macarena

India is a price sensitive, and value conscious market. And clearly, Apple has been failing to deliver on the value front. In its relentless quest to up Average Selling Price, Apple has now upped the price points of its products to a level where even Apple loyalists look at Android as an alternative. I believe Apple's India sales serve as early warning signal that the direction Apple is headed in could have serious problems down the road.

This is the first year when Apple has completely shifted away from its earlier sub-$700 pricing. There is no iPhone available today that is below $700! Unless you consider the older models.

It is this sort of hubris that destroyed Apple 30 years back, and looks like they haven't learned from their mistakes.

Never take your customer's loyalty for granted. Never leave your customer feeling cheated.

Apple's bigger challenge in India is not price. It is that Apple's ecosystem of services that make the iPhone so valuable elsewhere are simply not relevant in India. You cannot use Apple Pay. Most Indian content is simply not there in iTunes. Apple Maps is not at all usable in India. iCloud data centers are not active in India, whereas Google and Amazon have started making decent headway in terms of locating the data center nearer to the end user.

None of these challenges have anything to do with government policies. But the reality is that with a small installed base, investing the money needed to crack these problems doesn't make sense to Apple at the moment. And without these ecosystem aspects sorted out, the iPhone is not nearly as valuable as it is for US consumers.

Why on earth would Indians buy a product that is overpriced, and where you get lesser usability?

Apple's Mac Mini used to be a favourite with the developer community in India, with it being easy to buy the cheapest version, and upgrade RAM to 16GB to get a powerful development machine. However, Apple shot itself in the foot by making the RAM as a soldered - and totally crippled its own sales. On the contrary, Microsoft is activiely wooing developers with Xamarin as a better option to build iOS apps, on regular Windows laptops, using Xamarin Live Player.

The pace of technological change has become so rapid, that anyone coming up with a new product today will find it quite difficult to make it a commercial success on the scale Apple pulled off. They will have very little head-start before others snap at the heels.

Secondly, Apple has humongous advantages of scale, that give them edge in pretty much any business they choose to touch. Apple has advantages in areas like manufacturing processes, logistics, data center capacity, etc. that someone like a Tesla simply cannot replicate easily.

Thirdly, the real big advances of the future will likely come about because of Apple's capacity to throw massive amounts of money at problems. Things like Cable TV industry, Banks, etc, have large entrenched players, and a new comer simply cannot hope to disrupt those massive businesses. But Apple has the capital and the credibility to actually attempt a disruption in those areas. Just because they haven't done so yet, doesn't mean anything.

Fourthly, Apple has never bothered about being the first company to tackle a problem, They have taken on problems well after the pioneers, but provided better solutions that have then disrupted the market.

Finally, the biggest threat to Apple has to be from Amazon, Google and to some extent Facebook - simply because of the fact that these companies have larger audiences than Apple locked into their ecosystems, and are also innovating rapidly. Tesla cannot hope to attain the level of eyeballs that these other companies have already got, even 20 years from today! Of these, Amazon and Facebook don't have the phenomenal financial muscle that is available with Apple and Google.

Apple, at some point will need to extend its game, to cover areas where it will step on toes of Google and Facebook. And when they do that, it will not be easy for these companies to fight back. One needs to realize that there are certain natural weaknesses that Google and Facebook have - because of the inherent security and privacy concerns about these companies. Apple doesn't have even a fraction of those concerns - and if Apple offers a credible alternative, that by itself becomes a compelling reason for people to switch. It is not a question of if, but when, that happens. Even complex problems like Maps, and Cloud, Apple's persistence and ability to throw capital at the problem has made Apple's alternative as good as Google. They will surely do Search, Social Networking, etc at some point. I can also see iMessage becoming cross-platform at some point.

I faced these shutdowns several times. And each time, when I connected the charger, the phone would come back on, showing 30% battery. After a point, I didn't want to take chances and spent Rs 4200 replacing my battery! I thought about buying the iPhone 7, but then felt it was better to wait for the anniversary edition phone to be released in a few months! In any case, I want to give my phone to someone else, so it would not be usable if it was shutting down randomly!

And now I find out that this has nothing to do with my battery, it is a problem with the OS!! So effectively I wasted Rs 4200 on a battery change that was not needed at all!

This is the sort of crap that really angers customers about Apple. Why should we fork out serious money on lightning cables just because Apple doesn't know how to make good quality cables? And why would there be third party chargers and cables that cause problems if Apple charged a reasonable amount for their own products?

I will be one of those rubbing their hands in glee when karma catches up to this company, and its hit with a massive massive problem! Something so big, it wipes out all the stashes of wealth they have acquired by ripping off their own customers in multifarious ways.

Karma catching up? For a long time, Apple has been tempting karma - selling overpriced lightning cables to customers whose cables frayed out within months, soldering RAM into the motherboards, so that customers have no choice but to accept Apple's rip off pricing, etc. When a company goes out of its way to screw its own loyal customers, you can be assured that its day of reckoning is coming. It is ridiculous that a company that makes such humongous profits and that charges such a stiff price for admission into their walled garden finds the need to rip off even its own loyal customers this way. And not just the company, even Apple shareholders and Apple fan boys rubbed their hands in glee when Samsung had a huge loss from the Note 7 recall. There's lot of bad karma in there too. Apple's greed will only get worse. They will keep pushing the envelope, trying to make the phones thinner - even if the wimpy batteries struggle to last the whole day! They only care for making these devices as thin and as light as possible. Obviously, all that thinness and lightness is making the devices vulnerable to such problems. It is indeed unbelievable how many people hate Apple. And how even a lot of Apple's customers hate the company.