y2an

“Ordered”? There is no such power. 

If anything, Apple has been too timid in introducing some of these obvious features sooner and I wonder if that was because of concern for third-party developers or questions about IP ownership? As for the third parties, however good their products are, have they ever had any leverage to protect themselves against competition from anyone (Apple included)? Perhaps they have always been living on borrowed time. 

Lacking in build quality? I don’t think so, Apple never turns out a shabbily built product.

It advances the state of the art at the low end of the range. It uses an in-house modem which pushes up Apple’s margins and gives more flexibility for dealing with tariffs or discounting. It supports Apple Intelligence, which is crucial to Apple’s claim that their product range is ready for AI. It divorces from still having devices with Lightning connectors in the product mix. Not everyone wants the best camera, just an adequate one. I don’t think the 16e is for me, but I think it is for a lot of people. 11% is not to be sniffed at!

It feels like they are trying to correct for some misjudged pricing decisions made in the past, but sorry Adobe, that train left the station. Usually with tech either the features improve at the same price, or the price goes down over time. An explicit price increase without additional features will be seen as without merit and create further customer loyalty. Good luck with that, Adobe.

“Maybe they see something we don’t.”

It’s called downstream impact (DSI). With a little analysis you can estimate this quite well. I’m sure Apple has a good handle on the incremental impact per customer from having Apple TV+ available. It’s not a loss making venture, it’s an investment.

It’s hard to know where to start on this rather wrong article. First, there would be no “reshoring” of manufacturing for the iPhone to the US because it was never made here before; it would be bringing iPhone manufacturing to the US for the first time. Second, it is cost infeasible (widely reported just about everywhere) and the tariffs would have to be absurdly high and sustained at that level far into the future for Apple (or any other manufacturer, for that matter) to be able to justify investing in such an expensive project as bringing overpriced manufacturing to the US. This administration has little more than three years to run at which point policies could all change, hardly a stable environment for such enormous business investments; most businesses will just weather the storm. Third, and I really don’t know why the tariff hawks don’t get this, the only way Apple would bring manufacturing on a high volume item like the iPhone to the US is if it was highly automated, eliminating most of the human element, so it would fail to meet any hope the tariff hawks have of providing employment. 

It beats me why AppleInsider would have a point of view about seeing manufacturing in the US. It makes AI an unreliable reporter on the issue. What if every large country or trading bloc followed similar strategies to make sure everything sold was manufactured domestically? If businesses literally had no other choice but to follow these imposed rules they would spend all of their investment on regionalised production rather than R&D on innovative new products - assuming, of course, they didn’t simply want to forgo those other markets because the local manufacturing requirements were too draconian to care to participate. 

Revenue is a misleading measure. Cost of sales for hardware is much more than for search. 

The roles are confusingly reversed here. Perhaps Google made the first put, and suggested paying Apple (and others) for making Google search default, But when you get into the roles each party really plays here the reality is that Apple (and others) are demanding payments from Google to send search traffic to Google as their default. Extortion by any other name! in the normal course of business Apple (and others) would actually be paying Google (or any other search engine) for the service they are providing to support the volume of traffic they are sending! What clouds, this view is that Google makes money of the advertisements they can serve while delivering search results; take those away and the business relationship is more clear. A proper remedy would have Google Price the search service then agree with the cell phone makers on a revenue split for advertising served, settled by deducting their search service costs. The implementation would involve every year reviewing the fairness of the service costs and the revenue split from advertising. Any other search service would be able to participate on similar terms.