They have rather a serious problem there actually. There are many people who buy an expensive iPhone for reasons that would be entirely satisfied by a less expensive one if it existed. It's hardly worth raising sales by 15% if you would have to lower overall margins by 50%.
They could produce an intentionally crippled one to avoid cannibalizing their high margin products, but that would dilute their brand, and anyway who would buy it over similarly-priced non-crippled Android devices?
There is a place in the market for a luxury brand, but Apple already has more of the market than luxury brands typically have. It's going to be difficult for them to do much better when the main thing they could adjust is the trade off between margins and volumes.
I could have bought a midrange slower phone in 2015 thst would probably never get an update and then by another midrange phone 2 years later and buy yet another midrange phone this year.
Or alternatively, buy a 64 GB iPhone 6s in 2015 for $749 and still be getting updates and have a phone that is more performant than any midrange Android phone that was sold over the next three years and faster than high end Android phones in single core performance.
If history is any guide, the 6s will still be getting updates for two more years.
As a bonus, my phone isn’t running an operating system made by a privacy invading ad company.
And a $749 phone is faster than a $199 one, sure, but it also costs $550 more, which is the whole issue. That's real money to most people.
> As a bonus, my phone isn’t running an operating system made by a privacy invading ad company.
This is kind of a silly complaint when it's open source and anyone can modify it however they like. Especially with Apple pushing Apple ID and iCloud as if sending all your data to them is completely different.
If you're legitimately concerned about this then rather than Apple your vendor is Purism.
Most of what makes Android what it is are the closed sourced Google Play Services and you still require closed source binary drivers.
This is kind of a silly complaint when it's open source and anyone can modify it however they like. Especially with Apple pushing Apple ID and iCloud as if sending all your data to them is completely different.
iCloud is easily disabled. But I was shocked to find out when I looked at my dad’s Google account that Google recorded every time he opened any app on his phone. Apple doesn’t make money from my user data.
This trade off is inherent. If you want a map service that lets you bring up a map of your current location without first downloading a map of the entire world, you have to send your location to the place that sends you the relevant portion of the map. But you get to choose -- you can use Google Maps, or you can install one of the OSM apps that actually downloads the whole map and can operate offline. You can install apps from Google Play or you can install them some other way.
You can carve Google out of Android, and then it's worse, in much the same way that iOS is worse without iCloud and the App Store. Except that if you want to use F-Droid or Amazon instead of Google, on Android you can and on iOS you can't.
And closed source drivers are lame, but I don't see Apple providing driver source either, and presumably the drivers are not sending your data to a third party in any case.
https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/features/story/google-p...
Hopefully the entire concept of needing OEM or carrier involvement to update your OS will be dead soon.
When I got my iPhone 8 Plus, I gave him my 6S, he couldn’t be happier. When will a midrange Android phone finally catch up to the performance of a discontinued iPhone 6s from 2015?
That is true for a luxury hardware company, but not a services company that wants bigger market share. Your services won't get used if they only work with < 20% of mobile phone users - people will migrate to ones that can be use by everyone.
This is the biggest Apple dilemma - they can't be luxury walled playground and a services company at once.
My impression is that Apple is creating custom hardware that will be able to support high end chips while offering an extremely efficient and performant glue/systems layer that is well suited to the low end and much greater scale.
The problem is that transitioning to a more mass-market model will be accompanied by a period of reduced profitability. It's also not clear to me whether it is too late. I recently bought $10 and $100 Android phones and compared to a year or two ago these low priced models are significantly less clunky and annoying to use.
With every month that passes, Android gets closer and closer to the Apple quality experience on much cheaper hardware, and all the while Android market share grows.
This has been Google's strategy all along (obviously) but I had expected that Apple would step in with a market share move long before things got to the point they are today where I'd argue Google has the advantage.
The biggest hindrance to Google eating up more of Apple's share is that Apple has focused on lock-in products like Photos, Notes, Messenger, etc., which can't be installed on other devices. While these are convenient, they are not something to take to the bank, as consumers ultimately resent the lock-in and are eager to break free. WhatsApp's success is an example.
The biggest reason to open up the low end is to increase the audience size for apps and reduce the appeal of cross-platform shortcut frameworks.
- People want integrated solutions, not one-off devices
- Control of hardware and software, including updates
- High quality cameras, sensors, design aesthetics, etc...
- High price, because integration differentiates their IoT making it hard to compare directly with other products
- Latest technology: Siri voice assistant, face recognition, AI, VR/AR
Imagine if Apple IoT in a home worked with guest iPhones. The networking effect of people talking about iDevices (do you have Apple?) might be enough to create a monopoly.
An example of a simple opportunity: Apple could have in home data caching for music and video where an IoT device acts as a peer server that works with Apple TV -- buy more Apple IoT and all your devices get better.
That space is probably going to be owned by a descendant of Alexa.
But Apple's problems go much deeper. Product design has been mediocre since Jobs died, which either suggests that Ive isn't quite the genius he was sold as, or that Cook + Ive is a zero sum game.
Software quality is also mediocre. There always nice features, but discovery has all but disappeared as a concept, and bugs are a real thing.
But the real problem is lack of imagination. While everyone is arguing about how much an iPhone should cost, iPhones are already last decade's product line.
There should have been a new market-leading product line by now. There isn't.
Car is going nowhere. AR might be a thing, but unless it's a bullseye it's going to be Watch 2.0 - nice tech that doesn't have a can't-argue-with-this sells-itself need to exist.
IoT and smart home could have been a huge thing, but instead Apple handed HomeKit over to the market with a shrug. (Were the margins too small for Mr Cook? Maybe...)
So now there's a big yawning void where the new ideas should be. Momentum will keep the machine running for a long while yet, but without some freshness Apple is in danger of becoming a rather dull company with negative wowness.
Possibly, that device dying has lead to people discovering some truely excellent products. For me it has been Ubiquiti and Synology stuff, but you see other names here. For me it has been beneficial (though expensive) that Airport went away.
As an Android developer, I haven't heard anything about any such "battery killing features" being rolled out to anything. Can you provide a source or did you just make this up?
Pretty much everything you suggested would result in lower profits.
For some reason Apple doesn't see the competition rapidly approaching. Neither did Microsoft. All it takes is one misstep.
- Apple is a superb company but the stock price is still too high.
- Apple faces increasing competition from its own older phones that still work just fine.
- The older phones work just fine because Apple was caught crippling the older phones to preserve the life of the $20 battery inside the phone, and ended up having to simply replace batteries rather than sell new phones. This should be considered a scandal on par with the Volkswagen emissions scandal. I suspect the crippling was timed to make the shiny new phone seem all that much more appealing.
Note that Google recently rolled out Android updates that default a lot of battery killing AI features to "on" even on older devices, dramatically reducing their battery life. This may have been an attempt to boost sales of new phones, or it may be that Google thinks the AI features are so compelling that they will drive new purchases.
- Apple has continued its practice of small, steady improvements to iOS, but has also dramatically increased the price of the phones. I had to chuckle when I realized I spent $1K on my last iPhone. Wow.
I'd argue that the incredible Moore's law-like growth of mobile technology has actually held back a lot of innovation, and now that the platforms are more mature we'll see bigger investment in platform technologies that were risky before when the target devices two years out were largely unknown.
Apple has still shied away from trying to defend its market share by entering the low end market. Like Github's decision (far too late, after Bitbucket nearly caught up) to offer unlimited private repos, Apple will eventually enter the low end market, but only after its lunch starts to be eaten by competitors.
What happens when new big budget production apps don't prioritize iPhone by default as the first platform to launch on? Apple has no strategy to deal with this, and has neglected its development tooling substantially. This is basically the position Microsoft was in (and a nearly identical strategy) right before it took its own nose dive.
Apple should:
- Release a $199 iPhone as quickly as possible, and a $199 iPad also.
- Team up with Facebook to make React-Native a first class citizen for iOS development, even if this is a hostile fork and a blessed version released directly by Apple.
- Institute some programs (battery replacement, etc.) that show that the devices are the only one anyone would ever consider buying.
- Work with software vendors to create apps that actually do require the latest hardware features and the newest phones. Most apps do not need these.
- Make the devices fully waterproof so I can throw mine in the dishwasher once in a while to get it clean.
- Create car radios that are "CarPlay Only" that can be retrofitted into vehicles that didn't ship with one.
- Release a version of OSX that works (and is supported on) Intel NUC hardware.