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from the it-worked-until-it-didn't...-now-what? dept.
Apple has had an incredible decade. Since the iPhone debuted in 2007, the company's sales have jumped tenfold. The stock has soared over 700%. And up until last November, it was the world's largest publicly traded company. But two weeks ago, Apple issued a rare warning that shocked investors. For the first time since 2002, the company slashed its earnings forecast. The stock plunged 10% for its worst day in six years. This capped off a horrible few months in which Apple stock crashed about 35% from its November peak. That erased $446 billion in shareholder value—the biggest wipeout of wealth in a single stock ever.
[...] Despite the revenue growth, Apple is selling fewer iPhones every year. In fact, iPhone unit sales peaked way back in 2015. Last year, Apple sold 14 million fewer phones than it did three years ago.
[...] In 2010, you could buy a brand-new iPhone 4 for 199 bucks. In 2014, the newly released iPhone 6 cost 299 bucks. Today the cheapest model of the latest iPhone X costs $1,149! It's a 500% hike from what Apple charged eight years ago. [...] In 1984, Motorola sold the first cell phone for $4,000. The average price for a smartphone today is $320, according to research firm IDC. Cell phone prices have come down roughly 92%. And yet, Apple has hiked its smartphone prices by 500%!
[...] Twelve years ago, only 120 million people owned a cell phone. Today over five billion people own a smartphone, according to IDC. [...] now iPhone price hikes have gone about as far as they can go. [...] A publicly traded company that makes most of its money from selling phones is no longer telling investors how many phones it sells!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Tuesday January 22 2019, @09:47PM (2 children)
I've generally assumed that the overall geek-friendliness of Apple started dropping more-or-less the day Woz stopped being part of the day-to-day. Woz was always more about making cool stuff than about making oodles of money, and it showed in what he was involved in designing.
But the obvious problem now is that Steve Jobs' reality distortion field is no longer in effect, and the iPhone never was even close to as insanely great as he was capable of convincing others they were.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday January 22 2019, @10:50PM (1 child)
To be fair, the original iPhone was pretty cool. I was supporting a bunch of Nokias and a couple of Windows phones (Win CE 6.5 maybe?) when they came out.
Setting up email for the user was an absolute doddle, and it was a huge amount better for the end user too.
The various Nokias we had were pretty good phones, but the "smart" bit was stupid as hell, and the displays were too small to do much with.
The other thing the iPhones did was show just how shit Blackberries were for the end users. We had one executive who demanded a new Blackberry every time a new model came out. After the other senior people all got iPhones they sniggered behind his back. To be fair he was an absolute bellend.
The Win CE phone (we had two I think) were shit from whatever angle you looked, poorly thought out interface, buggy as hell, they dropped calls, missed txts, and needed restarting every morning. Just rubbish.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by PocketSizeSUn on Wednesday January 23 2019, @10:52AM
For business people (and especially those that travel outside the US) e-mail and BB PIN messaging were the killer apps. Nothing else was even worth wasting time on and while there was a lot of 'ooh ooh shiny' uptake and people 'demanding' iPhones because they were status symbols the bulk of the business world kept using blackberry because:
- e-mail arrived faster w/o blowing out the battery.
- unlimited data plans (including unlimited international data plans).
For people doing business (like your bellend) those e-mails *are* the business .. and for your iPhonys I would stipulate that there may not have been 'bellends' but they were most probably utterly useless middle management and it would take 6 months to notice if the just stopped showing up.
It wan't until Android matured enough to have push gmail that blackberry actually started to lose market share. That caused BB to try to 'catch up' to Android/iPhone by being more of an app-phone (like iPhone/Android). At that point their devices necessarily got data hungry which cause the unlimited plans to go away. All that was left was the PIN-PIN messaging. WhatsApp happened to be where everyone went and at that point the deal was sealed and the rest is history.