all day breakfast

It’s ironic that Steve Sinofsky, former head or Microsoft Windows (not sure of his exact title), has become a user and strong supporter of Apple products. He’s knowledgeable about the internal workings of software development in large corporations. Interesting comments and observations IMO.

Some observations:
1) some here seem to equate a new exterior design with a significant upgrade. Apple isn't stupid and know a lot more about who buys phones and when then the readers of this humble site. I'm always up for a new external shell but let's not get too superficial, the phone itself may be packed with new technologies. 
2) the fact is that a lot of people are holding onto their phones for longer, the number of us who upgrade every year is small. If you come from a 5s next year this next phone will be impressive. 
3) 2017 is the 10 year anniversary of the launch of the iPhone so a dramatically new phone body will be part of a massive 2017 campaign about reinventing the smartphone. 

I'm thinking Bloomberg is wrong, that from a few "knowns" they are drawing erroneous conclusions, notably the conclusion that Apple is scaling down its car efforts. We know Bob Mansfield was brought in to redirect the project. Bloomberg and others have decided this means Apple has drawn down on its efforts and uses staff leavings like this one as further confirmation. I and others think that Mansfield's job is to refocus the project to get the AI, software and mapping components worked out first and engineers originally hired to think through hardware solutions are no longer needed until the software is better developed. Apple is apparently interested in level 4 and level 5 autonomous vehicles (not just cars!) and designing such vehicles is too "blue sky thinking" at present. Fleet cars or personal transportation? Busses? Wheelchairs? Something that doesn't exist yet? Tim Cook repeatedly refers to autonomous vehicles as the mother of all AI projects. That doesn't sound like scaling back to me.