freeper

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  • Apple's Tim Cook says increasing pace of 'iPhone 8' leaks hurting sales

    People are holding off on buying the iterative update because they are waiting on the major redesign. Happens all the time - and not just with the iPhone or even just with Apple - so no news or shock here. It is only an issue for those who felt that iPhone sales were going to increase indefinitely. Everyone else - including folks internally at Apple - knew that the saturation point was going to happen some time. That was why 2 years ago Apple started making a concerted effort to get Android owners to switch - by playing up security and privacy fears and releasing the "move to iPhone" app - as well as focusing on overseas growth. But peak iPhone - more accurately peak (premium) smartphone - has passed. It may be an exaggeration to say that smartphones are just another product - as they still make Apple the #1 company in history by far after all - but the gee whiz phenomenon factor is gone. People are used to them, which means that they no longer have to go out and have the latest one ... or even get the best one that they can afford (since cheaper smartphones are no longer the brutal devices that they once were ... and by the way now include the iPhone SE, another attempt by Apple to goose sales and draw international customers and Android switchers).
    avon b7
  • Apple services, "Other" revenue sources impress with massive Q2 growth

    cali said:
    jungmark said:
    The analysts have said the watch and the AirPods are failures. how can this be?
    Apple bought Beats when the trend was dying remember?
    funny I see more Beats than ever now. 
    No. Apple bought Beats when - and because - their sales and profits were increasing year over year, they were the talk of the tech and music world, was a very popular brand fully embraced by the "urban" hip crowd (athletes, musicians, certain actors) and were expanding their product offerings from merely headphones to speakers and an artist-backed streaming music service (which after the Apple acquisition saw its efforts essentially migrate to Tidal). Prior to the Apple acquisition, Beats' biggest partner was Samsung, who considered buying them but decided against it, but still did a lot of cross promotional stuff such as ads with Samsung Galaxy users wearing Beats headphones - often featuring LeBron James - and automatically preloading the Beats streaming radio app onto all their smartphones. (Despite the fact that Samsung makes and sells their own headphones and had their own music streaming service at the time.) So yes, it is good that Apple has transformed Beats from being an urban product associated with rappers and NBA players to one that is safe for suburbia and exurbia via their upscale brand association and marketing campaigns - which are, er, totally different from what Beats used to run and let us leave it at that - with the increase in sales as a result, but please, no revisionist history. If anything, a lot of analysts speculated that Apple bought - and overpaid in the process - Beats in order to pre-empt Samsung from eventually pulling the trigger (because Beats did want Samsung to buy them and were lobbying them to do so). Apple's buying Beats was also part of their push to get Android - and specifically Samsung - owners to switch platforms. Apple had done market research - as had others by the way - and knew of the cultural/demographic divides between iPhone owners and Galaxy owners. Samsung - or at least Samsung America before the main office forced them out in a pique of nationalist nonsense - knew what they were doing when they signed LeBron James - as opposed to a golf or tennis pro or Peyton Manning if you know what I mean - as their pitch man and cross promoted with Beats as opposed to Sennheiser or Bose. Buying Beats - and as publicly embracing Dr. Dre as possible - was Apple's play for that same market. (If I am correct, that was after the fiasco where Tim Cook tried to force a U2 album on everyone as part of an iOS update only to find out that not everyone was as big a U2 fan as he is.) However, Apple's play for "street cred" failed - ironic since Apple was once considered the artsy, creative, progressive free-spirited upstart to the corporate stuffed shirts at IBM - and Samsung shifted gears when the South Korean office took over the U.S. marketing anyway ... and initially did an absolutely horrible job (the S5 fiasco followed by the "let's make the S6 look as much like the iPhone as possible!" mess that was saved by the S6 Edge, which Samsung didn't even think that it would sell because Samsung's South Korean marketers thought it was TOO DIFFERENT from the iPhone!) before finally righting the ship. So ... there is the way that you choose to remember things and what actually happened. Pick the one that you prefer. As for me, I still wonder what would have happened had Samsung bought Beats and in particular if they had not fired the American marketing team because they were too proud to admit that the American team was performing better than the South Korean one.They were eventually able to right the ship, but at the cost of losing a lot of customers to Apple, Huawei, Xiaomi and Oppo in the 2 years that it took them to start back making compelling products and convincing advertising campaigns. Even now, their current success is due to the new screen designs, first the edge and then the minimized bezels. If their smartphones still looked the same way that they did in 2015, they would still be losing money and market share.
    mac_128
  • Apple services, "Other" revenue sources impress with massive Q2 growth

    jungmark said:
    The analysts have said the watch and the AirPods are failures. how can this be?
    The analysts also claimed that Android was a failure because Google was not making any money on hardware (or software licenses, services, app sales or search) and they would never solve the fragmentation or security "crises" that turned out to be less than a hill of beans, or that Samsung should exit the mobile business because their year over year unit sales and profit declines would never stop, or that all of Android's customers would soon exit the platform for Windows Mobile because of Microsoft's superior brand name and their ability to integrate their mobile and PC products in the enterprise and get the huge Windows PC development community to make apps for mobile, and Nokia's hardware was oh so much better than anything in the Android world. Funny how no one among "the world is against us!" Apple fan blogosphere seems to remember stuff like that. Also, the media was not exactly wrong to point out that Apple Watch sales were not on the level of IPhone, iPad or even iPod sales. It wasn't a failure to make money. It was the failure to be "the next big thing" that transforms the industry the way that the iPhone, iPad and iPod did. As for the AIrPod ... who exactly called it a failure again? Give me a name or a link.
    mac_128
  • Apple services, "Other" revenue sources impress with massive Q2 growth

    fallenjt said:
    But still doomed?
    Name a single person who has said that Apple is doomed since 2009. Provide a name or a link.
    mac_128
  • Apple falls just shy of expectations with $52.9B in revenue, iPhone sales dip again to 50....

    chasm said:
    Best news from my perspective: Mac sales up to 4.2 million (200,000 more than last year, with revenue up 14 percent). This totally bucks the overall PC trend.
    Except that it doesn't. The top 3 Windows PC makers - Lenovo, Dell, HP - who sell primarily to enterprises and professionals saw gains, as did gaming rig type PCs. The only segment of the PC market that saw declines are the cheap ones made by the likes of Acer and Asus, because it is those that are being replaced by smartphones and tablets. And even there, the rate of decline is much smaller than it was during the dark days of Windows 8 - and the boom days of the iPhone and iPad - so it isn't as if even the cheap PC manufacturers are at any risk of going out of business. 
    elijahg