It doesn't look like Apple needs people to be upgrading every other year to do well. Not anywhere close.

Apple sold 232M iPhones in 2023, and had 1.83B active iPhone users.

Doing a little math, they'd need their existing users to upgrade every six years to keep selling them at the current rate. Your friend would still be ahead of the curve for Apple if he goes forward with that upgrade.

> and had 1.83B active iPhone users

be very curious to know what percentage of users bought second hand

It doesn't matter, second hand or not every day devices like phones do not last for say 10 years on average even iPhones.

Apple only needs a device to last 6 years(on average) to keep current sales levels, that includes all the irreparably damaged, or irrecoverably lost and bricked ones after theft etc.

Even if a device did last 10 years on average, Apple will still sell 183M units a year, iPhone is only 50% of the total revenues, so roughly 5% of their total revenue would be impacted, that is also ignoring additional revenue generated due to service and parts and batteries needed for older phones between 6-10 years.

A net impact of say 3-4% of revenue while significant wouldn't really change their fundamental numbers or long term market value. The market has already accounted for no further iPhone sales growth in the models anyway for last few years.

They need to only convince people over the next few years on the value of Apple Intelligence not with 16 right way to upgrade, coupled with lightening to USB switch since 15, it will be enough of motivator for 11 to 14 users to switch during the 17/18 cycle and beyond.

It's the camera for me, especially 5x zoom lens in the big phone instead of the enormous phone. But if I do go through with it I'll be coming from a 4 year old phone, so I'm already not in the $1000/year market.

If they're able to figure out a mass market VR headset that will give them another push for new phone sales. I hear the "spatial photos/videos" are very cool.

VR also isn't it. The best case scenario for Vision is that it becomes a <$10B/quarter market similar to the iPad, but it costs substantially more to build and evolve (more complicated hardware and software, lower margins, less software sharing with iPhone). The more likely outcome is that it doesn't even reach $5B by 2030 (that would be ~6% revenue).

I think the broader problem is that no one knows what "it" is; what comes next. We had web3, crypto, AR, VR, now AI, but none of these things feel like they have the horsepower to launch another $30B in quarterly or even annual revenue for Apple.

My predictions for Apple’s VR “ambitions”:

- 20% chance they continue to iterate on the Vision Pro or its successors for the next 5+ years

- 40% chance they release one more non-pro model that’s maybe half the cost and nobody buys it

- 40% chance it’s already dead and the Vision Pro is all we see of that whole product line.

If I were CEO I would definitely kill it now and lay off everyone involved. It was an experiment and it didn’t work out. Nobody wants or needs VR. Hardly anyone even remembers that it exists.

interestingly there was no mention of vision pro at todays' event

It came up in passing when they said that the base iPhone 16 would be able to take 3D images. When they showed someone viewing the images, they were using a Vision Pro.

I think it depends on whether they can find a useful mass market niche for it. The original Apple Watch was envisioned as a multipurpose wrist computer phone but after a few years turned out to be more marketable as a fitness tracker with pretty watch faces and available bonus features that aren’t widely used.

They’ve now discovered that $3500 device for a solitary person to watch 3D Disney movies isn’t it.

But personally I would bet they give it a runway to try and figure out how to make VR happen.

> If I were CEO I would definitely kill it now and lay off everyone involved. It was an experiment and it didn’t work out. Nobody wants or needs VR. Hardly anyone even remembers that it exists.

I have no idea if AR/VR will ever really be a thing, but this is hardly the first time Apple has launched a product that struggled with fit initially. It's also the first time they've launched so expensive of a consumer "gadget" as the initial foray into a market as a core product - the original iPhone was "only" $900ish in today-dollars, so the vision pro is nearly 4x in price, and apple slashed the price to $600ish in today-dollars shortly after launch. (Obviously they've had expensive computers, but the pricing wasn't out of the norm for the industry)

The original iPhone also totally flopped outside of the US. Total worldwide sales a year in were about 4 million, almost entirely all in the US. That's quite a bit better than the AVP, but, phones are also quite a bit more ubiquitous than the AVP. Smartphones were also already much more mainstream of a concept at the time the iPhone launched - you already had half a decade of Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Palm, etc. devices out there. VR stuff has existed too, but it's remained much more niche.

The Watch and HomePod's initial versions had slow starts. The watch is obviously a big deal to them now, and the homepod has done OK with the mini.

Sometimes it takes 2-3 generations to figure out a product fit. If Apple cut products every time the first generation product didn't meet expectations, we'd certainly have fewer Apple products.

Real AR with very lightweight glasses that work outdoors and don't use camera passthrough would be a massive market. The problem is that we are still far away from that point.

Yes, Apple vision seems like a sort of odd thing, like they decided to sell the developer platform/prototype.

It needs to be in a sunglasses form-factor for anybody to care. The tech isn’t here yet, might never be.

I'm not convinced the next "it" is a new hardware product any time soon. You can do a lot with a screen, battery, and cellular connection. All the stuff that AI pins and necklaces can do will end up in phones, watches, and earbuds, and Apple will keep selling all those existing product lines for years. They might even find a way to squeeze an "Apple Intelligence Plus" subscription in there somewhere, with their recent focus on chasing services revenue to make up for slower phone sales.

Just because phones are maturing doesn't necessarily mean a new computing paradigm is right around the corner.

For phones, I think foldable screens are good for a couple more generations of updates. I've had a Flip for a couple of years and won't go back, when they make them lighter I'm in the market for the next one.

Apple AI selfie drone with a monthly contract for your own livestream channel to stream everything you do, with Siri as the AI stream moderator, and an asset/app store to upgrade different parts of your streams. Maybe even 30% cut of the donations from stream fans.

If there's an Apple exec reading this, you can pay me for this idea before committing billions to develop and subsequently cancel it when everybody realizes it's dumb.

I agree. I do think Apple is thrilled with the sudden AI hype as this gives them 1-2 generations of new "selling points" as they were truly running out.

But still, it masks the problem of an underlying demand that will stagnate if not decline. They're aware of this danger, hence to pivot to earn more from services.

> spending $1000+/year with them

I figure Apple hasn't depended on latest model upgrades every year for a while now. Hell I'm going 12 to 16 Pro because I'm sick of not being able to photograph birds well.

I really hope the vast majority will never upgrade every year, regardless of those poor Apple stockholders and their incentives. What a bunch of capitalist driven excess that would be. I say that and I write code for iOS.

I feel like Apple is in danger of missing the foldable market. It has matured on Android to the point that the quirks have been ironed mostly out, the inventions necessary has been made, etc. Meanwhile Apple has made nothing at all in that area.

“Even” or “odd” number isn’t as applicable as it sounds, though I do remember if you were an “s” year or not. It was iPhone 3G, 3G S, 4, 4S, 5, 5S, 6, 6S, 7, 8/X, XS, 11, and standard annual numbering from the 11 on. In early days you’d ask if you were an “S” year or not. Only since the 11 could you ask whether you were “even” or “odd” without it meaning upgrades every 4 years.

What’s changed is that Apple increments the model number every year instead of every two years, and you can probably blame Samsung for that a bit. Your friends probably still upgrade every 4 years like we almost always used to. I remember getting the 3G for the network improvement, the 3G S for the speed bump and video recording, the 4 for Siri, the 4S for a speed bump, … back then it was often the case that the non-S model was a new design with last year’s chip, and the S model was a speed bump with last year’s design.

If anything’s changed, it’s that they often spec bump the processor every year in minor ways, instead of every 2 years, and the increases are steadily more incremental than they used to be. If you ask me, it’s because Apple doesn’t have competition in the mobile phone CPU space yet. (Or ever, while Qualcomm holds so many patents…)

Also it’s more clear than ever before that the iPhone X, Max, Pro series are all ways to ask for more money for the exact same chip/product. Some years the Pro is significantly faster because it gets the new CPU first, but by the next year both Pro and non-Pro end up getting the same CPU for cost reasons. It’s telling that most years Apple doesn’t claim a speed increase between the Pro and non-Pro models. For example, if I recall correctly the only difference for the iPhone 13 was actually software. Likewise in this generation (16) it feels like the only difference between Pro and non-Pro is the SoC binning and the binning of the quality of the OLED in minor ways.