If this device is 3% of iPhone sales, it would be an incredible success.
Nibbling at the edges like that has never been Apple's game. The iPhone Plus has routinely made it into the top ten selling smartphones in the world, and yet Apple is still allegedly cutting it for lack of "sufficient" sales. As for 3% of sales being a gigantic win--how do you figure that? I think you're correct that Fold sales will largely come from cannibalizing Pro Max sales. A mid-tier storage Pro Max sells for $1600. A similar storage Fold might come in at $400 or $500 more. But it's going to be a MUCH more expensive phone to manufacture, not to mention the costs for R&D, tooling and marketing that will go into it. I'm not seeing much added profit at all for Apple in that $400-$500 increase in the selling price over the Pro Max when you consider all of the costs that have to be amortized over a relatively small (for Apple) number of phones that will be sold.
Zero surprise. Galaxy Fold 6 ranges from $1600 to nearly $2K at Best Buy, depending on storage, So it sounds like Apple will be within a few hundred of those numbers. Why Apple would introduce this extremely niche and expensive bridge to nowhere is beyond me, but I also can't believe that all these predictions of its arrival are wrong. Apple has never felt the "me, too" need to chase Android gimmicks. and it's hard to see the Galaxy Fold as anything more than that when it has generated such little sales traction after six years on the market. Same for the Pixel Fold, although that has been around for only two years. Who knows? Maybe Apple will have come up with some compelling use cases by the time it arrives that will justify its stratospheric price and fragility when you inevitably drop it to a broader audience than either Samsung or Google has reached, but I'm not sure what those would be.
It’s like all the whining about Apple making a touchscreen laptop (the MicrosoftSurface) or the additional whining about putting macOS on an iPad Pro, whine number three will be the cost why can’t it cost $600?
If I were to be tempted by a folding iPhone, it would have to be a flip. I loved my Motorola flip phone in the 90s - a couple of years ago a friend had a Samsung flip which was also nice apart from the very visible crease. But at $2,000+ (probably £2,000+ in the UK)? Not on your nelly 😱 maybe, when/if the price comes down once the R&D costs have been recouped. But that's all moot, seeing as Apple's offering looks like being a fold rather than a flip phone.
Zero surprise. Galaxy Fold 6 ranges from $1600 to nearly $2K at Best Buy, depending on storage, So it sounds like Apple will be within a few hundred of those numbers. Why Apple would introduce this extremely niche and expensive bridge to nowhere is beyond me, but I also can't believe that all these predictions of its arrival are wrong. Apple has never felt the "me, too" need to chase Android gimmicks. and it's hard to see the Galaxy Fold as anything more than that when it has generated such little sales traction after six years on the market. Same for the Pixel Fold, although that has been around for only two years. Who knows? Maybe Apple will have come up with some compelling use cases by the time it arrives that will justify its stratospheric price and fragility when you inevitably drop it to a broader audience than either Samsung or Google has reached, but I'm not sure what those would be.
There are some things to consider here.
Apple is having a tough time competing in China. There are a few reasons for that but I'll highlight just two.
NEV sales are going through the roof there and the 'smarts' in those cars are very smart - blowing way past anything CarPlay can offer. Hundreds of thousands (and rising fast) of those cars are running HarmonyOS so anyone with a Huawei phone tied to a Huawei-partnered car will see the benefits. The opposite is also true. If one of those cars takes your fancy, getting a Huawei phone (or tablet, wearable, TV...) makes a lot of sense.
Xiaomi is another example although so far they only have one car.
What can Apple do to counter that situation if they have no competing product?
Folding phones are reaching maturity in many ways but remain expensive. That keeps the marketshare of folding phones down.
Prices especially of flip phones however, are seeing more affordable versions come to market.
Similar to the car situation if you want a folding experience, Apple is not going to get the sale because it has no folding option. You would have to look elsewhere.
It has been said that if the Huawei Mate XT hit sales of 500,000 units (unthinkable to my mind) it would bring in $1.5B in revenue. Yet just last week there were (unsubstantiated) reports of it having sold 400,000 units (in spite of the incredible price tag). In basically one quarter.
That model has now got a 'global' release so it's anybody's guess how many will be sold. Prices start at 3,699€ in the EU.
Now the Pura X has hit the Chinese market too with it's unusual form factor but great screen ratio.
Throw in the likes of Oppo, Honor, Samsung etc and there are lots of folding options to choose from and thinness, weight, creases etc are beginning to look like non-issues.
It's hard not to see Apple losing sales (especially in China) as a result of not having a folding phone.
There will clearly be a threshold to lost sales beyond which Apple must respond. Perhaps these reports are simply Apple gearing up to stop a trickle of lost sales turning into a flood.
The outlier here is maybe Google. While the US is shielded (quite literally now) from a wide spread of folding/flip options on home soil, if a Pixel Fold came to market offering Chinese level engineering, Apple would possibly be in a spot of bother (assuming there is untapped demand for foldables there).
Samsung is having an even a harder time competing in China. They’re nowhere to be found zero….
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