
Is This the End of the Age of Apple? - daschaefer
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/03/opinion/apple-revenue-china-innovation.html
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aphroz
"There would be no Uber and Lyft without the iPhone (and later the Android
version), no Tinder, no Spotify" > This is clearly an exaggeration. Iphone
clearly had an impact on design and smartphone apps, but they did not invented
it. They made it easier to install apps and monetize them. And invested a lot
in marketing. Apple strongest competitive advantage is their ability to make
people pay and it seems to have reach its limit because you cannot ask people
to pay more than 1000 USD for a phone when more competitors have similar
products costing half.

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ksec
>This is clearly an exaggeration.

I would argued it is not. Many had tried to make "Smartphones" for years
before Apple. None of them succeeded. And Android prototype were like
blackberry before the iPhone announcement. People often look back and think
what we have today was so simple and inevitable, but when it actually first
happen it was pure genius.

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aphroz
What do you call success? If you call success having 30% market share, then
you are right. But HTC had smartphones, Nokia as well. They made it a
commercial success, but saying that we would have no Spotify without Apple is
an exaggeration. Because even without smartphone we would have had Spotify.

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cherrygarcia
The age of Apple innovation sadly died with Steve. I think the time since he
passed has shown that without a strong willed visionary leader their products
have become fragmented and reactionary. I’m sure they have great engineers and
designers but I wish someone had said no to some of the recent ideas including
abandoning highly useful features like displays, magsafe chargers, usb ports,
headphone jacks, etc.

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abc_lisper
Have you used Apple Watch 4? AirPods?

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kumarvvr
This is the end of leaps and bounds of innovation in the smartphone sector.
Everything will be minor incremental innovations and a gradual saturation of
the hardware capabilities of devices.

I can't think of any sensors not already on phones.

I can't think of any innovation in hardware, apart from the usual pace of
improvement in speed, computing power and efficiency.

I don't think phones will be getting any bigger.

There is a point of screen pixel density beyond which it is impossible for the
human eye to differentiate quality.

Maybe there will spring up a market for innovative attachments to phones.

Maybe phones will become portable computing powerhouses for bigger machines.

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ohiovr
In 2013 I saw iPad sales growth figures quoted at 57% per year. There were
very rosy projections with that rate five years out.

Well there is no such thing as infinite growth. Are we to believe that Apple
is ever going to reach a two trillion dollar market cap?

In the year 2000 Cisco was worth over 550 billion dollars. 19 years later it
is now worth less than 200.

It was a good run. But it’s a long slide back to reality.

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mandeepj
on a different note - Cisco is trying to reinvent itself as a SAAS company.
Acquisition of AppD, BroadSoft etc, imply that. More here
[https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/about/corporate-strategy-
offic...](https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/about/corporate-strategy-
office/acquisitions/acquisitions-list-years.html)

