Bottom line is the rumored changes don't seem like they will get sales growth started again and its an almost certainty this release will fall short of prior releases. The question then becomes where will sales level off or will they continue to erode? Neither seems like an investors dream scenario.
Cook will sell it as the best iPhone yet, and he will be right, just not right enough for people to buy it in the numbers Apple will need. Doesn't mean they aren't making great products, but they will need more than a better camera and thinner phone to bring investors back.
Overall Cook seems like a terrible steward of the company. The watch was much ado about nothing. It really looks like he's put all his eggs in the iPhone basket and doesnt want to take a realistic look at where sales of the golden goose are going.
If all Apple does with iPhone 7 is improve the camera a little (on the 4.7" model - maybe much better on 5.5" 7+), remove the headphone port, and make it thinner - then I agree, that is not going to excite the market for upgraders. Do you really think that is all Apple will do?
If all Apple does with iPhone 7 is improve the camera a little (on the 4.7" model - maybe much better on 5.5" 7+), remove the headphone port, and make it thinner - then I agree, that is not going to excite the market for upgraders. Do you really think that is all Apple will do?
If Apple does that I'm going to sell all my shares. And then rebuy when it hits $60 a few months later.
It would be the dumbest move ever to make an iPhone 6s part 2.
I wish you'd just get out now and go hump Samsung or something.
bottom line is engineering drives product cycles not stock price. The minute Apple starts making product decisions based on stock price is the minute it stops being Apple.
Huh? Eveveryone on rumor and tech sites were calling the iPhone 5 a "stretched iPhone 4S". A LOT of people thought they looked the same.
And they were wrong.
The 5 was thinner than the 4s. The 5 was much lighter. The 5 width was less. The 5 had a metal back instead of glass. Bigger screen. Much smaller top and bottom bezel.
The 5 was a huge step up over the 4s.
I want the 7 to be a huge step up over the 6s. I don't want to see an iPhone 6s part2, that has the same shell but just better internals. That is not good enough in today's market.
It doesn't matter what you want. Engineering drives product decisions. What if Apple is planning to go OLED (or something even better) and lose the physical home button but the technology isn't there yet, at least not in the volume Apple requires? Why is it so hard to comprehend that a radical redesign isn't ready yet from an engineering standpoint? You want Tim in a fit of rage in the design studio threatening to fire everyone if there isn't a radical new phone ready this September? You're just spewing BS all based on the stock price.
Huh? Eveveryone on rumor and tech sites were calling the iPhone 5 a "stretched iPhone 4S". A LOT of people thought they looked the same.
And they were wrong.
The 5 was thinner than the 4s. The 5 was much lighter. The 5 width was less. The 5 had a metal back instead of glass. Bigger screen. Much smaller top and bottom bezel.
The 5 was a huge step up over the 4s.
I want the 7 to be a huge step up over the 6s. I don't want to see an iPhone 6s part2, that has the same shell but just better internals. That is not good enough in today's market.
With the dimensions of the current iPhone there's little to no wiggle room for a drastic redesign.
It doesn't matter what you want. Engineering drives product decisions. What if Apple is planning to go OLED (or something even better) and lose the physical home button but the technology isn't there yet, at least not in the volume Apple requires? Why is it so hard to comprehend that a radical redesign isn't ready yet from an engineering standpoint? You want Tim in a fit of rage in the design studio threatening to fire everyone if there isn't a radical new phone ready this September? You're just spewing BS all based on the stock price.
Who asking for a radical redesign?
I would be happy if they just decreased the top and bottom bezel by 50%. Just make the home button smaller or make the top bezel smaller. The current design with the massive forehead and chin is a joke.
I think I have figured it out....you just want to get to 10,000 posts...just 68 more to go.
On John Gruber's latest podcast he said the rumors he's heard is that next years phone is going to be a radical redesign with no forehead or chin. It sounded like the big redesign isn't ready yet so there will be minor cosmetic changes (like the antenna bands).
Ben Thompson was his guest and said Apple needs to have new phone designs every year because in China it's all about status. I think that's BS. For one thing I don't think one country should be the driving force behind Apple's product decisions. Second, the idea that people need to be buying a new phone every year is ridiculous. People don't buy a new car or appliances or furniture every year. I really doubt someone using a 4S/5/5S didn't upgrade to the 6S because it looked just like the 6. The biggest reason people aren't upgrading is because the phone they have is good enough for what they're using it for. It's not because they need everyone to know they have the latest phone,
What is the downside to having "refreshed" external design each year? It might not be anything radical, but enough to visibly tell a difference
because thatd be change for change's sake -- something Ive has already said they dont do. they do functional change to improve things. if there is no improvement they wont reshape it just to sell more in china.
note that colors arent part of a discussion on functional change.
If Apple does that I'm going to sell all my shares. And then rebuy when it hits $60 a few months later.
It would be the dumbest move ever to make an iPhone 6s part 2.
I wish you'd just get out now and go hump Samsung or something.
bottom line is engineering drives product cycles not stock price. The minute Apple starts making product decisions based on stock price is the minute it stops being Apple.
yup. doing so would be the dumbest idea in the world:
...you dont run a company to appease wall street or maximize shareholder value. you run it to delight your customers. period. the investment will follow.
that sog continues to call for this, over & over, just proves he has absolutely no idea what hes doing. i doubt hes even an investor, in anything. sane, sensible, thoughtful people know you dont constantly spaz out over every headline and go into full-on panic mode at the drop of a hat.
judging the extreme positions that shift from week to week, i think some sort of bi-polar thing is going on.
I think after the time said he would leave the forum if Appl did not hit $150 by 12/31/15 what little red. he had went to zero, He is also sitting on a paper loss of about 7% since he bought at $99. I doubt very much if anything he says is based on an reality on Planet Earth.
I wish you'd just get out now and go hump Samsung or something.
bottom line is engineering drives product cycles not stock price. The minute Apple starts making product decisions based on stock price is the minute it stops being Apple.
A redesign is not based on stock price. Its based on the market and competition.
The competition is making phones that look much better than the aged 6s. If they repeat that same design with the 7 they will be in big trouble.
Even a mid-tier brand like LG has a much nicer phone because of the much smaller bezels
Nicer huh, looking hella ugly there with that horrible android interface - also notice battery is at 14% because it is an energy hog
None of the leaks show the front of the phone. I'm hoping the bezels have shrunken.
They can't get rid of the bezels until they figure out what to do with the physical home button, numb nuts. That isn't a trivial matter and shoving it on the back of the phone is a terrible experience.
rogifan_new said: They can't get rid of the bezels until they figure out what to do with the physical home button, numb nuts. That isn't a trivial matter and shoving it on the back of the phone is a terrible experience.
The physical home button, which includes the TouchID sensor, the 3.5mm audio jack which takes up a lot of space,the lightning connector,the earpiece,the Facetime camera, the iSight camera, and the flash. All of these, at the moment, dictate the size of the bezels. If they removed the audio jack, they could get a couple of mm off the bottom bezel before they hit the TouchID/Home button. I can see them using 3D Touch to create a virtual home button, and maybe they can work with a TouchID sensor under the screen (there was a patent for doing that recently), but those are not minor challenges, and I don't expect to see them for a while yet. The biggest challenge is making the optical components and the earpiece speaker smaller without compromising quality. If you want to remove or even shrink the top bezel, you have to be able to fit the cameras into less space than they have at the moment. That means making the sensors and lenses smaller, which would mean a smaller pixel size, and less light getting into the sensor. Or they could make the phone thicker, so that the non-forward facing components can fit behind the screen, the touch sensor, the backlight, and the haptic feedback engine, but I doubt that will happen. Plus you'd still have the forward facing components to fit in.
It's impossible to compare because every year Apple had gone into new markets and on more carriers. And no Android OEMs aren't redesigning phones every 3-6 months and if if any are it's more out of a desperate need of attention than anything else. HTC One M7-9 look very similar. Samsung Galaxy S6 and S7 look very similar. if Apple needs to redesign the iPhone every year then they're not very good at their job. After all it was Dieter Rams who said good design is long lasting. And Apple has long had an ethos that they don't redesign just for the sake of it, they don't do things just to be new or different. What you and Ben Thompson are saying is Apple needs to do a complete 180 and redesign just for the sake of it, just so someone in China can say look at me I have the newest iPhone. That's not good nor responsible design. But as I said according to the scuttlebutt John Gruber is hearing Apple is working on a massive redesign for 2017. If its not ready for 2016 it's not ready. It would be silly for Apple to spend money on new tooling and manufacturing for one year.
Look at how many redesigned phones Android had since the iPhone 6 came out:
Galaxy S6, S6 Edge Sony Xpertia X HTC 10 LG G5 Nexus 6P Motorola X Pure
And then throw in the new Xiaomi and Huwei phones.
yes each Android maker does not redesign each year (some do) but in total there is at least 3 or 4 new fresh Android designs a year. The last 12 months it has been all about thinner bezels, smaller forehead/chin, curved screens, ect. If Apple only redesigns every 2 years their phones look old and outdated because over a dozen Android fresh designs have come out in that period.
And stop spewing that only China wants new designs. Everyone wants the hot new looking phone in USA and everywhere else.
This is like saying BMW need to completely redesign the 3-series every year because Audi, Alfa, and Mercedes all released new models over the same period. (I make no value judgments about the relative merits of these cars, just trying to illustrate a point.) What happens instead, is that BMW update their existing design most years to add features to attract purchasers, and only periodically do a full redesign. This is because completely redesigning something is an expensive operation, whether it's a phone or a car, while making improvements to an existing model is relatively cheap. (Of course, it's more expensive to redesign a car than a phone, but as a proportion of retail price, redesigning a car is probably cheaper.)
Yes, Apple is competing with all of these different manufacturers, but those other manufacturers are also competing with each other. Thinking that the Apple's competition is "Android" rather than Samsung, HTC, Motorola, etc falls into the same trap that people fell into in the 90s (including some at Apple I suspect). Apple's competition then wasn't Windows, it was Dell, Compaq, HP, IBM, etc.
I think cleaning up the back of the phone and making the body of the phones more compact would be enough of a design change for the 7 model. The following are mockups done by people online. New on the left, current model on the right:
This wouldn't be like the Galaxy S7 Edge, which distorts the image at the sides because the curvature of the iPhone 6 display is much further out towards the edge, see where the highlights are at the edge of each:
The metal can even be wrapped round more like this:
The display wouldn't get bigger, they can pull the body of the phone inwards to make it easier to handle while maintaining the screen size.
The camera could still have dual sensors with a single lens. Having dual lens is good for depth of field and one being monochrome gives much improved low light but they can split the light internally onto two sensors for the quality improvement and this allows HDR video. If the camera uses internal light splitting, it can share the sensors with the front-facing camera so you get the same quality from each camera. Apple employs 800 people to work on the camera so I expect they will have ongoing improvements:
HDR video (and depth of field) brings smartphones even closer to DSLRs.
There's also fast or wireless-at-a-distance charging technology still to add to phones. There hasn't been much of a marketing push towards wireless headphones. Apple can bundle Beats wireless buds with the next iPhone if they want. The Beats hardware costs a fraction of the retail price. If $179 buds cost Apple $50 to make, bundling them with the iPhone purchase means people see $179 of added value to the phone purchase and it has a knock-on effect for the Watch as iPhone owners already have wireless headphones that work with the Watch too. Another type of display like OLED on the Watch is another extra they can put in when they feel it's right.
The features on new phones are inevitably going to keep getting less significant. That's just the nature of technology, there's little else that people need their phones to do. The upgrade cycles will then get longer. There are enough improvements to cover a 7, 7s, 8 and 8s, less after that but this would be ~$200b in earnings. Then they lower the price points and hit a larger audience. Then they will venture into cars.
After a few years, VR tech may have advanced enough that it's comfortable enough for everyone to wear and it really should behave differently from how normal displays work. It should act like a modifier to real light signals that go into your eye. That seems to be what Magic Leap is aiming to do using light fields:
When the display is off, you just see normal light passing through the viewer. It shouldn't need the lenses darkened and shouldn't just be a transparent LCD (the Hololens seems to be like this). It would be a way of modifying the light coming in from the outside so that it can be converted into how that signal would be if the digital content you added existed in the real world.
This way we can do away with displays on everything - TVs, phones, computers, watches. Only having to compute the light projections where digital content is means much less power usage, especially if it's possible to modify incoming light signals without light creation i.e just partially absorb, modify and amplify. It can sample a small portion of an incoming light wave to see what's coming in, figure out what it should be, partially absorb the remainder and then boost its intensity to what's needed.
Sound has been controlled already, you can recreate sound waves that sound exactly like they were made somewhere else but not light. The tech is in its early stages but it will be amazing when it's done properly. You will eventually be able to see digital objects and people as though they were right in front of you in the same environment you are in and look exactly like they do in real life. That's why Facebook invested in this technology even though they are a social media company because their aim is to connect people together. There will be the option to use facial capture tech with digital representations of the face for putting someone wearing the devices into the digital world. It takes years to get groundbreaking tech right for mass production, in the mean-time you get the little improvements.
I would be happy if they just decreased the top and bottom bezel by 50%. Just make the home button smaller or make the top bezel smaller. The current design with the massive forehead and chin is a joke.
I think I have figured it out....you just want to get to 10,000 posts...just 68 more to go.
And here I was thinking he was being paid by sentiment traders to whip up negativity. 10K post makes more sense.
It's amazing how many people throw good engineering right out of the window just to get thinner bezels...
If thin bezels are what makes or break a product, it was a pretty thin idea and execution to begin with. End of story.
A lot of people think that thinner bezels are more aesthetically pleasing. I would be one of them. I don't recall anyone complaining about Apple taking aesthetic design decisions over engineering perfection with the iconic 4 and 4s.
This is a mid-tier phone Panasonic are aiming at the Indian market, a market where Apple want to palm-off used phones by the tonne. Apple need to wake up.
Comments
bottom line is engineering drives product cycles not stock price. The minute Apple starts making product decisions based on stock price is the minute it stops being Apple.
note that colors arent part of a discussion on functional change.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/11/28/maximizing-shareholder-value-the-dumbest-idea-in-the-world/
https://www.google.com/search?q=dumbest+idea+in+the+world
...you dont run a company to appease wall street or maximize shareholder value. you run it to delight your customers. period. the investment will follow.
that sog continues to call for this, over & over, just proves he has absolutely no idea what hes doing. i doubt hes even an investor, in anything. sane, sensible, thoughtful people know you dont constantly spaz out over every headline and go into full-on panic mode at the drop of a hat.
I think after the time said he would leave the forum if Appl did not hit $150 by 12/31/15 what little red. he had went to zero, He is also sitting on a paper loss of about 7% since he bought at $99. I doubt very much if anything he says is based on an reality on Planet Earth.
Nicer huh, looking hella ugly there with that horrible android interface - also notice battery is at 14% because it is an energy hog
The biggest challenge is making the optical components and the earpiece speaker smaller without compromising quality. If you want to remove or even shrink the top bezel, you have to be able to fit the cameras into less space than they have at the moment. That means making the sensors and lenses smaller, which would mean a smaller pixel size, and less light getting into the sensor.
Or they could make the phone thicker, so that the non-forward facing components can fit behind the screen, the touch sensor, the backlight, and the haptic feedback engine, but I doubt that will happen. Plus you'd still have the forward facing components to fit in.
Yes, Apple is competing with all of these different manufacturers, but those other manufacturers are also competing with each other. Thinking that the Apple's competition is "Android" rather than Samsung, HTC, Motorola, etc falls into the same trap that people fell into in the 90s (including some at Apple I suspect). Apple's competition then wasn't Windows, it was Dell, Compaq, HP, IBM, etc.
This wouldn't be like the Galaxy S7 Edge, which distorts the image at the sides because the curvature of the iPhone 6 display is much further out towards the edge, see where the highlights are at the edge of each:
The metal can even be wrapped round more like this:
The display wouldn't get bigger, they can pull the body of the phone inwards to make it easier to handle while maintaining the screen size.
The camera could still have dual sensors with a single lens. Having dual lens is good for depth of field and one being monochrome gives much improved low light but they can split the light internally onto two sensors for the quality improvement and this allows HDR video. If the camera uses internal light splitting, it can share the sensors with the front-facing camera so you get the same quality from each camera. Apple employs 800 people to work on the camera so I expect they will have ongoing improvements:
HDR video (and depth of field) brings smartphones even closer to DSLRs.
There's also fast or wireless-at-a-distance charging technology still to add to phones. There hasn't been much of a marketing push towards wireless headphones. Apple can bundle Beats wireless buds with the next iPhone if they want. The Beats hardware costs a fraction of the retail price. If $179 buds cost Apple $50 to make, bundling them with the iPhone purchase means people see $179 of added value to the phone purchase and it has a knock-on effect for the Watch as iPhone owners already have wireless headphones that work with the Watch too. Another type of display like OLED on the Watch is another extra they can put in when they feel it's right.
The features on new phones are inevitably going to keep getting less significant. That's just the nature of technology, there's little else that people need their phones to do. The upgrade cycles will then get longer. There are enough improvements to cover a 7, 7s, 8 and 8s, less after that but this would be ~$200b in earnings. Then they lower the price points and hit a larger audience. Then they will venture into cars.
After a few years, VR tech may have advanced enough that it's comfortable enough for everyone to wear and it really should behave differently from how normal displays work. It should act like a modifier to real light signals that go into your eye. That seems to be what Magic Leap is aiming to do using light fields:
http://www.wired.com/2016/04/went-inside-magic-leaps-mysterious-hq-heres-saw/
When the display is off, you just see normal light passing through the viewer. It shouldn't need the lenses darkened and shouldn't just be a transparent LCD (the Hololens seems to be like this). It would be a way of modifying the light coming in from the outside so that it can be converted into how that signal would be if the digital content you added existed in the real world.
This way we can do away with displays on everything - TVs, phones, computers, watches. Only having to compute the light projections where digital content is means much less power usage, especially if it's possible to modify incoming light signals without light creation i.e just partially absorb, modify and amplify. It can sample a small portion of an incoming light wave to see what's coming in, figure out what it should be, partially absorb the remainder and then boost its intensity to what's needed.
Sound has been controlled already, you can recreate sound waves that sound exactly like they were made somewhere else but not light. The tech is in its early stages but it will be amazing when it's done properly. You will eventually be able to see digital objects and people as though they were right in front of you in the same environment you are in and look exactly like they do in real life. That's why Facebook invested in this technology even though they are a social media company because their aim is to connect people together. There will be the option to use facial capture tech with digital representations of the face for putting someone wearing the devices into the digital world. It takes years to get groundbreaking tech right for mass production, in the mean-time you get the little improvements.
If thin bezels are what makes or break a product, it was a pretty thin idea and execution to begin with. End of story.
This is a mid-tier phone Panasonic are aiming at the Indian market, a market where Apple want to palm-off used phones by the tonne. Apple need to wake up.