Dan_Dilger

spice-boy said:

do people that are living paycheck to paycheck buy a phone for $1,000? 

Yes they do. It's cheaper to trade it in every two years and keep buying the latest new premium iPhone than buying a cheap $300 Android every year and watching it glitch out and end up with zero residual value. 

ElCapitan said:

First of all there is a rude awakening across the planet of the insanity of shipping production of goods and services offshore, and putting all eggs in the Chinese basket.  The effect of the COVID-19 crisis is that suddenly all countries starts to act like countries again, and global sourcing has to a large extent collapsed. 

With the upcoming financial depression we just have seen the start of, people are going to first cut on subscriptions; cloud services, music, media streaming, software subscriptions, then anything premium.

People are going to get much more aware of purchasing products that creates jobs in their countries and not someone elsewhere. Equally they are going become much more focused on that their hard earned money don't stuff the coffers of international companies that hardly give anything back to their markets (taxes, job creation, local economic growth). 

If you look at Apple and think there's tremendous value in the manual labor assembly jobs contracted out to Foxconn in China, and then discount the 80,000 workers Apple directly employees in the USA (many are retail; ~20,000 are professional designers, engineers, and office staff working in California, Texas, FL, etc facilities), plus the 450,000 supplier employees that work for Apple in the US, and 1.5M developers + who work in content and apps directly attributable to Apple's platforms, there's something wrong with how you are looking at things. 

Apple is doing its valuable creative, design, engineering, planning, product work domestically and shipping the routine low-value jobs elsewhere because nobody in the US is qualified to run precision manufacturing and basic labor and there's nowhere to do it and no supply chain to support it. 

You really need to reconsider what you think about jobs.

Also, you're right that working people who can suddenly not feed themselves or pay rent are going to be cutting services and other luxuries. But Apple's installed base includes a vast number of independently rich people who are at most going to be inconvenienced by this turmoil. The damage is going to hit certain groups far harder than others, as grossly unfair as that is. And those hurt the most are at the bottom, using Android phones already. 

Apple also pays the most taxes in the US, and its sales are hit by state sales tax etc. Substantiate what you're claiming because it sounds awfully weak. 

WarrenBuffduckh said:

More relevant to the Q. “ Will the COVID-19 disaster sink Apple's premium hardware?” is that we’re waiting, waiting and waiting for AirTile, AirPower, AppleHeadphone, AirPodsPro Lite, AppleGlasses, AppleCar, iTV, iPhone SE2, MacBook 14”, iMac, HomePod 2020. No, it’s not COVID-19 that is the (main) cause of delays - although it will certainly be attributed being so. The core problem is the dispersed focus on all the services mentioned, the CEO not obsessed with products, and the money addiction of the immense Tech Bureaucracy he created reaping fruits from Steve’s ideas. Steve said: “Stay lean and mean, stay foolish, focus on products” Tim did: “Become large and keep counting, focus on cash” Hence its inability to act as a lean, mean and innovative aggressor. It has become merely defensive, sadly, where keeping market share is key and innovation considered merely disruptive. On the individual employee level that translates “Think different” into “Think indifferent”.

The fact that you can list off almost a dozen products that a lot of iPhone users know about and are interested in evaluating or buying says much more about Apple's level of competency and performance.
What is anyone waiting to come out of Facebook or Google, and what of those things would anyone actually pay for?
I don't get your contrast between Jobs and Cook. Jobs tried many more wild things out as desperate reaches than Cook ever has. Jobs introduced iPod Socks and floated out some pretty bad software and internet services, including multile things he felt compelled to appoligize in public for. Cook has rather deftly launched hit after hit, even after the obvious product niches were filled.
Cook is sailing a much larger ship. He can hire smart people to make design decisions. Jobs had a magical vision for knowing what upcoming generations would want and need. But if he were still around, he'd likely still be pushing for fake leather trim on windows and shiny chrome knobs in the UX, stuff that just slows down real progress in utility. Jobs was sort of notorious his whole life for occasionally prioitizing something really inessential over the greater good of a product.
Apple would be far worse off if Cook blustered along as if he thought he were really The Visioary rather than being really excellent at operations. At this scale, Apple should be run by somebody capable of delegating work to a design talent team, rather than somebody who is there to stroke their "I'm a genius ego." Imagine if Apple run by some ultra privelaged rich dick who thinks he's smarter than he really is, like Elon.

luxuriant said:

Always great to read your thoughts, Daniel. But the tldr; is simply to apply Betteridge's Law of Headlines:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines

I do that ironically to feel clever. It also lets me phrase the question as absurdly as possible, so just reading it conveys what a dumb question it is. The article is just some extra articulated proof.

dclivejazz said:

Even given that this site is devoted to all things Apple, this editorial is over the top in building up a straw man of a publication it claims has historically made inaccurate negative predictions about the company and then hysterically tearing it down.

The stories it emotionally criticizes were not necessarily malign in intent and were possibly just wrong, based as most of them appear to have been on speculation made by financial analysts or parts suppliers.

Furthermore, Apple may well be one of the most well-positioned companies to weather the current crises but it will not be impervious to it. It very well could have to delay the iPhone 12 even past the Christmas holiday sales season. Maybe not. BFD either way for such a financially solid corporation.

"Straw man" has a meaning. It referrs to "giving the impression of refuting an argument, while actually attacking a different argument that was not presented but is simply easier to criticize." That didn't occur here in any way. In fact, by claiming "a straw man was attacked," rather than refuting any of the arguments of the actual article here, you are the one building up a straw man you can then attack because it's so easy to effortlessly do so. 

There is also not any "emotional criticism" of the new and historical false claims made by Nikkei in covering Apple. The article merely pointed out that the Nikkei's staff has repeatedly presented false information that confidently predicted an outcome that did not actually occur. In the most recent case, it contrasts the comments of an analyst, and Apple's suppliers and assemblers against the Nikkei's "months late Phone 12" conjecture based on unnamed, unverifiable "sources." 

Further, by attempting to shift the conversation from whether Apple can "weather the current crises" to the very different argument of whether "it will not be impervious to it," you are again making a lazy straw man argument to avoid actually refuting any of the points made. Nobody has ever been saying Apple will be "impervious" to challenges in the assembly and selling of its devices this year. Apple was the first to report that it would not be reaching its expected Q2 guidance. AI has never stated Apple will be unaffected by the shutdown of society, because that is ridiculous. Its stores are closed! 

Your entire comment is therefore an erected, phony straw man you mercilessly beat up because you can't really address any of the actual arguments presented here, because there is nothing to complain about. If you could present a clear argument that takes apart what is written here, you should have, rather than erecting a straw man of a straw man.

Apple has a variety of options available to it to avoid launching iPhone 12 "months" late, including a streamlined, limited release of iOS 14 features and even a less ambitious release of iPhone 12 models that partially delays segments of the launch, just as it delivered iPhone X weeks after the launch of 7+ and 9 in the same year. The nikkei clearly aimed its fact-free conjecture to generate the most FUD possible, and it delivered no real insight into Apple's situation.

Along with the Wall Street Journal, it also was completely inept at framing the importance and impact of Apple's setbacks with that of the greater industry as a whole. There is no company better positioned than Apple what will gain a leg up while Apple is struggling to meet demand or produce inventory. As AI has repeated several times, Android makers are far worse positioned in their ability to cope. They have less funding, less profitability, and were dead set on catching up to Apple this year leveraging the promotion of via extreme-luxury tier folding screen devices and 5G models. 

Nobody is going to care about $2,600 crippled folding devices during a crunch. 5G is not rolling out on schedule. The Tokyo Olympics that Samsung was betting on using to promote its temporary lead in 5G have been delayed for a full year, erasing that entire strategy. Samsung bet big on that and is now screwed. Even a modest 5G iPhone launch will catch Apple up to the only significant advantage Android has enjoyed recently. In fact, a weak iPhone 12 launch that can be blamed on COVID-19 is a huge relief to Apple, as its the best opportunity the company has ever had to reset expectations and lower the intense scrutiny of whether Apple can ever grow beyond its current sales. 

And unlike all the Android companies that had been hoping to launch something new and attention getting this spring and summer before another new iPhone appears, Apple has the longest lead time of anyone in the smartphone industry before it needs to deliver something that can help it to recover. These are facts. You couldn't refute a single one of them, so you resorted to throwing out "straw man" as a straw man.