wanderso

Apple has a fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders to provide transparency. Like it or not, unit sales is a key metric of a company that sells hardware. Apple’s services business can be seen as a shift away from this but they can and should share this unit sales information going forward. If I owned Apple’s stock or was the manager of a fund that owns it, I would press for unit sales to continue to be openly shared.  

I can see Apple’s strategy here as they choose to be less transparent as unit sales decline and price increases make up for the difference.  After all, winning on market share can still be a very unprofitable venture that is not sustainable. 

By still showing unit sales figures and adding this visibility such things as Apple Watch sales, Apple shows an honest reality to shareholders.  It helps them understand how Apple is going up market and the success of various business lines.  It also allows them to hold the board and management team  accountable. By choosing to not be opaque, Apple has an opportunity to lead here - doing so by example.  I hope they they reconsider their stance.  Shareholders can and should bring this as a requirement. As consumers of their product, we should also expect nothing less. 

I just wish that airpods fit my ears without falling out. 

I went from a 5s to an XS. Battery life was bad for the first few days. Better now. I also carry a 7 plus for work. It has better battery life even after a few years of use. 

As others suggest, I turn off background app refresh on everything I can; change email to only retrieve when I am in the app and all the other tricks to maximize battery life.  If doing it all over, I would have waited for the XR purely for battery life reasons. Still, I’m happy with the XS and spoiled because I can simply use the 7 plus if / as needed to max out battery life on both. 

A trend that concerns me over the past year or so is that every new product released has increased in price.   Everything announced this week had a price increase. 

It it appears that once the iPhone X passed the $1,000 barrier, all other items followed suit with price increases.  The supposed justification is that things are more feature laden, but in the past we generally saw improved features at the same price point.  What if some customers would be content with a non-retina display but all other features still in place?  Also, why discontinue standard USB ports when the majority of devices still use a standard USB connection? Remember Apple  that the Air is your entry level laptop. Those users aren’t invested in thunderbolt.  Oh and only 2 connectors ?  At least one standard USB connector should have remained. 

Apple - I’ve owned your products since 1992. I’ve spent a lot of $ over the years, even supporting and buying when you were 90 days from being out of business due to having no cash left.   You make a lot of $ today on services. You can afford to give up a bit more margin in the hardware space to accelerate growth of your ecosystem through lower ASPs and higher sales volumes. Those buyers will buy your services to more than make up the difference. 

2011 Subaru Outback Harman Kardon head unit and XS. No issues.  I bought the Apple Watch Series 4 (Cellular). Interestingly, I have had a few instances of it losing pairing and thus reverting to cellular without me realizing until later.