chasm

Apple News (the iOS app) has led me to a lot of new sources for solid journalism and interesting feature reading, so I'll be paying attention to what the offering on this is exactly. The macOS version of News, at present, falls short of the iOS versions (particularly in your ability to share articles of interest on social media), so I hope it gets an overhaul as well. I'm very happy to support quality journalism.

I'm fine with Samsung having some truly competitive phones (unless you like security that is) at competitive price points. Competition is good, it keeps Apple (and everyone) on their toes.

That said, I don't care how great their cameras allegedly are ... after the reading I've been doing, I wouldn't touch a Huawei phone if you gave me one for free. Google and Android are quite bad enough about personal info, but China takes this to a whole new level.

Dave Kap said:

Apple Insider is turning into forbes.. 

How do you know that workers are “rattled” ?

You should probably try reading the article more closely, it will improve your comprehension. AI didn't say the workers were rattled -- it was in quotes, indicating that that specific description comes from the WSJ report.

I can remember when the WSJ did a decent job covering tech, but this last couple of years Murdoch Syndrome has set in, and now it just fabricates tech stories based on the misinterpretation of rumours.

elijahg said:

Looks like Tim has finally, directly admitted in a sentence full of many words but that says just one thing: iPhones are too expensive.

No he's not -- at least, not in the way you infer.

He's saying that iPhones jumped up too much in price due to foreign currency changes in developing countries (China and India primarily). Sales of the "too expensive" iPhones are actually up in all developed regions, so POOF goes your half-baked theory.

I think Cook is being very wise to compensate for the currency differential in the short-term to bring prices in line with standard pricing, but it's not really a discount as you imply.

I would suggest to you that premium smartphone prices (let's not forget iPhone is not the only expensive smartphone out there) are going to stay "high" and may in fact get higher (foldable RAZR, anyone?) -- but that this will be offset for consumers by a move (supported by Apple, at least) to hang on to your phone for longer. I'm already seeing this becoming the norm -- anecdotally most iPhones I see are either very <1 year old, or 3+ years old.

As near as I can make out -- with some hints from helpful little birds -- this is what I believe happened:

1. Apple execs were shown the innovative prototype, loved it, put it into production.
2. Engineers discovered a serious issue (overheating) in quality testing.
3. I believe the engineers resolved the issue only a few months later, but this involved some further innovation and changes in the design.
4. New extremely thorough testing, new patents filed, new manufacturing process, wait for patents to be approved, et cetera = quite a long time.

And thus here we are. While the silence was annoying, Apple never cancelled the product. I'd much rather they resolve the problem before sales commenced than do what most other companies would do -- sell the product knowing there could be an issue, and then do a recall after a few houses burnt down/people were injured.

I'm hopeful this report is accurate and that in a few weeks Apple will make an announcement.