maestro64
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Apple lowers holiday quarter guidance on lower than expected iPhone sales
Wow, this one brought out everyone, have not seen a thread this long in long time.
BTW, I was at the Apple store yesterday 1/1 getting my battery replace on my 6S (work Phone) 18 months old, for the last month the battery was dead by noon each day with light usage and supposed 89% life on the battery. Went to schedule an appointment last week and all the store with in 50 miles were booked through the 1st for in store support. When I call apple support they confirm as long as I book the appointment for the repair before 12/31 the store would still honor the discounted replacement.
Get to the store the story there was completely different, they refuse to honor the discount replacement, did not even want to talk about, refuse to call Apple online support to see what they were telling people, there were two other people at my table who were told the exact same thing. They made us all pay the full price. But they were more than happy to talk to us about trading in our old phone for a brand new one. Not sure how many time they reference trading in the phone.
After that experience I believe all the employees at the store were told no not talk about the battery replacement and push people to trade in their old phones.
I have to say this was the worse Apple experience I had. If this is the game they are going to play this is not going to go well for Apple.
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Declining iPhone sales in India is a sign Apple is failing to adapt its business
Yep, unless Apple want to get into the race to the bottom with cheap phones they will not be successful in India. This is bad path for Apple, if Apple dropped the price low enough to attach a buyers attention, it will create a problem for them in the balance of the world. If they sell cheap phones in India the rest of us will find out and demand the same thing. In India, they see no difference between any cell phone other than the price. they see they as pure commodity and interchangeable. All the things Apple brings to the table has not value in India. Then you have the fact that most of the people in India can not even afford a phone, the one who can only buy on price at the end of the day.vulcan__ said:I believe it is time for Apple to get out of India. Apple is not ready to change the pricing strategy and my countrymen are not ready to change their mindset.
The entire country rallies behind cheap android phones and have zilch worries when it comes to privacy and sharing data.
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Steve Jobs wanted ultra-optimized US manufacturing, Apple vets say
As person who worked for companies who hired lots of H1B, i can tell you its not about hiring the best talent, it about hiring the lowest cost. H1B do not command the same salary as their US counter parts. Many times instead of sponsoring and H1B since only so many can be sponsored each year the companies I worked for would just outsource to these foreign countries and hire lots of people locally and 25% the US wage. Also as person who has seen lots of H1B resumes and interview a fair number of them, they are not as well educated as the US counter parts. I will give you one example since this is what I had the most experience with. I would get resumes of people who had an education in Electronics Engineering or the close equivalent, most all these people had no experience in electronic, most their experience was in power but they will sit across you from you and tell you they could design and test digital circuits. They had no clue what they were talking about, but they did not stop them from claiming their could do they job, I give they credit for the positive attitude, but these people were replacing people who have real experience.mac_dog said:
We’re already too fat. Seriously, though. Companies hire the best. Period. We don’t even have an adequate school infrastructure. This is what happens when you have 10x the amount of money pouring into the military. You leave nothing for educating the masses. The irony about Indians is that they modeled their school system after our public system of the 60’s & 70’s.sirozha said:My town is inundated with H1B-visa Indians who have replaced 50% or more of American IT personnel. About 35% of doctors are Indian on H1B visas. They have pushed Americans out of the jobs here, and these are not manufacturing jobs. These are high-tech and medical jobs. As a result, housing prices are through the roof. These temporary Indians are buying several houses each on interest-only loans, knowing full well that they are going to have to leave within 5-6 years and can simply abandon their houses (if the market turns down) with no consequences. Their monthly mortgage payments are significantly lower than apartment rentals because of the ARM-type loans that they take out. In the meantime, they are collecting rents on the multiple houses that they purchased with no credit history and no permanent status here. How can a temporary worker buy a house in the US on a mortgage is beyond comprehension. We have not learned anything from the 2009 housing crash.
If we don't want to manufacture anything, we don't want to build anything, we don't want to work in agriculture, we don't want to study sciences, we don't want to work as engineers, we don't want to be doctors, what the hell are we good for? Are we going to be pigs for the rest of the world to raise until we get fat enough to be slaughtered?
We can have robotic factories built in the US and train our citizens to maintain and program robots. If we don't know how to do this, let's invite Chinese, Japanese, and Germans to help us out, pay them handsomely, and learn how to make our own crap efficiently by leveraging the latest robotic technologies for manufacturing. This could not be done three decades ago, but with the advance of technology, it is now possible.
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Here are all the Apple Pay banks added during 2018 and 2019
All the POS vendors do support it, mom & pops shops just need to turn it on and agree to the terms with their bank who process their CC transaction. That is the simple answer, and had this discussion with the place I get my hair cut, the owner had not idea his system supported it and he was an Apple guy too. The next month he was accepting Apple pay.crabby said:To make this work Apple doesn't need to get more banks on board. It is the still amazing number of POS venders who do not have the system working. A million free devices to the mom & pops would further Apple's biz more than signing 100 more banks.
What I have seen is most mom & pop stores usually are using old cash register software which is still running on an old windows environment and this software does not support the NFC token transactions or the interface to the new POS. Some places I have been to who except Apple pay and they are still on their old cash registers system have to key in the amount in to the POS terminal to allow you to process the transaction with Apple pay, this is work around to the old systems which still exist and small stores who refuse to upgrade since many times it ties into their accounting software. There is a small bakery i go to and last year they updated all their cash register and POS to Square so they now accept Apple pay without an issue.
Apple pay changes are more than the POS systems for many small places it has a ripple effect and many times there is lots of costs to it which is not obvious.
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Apple's largest supplier reported 24 percent surge in revenues from OLED display, componen...
Actually we do not know that. Lumentum waring could be them just finding out now they loss some or all of the Apple business. Apple could have move a portion or all of the Face ID silicon to another supplier Lumentum found out when the new products launched and they did not see the increase orders as they expect. Apple had a long track record and is well known in the industries for not telling suppliers what they are doing. They usually find out after the fact.78Bandit said:
The verifiable facts are multiple suppliers of iPhone components have issued revenue guidance warnings lately. It is no less speculative to attribute that to iPhone sales woes than it is to attribute Samsung's good revenue to positive iPhone sales. Neither Samsung nor the other suppliers have gone on record as to exactly what Apple's orders are, so any assumptions based on overall results/warnings are pure speculation on either side.corrections said:
none of the things you said are based on any verifiable facts.78Bandit said:
From the article: "The only explanation is that it continues to benefit from a solid customer with strong sales, and Apple is by far the primary driver of the high-end, flexible OLED panels that Samsung credits for its component sales success."corrections said:
Rampant speculation based on "maybe this could be happening" guesswork is called conspiracy theory. It's easy to construct a narrative where parts of the story are designed to fit together with other rumors or conjecture.78Bandit said:This actually fits nicely with the rumor Apple is restarting production of the X because it has a glut of OLED panels it was obligated to purchase from Samsung. If that rumor is true and Samsung had a guaranteed minimum number of panels Apple agreed to acquire then any slowdown in OLED iPhone sales wouldn't affect its revenue in an unanticipated major negative way. You wouldn't see the effects on Samsung's revenue until the after the contract was up for renewal as Apple couldn't cut it's order mid-cycle like it can with smaller suppliers.
It's not news or reality though.
It's not even clear that Apple ever stopped production of iPhone X. It only stopped selling it in the USA, to focus on its new models. In some other countries, it continued to be sold, the same way Apple kept selling the 6 long after ending its sales in USA.
When the same sources claim that Samsung was selling few OLEDs because iPhone X demand was weak come back in 6 months and say Apple had minimum quotas that are keeping Samsung afloat because iPhone demand is weak, that should tip you off that they are lying to promote a perpetual narrative that iPhone sales are weak, which is the opposite of every real point of data we have.
iPhones are selling for $800 next to $200 Androids, and sales figures were slightly up this year in a market where smartphones are shrinking. It's totally asinine to be creating new possible stories to explain how Apple is in a desperately bad position and that nobody wants iPhones.
I was simply pointing out that there is another possible explanation that has already been brought up that would call into question the assertion that Apple must have strong sales for Samsung's revenue to be what it is. Yes, it is speculation, but no more so than this article either.
Is it any less of a conspiracy theory to say "Samsung's sales are strong, therefore Apple's sales must be strong too"? It is still a "maybe this could be happening" guesswork that takes particular facts and uses them to fit a predetermined narrative.
On the other hand, we do know where high end flexible OLED panels come from, and we do know where they are sold in commercially significant quantities. There is no "maybe" conjecture.
We know where face ID cameras come from (Lumentum which counts on apple for 30% of its revenue), that supplier issued a warning.
We know where the audio chips come from (Cirrus which counts on Apple for 80% of its revenues), that supplier issued a warning.
These are not insignificant quantities of components provided to Apple.
Apple could be having poor iPhone sales or it could be having record iPhone sales, and there is verifiable information that can be used to form an opinion either way.
We also know that Apple has complicated supply chain, and there is no was of know if why one supplier business is going up or down since Apple could be normal moving business around and also trying to mitigate supply chain risks which you would have not idea what those could be.
Lastly, last year Apple had 1 product which uses these parts, this year they introduced 5, do you really believe the volume on 5 product is going to so much worse that is falling well below a single product last year to the point that a supplier had to put our a earning warning so bad if they were truly the sole source the face ID silicon. This is where critical thinking and problem solving needs to kick in.
