charlesn

muthuk_vanalingam said:

charlesn said:

tht said:

If this device is 3% of iPhone sales, it would be an incredible success. 

Nibbling at the edges like that has never been Apple's game. The iPhone Plus has routinely made it into the top ten selling smartphones in the world, and yet Apple is still allegedly cutting it for lack of "sufficient" sales. As for 3% of sales being a gigantic win--how do you figure that? I think you're correct that Fold sales will largely come from cannibalizing Pro Max sales. A mid-tier storage Pro Max sells for $1600. A similar storage Fold might come in at $400 or $500 more. But it's going to be a MUCH more expensive phone to manufacture, not to mention the costs for R&D, tooling and marketing that will go into it. I'm not seeing much added profit at all for Apple in that $400-$500 increase in the selling price over the Pro Max when you consider all of the costs that have to be amortized over a relatively small (for Apple) number of phones that will be sold. 

geekmee said:

Remind me, what problem does this solve again?

It will finally stop the whining on tech sites for Apple to make a folding phone. 

I don't think the highest storage tier foldable iPhone will cost just $400-$500 when compared to the highest storage tier iPhone Pro Max. It would be the entry level iPhone Fold that would cost $400-$500 more than the highest storage iPhone Pro Max. If you make an apples to apples comparison, the iPhone Fold would cost almost double when compared to iPhone Pro Max. So margins won't be an issue with iPhone Fold lineup for Apple.

avon b7 said:

There are some things to consider here. 

Apple is having a tough time competing in China. There are a few reasons for that but I'll highlight just two. 

NEV sales are going through the roof there and the 'smarts' in those cars are very smart - blowing way past anything CarPlay can offer. Hundreds of thousands (and rising fast) of those cars are running HarmonyOS so anyone with a Huawei phone tied to a Huawei-partnered car will see the benefits. The opposite is also true. If one of those cars takes your fancy, getting a Huawei phone (or tablet, wearable, TV...) makes a lot of sense.

Xiaomi is another example although so far they only have one car. 

What can Apple do to counter that situation if they have no competing product? 

Folding phones are reaching maturity in many ways but remain expensive. That keeps the marketshare of folding phones down. 

Prices especially of flip phones however, are seeing more affordable versions come to market.

Similar to the car situation if you want a folding experience, Apple is not going to get the sale because it has no folding option. You would have to look elsewhere. 

It has been said that if the Huawei Mate XT hit sales of 500,000 units (unthinkable to my mind) it would bring in $1.5B in revenue. Yet just last week there were (unsubstantiated) reports of it having sold 400,000 units (in spite of the incredible price tag). In basically one quarter. 

That model has now got a 'global' release so it's anybody's guess how many will be sold. Prices start at 3,699€ in the EU. 

Now the Pura X has hit the Chinese market too with it's unusual form factor but great screen ratio. 

Throw in the likes of Oppo, Honor, Samsung etc and there are lots of folding options to choose from and thinness, weight, creases etc are beginning to look like non-issues. 

It's hard not to see Apple losing sales (especially in China) as a result of not having a folding phone. 

There will clearly be a threshold to lost sales beyond which Apple must respond. Perhaps these reports are simply Apple gearing up to stop a trickle of lost sales turning into a flood.

The outlier here is maybe Google. While the US is shielded (quite literally now) from a wide spread of folding/flip options on home soil, if a Pixel Fold came to market offering Chinese level engineering, Apple would possibly be in a spot of bother (assuming there is untapped demand for foldables there). 

radarthekat said:

dewme said:

randominternetperson said:

AppleInsider said:

Cook was once described by Steve Jobs as not being a "product person," but he's unquestionably a politician. He apparently kept the working relationship going with Trump before the last election, and he is confirmed to have personally donated $1 million to the president's inauguration.

I'll do more than question it, I'll flat out assert that he is not a politician.

Politicians (at least when the term is used pejoratively, as it seems to here) don't stand for anything, say whatever they need to say, and shift with the slightest breeze.

That isn't Tim Cook. Exhibit 1: https://www.apple.com/diversity/ ;

Perhaps we can agree that he is politically astute, but that doesn't make him a politician.

I agree with your assertions. What Tim Cook is doing, at least when he's wearing his Tim Apple Super CEO suit, is not politics but doing everything he can to ensure the success of his company and all of its stakeholders. However, what Tim Apple does probably does not reflect what Tim Cook, the man, would do in order to maintain his own personal integrity, reputation, value system, and generally how to exist peacefully as a citizen of the world.

The problem for Tim Cook is that every time the president mentions his name or insinuates a real connection with Tim Cook, the man, Tim takes a hit in the things that many people and especially Apple customers value in him, including his reputation and integrity. Tim Cook was hand picked to take the helm when Steve Jobs stepped back. That is a really big deal considering Steve Jobs is the one who restored Apple's reputation, integrity, competitiveness, differentiation from the crowded PC world, and a willingness to always make sure customers were delighted with the products he help bring to market. 

The current president has significantly damaged the reputation, trustworthiness, and reliability of the United States. In the same way, every time another leader in the private sector gets anointed as a "True Trump Buddy" their reputation, trustworthiness, and reliability takes a big hit. In some cases it gets obliterated as we've seen with Elon Musk and Zuckerberg.

Apple will pay a price for this, we just don't know how large or how fire-walled or DMZ'd it can be kept  between the real person and who they play when they step into their corporate role. 

i believe Cook knows this and will sacrifice himself by retiring as soon as this Trump administration is replaced by a saner president, hopefully Democrat.  Tim will look back at these years with remorse for what he had to do to bring Apple through them.  There’s no winning, so he’s taking the path of least losing, knowing his entire career will be get a red mark.  But he’s willing to take that hit to minimize the damage and attempt to keep Apple competitive in a global market.  

tht said:

If this device is 3% of iPhone sales, it would be an incredible success. 

geekmee said:

Remind me, what problem does this solve again?

swat671 said:

charlesn said:

Hope springs eternal for these changes but Apple has long been resistant. There was similar hope for iPad OS 18, especially after the debut of the all-new Pro iPad models, but that hope died at WWDC. We'll see this year. If Apple wanted to give the iPad Pros a real sales boost, make them capable of booting into either iPad OS or Mac OS at the user's discretion, which Apple Silicon can do. In iPad OS, it works as usual. In Mac OS, you lose touchscreen capability and it operates just like a Mac, requiring the use of Magic Keyboard with the built-in trackpad. Apple could do this today. No merging of 2 very different OSes required, no need to figure out how to bring touch to the Mac, no blah, blah, blah whatsoever. Boot into whichever OS makes the most sense for your needs at the moment. Macs have been able to boot into Windows for how long? 

Macs could use BootCamp only on the Intel chips, so 2006-2020. 

braytonak said:

charlesn said:

[snip] If Apple wanted to give the iPad Pros a real sales boost, make them capable of booting into either iPad OS or Mac OS at the user's discretion, which Apple Silicon can do. In iPad OS, it works as usual. In Mac OS, you lose touchscreen capability and it operates just like a Mac, requiring the use of Magic Keyboard with the built-in trackpad. Apple could do this today. [snip] 

This is not, as Apple would say, elegant.