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A comment on The Phone That’s Failing Apple: iPhone XR. Parent comment

Re:The Phone That’s Failing Apple: iPhone XR by rahoulb on Monday January 07, 2019 @02:31AM (#18843441)
Someone made the point that Apples margins are quite consistent and have been for years. But a larger proportion of their revenue comes from services which are normally very high margin. Which implies that they are actually cutting their margins on hardware - in other words the phones are expensive because they cost more to build, not because Apple are getting greedy.
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Re:The Phone That’s Failing Apple: iPhone XR by have_faith on Monday January 07, 2019 @03:36AM (#18843702)
> because they cost more to build

Then they should offer models that are cheaper to manufacture, like the 5c. I'm surprised not to see a successor to the 5c. Maybe they are worried it would be too popular and gouge sales of flagship models negating some of their premium branding.

I'm currently on a 6s and see no update path for myself, I would happily sacrifice faceID and some of the higher-end phone materials for a modern paired down iPhone. I have about as much confidence in this appearing though as them fixing the state of the keyboards on the MBP's.

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Re:The Phone That’s Failing Apple: iPhone XR by SyneRyder on Monday January 07, 2019 @06:26AM (#18844377)
> I'm surprised not to see a successor to the 5c. Maybe they are worried it would be too popular...

The 5C was a sales flop. In Australia, the 5S was outselling the 5C by eleven times [1]. Even in China, people were buying the more expensive iPhone rather than the plastic 5C one [2].

[1] https://www.smh.com.au/technology/australian-telcos-struggle...

[2] https://techcrunch.com/2014/03/24/apples-iphone-5c-sales-sto...

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Re:The Phone That’s Failing Apple: iPhone XR by yoz-y on Monday January 07, 2019 @08:11AM (#18844819)
Why people thought that the 5C was supposed to be a cheap phone for China is beyond me. Most people in China who can afford iPhones would not want to have "the cheap one".
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Re:The Phone That’s Failing Apple: iPhone XR by benzoate on Monday January 07, 2019 @05:10AM (#18844069)
The 5c was essentially an iPhone 5 (the previous years iPhone) in a plastic shell, with some other minor differences. Given that Apple are continuing to sell the iPhone 7 and iPhone 8 you could say that the spirit of the 5c lives on (iPhone 7 is $450, vaguely the same price as the 5C).
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