Sad to see "services" as a headline on Apple's earnings beat. I'm sure it is gratifying for Tim Cook, but this is going to be the thing that brings on much harder regulation for Apple.
My main issue with services is that they’re degrading the general experience in favor of pushing them. The Music app is barely functional for listening to your own music files, and they make it very difficult to find broadcast radio streams, instead promoting “Apple Radio Stations”.
Setting up a new phone prompts you incessantly about Apple Wallet, iCloud, etc. and uses badges to make you think something is wrong until you begin the process for each (the badges go away if you cancel out of it).
It's been clear for a couple of years now (to me) that Apple devices have become a sales platform for Apple services. It first started when I was constantly getting notifications that I was "running out of space" and needed to sign up for paid iCloud services. This, in fact, when I had plenty of space on my Macbook.
Such things have only continued. They're adding new products and paid services at a slow but steady pace, and regularly sending me notifications to sign up for those services. When you "upgrade" the OS, you're confronted with a whole slew of opportunities to sign up for more services, with no way to just ignore these prompts. I don't blame them for doing this, but it's become increasingly grating, and turned me off of Apple in general.
Like a lot of companies, they're focused on growing their bottom line, and don't see how they're angering their locked-in customers.
“they… don't see how they're angering their locked-in customers.“
yea those apple employees are so stupid they have no idea that nagging you constantly is annoying. no of course they just don’t care about other people including their customers.
although to be fair sociopathy is essentially just another form of stupidity
I have an Apple TV 4K, series 6 Watch, iPhone 11, a few Homepod Minis, and smart lights. I also have a MacBook Pro. It is astounding to me how much money I've put into the Apple "ecosystem" only to have anything but a seamless experience with Music and Homekit. It is downright pathetic.
Music just doesn't sync well across my devices. Full stop. I can start playing something on my phone, select my Homepods as my speakers via Airplay, and it will play. But if I lock my phone and come back a few minutes later, it'll forget what is currently playing on my HomePods and make me "replace" the music. If I try to control it from my other devices it's the same story. More than once I've had it yell at me for trying to play music in more than one place at a time and try to get me to upgrade to a family plan. I'm single and live alone.
Siri also often misunderstands scene names. I just turned to one of the HomePods and said, "Hey Siri, activate 'Nightlights Only'" (a scene name). She said, "Good night." and did nothing. This happens no matter how well I enunciate (general American accent) or how many times I try.
In the process of messing with it just now to prove my point before sharing, Siri hit a snag and told me to go update my iCloud account in the home app, so I did and ran into the same problem as this user[0] did two years ago (disappearing password prompt). It's wild.
This is not the Apple that made iMessage and Messages in OS X the most seamless text messaging experience I've ever experienced before.
I am also heavily invested in Apple gear, but any feature dealing with Siri/HomeKit gets a big doubt from me.
I have two HomePods setup in stereo mode configured to an Apple TV 4K, and I cannot reliably get it to tell me today’s date, start a timer, play a movie, and not even pause or resume the Apple TV 4K.
It is so bad, that recently, if you say “Hey Siri, resume”, the audio resumes playing from the Homepods, but the Apple TV 4K still displays the screensaver until you press play on the remote. I do not even understand how that bug works (and it is a new one, the software continuously gets worse).
That’s odd. I swear I’ve had the date problem too, but I just tried it and had no issues with that or any of the other problems you mentioned.
Overall I agree though. The core products are still good, but I’m hard pressed to spend any more money on this until they improve Siri and Homekit. I know there’s a big UI refresh coming that is welcome, but it feels bigger than that.
It is sporadic. I would say the date problem never occurred last year, but in recent months it has been more and more frequent.
I wonder if it has to do with my five HomeKit secure video cameras and the HomePods or Apple TV 4K acting as a hub. And the fact that my Apple TV 4K is not wired to network.
I am super impressed you were able to get the HomePods to work reliably as stereo speakers. We were never able to get it work consistently. One of the four HomePods I purchased is already bricked.
You may have to look at replacing your router. Because AirPlay works over WiFi, if the router is unable to keep up you will end up having a bad experience
This is true for community generated playlists too. I pay for Apple One, therefor Apple Music, but I keep returning to YouTube Music and Spotify because they both prioritise community generated playlists in their recommendation engine and search results.
> The Music app is barely functional for listening to your own music files
I do still have all my old itunes music in the Music app, so not sure if that's what you're complaining about.
OTOH both Music and iTunes can only handle a limited set of file types; neither can do anything with my huge library of flac files. Perhaps that's your complaint, which I agree with.
I think I am the luckiest person ever because I have thousands of uploaded music files (all converted to ALAC if they weren't already in MP3) and have never had a problem listening to them on any of my devices. The Music app reads the metadata the files already had and I've been able to import lyrics and the like without an issue. It all even works properly on Apple Music for Android, when I briefly had to carry an Android phone for work.
Plus, I can edit the metadata for tracks that come from Apple Music to my own tastes so I can tag that a song from the service is one version while my copy of it is a different version.
For me, Music is one of those things I hope Apple never "modernizes" because I feel like a lot of this nerd-level functionality would be lost in a major rewrite. It's certainly light years ahead of Spotify's truly pathetic "local files" function.
IMO the experience of using Music app for local files (AAC or MP3) has regressed over the years from the 3GS days... You can't hide some things like the Radio button, you can't click artist names of songs playing to jump to the artist, etc... it's functional, but not great...
Apps like Ecoute are alternatives and better in some respects (better navigation IMO), but worse in others.
> The Music app is barely functional for listening to your own music files, and they make it very difficult to find broadcast radio streams, instead promoting “Apple Radio Stations”.
Oh wow I remember when Microsoft did that! Wow that turned out badly for them, even if the Zune app had an amazing UI.
Ahhh yes, I hated this. My phone kept saying is wasn't fully set up because I hadn't set up Apple Pay but at the time my bank didn't even support it.
I think I might have ADHD and I like to minimise any visual distraction by removing everything I can, else it becomes overwhelming for me, just seeing that badge marker when going through something was enough to annoy me.
I really wish there was more customisation so you could turn all that crap off that you didn't need / use so it wasn't even through, there is just too much junk on these devices but it's there to serve Apple and not you as a user.
> The Music app is barely functional for listening to your own music files...
The fact that you can't click a band name to navigate to that band's list of albums when playing local media is perhaps the thing I hate most about iOS. The band name renders in the color of a link, but is non-interactive.
The best part is how Cook declared that the future of Apple is in services like Apple Music, but then Apple made it harder to consume those services by removing the headphone jack from its best-selling music player (the iPhone) and gimping its battery to make it "thinner."
First of all they haven’t stopped looking for the next next big thing. At least I hope they haven’t.
More importantly, services, or really software, can be very exciting too, no less than hardware. Apple isn’t a hardware company, they’re a company that integrate hardware and software into packages that users desire. Services are just the extension of device’s software.
Yes, but are any of Apple's services really that exciting?
There all just 'me too' products levelling the ego system.
Apple TV+ is an odd one for example, it's not needed, there are plenty of streaming services around and they all work fine on apple devices.
They have not tried to do anything interesting or exciting with there services, they've just attached them in the most basic way and watched the cash flow in.
> all just 'me too' products levelling the ego system
Apple created what was pretty much the first real platform for selling music online with iTunes. You could call Apple Music a “me too” move, but they really pivoted an existing business that had been threatened with disruption.
People have enough gadgets already. The services income is largely going to be people switching from other brands services so it’s not much of a change for the user but they now get a more integrated experience.
I haven't owned apple hardware for about a decade, and I was seriously considering buying a MacBook Air to try the ecosystem out again, thinking that I'd give it to my gf if I didn't like it, or if I really liked it I'd upgrade to a MBP and still give her the air.
These comments about services have me reconsidering this plan.
So far the services are value add and not required at all. I have a paid iCloud account because I like syncing photos between devices and seamlessly sharing with family, and I need the cloud backup option. The other stuff I don’t have and I don’t feel like I’m missing out on.
Apple doesn't really push or require their services. The Google and other ones work just as fine as they do on Windows. Apple wins people over by just making their stuff work better and you naturally end up using their stuff simply because its better rather than because you had to.
* Some of their services actually don't work better. Apple Music sucks so people still use Spotify. Which is one of the areas of growth for Apple since they have the ability to make Apple Music the best, they just haven't yet.
Something which I will never, ever wear. Apple is about supporting healthy lifestyles, not escaping from them. I see value in an Apple version of the HoloLens, but not as a consumer device.
The next iPhone is likely what they are really shooting for.
The next 'watch' would be a relatively minor product. The watch is a fairly pointless niche device. It helps apple and it's another product in the eco system, but it doesn't move the needle that much.
Plenty of companies don’t have much if any growth, utilities for example. It’s just Apple is no where near the end of the line for growth and new opportunities.
what's the connection here between growth and dividends? Come to think about it it's something that's carved out in investment products huh: growth stocks, rising dividend stocks, etc. Are growth and dividend payouts semi mutually exclusive or something?
A growing company reinvests profits into further growth, developing new products, building new factories, whatever. When you can no longer grow, you return profits to shareholders.
They're not asking for $4.99 -- from their perspective, once you sign up, you'll likely stay for years. $4.99 a month for ten years is $600. And you'll likely need to upgrade your iCloud storage at some point, because you'll run out of space, increasing your value even further. I wouldn't be surprised if many of the people paying for iCloud now will remain iCloud customers for the next 20 years, or even longer.
> "services" is where you still have growth. Cloud storage, music, video streaming
Too bad Apple is still so, so very bad at this. Their services are barely functioning, at best, with multiple WTFs daily.
When they work, they are not even magic. They are the bare minimum of what you expect them to do (like, for example, to quickly and correctly sync photos between me and my family).
Sorry to bother you, but I read this comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31101384) and I was wondering myself: how did XP managed to have the transparent rounded corners? AFAIK, it doesn't use any compositing, yet the system is able to tell what should be "behind" the window to whatever that was in the transparent regions of the corners. The same thing applies (I guess) to the shadows of the right-click menus.
The transparency is a 1-pixel mask bitmap. There's no partial blending required. Shadows of right click menus are different -- Windows actually had a secret, weird compositor ever since Windows 2000 called "layered windows", but the app has to be rewritten to use them.
Well, seems like it would be relatively easy to make growth happen then. Imagine if Apple properly applied itself and brought the magic from the early iPhone to its cloud services.
Apple's services benefit hugely from being built into the OS. If you're pro-Apple you would say that's just enjoying the benefits of vertical integration, and on the other hand if you're a regulator you would say that's illegal bundling (a la Microsoft w/ IE in the late 1990s).
The antitrust case was only partially about the bundling, the fundamental issue was MS's abuse of their monopoly position in the US market. Apple still is nowhere near that 95+% threshold that MS achieved with Windows on desktop PCs in the 90s.
Do somethings provide value? Yes? If I want to write an app for my own phone (and provide it to no one else) I need to pay them $100 a year. That turns my $1000 phone into a $1100 phone the first year, 10% increase. Is it providing me value? Services are rent seeking because its MRR and ARR, some worth it, some definitely not (an SD card slot would crush and kill iCloud)
You haven't needed to pay Apple to write your own apps and load them on your device for years now. Since iOS 9. You have to pay them if you want to put it on their app store.
iCloud increasing the effective storage of the phone is about 10% of the value prop. Your point is like "dropbox is just rsync + a VPS".
I dont believe you get access to all features and functionality if you do not pay for the developer subscription (maybe it has changed?) but things like push notifications, third party libraries....? Regardless their services strategy is rent seeking for one of the most profitable companies on the planet. (ex: making 5+ billion selling charger bricks after not including them when you buy a phone)
No push notifications (this is unsurprising, Apple runs the push notification servers, and those cost money). I don't see anything about linking against third party libraries.
---
More to the point, you keep using this term "rent seeking" to describe Apple selling optional services. Nobody is forcing an iPhone owner to pay Apple for services. Rent seeking implies once you have the thing, you have to pay rent on it. That's just not true for iPhones.
Oh its definitely rent seeking. They are trying to eek out more money from customers without adding additional value. Headphone jacks, no SD card for storage, no charger blocks, no ability to add music to your device without a windows or Mac computer, etc.... We can go on and on and won't agree so we do not need to continue to discuss this. No they are not forcing you, but they are absolutely rent seeking. (everyone is these days).
You could also get 256gb of storage from a $30 high-endurance samsung microsd card and not pay a recurring monthly expense. It's not just an apple thing, but the hardware from most manufacturers is clearly being designed to exclude that possibility in favor of pushing you to high-priced internal storage and cloud services with recurring billing.
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Don't cite the deep magic to me. Calling my comment "flaimbait" for asking if you understand the differences offered between an SD card an cloud storage is an extremely poor interpretation of my comment. Please refer to the HN guidelines.
Cloud storage and a $30 SD card are in basically no way fungible. It's just not what fungible means. Calling an SD card fungible with cloud storage is more incorrect than calling Dropbox fungible with "rsync + VPS".
Everything you compare with is the complete opposite to what Apple is selling and what their customers want (I base this on their success selling what they’re selling). Apple is in the ecosystem business and their services are supposed to unify it.
I’m a techy enough person in this context, using Arq for backups to Backblaze B2 for my photography stuff, I wouldn’t ever want to bother with that for the things I have on iCloud though, I just want that seamless and integrated.
Paying for Apple One is probably the best deal of all my services, based on how much I use it and the value I get.
You're a nerd. Normal users don't care and want the convenience of iCloud sync. They don't want anything but "it does it automatically". People need to stop looking from a tech enthusiast POV
I know myself and a few other people settled on M1 MacBook Airs rather than waiting for Pros around that time. Part of the thought process was "what the hell, they're great computers and a Pro would cost n% more". I was fine compromising performance for having a machine I needed when I needed it, and saving some money in the interim.
It didn't make sense to wait several months when the M1 Airs are already great computers. If this was a common sentiment, they lost around $1500 from me alone, and perhaps a similar amount from many other people.
Hard to get my head around the -10% in Mac sales since i expected the Apple-silicon transition to “open up the flood gates”.
Not coming from an investor mindset - mostly because the new macs are finally great value for money again and well built, mostly designed with actual users in mind and thus surprised there doesn’t seem to be a real impact financially.
Can anyone explain or put forward an interpretation on the “why” behind this?
I know everyone else is saying it as well but the lead time to get a high-specced MBP is insane. So much so that my company had to give new hires a base model M1 Pro because that was one of the only things they could get their hands on.
Base MBP with M1 Pro, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD: $2,499.00
Minimum desired MBP with M1 Pro, upgraded GPU so you can get more RAM, 64GB RAM, 1TB SSD: $3,699.00
And that's just assuming we wouldn't have considered M1 Max chips. We are a smaller company but have had had to buy at least 2 "compromise" laptops that I know of due to lead time. I imagine larger companies are in a similar position so Apple is losing $1-2K per laptop just because we can't buy the one we want in a reasonable timeframe.
Is it possible they just can't make enough? I know I work for a big company that would have purchased a metric ton of these but they simply couldn't get them.
Heavily weighted towards #1. I’ve been watching and waiting to order when delays shrink because the only rush I’m in is wanting in on the new shiny… and delays have shrunk to weeks instead of multiple months, but that’s still pretty astonishing for machines which (some anyway) were announced nearly a year ago.
I would bet supply constraints meaning they couldn’t make enough to sell. I was trying to buy large numbers for work (orders of 50-100 a time, multiple times) from Q4 through Q2 and ship times were months out at some points.
The only thing I can think of is these things are lasting longer and the cheaper machines meet many peoples needs. I can hang on to my 2015 mbp another year or two for personal use anyway. And I won't be replacing it with a $3k MBP, I'll probably be going with an m2 or m3 MBA which will be under $2k.
I have 3 Macs at home and two of them are 2015 vintage--one desktop, one laptop. I did get a new Apple Silicon MacBook with a much larger SSD for various reasons. But for most purposes the other computers are fine and I'll probably use them even after OS upgrade cutoff as essentially browsers for a good long time.
I have the first Mac Book Air (2008) driving an old scanner with outdated drivers. Another old (not as old) Air is my portable Logic recording station. The last Intel Air as my current laptop. My desktop is a 2013 Mac trashcan. They end up being used for a very long time doing something useful.
I don't get why people thought it would change anything. The OS is still MacOS, and having to use a totally different OS to get a slightly better CPU performance isn't going to convince anybody to switch. None of my geek friends who use PCs give a single rip about the M1/M2 processors. Nobody I know who works with Windows and Linux on x86 systems care either, because MacOS is not their preference nor part of their business. Lots of people are still using 7-10 year old systems that work fine. It has literally zero impact on what they do. Nobody who is not technically-minded is going to care, because they'll either want a Mac or they won't. You turn it on, and it looks the same as the x86 Macs, and for 99% of what people do, the peak performance doesn't mean that much to them.
Intel macbooks are so goddamn hot that any dev I know envies the colleague with the M2 that has never such problems and whose laptop last an entire day with charging.
I would always choose my 2020 lowest specced M1-MBA over my highend specced Intel-MBP from 2017.
Not only are they hot, they are also loud. You notice when intel users join a video conference because of the constant fan-noise [1].
Not to mention that the constant heat comes with rediculous malfunctions over time.
I considered leaving the platform until the Apple Silicon CPUs arrived. I currently run a kubernetes cluster on my new MBP with 13 pods plus 2 dev servers for some Java BE and another for a web-FE - no fan-noise!
You're comparing mac people with intel vs mac people with M2. They are comparing non-mac people before M1 was released to after M1 was released and (rightly) pointing out that none of those people really care about this.
Well, I for one made the latter switch - did not care about Apple before M1/M2 but the processors are so far ahead technically that I was willing to make the ecosystem switch. Having a high-performance laptop that will last a whole day of browsing and intellij development and also still can get the lead out when I need performance is a huge win, there is nothing comparable in the PC space for what I paid ($919 for a refurb 16/256 with mil discount). Unix on the desktop in some relatively sane and polished format is a huge win for engineering sanity and usability too.
And I’m not an exception, you can find other people right in this thread saying “I had macs 10 years ago, went to windows, and the m1 was compelling enough to give it another try”. And while Joe Public may not be interested in the nuances of hardware specifications, those are the exact sorts of people macos is marketed to in the first place. The “happy bubblewrap os” that you decry is very popular among non-techies, and the techies respect the hardware.
I would ask why it's conceptually shocking that a wide performance gap at extremely aggressive pricing (for M1 MBA) could lead people to consider the product who otherwise wouldn't have - but a lot of people simply deny that entirely, despite the very obvious improvements in performance (this thing cranks indexing Spring libraries in intellij or doing builds) and battery life that self-evidently could not occur without the claimed performance benefits. There is a weird Alternate Facts Bubble / Epistemic Closure thing going on with a lot of people where the facts don't agree with their preconceptions so they're rejected entirely.
And sure, if your software isn't Apple Silicon-aware then you have a problem, but that's much less of a problem than people think it is. And M1 is such a performant platform that over time it will drive migration and that will continue to become even less and less of an issue - it’s a fast enough platform that If You Build It They Will Come. And it is already an edge-case for the most part.
For docker/k8s, in particular, just set up your NAS as a host. If you’re doing a build, Socket 2011-3 stuff has dropped heavily, a 2697v3 is $55 and 32GB rdimms are $50 a pop, or you can just slap some ram into an old Ryzen desktop or something. It’s not expensive to build yourself a much beefier machine than you could ever put into a laptop, and I work from home so latency will never be a realistic issue. I’m happy to work with it on the dev side to get the ide and daily-driving responsiveness.
Its sort of like Linux on the desktop - yup, if you aren’t interested in occasional debugging, changing away from generic x86 ISAs maybe isn’t for you and you probably will be better off with windows and a beige box from Walmart. But there’s a lot there if you will work with it.
There just is this primal shriek among a lot of the tech community - no, apple can’t be good! no, there can’t be a way to utilize it effectively within power-user workflows!. Like, the classic “apple fanboy” is a well-remarked phenomenon but there is clearly a group of people who are looking for reasons to pan the hardware because they don’t like apple and will grasp whatever straws they can find. The performance is a lie, no software will run on it, my k8s containers are x86 and cannot possibly be rebuilt with arm, no I can’t run those containers on my NAS… they’re digging for reasons not to do it. And the Irrational Apple Hater contingent is actually seemingly much larger than the Irrational Apple Fanboy contingent - this whole M1 saga has revealed that a lot of people hold latent negative oppinions based on the branding that they just haven’t felt threatened enough to reveal. Supremacy is very comfortable, it’s when that supremacy gets challenged that people start getting ugly about it, and x86 and commodity laptop hardware has held a very comfortable supremacy for a long time.
And you do you, but your consent is not required, it’s a good experience and it’s good enough that people are going to continue refining it to make it work. People will just move on without your approval.
You're so blinded by your love for Apple, that you don't realize that the results in the third quarter results prove that "the floodgates" didn't indeed open, and that nobody is switching to M1/M2 in droves. The comment I replied to, said he can't figure out why people aren't switching in droves. Guess what, regular ass people don't care. Only fanboys, developers and people with heavy workloads might care. Otherwise the slightly better performance in certain scenarios (are you familiar with how benchmarks work?) isn't enough to make people switch in droves.
After getting an M1 Pro, I don’t worry about battery life on laptop at all. This is such a huge quality of life upgrade and competition has no answer for this. I switched from Linux because of this.
Long page, scroll down and you'll find stats for the past 13 years through last quarter showing the numbers for each product per quarter. Sales are, overall, up since M1/M2 were released. There have been other past quarters where there is a major drop in Mac revenue (and same with other products). The iPhone numbers show this with a much more pronounced effect, but that's essentially a single release date for all products whereas Mac products get released throughout the year so it's harder to observe without more breakdown (at least to laptop and desktop levels).
Maybe everyone rushed out to buy the M1s last year because they were so good and disrupted the natural upgrade cycle so that this year there were less purchases?
The laptops with M2 chips weren’t out during the quarter being reported here. The 13” MBP was available on the last two days of the quarter, and the much more popular MBA came out in the following quarter.
Only matters to 15% of the desktop world, it won't run the software used in remaining 85% of the desktop world, nor the game development SDKs used for 100% of game consoles.
Sorry for being ignorant, but I suck at reading numbers. Especially the comma confuses me as a European. Do I read correctly that Apple turned over more 40 billion USD on iPhone sales this quarter alone?
If iPhone owners buy a new iPhone every 2.5 years, then it corresponds to a total of 600 million iPhone owners worldwide, or 7.5 % of the world’s population. The numbers aren’t that baffling when you consider the size of the market.
Early in his career, Tim Cook called himself the "Attila the Hun of Inventory", meaning he knew how to handle a supply chain so aggressively that the firms he managed (Compaq at the time) didn't need to carry that very expensive inventory. It could be obliterated.
He has only gotten better at it since then.
Apple is supply-chain constrained today, especially around Macs. But it has managed this difficult supply-environment way, way better than most other firms.
so many people were misusing the word “literally” the Merriam-Webster dictionary definition expanded to include the “figurative exaggerated” usage of it. So I understand but it’s “technically” correct
From the link in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32271400, there's references as far back as 1769 where people were "misusing" the word "literally". It has basically never just meant "literal".
Sure, if by "Now" you mean since at least 250 years ago.
> 1769 F. Brooke Hist. Emily Montague IV. ccxvii. 83 He is a fortunate man to be introduced to such a party of fine women at his arrival; it is literally to feed among the lilies.
A better phrasing that correctly uses "now" would be: The OED now recognizes that "literally" can be used to mean "figuratively".
> > 1769 F. Brooke Hist. Emily Montague IV. ccxvii. 83 He is a fortunate man to be introduced to such a party of fine women at his arrival; it is literally to feed among the lilies.
> A better phrasing that correctly uses "now" would be: The OED now recognizes that "literally" can be used to mean "figuratively".
I wouldn’t be so sure about that.
“Lilies” may figuratively refer to “women” as a group of persons named “Lily”. If so, attending a party filled with “lilies” would mean to literally (literally) feed among them, presuming snacks and refreshments were served at said party.
Good try. Fortunately we can check the text[1] and there are no characters named "Lily".
However, there is a prior reference to lilies as a thing of beauty:
> Our beaux are terribly at a loss for similies: you have lilies of the valley for comparisons; we nothing but what with the idea of whiteness gives that of coldness too.
and it seems likely the author was referring to that theme.
Additionally this isn't the only quote from a similar timeframe:
if you've ever worked low income side jobs the amount of people you see with the newest airpods and iphone while living paycheck to paycheck is high. Of all the forms of conspicuous consumption that people get accused of, this is probably the most real one, with the exception of Jordans maybe
I'm confused by why the people you're talking about cannot afford food? They're gainfully employed, even if at a low wage.
And it makes sense, because an iPhone is a fairly inexpensive luxury good. Certainly, it's cheaper than a comparably high end purse, car or house. And, in the US, it's heavily subsidized by carriers.
Gainfully employed is probably not the type of employment you mean. Smart phones and stuff typically come with a payment plan so they’re rarely bought with a lump sum
Credit cards mean a lot of people can run negative budgets for quite a while before they can't eat. And a lot of people have inconsistent income. Afford an iPhone one month, can't afford groceries the next.
Wow can’t downvote this on mobile but this comment is pretty rude. The usage of “them” is incredibly othering and there are so many systemic issues contributing to the poor remaining poor.
For crying out loud a quick web search for “percentage of Americans living paycheck to paycheck” puts that number around 60% right now.
+1 as soon as you look at the costs per day, iPhones are cheap!
At $1.5 per day for the latest iPhone+AppleCare, the upgrade program made me realize I get at least $5-$10 of value out of my phone daily. Even in just time saved on daily tasks e.g. banking, shopping, taxis, work (I don't have to walk to the "location" or even to my desktop).
But why let Apple take all of that margin from you? This year my iPhone XS will depreciate like $100, costing me $0.30 / day to do the same tasks just as well.
Context: For a long time I stayed on my iPhone 6, trying to extract every last bit of value from it (replaced the screen 1x and the battery 2x) before it was no longer getting updates (I had it 6 years).
1. The cognitive overhead of trying to extract every last dollar is greater than $1 a day. In the back of my mind I kept going back and forth, do I upgrade the battery again, or switch to a newer $1000 phone? If I include the time and money ($100 every 2 years - $0.14 per day for the battery; $150 every 3 yeas - $0.14 per day for the screen) actually spent getting the phone fixed, then the upgrade program is a no brainer winner.
2. The improvements were noticeable! Significantly. When I got my iPhone 11 Pro after giving away my iPhone 6, my laptop usage reduced by 75% (I had been thinking of buying a new laptop - the iPhone purchase saved me money overall).
3. I stayed on my iPhone 6 because "I just didn't believe X, Y, or Z was actually worth the upgrade". For $1.5 per day (vs $0.3) for a tool able to save me $5-10 per day, every day, why ever lag behind? What if the 14 is able to save me $15 per day because of X, Y, or Z but "I just don't believe it" and miss out on years worth of "savings".
4. Even without everything I've said prior, I can afford the $1.5 per day, even for frivolous reasons. When my iPhone, a tool, costs the same as one bubble tea / fancy latte a week, I'd rather reduce my cafe visits slightly and use the best version of the tools that are known to improve my life.
5. There is still a lot more iPhones can improve on, and I would like them to improve. I specifically also buy the Pro because I view "giving Apple that margin" as a "vote with my wallet" that there is a market for a more feature-rich iPhone can do next year and the more my vote counts.
chuckling because there was a point when I had an iPhone but could barely afford to eat (and couldn’t afford to live in a house). But yeah it was not the latest iPhone
I feel like the number of people who both cannot afford food and will buy the latest iPhone is vanishingly small. I am sure such people exist, and that is... strange, but it doesn't feel like a useful explanation for what is happening.
At least in the UK, a lot of the (quite dreadful) infrastructure around social support requires you to have internet access - an iPhone on credit with a cheap/free SIM isn't a terrible way to achieve this on a low budget. Plus you know the phone is going to last a long time and hold its value once you're done with it.
How's the Iphone selling so well over the past 3 months then compared to last year, especially in face of weak international currencies? These have been rough months for the average consumer supposedly. Does the Iphone 13 have a particular selling point other than being the latest and greatest? Obviously the people aren't feeling the inflation pressure when it comes to buying Iphones.
Sorry but the other commenter is correct. I've seen this first hand because with every new phone I've ever bought since even before smart phones were a thing I've always negotiated how much I paid up front for the phone vs the monthly contract and run the maths to see how much difference the contract would be. In every instance, even during my last upgrade which happened ~12 months ago, the amount I paid up front wasn't proportional to the amount my bill reduced by.
For example, If I paid for £1000 phone up front the monthly contract would be £40. So if your argument was correct then that same contract should be £40 + (£500 / 24months) == £61. But it wouldn't be. It would be more like £75 a month. Sure that's only £10 a month more. But over 24 months that works out £240 extra. So that £500 ends up costing £740.
These are just made up figures but they're roughly in the same ballpark as what I've experienced.
On occasions when I've asked for a pen and paper so I can make a note of the differences over the contract term, the sales people have even literally said "So if you go on this contract, your phone will cost £x more". So I don't think it's even a fact they try and hide.
If I go to Verizon.com right now and select iPhone 13 Pro Max I can get a base phone for $30.55/mo over 36 months. That is equal to 1099.8 which is the the same price (if not less) than the 1099.9 if I bought it out right.
That $30.55 DOES NOT include the price of the contract, which costs an additional $85.00 for 5G Ultraband. I would have to pay $85 whether or not I bought a 0% interest phone, bought it at full retail or brought my own phone.
So no, I don't see where the "double" is coming from. It's just math.
I mean that's kinda on you if you want to contract for cellular service + handset in this way, but even in the UK the cellular market has offered iPhones at 0% over two years with option to find cheapest rolling 30 day contract you can - the iPhone upgrade program is run in the UK under very similar terms to the US one, and is still sim free/0 percent.
I've also seen the handset cost separated at 0% APR with separate service charge from major UK telcos too.
There aren't that many Apple stores in the UK, a lot of cities don't even have one. Whereas every mobile network will have a shop in nearly every town. So I'd wager most iPhone owners aren't even aware this program exists.
Plus the standard way to buy a phone since long before Apple entered the market was to buy from the network. So it's a habit that still persists today.
The other thing to note with that is you're continually trading in your old phone to access that scheme. Whereas mobile networks let you keep your phone (I mean, you literally own it). People often then sell it or hand it down to a family member. One of my friends went ~5 years without buying a new phone because he had my hand-me-downs.
"The United Kingdom (UK) is home to more Apple stores than any other country in Europe, with 38 stores in operation as of November 2021."
I bet you those 38 stores are located strategically to cover a vast majority of the population.
You're simply nitpicking. The reality is, you can get an iPhone for 0% interest. It's not some kind of insurmountable quest. You don't even need to go into the store, you can simply order it from Apple.com.
> I bet you those 38 stores are located strategically to cover a vast majority of the population.
I'm sure they are but if people have to travel when there's a competitor on their door step, they'll generally buy from the competitor. This is a fact that's as old as commerce itself.
> You're simply nitpicking. ... It's not some kind of insurmountable quest.
How am I nitpicking? I'm literally just stating how the UK consumers shop. You might not agree with their logic but telling them they're wrong on some random tech forum none of them would visit is about as productive as pissing in the wind. What I've described is literally how things work in the UK. Sorry if that seems egregious to you but it's a fact.
> You don't even need to go into the store, you can simply order it from Apple.com.
...and now we're back to my point that most iPhone users are unaware of that offer. Most wouldn't even visit Apple.com. I wasn't even aware of that and I'm a techie so none of my non-technical friends would have been aware. The way people buy phones in the UK isn't and hasn't ever typically been to buy direct from the manufacturer. So most people wouldn't know or even think to check apple.com for offers.
Please remember that the UK is a totally different country so some behaviourisms will differ from what you're used to. And telling me I'm nitpicking because an entire country of people shop differently to what you consider sensible (or perhaps "normal" in your country) is, frankly, ridiculous.
Honestly though, I'd be interested to know how many people in your own country are aware of that offer. I suspect it might be less than you'd like to believe. Are you going look down on them for being out of the loop too?
> The reality is, you can get an iPhone for 0% interest.
I'm not disputing that. I'm stating why most UK iPhone users don't take advantage of that. You can argue that fact to your blue in the face but it means jack shit if the actual consumers either aren't aware of it, or are too lazy to take advantage of it. THAT is the real issue, not whether the 0% interest offer exists or not.
Are you buying the phone through the carrier? God knows what scummy tactics they will use and it's not a fair comparison. You can buy the phone through Apple and only pay for the phone, no extra (unless you upgrade after only 1 year).
I can't speak for the US but in the UK they're transparent about the costs and thus you can compare their costs with that of buying directly from the Apple store. So there isn't really any room for trickery there.
Even the contract you sign has to have terms explained by the sales person because that contract can be contested if the customer claims they were duped into signing something they didn't understand. We have a lot stricter consumer laws in Europe.
The current Apple Card, fully Applized and wallet integrated is in partnership GS. The old Apple-branded card was Barclays, but it was just a standard retail-type branded card.
iPhone financing is CitizenOne, eg the iPhone For Life program, although you can also use Apple Card to purchase it.
I am an Apple fan because I have been a fan for 20 years. However, Apple has been objectively a "boring" company the last 10 years. They are famous for design but they don't push design forward anymore because they don't have a crazy, arrogant person at the top to rally the troops in a unique direction.
The only area they're not conservative in is chip design, but that's not a cool and trendy thing. You don't hear regular people talk about the chips in their iPhones. How is Apple able to stay relevant among younger people and convince them to buy iPhones when Android phones are just as capable and look just as good?
Apple have been plenty innovative. In the past 10 years, Apple have:
- released Apple Watch
- all displays are Retina. (As far as I can tell by looking at all the monitors from other companies in an electronics store, they all still think that 96-dpi is acceptable)
- Apple displays have a much wider color gamut (I suspect the largest in the industry, but don't know)
- Apple Silicon (as you mentioned)
- AirPods, which people seem to really love
- continuously improved cameras on iPhones; no comparison between the current camera(s) and the iPhone 5 from 2012.
- Touch Bar (might or might not like it, but it is innovative)
- new, thin keyboard design (turned out not to be a good design, but it was innovative)
- integration between iOS/macOS: use your iPad as a monitor, handoff calls between phone and computer, shared copy/paste, etc.
- macOS can now run iOS apps
- Rosetta 2: invisible translation of x86 code that even runs faster than on their most recent native Intel laptops
- privacy as a feature (arguably innovative, but compared to what everyone else is doing it is...)
There's not so many new-category-defining innovations, but Apple have hardly been sitting on their hands.
> There's not so many new-category-defining innovations, but Apple have hardly been sitting on their hands.
Yep! With more to come too. Seeing Apple’s take on VR/AR in these next few years is going to be very interesting. Probably not as big of a paradigm shift as the iPhone, but still exciting nonetheless.
Apple Watch is only what it is because Apple shut off the ability for anyone else to have that level of integration. Hope the EU forces them to open it up.
This is just patently false. There might be a few things that Apple shuts off (though none are coming to mind, I had a Pebble for years and it worked perfectly), the truth is the competition isn't playing in the same league, mainly due to the chips/OS available. On top of that the Android Wear products I've seen don't hold a candle to the Apple Watch in terms of looks or capabilities.
Not only that but Apple commits to their products. Apple Watch v1 was pretty meh, but they kept at it, iterating year after year, until I finally pulled the trigger on one because it had the functionality that I was looking for.
All the other companies are constantly rebuilding their products from scratch, or dropping them entirely. Apple sets a vision and just continually works toward executing on that vision with small advances every year. That’s why users love them.
I felt the same way with the Samsung watch. v1/v2 was pretty meh, but they kept at it, iterating year after year, until I finally pulled the trigger on one because it had the functionality and design that I was looking for. I was specifically keeping away from squarish smartwatches because I didn't want a watch that screamed "smartwatch" and wanted a rounded design, which I find more aesthetically pleasing.
You nailed it. They are focused and relentless - something to admire in a world where companies are usually super reactive and don't have confidence in their vision.
Ben Horowitz’s peace time CEO vs war time CEO in ‘The Hard Thing About Hard Things’ comes to mind. Tim Cook is a great peace time CEO that can ‘focus on expanding the market and reinforcing the company’s strengths’. In war time (like when Jobs joined Apple and was weeks away from bankruptcy) ‘a company is fending off an imminent existential threat..has a single bullet in the chamber and must, at all costs, hit the target.’
There are probably ten thousand hackers on here that day dream about being at the helm of Apple with a world class team and war chest at their disposal. I know I’ve day dreamed about it and truthfully if money and technology were no object I’m not sure what opportunities remain for products that can fit inside a briefcase that Apple does not already pursue.
Curious to hear ideas that aren’t VR/AR or a SmartCar..?
(The best I can do is just a new take on existing products like a eInk iPod with 2 million songs and a month long battery.)
Apple is about to find its self in need of a wartime CEO. The threat will come when China is no longer a viable place to manufacture high-tech devices. Apple has deep pockets, but they've been doubling down on China with each new warning sign. At some point they'll have to scramble to start manufacturing on this side of the Pacific, and it'll be rough.
It's not that I think there's someone more skilled at operations. It's that Cook got Apple into this situation. He was the one that reimagined Apple's manufacturing strategy, closed their American factories and moved everything to China. He then spent 20 years expanding, refining and doubling down on that strategy. And it was brilliant. Jobs could not have saved Apple without Tim Cook. But the time for that strategy has passed.
To get out of China, Apple will need to again reimagine all its operations from first principals, and they need someone who is intellectually and emotionally free to do that—even able to repudiate Cook's past decisions in order push Apple in the right direction. Just as Ballmer couldn't lead a shift away from Windows and it took Nadella transform Microsoft, Tim Cook will not be able to remake Apple.
More integrated services for the home. HomeKit was supposed to be this big thing and it seems to have been silently forgotten. Same with improving the developer experience for building things on Apple platforms: the docs suck, the APIs are arcane (sign all your things, read this spec to figure out how!). IMO, aside from the swift fanboys, no one I've met enjoys developing for Apple.
> HomeKit was supposed to be this big thing and it seems to have been silently forgotten.
Actually this has just been rebooted as part of the "Thread" and "Matter" alliance. Might finally start working.
Apple's niche, as usual, is privacy, and part of their go it alone attempts (yes, plural) was because they wouldn't certify anything that nakedly leaked info. I don't know how all that will work now that Nest and Alexa devices (which share info with the cops without a warrant) will also be thread/matter devices.
> HomeKit was supposed to be this big thing and it seems to have been silently forgotten.
Hopefully the reason work has slowed on this is because Apple & Google (and others) are actually getting Matter[1] right, so home automation will actually, finally work without having to geek out over all the details all the time.
I'd like to see a carry around device (phone format or even nano) that can dock into other things like a desktop or laptop and convert into that thing.
So I'm on my MacBook, pull out the device (like a cartridge) and it's a phone. Plug it into something else and it's a desktop. Plug it into a car and it's a CarPlay. Everything I plug it into charges it too.
I think the current idea is that the universal computer is the clown, and your terminals (phone/notebook/laptop) have some local processing and different kinds of views into that computer's space.
I actually like that model and remember it well from the late 70s/early 80s. Unfortunately as unix workstations became more popular their somewhat stovepiped model overtook that (despite Sun's "the network is the computer" bull). I hoe we come back to that.
There is iteration, but nothing like the scale and customer base which Apple can bring to the table.
I think Apple would just need to aim for a market that barely exists. Single person transport vehicles would be my guess. It would need a big name brand which emphasizes safety and privacy over noise and power.
There are gyroscope based motorcycles with roof shells which would be great for the average consumer which would be in line with their environmental goals. Combine that with a complete augmented reality surround experience and some sort of ridiculous safety features like multi-limb airbag deployment or emergency jet obstacle avoidance they are in a unique position to completely change personal transport.
Add in some alternate transport options which are not available at all which would require major corporation negotiating power. Short flights added in as an option dropping some wings to bypass traffic. Perhaps some sort of rail connection to hook into those single car tunnels or existing railway tracks. Open the railways for traffic each direction when not otherwise occupied. Perhaps an optional jet ski and snowmobile accessory. Make it buoyant so it never sinks like trashed scooters in the river.
I would imagine they would focus on ergonomics, smoothness of the ride and energy efficiency over power. All digital so lots of haptics. Light enough to take into an elevator to park in your apartment. Just flip a switch and the gyro makes it stand on one wheel to fit in an elevator. Imagine being disabled and it opens your front door and drops you off in your living room.
I should imagine they would combine some high resolution camera technology to easily snap photos in any direction of whatever is interesting, 5G cellular for live-streaming in vehicle with easy swapping between internal and external cameras, automated pickup so you could send your bike to the store for curbside pickup without going with it and taking control from home if necessary. Disable local control so can send it out to pick up the kids from school. Or send it to park when you have reached your destination and it pays for parking and comes back when you need it.
Perhaps OLED exterior so you can change the look on the fly. 360 degree camera coverage so you have no blind spots. Auto collision avoidance from any direction.
There is a huge wishlist out there and it is easy to brainstorm all sorts of things that small companies just could not pull off in any sort of scale. Production wise they already custom design all the phone manufacturing hardware which runs 24/7 and there is always the possibility of just acquiring what they need.
Xiaomi, which started as a smartphone OEM, has released several e-bikes, which as a non-biker I wasn't interested in, but I though there was a sentiment that it's a pretty good e-bike, especially for its price range. Maybe someone more knowledgeable can chime in.
How is Apple able to stay relevant among younger people and convince them to buy iPhones when Android phones are just as capable and look just as good?
If you truly can't figure it out, first thing I'd recommend is checking your assumptions.
> How is Apple able to stay relevant among younger people and convince them to buy iPhones when Android phones are just as capable and look just as good?
There is quite an element of peer pressure for young people to display status through having new and expensive technology (which I believe is one strong reason the design of smartphones are rev'd every year, so that people can tell at a glance whether you have the latest device), and add upon it Apple's cultural cachet to be the "cool/in" brand, it's often hard for young people to resist the pressure. This has led to issues such as "blue bubble versus green bubble" where young people on Apple devices exclude those on Android device based on not wanting to see an out-of-place color in their text message window.
