andy-uk

There is a good living to be had selling more expensive devices to fewer and wealthier people, and Apple does a good job with that, but one factor I think in support of the iPhone SE 2nd gen would be to provide a new entry point to Apple products. It used to be the iPod, but no-one buys dedicated music players any more, and it is now probably the second hand market. My first, and current, iPhone is an iPhone 7 Plus which I bought in the UK for £210, which is £210 Apple will never see. It's not that I can't afford £1,000 for something that is worth £1,000 to me - I am typing this on my 15" MacBook Pro which I paid nearly £2,000 for and consider money well-spent - but a handheld device I don't use much, which I am likely to drop and break or have stolen, is not worth £1,000 to me, but I could be persuaded to pay £300 or £400 for. If the lower price means I can't make my head look like a talking poo or make tiny AR dinosaurs appear on my desk or shoot TV broadcast quality video you know what, I can probably live without them. 

If Apple want to drive revenue from services they need to get iOS devices into as many hands as possible, and post-coronavirus lockdown we are about to enter the worst recession in 100 years, so an affordable, entry level iPhone that does what most people want a phone to do connected to revenue-generating services seems sensible to me. Roll on the iPhone SE 2nd gen Plus.  

Let's face it, the butterfly keyboard MacBook was something you bought if you had to because you were tied into the Apple operating system, not something you aspired to, so if you've got to settle for something you don't want then why would anyone pay a premium price for that when you could get a cheaper Windows PC you didn't really want instead? I am typing this on my mid-2015 15" MacBook Pro and I have dreaded anything going wrong with it in case it meant I had to replace it with one of the pre-16" range. It looks like we are about to enter the biggest global recession since the last one so if Apple is moving towards the radical business model of selling products people want at prices they can afford then maybe they could do something about the webcam, too? We are all Zooming and FaceTiming each other and nearly every TV news broadcast is sent from the reporter's webcam so if they ported just a fraction of the camera technology they have developed for the iPhone onto the MacBook it might help remove one more sales barrier.

corrections said:

andy-uk said:

There is a good living to be had selling more expensive devices to fewer and wealthier people, and Apple does a good job with that, but one factor I think in support of the iPhone SE 2nd gen would be to provide a new entry point to Apple products. It used to be the iPod, but no-one buys dedicated music players any more, and it is now probably the second hand market. My first, and current, iPhone is an iPhone 7 Plus which I bought in the UK for £210, which is £210 Apple will never see. It's not that I can't afford £1,000 for something that is worth £1,000 to me - I am typing this on my 15" MacBook Pro which I paid nearly £2,000 for and consider money well-spent - but a handheld device I don't use much, which I am likely to drop and break or have stolen, is not worth £1,000 to me, but I could be persuaded to pay £300 or £400 for. If the lower price means I can't make my head look like a talking poo or make tiny AR dinosaurs appear on my desk or shoot TV broadcast quality video you know what, I can probably live without them. 

If Apple want to drive revenue from services they need to get iOS devices into as many hands as possible, and post-coronavirus lockdown we are about to enter the worst recession in 100 years, so an affordable, entry level iPhone that does what most people want a phone to do connected to revenue-generating services seems sensible to me. Roll on the iPhone SE 2nd gen Plus.  

What about AirPods and Apple Watch? They cost around what an iPod model once did. 

They do, but I would say neither is an entry point to iOS from which the iPhone is a natural upgrade in the way that the iPod was. AirPods work best with the iPhone, and the Apple Watch didn't used to work at all without an iPhone, so I think both products presume you are already in the Apple ecosystem rather than providing an entry into it. HomePod does the same thing, it helps build the garden wall a bit higher once you are in Apple's walled garden but there's not much you can do with it without at least one iOS device.