak that employees can already buy it on discount
#76If they made a 16 mini I might buy one, but as it is my 13 mini still works fine and anything larger will be an inherent downgrade for me.
I would trade my left kidney for an iPhone 16 Pro mini.
Right one's faulty? ;-)
Why Pro etc for a Mini? I thought the point of Mini was not only to be a sanely sized phone but also a phone that is just a useful phone and not a phone with spec list that were more than overkill.
Re: iPhone 16 demand is so weak that employees can already buy it on discount
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hear you and I agree on the surface but I really wish Apple better understood 2 things: 1. Not every device can be your best seller 2. Some product categories are important to fill even if sales are low (even very low) Apple doesn’t release per-device breakdowns so it’s hard to have conversations on this topic but I’d bet money that the Mini (or another example: the Mac Pro) sold at levels that most companies would…
They just didn't sell very well at all. I've seen estimates that the little phones represented just 5-6% of total iPhone sales while they were around. They're darling little devices, but they were simply not very popular. Now, sure: You or I would probably love to have a product that "failed" by selling only as much as 5% of iPhone sales. We'd either be rolling in dough, or working our nuts off trying to figure out h…
5-6% of sales ABSOLUTELY matters. The biggest question is really will the majority of these purchasers substitute the absent "Mini" model with another iPhone model? If 90% of those users will just buy a different model then there is little advantage to offering the mini, given the additional design/engineering costs of the smaller size.
Anecdotally, I'm a techie but a small phone die-hard. I help onto my original SE until they finally released a mini model and will likely do something similar with mini 13. They definitely lost some potential upgrade sales from me, but despite that Apple STILL has the best tiny phone offerings, they are still software and hardware supported by Apple, although you have to purchase refurbished. There just isn't a serious Android competitor, with any sort of long term commitment to small phones, that would justify the switching cost.
My opinion is that Apple botched their positioning with the mini. "Mini" is a diminutive term, it implies less than. It was the lowest pricing outside of their SE model. They released the 12 mini shortly after an SE release, leading to cannibalized sales. And they released it at the beginning of a period (ongoing) where Apple leaned into the messaging of "Bigger is Premium". The only people left to buy the mini were people obsessed with small phones.
I think a more successful product would have been to lean into their "Air" brand, leveraging Apple's known ability to engineer premium devices in the smallest, most-elegant packages; positioning it as a premium product orthogonal to their main iPhone line. And from the rumors, it sounds like this might be Apple's next move in a device market that is increasingly undifferentiated.
Re: iPhone 16 demand is so weak that employees can already buy it on discount
#78I don't how most of the Apple users miss (or do they?) but iOS has been on constant decline for some time. Bloody hell they screwed the Photos app to pathetic. Why would they even do that? Was someone bored?
They locked and coupled "call recording" feature with AI (and transcription as if older users would protested getting just the audio) and hence shrewdly limited to new devices. This was disgusting. The only feature I was really looking forward to.
Why the hell did they add that "colour tint" change for icons? Bloody hell!
And yet, even in iOS 18 you cannot change alert/ringtone settings for different SIM separately. I mean how retarded they at Apple have to be to not realise that two different numbers might actually demand that! Or maybe they will have to overhaul their entire codebase to do that. This seems plausible seeing their track record on Software.
Oh yes, iCloud and iCloud syncing across "various things" still sucks and is still opaque and you just hope it works and you have no idea of knowing what was history, if there was any conflict, did something even sync, where the hell are my tabs from the other device hours and days later, why the hell some tabs remain glued in iCloud Tabs which I removed from a device a fortnight or month ago. Et cetera. Et cetera.
Not to mention there is barely any advancement in the Phone and that too with raised price. No wonder people don't want a new iPhone.
I thought Google would step up - make privacy better et cetera. But no, these companies are in completely harmony and perfect duopoly knowing fully well that they should not try to eat each other's lunches.
Re: iPhone 16 demand is so weak that employees can already buy it on discount
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple listened. They made the 12 Mini and it sold poorly. But persevered and released the 13 Mini. Again, it sold poorly, so they gave up. Don’t blame Apple here, vast majority want gigantic phones.
The iPhone 13 Mini has a 50% larger screen than the 4S. I have quite large hands, and it's still difficult to use it with one hand and it also isn't as well-balanced when holding it. If Apple expected the Mini variants to be as successful as the others that's on them. It's clear that most people spend a lot of time on their phone consuming multimedia content and so for those a large screen makes sense. But there shou…
uhhh… are you “holding it wrong”? how could the iphone 13 mini possibly be difficult to use with large hands? i have a 15 pro max, am not kareem abdul jabar, and have absolutely no problem with one-handed operation…
Re: iPhone 16 demand is so weak that employees can already buy it on discount
#80Remake the form factor of the 4S and we’ll talk. That’s the last phone that was comfortable to hold.
Apple listened. They made the 12 Mini and it sold poorly. But persevered and released the 13 Mini. Again, it sold poorly, so they gave up. Don’t blame Apple here, vast majority want gigantic phones.
They released the 13 mini because their product lead time exceeds one year. They didn’t have a Plus model to replace it with in time. It still sold more units than many Android models.
In addition, the mini is significantly larger than the 4S, so it doesn’t really address GP’s point.