charlesn

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. 

Zero surprise. Galaxy Fold 6 ranges from $1600 to nearly $2K at Best Buy, depending on storage, So it sounds like Apple will be within a few hundred of those numbers. Why Apple would introduce this extremely niche and expensive bridge to nowhere is beyond me, but I also can't believe that all these predictions of its arrival are wrong. Apple has never felt the "me, too" need to chase Android gimmicks. and it's hard to see the Galaxy Fold as anything more than that when it has generated such little sales traction after six years on the market. Same for the Pixel Fold, although that has been around for only two years. Who knows? Maybe Apple will have come up with some compelling use cases by the time it arrives that will justify its stratospheric price and fragility when you inevitably drop it to a broader audience than either Samsung or Google has reached, but I'm not sure what those would be. 

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. 

M-chip Macs can still run Windows using Parallel Desktop--not the same as Boot Camp, but the salient point is that M-chips can boot into either MacOS or iPadOS. 

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.

Oh, please. Multitasking in iPadOS is the definition of inelegant kluge. And what's not elegant about a tablet that can easily boot into whichever OS suits your needs best at the time? What Apple would say in protest is this: we want to keep selling you two devices, not one. 

9secondkox2 said:

AppleZulu said:

Now China is halting exports of certain rare earth metals and magnets. They have a monopoly on them, and the US needs them. I'm sure @9secondkox2 ; will tell us how this was all part of Trump's brilliant master plan as well. He has our best interests at heart, and has thought all this stuff through, you know. Don't you fret. Everything's fine.

Pretty sure the current admin is prepared for chin to pull every last one of their cards. 

Really? So what's the plan to supply our military with essential rare earth magnets now that China has cut off the supply, to say nothing of the other U.S. industries that need them?
What's the plan if China decides to devalue the yuan?
What's the plan, now that Trump has managed to send quakes through the bond market for T-bills, if China decides to start selling the 3/4 of a trillion dollars it holds in U.S. debt? You do realize, don't you, that if we have to pay higher interest on T-bills because investors don't trust America as they once did, it will devastate our economy by exploding the interest we have to pay on our debt?
What's the plan, now that America is the new global supervillain, to prevent China from allying itself more closely with Europe and Southeast Asia since Trump has managed to make China look like more sane and reliable trading partner?
WHAT'S THE PLAN TO EVEN STICK TO A PLAN, since Trump has backtracked, sometimes more than once, on everything announced thus far? Or have you deluded yourself into thinking that this dimwit, id-driven, serial bankruptcy filer who managed to run his casinos into the ground is playing multiverse chess? Because here's the reality of the chess board as it currently stands: Trump and his sycophants are too dumb to realize that they only have one piece left on the board, appropriately a king with no power other than to move a square at a time to avoid checkmate. Xi has an array of powerful pieces he can still play at will, but he'll toy with and humiliate Trump for a while before he moves in to end the game in a win for China. 

No surprise that after revising the regular Apple watch last year, nothing new for this year. But no design tweaks or hardware changes for Ultra 4? Nevermind that Apple didn't even bother with an Ultra 3 at all, and just added a black color. That would leave Ultra essentially unchanged since its debut, except Ultras imported into the US and sold since Jan 2024 no longer have pulse oximetry. (Kinda surprised that Apple and Masimo haven't figured out a settlement after the forced exit of CEO Joe Kiani, who seemed to be the stumbling block. So maybe it's Apple that's the real obstacle.) Not that I would be unhappy keeping my Ultra 1 for another year, but Apple just lengthens the upgrade cycle when they provide no meaningful reasons to upgrade. I'd like to see Apple improve on Ultra battery life, which is the one area where it remains seriously behind in the adventure watch space.