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Iphone Businesses Cellphones China The Almighty Buck United States Upgrades Apple Technology

Apple Says It Could Miss $9 Billion In iPhone Sales Due To Weak Demand (theverge.com) 332

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Apple CEO Tim Cook published a letter to investors today warning of weaker than expected first-quarter earnings, citing "fewer iPhone upgrades than we had anticipated." The weakened demand came primarily from China, although Cook notes that "in some developed markets, iPhone upgrades also were not as strong as we thought they would be." In his letter, Cook offers several explanations for the lower earnings guidance: earlier launch timing of the iPhone XS and XS Max compared to the iPhone X, the strength of the US dollar, supply constraints due to the number of new products Apple released in the fall, and overall economic weakness in some markets. But the core issue remains simple: people just aren't buying as many new iPhones as Apple hoped. All in all, Apple's revised Q1 guidance forecast is dropping by up to $9 billion in revenue compared to its original estimate.
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Apple Says It Could Miss $9 Billion In iPhone Sales Due To Weak Demand

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  • by I'm just joshin ( 633449 ) on Wednesday January 02, 2019 @10:38PM (#57896346)

    Guess they should have realized they were pricing themselves out of the market earlier.

    • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      More like keep the same horse galloping and it will eventually slow down and or collapse. Apple had become too stagnant with the iPhone and really did not work on the rest of their product range or develop new products. Eventually the iPhone was bound to hit a wall where people stopped upgrading and of course to keep revenue up, taking cheapy hardware shortcuts or not working on the software created problems. They can of course charge a premium if their product is the most reliable and the most repairable (

      • Smart move would be for Apple to introduce a user replaceable battery.

        That would take a lot of courage.

        tougher phones instead of svelte unreliable product.

        Making a tough-looking rugged phone is a cool idea but goes completely against Apple's philosophy. Every designer at Apple would have to be fired first.

    • by Que_Ball ( 44131 )
      I can just see the executive meeting.

      They will simply raise the prices to make up for the missing revenue. 
    • by sit1963nz ( 934837 ) on Thursday January 03, 2019 @02:19AM (#57896938)
      And the phones are too damned big.

      My iPhone SE does all I need , and it fits comfortably in my pocket. These new monster arse things are of zero interest to me. I had upgraded every 2 years, but there was no upgrade path that interested me, so I will keep my SE until it dies and will probably have to go Android to get what I want.

      But its NOT just the phones.

      Apples financial issues are probably down to a loss of trust with the consumer.

      Sure, I trust Apple more with my Data than Google, Facebook or Amazon, but I am talking about trust in their products.

      Mac mini, languished for years
      Mac Pro, languished for years, and still is languishing
      Airport, DOA
      Time Capsule DOA
      OSX Server, so many bits deprecated my next “upgrade” will be an Intel NUC running Ubuntu
      Wireless charger, MIA
      Took how many years to make a wireless extended keyboard
      Buy an overpriced USB-C power supply and Apple does not even supply the cable
      Automator has languished for years
      Apple script has languished for years



      And for me personally
      Siri for the ATV4 in New Zealand, the ONLY Siri compatible device in NZ that does not actually support Siri
      HomePod, completely missing in action in NZ, made WORSE by the fact the NZ online store is the exactly same building as the Aus Online Store
      All the iPhones are now too big, when my SE dies it will be Android as my only option
      New Zealand did not get any iTunes bonus like the US, Australia, EU and others did, that’s Apple telling us to F**k Off, you are irrelevant , last time I saw iTunes cards discounted was about 4-5 years ago. We used to buy them as stocking fillers for the kids, we have not bought any for 4-5 years now.

      Piss poor design decisions
      Headphone sockets on the rear right side (of laptops that still have them)
      Wireless mouse, you got to have it looking like a dead turtle to charge it, why not have it plugged into the front so you can use it and charge it.
      Try turning text 90 in Numbers, so much for that font technology.
      The USB-C cable supplied is power only, not USB-C data and not Thunderbolt 3, and USB-C cables are not thunderbolt 3 either, but they all look the same
      Laptop keyboard, this generations Apple III
      Laptops non upgradeable, RAM or SSD
      Laptops with ZERO standard ports (USB-A, Ethernet, etc) forcing everyone to buy bloody dongles
      Get off the bloody “Thin” bandwagon, how thin a computer/phone has been has NEVER been part of my buying decision, that’s pure marketing wank , reminiscent of the MHz wars


      I know lots of people who have gone down the Hackintosh routine, if only so migrating to Windows can be done gradually

      Me, I have free access for home to the Microsoft suite of software as well as the Adobe software.
      Do I dump Final Cut 7 which has served me well for my home moves, and head to Adobe ?, because to be frank I have little faith that Apple is all in on its software for OSX anymore.

      And to be brutal, its getting damned hard to justify Apples prices, combine that with the loss of trust that Apple is actually going to support any particular piece of hardware or software and you get a slump in sales.

      Me, everything is working, so I will wait and see, but with what I have played with so far, Ubuntu is looking like a good option.

      This year will tell if its a blip, or a slide.

      But unless Apple realises that FUNCTION is actually more important than FORM, they they are screwed, and currently they have no one championing function.
      • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        Mac mini, languished for years
        Mac Pro, languished for years, and still is languishing
        Airport, DOA
        Time Capsule DOA
        OSX Server, so many bits deprecated my next âoeupgradeâ will be an Intel NUC running Ubuntu
        Wireless charger, MIA
        Took how many years to make a wireless extended keyboard
        Buy an overpriced USB-C power supply and Apple does not even supply the cable
        Automator has languished for years
        Apple script has languished for years

        Mac Mini and Mac Pros are the worst selling Macs in the entire lineup. Th

        • Mac Mini and Mac Pros are the worst selling Macs in the entire lineup. This has been true for years, even when they were new and refreshed - they were not machines that sold particularly well. In fact, if Steve Jobs was around, he'd have axed both of them for being really bad sellers.

          The problem as I see it is that despite being bad sellers, they are the Macs that are *needed*. The mac mini gets developers a cheaper way into developing for the ecosystem and the mac pro lets professionals have a powerful workstation that is officially supported by apple. If you took those away and focused on the high selling iphones, imacs and macbooks you'll have a few great quarters but then the complaints about lack of software will start as software attrition sets in and people who once could use mac

        • Neither the Mac Mini nor the Mac Pro exist to be good sellers. The Mini was introduced because Apple needed an entry-level device. The cheapest Mac was 3-4 times the price of the cheapest Windows machine and it's very hard to make people switch operating systems and buy an expensive computer at the same time. The Mini was intended to be the device that got customers hooked on OS X and encouraged them to then buy a second Mac.

          The Pro was there to be the device that developers and content producers would

        • If they hadn't fucked up the Final Cut Pro suite with FCPX, they might not have had problems selling Mac Pros, especially since Adobe went subscription and doesn't seem to care about any of the plights of its paying customers. The trashcan form factor was a stupid move, but it only mirrors the stupid move that was FCPX. Even today, many professionals stubbornly edit on FCP7 or use FCPX with a huge grudge. FCPX is basically nothing more than an iMovie on steroids and that dumb magnetic timeline emphasizes th
        • by rl117 ( 110595 ) <rleigh AT codelibre DOT net> on Thursday January 03, 2019 @07:36AM (#57897618) Homepage
          That's a typical MBA attitude, and it's devastating to the long-term prospects of a company. It doesn't matter that they are the worst selling. They are needed, because they fill a niche. If you continually axed the "worst selling" product, you'd drop everything except the iPhone... Oh, wait... The Mac Pro should not take much R&D time. It's a box with a PC mainboard in it. A slightly nicer box than other midi towers, but it's still just a box. They could rebadge a Dell Precision and I'd buy it. The Mac Mini could be a standard mini-ITX or equivalent. The problem here is that Apple wants to over-engineer these systems to use highly custom board designs and cases to make these as small as possible. But for the niche they occupy, the end user is unlikely to care about that. That's the strategic mistake. The Pro should be powerful and expandable, but it's neither. It's dated and restricted. The mini is smaller, but there's no need to make it so small it can't be upgraded by an end user. A little bigger, and it could have M2 interfaces and maybe a couple of 3.5" bays internally. But you have to dismantle half the internals just to access the RAM slot, and the SSD is soldered. What a pain. I want a new Mac mini (or Pro) for my consulting development work. But the capabilities and price of current hardware makes it pointless. Even if I invest in one, who would want to run my code on such anaemic and overpriced hardware? They need to remember that while the phone and iMac are to a large extent fashion products, the high-end PC depends primarily upon functionality and price, and they've missed the mark for years on that front.
      • Another thing is that they don't invest enough in their software. iTunes is still a piece of garbage (shuffling the buttons around doesn't count as an upgrade). XCode got some love (certificate management is now actually working instead of it requiring the sacrifice of a goat first), but on the whole the experience has degraded a bit, especially for new users and that all-important first impression. In the old days, adding a new Mac or iPhone or replacing an older one was a great experience, painless, an
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Guess they should have realized they were pricing themselves out of the market earlier.

      They are selling them too cheap. Hipsters know that at that price they must be trash, taking quality as proportional to price cubed. Now if they charged $20k the Apple fans would be flocking to re-mortgage their houses for one.

  • I wonder if the China tariff stuff gets resolved this month, if that would improve the outlook a lot since most o the miss is supposed to be from China.

    It's going to be down even so though, as it seems like it's not just China...

    The funny thing is Apple at the last keynote was talking about wanting users to have longer upgrade cycles. The wish came true, just a bit early. :-)

    • I wonder if the China tariff stuff gets resolved this month

      I'm not expecting that to happen. China's playing the long game and waiting it out. Trump will be president for another 6 years max, 2 if his trade dispute with China puts us in a recession. Xi Jinping is president for life.

      China's willing to cut off their nose to spite their face.

      • I'm not expecting that to happen. China's playing the long game and waiting it out.

        While that is traditionally China's strength, they do not have that luxury.

        The Apple guidance in a way, is a small window to how tariffs are actually hurting the Chinese economy. They cannot afford to play the long game here; the U.S. can, and Trump would. Do you seriously think there will not be major unrest within a year if things carry on as they are?

        China's willing to cut off their nose to spite their face.

        Yes but not b

        • They cannot afford to play the long game here; the U.S. can

          You are delusional. America is the brokest it's ever been since the second world war. [wikipedia.org] China will expand by more than 7% in 2019.

        • The Apple guidance in a way, is a small window to how tariffs are actually hurting the Chinese economy.

          Apple and Tesla are manufacturing in China for export to the Chinese and European market.

          China is buying soy from Brazil, and I see no reason they should switch back to America ever. Brazilian soy production increases and market price equilibrium with United States farmers has displaced the American export market. China could go to Venezuela next for oil.

          People don't realize that shirts are made in China with cotton grown in Egypt or America. Those northern Sud states can produce cotton just as well

      • 2 if his trade dispute with China puts us in a recession.

        This administration inherited a strong recovery economy and went on a two-year cocaine binge. It's been a house of cards for a while now, and it's coming down. Of course we're going into recession.

        • by jwhyche ( 6192 )

          administration inherited a strong recovery economy and went on a two-year cocaine binge. It's been a house of cards for a while now, and it's coming down. Of course we're going into recession.

          You are mostly correct but here let me help you. What you meant to say is.

          This administration created a strong recovery economy by removing barriers set up by the previous that was on a 8 year cocaine binge. This remains in place despite left wing attempt to sabotage or the previous administrations attempts to falsely clam it. Since they can't do ether they are now running around in circles with their hands over their heads screaming "recession" even despite evidence to the contrary.

          There we go. A

    • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 02, 2019 @11:16PM (#57896522)

      People are rejecting Apple products because of Apple's insistence on not allowing users of tbeir products to fix their own stuff after they have bought and own it.

      Louis Rossman exposes this regularly. A high school kid saves up enough money to by an Apple laptop as their first one, believing it to be the best option for them at the time with its ease of jse for newbies. Fast forward to where a solder joint breaks and the laptop no longer boots and the kid takes it in to a Genius Bar to get jt fixed. Apple will charge the kid for an entire new motherboard and refuse to allow its store staff to fix the old. Kid is out $1200 dollars (on purpose, Apple's goal is to get the kid to just buy a new laptop and throw tbe old in their trash) instead of $35 parts plus labor combined at a competent laptop repair shop.

      People who use Apple products are increasingly seeing the light. That type of behavior is profit driven and in no way consumer positive. It's a shame as Apple do seem to see the light with regards to protecting privacy of its consumers, when other companies flat out don't care.

      But therin lies the rub. Apple makes bank based on their no repair policy whereas everyone else subsidises their stuff through collecting and selling user metrics and serving them ads. The entire culture is a racket and people getting rich off it don't give a flying fig if it all comes crashing down when justice finally catches up with them (Google is a hack away from being sued into oblivion for the amount of interconnected data it has managed to collect and actively store. Once the data gets released to the light of day, practically no one will be able to prove they are who they say they are in legal settings, and any criminal can electronically become any other person they want as many times as they want).

    • I wonder if the China tariff stuff gets resolved this month, if that would improve the outlook a lot

      You can hope. But obvious fact is, Huawei and Xiaomi phones just deliver a whole lot more value to Chinese customers, that is the problem. We all know how to fix that, don't we? Cut prices.

  • by DaMattster ( 977781 ) on Wednesday January 02, 2019 @10:42PM (#57896362)
    I don't think that it will be just Apple feeling the pinch. We've really hot and passed the point of peak smartphone. At this stage, improvements will really only be in screen quality and processor. I believe that the improvements are less groundbreaking and more incremental.
    • They could add :

      DVB2 Digital Radio.
      3D Camera - like VR180 stuff, home made 3d porn
      FUCKING ADD MICROSD you fucking retards - even if its 100% for PHOTOS/VIDEOS only stupid fuckers - you think we all live in a infinite 4G world, cant transfer 512GB in 10 seconds it takes to replace the SD card.
      Add more fancy LEDs on the back for notifications.
      2x larger battery.

      • by quenda ( 644621 )

        2x larger battery.

        WHAT! That would add over a millimetre of thinness. Apple will never trade convenience for looks.

        Next you'll be wanting to go back to a Nokia-style plastic face, that gets bothersome scuff-marks occasionally, just because it never shatters.

        (I do miss the days when you could accidentally drop your phone from a moving car, find the battery and cover, reassemble, and it still just worked.)

        • by sjames ( 1099 )

          Relevant Scottish tweet:

          Member the days when you used to drop your phone n the battery would fall out. Now if you drop your phone your heart falls out ur arsehole
          Megan Macleod

        • by jwhyche ( 6192 )

          (I do miss the days when you could accidentally drop your phone from a moving car, find the battery and cover, reassemble, and it still just worked.)

          Those where they days. I liked how I could go to disney world for a week, forget my charger at home, and still have a half full battery when I got home.

      • DVB2 digital radio: LOL what? That's not even niche.
        3D Camera: nobody wants this. Remember how popular 3D TVs or 3D P&S cameras were?
        MicroSD: Yeah if I go back to 2004 this will be a great place to store my Napster collection. In modern times people just stream, grandpa.
        LED notifications: I remember my Galaxy 5 had that! Never fucking used it, which I guess is why they got rid of it.
        2x more battery: I dunnow. Wouldn't complain, but unless if goes a week like an old Nokia, who really gives a fuck.

        • FM radio is being replaced by digital, that's why. Could be unknown in the US. As iPhones over here. We use mostly Android.
        • MicroSD: Yeah if I go back to 2004 this will be a great place to store my Napster collection. In modern times people just stream, grandpa.

          HAHAHA what a fucking knob! Good luck to you when you have no signal or when you have to start paying for your own data. Or when your price doubles (times your ten different subs), or shuts down or any other number of things and your left holding nothing but an empty wallet with nothing to do but shove it up your ass.

    • The high-end phones are "good enough" that people don't feel the need to upgrade them. The mid- and especially low-end phones still need to be upgraded because they become obsolete more quickly, having started off further behind in capability. They are now the largest growth segment, and the vast majority of it is in China and India. Huawei and Xaiomi have been the primary beneficiaries. It's also traditionally a market segment that Apple has eschewed, so Apple will feel the pinch more than any other sma
  • by yorgasor ( 109984 ) <ron@nOspaM.tritechs.net> on Wednesday January 02, 2019 @10:45PM (#57896380) Homepage

    I bet if they added headphone jacks again, the new phones would sell like hotcakes. Who wants to upgrade when there's a huge decrease in functionality?

    • by garcia ( 6573 )

      I didnâ(TM)t upgrade because of two factors:

      1. They no longer offer a current phone model with the form factor I want.

      2. There were no deals which would have avoided me paying a monthly fee on top of my mobile service costs.

      â"-

      I refuse to pay full price for a phone. Period. Especially if theyâ(TM)re not going to see me a phone in the size I prefer.

      So, normally I would have upgraded my phone and they would have had some sort of sale to someone. This is the first time since 2008 when it was

    • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 02, 2019 @11:21PM (#57896540)

      I bet if they added headphone jacks again, the new phones would sell like hotcakes. Who wants to upgrade when there's a huge decrease in functionality?

      @yorgasor nailed it.
      The iPhone was an iPod that could make phone calls first and foremost. Somehow that was forgotten and those Audiophiles among us have slowly become increasingly annoyed with Apple as they have:

          - Taken away the Headphone jack
          - Destroyed the usability of iTunes as a Jukebox (I mean seriously it turned into an App Store Device management system)
          - Caused Massive AppleID Identity Crisis As Apple tried to conflate iCloud with Me.com/Mac.com and iTunes DRM Log ins
          - Arbitrarily and without my authorization erased all my local music from my iPhone in a Vain attempt to get me to Stream from the Cloud Driving my Data Rates into the Sky while simultaneously putting all my music into buffer-hell
          - Artificially Kept Storage capacity behind the curve of progress, We should have Terrabytes of local storage by now, But NOOOOOOO That goes against their motivation for a cloud ($Subscription)

      Sigh..... Stallman was right..... I should just chunk my iPhone 6s and just go back to a moto Razr.....

    • I have an iPhone 7 and never really missed the headphone jack. I've been using portable music devices for decades and those ports always seem to eventually develop shorts or had poor insulation or shielding problems which made a big annoying startling static POP in the headphones when you plugged them in or just wiggled the cable a little. It's time for that port to go. I don't get any static noises that with the lightning port.

      Also, if I'm spending $500 on a something, well another $9.99 for a dongle i

    • by Powercntrl ( 458442 ) on Wednesday January 02, 2019 @11:56PM (#57896676) Homepage

      I bet if they added headphone jacks again

      The iPhone has been jack-less since the 7. The iPhone jumped the shark with the X - when Apple decided to go fucking nuts with the "flagship" model starting at $1k, and they haven't looked back.

      Dare I say it, the other problem with the X and later models, is that the iPhone has ceased to be intuitive to operate. You have to just know where/how you're supposed to swipe to make stuff happen, and Steve Jobs is probably spinning in his grave. I'm sure this has put off a lot of the older generations from upgrading.

      • by jwhyche ( 6192 )

        and Steve Jobs is probably spinning in his grave

        If you apple people where smart, a few of you would take some shovels out there and dig up that piano crate Jobs was buried in. Thus release Zombie Jobs to go forth and clean some shit up.

    • And remove that stupid ass notch, as well as bring back the 4" option.
  • Apple is dying (Score:5, Insightful)

    by WCMI92 ( 592436 ) on Wednesday January 02, 2019 @10:52PM (#57896416) Homepage

    They have lost their momentum. They used to make great products that just worked. Perfectly. They have been living on that reputation and it's about over.

    • Re:Apple is dying (Score:5, Insightful)

      by exomondo ( 1725132 ) on Wednesday January 02, 2019 @11:53PM (#57896664)

      They have lost their momentum. They used to make great products that just worked. Perfectly.

      Now you can buy the latest MacBook and the latest iPhone and the cable they supply won't even connect the two together.

    • by oogoliegoogolie ( 635356 ) on Wednesday January 02, 2019 @11:55PM (#57896672)

      Apple should be very concerned about who is making negative statements about Apple products today.

      In the past it was mostly hate-anything-Apple-trolls, but today many of the 'Apple has lost it's way',"Apple is crap', ' Apple is way overpriced' complaints are now coming from past Apple customers who do not see any valid reason to spend $2000+ to upgrade their old 2010 iMac or 2012 Macbook Pro to an inferior product that has no function keys, a mouse that has a charging port on the bottom, fewer ports, and keyboards that feel like you are typing on jello. For that much money you expect something that stands out from the rest, but their repeat customers just don't see Apple as having those products or the perception of having those stand-out products anymore.

      Look at their greed: they release looooong overdue Macbook Air and macMinis with mediocre upgraded specs and less ports in late 2018, then jack up those prices by $300. Pure blatant greed.

      • by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Thursday January 03, 2019 @07:05AM (#57897530) Journal
        I'm typing this on a late 2013 MacBook Pro, with a 2.6GH quad-core (Haswell) i7, 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. I got this machine just after it was released, five years ago. They only released a noticeably faster model a few months ago. The starting price for the new model is £2,349, which gives you 16GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD (seriously, in 2019! The older one that this machine replaced had an SSD that big!) and a 2.2GHz (6-core) processor. If I want the 2.6GHz model, it's £2,699. Upgrading to 32GB of RAM is another £360. Upgrading the SSD to 2TB is a whopping £1080! 2TB of NVMe costs less than that retail! This brings the price for a machine that's a bit better than my current one to £4,139. Sorry Apple, I'm not willing to pay £4K for a slight upgrade. Especially not when this machine has quite a nice keyboard and the newer ones have absolutely horrible ones. The same specs two years earlier, and I'd have jumped at it. Now? It's just not competitive.

        If I max out the specs (bigger GPU, 4TB SSD on top of what I listed above), it's £6,254. That's a silly amount of money for what you actually get.

      • by rl117 ( 110595 )
        Apple made a deal with the devil when they transformed their products into "fashion statements". The problem being that fashion is a fickle thing, and while they profited greatly from their image and sold a whole lot of iPhones, fashion always changes and they stand to be left behind when their design aesthetic goes out of fashion. This is why leaving their core computing competency behind has been so short-sighted, particularly when they have the money and resources to do both very well. Will they have
      • In the past it was mostly hate-anything-Apple-trolls, but today many of the 'Apple has lost it's way',"Apple is crap', ' Apple is way overpriced' complaints are now coming from past Apple customers

        I came to hate-anything-Apple because I was a past Apple customer. As in, since the Apple 2 days. My second computer was a ][+. (My first was a C= 16.) They lost their way the first time in the Centris/Performa era, and they've lost it again now.

    • They have lost their momentum. They used to make great products that just worked. Perfectly.

      When was that? I was a Mac user almost from the beginning, so I know that has literally never been true. (I skipped straight from Apple // to the Mac Plus.)

  • The weakened demand came primarily from China, although Cook notes that "in some developed markets, iPhone upgrades also were not as strong as we thought they would be."

    The writing was on the wall when, for the 1st time, Apple increased iPhone trade-in credit in late November by up to $100 [9to5mac.com] to get lure people in to buy the iPhone XR, XS, and XS Max, and then extending the offer to other countries like China, Japan, and Australia, and throughout Europe [macrumors.com] a month later.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    bring out your strawmen; warm up your hyperbole; put a fresh set of batteries in your whataboutisms and start your ipologies!!

    • by pjrc ( 134994 )

      But you'll have to take it to an Apple Store to have that fresh battery installed.

  • Prices, Quality (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 02, 2019 @10:54PM (#57896430)

    In his letter, Cook offers several explanations for the lower earnings guidance

    And he never once mentioned the jacked up prices of the new Apple offerings nor the lack of innovation that has led to Apple's quality being par with competitors'.

    Cook has neither the vision nor the control that Jobs had. The latest phones have Lightning ports instead of the industry-standard USB-C, dropping the headphone jack, but the Mac lines all offer USB-C. A competent CEO with control over his various divisions, as Jobs was, would have standardized on USB-C for all products. Cook simply does not wield enough power within his own house to make that happen. Jobs moved Apple to eschew the PS/2, serial, and parallel ports in favor of a single standard, USB, and that took vision and control: Cook has neither.

    Cook wastes Apple's time and resources on content creation, bogus iTunes adventures like music streaming, and so forth. Apple needs to recenter itself around its core competencies: hardware and software. Forget "thinner" and remember what "pro" used to mean. Revive the 2012 MacBook Pro design with its thick but accessible, repairable, tough-as-a-tank system.

    My 2012 MBP has a massive dent in one corner from being dropped onto Frankfurt Airport's hard, stone floor: the aluminum deformed, but neither the screen nor any other component was harmed. I've spilled an embarrassing amount of beer, water, and champagne onto the keyboard and drained each out the optical drive; it still keeps on ticking. Why would I buy a Cook-era MBP whose useless touch-bar will fail due to heat issues? How would I deal with all the dongles?

    • Why would I buy a Cook-era MBP whose useless touch-bar will fail due to heat issues? How would I deal with all the dongles?

      You pay for them, Wilde. You pay for them.

  • by X!0mbarg ( 470366 ) on Wednesday January 02, 2019 @11:28PM (#57896570)

    People are Content with their current phones.
    After all, they paid Through the Nose for their current iPhone, and are not willing to drop even more their hard-earned cash for yet another upgrade that isn't really a substantial improvement over what they have. Sure, it's a status symbol and all that, but people don't all have the same level of disposable income as they used to.
    Didn't the PC market go through this a while back?
    Isn't Microsoft going through this yet again over Windows 7 vs Windows 10, and won't they be feeling same "loss of profits" bite when it comes to the next iteration of Windows?
    You can certainly tell that Microsoft holds a substantial share of Apple by the way they make the same mistakes.

  • Give us something fucking amazing...
  • not surprising (Score:5, Interesting)

    by renegade600 ( 204461 ) on Thursday January 03, 2019 @12:08AM (#57896710)

    since users found that apple was secretly throttling their phones causing problems on purpose it was bound to happened. getting the battery replace is just so much cheaper for a perfectly good phone. besides iphones are just too expensive to replace yearly now.

  • Not surprised (Score:4, Interesting)

    by buss_error ( 142273 ) on Thursday January 03, 2019 @12:21AM (#57896734) Homepage Journal

    At $1,100 and $1,200 USD for an iPhone X (what ever), I just kept my iPhone 7. Still working. I guess for their next trick, Apple will start bricking phone 3 versions or older. At which point, Android, here I come.

  • Sure, they sell less than expected, but from the start of the letter:
    - Revenue of approximately $84 billion
    - Gross margin of approximately 38 percent
    That is still good profit for a quarter by any metric.
    Many people prefer to use their phones longer, the price to swap is high nowadays, and I don't find most improvements that noticeable except for the cameras in the latest top smartphones which now yield pretty good results.
    I changed the battery of my 5 year old 6 Plus and together with the "efficient" I
  • Thanks to trump Chinese companies like hauwei will corner the market now that apple is cut off. By the time heâ(TM)s reversed his stupid policy the damage will be done and American business will be permanently disadvantaged.

  • Lost sales suit somewhere...
  • My Samsung S5 is wearing out (accelerometer stopped working in November). Here's what I want to replace it: an S5 with more memory.

    I don't want a faster processor (unless it gets more flops per watt). I don't want a higher res screen. I don't want a screen that goes to the edge so that I have to hold it up with just my telepathic powers. I don't want a better camera. I JUST WANT MY FUCKING PHONE that I've been using for years without any issues.

    The current S9 is £600 while a boxed S5 is available for

  • You simply do not make them. A sale is something you have to win, not something you can take for granted.

    • by Luthair ( 847766 )
      Sure you do, its called a sales target.
    • by jdharm ( 1667825 )
      Eh, normally I would agree with you but in this case I'll accept "miss". When sales were a gimmie (due to zealotry or lock-in or whatever) and you still fail to make them then you 'missed'.
  • Yesterday, theverge highlighted this as "Apple says cheap battery replacements hurt iPhone sales - The easier it is to replace a battery, the less willing people are to buy a new iPhone" [theverge.com], which was a scandalous way to finally admit they knew and intended to fucking with batteries on purpose.

    Today, I find it nice they downgraded that article and replaced exactly the same news to a stock market insight - "yeah nah the largest company in the world won't make as much sales as it expected, likely will still prof

  • With pro level machines, machines priced for education and the general public to mitigate and ups and downs in sales.

  • I have been asking myself for a few years now how people can be so blind to the {add any high tech market} industry. With cell phones there is a yearly release of the new 'flagship' model, that is always just marginally better than the previous generation. Then literally within a month of the release we are seeing 'leaked' images of the next 'new and improved' model. Each years new model is more expensive than the last too.

    This is not an apple problem alone, although they could fix their problem by dippi

  • The 22 immutable laws of marketing.

    Tim Cook and crew should read it once again. I never owned an iPhone and never considered buying one. Yet until this years lineup I always knew what the newest and best iphone was.

    Now I don't anymore.

    It's a total disaster in brand and lineup bloat. If they carry on, the iPhone will lose it's brand value in 2 years or less.

    Apples value proposition has been degrading sharply in the last few years and now they've reached a tipping point. If I were in charge I'd weed 2 thirds

  • Apple Says It Could Miss $9 Billion In iPhone Sales Due To Effing Insane Pricing


    So, $9bn huh? What's that, like 36 new iPhones or something?
  • Back in the 80's PC wars, IBM made no improvements to the PC and just milked the revenue stream.
    We're seeing APple follow the same failed playbook with the Iphone assuming market share alone would drive future sales.
    Nope, nobody in their right mind is going to pay a grand for an small tablet with a cell antenna and a phone app - cause really, "phone" is just an app. It fails as a tablet, it fails as phone - no new features worthy of the price gouging
  • Apple misses expectations slightly, and investors go into a selling frenzy. Apple does a bit better than expected, and investors go into a buying spree. No wonder we are doomed to having market crises every so often, with such hysterical, unbalanced people. Nothing more stupid and irrational that this market.

"I shall expect a chemical cure for psychopathic behavior by 10 A.M. tomorrow, or I'll have your guts for spaghetti." -- a comic panel by Cotham

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