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While iPhone sales remain stagnant, Apple services hit $10B in revenue

arstechnica.com

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Re: While iPhone sales remain stagnant, Apple services hit $10B in revenue

#91

Post by ryanwaggoner »

RickS wrote: post #44
SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What word would you have used instead? "Stagnant" is technically accurate.

I don't have a dog in this fight re: spin, just playing the word game. "consistent" for a positive spin or "steady" for more neutral. "Flat" is fairly uncharitable but also on the table. For example, I suspect one's wife would rather know her beauty has been "consistent" over the years, rather than "stagnant", despite technically both meaning "stayed the same".

Yep, the wives of the HN userbase and their ongoing obsession with maintaining their beauty.

:eye roll:

Re: While iPhone sales remain stagnant, Apple services hit $10B in revenue

#92

Post by ryanwaggoner »

Terretta wrote: post #79
baybal2 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, they are determined to milk their cash cow dry while they can.

Why wouldn’t you? Since they don’t really “go dry”, turns out “milking while they can” is how any industrious farmer maximizes milk per cow over the natural life of a milk cow.

Now I’m just imagining baybal2 running a huge dairy farm where none of the cows get milked so they won’t go dry :)

Re: While iPhone sales remain stagnant, Apple services hit $10B in revenue

#93

Post by toasterlovin »

beerlord wrote: post #23

Apple takes a 30% commission on any revenue passing through the store, and 15% on subscriptions. These fees are exorbitant - they are merely ringing a credit card, transmitting a few megabytes of data, and performing a basic examination of the app itself. The oligopolistic position that they hold is their main point of value.

They control access to the customer. If you don’t think this is a valuable service, try selling stuff sometime. I sell on Amazon and they take 15% just for originating the sale, plus another 15% for FBA. If Amazon wasn’t around to charge me 30% to sell on their platform, I wouldn’t have a business.

Re: While iPhone sales remain stagnant, Apple services hit $10B in revenue

#94

Post by ryanwaggoner »

browsercoin wrote: post #71
mark_l_watson wrote: post #53

Apple services definitely are on an upward trajectory for quality and breadth. Two years ago I thought Siri was a bit of a joke because the voice recognition and accuracy/usefulness of results was not there for me. Different now: about 4 months ago I deinstalled the Google Assistant from my iPhone and now just use Siri. Siri is still not as good but there is the privacy issue. Siri is good enough for me. I still pref…

> Google for the Play Music + commercial free YouTube easy to sell to a demographic that pursues perceived luxury over dollar to value ratio but you are right that Google has built an economic moat around their monopolies that unfortunately Apple or Microsoft can ever overthrow. Google realized the value of services which Apple is way too late to the party. Kudos to them for trying. But I doubt the same number of peo…

YouTube, yes. But I think it’s highly debatable that Google Play is anything remotely close to a monopoly or has anything resembling a moat. Both Apple Music and Spotify are superior and far more popular.

Re: While iPhone sales remain stagnant, Apple services hit $10B in revenue

#95

Post by ryanwaggoner »

browsercoin wrote: post #72
wycy wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, what do you use Siri for that it can be good enough? I use Siri almost exclusively for reminders (e.g., "remind me at x PM to do y" or "remind me when I get home to do z"), and even with this limited use case I often end up with baffling reminders in the future (my favorite reminder is to "make farts"--I never did remember what it was supposed to be.) Beyond reminders I've yet to find a compelling,…

It's amazing that I would be having a random discussion and to check a fact, I would ask Google because Google Search Engine. Google reads the answer in a natural human like way. It works well. Countless dinner arguments arbitrated by Google via Google Voice by a simple ask. Shit saves marriages I bet. "wtf you mean the Mongol Empire didn't last long? hold up, lets ask Google about the Crimean Khnate that still kicke…

Your marriage is very different than mine. Not just because of what you argue about, but because you think the injection of a fact provided by a robot in the cloud is what’s missing from the path to de-escalation.

Re: While iPhone sales remain stagnant, Apple services hit $10B in revenue

#96

Post by [deleted] »

ForHackernews wrote: post #64
cm2187 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How high do you think they can go in term of prices? And do you think they will sell many £1000 smartphones in a recession? Stagnant volumes is not an imminent problem but the share price is a forward looking metric.

iPhones might be a Veblen good. They could probably release a $5000 or $10,000 model and there would be a market for it. Plenty of people buy $50,000 watches.

[deleted]

Re: While iPhone sales remain stagnant, Apple services hit $10B in revenue

#97

Post by ryanwaggoner »

browsercoin wrote: post #73
Shivetya wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well looking at the offering, the new Xs and Xs Max, are not that big of a change from the X so the desire to upgrade may be mooted. With the X Apple introduced a whole new means of authentication and screen technology that was truly a jump from previous phones. This fulfilled two very important categories for sales, the people who love new tech and the people who love being seen with the newest tech; these are not n…

im seeing more ex-Apple users being woke after using Android. They've tasted endless hours of ad free Youtube + Youtube Music + Play Music. You can download songs to YM and what can I say, youtube has music you can't find anywhere. It's convenient that while I'm driving I can interact with different apps like maps and switch to music or play it at the same time without touching the phone. Youtube Music lets me play a…

You know Apple has Apple Music for ad-free streaming, right? And it’s all integrated with Siri and everything. It’s also way more popular than Google Play Music (or whatever it’s called this month), and I trust Apple a lot more than Google.

Since we’re trading anecdotes, I know exactly no one switching to Android, and a number of people who have switched back to iOS in the last couple years. Of the few Android users in my circle of family and friends, about half are just sticking with it because of stubbornness, I think, not because they really deeply value anything it provides.

Apple completely dominated the high end smartphone market and won’t be dethroned by Google’s latest foray into having multiple weirdly named internal competing services that collect as much of your data as they can before will being renamed, merged, and ultimately killed off in a few years. No thanks.

Re: While iPhone sales remain stagnant, Apple services hit $10B in revenue

#98

Post by ryanwaggoner »

cm2187 wrote: post #68
tguedes wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why down? If iPhone sales remain stable, which they should, iPhone customers are extremely loyal; as long as they continue to grow in their Other and Services category, there will be a lot of growth for the company. Plus whatever device that comes out for AR will be interesting. Apple still continues to understand strategy and the technology landscape better than any other company.

You think customers are going to spend more than their rent into their smartphone?

We’re a very long way from that. Do I think customers will continue to buy a smartphone every couple years AND also pay $20-30 per month for various services like music, tv shows, software, etc? Yep.

Re: While iPhone sales remain stagnant, Apple services hit $10B in revenue

#99

Post by GeekyBear »

Theodores wrote: post #52
hacker_9 wrote: post #8

I mean sure 'Stagnant' means that there was no growth, but it also implies that this is a bad thing, which in this case it obviously isn't. Clickbait title.

The real story is that from now on Apple will not be reporting unit sales for their products. Next quarter and from there on there will be just the aggregated sales figure for how much physical stuff they sold with nobody knowing whether that was phones, watches, laptops or dongles. This is their choice and their business. I don't think this is fair on the people that have helped them get to where they are by writing…

Meanwhile, Google does not reveal their unit sales or even their revenue for the various Pixel devices.

>unlike most hardware manufacturers, Google refuses to share official sales numbers for their phone. Instead, during earning reports they simply bundle the product under Alphabet's "Other Revenues", leaving us in the dark about how successful the product is.

https://android.gadgethacks.com/news/rare-moment-pixels-sale...

Re: While iPhone sales remain stagnant, Apple services hit $10B in revenue

#100

Post by TheAdamAndChe »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #91
RickS wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have a dog in this fight re: spin, just playing the word game. "consistent" for a positive spin or "steady" for more neutral. "Flat" is fairly uncharitable but also on the table. For example, I suspect one's wife would rather know her beauty has been "consistent" over the years, rather than "stagnant", despite technically both meaning "stayed the same".

Yep, the wives of the HN userbase and their ongoing obsession with maintaining their beauty. :eye roll:

Are you saying people(wives included) shouldn't care about their beauty? This seems like a completely unnecessary response to the comment.
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