81–90 of 161 posts
Apple is being dragged down the trade war's reputational halo effect. Keep an eye on major international consumer US brands (Disney, McDonalds, Starbucks, and others).
Obviously there's an rapid economic deceleration, too, but things happen for more than one reason most of the time.
Is it possible that they deliberately priced themselves in excess of the competition in an attempt to cultivate a more exclusive, high-end image? With so much competition in the Chinese market it has to be hard to distinguish themselves otherwise.
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I don't question that the super expensive phones are better than the cheap ones but they are better in ways that are so insignificant to the average person. I got a nexus 5x a few years ago for about $250 and it does everything modern phones do. Yes I have slightly less pixels in my selfie and my screen is still rectangle shaped but is that really worth the extra $800? I suspect its simply a fashion/trend thing pushe…
Give me a break. This idea that anyone who isn't buying some cheap Android phone is doing it for fashion/trend reasons is ridiculous, insulting and condescending. The fact is that I care about my privacy and security and only Apple seems to take it seriously. They also support their devices for years so I look at it like its an investment. That is easily worth the extra $10 or $20 a month I pay for my mobile phone pl…
You can't blame it on the price of the iPhone for what's happening in China right now. Also from Bloomberg: Chinese consumer tax receipts down 70% in November. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-12-31/china-...
Why can't it be both? It seems logical that a downturn would hit luxury models most strongly. High pricing can often be self-justifying, especially if it's combined with actual higher quality - except once you reach the point that a thing involves too many material sacrifices and then suddenly the "value proposition" stops making sense.
Combine that with:
"In fact, categories outside of iPhone (Services, Mac, iPad, Wearables/Home/Accessories) combined to grow almost 19 percent year-over-year."
In other words, even Mac and iPad fell in China while growing overall for the company. So the problem is not isolated to iPhones in China, consumer spending is way down. And yes, aspiring high-end products like Apple products will take a hit in a market where consumers have less money to spend.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/01/letter-from-tim-cook-...
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I don't question that the super expensive phones are better than the cheap ones but they are better in ways that are so insignificant to the average person. I got a nexus 5x a few years ago for about $250 and it does everything modern phones do. Yes I have slightly less pixels in my selfie and my screen is still rectangle shaped but is that really worth the extra $800? I suspect its simply a fashion/trend thing pushe…
Give me a break. This idea that anyone who isn't buying some cheap Android phone is doing it for fashion/trend reasons is ridiculous, insulting and condescending. The fact is that I care about my privacy and security and only Apple seems to take it seriously. They also support their devices for years so I look at it like its an investment. That is easily worth the extra $10 or $20 a month I pay for my mobile phone pl…
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Apple has never tried to compete on price and as such continues to capture most of the profit in the industry. Seems like a good business plan to me. https://gadgetmatch.com/apple-samsung-huawei-global-smartpho...
Never tried to compete on price? Then what were the basic "c" and "se" plastic bodied iPhone models?
I really don't understand why anyone is paying $1000+ for a phone when you can get really amazing phones for $300.
No matter how much money I pay for an Android phone, I have to fight with it to stop my data being harvested by everything from the very OS up. Sure, I can get decent quality cameras and build quality on Android phones but I’m either paying a stack of money for the likes of a Samsung or I’m paying for something from some sketchy Chinese brand.
I don’t know if any android phone manufacturer has a hardware security implementation as high quality as Apple’s and even if there were, I’m not sure how many of the manufacturers I’d actually trust to build it properly, let alone have the OS use it properly.
I’ve also got far more consistent battery life out of my iPhone X than I have out of my previous Android phones.
Am I paying a premium? Yep. Is it a premium I’m happy to pay because I actually get what I want and my data is so far, more secure than on any Android device: yep.
Chinese flagships offer better, more differentiated technology at the same or lower prices... also Android AOSP China is more desirable now because Android apps are first class citizens in China (WeChat + social + camera apps). Apple is losing it's innovation edge as well. Current flagship phone cycles in China are faster than Apple's -- triple, quad cameras, in-screen fingerprint readers, articulating selfie-cams, p…
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I've been buying/using iPhones since 2009. The last iPhone I bought was a 7+. Right after that I had sensed that Apple is messing around with us on the CPU thing, and it finally came out that they did. I now have a Honor X8, I am super content about this, it cost me 229 pounds, takes 2 SIM cards and a 128GB SD card. I can also have a firewall NoRoot Firewall), more granular privacy controls, I can root and and replac…
> Apple is messing around with us on the CPU thing Are you referring to modulating the power usage to avoid random shutdowns? If so, I don't understand why people have viewed that as a nefarious scheme. Seems completely reasonable to me. The newer user-visible stats on battery health and power usage are also a good idea, but don't change the physics involved, you still need to modulate power usage to match what is av…
I would gladly pay for a new (£50-£70) battery every 2 years to keep my phone up and running. It is the lack of transparency that made me angry. I do have the technical skills/knowledge to understand the reasons. I also have the critical thinking to (imho) dismiss their BS answer that they force me to spend £1000 instead of £50. And this is where they killed my 'loyalty' to their products.
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despite all the advertising, it may surprise you to learn that it's actually quite rare for people to buy expensive clothes. i looked it up one time. i think it said less than 1% of the jeans sold in the US cost more than 50$
Off topic, but I think jeans are a great example of a product where more money leads to a better product, especially for a well informed consumer. Japanese Selvage Denim[0] (starting at ~$80)[1] uses higher quality denim, is woven tighter, comes unstretched/untreated so that the fabric better forms to the wearer's unique body shape, and often uses natural dyes which fade slower. In my experience they last longer, fee…