"...customers taking advantage of significantly reduced pricing for iPhone battery replacements"
Very interesting that Apple included this as someone who took advantage of a $29 battery replacement for my 6S just last month. The chain of decisions that took place for this to happen should be a lesson for more companies.
I imagine it went something like this:
- Feedback that iPhones were shutting down unexpectedly due to degraded and/or defective batteries.
- Instead of shouldering the battery replacement immediately, the product team decides to change the performance envelope of the phone.
- The root issue is not addressed.
- Betterygate™ inevitably happens.
- Apple heavily subsidizes battery replacements for everyone
- Some people decide that they'll stick with their phone a bit longer than they otherwise would have, reducing iPhone sales.
- Apple misses their earnings target, likely costing them more in value than it would have cost them to address the root issue in the first place.
Of course there are other factors addressed in the letter, but this issue was notable enough to be included.
>- Apple heavily subsidizes battery replacements for everyone
> - Some people decide that they'll stick with their phone a bit longer than they otherwise would have, reducing iPhone sales.
> - Apple misses their earnings target
This is a gross misrepresentation of the report which clearly states "Greater China and other emerging markets accounted for the vast majority of the year-over-year iPhone revenue decline."
Battery replacements may have been notable, but it is incorrect to imply that they were the dominant factor.
OP did not say "mishandling batterygate screwed Apple's earnings", but instead pointed out that something that could have been better handled and would have cost significantly less was considered a big enough mistake to be mentioned.
OP not implying causation, they're calling something interesting out.
I fundamentally disagree with your analysis, as OP helpfully listed their entire thinking out:
> "It went something like this:"
> ....
>- Some people decide that they'll stick with their phone a bit ?longer than they otherwise would have, reducing iPhone sales.
>- Apple misses their earnings target, likely costing them more in value than it would have cost them to address the root issue in the first place.
OP using a list format is implying a causative link between battery issues and earnings targets. OP even suggests that their value would be safe had they simply corrected the battery issue earlier.
You’re misunderstanding the thread here. OP suggested batteries, a minor factor in the report, were the primary cause in the earnings drop. For whatever reason there are people who really badly want to believe this. swish_bob countered, inaccurately, that OP did not claim causation.
Now that we all can agree swish_bob is wrong, the problem remains that OP misrepresented the primacy of the factors stated in the report.
> There's an implicit "because of this" between the two bullet points.
Not about this being the most significant factor. You've decided to infer that from the list - most of us didn't because he _explicitly_ says so in his last sentence. They also had influence over this particular issue, unlike the macroeconomics of China.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills considering how many people are completely ignoring the very obvious connotation here. It's like they're willfully ignoring the Chinese market issue entirely.
Despite noting that the comment still implies that battery replacements were the dominant factor why “Apple misses their earnings target.” This is an invalid logical leap in its step by step reasoning.
Clearly that is not "only" what it says. It jumps directly from "stick with their phone a bit longer... reducing iPhone sales" to "Apple misses their earnings target, likely costing them more in value than it would have cost them to address the root issue." That is very clearly drawing a casual relationship between the two things, and underscores it by stating it "should be a lesson for more companies" on how to avoid such outcomes.
The last line is a dodge because, obviously, China's economy is actually the main culprit stated in the report. But I guess some people are going to hear what they want to hear.
The recent devices are more overpriced than ever and getting over the limit of what ordinary people are willing to pay for a phone.
I have an iPhone 6s and my wife had a 6 and needed a new phone. We bought a new Xr but it was a small fortune, even though we're both working in IT and having good income. The phone is a brick and I saw lots of slicker Android phones costing half the price and providing a very similar if not better experience.
yes it mentions the battery replacements and emerging markets as well.
I think he forgets to mention lack of innovation. It was the first year that I wasn't surprised from the new iPhone at all and none of my friends did. At this point I don't see much difference in having an X model vs XS.
You'll tell me that they had S models in the past and worked fine for them, sure... its not the same market anymore. There are very strong competitors using android which has also evolved and its doing really well as an OS vs what it was in the past at way cheaper prices.
At the price tag those iPhones are coming at plus the lack of innovation, I only see a constant drop in sales.
Personally I upgraded from an iPhone 7 to XS Max, my wife has an iPhone X and I don't see any difference between them, only the size. That plus the fact that I got my hands on some new android phones and got to use them made me think that I might change to android when my next upgrade is due. The apple ecosystem seems to be okish but I can't really say that it will keep me from changing.
And truth be told there are quite a few solutions out there for them to become innovative again like the new ipad pro... have it use OS instead of iOS, that will definitely make people switch over to that and what comes with its ecosystem e.g pairing your mobile phone etc. Also airpods 2, just make some airpods with water resistance etc maybe improve connectivity a bit. Its not like we are requesting crazy innovation here, just simple solutions that will make us stick with the apple ecosystem.
Disclaimer: I was an avid windows user and android phone user up till iphone 5s came out, I switched to 5s and the difference on iOS quality vs Android was massive. Due to work I also started working with a mac and so I joined the ecosystem and I can't say am very displeased apart from the price tag, but seeing how Android has progressed over the years and how stock Android can be even superior to iOS has made me thinking of changing back.
I'd also point out that iOS 12 has made older devices significantly more usable. If it weren't for a battery replacement, combined with iOS 12, I would be looking to replace my iPhone 6.
What parts of the iPhone X cycle are less innovative than previous generations?
Which competitors are innovating better than Apple?
With AirPods, they mentioned yesterday that they were supply constrained throughout the holiday quarter. I'm not sure innovation on that product is an issue here if they can't keep the current version stocked enough to meet demand anyways.
I switched from a Nexus 5 to an IPhone 7 and I am extremely happy. I like the hardware and software integration. I like the better battery life. I like that I can turn off all notifications from a single menu. What I like most of all is the consistent interface. I do not like to learn how to use a new interface on every release. Nokia use to be great with this in the early days before touch screen phones.
Battery replacement scheme was available India. But, due to absence of Apple store, users have to go to Apple authorized service vendors where services take days.
It took me 5 days to replace the battery in Dec 2018 because battery had to be specially ordered.(I live in major Indian city.)
Cheap Android phones from Xiaomi etc are flooding the Indian market. If Apple doesn't ramp up the quality of experience in areas other than Hardware and OS, it's gonna lose whatever market share it has in India.
I can’t imagine Apple headquarters wanting to ignore a 100 million rich people market, but obviously it’s not worth the trade off of having to become business partners with someone they don’t want to be partners with.
Well Samsung, One Plus and others are thriving in India, they dont have their own stores. So clearly its not the stores. The major factor is price (Apple tax + Indian Tax = One very expensive phone.
That's not quite right, although yes WeChat rules in China. Having the new shiny does matter - source, my wife is Chinese and I have a Chinese sister-in-law and niece both which got the X last year.
They are absolutely typical Chinese consumers in this regard. As soon as iPhone because hard to distinguish from other phones they switched away. As soon as iPhones became clearly distinguishable again they switched back. This is not just an observation, they say this is why they did it.
I think there are actually three factors hitting Apple in China this year. One is that a disproportionate number of purchasers got the X when it came out because it was so distinctive bringing forward purchases from this year, then there are a lot of Android phones now that look like the X models and the new X models don't look enough different from the original X to look new, finally the economy in China is pretty soft right now and people there are worried about the future.
You missed the fourth, which is a trade war going on that is inducing a soft boycott of iPhones. Some of those users may be lost permanently to local alternatives.
I’m not sure what you mean by “address the root issue”.
The root issue is that batteries degrade over time, for everyone, not just apple. iPhone’s did a good job hiding that away by degrading performance along with it.
The same thing still happens with new phones, but now apple just tells you when it happens. My X crashed in the cold and it said something like “your battery couldn’t provide peak power and your phone is now in degraded performance mode. Disable this setting in the settings app.”
The main difference is _consent_ and it should not require an explanation on why it is important. May be I am strange for wanting transparency? I do not want such facts to be hidden. Slowly degrading my user experience over time with no way of me knowing why is not a good way of handling battery degradation. And so I strongly disagree with you and the child comment, Apple did not do 'a good job' hiding it, and them now handling it as they should have in the first place does not deserve praise.
At the level of battery management, yes I think you are "weird" in the general population (like all of us here by the way).
I don't see this as any different than the thousands of other OS management decisions like how to manage memory of new tabs or apps when you have a dozen open. What if you want to keep the memory/bandwidth etc... going for one app and not the others? Where's the consent there? Same idea IMO
Because in most other examples the decisions it makes have a virtually hidden effect. However in the case of the battery issue, the performance degradation was _very_ noticeable, causing years of comments on Apple intentionally obseleting old devices by slowing them down.
Put this way - if your car suddenly refused to go above 30mph when previously you'd happilly race along the highway at 70mph, you'd wonder what the hell was wrong, and not think "Oh well, my car manufacturer is just trying to extend the life of my vehicle, it's fine."
> the performance degradation was _very_ noticeable, causing years of comments on Apple intentionally obseleting old devices by slowing them down.
You just disproved your own point. This throttling was only implemented shortly before it got noticed and Apple announced it’s existence, like a couple of months at most. Apparently it wasn’t ‘very noticable’ and the perceived slowdowns were all in your head because for all those years you claim this was going on, it wasn’t.
modern cars retune their engines on the fly based on engine temperature, fuel quality, local air pressure, and other factors. this is to extend the life of the engine in general and to prevent catastrophic failure from knocking.
if you use your car as an appliance (the way most people use phones/computers), you will barely notice the fact that your car's performance is constantly varying other than a bit of sluggishness on a cold morning. to an enthusiast, it's almost impossible not to notice what the car is doing.
most apple customers just want their phone to not crash. if you offer them a performance/stability tradeoff they won't know what to pick anyway.
Sure. Except the manufacturer is not trying to extend the life of your vehicle. They're trying to avoid you running out of gas at 70mph on the highway.
Exactly this happened to my father last fall with a Audi Q1. It finally turned out to be a electronics issue, but the car was limiting itself to very low max speeds (40 kmh or so, which legally disallowed my father from using the Autobahn).
With a car the obvious answer is: get the thing checked immidiately. He did, and he still had to drive around like this for 2 weeks till a replacement part arrived.
> Slowly degrading my user experience over time with no way of me knowing why is not a good way of handling battery degradation.
Your user experience will always degrade with battery age. This is an unavoidable consequence of using a rechargeable battery. It is physically impossible to run a Li-ion battery through hundreds of charge cycles and have it work just as well as it did the day it was new.
Without power management, the phone would turn off sooner, in some cases a lot sooner. That is also a bad user experience, especially if you need the phone to make an emergency call. This is one example of why using software code to prolong phone availability creates a better user experience, even if comes at the expense of peak performance.
You say degradation is inevitable, hence implying this kind of degradation is unavoidable.
But to draw an analogy: that's kind of like saying death is inevitable, so there's nothing we can do about infant mortality. It's absurd to suggest that some kind of physical inevitability caused the symptoms actually observed to any significant extent whatsoever.
Battery aging does not need to lead to any user experience degradation within the first few years at least, because you can overprovision a battery, and because such overprovisioning actually not only provides some runway, but also reduces even the relative rate of battery decay.
Not to mention there are a bunch of other things a manufacturer does that influence battery lifespan. Which design aspects are at fault here? Apple surely knows by now, but they're not saying.
But even if you do choose to allow slow degradation - entirely reasonable! - the rate of decay is largely a matter of choice for the manufacturer. You can sell em to last for at least a decade if not more, or you can push em to the limits and have em degrade in months. Sure, that might cost a few extra grams and cost a few percentage points of the maximum initial charge - but nothing a user would likely notice, let alone mind.
Apple simply sold near dumpster-level quality li-on battery integrations - whether by accident, or to save money, or to limit device lifespan - we can't really know.
That's not true; every manufacturer, including apple, does this. The question is simply to what degree. Battery chargers need to decide upto which voltage level to charge, and at which voltage level to consider a cell depleted; and similarly need to decide at which temperature to throttle during discharge - and at least as importantly - during charging. And it's not like it's got to cost and arm and a leg; even small amounts of additional headroom can likely prevent problems like apple's.
Basically: you can throttle after the battery is damaged or before. And if you throttle beforehand, you need to throttle a lot less.
Finally, you imply this is costly - but don't forget that apple's phones are amongst the most costly out there, and similar sized batteries are found in devices a small fraction of the cost. Clearly the bill of materials for the battery isn't a going to be a big deal for apple, compare to those competitors, which also happened to ship higher quality batteries.
Not really, but its a fair question. An automotive application will degrade significantly over hundreds of cycles as well. As a result, the power output will decline a little (not quite as good 0-60 times as new) and range will decline as well.
The significance of this will vary, largely based upon the range of the car. Think about how many cycles the battery takes after 100,000 miles on a car with a 100 mile range vs one with a 300 mile range, for example.
> No, it is simply a maintenance issue. There are already plenty of those in motor vehicles, and people are well-trained to track and manage them.
In addition, car batteries have:
a) vastly better charge controllers than the cheap crap that's put in phones
b) better quality cells to start with, or at the very least higher QA standards
c) BETTER CHARGERS. Cheap cellphone chargers can kill the battery with their unclean power, especially when linked with cheap charge controllers in the phone.
d) better thermal management with cooling and (iirc) heating, compared with a cellphone battery that has to endure anything between double-degree negative temps in winter to +40 °C when it gets held by the user or the CPU gets active.
Apple did not slowly degrade the user experiebnce over time, they throttled the cpu in order to prevent the phone crashing due to a old battery, do you think that a phone that crashes sporadically is a better user experience?
As you state it is an issue of consent to this throttling, if it was communicated effectively this wouldn’t have been a ‘Gate’.
A good way described in a podcast (think it was Rene Ritchie on the talk show) would be to let the phone crash then pop up a message with an explanation of what’s happened, that the phone is now dialled down to prevent future crashes, you can turn it off in settings etc..
a) It is perfectly possible to include a battery, that, even degraded over some time, can provide enough peak power.
b) They could have sold their approach as a feature. Or they could have included a warning: Slowed down, replace battery. Similar to what they do now. But no, they kept it secret. Ask yourself why.
Also, if you have that functionality, why crash and then display a message. Write: Crash prevented, but clocked down.
Look what a Raspberry PI does: It flashes an icon if the power supply is not keeping up.
> The main difference is _consent_ and it should not require an explanation on why it is important.
What a copout. There is no good reason. Your phone already does a 1000 things that you don't know about. Do you also want access to how many cores are used, which ones, what speed they are running at, which frequency your phone is using, how the GPS is getting its location, etc...
Why not? PC BIOS provides access to a ton of advanced settings on gaming motherboards. If you don't want to fiddle with things, don't, but don't tell others they cannot.
Most of those examples don't directly impact user experience, create an increasing performance gap with new phones that would make an upgrade a bit more desirable or in cases where there are applications that push new hardware to the limit, make applications effectively incompatible with the hardware.
no, but if my phone is going to massively slow down I want to know why so that I can correct it, rather than being left in the dark and ending up buying a new phone for no good reason.
Batteries do not all degrade alike; not even close. There are huge differences in the rate of decay, and those are significantly impacted by the way the battery is used in the device (particularly maximum charging level, temperature, discharging level, power draw, charging rate) and the quality of the battery.
Apple did NOT do a good job of degrading performance along with it; because if they had, they could have degraded performance before the battery became damaged. As a ballpark, I'd expect a life extension for the iphones in question by at least a factor 10 would be technically fairly simple and affordable; i.e. this isn't peanuts that apple left on the table here. A 10 year life expectancy is totally doable.
So a battery as old as the decaying iPhone batteries need not have decayed significantly, as should be obvious considering that not all phones (let alone other Li-On battery devices!) degrade to this extent. The fact that iPhones did decay like this is almost entirely due to choices that Apple made (even if they made those choices without considering the consequences). Apple is pretty competent, so I'm a little skeptical they didn't know they were pushing the edge of what's reasonable, but sure, maybe it was incompetence rather than intentional penny-pinching or planned obsolescence.
User choices can matter too, but given how locked down these devices are and how managed the environment and how technically nuanced the necessary user actions are to have an ameliorating effect it's unreasonable to assume users had any practical ability to avoid this outcome.
Sure: try to avoid the phone getting hot; don't charge the phone when it's hot; and definitely don't use the phone while it's charging if doing so causes it to become hot. Problematic phones are probably tuned to close to the physical limits; so "retune" manually: disconnect the charger before it reaches 100% (even a few percent matter). Never use quick charging on phones that are living near the edge like this (or accept that each time you do you're doing a little damage to the cells, so use it sparingly). Similarly, don't run the phone completely to 0% charge. But also don't recharge constantly after each tiny usage.
It's much harder for users to do this reliably than for the battery controller. Damage is maximized when all factors align; that's e.g. why controllers automatically turn of quick charge for the last few percent; similarly you can get away with violating a few rules without too much damage as long as you don't violate them all.
Finally, 0% and 100% charge are nebulous floating concepts. What you're really guessing at are the voltage levels in the cells - but again as a user it's kind of hard to guess those in a simplified UI. Is 95% worse than 5%? Typically high charge is worse but... who knows, without knowing what the controller actually interprets as those percentages.
I've never looked, but I'd be willing to bet you can find software to do most all of this automatically on a rooted android; to what degree you can automate care on other platforms - I'm not sure.
But again, the whole situation is mildly idiotic: all of these things the battery controller/OS can do too, and probably better that any user. There shouldn't be a need for much user handholding. The only thing the OS really can't do is choose for you when you're willing to accept a small amount of damage for a temporary dash of extra charge or quicker charging; a feature that by default kept your battery in "care mode", with a temporary toggle to charge more quickly or to a higher level.
I essentially was doing this on my own when I had a Galaxy. Battery started dying faster so I would leave the battery saver mode on.
Apple is good about doing things so the user doesn’t have to think about it. The media just ran with that shit and made it out to be way worse than it was.
The issue wasn't that the battery only lasted 3 hours instead of 5. A degraded battery literally couldn't provide a high enough voltage to keep the CPU running, so the phone crashed. Apple covered this up by always throttling the CPU.
Apple does not "always throttle the CPU". Battery performance management only kicks in when the battery starts to get low. A fully charged iPhone battery, even an old one, can supply sufficient voltage for max performance. Peak voltage falls off only as the charge is depleted.
What do you want them to do, make the device unusable?
Look they could have been more transparent about it and gave the user a heads up but I see it as a super reasonable response. I think people would rather have a phone that's slower than one that crashes at 29% battery.
No, I expect Apple to provide a large enough battery to ensure the device is still usable after a year.
This was a design flaw. Before the throttling update, there were ~1 year old iPhones that would reboot anytime you took a photo or opened a large app if the battery was below 90% charged.
Now I get why Apple did it, a recall would have been far more expensive, but nobody should be surprised by the media shitstorm and lawsuits that followed.
Thats a very cynical perspective. There's two ways to look at this:
(A) Apple's terrible because they should have released the device with a "better" battery. One that's not "defective". One that could allow the CPU to run at full-throttle all the time for the usable life of the device. They slowed the device secretly to match the capabilities of the battery because they're trying to cover up a manufacturing defect, and they dont want to foot the bill for repairing everyone's phones.
(B) Apple was trying to get the most performance possible out of the physical capabilities of the battery. Unfortunately, it turned out that as the battery aged, due to physical changes, the battery couldn't keep up with the demands of the CPU running as fast as they thought it could over time. To prevent devices from shutting down and forcing users to replace the battery/phone earlier, they scaled CPU performance with battery age and therefore capabilities. Because batteries are consumable and their performance characteristics change over time. This means that the phone always give you just as much performance as physically possible at any given age.
We constantly hear about phones that die before reaching 0%, or losing the last 20% very fast. Google Nexus 6P comes to mind.
I'm fairly confident that what apple did was the most logical thing. They should have been more informative about it, but it's better than a phone dying at 20%.
Filed in the US (a heavily litigious society) against what was recently the worlds largest company (so right or wrong if they lose they can definitely pay)? I'm shocked that they found only 60 groups who could be both cynical and litigious :P Put yourself in their shoes.
I always find it amazing how many ‘technical’ people have a warped view of reality and it’s physical limitations.
I guess the take away here is that for the X13, they should just clock it way down from the start and just maximise battery life. Which is not a bad idea.
> What do you want them to do, make the device unusable?
I want them to say (as you do mention) 'hey, your device has been slowed down because your battery is old. Get it replaced to restore full performance'.
I'd absolutely rather have a slow phone than one that arbitrarily dies at 29%, if and only if I'm given this heads up. At least with one that crashes at 29% battery, I might suspect the battery is dying and get it replaced. The average user has no reason to think that an old battery will slow their phone down, and just ends up with a super-frustrating user experience.
Apple is good about doing things so the user doesn’t have to think about it
There's a fine line between that approach and the approach of actively disregarding the user's need to control their own device. Apple too often falls on the latter side of the line, and "Batterygate" was a prime example. I certainly appreciate it when I don't have to think about something, but when I eventually do have to think about it, I need to be able to do something about it.
I do give them some credit for fixing the issue by making the phone work the way it should have all along.
I don’t mind the lack of knobs as much as I mind the lack of a notification. If Apple throttles my cpu because my battery is degraded I expect that of Apple. What I don’t expect is them doing so without telling me because I can fix the issue by replacing the battery. Since most people would understandably assume a performance degradation over time was software updates they stood to profit from this omission. That looks bad and that’s why they replaced batteries.
iPhone already has Battery-saver mode feature which kicks in at 20% battery.
Involuntary CPU throttling feature & voluntary battery-saver feature, is wrong comparison.
I'd have preferred to prevent the CPU throttle by replacing battery within the phone warranty period than having to know it(cpu throttling) afterwards, when my phone was already out of warranty.
>The root issue is that batteries degrade over time, for everyone, not just apple. iPhone’s did a good job hiding that away by degrading performance along with it.
Apple sacrificed battery capacity for size and weight. They built several generations of phone that had just barely enough capacity for a full day of use and could just barely deliver enough current for peak performance. Unlike their Android rivals, they failed to over-provision the battery to account for degradation over time.
The Xiaomi Mi 6 had a 3300mAh battery. The Samsung Galaxy S8 had a 3000mAh battery. The Huawei Mate 9 had a 4000mAh battery. The iPhone 8 has an 1800mAh battery. See the problem?
Isn't the iPhone more power-efficient than many Android counterparts? That would explain why they can afford a smaller battery (but may not explain all the gap).
> The root issue is that batteries degrade over time, for everyone, not just apple.
What? No.
First of all, battery degradation is a design parameter. You can easily verify from apple own pages that iPads are rated for twice the charging cycles of iPhones. Apple intentionally included a low rated battery to limit the product life.
> iPhone’s did a good job hiding that away by degrading performance along with it.
And no.
Apple did an awful job, lets not forget the phone where crashing before apple introduced massive throttling killing the device performances. Neither of which sounds like a "good job".
Here's what a good job would have looked like (since apple sells top of the line devices at peak pricing): from the processor minimum voltage and battery degradation metrics figure out a voltage margin that would satisfy the processor constraints after one or even better two years of degradation.
Or, second best, start of with a throttled processor to begin with, but that would have ruined marketing precious "x times faster than previous generation", so they decided to do the shady thing: selling something as fast and killing it's performance six month after purchase.
And of all this what amuse me most is people defending it.
The iPhone 6 became practically unusable due to throttling. They were not hiding the issue effectively. But they didn't tell people that the issue was the battery. Affected users complained on forums, and tried all kinds of things like factory resets and uninstalling certain apps but couldn't find out why there phone was unusably slow. And Apple support didn't help either. They just suggested to install the latest update.
Only after Batterygate became public did people find out that they needed to swap the battery to fix their phone. I bet a lot of people threw away their phones becUse they didn't know. (why bother replacing the battery when your phone has become unusably slow?)
I never really understood the narrative of the "Batterygate"...
I absolutely agree, Apple should have alerted the user when the throttling was enabled (and given the user a choice) from the day this feature was implemented.
However, I actually prefer my phone being slower and usable rather than fast but randomly shutting down. But somehow this does not seem the general consensus?
Apple’s processors are significantly more energy-efficient than their counterparts’. They might be “more powerful” but are also competitive in terms of battery life.
Serious question, is it not possible to simply recalibrate the "battery remaining" readout to match the battery's reduced capacity? I feel like it shouldn't take many cycles of the phone suddenly shutting down at 10% for the system to realize that 10% is the new 1%.
The issue wasn't lowered overall capacity but lowered peak performance. During basic usage when the CPU is mostly idle (reading email and whatnot) the peak current draw was fine and the battery could handle it. But if the CPU suddenly peaks to full usage (load a heavy web page), the battery can't deliver the instant amount of current and the phone browns-out and shuts off.
Temperature also effects the performance of the battery so if you're out in the snow it could handle less than being indoors in the heat.
That's why the CPU throttling worked. It kept the CPU from pulling too much power in one instant, and then the battery lasted fine all they way down to 1%
These specific batteries were terrible, I had one replaced and the replacement went to unusable in a year. Apple stance is that that is normal. Unfortunately the law does not provide for warranties for parts that are replaced for free.
Just adding my voice to the crowd of people willing to seriously shell out for an updated SE. I have a tablet and a laptop, what I want out of my phone is portability and phone, in a one-handed form factor. For now I just replaced the SE battery and I’m waiting for trends to shift again.
I still CANNOT believe the amount of people that want these gigantic ass phones. How are we in the minority for wanting a phone that fits in one hand??
In my own friends and family circle, they want the larger phones because it has become their sole personal computing device. The calling function is not the primary use anymore.
small phone + laptop/desktop is becoming the tech equivalent of owning a 4x4 truck and a small compact. consumers on a budget just want to own a crossover.
Because a phone that fits in one hand has less screen real estate, which converts to either poor resolution or a ton of squinting?
I’m a huge fan of the Xs Max. The near-bezelless display gives you maximum screen size in a relatively slim form factor. Watching videos on this thing is just amazing tbh.
iPhone and Android sales numbers have proven time and again that the vast majority of people want a larger screen. Your best bet is probably the compact Sony Xperia Z series.
I’m in the same boat and would rather have a small phone. Using 6 plus right now and holding phone against hip sitting down just to type with one hand. Far from ideal.
Having seen plenty of grown women using two hands to type on an iPhone 4s when those things were popular, I'd say we need accurate population data to truly confirm.
Because we largely don't carry multiple digital devices around and can work off the phone a lot of the time. I don't use any tablets and don't carry my laptop to meetings since OneNote on mobile works perfectly well. When I do need to do serious work, I use a souped up large screen high RAM, SSD i7 laptop.
I can comfortably type with one hand on my OnePlus 6 (6 inch phone). I use it to browse when and I'm out and about, so the extra real screen estate is very valuable.
was so hoping for xr to be smaller. i mean prob wouldnt have switched anyway without my headphone wire antenna enabled built-in FM radio in moto phone, but was thinking about it.
I’d buy several. It was the most best way to give family members an affordable way to be part of Apple’s ecosystem and now I’m weighing Apple’s pricing vs disappointing them with an Android device when it’s time to upgrade.
I'd pay $1000 for an XS Mini should they ever decide to make one. Until then, I'm sticking with my SE, which is the best iPhone they've ever made regardless of price.
I got my 4 out the other day because I was having the $29 battery replacement done in my SE. The 4 feels a little heavy, but the size is juuuust right. I would gladly pay the same. Hopefully with a headphone jack.
Purely anecdotal, but how are you comfortable with the real estate the screen offers? I understand it feels amazing in your hand, but it wasn't until I actually picked up a working iPhone 4 that I realized I could read maybe only two message responses from a person I would be having a conversation with.
I'd imagine if they reduced the bezels on the size of the 6 product line, you'd really find the best of both worlds. Both small in the hand, but also enough space to get more screen real estate out of your applications.
For that kind of reading my iPad is right here in my bag. For quickly sending messages, playing music or arguing with Siri, the iPhone 4 or 5 were much easier to hold or pocket.
Apart from a better screen, faster processor, T2 and A-series chips with far better graphics performance, Touch ID, inductive charging … what have the Romans ever done for us?
The iPhone 4 is significantly thicker than the later models, somthere’s plenty of space for a battery. The backlight of the screen is a large power consumer too so smaller screen means less energy used for backlight, more energy available for power hungry extras.
The iPhone 4 has less real estate, so far fewer pixels, so less graphics processing required. Also less energy required for the same brightness. Also the case doesn’t have to be proportionally thicker, so the extra thickness is entirely for battery.
I’d be surprised if an iPhone 4 based on new power-sipping technology wasn’t within a few percent of the web browsing/movie watching time of the iPhone 8 or similar.
There obviously are trade offs, but personally I would forego nicer screens, cameras, CPUs, and slimness to have a smaller phone. Obviously, Apple is betting that this isn't a sufficiently profitable market, but one can dream.
An iPhone XS phone doesn't even fit into most women's pockets. It'll be funny if pockets get bigger to accommodate phones.
Hard to imagine many Apple people lined up for that opening day: "Here's an iPhone-4-shaped thing running Android!"
Even if they nailed the form factor, how many people are really willing to switch? You see some people swearing off a brand (on the internet, anyway) when something egregious happens but there's definitely inertia that keeps most people firmly in one ecosystem or the other.
The lock-in is real, especially when you’re younger and more vulnerable to peer pressure. I doubt my kids would appreciate being the cause of a downgrade from an iMessage group to MMS.
For me the lock-in is not iMsg, hell I don't even use it - no one uses it in my circle, it's the knowledge that Google is not getting to track my every shift, every breathe, every shake, every jump etc etc.
It's sad I will have to move back to Android within a year (I can neither buy big iPhones nor spend those amounts the way the new ones are priced). I wish there were fully functional privacy focussed ROMs that was shipped by Android OEMs.
> I wish there were fully functional privacy focussed ROMs that was shipped by Android OEMs.
I'm sure everyone on this discussion board knows why this will never be the case, unfortunately.
With that said, are there any regularly-updated aftermarket ROMs that are privacy-focused? I've had a rough look at LineageOS[1] - a continuation of CyanogenMod - and it seems to mostly fit the bill.
I'm aware of CopperheadOS, but they had a "touch" of infighting about half a year ago[2] and mostly dissolved.
I too am moving away from Apple products, for the same reason. They are reaching expense levels (especially in my country) that I simply can't justify when I can get a HP or Lenovo business-grade laptop with drastically better hardware specifications and install simply OpenSUSE on it. Without going all-in on the Apple ecosystem to fully reap the rewards, it's simply not worth it for me to use any of them.
The SE was my question too—and I just bought a new one in Q4 after breaking my old one. Is it not the case that the average hand in China is smaller than the average hand in the US? I'm surprised they didn't mention this at all. Do they have data finding that reluctance to upgrade to a bigger phone was not a factor in reluctance to upgrade?
Does Apple report enough data for us to attempt to make correlations between average height (as a proxy for hand size) per country and purchasing decisions?
Same. Went in the last day of 2018 and got the battery replaced on my SE even though it was only at 88%. Hoping it lasts for long enough that design trends change and apple issues another SE or even an original iPhone sized phone.
I was one of the people with. 6S that replaced the battery at $29 recently. I can honestly say I did it because the battery life was getting worse but would have paid the normal price instead of get an XS. It’s just not that compelling over the 6S. Also, they keep making the phones bigger. No thanks.
Same here in every regard, except I did upgrade to the XS solely for the ability to have two phone lines. I still use the 6S as an at-work iPod. After a month as a light phone user, here are the changes I particularly notice:
—more attractive screen
—faster
—much better camera, which is not a big thing for me, but always nice to have
—size in pocket is fine, but the size is annoying for on-screen reachability
—FaceID is better than TouchID in two particular ways: in-app authentications and unlocking the phone with wet fingers (which is common because of my work)
—the swipe down for Control Center is far less convenient on the XS because there's a much smaller target area for beginning the gesture
—the XS can't by default show the battery percentage, and for long-term device life I preserve my battery (I always run in low-power mode, even), so this is information I like visible at a glance
There's no doubt the XS is a more capable device than the 6S, but for how I use a smartphone the gains are not particularly beneficial. Maybe after I add the second phone line to increase the telecommunications divide between myself and my business I'll appreciate the XS more, but for now I am regularly reminded how much I enjoy the 6S when I pick it up to use it as an iPod.
So this is not the first battergarte-like issue for apple. I've had my battery replaced when it was below spec twice. Once when it failed their diagnosis test, and another time when I had the "swollen" battery causing the screen to separate from the case.
However, when my MBP literally caught fire in my bed while I was asleep and melted the keyboard, apple refused to fix it as the warranty was two weeks out and they claimed that the "liquid sensors had been triggered at some point in the past - and while apple recognizes that the machine catching fire was a safety issue - they didnt find reason to justify fixing the machine. You can purchase a new MBP for $1,299 - or we can replace all the guts of your machine for $1,500"
I decided to take advantage of the offer for my SE at the end of the year, instead of replacing the battery they gave me a brand new SE for free. Apparently it shut down unexpectedly at some point in the past, there was literally nothing else wrong with it so I can only imagine they were so overworked replacing batteries that it was easier to just give me one of the discontinued phones?
So this means that 12 months ago I bought a 32GB SE for 100 pounds, sold my 16GB model for 95 pounds (SE prices seem to bottom out around there) and got a brand new model a year later for free. At an overall cost of five pounds I've gotten a phone (well, two phones) that's hopefully gonna last me a total of 3 years.
Beyond the inconvenience of catering for a 320px wide phone in the app store, it's not hard to see why Apple felt the need to kill it.
Anecdotal, but I am not a heavy phone user at all. Within a year of purchasing my brand new iPhone SE, the battery capacity dropped from 100% to 82%, causing it to begin to lag considerably doing even basic tasks and shut down randomly two or three times a week. This should not happen to a product that's only a year old.
That sounds like you have defective hardware. You're right in that you shouldn't experience significant battery degradation within a year. But beyond that, 82% battery capacity should not result in significant lag and really should not result in randomly shutting down two or three times a week.
If you had brought your phone in to an Apple Store during that first year I'm sure they would have replaced it for you under warranty.
My SE is slightly over a year old and I'm already at 90%. Not happy. Though unless Apple comes out with something similar, I will replace the battery at full cost before I replace the device.
>[Apple] will not allow me to replace batteries, because when I import batteries that are original they’ll tell me the they’re counterfeit and have them stolen from by [CBP].
There is no evidence from the article that Apple is working with Customs to block the imports of batteries or any other parts.
Customs in general prevents the importation of counterfeit goods. Which they determine by whether that item has a logo and if it came from a legitimate source.
Interesting, I know someone in that line of work. They've never had a problem with apples aggressive security measures. Phone is repaired and shipped out.
There was an issue in the past with the Secure Enclave and the verification between it and the TouchID sensor. Third parties who replaced the sensor didn't have the ability to reset the pairing and even if you did there was the infamous Error 53 problem.
All solved now and third party repairers can do most things.
The 6/6S were plagued with defective batteries, so phones under their 1 year warranty were affected. Only some phones manufactured during specific dates were covered by a free replacement; my phone was one of those.
Furthermore, the root issue could have been addressed not just by offering free replacements (They weren't), instead of slowing down phones and having customers believe their devices were obsolete much earlier than anticipated, they could have been transparent about the issue like they are now.
Instead, I ended up with 1 free battery replacement, and 1 heavily subsidized replacement, which certainly factored into my delayed upgrade cycle. Apple experienced this enough to warn their investors about it in this letter.
The point I am making is that NO manufacturer replaces naturally degraded batteries for free. Defective sure. And not just phone manufacturers but I haven't heard of any manufacturer doing that. Batteries are a consumable item.
I do agree however that Apple should have been upfront about their measures they were taking to mitigate battery degradation.
Correct and perhaps I could have been more clear, but as far as a consumer is concerned Apple did conflate the two issues.
Apple initially refused to replace my battery because they're consumable, even though they later admitted that some batteries were defective. They replaced some batteries for free [1], everyone else got an iOS 10.2.1 update with silent throttling [2]. Note that Apple did not admit to defective batteries until late 2016, and then announced an update with silent throttling in early 2017.
I am not implying that Apple should replace everyone's batteries for free, I am however under the impression that they attempted to keep warranty costs low by denying for as long as they could, and quickly following up with an update that hides the symptoms.
I think the big question is is this an issue for Apple alone?
They explicitly write about a sharp turndown in China.
The guidances drops from 89-93 to 84 (about 8%). From what they are writing that all can be accounted for by the drop of revenue in China. Since China accounts for around 1/5 of Apple's revenue - the drop must have been around 40%-50%.
Which is a lot for a single quarter.
Also notice the reaction in the forex market. That certainly indicates that this is a broader issue.
It's a broader issue but Apple is more exposed to it, because [large percentage] of recent growth has been in China.
In the bigger picture Trump has decided that a trade war with China is a good idea, so of course there are going to be unpleasant consequences.
Cook's reign has been rather miserly - pay more for less. It's been an effective short-term strategy for investor returns, but it hasn't created a solid foundation for future expansion, and has also given users very little to be proud of.
Where does Apple want to be five years from now? iPhone XIIIS? MacBook Hydrogen? Mac Pro Gold Professional Edition? There's only so far you can push that boat before the lustre fades.
> Emerging markets; China, India, Africa can still grow for Apple.
Indian market for Apple has been shrinking because of the ridiculous prices for Apple charges in India. Samsung, One Plus and others now dominate there.
Is subsidizes the correct word? Let along "Heavily" ?
You could get the exact same Apple Battery from China for about $7 including shipping. I would bet Apple have them for less than $5. Even at a reduced cost of $29, there is still $25 margin for Apple. Even if you subtract the operational cost involves, I doubt Apple ever subsidizes.
My understanding is the $29 is very much at- or below-cost. The all in cost is just not that cheap for anything involving a service that has labor, a warranty, etc. Not only is labor expensive, there's a chance that the customer's phone will be damaged in some way which they'd be on the hook to replace it, and it still costs money to ship to/from depot, operate the store where customers can drop it off, etc. Part cost /= total cost.
Also, a $7 battery from China is a gamble especially for something heavily used and physically next to your body a lot of the time. I'm sure you'd get a battery that had the same physical size and stated spec, but I'd be skeptical it'd have gone through the same QC. You could get one from a bum batch, or a relabeled one operating out of spec. You just don't know.
The Apple Store, Repairing Technician are all part of Apple ( As I stated Operational Cost ) whether they were doing the battery replacement programme or not. They just have more works to do. And it is a ~10 mins job following Apple standard procedure, less than 5 min if you don't.
Not to mention Apple outsource a lot of these Battery replacement programme to Registered Third Parties.
A better Spec battery cost less than $7 from LG Chem. BOM cost on battery are not expensive at all, and it is not a secret.
Apple heavily subsidizes battery replacements for everyone
I think the lesson should be to have your battery replacement prices be reasonable to start with and avoid inflating the market for your devices artificially.
$69 is pretty reasonable to me. The problem isn't that the battery replacement cost was too high, it's that Apple didn't clearly communicate that the problem was a battery issue in the first place. The phones just slowed down without telling you why. The cost subsidies were just a PR move to atone for that.
I bet even at 29$ Apple is making money on this replacement program. If I can buy an iPhone 7 battery for $15 shipped Apple probably pays <$10 each when buying them by the tens of thousands, even for higher quality units. Then add 10 minutes of replacement labor.
Just a point on this, in the two UK apple stores I went into recently, they were literally crammed with people getting replacement batteries. At least three people’s battery change didn’t work (including the screen repair I was getting done due to a white spot on the display) and they handed over brand new iPhones to those people. This has a significant cost to it which multiplies the original problem somewhat!
It’s extremely obvious they weren’t ready for this quantity of repairs.
Exactly like my story. My battery life sucked and I had put off replacing it until two months ago, knowing that I would do that instead of buying a new phone.
I'd rather use an external battery pack than change from my 6S.
If they hadn't been chasing thinness so aggressively they could have avoided some of the negative side effects of battery degradation by just increasing capacity.
> And that's not because of the battery, that's just because of the software updates. Like, the CPU didn't lose any MHz along the way.
The software changed its requirements. Within reasonable limits that's just the nature of technological advancement and availability of faster hardware. I don't know if the performance degradation of iOS 11 and 10 were reasonable, but judging by user feedback Apple seems to have increased performance with iOS 12, particularly for older devices. Of course that comes too late for the iPhone 5C, which isn't supported anymore.
Thank you for your response!! I actually didn't know that 5c didn't receive iOS 12. If iOS 11 was the last OS I was using before I left Apple, then it was definitely a problem. Even after switching out the battery, the camera took 15 seconds to open and web pages would freeze upon loading. I tested them side by side on my gigabit wifi even!
I don't want to hate on Apple. I have no allegiances to anyone in particular. I just am a cheapo user that values basic functionality, some speed, some longevity.
I don't put a premium on privacy or animojis or nice cameras or huge amounts of storage :)
There isn't a "root issue". People have gone over this ad infinitum. The "root issue" is iPhone batteries like most cell phone batteries do not last more than several hundred recharge cycles and especially when under high load the power will be insufficient to maintain full phone performance without the phone suddenly shutting off. On Android your phone simply shuts off on high load on old batteries. Apple gracefully fails rather than hard crashes. This is a good thing, not a bad thing. Apple gave out free upgrades because people perceived it as if Apple had done something wrong so out of good will they gave free upgrades. Current phones will do the exact same thing given time.
Do you remember when when phones had replaceable batteries?
If you noticed your battery would not last as long as it used to, you could just buy a new one and change it yourself, no tools or action by the manufacturer required.
Yeah, not sure why this is such a hard concept for some people. I just replaced my two year old Pixel's battery as it started crashing at around 35% (as high as 50% with the camera on) and I'm not a heavy user at all.
Nobody is asking Apple to defy chemistry. Problem is iPhone bidding the fact. When your phone crashed at 35% and started working fine on charging you knew it was a battery problem because that's how all phones and batteries had been behaving since 3310.
Now someone at Apple thought instead of shutting the phone why not slow it down so that user can still make that urgent call. That's brilliant and all phones should emulate it. Apple's bad is the did it silently so user didn't know it was a battery problem, the blamed os updates, hardware, weather but not the battery, because degraded batteries never slowed down any phone including iPhone till now. So instead of getting battery replaced they bought a new phone which as a 'side-effect' was beneficial for Apple.
Now once people figured it out they were outraged, so as a PR measure Apple gave discounted battery replacement and once people did that phone was good enough again so delayed new phone purchase. Now as karma striking, all this news and discounted battery may have nudged users who otherwise chuck their phone every two years to get the battery replaced and the fact new device is costing 1000 fucking usd, some delayed for another year.
Anecdata: Happened to me with my last two phones, Nexus 6P and Pixel XL.
Unethical LPT: Always buy the extended 'protection plan' since this problem happens so reliably around the two year mark. Call complaining that your phone crashes when it's low on battery and get a new phone for like $100. Cheapest way to get 4-5 years out of a single phone purchase.
And since it's been two years since you bought the device they'll almost always give you a better phone as a replacement.
In Apple land all you’re getting is a battery replacement. Definitely no upgrades either. Not worth $100, as aftermarket battery replacements are cheaper, and you’re out of warranty anyway..
Or people simply aren’t buying new iPhones because the price has pretty much doubled in the last 2 years (while functionality/performance improvements are less noticeable than ever to the average user)
I think it's unambiguously about revenue as the paragraph it's in is all about the factors affecting revenue and the containing sentence specifically says it's enumerating factors affecting the divisions performance which would never be measured in units in the context of a post on revenue.
I don’t follow your logic. If Apple had handled the battery behavior as it does now, their iPhone sales would have been that much lower for many more years going back, as people would have opted for battery replacements over new phones.
or worse, battery replacement were unavailable in Japan. Even though it's on the Japanese site, at the start of November I tried to schudule an appointment for replacement. It would tell me no appointments available within the next week. same for various stores around Tokyo. I set an alarm to check every night just after midnight. Same thing every night. It's easy to believe either it was impossible to make the appointment or the number of actual appointments available was very small basically letting them claim to giving cheap replacements but in reality offer very few
This seems to be a worldwide problem with the Genius Bar reservation systems; happens to me all the time, even for "I just need someone to run a hardware test on this" appointments.
IMO Tim Cook did a good-enough analysis but deliberately omitted the rather insane prices of the XS and XS Max phones. Just look at the prices of the 256GB storage models.
My wife's brother has a 6S Plus. My mother has 7. They work amazingly well and fast. To them X / XS / XS Max are basically "spend 1300 EUR to get a bezel-less phone and nothing else"... and in a way, they are correct. Many people don't care about FaceID or OLED screens.
Smartphone market is nearly saturated. It's time for more realistic pricing. And I am saying this is a loyal Apple user.
I have a 7. I’m a typical dream-customer for Apple and my carrier in that I upgrade every 24months (Hand phone to a family member and get a new one).
I don’t care about new features such as Face ID. I do look with envy at the X camera though.
My next phone might be another 7 unless Apple drastically cuts prices or introduces an iPhone 9 with the X camera.
There is no justification for adding 50-100% to the monthly cost of a smartphone in 2019 when it’s the first time I don’t really need a faster phone!
Apple obviously realize that if they had a reasonably priced phone it would eat all their XR/XS sales, but the product strategy just looks like it risks losing customers to Huawei/Samsung.
Their revenue for those models were in line with expectations, so there was no reason for him to spend time on the issues that may be effecting that revenue.
That's a bit like the chicken and the egg problem though: did they project the iPhone sales correctly because they were aware of the high price? And couldn't they have reduced it a bit and project bigger sales numbers?
I think the point they wanted to get across was that they're seeing compelling evidence that China's economy is slowing dramatically. They mentioned the other things to establish that the revenue miss was not a mistake in modeling other factors. It's evidence for the broader point.
> Smartphone market is nearly saturated. It's time for more realistic pricing.
Just before Christmas I bought an iPhone 6S for $99 from AT&T. That’s a very realistic price for a very nice phone!
Fine print: I had to pay $145 plus tax but $45 is credited to me for monthly charges. The phone is locked to AT&T for 3 months. After Christmas the price has gone back to $199.
As an AAPL investor, I want Apple to raise prices for their top-of—the-line phones, otherwise the cheaper phones (like the one I purchased) will lower the average selling price. Of course people are not going to pay higher prices without getting something substantial in return. This is where Apple is lacking at the moment. The pace of innovation in both hardware and software has slowed down. There is plenty of room for improvement.
EDIT
Take a look at this video from Microsoft where they show how hover and squeeze gestures can dramatically improve the phone experience: https://www.theverge.com/2016/5/5/11595564/microsoft-3d-touc...
This shows there is plenty of room for innovation, Apple just isn't innovating fast enough.
There is a maximum amount of money people are ready to part with for status / stronger hardware / bigger screen / better screen / more storage / integrated experience / ecosystem / something else. And I believe Apple did hit that maximum back in November 2017. I spent 1400 EUR for my X as an early adopter so as not to wait 1-2 more months for sufficient stock in my country -- and gave the exact sum for my wife's X at the same day, so make those 2800 EUR in total -- about 13 months ago and it really tested my patience even though I am quite ready to invest solid money in good and reliable long-term tech (which mostly describes Apple's; I am also heavily eyeing the maxed out iMac Pro which sits at 14_000 EUR).
I agree Apple -- and everybody else -- does little to no innovation in the smartphone sector but I don't feel that's the only factor. At certain point prices are so high that people refuse to buy and then do post-hoc rationalization. My wife's brother loves the idea of a bezel-less phone but he is not in a situation to spend the ~1000 EUR on an iPhone X or ~1500 EUR on an XS Max so he just said "screw that, it's not worth it". It seems that many others are doing the same.
I don't necessarily disagree with you -- just adding that IMO there's a maximum price you should not test your loyal buyers with no matter how much can you sweeten the deal otherwise.
I spend many hours a day using my phone. More than I use my personal laptop, really (which was a lot more than EUR1400). Not quite as much as I use my work laptop, I suppose (c'est la vie because I like to eat and that requires money.)
Consider it like buying an expensive bed and mattress because you use them an awful lot (20-30% of your life, pretty much, for most people.)
Eh it's not about how often you use something, it's about the added value of a 1400 Euro phone over e.g. an iPhone 8. You can still use an 8 often. I think it's more of a status symbol thing for most people (though they would not admit this).
It kinda is, though. If I spent a huge amount on something and never used it, that would be a status symbol thing.
> the added value of a 1400 Euro phone over e.g. an iPhone 8
That's implying there's no difference worth the additional cost. The X has a better, bigger display than the 8; better camera(s); better battery; all things which are extremely relevant to my daily use.
Status symbol smartphones are a fact of life for many. Just 3 days ago I've seen a drunk girl boasting her brand new Note 9 in a company. In her excitement and joy she dropped it and shattered the screen. Then started crying.
But you should not generalize. Many people, me included, made a rational analysis and chose the iPhone for the unqestionable benefits it offers (and for personal philosophy reasons like Apple's stand on privacy).
As usual, it's not about if something is "overpriced". It's about if the device commands enough added value so the customer deems the price fair. MANY people, me included, find the Apple tech expensive. But for the things I am looking for in my mobile and personal computing needs they don't have competition. So we swallow the price and pay up. It's pretty simple.
I feel a lot of people feel the need to express contempt and call many Apple users "iSheep" but they are missing a lot of legitimate factors in the process.
Yes, but most people's phones have broken screens! I don't want to fork out that much money for something that's going to get smashed at some point. This is why I spent that much money on a nice desktop computer, and have a £18 nokia dumbphone. It's rugged and I don't have to worry about it getting dropped, stood on or even care about the remote possibility of damage since I can replace it with another immediately. A high-end phone is something I would worry about getting lost, damaged or stolen.
> Yes, but most people's phones have broken screens!
Which is baffling. A screen protector and case will cost you about GBP20-30 and they work. I closed a taxi door on my iPhone X last year - all that happened was the screen protector broke and there was a dirty scuff on the case.
I've dropped my phones countless times and only once has the screen cracked[1] (and then I didn't have a screen protector on.)
[1] Which was an internal hairline that you couldn't see unless it reflected external light just right. Apple Store said they'd never seen a crack like it and replaced the whole phone immediately without question.
I agree that it's worth paying for quality, but I didn't pay €1400 for my bed. I paid less than $1000 (€881) and am quite happy with it several years later. I agree with the other comments that suggest an upper limit to the amount people are willing to pay for a phone.
The OLED screen is much easier on my eyes. I often read in almost full darkness and that helps a lot as well. Battery life is very good. The device is insanely fast for anything I do (although that's likely true for older models as well). The smaller form factor and bigger display are something you can't understand the appeal of until you experience it.
It's a solid 3-5 years investment especially if you use it a lot -- like I do.
Hover input on touch screens is cool tech but I’ve yet to see an implementation of it where it really added usability. More hidden UI just seems like more difficulty for average users.
More hidden UI in a car seems like the absolute worst place to use such a hardware feature. Drivers should have their eyes on the road, not staring at the screen while they try to get their finger just the right distance to make some UI element pop up.
Edit: the linked Microsoft demo is pretty cool, and could improve mobile devices, but is exactly what I was thinking should not be in a car control surface.
Hover is not necessarily more hidden UI, but could actually go to making bits of phone UI that currently exists more discoverable. A personal gripe of mine is that press-and-hold on a button is a terrible way of discovering something new, you’re never sure if the button is just going to perform its default action (which is something you may not want to do, and without a readily-available “undo” key is kinda dangerous). Hover could go a long way to improving this.
I have no written source to back this up, but based on a conversation I had with an Apple engineer, the first version of the iPhone way back in 2007 could’ve supported hover. Steve Jobs personally nixed the idea as he felt it wasn’t intuitive and thus we are where we are today.
More ways to interact with the phone does not make for an improved user experience.
One success of the iPhone is that regardless of what is happening a user can alway simply press the home button and be back at the home screen. I think one of issues with the new X phones is that the lose this.
My mum / gran can use an iPhone because of this - they never feel intimidated or confused by it. Start to throw in new, undiscoverable interaction gestures and you start to lose this simplicity.
Quite interesting -- that was exactly the reason why I was wondering if I should gift my X to my mother when I decide to buy my next iPhone. And like you I feel it might be confusing.
I miss more physical buttons. The first semi-smartphone devices were perfect. They had 6-10 physical buttons and still plenty of screen. Nowadays everything is gestures. :(
With emerging tech like radar-like detectiong of gestures above the screen I feel this trend will become even worse.
Out of curiosity, what do you consider innovation in software? There's numerous quotes out there across the spectrum about how what Apple is currently doing in software and hardware is unprecedented, even from Microsoft execs.
I suspect people like to throw a lot of airy claims about terms like innovation without understanding what exactly does that even mean vs. what do they actually mean, although we'd need less hand-waviness and more well-stated gripes to be sure.
Innovation would be to finally integrate a high-quality OCR right into your builtin apps. It would be to allow scheduled clearing of 4G traffic numbers at your mobile bill rollout (now I have to manually do it every time I receive an SMS that my megabytes have been reset for the next month). Innovation would be to have your WebView apps and the native Safari browser share the session cookies of the relevant domain -- I am tired of Amazon links not opening in the app but in an embedded WebView (and every app I receive links to products has their own instance).
...Hell, these are not innovations. They are baseline expectations, IMO anyway. Let's not even mention AppStore which is an awful experience overall. I literally type the exact name of an app and AppStore cannot find it! Discoverability is a joke.
I like Apple's ecosystem better for reasons I won't list so as not to make this comment huge. But it's IMO undeniable that Apple has been coasting for a while now.
They should take a few hints from Android, the now dead Windows Mobile, and Sailfish OS.
I don't demand Iron Man level of UI and usability with holographics and intuitive blend of real world and VR interaction. I demand a more modern and smooth experience though. And even on a very strong device like the iPad Pro 10.5" and an iPhone X, many Apple apps still manage to lag and take several seconds to respond.
"isn't innovating fast enough".. How many people are going to go "well, I wasn't planning to upgrade just yet, but look at that gesture! I've got to have one now".
The smartphone as a product has peaked for the moment. Apple's growth will eventually stop as it's tapped out all its markets. It has nothing to do with innovation.
It is coupled. The innovation is dwindling while Apple raises prices. So people will be more reluctant to switch, because 1000 dollars or north is a huge amount of money in any country, not something you could spend in a blink of eyes.
Apple has a lot of opportunities to innovate outside of smartphones though. They can be a luxury version of Nintendo, innovating on the front of HCI, not repeating 'Thinner, Faster and Pricier' recipe every year.
People are already switching slower, and it is not because of the price (at least not in isolation.. the end of subsidized phones with phone plans did create a sticker shock across the board). Phones are now so powerful, especially iphones, that people have been holding onto them longer and longer for many years now. It is in response to that drop in sales that Apple had to raise revenue per sale or face a drop in overall revenues. Of course, they're postponing the inevitable, but in the meantime over the past few years Apple stockholders have benefited, and customers kept paying up.
Apple has a smash-hit already in the Watch, which is an amazing technological achievement and a sales success. But nothing they can do measures up against the explosive growth of smartphones, so all their innovation will be overlooked in any case. If the complaint is that smart watches are too small of a product for Apple (not what I'm saying, but a lot of eggheads out there) then "a luxury version of nintendo" won't sell nearly well enough to matter at all.
Agreed. Even if there are innovations to be made they are either (a) held out deliberately to inflate future prices or (b) are not feasible, materially or financially right now or (c) just don't exist.
But it doesn't help that Apple is trying to compensate for slower sales with higher prices. They are digging themselves deeper that way.
The OLED display on the X uses pulse-width modulation, which is basically where the OLED panel flickers at different frequencies to adjust its brightness. Most people (like me) don't really notice it, but for some it can cause headaches over prolonged use, and in some extreme cases really bad migraines.
Basically yes. But the frequency used for PWM is usually _way_ higher than what should be realistically visible to the human eye - If it was me, I'd probably use a couple of kilohertz.
Not sure how specifically it's done for OLED though.
Is PWM for varying the brightness of each pixel separately, or for adjusting the brightness of the entire screen? How are these two implemented generally on modern screens? Are PWM and FRC complementary or does one supersede the other? You can tell me about LCDs since you know them better.
At least on my Samsung Galaxy S3, turning the brightness to 100% stops the PWM flicker. If the current to each individual sub-pixel is also PWMed, it's done at a much higher frequency than the global brightness control PWM frequency.
I found it noticeable at first, it left my eyes feeling slightly tired and “scratchy” and the flicker was particularly noticeable in dark environments with low brightness (which probably makes sense, I guess the “off” part of the duty cycle is longer at lower brightness). I don’t notice it at all now, though I can still spot it if I look for it in a dark environment.
Image quality is improved by PWM brightness, because the alternative is running at 100% duty cycle and changing brightness in software, which causes color banding because you're throwing away bit depth. Additionally, even slow (200Hz approx) PWM is well above the flicker fusion threshold for all humans, so no flicker is visible when your eyes are still.
The problem is phantom array effect artifacts when you move your eyes. These appear and disappear in response to eye movement, so they can be perceived as motion, which is distracting to some people. I personally find PWM very obvious and annoying, but I suspect I have unusually weak saccadic masking.
I use my X in a pitch black room on the lowest brightness setting a lot. I never notice any flickering. All I notice is a vastly better quality screen compared with every other prior iPhone device.
Take another smartphone, and point the camera at yours. Try the X on max brightness and at 10%. You should see some flicker in what the camera sees at 10% but not 100%.
You may not be bothered by it, mind you. I just tend towards dry/sensitive eyes and don't want to aggravate it.
I have very sensitive eyes with classic night blindness and an iPhone X. I don't think I've noticed any problems with headaches or eye strain. Did you notice them after usage or is it just a hypothetical outcome? Does the auto brightness control feature mitigate the problem or push it front end center? I'm curious as I also do not want to aggregate my situation.
Your eyes become less sensitive to flickering in low light. That's how movie theaters could work at 24fps.
That's not to say no one can be bothered by it. But it's much less likely to bother anyone. I have sensitive eyes and tend to notice flickering at anything less than ~70hz. My Xs hasn't bothered me and I tend to use very low brightness even in well lit env.
Traditionally, movie theaters showed each analog film frame two or three times, so the flicker would be 48Hz or 72Hz, not 24Hz. 24Hz flicker is very obvious and annoying to everybody. Digital projectors might sample-and-hold like LCD displays and therefore have no flicker despite the low framerate.
I also have really dry eyes pretty much year round (and I'm in Denver which unfortunately makes that worse!) and it's still no issue.
I have seen the videos (especially review videos) where the flicker on the camera is present from another camera, but I haven't noticed any eye strain or any problems with this device. If anything, I'm using it more than my previous ones because reading text on it is so enjoyable with the better screen.
I think they were in the luxury position to try bumping up the prices a few generations; up until and including the X that strategy was successful, but now people are voting "no more". Or well, it's still selling, just not as much that it's causing Apple's revenue to keep going upwards. Apple is still one of the most successful companies in the world so I wouldn't call it a problem / failure just yet.
Yep. As I written in another sibling comment, there is a ceiling to what people would pay even if they love the idea of the device. And Apple has hit that ceiling.
I know people who can easily buy 10x iPhones for their entire family and part of their relatives -- and they refuse. These are people who can spend $50k and almost wouldn't notice and even they think the modern iPhones have taken the price too far.
I just totally de-Googled my life recently, and ended up almost entirely in the Apple ecosystem after evaluating my options. Switched to DDG full time for web search, Safari for browsing, iCloud for email, and Apple Maps is actually usable now with decent real time traffic. I never thought in a million years it would come to this, but the lines have clearly been drawn over the last two years. Apple has time and again come out emphatically in support of The User in a way that Google simply has not (or will not) step up to. It's quickly becoming their single largest competitive advantage in consumer web services.
Dissenting opinion. I currently have an iPhone and a Macbook and I cannot wait for the next cycle. I'm ditching Apple and its products entirely. Between the predatory rent-seeking app store, hostile my-way-or-the-highway developer environment, and just downright awful products (mail, message, contacts, and all the other apple nonsense apps preinstalled i never care for) as well as a buggy and unreliable icloud that has lost me data, I can't wait to leave.
I won't try to sell you on a MacBook, but I tried ditching my iPhone for an official Google Android phone because I felt similarly to the way you do and it was one of the worst decisions I've ever made.
I chose an official Google phone because I wanted to be sure that I could get security updates and run the latest version of the OS. But it didn't take long before the phone's UI performance became extremely noticeable. Simple stuff like triggering the back action or switching between apps would take multiple seconds. Chrome sometimes took up to 20 seconds to load. I can't help but think that Android made some fundamentally bad decisions in their software stack given just how bad the experience can be. And 13 months into my Android phone experience, the phone started boot looping and basically turned into a brick. Called Google, who ducked out of any responsibility because their warranty only covered the first 12 months, despite the fact that they've known about this issue for more than 2 years and kept selling the phone anyways. Compare that to the way that Apple responded to batterygate and you can see the difference in customer service between them and Google is night and day.
Maybe it's just me, but I've also talked to others that have gone to Android and found only a world of hurt. With Apple making iPhone battery replacement very affordable, you'll get a far smoother experience sticking with an outdated iPhone models than you'll get with top-of-the-line Android phones. I hope for your sake that you have a more positive experience with Android than I did. But less than 18 months later and I'm back using an iPhone 8 and have no plans to ever consider Android again.
> Simple stuff like triggering the back action or switching between apps would take multiple seconds. Chrome sometimes took up to 20 seconds to load...
Something is definitely wrong with that phone, or maybe that Google model. I'm definitely not seeing slow behavior like that on my Samsung S8 that I've owned for over a year. It's been getting regular security updates too (just got the December update a couple of weeks ago). I have seen similar slowdowns on my older Nexus 5 & iPhone when the internal storage got too full.
I'm a long time Apple user (over a decade, one of those people who queued up for a day one iPhone), but I am ecstatically happy with my Samsung S8 and find it to be the most "Apple-like" device I've bought from a non-Apple company. That said, if you prefer the iPhone, that's okay too. People like different things and use different features.
That is definitely not typical. I have the Moto x4, a budget phone, and it's as snappy as that day I bought it, at launch, through 3 major version upgrades.
I do remember seeing your complaint in the pixel subreddit, though. Seems Google has a QC problem.
Agreed. I had a Nexus 6 for a couple years, and my only complaint was that it got a little slower with Android 8, but it was still quite usable.
I accidentally destroyed my phone, so I got a Moto x4 and couldn't be happier. It's faster than my Nexus 6, has way better battery life, and my only real issues are with Hearthstone (frequent disconnects, seems to be pretty common) and Smart Lock sucking, and Smart Look seems to be a common issue across Android phones (after a reboot, Smart Lock won't work if it was enabled, so disable it from Trust Agents, reboot, and reenable it and it works great again; I've run into this on Nexus 6, Pixel 2, and Pixel 3).
However, I'm trying to de-Google my life, and I don't want to run to another monster (Apple), so I'm watching the Librem 5 to see if that's an option once this phone gets long in the tooth. That being said, Android doesn't suck if you want a mainstream phone, and the Moto x4 is quite nice for how cheap it is.
The issues you are describing, I remember having them in Android 2'ish era. For the past many years, I have had an extremely stable and positive experience with Android.
I have even used cheap android devices like Moto E4 without any problems at all. I am not sure what you are doing with your phones. Android is the most common phone OS, it's not nearly as bad as what you experienced.
I actually quite like a lot of the software, but about two years ago I started a job where I needed to run windows, and I needed some 3d muscle (A GTX1060). A widows laptop was literately half the price of a mac laptop of a similar speed.
Well, that's when I found out how locked into the mac ecosystem I was. It was very painful to switch back to windows. Even my keyboard shortcut muscle memory was difficult to overcome.
The rent seeking trickles down to customers. See Netflix not taking subscriptions through Apple anymore. If this happens with one service, customers may be puzzled, if this happens with all services, customers will get annoyed. The way Apple treats their developers is how they treat their platform.
The apps and iCloud portion of my comment should be relevant, as is the observation that I can't load whatever I want on the phone. I have to go through this horrible app store which Apple took years to redesign and ended up being even worse than its predecessor for discovering content (and policing content!)
While I haven’t de-Googled I do mostly stick to Apple products because of the quality and advantages of the ecosystem.
I’m more interested in using the best product for what I want to do. While that is sure to be subjective it feels like Apple is the best to me.
That being said, I’m not able to stick to DDG. Every time I do a search and I don’t find what I’m looking for on DDG I think, “I bet Google would have found it”. However when I’m on Google and I don’t find what I’m looking for I think, “I just didn’t write a good query”. That mental hurdle is hard to get over.
Safari vs Chrome is another one where I choose Google. The web developer tools for the browser and the integration with Node/V8 seem so much better. If I were not a developer I imagine I could prefer Safari but it’s too hard to pretend when it’s what I do all day.
> Every time I do a search and I don’t find what I’m looking for on DDG I think, “I bet Google would have found it”. However when I’m on Google and I don’t find what I’m looking for I think, “I just didn’t write a good query”. That mental hurdle is hard to get over.
Same here. It doesn't help that 80% of the time I'm having the former issue, I copy the query to Google and the top hit is perfect, a hit which didn't even show up 30 results down on ddg.
I should try copying the other way, but Google does seem objectively better (doesn't stop me trying to use ddg and only go to Google manually as a fallback).
I use DDG nearly exclusively, and writing better queries is definitely workable. I just throw a couple more keywords and I usually find what I need.
Google does a ton of personalization of search results, whereas DDG doesn't, so it's not really a fair comparison. I've found that, with my better queries, StartPage (anonymous Google results) isn't much better, so the difference is likely Google getting to know you better.
The only personalization they can do is based on my region (IP address), user agent (all the better if "crop image" gives me Linux results), and the fact that this is the only data they have on me. There are no cookies or localStorage. Unless they do browser fingerprinting (which I hope would be big news and would legally have to be in their privacy policy, so I'd know about it), it can't be that custom. I'm quite convinced google search really is just that much better.
The country localisation gets in the way as often as it doesn't for normal usage, but given that I use ddg by default, many of the queries I use Google for are the ones I actually want localised. (Ddg is even worse at searching in other languages, which gets slightly better if you manually change the search language on the results page, but not much.)
I'll give startpage a try. I thought Google blocked (or at least CAPTCHAd) third parties from using the search without paying for every query (their search api is super expensive), so I didn't look for a proxying service before. Thanks for the tip :)
Same for me. I prefer Apple hardware because I still consider it the best tool (maybe with the exception of the MBP keyboard). I won't go into debates with others about my choices (here in Europe most people prefer Windows laptops and Android phones). However I can't ditch Gmail, Chrome and Google Search. They still offer the best service :/
I've looked ProtonMail, Firefox, and DDG so far. ProtonMail and DDG feel like a downgrade in features, but they're good enough and I like the biggest feature they offer: privacy. I legitimately like Firefox better than Chrome.
The last Google product I'm having trouble ditching is Drive. I like accessing spreadsheets everywhere, including my phone, and I find LibreOffice less intuitive, and self hosted LibreOffice Online sucks. I'm looking at OnlyOffice, but the resource requirements make hosting on a VPS expensive, so I'll have to get a machine set up locally if I want to do it (and all the headaches that brings with exposing it to the world through my ISP).
I'm also on Google Fi, but I'm not too attached to it. If the Librem 5 ends up being as awesome as they promise, I'll likely leave for something else, like Ting (I used them for a couple years).
It's a reminder that Apple does offer something for the high price. Maybe their tech isn't breaking new ground, but their attitude towards their customers' privacy rights may help sales going forward.
I'm also considering switching from Android. I'd rather pay more and be the customer instead of the product.
Unless you want to deal with custom ROMs, breaking apps because you used a Google services alternative and everything all over again if you want to upgrade to another Android version which will never be the latest you will end up on a phone which is the Google Android and then you can only do so much for privacy.
Android phone today is like living in a room full of CCTV cameras and mics and tons of sensors and trying to close the windows and doors while the control of those feeds are in the hands of Google.
Which is why I'm so excited about the Librem 5. If you have modest requirements, it should work for you. App availability will be pretty limited, but if you're willing to go the custom ROM route, that's probably not a huge concern.
Once I find an alternative to Google Drive that I like well enough, I'll seriously consider the Librem 5 or going back to a flip phone. My phone requirements are pretty modest, but since I already give Google a ton of data through Drive, I figure using their phones isn't that much worse (I just limit how many additional services I use).
I haven't completely de-googled, but mostly. Now using: iPhone, DuckDuckGo, Outlook, Firefox. Still using google maps, and I haven't yet moved all of my email from Gmail to Outlook, but getting there.
Mozilla has lost my trust lately. I don't doubt the sincerity of the developers there. But they've grown into a large revenue generating organization now, and their principles appear compromised at the executive level. See this debacle over the recent Booking.com ad that finally made me dump Firefox [0]
You can't sync Safari bookmarks with Firefox, Firefox has tons of awesome extensions on desktop, Firefox exists on all major platforms, and Firefox on Android has extensions as well (ad block on mobile is awesome).
Why Safari instead of Firefox? On iOS, they're the same browser underneath anyway, so there difference lies in extra features on top.
How is requiring (and selling) a portfolio of overpriced dongles "in support of the user"? Apple has let margins dictate design decisions for many years now. That's not user first. I don't know a single iPhone x user who likes being jackless.
When I got my iMac in 1998, it came with a crappy mouse and no ADB ports to plug my old mouse into, it only had those new fangled USB ports. Apple didn't make dongles and it was something like three months before a third party dongle was available, which cost more than a new USB mouse. For about two years, I had to run my Zip drive and printer on the dodgiest series of parallel-to-USB converters ever made. My point is that it has been ever thus. This is not new. I like that Apple push standards. USB-C is clearly the right direction to go. I’m just bitter they’re not available on iPhones. Yet.
As for headphone jacks. I haven’t used wired headphones with my iPhone for over 5 years. Dropping the jack has literally had no impact on me whatsoever. In fact it’s one less hole to fill with pocket lint. Before you go on a tirade of audiophile nonsense, I’ll remind you that most people listen to audio and video that is streamed over cellular data in a lossy format. All arguments are rendered moot. I am a content iPhone X user, so now you know of at least one.
> As for headphone jacks. I haven’t used wired headphones with my iPhone for over 5 years. Dropping the jack has literally had no impact on me whatsoever. In fact it’s one less hole to fill with pocket lint.
Your needs don't define the needs of everyone else in this world. It wouldn't be a controversial move if it didn't piss off a bunch of people, now would it? If the airpods/dongle works for you, great. That doesn't mean they don't piss off and inconvenience a large group of people because if they didn't, there wouldn't be the corresponding backlash.
> Before you go on a tirade of audiophile nonsense, I’ll remind you that most people listen to audio and video that is streamed over cellular data in a lossy format. All arguments are rendered moot. I am a content iPhone X user, so now you know of at least one.
In case you didn't know, audiophilia is actually a very expensive hobby so most people aren't audiophiles. Most people pissed off about the removal of the 3.5 mm jack are not audiophiles. It is the everyday people wanting to listen to their device through headphones that are inconvenienced by this move. Audiophiles listen to music on their desk with their $2k open-back headphones and $2k dac/amp stack. And when on the move, they use digital audio players to play lossless flac. Most people pissed off are not pissed off because of sound quality, they are pissed off because now they have to use a dongle to do something as basic as listening to their device privately.
Not to mention the fact that Apple/Google/HTC/etc claim that the reason why they removed 3.5 mm was to improve sound quality. In their opinion, 3.5 mm is archaic and is holding back the audio industry. This seems like a bullshit excuse, because you don't hear any audiophiles complaining about that, and they are the people would'd drop $2k for a 5% improvement in their dac. If they removed 3.5 mm because it's holding audio back, where are the improvements and benefits from using their latest hyped flashy "adaptive" audio technologies? Where are the white papers? If you ask anyone working in high fidelity sound, I don't think anyone would have suggested that this is what we needed.
> Your needs don't define the needs of everyone else in this world...
But yours do? You are part of, in my experience, a extremely vocal minority who are doing exactly what you are accusing me of.
> In case you didn't know, audiophilia is actually a very expensive hobby so most people aren't audiophiles.
I am actually very aware of the fact that it is an expensive hobby. A lot off the tat is baseless nonsense.
> Most people pissed off about the removal of the 3.5 mm jack are not audiophiles. It is the everyday people wanting to listen to their device through headphones that are inconvenienced by this move.
How? They gave away a dongle until the X series phone. It works just fine. I see on my daily commute a heck of a lot of headphone users. I see a lot of dongles and I see a lot of wireless headphones, AirPod being extremely common. I can only presume that the majority either use the headphones that came with their phone (a lot of apple headphones out there) or keep the dongle attached.
> ...now they have to use a dongle to do something as basic as listening to their device privately.
So? A bit of history; back in the day, expensive 'on/over the ear headphones came fitted with TRS Audio jack (6.35mm). In order to use decent headphones on your walkman/discman, you had to use a converter (a dongle in modern parlance). The horror!
> Not to mention the fact that Apple/Google/HTC/etc claim that the reason why they removed 3.5 mm was to improve sound quality. In their opinion, 3.5 mm is archaic and is holding back the audio industry. This seems like a bullshit excuse, because you don't hear any audiophiles complaining about that...
Do you have any evidence other than the opinions of individuals who spend thousands on snake oil?
> If they removed 3.5 mm because it's holding audio back, where are the improvements and benefits from using their latest hyped flashy "adaptive" audio technologies? Where are the white papers? If you ask anyone working in high fidelity sound, I don't think anyone would have suggested that this is what we needed.
For portable music players, I doubt many would care...
It doesn't justify it. I wasn't trying to, but like many I know, I don't miss it. And let's be frank, the reasons for keeping the jack have been solely centred around cognitive biases. At the end of the day, prophecies of doom have not been met and the world keeps turning.
Pretty much anyone with AirPods or wireless headphones couldn’t care less about the jack missing. It’s really not a big deal, anyone with wired headphones I know, just keeps the free dongke attaches to the headphones as if it was part of the cable.
Not OP, but I like not being tracked. Also, DDG has a slew of awesome features, such as bangs (shortcuts to sites, e.g. !a for Amazon, !w for Wikipedia, !aw for Arch Wiki, etc). In fact, I prefer DDG to Google on that basis alone, though occasionally I have to !g or !sp for better search results (Google and Start Page respectively).
I still use Google Drive, Google Fi, and Gmail (moving to ProtonMail), but I've found awesome alternatives that improve on Google products:
- Orgzly - way better than Keep, and with Syncthing, I can edit task lists on my desktop with my preferred editor
- Firefox - ad block on mobile is awesome, as is browser integration for Bitwarden
- Signal - better than Hangouts for SMS, if only for the dark theme
- andOTP - pin lock for second factor auth beats out Google's Authenticator app
I've been considering moving to NextCloud (tons of advantages over GSuite), but I'm having trouble replacing Google Sheets. Honestly, most of Google's products are mediocre, and it's really annoying switching to their flavor of the week (Google Talk -> Hangouts -> Allo -> Duo, Gmail redesign that runs like crap on Firefox, etc). I also wish there were compelling alternatives to YouTube (PeerTube looks interesting, but unlikely to get traction) and Android (Librem 5 might be good enough).
In trying to switch, I'm realizing how much better some options are once you get out of the Google ecosystem, but it's hard to kick the few strong products they have.
> At this point you’re just pretending like you don’t know why people degoogle.
My point was: if you've made it as far as de-Googling yourself and you are now not locked into an unethical company, why get yourself into the grip of another unethical company?
I'm trying to degoogle without using another huge company, but it's difficult piecing together alternatives. For example, I'm having the most trouble with Drive (spreadsheets specifically), Android (I dislike iOS), and YouTube (content is king), but I've been about to kick nearly everything else.
Apple provides a lot of solutions to common problems Google users run into when switching away, and they seem way better from a privacy standpoint than any other one stop shop. Unfortunately, they arguably have worse lock-in, so you can't easily switch single pieces out (e.g. Safari isn't a thing on other platforms, not sure about iCloud, but most Apple services don't seem to work outside Apple's existence, like AirDrop). Apple works hard to make their ecosystem work seamlessly, just as Google does.
I agree, moving from one to the other seems a little self defeating, but it may be a net improvement for some. I prefer to try to piece together disparate services for redundancy, but I understand the desire to just let Apple take control.
Personal anecdote: I broke my iPhone and have been using Android for a bit, and I must admit: at first I thought I'd switch back but nowadays Android is pretty good.
Hardware at a comparable price-point is solid, the UI is smooth and better-looking than it was before, the app ecosystem isn't quite as good, but is very very close, and there's features I would actually miss on iOS (a calendar widget on my homescreen, unlocking my device without touching the screen and Google's Night Sight).
I miss my to do app and my email app, both of which are not on Android (Things and Spark). But overall, I personally can't think of a single aspect where iOS "miles ahead" anymore, from an end-user perspective.
My last two phones were Samsung Galaxys. Samsung only updates your phone for two years. I'm not about to have an internet connected device that doesn't get security updates any more, that just seems crazy to me. My new phone is an iPhone, which apple updates for five years.
> But overall, I personally can't think of a single aspect where iOS "miles ahead" anymore, from an end-user perspective.
There's one place that iOS is miles behind though, and that's file handling. Having to go through a desktop and iTunes to receive music from a friend is a pain in the arse.
Unbelievable! In all of my searching and asking around for exactly this I was unable to find a suitable app. Thank you for sharing—and, to the author who may be browsing this, thank you for sticking up for us digital dinosaurs who refuse to integrate into the “library as a service” dystopia. Let me know if you ever need a helping hand.
> the app ecosystem isn't quite as good, but is very very close,
It's interesting you say that. I've been looking at de-googling myself and getting off Android, but I cannot find a decent replacement in the App store for my password manager of choice (KeePass2Android, cos I use KeePass everywhere).
Other Apple owning friends of mine say I should be using whatever it is that iPhone supplies by default, but the problem is I want to de-google myself, not move entirely into Apple land, so having something which only works on the phone isn't going to fly. I've got Windows and Linux machines all over the place that I want my password manager to sync with.
There are a few keepass clients for iOS, but most of them are pretty serious abandonware and don’t support newer features like autofill integration. https://keepassium.com/ is supposed to come out soonish, and will probably take the crown when it does. For now, your best option is probably https://strongboxsafe.com/. No affiliation or experience with either, but strongbox seems to be the favorite for now and keepassium looks like it’ll be better when it’s out.
Just a quick comment: I use MiniKeePass on iOS. It is not that nicely intergrated etc., but you can at least keep using your files etc. You will have to manage the file on your "cloud server" though, two-way-sync is not there yet.
Yes, this is more or less what I found - a reasonable number of implementations of apps which can read/write a keepass database, but sorely lacking in all the nice bells and whistles features that I like in the Android app.
It's not ideal to suggest wholesale replacing your trusted system, but I can recommend Bitwarden. It's open source, free with a premium option and has clients for iOS, Android, Linux, Windows, Mac as well as CLI options and browser integration.
For me, this is the #1 reason. Sure the Apple ecosystem is fantastic (lastpass on my iphone can prefill passwords on my apple TV!) and the level of polish and quality is high, but the one single solitary thing that would truly prevent me from moving to Chromebook or a pixel is the privacy aspect.
Apple has done well to make privacy one of their prime offerings.
And it will be their undoing, since now that people are not upgrading their iPhones continued growth will depend on how well they can transition to become a services company, which, for the most part, you can only do phoning home the way Google and Facebook do. The only reason Apple touts privacy today is because they suck at services, and they figured they might as well sell it as a feature. But that won't last if Apple is to grow.
I don't think so. They did a bunch of extra engineering work to do machine learning on photos in a way that respected people's privacy. iCloud Photo Library has been working great for me, and the photos are encrypted on my devices before they land in iCloud. The current implementation has the drawback that all of my devices need to do the ML work independently as a result, but it still works okay.
As a fairly heavy iCloud user, I wouldn't say they "suck" at services. They're not as good as Google at it, to be sure, but most things work pretty well for me.
> As a fairly heavy iCloud user, I wouldn't say they "suck" at services. They're not as good as Google at it, to be sure, but most things work pretty well for me.
I would also add that Apple is actively working to close the gap. Look at last years hire of Giannandrea from Google.
> transition to become a services company, which, for the most part, you can only do phoning home the way Google and Facebook do
I really hope this is untrue. My instinct is that you perhaps can't be a big behemoth of a company if you don't behave like Google and Facebook, but Apple occupied that middle territory successfully for a long time.
If you are willing to take total control of your mobile environment, Android can give you very good privacy. Arguably better than Apple.
Simply buy a Pixel (or any other device that supports AOSP). Build your own AOSP image (which is quite easy). And you are ready to go. Use applications from F-Droid only.
Admittedly it's not as straightforward as running your favorite Linux distro, and there are some caveats, but it's quite close.
Both of those apply to iPhones as well. The only difference is that on iOS, you cannot turn off AGPS location collection, while on Android, not only can you turn it off, it's opt in.
For state-sponsored privacy, sure. But for ad-tracking privacy, I don't think you can do comprehensive ad-blocking in browsers on iPhones, right? It's still either VPN-based or the capped blocklist api, right?
I would love to switch, but Firefox+uBlock on Android is soooo nice for a fast mobile browsing experience. The moment I can do what uBlock does on an iPhone, I'll switch.
A few days ago my friend complained that her phone had randomly started popping up ads on its screen as she was just using it. She had to dig through the play store and find the 'recently used apps' to identify the culprit, which was a random app she'd downloaded that after a few days updated itself to start pumping out ads.
That is a distinctly android problem, and is an example of one I'm glad to avoid by sticking to iOS.
Perhaps she should be more selective with apps she installs? Also, how would this be exclusive to Android? iOS apps can have ads on them. Even if the feature is added with an update.
The ads weren't only displaying in the app, they were appearing over other apps. This is something that simply can't happen in iOS.
How does a standard user know whether a small app to e.g. manipulate photos (as in this instance) is going to be updated a few days later to show ads when it's not running? Shouldn't an end user be able to trust Google's app marketplace to not feed them junk like this?
> Firefox+uBlock on Android is soooo nice for a fast mobile browsing experience
I use BlockBear on safari. Any speed gains you may have because of uBlock are offset by the cpu speed gains on iPhone XS. Hell, hacker news loads faster(less than a blink of my eye) on my iPhone than 2017 MacBook Pro.
> Any speed gains you may have because of uBlock are offset by the cpu speed gains on iPhone XS.
Depends on network performance, how heavy your typical sites visited are, and what type of configuration you're running on uBlock.
Anecdotally, I find my Snapdragon 835 phone with Firefox/Ublock Origin to feel somewhat faster than my A10 with Safari/1 Blocker X. (Plus Firefox/uBlock gives various QOL improvements over Safari, like customizably removing cruft from various sites, and not autoplaying video.) My biggest complaint with Firefox/uBlock Origin is that the UI isn't very nice for whitelisting scripts on mobile.
I believe 1blocker X made a new app with more categories so they could get around the cap. Like the cap was category based, but not hard to circumvent.
> I don’t care about privacy. What I do care about is being manipulated.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but those two sentences contradict each other. ;)
The main publicly visible application of personal data is advertising, so if you don’t want ads or manipulation, then you actually do care about privacy.
And are you certain you don’t care about privacy outside of ads? If so, why? Many people who’ve said things like that just didn’t even think at all about what happens or could happen to their personal information. Would it surprise you if you found out that insurance companies were purchasing personal information in order to increase their denial rates on claims? Would it bother you if your personal information was used to support a politcal party you oppose? Would it concern you if your personal habits were used to advertise to your neighbors or co-workers or friends or family instead of you personally?
> You need to work on your argument a bit I think. I get what you are saying, but your points are a little weak.
Okay, sure. I asked you why you don’t care about privacy, and you haven’t bothered to answer. I don’t really mind if my argument is weak, but yes I could certainly work on it and improve it if I had a reason to. I can’t read your mind, though. Do you want to provide any reasoning for your case or counter-argument at all?
Two things to think about. 1- I wasn’t attacking you, in case you felt like I was criticizing, and were just trying to criticize me back. 2- None of the examples I gave are made up, they are all real things that have happened.
That ignores the privacy threat Google itself poses. There's a lot of things I don't like about Apple, but using a phone whose operating system contains unlimited amounts if closed source Google code is really scary to me, simply due to their business model and their disrespect of privacy.
IMO I just reviewed all the phones and the iPhone XR is the best phone for the price (~$750). Battery life is great, security is a plus, waterproof, great CPU, etc.
I rotated through the pixel, iPhone XS, Samsung Galaxy, and 4 or 5 other flagship phones (was able to get amazing two week return policies)
Ended up with the XR simply because it was an excellent solid phone, cheaper than the other flagship phones. Admittedly I didn’t checkout the Xiaomi phone.
For reference, I had to replace my nexus 6p because the battery was so bad it was dying at 50% randomly. Plus google was no longer pushing updates.
If you want a top flagship, I agree Apple is a solid choice. What Xiaomi and Android does well in general is midrange. I've got a ~$150 phone (Xiaomi Redmi Note 4, now superseded) that has fantastic performance (never had any issues with tens of tabs in browsers, multitasking, games, etc), fingerprint sensor, battery lasts for 2/3 days, etc. You can tell it's not a flagship: the camera is just tolerable, it's got a plastic back (which doesn't break after repeated falls); but overall it's insane value/cost.
It's nice to surf the wonders of billion-scale device mass-manufacturing if you don't need the latest and greatest.
Xiomi phones are horrid in terms of privacy. Their MIUI sucks, constantly pestering me to use their app store. Privacy policy of their other stock apps like file manager, galary etc includes sending filename and other data to chineese servers. Not to mention some of their misterious 'analytics' apps always running in background.
I switched the other way around and was mostly surprised that iOs had barely an edge over Android. In a few places downright inferior to it (e.g. keyboard).
I can at least trust iOs to provide software updates for my device until 5 years of age. But I find it hard to see that many people value this remotely close to the price difference.
My main complaint for Android is that they are obsessed with copying Apple so they are always one generation behind. If Apple removed headphone jack, next year you can expect most Android phone to do same. Same goes for all good and bad features Apple introduces like notch, Touch ID, FaceId, slow-mo, memory capacity, AI selfies etc etc. Other way around also happens but much less often and is typically fragmented in niche devices instead of one all rounder. So buying Android always felt like buying last year’s iPhone. But last year’s iPhone usually cost same as this year’s Android. So what’s the point?
Not everyone copies Apple. Samsung and LG still have headphone jacks. If anything they had fingerprint sensors before Apple. Notches are the in-between bezels and full screen phones. LG experimented with fake notches on the V10 and V20, branded as a second screen rather than a notch.
This is exactly the issue. In Android world innovations are fragmented and there is no one package that has all of these combined. If you want Samsung features then you lose out on LG features.
We believe there are other factors broadly impacting our iPhone performance, including consumers adapting to a world with fewer carrier subsidies, US dollar strength-related price increases, and some customers taking advantage of significantly reduced pricing for iPhone battery replacements.
Why spend $1,449 on an XS Max when you could have replaced the battery on your phone for $29?
Hi, I was someone who traded my 64GB 6s in for a 256GB XS.
- $200 no questions asked buy-back
- Better camera
- Larger screen in a just about the same size form factor
I expect to have this phone for ~4 years with probably a battery refresh in ~2ish.
I went 4S -> 6S -> XS. I hadn't upgraded an iPhone in years, Apple has made the process extremely slick and painless. I was seriously impressed at picking up the new phone and being "good to go" in ~45 min when my apps downloaded.
I think I'm with you in that a better camera is really what incentivised me to switch. Modern phone cameras are simply stunning - the video on the X series and the photos on the Pixel devices are incredible for their form factors. To me it was never a question of "Do I want to spend $1k on a phone", it's always been a question of "would I spend $1k to have the majority of my photos from these 4 years be of much higher quality". That's what made me switch.
I agree. The camera is great. But I have to admit that I’m also a bit underwhelmed. The Apple keynote obviously shows the best pictures only.
In not-perfect-light scenarios (not necessarily by night), photos shot with the iOS stock camera App have noticeably grain or "patches". The portrait mode is nice, but has glitches occasionally such that some item in the background gets merged with the face in the foreground.
So, I’m not a professional photographer, I only use the camera of my iPhone XS Max. The results are good enough, but the improvement isn’t that big over the iPhone 7 or 8.
What I do like is the big screen, since I use my phone only a couple times per week to make a call. Most of the time is spend in apps.
One thing that makes me hesitant on changing my phone is Google Authenticator. I still have some services using that instead of Authy. I got my secret codes but it will be a hassle to use them when the time comes...
I replaced both Authy and Google Authenticator with 1Password; it is really nice to have OTPs all in one place and sync'd across mobile devices and laptops.
I don't understand the problem. I went from 100% Google Authenticator to 100% Authy. It's a pain to turn off 2FA, then turn it back on using Authy instead of Google, but it's 100% under your control. So you can do 2 or 3 a day until you're done or one long session.
Now I have 2 devices that I can use, which makes me much less fearful about losing (or more likely misplacing) my phone.
I use KeePassXC on a Linux desktop and store the 2FA codes in it. Every site that offers 2FA will let you use a code instead of scanning the QR image. As long as I have the underlying codes I can reuse them anywhere else.
I wonder if there's an equivalent on iOS for andOTP. It puts the backup responsibility on the user in which you can export all tokens to plaintext or password-secured encrypted text. You ultimately put trust in the app maintainers instead of a third party like Authy.
Checkout OTP Auth, which does all that. Very friendly, and very well written with excellent attention to usability details. No net connection unless you enable iCloud saving. No ads even in the free version. Well worth the tiny donation for premium!
I have no connection other than being a happy premium user for around 2 years. By far the best of those I found.
Jumping in to reply because I made the switch to Authy about two years ago and haven't looked back. You get the ability to sync MFA across devices and desktop without a hitch. Add in the backup (with encryption) and you can onboard a device quickly and it fits every use case I need.
I actually just completed a migration from Authenticator to Authy. I don’t have much to say except that it was pretty seamless. Sync between multiple devices works very well. I’m not a fan of the Authy UI but it does what I need.
If you use a password manager that supports OTP tokens (lastpass with their authenticator app, 1password, bitwarden) you could just use that and remove Authy out of the picture.
You really shouldn't be storing OTP tokens in your password manager. Yes it's better than nothing, but if your password manager vault gets compromised your 2FA does nothing to stop it.
My thoughts exactly. The iPhone 6S is still plenty fast, does everything I need it to, has a large screen, and a headphone jack.
I have used the latest models and don't see any improvements worth upgrading for. FaceID is cool, but not enough on its own to convince me to upgrade.
In previous cycles, my update from 3GS to 4S was a no-brainer (retina, massive speed improvement), as was the upgrade from 4S to 6S (lightning port, LTE, massive speed improvement, larger screen).
Once I got my battery swapped, the phone was as good as new.
From someone having sweaty hands (Hyperhidrosis). FaceID is not only cool, but it’s a game changer! I always get frustrated when attempting to unlock my 6S plus 3 times, then ultimately being just asked for my passcode. With FaceID, everything just works smoothly/seamlessly as if there’s not even an authentication phase.
If I knew this earlier, I could’ve bought the X sooner. Couldn’t recommend it enough.
Was just talking to the family the other day about this. Every phone up to the 6 I had in my hands the day it was available, and that’s including the original iPhone which wasn’t available in Australia. We imported them and had to wait for a jailbreak until we could do anything with them!
So yeah, iPhone nerd here.
I’ve been rocking an SE for a couple of years now. Love it. Works. Quick enough. Small, robust. No plans to update.
I think the novelty has worn off. They used to be these cool new toys. Now it’s just a phone. I want to spend less time with the thing as time goes on, not more.
Whether it’s $29 or $79 for a battery replacement for an iPhone 6S, it’s still a good value proposition to get more years out of it. I’m planning to do the same.
I'm in the same boat, I intend to keep my 7+ and X for quite a while - especially since there's nothing really interesting out on the market or any new killer feature on the horizon for now.
Having recently deleted all my timeline-based social media accounts, I'd even consider switching to a smart dumbphone like the Nokia 8110 if it had WhatsApp and Spotify (WhatsApp is rumoured to be at least coming soon to KaiOS) and just get rid of the distraction altogether.
That's one part. The other is that iOS 12 really did focus on speed improvements. For many (most?) people, an iPhone 7 with a new battery is still a great phone.
I replaced an iPhone 6 or 6s with a 7. I also find $1,000 just obscene for a phone. I'm a person could have afforded the OLED versions and chose not to.
And ios 11 may have shifted sales forward. I was still doing ok on ios 10 on my iphone 6. Ios 11 slowed it down (even with a replaced battery) so I got an iphone 8.
Now on ios 12 my iphone 6 is fast again. But, I probably would have bought the iphone 8 by now anyway, just because of camera quality, etc. The speed trouble just pulled my purchase up by a year. (I even bought a stopgap SE in the summer of 2017)
I suspect others also upgraded early in 2011 due to ios 11. Of course this situation is better long run now that its fixed. I'm so pleased with ios 12.
In an attempt to get more mileage from my iPhone 6S and prolong a future phone purchase, I recently did the $29 battery replacement. I hoping that I avoid getting a new phone for another 2 years.
I’ve noticed that people like to spout the price for the highest tiered item as a reason for not buying a product. Like the original Apple Watch with the $10k Apple Watch Edition.
Just one anecdote, but I got my battery replaced and initially my phone was super-fast. After a few months though, it slowed down considerably, and is now as slow as it was before I replaced the battery.
The battery-protection performance throttling is either on or of, and you can check the status in iOS 12 (settings>battery>battery health). If it's off ("Peak performance mode") and your phone is slow, it's something else (bloated apps or web pages perhaps)
Not true - lithium cells see most 'wear' when used and stored above 90 percent charge and below 10 percent charge.
The effect is so dramatic that some manufacturers rescale the indicator so it isn't possible to reach those charge levels, and makers of electric cars won't charge above 90 percent by default.
Right but we're talking about the whole battery, not individual cells. I thought "prevent the cells from charging too high or dropping too low" was standard practice these days for everybody, and so at the battery level the "don't charge to 100%" advice is obsolete.
I don’t think you got that quite right. Most cellphone batteries are single cell (L shaped ones excluded). All cells have the property of degradation per cycle depending on range of charge/discharge (0-100 worse than 10-90 worse than 20-80). Standard cell phone BMS charges 0-100 because most manufacturers optimize for battery life per unit weight, not cycle count. Planned obsolescence and all that..
At the very least, the "battery" includes the circuitry protecting and mediating access to the cell(s), and that's the point where it would prevent the cell(s) from overcharging.
This site seems like a decently credible source on battery life, and they recommend setting devices into a mode to leave the charge at around 80% if its not going to be really used heavily as a mobile device.
"A laptop battery could be prolonged by lowering the charge voltage when connected to the AC grid. To make this feature user-friendly, a device should feature a “Long Life” mode that keeps the battery at 4.05V/cell and offers a SoC of about 80 percent."
I've had a lot of laptops with this kind of mode on them from several different manufacturers. I think Samsung, Lenovo, and HP have some knowledge of extending the life of their batteries.
https://support-us.samsung.com/cyber/popup/iframe/pop_troubl...
"...it is strongly recommended to select "Optimize for Battery Lifesapn mode" or Conservation Mode and keep AC adapter connected alll the time. This mode will enable the battery to be fully charged to 80% or 60% of its design capacity."
https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/solutions/ht069687
I have little reason to think a similar concept applies to phone batteries, as they're usually a similar chemistry these days.
Common knowledge and from what I've read about batteries the last two decades. And from using AccuBattery.
Please do state why it is wrong, so we can sort it out :)
Both samsung and apple says that you should have at least 50% charge if you store the device long term and also avoid going too low and leave it empty.
I get that apple/samsung will not recommend not charging 100%, from using accubattery (play store) they say that a full charge uses about one charge cycle, but charging to 82% does not take any charge cycle.
From what I've read the best thing for the longevity of the battery would then be to have it between 20 and 80%. But if you will replace the battery or phone after 500 charging cycles you could just charge it to 100% as much as you like. But never go below 20%.
AccuBattery should really add a warning about the battery health when going under 20%.
I did not know that it's possible to monitor battery health in iphone settings nowadays, that's great!
Can you share why it's wrong? I learned the same thing as the OP and would love to learn more. As far as I learned, the more harmful part is discharging to very low levels, especially if you use it until it shuts off and then don't connect it to the charger for a long time. Is that also no longer the case?
I know that manufacturers sometimes gate off some of the capacity so that the battery doesn't actually reach extremely high or low levels of charge, but that would still imply that avoiding the very high and low ends of the reachable spectrum would still be helpful, just maybe not as much.
>Why spend $1,449 on an XS Max when you could have replaced the battery on your phone for $29?
Just have to crack that digitally signed battery cable ;)
Jokes aside, Apple been deliberately reducing their products' repairability since at least iphone 3. I myself had a side business of selling factory refurbished phones when I was an exchange student in Singapore from 2007 to 2009. Malaysian refurbishers told me that in the middle of production run, Apple deliberately began gluing their front glass to the display with impossible to undo glue to nuke any chance of profitable refurbishment.
In contrast to "dumb" phones of Japanese brands, that were designed for extreme manufacturability, Apple's products are unique in that regard to be engineered with an opposite goal.
Yes please let me spend more on an "inferior product" (without a headphone jack) instead of replacing the battery
Funnily enough I got an email about availability of the new models for a discounted price "for a limited time only". Maybe their prices will be reviewed?
Once you lose that giant bezel it looks really jarring on phones that still have it. As for the headphone jack, for many, it doesn't make the phone inferior any more than the MacBook is inferior for not including an ethernet port.
Once you lose that giant bezel, you get it back immediately by putting that phone in a case.
And very few people won't do it to a phone that costs several hundred dollars to buy, and that will likely suffer considerable damage if you ever drop it on any hard surface without a case.
We once waited until the tech matured before removing older legacy components. Last I checked, Bluetooth audio still sucks, and Apple knows it, which is why they supplied a dongle to get around the justified complaints.
I guess that depends on your definition of sucking. Between AirPods, random $10 BT speakers, my car, and a pair of Bose QC's, my phone (X) works well with BT, but I may not be a discerning audiophile.
It isn't even the clicks or stutters, though that can be annoying. It's the stickiness. I turn on my bluetooth speaker and ... it connects to a phone in the other room. So, now I have to walk through the house to find it and turn off bluetooth. Now I can connect to the speaker with my phone.
Headphones, same issue, phone wants to initially connect to any other bluetooth device except the headphones in my hand. So, now I have to dig into settings, etc... I don't have that issue with 3.5mm jacks.
I totally agree with you. This also does not make any sense to me:
> US dollar strength-related price increases
A weaker dollar (due to inflation, etc.) is the reason that consumer prices increase. A stronger dollar in theory should make the prices decrease.
EDIT: I understand that a stronger dollar means the prices in other currencies will increase, but I was referring to specifically the price in US markets. Pretty sure the iPhone prices in the United States increased as well.
A stronger dollar in theory should make the prices decrease.
But for whom? If you're outside the US, and I'll remind you that most of the world, including China, is, then goods effectively priced in US dollars will be more expensive.
The US price increases aren't being attributed to the strong dollar. The letter is referring to the reasons Chinese sales are weaker than predicted. The stronger dollar is one of those reasons.
But I'm still a bit confused on it. How is Foxconn being paid? In dollars or in yuan? If the dollar is strong, shouldn't the BOM and manufacturing costs decline in lockstep with the Chinese buyers' purchasing power (relative to USD)?
I imagine the BOM and manufacturing costs aren't as big as paying all of those employees at 1 Apple Park Way, their IP holding companies overseas, or all their construction costs on billion dollar campuses they're building, who are being paid in dollars.
They increase the price in US, they also increase the price in local currency ON top of that, to hedge the currency fluctuations. In the end, the oversea consumers pay much more even in terms of us dollars.
So US probably has the cheapest iPhone in the world.
If the shortfall is indeed almost entirely within China, then it is fair to say that all of the usual criticisms you see on the Internet at large, where people explain why Apple products are not good enough/too expensive/whatever for them personally, are irrelevant.
The issue here is entirely around Apple and China.
While Greater China and other emerging markets accounted for the vast majority of the year-over-year iPhone revenue decline, in some developed markets, iPhone upgrades also were not as strong as we thought they would be.
Sounds to me that it isn't just China. The new phones are even more expensive then the previous ones. It's kind of hard to imagine that those high prices have no impact on sales and I would have at least expected there to be a mention about pricing in the letter.
In fact, most of our revenue shortfall to our guidance, and over 100 percent of our year-over-year worldwide revenue decline, occurred in Greater China across iPhone, Mac and iPad.
I don’t think iPhones are the problem as it’s not just Apple that’s having sales issues in China. You can find articles like the one below for many tech luxury brands.
> then it is fair to say that all of the usual criticisms you see on the Internet at large, where people explain why Apple products are not good enough/too expensive/whatever for them personally, are irrelevant.
You could swap out Apple with pretty much anything and you'll be accurate. The person commenting on the internet all day isn't representative of the average person.
I'm sure if you included the effective subsidies China-homed conglomerates enjoy, the ratio of COGS between e.g. Apple and Huawei could be as high as 4:1. Huawei can certainly afford to make phones cost 1/4th as much, although Apple could also afford to cut prices by 38 percentage points (as per their margins).
On the other hand, China-homed companies aren't responsible to public markets (Wall Street really) in the same way US-homed are. You could book a 1% margin, but your family owns the company, so the board isn't going to take away your private jet, let alone dump you as CEO.
In the US, the "family owned" (in the sense of being management controlled) mega-techs like Facebook and Snapchat are actually suffering greatly due to their poor accountability. It's truly bad for equities, even while Facebook and Snapchat book ever-growing revenues.
It will be an interesting reckoning. Not the change in consumer tastes in China, mind you, which doesn't really matter for share prices. It'll be an inevitable change in corporate culture.
After all, there are millions of extraordinarily talented people in China who will want the kinds of riches and glamor only a certain privileged minority get to experience. If the bottom line doesn't motivate public accountability, ambition will. That's healthy for everyone, but it will signal the end of sclerotic, state sponsored corporations in China.
So as always, the Chinese consumer is the victim. They get to enjoy phones that cost 1/4th as much as an iPhone. But in exchange, they forfeit a certain kind of life fulfillment that, in my opinion, they deserve.
Let's say that there are no external factors, like changes to China's economy. If this is just Chinese customers being price sensitive, I stick with what I said above.
Me sitting in Toronto saying, "iPhone is too expensive for me, I have a mortgage to pay" is still irrelevant, because Apple is hitting its targets in Canada, the US, and so forth. Maybe it is too expensive for me personally (I'm on an iPhone but it's a 6, not a 6s, not a 7, not an 8, not an X of any kind), but I don't speak for my economic zone.
If there is no subsidies in US from carriers, I would say that would be a better comparison. Consider that 40% US family had less than 400 in their bank account.
Interest free installments are all well and good, but as subsidies were phased out, there was really no decrease in overall plan price. So now we pay full freight on the handset and still have the same bill.
I don't know all of the details, but I recall working with something like that twenty-five years ago, and usually there are a lot of tax breaks and so forth, because most of what's getting manufactured is exported. Jobs stay, products go.
So if you then sell those products in the same country, they want some of the taxes and and so forth.
The alternative would be to charge all the taxes, then manufacturers would file paperwork to get a refund for the goods they exported.
This system streamlines that for the case where the intent is to export more than is sold domestically.
Oh very much so. That's why China is careful about starting a trade war with Apple. They want to get their own manufacturers up to speed to replace Apple, but they don't want to just kick Apple out of China in one stroke and penalize the Chinese businesses that depend upon Apple.
If it wasn't for that, Apple and their strong privacy approach would be Persona Non Grata, IM-uninformed-O.
Indeed, and that why Apple was actually cranking up their effort to get more "presence on the ground" in China.
Apple tries to be less public about them having HUUGE R&D and business units in China with lots of things being done here.
In 2016 they posted a tiny press release about them opening their "first" R&D centre in China in Shenzhen, and deliberately making an impression of it having no significant role.
In reality, it was their _third_ RnD centre in Shenzhen only. Besides their nominal "design centre" in Kerry plaza, they rent a whole building in Discovery park in Nanshan, and have own section in Foxconn campus. The rumor is that they also rent yet another office for their product/project management staff somewhere closer to Longhua.
Seems weird to me too that people in China pay duty on a Chinese made phone. You say it's not weird. I think it's weird, like the guy you responded to. Difference of opinion I guess.
Hey, it may seem weird, but here's one way it might work. Again, I know jack-shit about the specifics.
If some portion of the phone is imported, and that portion has duties, under normal circumstances Apple's subcontractor would import that thing, pay the duty on it, then export the phone and file for the duties to be refunded.
If the phone stays in China, the duty applies. So there may be duties involved if there are materials imported to China for assembly.
iPhones are made in special export zones, along with many other made in China products. SEZs don’t tarrif on inputs (components, raw material, factory machinery from Germany), so outputs are considered not made in China for the purpose of tariffing, even though they are technically made in China.
Apple was the first foreign company to price their computers and phones reasonably in China. Before the markup was around 50%, after Apple opened its first Apple stores in China that markup fell to 10-20%, which is about inline with tariffs.
I think if I want to invest in AAPL today I'd rather focus on this: "Services generated over $10.8 billion in revenue during the quarter, growing to a new quarterly record in every geographic segment, and we are on track to achieve our goal of doubling the size of this business from 2016 to 2020." Apple is definitely trying (successfully IMO) to diversify its business to services-centric and that is exciting to me!
Looking at the increase in Apple's services revenue ($8.5B, Q1 '18 -> $10.8B Q1 '19 -> $2.3B YoY increase) vs. increase in service revenue due to Google sharing ($9B - $3B = $6B / 4 quarters = $1.5B), we get that approximately 65% of Apple's incremental services revenue is due to increased revenue sharing from Google. IMO, this doesn't seem like a long term sustainable source of revenue growth for Apple.
The actual numbers are in Google's quarterly reports as "traffic acquisition costs".
That figure bundles in the costs paid to Dell and hp to have Google the default search engine on those machines, but I think we can be pretty sure that is dwarfed by the amount paid to Apple...
Based on Q1-Q3 earnings, TAC to all distribution partners in Google's reports is approximately $13B in 2018. This is approximate since Q4 results are not released yet.
The services business includes the app store fees like the one that Netflix is getting out of, so that revenue stream might have some challenges of it's own.
Services also includes Apple’s anticipated video / TV offering, which will be 100% additive vs 30% (15% recurring) from Netflix customers willing to pay the upcharge.
Yes - I think that will become a bigger trend among apps that have hit mass scale, which are probably the exact apps that make up the bulk of those fees.
Here's what I posted elsewhere in this thread that addresses it:
"The actual product is the Apple ecosystem and that's the bet Apple is making.
Right now, the ecosystem is tied together by iOS whose most popular incarnation is iPhone. But iOS was so successful that it has an install base of over 1 billion users.
That's nothing less than an incredible user-base - a hell of a foundation. If they can sustain that install base with iterative iPhones while strengthening their ecosystem through value-add products like Apple Watch, AirPods, HomePod and Apple Music, then they have potentially many cash cows with dramatically high ceilings and reach.
This is a good bet for them because it plays to their strengths and they've earned incredibly loyal customers over the years.
iPhone may not be the future of Apple, but it is the core from which many futures will emerge. It'll still be a critical product for Apple, but no longer a key top-line growth driver. And that's OK, that's how innovation cycles go. iPhone made it possible for them to start on 3rd base for the next cycle."
I think they are generally selling fewer phones because people are sticking to their iPhone 6 or 7 rather than switch to a $1500 XS. They are not switching to Android.
As an investor what you would be betting on is that services revenue growth will be enough to compensate for the negative iPhone revenue growth. For the previous quarter, iPhone revenue was ~3.7x the services revenue. So if the iPhone revenue drops by ~30% in the next 2 years and the services revenue hits the goal of doubling since 2016(~12B), you would essentially see a flat overall revenue which is problematic.
> "Apple innovates like no other company on earth, and we are not taking our foot off the gas."
Apple has indeed accomplished many things since Jobs handed over the reins, but delivering a new, innovative compelling product line is not one of them. If they finally deliver on the Apple Car or some as yet unknown new product, they might finally fully move out of the shadow of Jobs' final tenure.
If not, they will find their existing product lines eaten away by relentless, industry commoditization. Having to bump profit margins on the iPhone X was their first serious stumble -- only to be rectified, if they can deliver a new, compelling product line in the next 1 to 2 years.
Apple Watch and Air Pods are two examples of innovative and compelling products introduced since Jobs left. Cook notes today how well they are selling, and that's after reporting in July that trailing 4Q revenue topped $10 billion on 60% growth--which is more revenue than iPods did over any 4 quarter span, BTW.
Usually when people complain that Apple hasn't delivered a great product since Jobs left, they are comparing to the iPhone. But it's important to remember that Jobs himself only delivered a product like the iPhone once! No other Apple product line, no Macs, no iPods, no iPad, nothing, ever came close to the impact of the iPhone.
If the iPhone is your bar of success for a new Apple product, I feel pretty confident that you're going to be disappointed. But Apple doesn't need another iPhone to grow very well for a long time.
>>Apple has indeed accomplished many things since Jobs handed over the reins, but delivering a new, innovative compelling product line is not one of them.
What company has, though?
My observation is that, while technology evolves very quickly, revolutionary product lines appear about once per generation. iPhones came out in 2007, so we have at least another decade to go.
I mean, I think that's false even among Apple! The iPod came out in, what, 2001? I think a lot of people then (and me, now) would have said that that was a genuinely revolutionary product.
I don’t see why the iPod was revolutionary. While it was a very popular product, and set a high bar for MP3 players, at the end of the day it was still just another MP3 player. It didn’t create entirely new ecosystems and allow people to do things they previously couldn’t, the way the iPhone did.
I think far more revolutionary in the long term with the iPod were the digital licensing deals they managed to forge with the record labels. However, for a device of it's time it did hold novel technical features.
Agree. And not to overstate the role of the CEO or to open up a can of worms about Steve Jobs, the fact is that Steve was a product guy and Tim is an operations guy. And not that creating innovative new products that will sell at worldwide scale is easy, but they haven't come up with one in a while.
That’s what people have said over and over again. What’s the difference between BMW and Apple? Why doesn’t BMW need to get into a completely new product line all the time? (Outside of cars)
1) BMW is a much smaller company, 15x smaller than Apple. Apple's valuation is partly based on them pocketing _most_ of the smartphone profits globally. There is no expectation like that towards BMW. Remember, stock market is a game about expectations.
2) Cars don't seem to be a winner-takes-it-all market. IT services are not always like that either, but closer. It doesn't make your life harder if your friend is using a VW and you're driving a Toyota; but it does make a difference if your friend is on iMessage and you're on Android. So there's a market force towards oligopoly.
1) so if size is an argument: does google need to have a new product every 5 yrs? I don’t think google has innovated outside its main product “search” (like a new category with a major source of revenue on the size of search). They’re doing just fine
2) that’s actually a strong argument pro Apple and not against them (that’s like saying: no one will ever use another search engine than google and because of that they’re growing bigger and bigger)
Exactly. Imagine how silly it would sound if someone said "Not sure about this new BMW CEO chaps, unless we see some innovation from the company like them developing a line of smartphones or computer tablets and an app store, we can safely say they are not properly innovating"
> we believe there are other factors broadly impacting our iPhone performance, including consumers adapting to a world with fewer carrier subsidies, US dollar strength-related price increases, and some customers taking advantage of significantly reduced pricing for iPhone battery replacements
Dropping the SE - the one affordable iPhone - is starting to look like a really bad move for Apple.
Exactly. There are tons of people (like myself) who wanted a small smartphone that gets the job done and gets out of the way. Apple blew every bit of that market away for reasons I can't fathom.
And since everyone copies apple, get ready for massive slabs across the entire smartphone market.
The difference is that most phones were large due to limitations of miniaturization of the tech. Now it's mostly for aesthetic reasons, which is fine, as long as manufacturers make smaller form factors. Apple stopped doing that, so expect everyone else to follow suit and make phablets from now on.
This is definitely not true. I worked in the smartphone industry before and at the time Apple started making large phones. Rumor had it Apple stuck with small phones because Steve Jobs wanted them to stick with the same screen size to avoid apps looking different on different iphones. Regardless, everyone was making them large because it provided the best user experience and eventually Apple switched to it as well because it put them at a disadvantage in terms of user experience.
Even the term 'phablet' was coined before Apple switched to large phones.
In late November 2017 no-contract SEs were going for $99 at some stores. A year later the price had dropped to $79. I bought one at $99 to use as an mp3 player and camera. Works great. I don't want a phone that's any larger because it won't fit comfortably into my pockets. Still using for day-to-day actual phone use a pretty great similar sized Android phone I bought for much less. I prefer it because it has an SD slot and replaceable battery and uses USB, all better AFAIAC than no SD slot, no replaceable battery and no USB. Phones are cheap and the cheap phones are very good.
Maybe in the US, but where I live (Eastern Europe) the cheapest 32GB iPhone7 is still about 200 euros more expensive compared to the iPhone SE I purchased about a year ago. 200 euros is a sum that matters for a lot of people, including myself.
450 Comments And no one has done any numbers. May be I am the few who are actually interested in this, I did these for fun during Xmas as Data from many analysts companies were made public. I wish I had post some of it before Apple revised their guidance. Oh well.
Last Year they had $88.3B, this Year their lowest guidance were $89, so roughly the same. But Apple knew well ahead that they had new iPad, new MacBook Air, new Apple Watch for this quarter. They also changed their accounting to move revenue from Apple Maps and Siri to Services instead of bundled with their Products. So they knew Services were going to have a substantial increase.
In other words, they knew their Non-iPhone revenue were going to increase YoY.
They knew, nearly in real time their iPhone XS were doing well when launched, factored in the Q4 2018 quarter. That was what pushed the record Q4 quarter numbers, by those analytics over 30% of XS in total were sold during first two weeks, out of a total 14 weeks since launched.
In other words, to have made that initial guidance, Apple were expecting Xr to be a great seller. Everything from Non-iPhone and XS has been better than expectation, it was only the Xr that let them down. Xs Max has been doing better than possibly Apple has estimated likely pushing ASP even higher ( even though they may no longer release the number ) So 5% lower revenue is actually better that most would have expected.
All these leads to Xr. The Xr were targeting general buyers, but they were used to paying $749 for latest Smartphone, which the current $999/ $1099 are out of their bracket. Some have extended battery life that want their iPhone last longer. And more importantly in China, the price / performance gap between Chinese made Android Phone and Apple iPhone has never been greater. Huawei, Vivo, OnePlus and Mi.
If we assume the the ASP increase were roughly 15% compared to last year, we can estimate this year Apple had ~25% drop in unit sold. ~57.7M Compared to last year 77.3M.
Now more importantly, what will the guidance be for Apple on Q2?
Edit: I think this is the best thing happen to Post Steve Jobs Apple and I hope Q2 will be even worst and served as a Wake up Call. In my opinion for the past years Apple has been doing something wrong with their design and features decisions that add cost while brings little to no value to users. Touch Bar, Curved inside Bezel display, Butterfly Keyboard etc. While trying to nickel and dime on many areas, lack of fast charging, new lighting cable connector ( lower cost but higher resistance ) etc. Apple under Tim Cook has been far to concern about 20% Net Margin and other numbers.
Your comment paints a worse picture than I thought. Mostly because I think a great majority of potential customers are hoping apple will finally eat dirt, get the market's message and stop their new trends, but with those numbers in hand they might think that their mistake was selling the lower priced product and continue on their path on all other areas...
1) China, obviously, if luxury perceived items like Apple products are slowing then that is a real indicator of the economy truly slowing regardless what the government states.
2) Having to full develop an in store trade in program pretty much is admission they priced themselves out of the market
> then that is a real indicator of the economy truly slowing regardless what the government states
A bunch of prominent economic figures out of China in the last month or two have pointed to a near-recession there. They're outright lying about 6.5% growth (if it's more than 1/4 that I'd be surprised), their economy is getting close to contracting. Their manufacturing sector is about to tip into recession [1] (guaranteed with the worst of the tariff hit just starting now) and their consumption tax numbers [2] have imploded at a historic rate. The iPhone sales drop in China aligns with the drop in the consumption figures there. Their credit impulse is deeply negative, which is a particularly bad thing to have happening with all the other negative numbers. Their new export orders PMI is in deep contraction.[3] They've got a lot of banks that need recapitalized soon with a central government intent on constraining the growth of further debt. In the cities you're seeing a painful wave of deflationary pressure hitting their housing market, with their world-leading vacancy rates on housing units (epic overbuilding) only making it worse.
They played that Appel Status Symbol card for too long. In China, Yuan's depreciation should also be counted, so eventually Apple raised the price for local customer for about 30%, north to 10k in Chinese Yuan. In fact with 4 times that much money you can buy a budget car in China.
People chasing status symbol but they are not fools, and the local brands offer good enough quality with only 40% of the price, you know what to choose.
> People chasing status symbol but they are not fools
I think that is the real risk to Apple. Right now iPhones (esp. in China) are a status symbol, but public opinion is a fickle thing. It's possible rising nationalism in China could also lead to an atmosphere where buying an iPhone is looked down upon as an exercise in conspicuous consumption but paid to China's enemy (when home grown phones are "just as" good). When that happens, Apple really is in dire straits. Apple needs to ensure they can innovate faster than the competition, but with a lot of value shifting to AI-related services (not necessarily Apple's strong point - compare Siri to Alexa or Google Assistant), that's a tough battle for Apple.
Nationalism is one thing. My observation is that Chinese people generally hold favorable opinions towards Apple, it has a harmless image: selling good phones that happen to be really good looking.
But I would say the real reason that Apple is suffering now is that they stopped to innovate. Those touted innovations on their press conference is hardly convincing that they are essential to my user experience. Gimmicks, like Animojis are showcased and centred during the once a year event to communicate to their customers. It is embarrassing and laughable.
And I blame Apple itself 100% on this, they are setting on a largest pile of cash that mankind every entrusted to a private corporate and does nothing. Now comes the recoknining, and it is probably overdue.
I don't necessarily agree Apple stopped innovating, but I think that as the smartphone market has matured the places ripe for innovation are not in areas of Apple's strengths. For example, Apple's design and hardware/software integration excellence were absolutely perfectly aligned with the transitions from "phone" to "high powered computer in your pocket". But now most of the innovation is happening it data-related AI areas where Google and Amazon are much stronger. I mean, Apple Maps was released 6 years ago, and while it has improved by leaps and bounds I still don't see any reason to use it over Google Maps (and that is despite Google Maps becoming ever more annoying with more clutter every release).
> People [are] chasing [a] status symbol but they are not fools
I’m not an economist nor social scientist, but I don’t think a simple “fool” judgement necessarily explains what motivates. Mind the story below is from 2009 and of luxury automobiles, but my point stands... I feel like the “rationalization” for events is just post-hoc acknowledgement of “which way the wind blows”.
1. Possibly. It could also mean that apple is reaching saturation and evolving from growth sales to replacement-level sales as purchased products get old and wear out.
I couldn’t care less about those features. I’ve never met anyone who says they would buy a new iPhone if only it had those features.
The problem is the iPhone has been so good for a few iterations now. There is absolutely no reason to buy a new one unless you are gaming. I can’t tell the difference between the 7, the X or the XS in terms of day to day capability.
It used to be there was a good reason to upgrade every year. Now you can easily go 2-3 years without missing much.
I dumped my iPhone 7 this year for an Android. I would have upgraded if they still had headphone jacks. Bluetooth headphones are garbage: I have enough things to charge and I wear my headphones pretty much every waking hour of my life. Any contemporary android phone with a headphone jack seemed like a better value proposition than a current iPhone.
I value good headphones too. Which is why I simply leave the small lightning-to-jack-adapter attached to them. A minor inconvenience that surely won't make me swith from an otherwise fantastic phone and platform. And of course the headphone jack is on its way out in Android land as well.
IMO you are on point. As an X user I couldn't care less about the XS or XS Max (even though I do want a bigger screen since I read a lot) since they are small and iterative upgrades but people I know who switched from 6S / 7 to XS are very happy with their choice.
Wait till you try using your fancy Airbuds on an airplane or on a crowded street. They's simply not enough wireless bandwidth available for more than a dozen people in a small area to be using them
Never had that problem. I'm certainly not going to preemptively switch from iPhone to Android - which has a laundry list of its own problems far larger than the lack of a headphone jack - in order to avoid an issue that may or may not occur with a function that isn't one of my primary use cases in the first place.
I have a pair of headphones I like that can connect via bluetooth or wire. I have a headphone dongle that works even if it is a minor inconvenience. I also have the cheap lightning headphones that came with the phone.
Basically, the headphone jack issue has been mitigated to the point where it's simply not an issue for a lot of people. Maybe it costs Apple a sale here and there. I would be willing to bet a significant number of buyers don't realize it's missing and an even larger number don't care enough to make an issue out of it.
The headphone jack issue is old news anyway. It's been multiple iterations that haven't had it and some of them sold well. It has absolutely no bearing on sales of current models.
An iPhone that's Slightly fatter (fill the space with a larger battery), headphone jack, and a "smaller" screen. Of course, have all of the latest hardware (camera, soc, etc.).
Or, a MacBook Pro, again slightly fatter (larger battery), with a great keyboard, actual ports (no dongles), and no touch bar. Give us the option for a matte screen to totally blow our socks off.
I'd buy those two devices tomorrow if Apple introduced them.
He dances around the point so many times, but never comes out and says it (and of course he wouldn't) - The 2018/2019 lineup of iPhones is TOO EXPENSIVE and this is causing a significant number of people, particularly in "emerging markets" (i.e. poor people) not to buy iPhones.
The surprise is that they didn't expect that raising the price by 20% wouldn't have an impact like this
The iPhone XS was the exact same price as the X and that sold plenty fine. It wasn't the price as his letter points out, much to the dismay of many people.
It could be a slightly lesser effect; people were willing to buy the S models of previous iPhones, even though the changes weren't that big on the surface, because the price was lower, however when the phone is so expensive, people wait for a bigger change before buying a new phone. The iPhone S was a gigantic change relative to all other new models of iPhone; the Xs is mostly more of the same.
Or that might not be the reason, I don't know enough to analyze the situation by far. I just don't think we should rule out the extreme price increase as a potential partial explanation.
I think that's the key. I've upgraded every year for many years, but I just wasn't compelled to do it this year. I love my X, and it's still working great! I fully expect to upgrade next year.
That's not true. Users usually upgrade in cohorts. Not everyone upgrades every year and those upgrade cycles are getting longer industry-wide as Apple and others have acknowledged repeatedly.
What you said doesn't contradict him/her. As an X user, XS and XS Max are very minor upgrades and are absolutely not worth the 1450 - 1500 EUR of price.
But the people I know who switched from 6S / 7 are very much happy with their decision to buy an XS.
You just described me. I am still tempted because I want a bigger screen (I read a lot on my phone) but I cannot justify the ~1450 EUR price that the XS Max at 256GB storage sits at around here in Eastern Europe.
Agreed - This is what their strategy overlooked. Lineup needs to exceed expectations to justify price increase y/y, but revisions are increasingly minor since the 7 lineup.
Some emerging markets (e.g. Malaysia, Vietnam) generated record revenue. It was China in specific that underperformed and recent economic numbers for China are also underperforming (GDP growth during the September quarter was the second lowest in the last 25 years).
They are self-competing. An iPhone 6 is good enough for me for a fraction of the price. The problem sadly is their older products are of good quality, so there is less obsolescence there. The sad bit is that if they made crappier phones they'd sell more of the new ones.
I agree that the new phones are too expensive (the price of the XS has got me hanging onto my iPhone 7 for another year), but it sounds like the "emerging markets" fail was mostly China. But the issue is that China is a huge market, emerging or not.
>We believe the economic environment in China has been further impacted by rising trade tensions with the United States. As the climate of mounting uncertainty weighed on financial markets, the effects appeared to reach consumers as well, with traffic to our retail stores and our channel partners in China declining as the quarter progressed. And market data has shown that the contraction in Greater China’s smartphone market has been particularly sharp.
How would fallout from Huawei have anything to do with fewer people walking into Apple stores and buying a new Apple product? Have the prices risen or something? Are people afraid of being kidnapped if they walk into an Apple store?
To me, it is just a lame hyperpolitical straw man excuse as to why they aren't selling more products. It has zero to do with China, imo. It has to do with people not NEEDING a new device, so they are upgrading (a lot) less frequently. Personally, I'm on about a 5 year upgrade cycle now. Apple will have a harder time going forward having increasing records year after year, because they mostly rely on new hardware sales. I think we're kind of coming to a Moores law type effect in terms of hardware perception (not design/capability). There just isn't enough of a perceivable or revolutionary innovative difference for the average person to justify purchasing a new multi $k machine year after year. For most people (non power users), they get no actual tangible benefit. An iPhone X will perform just as well for the vast majority of an average users applications as an iphone 8.
China is showing all kinds of evidence of an economic slowdown (not a contraction, just not growing as fast). I am sure that Apple has very specific projections on a per-country and per-region basis. If they say that the problem is their China projections, I'm quite sure that's true. They would be facing a huge shareholder lawsuit otherwise, given this letter.
>Third, we knew we had an unprecedented number of new products to ramp during the quarter and predicted that supply constraints would gate our sales of certain products during Q1.
> ... AirPods and MacBook Air were also constrained.
(emphasis mine) Interesting that Apple still can't manage to make AirPods, a 2 year old product, fast enough. I wonder why that is.
Also interesting that AirPods are still the new hotness with plenty of people. Usually the interest goes down after launch, but my anecdotal experience suggests that, at least where I live, the interest has certainly risen.
I think maybe it's something like the fashion adoption curve: first almost everyone thinks something looks radical and weird, but a few people adopt it; then a few more think it looks acceptable-enough, then it becomes slowly more mainstream, then it is mainsteam, then it looks old-fashioned, then no-one uses it anymore.
I know that in my own case I think that AirPods look ridiculous and stupid, and I can't believe anyone allows himself to be seen in public with them. But I think that less now than I did two years ago, and presumably in another two years I'll think that less still. No doubt in a decade I'll think that they don't look dumb at all, and maybe someday I'll have AirPods or something similar. And then one day I'll quit wearing them, because they're out of fashion again.
Heck, digital watches were popular for about 15–20 years, right? Maybe AirPods will someday be looked at as the digital watches of the early 2000s.
I bought a few AirPods as gifts this year. I think it comes down to iPhone user's not upgrading (due to cost) and instead looking towards accessories for their existing devices.
My wife should be due for a phone upgrade but instead she got the battery replacement a few months ago and AirPods for Christmas.
Airpods were arguably the best mobile innovation in the last few years but the tech media and commentariat were too busy griping about the headphone jack to really notice. So the spread has been steady instead of like the iPad where everyone got one the first couple years.
Tucking my Apple Admirer badge under the keyboard for a moment, they can't make the promised wireless charging pad at all.
Tim Cook is one of the finest CEOs of his generation, but he cannot walk on water, and neither can his company. They do some things well, and on others, their reach exceeds their grasp.
I am well aware of the difference, my point is that Apple is unevenly great. They have hits and misses, they do brilliant things with the supply chain... And they have some clunkers.
I'm in the same boat, I like my headphone jack. And honestly the phone is fast enough.
But I'd like a better camera so I took a look:
The other thing that isn't helping apple is the went from a simple system to understand iphone 6, 7 8 (s for the bigger models (edit: whoops I meant plus.). To so iPhone Xr, X, Xs.. I can't tell it the iPhone 8 is the end of the line for the numbered iPhones with a front button. Basically I'll have to do some research.
They made a page to help, but when comparing phones, price is an important factor to compare...
> The other thing that isn't helping apple is the went from a simple system to understand iphone 6, 7 8 (s for the bigger models).
S has always been for second models with the same number (kind of like a minor version), they invariably are released one year after and are the same size (not bigger) as the corresponding non-S version (the XS Max is the only exception, there is no X Max, and XS Max is just a bigger same-year cousin of the XS, but the XS has the normal S-to-non-S relation to the X.)
This holds the whole way back to the first S, the 3GS.
I have an original X and love it. I see no need to upgrade to the newer X. Wife has an 8 and kid has a 6S. Only thing that would get me to upgrade would be the X in the form factor of the iPhone5.
Just to share an anecdote from my experience in China. I was in Beijing over the holidays and met up with a handful of friends who live there, surprisingly they all switched to Huawei within the past year, three of them even in the past 2 months. The Huawei phones they use are flagship models and not cheaper than iPhones and they have all been Apple users for years (like myself) and who still use Macs today.
I asked each one of them if patriotism or the recent Huawei/US kerfuffle influenced their decision. They all resoundingly said no. When I asked why they chose Huawei after being in the Apple ecosystem for a decade, all of them said "camera". They said camera quality isn't about DXO scores or 4k60 but being able to take "beautiful" photos out of the box for some definition of beautiful. To them, iPhoneXS is the same if not worse than a 6, because the iPhone camera doesn't take more "beautiful" photos, only more "realistic" ones.
Obviously anecdotes are meaningless and all that, but I want to note that China is a very homogeneous society given its population, so even a brief first-person glimpse into people's everyday lives can be pretty telling. I would not be comfortable making similar conclusions about any other cluster of 1.3B people.
TL,DR: I don't buy that the economic downturn in China and the Huawei/US situation are the sole perpetrators of Apple's problem in China. Apple is missing opportunities due not innovating in certain crucial areas.
>> because the iPhone camera doesn't take more "beautiful" photos, only more "realistic" ones.
I hear this all the time from friends and family. Such and such camera is so much better.
Most of the time the images really aren't. The brightness is just cranked up or something, the image doesn't look that great. I'm not sure why the iPhone doesn't have better low-light settings, even my 8 Plus doesn't take very good pictures indoors if I don't use a different camera app.
> When I asked why they chose Huawei after being in the Apple ecosystem for a decade, all of them said "camera". They said camera quality isn't about DXO scores or 4k60 but being able to take "beautiful" photos out of the box for some definition of beautiful. To them, iPhoneXS is the same if not worse than a 6, because the iPhone camera doesn't take more "beautiful" photos, only more "realistic" ones.
By "beautiful," do they mean those auto-Photoshopped images that are popular in China; where they eyes are made bigger, chin pointier, and skin lighter?
> Popular smartphones like the Samsung Galaxy S8, the Galaxy S7, the Huawei P9, and many others often feature something called "Beauty" or "Beauty mode" when you turn on the front camera to take a selfie.
> Theoretically, it does what it says on the tin: airbrushing magic to make you look prettier in photos. Usually, it makes your skin look smoother and your eyes brighter.
A lot of Apple fan here are in denial that iPhone is a boring product, probably for some time now. Huawei P20 had 6 cameras and take super high-resolution lossless photos. At least that is something consumer is willing to buy.
What is worrying in addition to the global economy slowing down is the volatility and how the stock market closed 2018. I believe a new crash is imminent and I hope this time we have our seatbelts on.
Sorry Apple I bought then returned the iPhone XS(happy with 8)...
- No home button
- no Touch ID... I can no longer quickly unlock phone with thumb .. Face ID is no good and can be dangerous in certain situations we all can relate but don’t admit (i.e. in stand stil traffic)
- it’s too big.. I can’t one handed text
Hoping some of the above is addressed and brought back in the 2019 models.
This might not be popular, but here goes:
I wonder if knowing that he will have to share this news with his investors is why he came up with that semi-religious cult-like speech about exercising corporate censorship at the ADL not that long ago (https://www.macrumors.com/2018/12/03/tim-cook-adl-keynote-sp...), if that was his way of pandering to an audience in hopes of getting some additional sales...
I might be wrong but it's happened several times before where companies were trying to drum up some support by suddenly being extremely "woke" just before having to come out with some bad news.
I really doubt that “woke” speeches do much to drive sales, but I’d wager his speech to the privacy commissioners had a larger effect than the ADL one.
What the hell is Greater China... Odd context to use as a company when better alternatives (that are less politically charged) are available. Very strange to see such an appeasement term being used.
China the SARs and Taiwan. It’s meant to be least politically charged since you refer to both Taiwan and mainland without, you know, without specifying which one is the more legitimate China.
The Chinese governement has since long tried to "shift vibes about Apple" through the "China Central Television".
In 2013 it was named together with the "820 Party", i don't know what happened now though. But i'm not sure that "blaming it on the trade war" tells the entire tale.
PS. They did the same thing with Google, after "Operation Aurora" happened. That was the moment that Google left China.
I wonder how long before Apple offers a One-Google like offering they really embrace the recurring revenue model. Imagine if Apple could get people to pay $20 a month for Photo storage, iCloud storage, some TV offering, and possibly some Apple Music.
I hate that we're in this in-between land that requires 3 or 4 different subscriptions to the same company whereas these things in my mind would just be bundled together.
> While Greater China and other emerging markets accounted for the vast majority of the year-over-year iPhone revenue decline, in some developed markets, iPhone upgrades also were not as strong as we thought they would be.
Translation: We tried to charge $1,500 for a phone, but not even our core demographic is this gullible.
Quite funny. Mr. Tim Cook apparently either think investors are stupid or he, and the Apple board, are detached from the reality.
For other people reasons for this is clear. Apple is making slightly improved phones, with the extreme price tag. The pain threshold has been exceeded.
Almost all innovations now are from Asian manufacturers. Notch is not progress, it's a deffect. OLED? It was innovation 8 years ago, with Samsung Galaxy S. A phone as fragile as an egg, with back glass replacement costing $599 (versus $99 for Samsung Galaxy S9+). In my opinion, the only real advantage of iPhones is iOS, without apps slowing down OS, tons of bloatware, and lack of privacy even on the system level. But this not justify
And lastly, batterygate, that weakened trust to the brand, also didn't help here.
> We can’t change macroeconomic conditions, but we are undertaking and accelerating other initiatives to improve our results. One such initiative is making it simple [...]
As a naive person on the outside looking in, why are there no suggested changes to the clearly incorrect estimation approach, especially in volatile markets? If the numbers are not as expected why not look at expectation generation along with other factors instead of ignoring it? Or are they saying in so many words that they can't be blamed due to macroeconomic conditions? Sounds like such a volatile environment would require caution on these short term forecasts. Again I'm naive, I just didn't see it addressed.
Marginal value of a new I(thing) over the prior generation is a significant barrier once it's good enough. There is no looming improvement in UI experience except probably bad ones like the failed 3D push in TV's. I won't pay a premium for a foldable screen or curly edge bezel-less experience right now and I suspect most consumers are feeling much the same entering a trade war focussed global economy. I've got better things to do with my disposable income now.
Apple has a tonne of money. It can solve shareholder disappointment by using it to buy back stock or pay dividends or something.
I don't look to Tim Cook for innovation right now.
Declaration of Interest: disappointed touchbar MacBook owner
They used to, at least in the case of Macintosh. Once it started to show weakness (lack of YoY growth), they rolled it into other measurements. Now, unless all of them flail, they can declare success without you knowing the real story about any one of them.
Apple's fate in China is very similar to German premium car brands – despite being a definite good sell elsewhere, they have no real alternative to actually double down their stakes and investment into China, if not making it their primary focus.
BMW, Audi (WW premium brand) and Mercedes all committed to gigantic investments into growing their presence here in last hew years, and so now has Apple.
In the past, American companies were some of the most passive players in China. It seems that they finally started to notice that China is a no joke market.
The most common dig I continue to read about Apple’s strategy is that the phones are too expensive. But there’s little evidence from their earnings that this is the case. Today’s report reduced guidance by $6 billion and was fully attributed to lagging demand in China. All signs point to the new phones selling very well in the US and anecdotally I’ve noticed lots of my friends and family upgrading to the XS with no regard for the cost. These are not extremely wealthy or otherwise financially irresponsible people.
Say what you will about lack of innovation (which I don’t agree with), but the constant skepticism about cost ignores what consumers actually do in the real world. China is probably not going to be a reliable market for Apple because as Ben Thompson points out, smartphones are much more of a commodity there because consumers don’t value Apple software as highly as consumers elsewhere. If that’s indeed the case there’s not much Apple can do about it because they sell the entire package at a high price point. If people don’t value the hardware and software it’s probably not a market that is going to be good for Apple. Apple wants no part of a race to the bottom commodity market where cost is the sole differentiator. It’s a tough pill to swallow but what we’re talking about is consumer preferences in different markets around the world.
Apple should be worried about customers flocking to cross platform messaging apps in the US, though. Right now US consumers won’t part with Apple largely due to iMessage. What happens if people slowly transition to WhatsApp or FB messenger? I could see this as a real threat if FB continues to innovate in messaging.
Apple has outpriced all its competitors, I have not updated my MacBook Pro for 4 years, not upgraded iPhone for 3, never bought iPad Pro, watch, air pods.
bought last years MacBook Air , 2018 iPad instead .
Apple can reduce pricing by 10-15% or give credits so that people can use it for accessories and apps.
Until it gets price right, market like India can never grow for Apple.
Autopilot, Database of billion+ miles, awesome products in pipeline, given EV is the future, Tesla as Taxi network (the new business plan), the charging network, self driving cars means people will have more time to consume Apple's services, Apple music in Tesla's, Apple pay for transactions, Apple TV also in Tesla's or once level-5 driving is reached then front windshield can be converted to a TV, Wireless charging for these cars (http://www.ubeam.com/)
iPhone upgrades are slow because Moore’s Law is dead and, guess what... the new iPhones don’t offer significantly better performance per physical size.
(And note that Moore’s Law being dead just means density doesn’t double on schedule. I am not suggestion there is zero progress in semiconductor technology.)
Blaming China for slowing demand for its phones screams cop out. They jacked the prices for everything from the Mac to the iPad and the iPhone way too high and customers aren’t buying. Simple as that. I think they’re using China wales a scape goat.
honestly I think the notch may be slightly to blame too, even though it’s totally a non-issue and I actually like it, you need to really get your hands on the device before you realize that it’s great, I wonder how many average users aren’t interested in bothering with what they feel is too quirky or different to be worth the risk, and would rather stick with more familiar ground
also thinking that if nobody had noticed the battery longevity performance degradation “feature” would Apple be sailing more smoothly right now? maybe they depended too much on crafty ways of trying to get people to upgrade and it didn’t pan out so here we are
I think the additional value the newer iphone provides i.e face id and better screens doesn’t warrant the increased price tag. Ideally the price should also be falling like it did for PCs in the 90s.
Apple needs balls. They need to show the world they can innovate where nobody has gone before. An Apple TV with screen and game controllers for $2k would sell like hot cakes. A stackable 'Mac Nano' the size of current Apple TV 4k for under $500. An 'iPhone Y' aimed at the lower end for under $300 so everybody can use Apple Pay, Facetime, etc and get immersed in the Apple ecosystem.
You can't survive in a competitive world with just 10% of the market share since interconnectedness is crucial for the dominance of any platform and that's why you need cheaper macs and phones without losing the appeal of high end products for those who have the money in times of economic duress like the ones to come.
I tend to agree with the sentiment that Apple just hasn't innovated off late like it did in the past. I'm an Apple user and am constantly fighting off the urge to switch to Android given just terrific some of the phone experiences are, over on that side.
I've heard from Youtubers who have maxed out the RAM on their Mac Pros that its absolute garbage at even handling mundane video editing tasks. This was two years ago.
Nonetheless, I won't switch to Android only because of the privacy promises Apple has made & doubled down on. Whereas Google doesn't seem to care so much. The forced auto-login into Chrome browser (desktop) when you login to your Gmail on the browser, was the last straw for me.
However I just don't get just why Apple doesn't loosen those purse strings and spend massively on re-capturing the imagination of the user like it once did.
Is it Tim Cook and the board?
Does the ROI simply not exist in this space anymore no matter the capital spend?
Where - if at all - does Apple see a justifiable spend in the near future - tvs? cars?
Maybe the market response will lead to Apple pricing its products and services more reasonably instead of just making them outright expensive as compared to the competition.
Remember, China is the second largest economy in the world. There was a HN article awhile back arguing that China is taxed as an emerging market (low tax), but is dollar size of a mature market. So, two questions:
Is China considered a maturing market?
Is China considered a mature market?
I don’t think just positive growth counts as maturing (even the US still grows), so I think the answers have to be mutually exclusive. Maybe you could argue the rate of growth makes it maturing, but I would love to compare it to the rate of US growth from 1950's-60's (was the considered US maturing or mature during that period?).
It's big but still has a lot of structural problems like any emerging market (e.g. very high unemployment, poor statistical data, only quasi-free markets, very high poverty rates, low per capita gdp, poor judicial system, et al). So it's pretty clearly an "emerging" market, i.e. non-OECD.
There's an unrelated question as to whether OECD and non-OECD countries should be treated differently.
Actually $1000 high quality smartphone isn’t quite unreasonable. You use your phone for at least 3 years so your daily expense comes out to less than $1. I’ve seen much more expensive things with much less utilization. Also note that phone is less of a phone and more of computer and camera that often fared better than many other $500 cameras.
But when you compare it to a phone 1/3 of the cost (e.g. my now 3 year old Moto 4G Plus) it's clear that for many people it's not going to offer 3x the value.
>We believe the economic environment in China has been further impacted by rising trade tensions with the United States.
That sounds like a slightly roundabout way to throw some of the blame at Trump and his trade policies. Not the only reason, but one of them, as the letter mentions.
I think the long term question for Apple is whether or not they can pull off another category-creating move at the level of the iPhone. I believe they will in the next 3-5 years therefore I am glad for the opportunity to put more money into AAPL less expensively.
I'm surprised by your optimism here. Over the last 5-10 years, Apple seemed to have receded in to the clunky monolith of its former mid-90s self. While their supply and distribution chain is amazingly streamlined, they're still dining out on the cachet of their innovative product line from 10-15 years ago.
I just cannot understand how an increasingly risk-averse, profit-driven company will summon the chutzpah to again create category-creating products once more.
AirPods, Apple Watch, Apple Music, Apple Pay, FaceID, huge strides in mapping, Privacy-aware services and much more were all created in the past couple of years and have tremendous category-defining value.
I don't think you can overlook those things and take them for granted.
There's still not great alternatives to AirPods or Apple Watch to this day. Music streaming is pretty much just Apple and Spotify at this point. Also, few companies have been able to align privacy and embed it into their business models.
Apple has also quietly built one of the best chip design teams in the industry - pumping out various custom silicon that is powering FaceID, ML, Photography, and AR among other things. The # of custom chips Apple uses in their products grows every year.
So they've done a ton of innovative things over the past couple of years, it's just that you're not going to get another product like the iPhone which is perhaps one of the best businesses of all time.
We may never see another business like it anytime soon, from anyone. So I think it's a bit unfair to grade everything Apple does on the "iPhone Curve".
Sure, tremendous innovation on componentry and services. But I think it's being a bit generous putting the Apple Watch or the Airpod anywhere near the game-changing legacy products of the 2000s.
I still can't see how Apple will surge again. The brand equity is based upon Ramsian aesthetics (which have been mimicked to point of being passè in 2019), coupled with category-defining products that became cultural phenonenas (nope: the Apple Watch is hardly holds a candle to those). Not to mention they've all but deserted the power-users with lacklustre notebooks and having 6 year silences between Mac Pro's.
I want to be wrong, by the way. I really do. But you are mainly describing features and not products when you talk about their strides.
The actual product is the Apple ecosystem and that's the bet Apple is making.
Right now, the ecosystem is tied together by iOS whose most popular incarnation is iPhone. But iOS was so successful that it has an install base of over 1 billion users.
That's nothing less than an incredible user-base - a hell of a foundation. If they can sustain that install base while strengthening their ecosystem through value-add products like Apple Watch, AirPods, HomePod and Apple Music, then they have potentially many cash cows with dramatically high ceilings and reach.
This is a good bet for them because it plays to their strengths and they've earned incredibly loyal customers over the years.
iPhone may not be the future of Apple, but it is the core from which many futures will emerge. It'll still be a critical product for Apple, but no longer a key top-line growth driver. And that's OK, that's how innovation cycles go. iPhone made it possible for them to start on 3rd base for the next cycle.
iOS adoption of new versions is extremely strong and has typically always been that way. Rate of adoption is fast as well. From release of a new version to 50% adoption is often just a few weeks.
Tim probably gave a video interview of some sort too but Apple should be glad the open web still exists and they are able to communicate such crucial information in a timely manner to investors. Nothing beats writing a blog on the internet which can be read by everyone with a browser.
Apple is extremely hostile to users. I'm going in to get a single K key replaced. Maxed out MacBook Pro (around ~$4,500) with the ridiculously overpriced AppleCare+ (another $450), and if they try to pull shenanigans with "full unibody replacement" to fix the moronically designed butterfly clip that's basically DOA in terms of usage, for a $5000 computer, I'm literally never going to buy another Apple product again.
Good luck trying to excise people's money through "Services" when everyone jumps ship after realizing they ship dumbed down products without any regard for people's need for workstations and not expensive toys that break trivially.
Very interesting that Apple included this as someone who took advantage of a $29 battery replacement for my 6S just last month. The chain of decisions that took place for this to happen should be a lesson for more companies.
I imagine it went something like this:
- Feedback that iPhones were shutting down unexpectedly due to degraded and/or defective batteries.
- Instead of shouldering the battery replacement immediately, the product team decides to change the performance envelope of the phone.
- The root issue is not addressed.
- Betterygate™ inevitably happens.
- Apple heavily subsidizes battery replacements for everyone
- Some people decide that they'll stick with their phone a bit longer than they otherwise would have, reducing iPhone sales.
- Apple misses their earnings target, likely costing them more in value than it would have cost them to address the root issue in the first place.
Of course there are other factors addressed in the letter, but this issue was notable enough to be included.