Plain and Simple the iPhone just lasts longer. In the time I've owned my 6 Plus my son has retired two new android phones, and my wife has just retired hers. These android phones just died or got screen problems that made it useless. I'll stick with Apple. My Macbook is another story, it's only a 2011 and it's obsoleted from using the latest OS's. The mac line used to last forever and the OS's didn't slow 3 or 4 year old models to a crawl. My iMac also crashes all the time but it is a 2010 model, but that's still a lot less duration of new OS compatibility. Old Macs like when they were beige and even after the iMac would last a lot longer and would be upgradeable each year for at least 6 or 7 years or more.
I'll have to mention that to my 2007 iMac that's running El Capitan just fine. No more updates though. Nine years and it's over to my shop for web browsing, music, email and spreadsheets. Hoping the new 5K will last that long.
I think this really illustrates the point. I just upgraded my 2007 iMac for a 4K SSD. I would not have upgraded if the old one had not just gotten so slow. There really is nothing new that the new one does, it just does it faster. Now the phones are a different story. My 6S is a completely different phone compared to my 3G. It does so many things the old one didn't. So if you want to talk about something that is not evolving your right to point out it is the personal computer and these are on at least a two year refresh cycle and often one.
Plain and Simple the iPhone just lasts longer. In the time I've owned my 6 Plus my son has retired two new android phones, and my wife has just retired hers. These android phones just died or got screen problems that made it useless. I'll stick with Apple. My Macbook is another story, it's only a 2011 and it's obsoleted from using the latest OS's. The mac line used to last forever and the OS's didn't slow 3 or 4 year old models to a crawl. My iMac also crashes all the time but it is a 2010 model, but that's still a lot less duration of new OS compatibility. Old Macs like when they were beige and even after the iMac would last a lot longer and would be upgradeable each year for at least 6 or 7 years or more.
I'll have to mention that to my 2007 iMac that's running El Capitan just fine. No more updates though. Nine years and it's over to my shop for web browsing, music, email and spreadsheets. Hoping the new 5K will last that long.
I'm on a loaded 2011 iMac and it is speedy and used for my desktop dev machine.
I get the feeling you're missing the point of the criticism aimed at Apple. Even if the next iPhone is the best phone on the planet, it'll still just be a phone. There are only incremental improvements each year. Comparing Apple to Samsung now is like saying in 2006 that HP is doing well compared to Dell, sure they were still making good products but there's minimal innovation. Each time Apple tries to innovate, it's ho hum. Siri is limited, the Watch was ordinary at best, Music and Maps are me-too services that rely on owning the platform. It's the smaller companies that are changing the world now that Apple is a corporate behemoth. They're the new Microsoft.
nope, you just don't understand how Apple rolls. iterative improvement is the name of their game, always has been. maybe new developments are rare, followed by years of iterative improvement. which itself is innovation, make no mistake -- these improvement don't design themselves and far off trees.
this has been their successful pattern since the '70s. and that's saying something.
The SE will probably save them these two quarters. While one year of YOY declines or flat growth may be acceptable a second year isn't so the iPhone7 is incredibly important. Maybe apple will surprise us with the AMOLED screen this year (one year ahead of what everyone expects) in a totally new, sharper, design. That's what I hope.
I am of the opinion that the Apple Car (project Titan) is getting the money that should have been put into put into SIRI years ago.(And Apple Maps and Software and Services). Development is going to whatever Ive wants to work on. First Watch Now car. Ive never sounded much like computer guy so know we see longer upgrade cycles for Macs.
If Apple really has pulled off this dual camera set up then they should find a way to have it on both the iPhone 7 and 7+. If they do then sales will probably soar again - at least for the next year.
People bought the iPhone 6 because of the larger screen. I find the look boring.
If the iPad Pros were such a hit they would have made up for the short fall in iPhone sales since its the first year of this product. - But in actuality its not a first year of a new product, but just an expensive evolutionary upgrade of a few features that should have been out earlier. I still believe that most iPad sales are probably going to the more affordable Air II. Stylus support is a niche feature already done by MS and Google. iPads are over priced by $50-$150. They need to lower the price to sell more units of the iPad Pros so that more developers add Pencil specific features. Unfortunately the Pencil isn't must have if you aren't an artist.
I'd take Continuity over Continuum any day, but the Surface Pro is certainly a nice, light laptop. I have a Surface 3. Its underpowered but the kick stand is a nice feature.
The one good thing I saw in WWDC was the changes in watchOS 3.0. When the apple watch was announced I thought there was something just plain wrong in the Apple sense that you needed a 15 training session to use it. The watch band connector seemed to be the only innovative thing about it. At least they seem to be willing the change some things that don't work. I'm expecting the 2nd generation watch to be quite nice and the down the road the 3rd and 4th will probably be killer. Until you have LTE and voice on the Apple watch it will remain an accessory that only small percentage will get - hopefully that will come with watch 3 or 4.
If Cook is smart he will get rid of Cue. If sales don't rebound he may be forced to offer up a sacrifice to investors. Cue's certainly failed failed to perform.
"If Cook is smart he will get rid of Cue. If sales don't rebound he may be forced to offer up a sacrifice to investors. Cue's certainly failed failed to perform. "
Agree with that
hmm so you guys work at the highest level of Apple and know what metrics are used to determine his deliverables?
Well, another interesting, but flawed, article by one of our most interesting, but one sided, authors.
While much in the article is right, there is much that is wrong as well. Often, I feel that he doesn't understand some of what he's writing about, because the spin he puts on things is often out of sync with reality.
For example, he talks about iPhone sales this year as though everything is fine. It's not. Last quarters' iPhones sales fell by 16%. No matter how it's spun, that's just not ok. Sales were expected to be flat, not significantly down. He talks as thought they were, in fact, flat. Whether we like it or not, the new features of the 6S and 6S+ weren't considered to be all that interesting by the general buying public, and that includes many iPhone owners.
If you read Apple's 10Q, its spelled out plainly that over the last six months ending in March (the first six months of iPhone 6s sales), iPhone revenues were down 8% Y0Y and unit sales were down 7%. You can cherry pick a specific 3 month period to make things look worse and claim that the problem is that people don't like the 6s and think it isn't new enough, but that's not accurate or honest.
Apple itself explained that its sales were down globally due to economic conditions and in particular currency shifts.
If we compare Apple's theory to yours, Apple's wins because when looking at Apple's other products, Mac units were also down 7% and iPads were down 23% across that same period. If Apple's primary problem was iPhone 6s not being exciting enough, it shouldn't be experiencing the same sales decline evident across the company's other hardware.
The problem is that Apple isn't looked at as the innovative company it has been looked at as being. So 3D Touch is shrugged off because there wasn't all that much software that used it well, including g Apple's' it has been pointed out that it's a little better than a double tap, but maybe not that much better. True? Maybe, maybe not. As noted above, your entire premise is wrong.
Apple plans several years in advance, and often, a first generation feature really doesn't do that much. But then, Siri hasn't done much more years after it was first released. Maybe this year, with the opening to third parties, it will change. But frankly, it's been a disappointment.
That's what columnists like to say, particularly when comparing against a fixed voice appliance like the Echo. But it's not true. Siri has improved significantly every year, including a focus on supporting 30+ languages, and being able to accommodate all those languages in the Intents mechanism to support third party apps globally. Amazon can't understand other languages, in large part because Amazon doesn't have significant business outside the U.S. like Apple does.
Be careful when you repeat talking points to make sure that you're not just repeating the BS of fools.
The camera, which Apple touts so strongly, has no real advantage anymore. Samsung, and others, have caught up, and are even a bit better in some areas. Though, the iPhone still takes pictures, that on average, are more accurate in exposure and color. Where are RAW files? That makes a big difference in quality, and a number of Android phones have had that for years now. It's just software, so there's no real good reason for not having it. I was surely hoping to see it this year.
iOS 10 introduces RAW support, along with Wide Color and advanced color management to support things like True Tone displays. It looks like it will be a lot harder for Android vendors to coordinate with Google to develop a comprehensive color management system that works with existing software.
Also, while some high end Androids may be able to take acceptable photos, Android is notorious for taking blurry, poorly exposed garbage photos. I see this among all my friends who post Android groups pics. They are atrocious. Not because of hardware sensors as much as poor camera logic. They're using the cheapest chips available.
The majority of Android phones are low end and take terrible photos. You can cherry pick the 10% that have better camera features than most, but that is a niche market within Android that's much smaller than iOS as a platform.
The SoC is definitely ahead of everyone else. But no, Apple doesn't double performance every year. Some years, yes, but most years it about 50% for the CPU and 75% for the GPU. That's not putting it down, but just for some real world accuracy.
If you're going to fact check, you can't just make up facts and call it "accuracy." Apple has actually about doubled performance every year, not just a "50% gain."
As far as styling goes, there is no doubt that Apple is no longer the leader there. While I like my 6+, and we will be upgrading this year, according to our two year phone cycle plans, I have to say, that while it's nice, and feels good, it's nothing to look at and admire, as I did with my 4+, and even my 5 (we switched carriers that year, so we got new phones after only one year). When we got our original 3Gs', while they weren't incredible designs, they were far ahead of the usual smartphone, and so stood out. But now that every manufacturer has the same concept of a keyboard less phone, the differences are smaller. Frankly, the new Samsung S models are more interesting looking. We'll have to see if any of the rumors about 2017 are correct.
CNET did point out that the "beautiful" Galaxy S7 was also an "annoyingly reflective smudge magnet."
There weren't really any other comments about "styling," and given how subjective that would be, the article stayed on a factual course looking at reality, not forwarding an opinion about supposedly what looks nicer. It was about what's new in iPhone 7, not an opinion about who makes phones the author thinks looks nice.
Nobody should care about that opinion, nor needs to be told what they should like.
Tablets. Well, what's to say here? The tablet revolution has waned, it seems, and Apple's tablet sales along with everybodiy else's. I was expecting more from Apple here too. I've bought every model except for the iPad 4. Nice evolution. But the truth is that we need more than expected evolution at this point. We need Apple to come up with something markedly superior. Yes, the Pencil is great. Having color management is significant, and hopefully, this year, we will see those new screens the 27" iMac and the 9.7" iPad Pro feature.
Apple is and has remained the world's largest tablet vendor, even despite the rest of the industry dumping cheap products into the channel for years. Apple continues to make virtually all of the revenues from tablet sales.
But that's not enough to stop the fall in sales, much less to reverse it. While I hate to admit it. The only place where we're seeing growth in the computer industry now is the 2:1 market. Somehow, Apple is going to have to acknowledge that, and product a product in that area. I hope they do so sooner than later.
The "2-in-1" market is a BS fallacy invented by IDC to aggrandize Microsoft by comparing everything it is selling with a subset of what Apple is selling. Don't be fooled. Apple doesn't sell a 2-in-1 iPad. It sells iPads and two premium iPad Pro models. It sells MacBooks. Why should some losing competitor define the market? Remember when Zune tried to compare itself against only one model of iPod? Think about why that happened.
Then, last but not least, there is the question of macOS vs iOS. Where are these going? While Apple has consistently stated that the two will never merge, the continued merger of features, both user facing, and at the lower OS levels, makes me think that just maybe Apple isn't as steadfast in this as they say they are. Never say never, as the saying goes. The bringing over of the full color management software is certainly a major step there. What they need to do there is open it with APIs as they have in macOS.
Apple now sells 4 platforms, with obvious technology crossovers. It brings new ideas to all of them as broadly as possible. The idea that Apple went from 1 to 2 to 3 to 4 on accident when it really meant to converge to 1 is pretty alarming.
But why stop there? Considering the Origen of Apple's various OSs, there is no reason to think that they can't be merged. With APFS coming soon, for all the versions, Apple is showing that they don't want any of them, from WatchOS to macOS, to diverge. If they are so concerned that they don't diverge, and with feature parity coming closer as time goes on, can they eventually do anything other than merge?
Apple is not trying to merge iOS and macOS, no matter how many times you think about how they "can."
I certainly don't expect to see a full macOS on the watch, but there is no reason it couldn't be a subset. As the watch gains in performance over the years, it will be more of a possibility.
This comment is now approaching pure lunacy.
In fact, if Apple can double performance of their "A" series chips in the next two years, with some changes that I've mentioned several times in the last, there is no reason why they couldn't power a notebook. The biggest problem is the one of x86 vs ARM instruction sets. It's fantasy to believe that every developer would run to move their software from x86 to ARM if apple announced a macOS notebook. And despite what a few think, and ARM SoC could, in no way support x86 software at anywhere neare required performance levels.
Glad you've come around to the "doubling" CPU power already. There could be an ARM MacBook at some point, but all signs point to Apple focusing its Ax development on iOS and related devices, while keeping Macs Intel. There are currently not enough reasons for Apple to refocus its Ax development from being customized to sell 150M iPhones and 60M iPads to instead devote massive resources to duplicate Intel's work just to ship 20M Macs, some of which will have ARM chips.
There are at least four major classes of Mac CPUs (MacBook, MBP, desktops, Mac Pro) that Apple would have to build to replace Intel. Plus, it would also have to develop desktop class GPUs, all for 20M units of sales. Maybe, but doesn't seem a priority when Apple can currently buy Intel chips and Nvidia/AMD GPUs.
Apple has, no doubt, been running MacOS on ARM for at least a couple of years, and possibly some of their software as well. So I would expect that if they did do this, they would have much, but not all, of their stuff ready. But that's not enough. So I would express my idea again. There are no patents or copyrights on individual instructions from CPUs. Big Endian, Little Endian, as well as other expressions of algorithms to process chip information is open to everyone. It turns out that the 80% slowdown experiences when making an emulator from one chip family to another is caused by just a relatively few instructions that are done differently. There is no reasons why these instructions couldn't be included in an ARM SoC, and referred to when an x86 app needs them. That would close the performance difference significantly.
If Apple chose to do this, then x86 software could be run directly on an ARM SoC with relatively little slowdown. If the SoC is fast enough on its own, they it could work. Apple could save a bundle, as even slow x86 chips, and chipsets, cost much more than does an Apple SoC. Just a thought!
Pretty huge logical leap, but even if it were possible, it would be a massive investment in what is now about tied for Apple's 3rd largest business segment (iPhone, Services, iPad). Seems like there is more potential in building iPads, in selling more powerful iPhones, and in selling apps than in replicating the conventional PC chip business. Particularly as PC prices fall and chip makers face desperation.
Maybe Apple will eventually buy Nvidia or AMD and wean itself off third party Mac chips, but that doesn't seem very important in the short term given far more lucrative opportunities elsewhere.
i think that running iOS and macOS apps would work well. I have no doubt that Apple software people could figure out how to manage that well.
Confusing "can" with "should" is a problem Google typifies in its hardware decisions. It has been spectacularly expensive and resulted in a series of massive failures. Apple can do a lot of things. It's very good at saying no to things it could do.
Well, Daniel, you can cherry pick your numbers too. By doing what financial people don't do, you can average the first quarters' enthusiast buying cycle with the second quarters' sales, and come up with a more pleasing result. No matter how you look at it though, iPhone sales were down 16% that second quarter, which is much worse than the smartphone industries numbers overall.
ipad sales have been falling drastically for quite a while now. Mac sales were certainly disappointing, but they've been up for all the past years where Windows computer sales have been falling. There's a lot of explanation that needs to be done here, and you aren't doing it satisfactorily.
You say that my premise is wrong but it's more correct than yours. Companies always talk about currency shifts and economic conditions. But that doesn't explain the drastic drop, only part of it.
Well, I'm not repeating your BS. Sure, many languages are now supported, but you know that's not what I'm talking about. Right now, while Apple is a worldwide corporation, with over 60% of sales, AMD profits out of the USA, Amazon is still mostly a USA based seller. So Apple needs to have its software in many languages, whereas Amazon doesn't, as yet. But I'm talking about these who matter here, as Amazon does not - Alphabet and Microsoft. There's almost universal agreement that both of their assistant products have left Siri trailing. You may one of the few who disagree. I've been using it from the very beginning, and I haven't noticed much of an improvement in its ability to understand what is being said, while if I try it in Android, the results are better. Deny it all you want, but it's a fact.
As far as I understand, RAW support is just for photos brought in from outside, not for the built in cameras in iOS devices, which is what I was clear about in my post. So it still lags some Android phones there. And of course, I'm "cherry picking" high end Android phones, because these are the phones iOS is competing against, as I'm sure you know. I've also talked about color management in iOS in a number of posts here as being a major thing. This was my business for several decades, and I know the importance of that.
Well, those numbers are good, but it does show that we're both wrong on some of them, doesn't it? I still think the "A" series is well ahead of the others.
Ah, so you think we shouldn't be talking about how Apple products look now? The fact that the past two generations of phones have been called bland by many writers means nothing to you, but the "reflective smudge magnet" remark does? And by the way, my 12.9" iPad Pro collects dirt very badly, and it's very hard to remove, unlike earlier models. Less reflections, yes, but dirt? Terrible.
Apple's tablet sales, as far as I can see, has been dropping faster than the market as a whole. A major problem is those really cheap models from China, and elsewhere. But it does seem as though Apple is having trouble getting people to upgrade (I'm one of the few who buys a new one every year), and new people to buy in. Price seems to be an issue. Samsung's new model, priced as Apple's is, though with 32GB storage, has seen a big drop in sales.
I get what Apple does. I know a lot of people in their engineering departments, and I've been a commercial customer of theirs since 1988. They have a long range plan. In many respects, that's good. But it also makes it difficult for them to respond better to quick changes in the market.
I'd like to see some proof from you that the 2:1 market is just BS. While, as people here know, I'm not a big fan of either Gardner or IDC, I see this from many sources, not just those.
And please, the Zune? I can say a lot about that. Microsoft has never been good at marketing to the consumer, despite the somewhat fake XBox division, with its high subsidies. Heck, Microsoft based its entire post Win Mobile strategy on reusing the Zune UI, and look what happened! So, in that at least, I think we can agree.
I think you misunderstand what is happening. There is no way Apple can make a watch UI look, or function like, one on a phone, tablet, or Mac. Same thing is true for the Tv. But as we all know, the underlying technology is the same. It's really the same OS inside. The UI is just a layer imposed on top. So the watch doesn need hundreds of printer drivers, etc. why add that? There are other things that make no sense putting there. But again, it's still the same OS inside, just without features that make no sense for that line of devices, and that take up too much storage.
But it's interesting that even the watch will have APFS. I'm really not going to get into any detail on that in this post, because I've done this elsewhere, and it takes too much room.
You know, for someone whose ideas are not exactly sensible, your insults are amusing.
Doubling, well, I did say "in two years", not one. I do t know how much you know about chip technology, but I'm pretty conversant with it. What I've said isn't something that can't be done. In fact, it can be done, if Apple is interested. I'm not saying they will, but boy, was it a shock when they went to Intel. Hardly anyone believed that! Even after Jobs had the news conference, people online were still saying it wasn't going to happen.
But I can't see that Apple can just transition to ARM, no matter how powerful they get. They need those x86 instructions. I read, a couple of years ago, in The Microprocessor Report, a good article about just that. It turns out that about a dozen instructions would cut about 80% of the speed loss, and another dozen, or so would cut it by about 90%. That's moving from any one CPU family to any other, not just from x86 to ARM. So this could be done.
Advantages would be a major reduction of cost for Apple. They could cut at least $100 from their costs for a lower end laptop. Another advantage would be the ability to control the future of their lines much more closely. It also doesn't rule out their using AMD or Nvidia GPUs for higher end devices.
Yeah, you're right, Apple just doesn't have the kind of money for this, after all they will only spend about $10 billion in R&D next year, and they hardly have any cash either. So we can forget them ever coming out with their own chips. Oh, gee, they have.
Alphabet is an odd company. They are an advertising placement company, and they make software-like margins, as Microsoft does, so they can spend a lot of money on strange products that fail, sometimes before they even come out. Remember their ball?
But Apple seems afraid to fail, and that's not always a good thing. I would see no problem with Apple stating that they will, from time to time, try some things that may, or may not, make it, but that are interesting enough for them to put out there.
As someone with a fair amount of Apple stock, I'm willing to see that happen, without worrying about how that would affect it. In the long run, I believe it would be better. I would like to see some more of the things Apple patents come to market, even as one of those things Apple is just trying out. They patent a lot of great things, but we rarely see them.
Apple has, no doubt, been running MacOS on ARM for at least a couple of years, and possibly some of their software as well. So I would expect that if they did do this, they would have much, but not all, of their stuff ready. But that's not enough. So I would express my idea again. There are no patents or copyrights on individual instructions from CPUs. Big Endian, Little Endian, as well as other expressions of algorithms to process chip information is open to everyone. It turns out that the 80% slowdown experiences when making an emulator from one chip family to another is caused by just a relatively few instructions that are done differently. There is no reasons why these instructions couldn't be included in an ARM SoC, and referred to when an x86 app needs them. That would close the performance difference significantly.
If Apple chose to do this, then x86 software could be run directly on an ARM SoC with relatively little slowdown. If the SoC is fast enough on its own, they it could work. Apple could save a bundle, as even slow x86 chips, and chipsets, cost much more than does an Apple SoC. Just a thought!
i think that running iOS and macOS apps would work well. I have no doubt that Apple software people could figure out how to manage that well.
I must have missed that, if you posted it before. Interesting idea, that sounds doable. They could up the capability by including 2 (or more) A10/86 SOCs for a Laptop -- and still beat the cost of Intel chips. Another option would be to build a really badass variant (the A10/86z?) designed for power users and servers.
Exactly. But Dan doesn't seem to be willing to look at that, and I don't know why. Using two for a notebook would still be at the power envelope for an i3, which Apple doesn't use, though over the "M" series, which they now do. Apple has vast experience using double chips, going back to the ill fated G4.
Well, another interesting, but flawed, article by one of our most interesting, but one sided, authors.
While much in the article is right, there is much that is wrong as well. Often, I feel that he doesn't understand some of what he's writing about, because the spin he puts on things is often out of sync with reality.
I just don't think that the display technology improvements are going to really drive iPhone sales . (lets hear some number on how the iPad Pros are selling compared to the iPad Air and Air 2 when they came out to see if it increase; probably not ; probably decreased because of the price increate).
Getting rid of the audio jack will just make things worse (unless they both give you lightning ear buds and a lightning to 3.5 mm adapter in case you have your own headphones). They probably should have come out with the lightning buds last year to convince people that lightning based audit is better and is the future.
DED wrote a similar article back on June 9, 2016, "WWDC 2016: Apple's Siri and the future of voice vs. Amazon's Alexa Echo, Google Now, Microsoft Cortana" talking about how SIRI is better than the rest and just wait, just wait for WWDC to be wowed by the SIRI announcements where Apple will soar to the top. I wasn't in any way impressed. In this article DED doesn't herald coming SIRI improvements as the next big thing which is both disappointing probably painfully prophetic that no signification improvements to SIRI will come a part of iPhone 7.
Voice AI interfaces to computing is the next big thing because it has the potential to sweep away any legacy UI - its not writing on an iPad with a stylus/pencil, its not pressing harder on a screen to popup a menus, its not drawing characters on a watch, and its not a brighter, sharper, better screen than the year before.
Of course the can probably score some big sales in 2017Q1 (Jan 2017-Mar 2017) if they release an iPhone 7 the thickness of the 5S with a bigger battery and correspondingly battery life of 2 days. iPhone 7XL. And there would be room to return the headphone jack too.
Improving the color of a display in a way that most people won't understand, or need, is one thing. But moving to OLED (have bright lights and music playing) is. People think that OLED is the future. I'm not saying it is. If Apple can get their micro led tech in color and in large sizes, that may be the future.
But, unfortunately, perception of the truth, to many people, is the truth. If they believe that Apple lagging, well, then it is.
Apple has a strange history of coming up with bleeding edge technologies, and then just making small incremental improvements to them for some time. But rivals try to leap ahead. Sometimes that leap fails, but sometimes it works. Siri is a good example. Yes, many more languages. But does that advance the way Siri works? No. But maybe with the opening of some APIs to developers, we'll see some movement. Voice is a difficult thing to do for many reasons. Way back, I read novels, and saw movies that had people talking to computers. Great, but really doing the work is not the same as a movie. The last thing I want is people on a line all talking to their phones, giving commands. It's bad enough they talk constantly to other people. But phones need to have a clearer voice, and a louder one too. Many places are just not suitable for this.
Well, Daniel, you can cherry pick your numbers too. By doing what financial people don't do, you can average the first quarters' enthusiast buying cycle with the second quarters' sales, and come up with a more pleasing result. No matter how you look at it though, iPhone sales were down 16% that second quarter, which is much worse than the smartphone industries numbers overall.
Except that it's not averaging to find a better number. It's looking at the first two quarters of a new launch, which was handled differently the previous year. It's really obvious that if you're trying to understand what has actually happened with iPhone 6s, you'd look at all the data, not just find a number that seems to support your theory of "disinterest" without explaining why disinterest caused Apple to build more phones faster this year.
ipad sales have been falling drastically for quite a while now. Mac sales were certainly disappointing, but they've been up for all the past years where Windows computer sales have been falling. There's a lot of explanation that needs to be done here, and you aren't doing it satisfactorily.
Find and read the article about why iPad sales--mostly made up of lower end, cheaper iPad minis--went down in tandem with iPhone 6 Plus. Not really a mystery.
You say that my premise is wrong but it's more correct than yours. Companies always talk about currency shifts and economic conditions. But that doesn't explain the drastic drop, only part of it.
No you are not correct, for the reasons outlined.
Well, I'm not repeating your BS. Sure, many languages are now supported, but you know that's not what I'm talking about. Right now, while Apple is a worldwide corporation, with over 60% of sales, AMD profits out of the USA, Amazon is still mostly a USA based seller. So Apple needs to have its software in many languages, whereas Amazon doesn't, as yet.
Yes, and that's kind of important. Being wowed by Amazon and a system tied to one language is like being wowed by how well Windows Mobile was doing in the USA before the iPhone arrived. Look it has copy/paste and MMS! How'd that turn out?
But I'm talking about these who matter here, as Amazon does not - Alphabet and Microsoft. There's almost universal agreement that both of their assistant products have left Siri trailing. You may one of the few who disagree. I've been using it from the very beginning, and I haven't noticed much of an improvement in its ability to understand what is being said, while if I try it in Android, the results are better. Deny it all you want, but it's a fact.
There has been "universal agreement" among columnists about a lot of things, and those were regularly wrong in spectacular ways. In the early 1990s the world was going Microkernel. Then everyone agreed that Microsoft was going to duplicate QuickTime while also copying and bettering NeXTSTEP. Then WinCE was going to beat the iPod. Then WiMo was going to beat the iPhone. They they all agreed eventually that with everyone contributing to Android, Apple had no chance. Haven't you been reading this stuff for 10+ years?
As far as I understand, RAW support is just for photos brought in from outside, not for the built in cameras in iOS devices, which is what I was clear about in my post. So it still lags some Android phones there. And of course, I'm "cherry picking" high end Android phones, because these are the phones iOS is competing against, as I'm sure you know. I've also talked about color management in iOS in a number of posts here as being a major thing. This was my business for several decades, and I know the importance of that.
Well, those numbers are good, but it does show that we're both wrong on some of them, doesn't it? I still think the "A" series is well ahead of the others.
Ah, so you think we shouldn't be talking about how Apple products look now? The fact that the past two generations of phones have been called bland by many writers means nothing to you, but the "reflective smudge magnet" remark does? And by the way, my 12.9" iPad Pro collects dirt very badly, and it's very hard to remove, unlike earlier models. Less reflections, yes, but dirt? Terrible.
This article is not about the appearance of devices. But if you look at what customers globally are paying for, it is overwhelmingly Apple's expensive models to a far greater extent than Samsung's flagship.
Apple's tablet sales, as far as I can see, has been dropping faster than the market as a whole. A major problem is those really cheap models from China, and elsewhere. But it does seem as though Apple is having trouble getting people to upgrade (I'm one of the few who buys a new one every year), and new people to buy in. Price seems to be an issue. Samsung's new model, priced as Apple's is, though with 32GB storage, has seen a big drop in sales.
Apple's have dropped further because it peaked higher, and then turned a major segment of small tablet buyers into iPhone 6/6s Plus buyers. Nobody else has a "phablet" business as large, nor had a successful tablet business prior. However, the "problem" of cheap tablets is invented. There were also millions of cheap MP3 players flooding Asia in the early 2000s, but nobody invented the idea that Apple's blockbuster iPod business was "failing" in comparison. Don't fall for BS.
I get what Apple does. I know a lot of people in their engineering departments, and I've been a commercial customer of theirs since 1988. They have a long range plan. In many respects, that's good. But it also makes it difficult for them to respond better to quick changes in the market.
I'd like to see some proof from you that the 2:1 market is just BS. While, as people here know, I'm not a big fan of either Gardner or IDC, I see this from many sources, not just those.
The fact that all Surface models are "2:1s" whilemost iPads and MacBooks don't really fit that unnecessary description (nobody is really buying notebooks to take the screen off to use as a terrible tablet) should clue you in to fact that it is pretty thin marketing propaganda.
I must have missed that, if you posted it before. Interesting idea, that sounds doable. They could up the capability by including 2 (or more) A10/86 SOCs for a Laptop -- and still beat the cost of Intel chips. Another option would be to build a really badass variant (the A10/86z?) designed for power users and servers.
Exactly. But Dan doesn't seem to be willing to look at that, and I don't know why. Using two for a notebook would still be at the power envelope for an i3, which Apple doesn't use, though over the "M" series, which they now do. Apple has vast experience using double chips, going back to the ill fated G4.
I wrote articles about it.
What I'm saying here is that it looks like Apple has other more pressing priorities than replacing Intel+GPU on 20M Macs. You know, like building a car or any number of any other products that will sell in much larger quantities and generate more money. Macs can coast along on Intel without any real problem for a couple years at least.
As Mac software gets closer to iOS/ARM software, maybe we will see convergence between AppKit and UIKit, or perhaps iOS apps will come to the Mac and we'll see hybrid ARM/x86 systems that eventually wean away any need for Intel. But that doesn't appear to be a short term goal.
I think it was MacBeth: lots of sound and fury signifying not a whole lot. All of the strawmen and moved goalposts in the world will not change the reality that Apple will sell fewer iPhones in 2016 than they did in 2015. Nor will it change the reason for this: the iPhone trend is over. Not the iPhone of course: it will remain a very popular and profitable product until such a time arrives that phones are not needed at all. But the days of the iPhone being the single most talked about and influential product on the planet, the thing that everyone had to have in order to see and be seen with: done. It lasted 9 years, and that is a long time as trends go. (And I consent that technically it is still going on ... it is just on the downward slope of the curve.) Did the disco era last 9-10 years? The glam rock (or hard rock or metal) era? The alternative/grunge era? The gangsta rap era? The slasher film era? The YA film era? And so on.
Another thing: as tech trends go, the iPhone is as good as it got. Take television: it was decades before even half of all households had one. Stereos were common, but never trendy or associated with one brand or company the way that smartphones are with Apple and iPhone. The Sony Walkman was great, but truthfully not very many people had them, and the competing devices were nearly identical in form and function. VHS, CD, DVD etc. more of the same. I suppose the closest thing would be the Wintel era of 1995-2007. Fine, but if it wasn't for the WWW - something that Microsoft had nothing to do with and actually tried their level best to block from becoming the open platform-independent entity that it became - Windows PCs do not become popular consumer devices. Also, Microsoft did not have anywhere near the level of competition that Apple had to contend with in mobile. Instead, Wintel reigned because it was all that most people and enterprises could afford and/or support. So as soon as the iPhone came along and gave people a viable practical choice in terms of computing platforms, scores chose it.
The upshot: stuff like this isn't going to turn back to clock to 2008. Or 2011. Or 2014. Instead, it is time to accept it and move on, just as everyone else - including Apple - has. What will be the next big thing? Who knows. But thanks to the iPhone, Apple no longer has to care.
So, complain about two logical fallacies by putting your own fallacy forwards.. OK...
It is incredible how dump people only look at the outside of the iPhone. The iPhone haven't innovate it looks the same. Well so do all of the other phones out there. Every phone looks very similar to its previous version. What changes and matters is it's insides. What good is a phone that looks very different in the outside but is the same in the inside. No good fo me. But for the stupid people out there it sounds like the outside look of things is the most important part and what tells if a company is innovative or not. I am tired of hearing and reading about all of these idiots who think they know everything. If they do, they should make their own hardware and software to compete with the so call lack of innovation that is Apple.
Enjoyed the whole article... but I especially thought the commentary on the headphone jack was spot on.
That part should be taken out and printed as its own article. It feels like the world has gone crazy over this whole headphone jack business... when it's really just the same incremental improvement that's always been happening in computing...
Except that removing the female part of the headphone jack is only half a solution. It does nothing to address the other half. An adapter is not an elegant solution and I'm sure the repairs of the Lightning port will skyrocket.
We are moving more towards a wireless era. The iPhone should come with Bluetooth headphones. To be honest I rarely use the headphone jack. I Bluetooth all my music from my iPhone. I am all for the removal of the headphone jack. Time to move forward. Stop being stuck in the pass.
Exactly. But Dan doesn't seem to be willing to look at that, and I don't know why. Using two for a notebook would still be at the power envelope for an i3, which Apple doesn't use, though over the "M" series, which they now do. Apple has vast experience using double chips, going back to the ill fated G4.
I wrote articles about it.
What I'm saying here is that it looks like Apple has other more pressing priorities than replacing Intel+GPU on 20M Macs. You know, like building a car or any number of any other products that will sell in much larger quantities and generate more money. Macs can coast along on Intel without any real problem for a couple years at least.
As Mac software gets closer to iOS/ARM software, maybe we will see convergence between AppKit and UIKit, or perhaps iOS apps will come to the Mac and we'll see hybrid ARM/x86 systems that eventually wean away any need for Intel. But that doesn't appear to be a short term goal.
I'm not seeing the benefit to Apple of x86 in any form on A series; it makes no sense. In the end, Apple would be better off deprecating Wintel support at the same time MS does, however far out in the future that is, than going to the effort to emulate it on A series.
It's quite possible that there will be a Mac Book analog in iOS, I actually expect that at some point, especially a version(s) for education and it would be possible for Apple to create a Mac OS analog for A series but they wouldn't be compatible binaries by any stretch. Likely just an iOS Pro with traditional file management for example.
Better though would be an effort to incentivize large developers as Adobe and Autodesk to create iOS apps with feature parity to those currently on Mac OS and Wintel, and the move to subscriptions over perpetual licenses has already created the reason to do so; reducing the product maintenance costs associated with multiple codes sets.
I woud prefer iPhone to lay flat on the surface but with the bezel around the camera, it won't be possible and looks not so good to me. I don't buy phone because of camera. It is good to have a good camera own phone, as long as it does not affect the overall design. But for me, camera certainly is not the primary reason when buying an iPhone.
For example, he talks about iPhone sales this year as though everything is fine. It's not. Last quarters' iPhones sales fell by 16%. No matter how it's spun, that's just not ok. Sales were expected to be flat, not significantly down. He talks as thought they were, in fact, flat. Whether we like it or not, the new features of the 6S and 6S+ weren't considered to be all that interesting by the general buying public, and that includes many iPhone owners.
The mistake that you're making here, and in some other points, is drawing the conclusion that a sales drop is primarily due to the features/innovation. You don't actually know that. Nobody knows that. In fact, if you look at the flagship smartphone market as a whole, it's unlikely that's the case. Samsung has basically resorted to 2 for 1 deals to increase S7 sales volume. That doesn't exactly show confidence from Samsung in regards to any new hardware/software features they might include vs. the iPhone.
It isn't Samsung who have resorted to 2:1 deals, that is being done the carriers in order to try and wrest customers from competitors. There have been iPhone 2:1 deals as well - are those the work of Apple? While DED and other one-eyes love to point out Samsung is past peak Galaxy S sales, their flagship sales and income are on an upward trajectory while Apple's are declining. It's like saying gold is past it's $1800 peak, forget gold, it won't go anywhere, no money to made there, invest in something else.
So many words and still iphone 7 will be to iPhone 6s what iPhone 6s was to iPhone 6. Everything's improved but nothing will be really new and desirable.
It will be desirable enough to move 100s of millions of units, and oversell any other smartphone model by a wide margin.
Also "nothing will be really new and desirable" compared to what? The grass is greener ho-hum offering on the Android side, or some BS unrealistic idea?
The main people who have a beef with "everything's improved" is people who seek shiny distractions.
Moving 170 million units -- and just failing to breaking Apple's previous record (which is also the overall record for every company selling smartphones ever)? Yeah, what a bad fate...
Don't be daft. The sale of iphone is not gonna drop to zero overnight. I won't switch to android because I'm too invested in apples ecosystem. But -16% is huge by any any measure. And you get there by being lazy. Two years is more than enough time to design a new form factor. Reduce the borders around the display. Anything. Good example being the 5se... adopting a design from generations ago, seriously? The sense I got from Apple is them thinking to themselves oh we feel so magnanimous about producing a cheaper phone. We are just gonna dive into the parts bin and cobble something together. We want you to know that you're using our cheap phone and we don't care to spend any effort to make it better. No other company would do this. Unless it's for some anniversary marketing gimmick.
Apple still produce some pretty decent products but I feel progress has slowed significantly. Even evolutionary ones that products like the AirPort Extreme, Apple TV lcd display or Mac pro would benefit from. Apple is Happy to cruise along on auto pilot and selling recycled garbage. I wonder what do the employees on those products do each and every year. And how hard is it to include one more port on the macbook? I get the design philosophy of stripping away all superfluous feature I really do. But this is buying your own bs in the most extremely and inconsiderate manner.
the notion that Apple is lazy and sitting around doing nothing is idiotic.
as for dramaticly changing the case design, repeat after me: Apple doesn't do change for change's sake. they won't redo the bezels just because. this hasn't bothered you with toasters, dvd players, laptops, or cars -- where annual releases look largely the same as last year's.
Thanks for pointing me to Joanna Stern's article on iPhone and AI in WSJ. I think she's spot on. The position of Apple on privacy is not a desirable one. If I look at my Android friends that are amazed by the AI delivered to their phone by Google & friends that analyse their data, I can't help but wonder how Apple will ever deliver something similar? Nobody seems to care that Apple protects their privacy (it's a multinational too!) and Google not. They just want useful information delivered to them when they need it.
Since you do not care about your privacy can you send me your email account information and all your passwords, I do not think you mind me reading what you been up to.
Enjoyed the whole article... but I especially thought the commentary on the headphone jack was spot on.
That part should be taken out and printed as its own article. It feels like the world has gone crazy over this whole headphone jack business... when it's really just the same incremental improvement that's always been happening in computing...
I read something about the lightning port being better than the quantity of Samsung's port attempts because Apple's been putting them on devices for awhile (if longevity of production of a port is somehow good, why is 3.5mm's run of decades bad all of a sudden?). But nowhere did I see anything that made a case for lightning over 3.5mm for the purpose at hand. The argument provided was of such poor quality and full of so many holes that it was a laughable attempt that it could only be taken as "spot on" from the most ardent and insane Apple apologists. There was no real analysis or case made, just drivel.
The only headphones you'll see for lightning will be expensive (for what quality you actually get) because of the licensing fees and the fact the companies still will have to make a 3.5mm version or ship with an adapter that you'll have to pay for even if you don't use it. Yes, they will either sell two versions of the same thing at different prices, or will throw in a crappy, worse-than-the-iPhone's DAC for you to suffer with while raising the price. The first 2-3 years of the "post-3.5mm era" will be junky sets going for 25%-50% more than they otherwise would just because they can; and in some cases have-to. If Apple drops the 3.5mm, you can bet companies that can will be waiting to take extra money from people who upgraded just because the door is open to do so and the alternative door is now shut.
Apple will never ship a set of lightning port earbuds with the iPhone that drops the 3.5mm jack. They want to sell you Beats now. They might include an adapter (I'd give it a 10% chance). With Apple's obsession with "dongles to the rescue!!", I'd bet we'll be on the hook for a $30 or more dongle if we want universal audio compatibility back. Just like someone buying a new MacBook has to sink money into an adapter to use the still ubiquitous USB-A. (Heck for a few weeks there in the beginning you couldn't even get an Apple USB-C-to-lightning cable to hook up your Apple iProducts to your new Apple MacBook...)
If you're unhappy with the quality of the DAC that Apple ships, that's Apple's fault for being lazy, not the fault of the 3.5mm jack. There are plenty of high-end sets that are deemed "flawless at audio reproduction" that still use the 3.5mm jack as the connector between the playback device and drivers. The only reason to drop 3.5mm is a money grab, plain and simple (from licensing fees). It is of no real benefit to the consumer since the lightning port is already there and average people are not lining up around the corner for headphones that use it no matter how great some want to say it is.
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nope, you just don't understand how Apple rolls. iterative improvement is the name of their game, always has been. maybe new developments are rare, followed by years of iterative improvement. which itself is innovation, make no mistake -- these improvement don't design themselves and far off trees.
this has been their successful pattern since the '70s. and that's saying something.
http://www.macworld.com/article/1151235/macs/apple-rolls.html
Well, Daniel, you can cherry pick your numbers too. By doing what financial people don't do, you can average the first quarters' enthusiast buying cycle with the second quarters' sales, and come up with a more pleasing result. No matter how you look at it though, iPhone sales were down 16% that second quarter, which is much worse than the smartphone industries numbers overall.
ipad sales have been falling drastically for quite a while now. Mac sales were certainly disappointing, but they've been up for all the past years where Windows computer sales have been falling. There's a lot of explanation that needs to be done here, and you aren't doing it satisfactorily.
You say that my premise is wrong but it's more correct than yours. Companies always talk about currency shifts and economic conditions. But that doesn't explain the drastic drop, only part of it.
Well, I'm not repeating your BS. Sure, many languages are now supported, but you know that's not what I'm talking about. Right now, while Apple is a worldwide corporation, with over 60% of sales, AMD profits out of the USA, Amazon is still mostly a USA based seller. So Apple needs to have its software in many languages, whereas Amazon doesn't, as yet. But I'm talking about these who matter here, as Amazon does not - Alphabet and Microsoft. There's almost universal agreement that both of their assistant products have left Siri trailing. You may one of the few who disagree. I've been using it from the very beginning, and I haven't noticed much of an improvement in its ability to understand what is being said, while if I try it in Android, the results are better. Deny it all you want, but it's a fact.
As far as I understand, RAW support is just for photos brought in from outside, not for the built in cameras in iOS devices, which is what I was clear about in my post. So it still lags some Android phones there. And of course, I'm "cherry picking" high end Android phones, because these are the phones iOS is competing against, as I'm sure you know. I've also talked about color management in iOS in a number of posts here as being a major thing. This was my business for several decades, and I know the importance of that.
Well, those numbers are good, but it does show that we're both wrong on some of them, doesn't it? I still think the "A" series is well ahead of the others.
Ah, so you think we shouldn't be talking about how Apple products look now? The fact that the past two generations of phones have been called bland by many writers means nothing to you, but the "reflective smudge magnet" remark does? And by the way, my 12.9" iPad Pro collects dirt very badly, and it's very hard to remove, unlike earlier models. Less reflections, yes, but dirt? Terrible.
Apple's tablet sales, as far as I can see, has been dropping faster than the market as a whole. A major problem is those really cheap models from China, and elsewhere. But it does seem as though Apple is having trouble getting people to upgrade (I'm one of the few who buys a new one every year), and new people to buy in. Price seems to be an issue. Samsung's new model, priced as Apple's is, though with 32GB storage, has seen a big drop in sales.
I get what Apple does. I know a lot of people in their engineering departments, and I've been a commercial customer of theirs since 1988. They have a long range plan. In many respects, that's good. But it also makes it difficult for them to respond better to quick changes in the market.
I'd like to see some proof from you that the 2:1 market is just BS. While, as people here know, I'm not a big fan of either Gardner or IDC, I see this from many sources, not just those.
And please, the Zune? I can say a lot about that. Microsoft has never been good at marketing to the consumer, despite the somewhat fake XBox division, with its high subsidies. Heck, Microsoft based its entire post Win Mobile strategy on reusing the Zune UI, and look what happened! So, in that at least, I think we can agree.
I think you misunderstand what is happening. There is no way Apple can make a watch UI look, or function like, one on a phone, tablet, or Mac. Same thing is true for the Tv. But as we all know, the underlying technology is the same. It's really the same OS inside. The UI is just a layer imposed on top. So the watch doesn need hundreds of printer drivers, etc. why add that? There are other things that make no sense putting there. But again, it's still the same OS inside, just without features that make no sense for that line of devices, and that take up too much storage.
But it's interesting that even the watch will have APFS. I'm really not going to get into any detail on that in this post, because I've done this elsewhere, and it takes too much room.
You know, for someone whose ideas are not exactly sensible, your insults are amusing.
Doubling, well, I did say "in two years", not one. I do t know how much you know about chip technology, but I'm pretty conversant with it. What I've said isn't something that can't be done. In fact, it can be done, if Apple is interested. I'm not saying they will, but boy, was it a shock when they went to Intel. Hardly anyone believed that! Even after Jobs had the news conference, people online were still saying it wasn't going to happen.
But I can't see that Apple can just transition to ARM, no matter how powerful they get. They need those x86 instructions. I read, a couple of years ago, in The Microprocessor Report, a good article about just that. It turns out that about a dozen instructions would cut about 80% of the speed loss, and another dozen, or so would cut it by about 90%. That's moving from any one CPU family to any other, not just from x86 to ARM. So this could be done.
Advantages would be a major reduction of cost for Apple. They could cut at least $100 from their costs for a lower end laptop. Another advantage would be the ability to control the future of their lines much more closely. It also doesn't rule out their using AMD or Nvidia GPUs for higher end devices.
Yeah, you're right, Apple just doesn't have the kind of money for this, after all they will only spend about $10 billion in R&D next year, and they hardly have any cash either. So we can forget them ever coming out with their own chips. Oh, gee, they have.
Alphabet is an odd company. They are an advertising placement company, and they make software-like margins, as Microsoft does, so they can spend a lot of money on strange products that fail, sometimes before they even come out. Remember their ball?
But Apple seems afraid to fail, and that's not always a good thing. I would see no problem with Apple stating that they will, from time to time, try some things that may, or may not, make it, but that are interesting enough for them to put out there.
As someone with a fair amount of Apple stock, I'm willing to see that happen, without worrying about how that would affect it. In the long run, I believe it would be better. I would like to see some more of the things Apple patents come to market, even as one of those things Apple is just trying out. They patent a lot of great things, but we rarely see them.
But, unfortunately, perception of the truth, to many people, is the truth. If they believe that Apple lagging, well, then it is.
Apple has a strange history of coming up with bleeding edge technologies, and then just making small incremental improvements to them for some time. But rivals try to leap ahead. Sometimes that leap fails, but sometimes it works. Siri is a good example. Yes, many more languages. But does that advance the way Siri works? No. But maybe with the opening of some APIs to developers, we'll see some movement. Voice is a difficult thing to do for many reasons. Way back, I read novels, and saw movies that had people talking to computers. Great, but really doing the work is not the same as a movie. The last thing I want is people on a line all talking to their phones, giving commands. It's bad enough they talk constantly to other people. But phones need to have a clearer voice, and a louder one too. Many places are just not suitable for this.
What I'm saying here is that it looks like Apple has other more pressing priorities than replacing Intel+GPU on 20M Macs. You know, like building a car or any number of any other products that will sell in much larger quantities and generate more money. Macs can coast along on Intel without any real problem for a couple years at least.
As Mac software gets closer to iOS/ARM software, maybe we will see convergence between AppKit and UIKit, or perhaps iOS apps will come to the Mac and we'll see hybrid ARM/x86 systems that eventually wean away any need for Intel. But that doesn't appear to be a short term goal.
It's quite possible that there will be a Mac Book analog in iOS, I actually expect that at some point, especially a version(s) for education and it would be possible for Apple to create a Mac OS analog for A series but they wouldn't be compatible binaries by any stretch. Likely just an iOS Pro with traditional file management for example.
Better though would be an effort to incentivize large developers as Adobe and Autodesk to create iOS apps with feature parity to those currently on Mac OS and Wintel, and the move to subscriptions over perpetual licenses has already created the reason to do so; reducing the product maintenance costs associated with multiple codes sets.
It's been three connectors in 15 years of iPod and iPhone: FireWire on the original iPod, 30-pin from Gen 2 onwards, and Lightning.
Don't be daft. The sale of iphone is not gonna drop to zero overnight. I won't switch to android because I'm too invested in apples ecosystem. But -16% is huge by any any measure. And you get there by being lazy. Two years is more than enough time to design a new form factor. Reduce the borders around the display. Anything. Good example being the 5se... adopting a design from generations ago, seriously? The sense I got from Apple is them thinking to themselves oh we feel so magnanimous about producing a cheaper phone. We are just gonna dive into the parts bin and cobble something together. We want you to know that you're using our cheap phone and we don't care to spend any effort to make it better. No other company would do this. Unless it's for some anniversary marketing gimmick.
Apple still produce some pretty decent products but I feel progress has slowed significantly. Even evolutionary ones that products like the AirPort Extreme, Apple TV lcd display or Mac pro would benefit from. Apple is Happy to cruise along on auto pilot and selling recycled garbage. I wonder what do the employees on those products do each and every year. And how hard is it to include one more port on the macbook? I get the design philosophy of stripping away all superfluous feature I really do. But this is buying your own bs in the most extremely and inconsiderate manner.
as for dramaticly changing the case design, repeat after me: Apple doesn't do change for change's sake. they won't redo the bezels just because. this hasn't bothered you with toasters, dvd players, laptops, or cars -- where annual releases look largely the same as last year's.
Since you do not care about your privacy can you send me your email account information and all your passwords, I do not think you mind me reading what you been up to.
The only headphones you'll see for lightning will be expensive (for what quality you actually get) because of the licensing fees and the fact the companies still will have to make a 3.5mm version or ship with an adapter that you'll have to pay for even if you don't use it. Yes, they will either sell two versions of the same thing at different prices, or will throw in a crappy, worse-than-the-iPhone's DAC for you to suffer with while raising the price. The first 2-3 years of the "post-3.5mm era" will be junky sets going for 25%-50% more than they otherwise would just because they can; and in some cases have-to. If Apple drops the 3.5mm, you can bet companies that can will be waiting to take extra money from people who upgraded just because the door is open to do so and the alternative door is now shut.
Apple will never ship a set of lightning port earbuds with the iPhone that drops the 3.5mm jack. They want to sell you Beats now. They might include an adapter (I'd give it a 10% chance). With Apple's obsession with "dongles to the rescue!!", I'd bet we'll be on the hook for a $30 or more dongle if we want universal audio compatibility back. Just like someone buying a new MacBook has to sink money into an adapter to use the still ubiquitous USB-A. (Heck for a few weeks there in the beginning you couldn't even get an Apple USB-C-to-lightning cable to hook up your Apple iProducts to your new Apple MacBook...)
If you're unhappy with the quality of the DAC that Apple ships, that's Apple's fault for being lazy, not the fault of the 3.5mm jack. There are plenty of high-end sets that are deemed "flawless at audio reproduction" that still use the 3.5mm jack as the connector between the playback device and drivers. The only reason to drop 3.5mm is a money grab, plain and simple (from licensing fees). It is of no real benefit to the consumer since the lightning port is already there and average people are not lining up around the corner for headphones that use it no matter how great some want to say it is.