charlesn

melgross said:

You have to be careful when you mention analysts expectations. If they already accounted for the problem in their estimates, then they would have been lower than otherwise. Beating these low expectations may seem good, but what would it have been otherwise? You don’t know that.

Actually, I do know that because I research and read, which you clearly haven't done and I'm not here to do remedial reading on the 3Q report. Suffice to say it not only beat expectations for the quarter, it was a solid YOY beat across the board. But as I also made clear, the delayed release of two major new products because of the app screw-up continues to weigh on Wall Street, which is why the stock has essentially treaded water in the wake of a decent report. No one yet knows when the app will be fixed with sufficient confidence to release those new products to market. 

jbirdiikun said:

Nice. But, and I know this will be ‘heresy’ to many, I worry how having a case on will affect all Capture Button functions. I’m one of those rare few (i.e., clumsy) that need a case on my phone 

Not heresy at all. It's actually kind of rare (relatively speaking) to see a caseless iPhone in the wild. I go through spurts of using a case and not, and when I'm caseless, friends look at me like I'm crazy. At any rate, cases have always had cut outs for buttons and this will require just another cut out. Since the Capture button appears to sit flush with the metal trip, case makers--especially on thicker cases--will likely need to bevel the edges around the opening of the cut out to give your finger better access. But I have to think case makers already have a solution. What it does mean, for sure, is that cases from the 15 series will not be usable. Case makers have to like that part. 

Gotta love Ming's "kick the can" predictions. "Hey, foldable Macbook Pro coming in 2025!" Which gets picked up by the tach press as gospel. But now that 2025 is only about four months away? Ooops! Turns out Ming was wrong by "at least" two years--as if he actually had ANY visibility into Apple's plans for 2027 and beyond--and I guarantee that when 2027 is upon us, Ming will have kicked the can down the road another couple of years. It's actually a great strategy: every prediction, with his name attached, gets picked up by the press, and ultimately he never has to admit that his predictions are total BS... they were just "early" by a couple of years, so just wait! 

I remember back in the day, before he went out on his own, Ming was the best and most reliable analyst covering Apple. Now? He just makes stuff up to keep his name in the press and the most reliable thing about Ming is that he's almost certainly wrong. 

tlinn said:

5. Optical quality is a meaningless term. When the author says the main camera can take "2x optical-quality" images, what they should be saying is that the camera can be configured to crop in-phone to simulate a 2x (48mm) focal length. In other words, Apple is taking 12 MP from the center of the sensor and throwing away the rest of them. Anyone can do this from any image taken by any camera using their camera app's crop tool or post-processing software. The same thing is happening when users set the primary camera to 28mm or 35mm. This is a crop setting.

6. As a photographer, the above illustrates my main grip with phone cameras in general: On the iPhone 15 Pro Max—and presumably both of the 16 Pros—the full frame equivalent focal lengths of the three cameras are 13mm, 24mm, and 120mm. The most commonly used focal lengths for non-phone photography, between 24 and 70mm, are totally missing. The 3X telephoto lens is 77mm, close to 70mm. The 5X lens moves farther away from this range. The iPhone is great for taking selfies. It's not bad for close up work either. But for traditional photography, it is regrettably limited. (To be clear, I'm not arguing that Apple is making the wrong choices based on consumer demand.) 

Thank you for this. I'm really happy to see someone other than myself posting "the reality" of iPhone's three lenses. There is no optical zooming. These are three fixed focal length lenses and any "zooming" is achieved through sensor cropping and computational photography tricks. I also agree 100% that the move to a 120mm telephoto lens is a move further away from quality in the range most used for general photography. The 24mm "main" lens will now handle everything from 24mm to 119mm, and when a 5X zoom range is handled by sensor cropping, it's inevitable that quality will suffer--as has been demonstrated in 15 Pro vs 15 Pro Max comparison shots in the 77mm to 119mm range. The 15 Pro shots are clearly and demonstrably better. I have read--but cannot find confirmation from Apple--that Apple uses information from multiple lenses, in addition to sensor cropping, to determine the image it produces for non-native focal lengths. For example, if shooting a 60mm shot on the 15 Pro, it is both cropping the sensor of the main, 24mm lens while also considering how the shot actually appears through the 77mm telephoto lens to arrive at the best rendition of a 60mm photo. This seems plausible and possible, but could also be entirely incorrect--I do wish Apple provided more transparency in how it achieves non-native focal lengths. Instead, we're being fed this "more is better" nonsense, where 120mm is "better" than the 77mm lens it's replacing, and that is only true if you're shooting at 120mm or more. For general photography, it's a step backwards. 

thrang said:

This is fatal-blow level error IMO for a company - you do one thing, and you bork it so severely, They could not have tested the app extensively, OR AT ALL, given the number of problems. How poorly run can a company be that this gets anywhere near the App Store for release?

Fatal blow? Suggest you get out of the tech website echosphere, where the sky is always falling over something, and actually research the company. Third quarter earnings that were just reported on August 8th--which reflected the months since the botched rollout of the new app--beat analyst estimates across the board. So any thought that sales are cratering because of the app issue are wildly overstated. As is the case almost 100% of the time, average consumers are blissfully unaware of whatever the tech echosphere is losing its mind over at any given time. 

But... and it's a big one... this is not to say that all is fine in Sonos land. The real damage inflicted by the botched app rollout will probably be reflected in Q4 sales to be released in early November. Why? Because the release of two major new products, which should be out and selling already, are being held up because of the app. One is the long overdue Arc 2... not sure what the other one is. Sonos really has no choice--they can't afford to take any chance of damaging the consumer experience and thus future sales of these new products because of the app. They can't release these products until certain that the app issues are fixed. But the shortfall in projected sales will probably be painful. How bad? The analyst with the best track record who currently covers Sonos has just slashed his estimates for year-over-year sales from +30% to -20%. Yes, a 50% swing to the downside. He also slashed his target price for the stock from $25--which seemed perfectly reasonable when Sonos was near $20 back in March--to $10. But if Sonos can get the app fixed and products released in time for holiday shopping, it should be able to recover pretty quickly.

I do think your question about how this botched app got out the door is a valid one. (fwiw, I've read that the pressure to get the Ace headphones released, which required the new app, was the reason.) But still... Sonos is selling a very premium-priced product relative to the competition, with the consumer experience of those products largely hinging on the app. So to rush a new version of that app out the door with (clearly) insufficient testing is corporate malpractice on an epic scale that has definitely dealt a blow to the company and its reputation, but one from which it still has the ability to recover.