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.
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.