undervalued Posted September 16, 2015 Share Posted September 16, 2015 http://www.macworld.com/article/2984416/apple-phone/3d-touch-is-a-hard-problem-that-apple-got-just-right.html Great piece about the importance of integrating software and hardware, and how hard that is. I want to know how this solves our butt dialing issue. It's becoming an epidemic. Guessing this is a reference I'm not familiar with :) http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-22/you-are-now-liable-for-your-butt-dials Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted September 16, 2015 Share Posted September 16, 2015 It will be interesting to see what Apple does with all the old phones that get turned in under the plan for replacement. Looks like many of the used, refurbished iPhones might be ending up in China: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2015/09/16/subscription-iphones Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
giofranchi Posted September 17, 2015 Share Posted September 17, 2015 Virtual Reality In Healthcare: Where’s The Innovation? http://techcrunch.com/2015/09/16/virtual-reality-in-healthcare-wheres-the-innovation/?ncid=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&sr_share=twitter I think there is lots of room for growth in this area, should AAPL ever get involved! ;) Cheers, Gio Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
giofranchi Posted September 17, 2015 Share Posted September 17, 2015 Is Apple Ad-Blocking A Mobile Ad-pocalpyse? http://news.investors.com/technology/091715-771462-is-apple-ad-blocking-a-vote-for-better-ads.htm?p=full Cheers, Gio Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
johnny Posted September 18, 2015 Share Posted September 18, 2015 Still seeing a decent amount of available 6s supply. Apparently the Plus model was constrained again this year by yield issues. As much as we are accustomed to looking at iPhone launches in a sort of "first weekend box office" framework, I think they're becoming less and less important to the actual business...that said, there are some reasonable signs that there may be some disappointment with the numbers. Just a heads up to any of you that are trading and not investing ;) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted September 18, 2015 Share Posted September 18, 2015 Also, comparing supply at launch of the 6 to the 6s isn't an apple to apple (heh) comparison. The changes going from the 5s to the 6 were much bigger than going from the 6 to the 6s (mostly internal changes). The supply chain is a well-oiled machine for many of the parts by now, with likely good yields and volumes. It's also possible that there isn't as much pent up demand because many people wanted bigger screens, but other things can compensate for that, such as the LTE rollout in China, Samsung not having much that excites people these days, and the fact that even with the 6 selling very well, only a small portion of the installed base has upgraded (most people who had 5s had 2-year contracts) and there are many Android switchers too (there's a theory that I like that says that Apple does better on people's second smartphone, because for the second one, people know how valuable a smartphone is and they're ready to pay up a bit, while on the first, people imagine that Android and Apple are equivalent...). Also: "@9to5mac: iOS 9 passes 21% adoption, one ups last year’s Android 5.0 Lollipop in just 48 hours" Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
johnny Posted September 18, 2015 Share Posted September 18, 2015 Definitely a possibility of greater supply...though I think this is easily the most substantial S revision they've done; essentially all the hardware is changed. We'll have to wait a bit for the teardowns, but I suspect there are almost no shared major components between the 6 and 6s..the battery has to be changed to accommodate the new haptic engine, and the casing has to have different dimensions in order to accommodate the new, probably thicker display assembly. Even the alloy was changed (although that seems like a minor repair), the A and M processors have been consolidated, etc. I can see a lot of potential production bottlenecks there. The 5 --> 5s change, by comparison, was very minor; they added Touch ID which resulted in a new cable assembly for the home button, but everything else was laid out almost the same. Even the jump from the 5s to the 6 just involved making everything bigger. No new component categories, that is. But the jump created -more- space for laying out components, rather than less space, at least. I think you are right that the average consumer was concerned with the bigger-screens in 2014 and that may have created a special one-time bump in launch awareness. Whether or not that translates into a substantial sales difference over the entire cycle I guess remains to be seen. Just to qualify this whole post, I don't have very strong thoughts on this one way or another. Just thinking out loud. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted September 18, 2015 Share Posted September 18, 2015 It is definitely a very substantial S upgrade, and that mitigates the effect this year, but I don't think components have to stay exactly the same for it to make a difference. Just keeping them pretty similar must help with manufacturing (fewer variables that can go wrong). And even on the 5s I'm pretty sure that they tweaked all kinds of things that might not necessarily have been announced (I know that the case was more scratch resistant, for example, and I seem to remember from photos that the circuit board layout was tweaked). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
innerscorecard Posted September 19, 2015 Share Posted September 19, 2015 I think Ken Segall is right in saying that it makes no sense to purposely create odd expectations of a "tick" and "tock" in alternating years by having the "s" designation every other year. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
johnny Posted September 19, 2015 Share Posted September 19, 2015 As undescriptive as the s designations are, i think they are potentially very important for keeping people on a 2-year upgrade cycle in the absence of subsidies. I hear people that aren't even on contract plans talk about whether -they- are on an "s" cycle or not, and so the rhythm is clearly something they've internalized. I'd be hesitant to disrupt it. People that last purchased a 5s are, I think, going to be just as inclined to get the 6s as they would a same-spec 7. But if they got the same-spec 7, they would have no more naming-convention clues for when they needed to upgrade. Another low-confidence, thinking-out-loud post for the thread. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted September 19, 2015 Share Posted September 19, 2015 The 's' nomenclature is useful because to most regular folks, for something to be new it has to look different. We saw this with the 5c; the externals got all the attention despite the fact it was mostly a repackaged 5. Calling it 6s rather than 7 makes people easily understand that it's an improved 6. If they called it 7 we'd never get to the end of the bitching... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
innerscorecard Posted September 20, 2015 Share Posted September 20, 2015 Great points I hadn't thought about - thanks you guys. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Palantir Posted September 20, 2015 Share Posted September 20, 2015 It's surprising to me that AAPL kept the base model at 16GB, when it is far from enough for most people. I guess it really undermines the idea that AAPL cares foremost about the user experience and not making the most money. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mephistopheles Posted September 20, 2015 Share Posted September 20, 2015 It's surprising to me that AAPL kept the base model at 16GB, when it is far from enough for most people. I guess it really undermines the idea that AAPL cares foremost about the user experience and not making the most money. My user experience has not been negatively effected because Apple is offering a 16GB model, I can tell you that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted September 20, 2015 Share Posted September 20, 2015 It's surprising to me that AAPL kept the base model at 16GB, when it is far from enough for most people. I guess it really undermines the idea that AAPL cares foremost about the user experience and not making the most money. I find it puzzling as well. On one hand, it could be just to push some people up a size and make more money, but it also causes enough problems to Apple that there's a theory that makes some sense: They could be supply constrained. They sell so many devices, growing so fast, that's going from 16 to 32gb on their base device is a big deal for the worldwide flash production supply chain, and they might not be able to cope with that just yet. A popular app developer (David Smith) recently pulled some analytics from his apps and estimates that about 43% (IIRC) of iPhone users have the base model. So doubling the flash requirements for 43% of iPhones is a lot of extra memory... (though they doubled the other tiers, so maybe that's about money too; start by doubling more profitable tiers and later they'll double the lowest tier) Thankfully, the new technologies in iOS 9 will help a bit with that (App Thinning, on demand resources, etc). Light users who just check facebook and take a few photos once in a while are probably fine with 16gb, but it's still too low IMO. I think 32gb should be a minimum now. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheAiGuy Posted September 20, 2015 Share Posted September 20, 2015 They've made a lot of their services streaming (photos, music) and lowered the price and raised the capacity of cloud storage. I wouldn't be surprised if it is more geared towards pushing people onto iCloud and increasing lock-in more tea it is about raising prices Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
innerscorecard Posted September 20, 2015 Share Posted September 20, 2015 It's surprising to me that AAPL kept the base model at 16GB, when it is far from enough for most people. I guess it really undermines the idea that AAPL cares foremost about the user experience and not making the most money. I find it puzzling as well. On one hand, it could be just to push some people up a size and make more money, but it also causes enough problems to Apple that there's a theory that makes some sense: They could be supply constrained. They sell so many devices, growing so fast, that's going from 16 to 32gb on their base device is a big deal for the worldwide flash production supply chain, and they might not be able to cope with that just yet. A popular app developer (David Smith) recently pulled some analytics from his apps and estimates that about 43% (IIRC) of iPhone users have the base model. So doubling the flash requirements for 43% of iPhones is a lot of extra memory... (though they doubled the other tiers, so maybe that's about money too; start by doubling more profitable tiers and later they'll double the lowest tier) Thankfully, the new technologies in iOS 9 will help a bit with that (App Thinning, on demand resources, etc). Light users who just check facebook and take a few photos once in a while are probably fine with 16gb, but it's still too low IMO. I think 32gb should be a minimum now. I think that's right, as I said in an earlier post in this thread (I think). Based on the starting memory capacity of the new Apple TV and iPad Pro, it's clear that Apple sees 32 GB as the "good" starting memory option that they want to offer in 2015. I also have read elsewhere that 32 GB is considerably harder to produce than 16 GB. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
johnny Posted September 21, 2015 Share Posted September 21, 2015 The supply-constrained apologia makes absolutely no sense to me. The fact that there will be a 16-->32 transition is not some surprise. It is an inevitability and Apple has no doubt been thinking about when it'll happen for many years. Just how long ago is important because it only takes two years to get a new fab up and running, so unless they just totally blew it back in 2013 and completely misjudged how people would be using their phones in 2015, there is no reason why they couldn't have locked up the appropriate supply by now. Remember, Apple pushed Samsung out of as a NAND supplier entirely in 2014, which was the year where all of the non-entry memory tiers were doubled. In other words, we are meant to believe that 1. Beginning in 2014, there was some critical NAND shortage preventing Apple from raising the base model to 32GB but that 2. Despite this, they still decided it was a good time to push out their major supplier of the resource and that 3. Despite a shortage and the loss of a major supplier, they were able to scrounge up enough memory to double the storage on all -other- models, and yet... 4. The shortage was so critical that it has lasted two full product revisions. This is competing with a very elegant alternative explanation: Apple has, for decades, made a lot of money charging exorbitant prices for storage/ram upgrades, and they have not lost their taste for that. I think they accurately concluded that almost nobody was going to -not- buy an iPhone (that otherwise would have) over this pricing structure. And there are probably a lot of people that would have been fine with a 32GB base, but are otherwise forced into the 64GB upgrade. And, perhaps more importantly, a good chunk of those people may become accustomed to the 64GB model and find themselves permanently stuck on the middle-storage-tier. I'm afraid I'm in that group. But regardless of what the actual reason is, I frankly think there's no -good- excuse for why they're selling 16GB 6s...es. Given how much negative feedback they're getting about it now though, it is safe to say this is the last year. EDIT: I think people like this explanation only because there were the early-days stories about NAND shortages and the folklore about how Apple locks up global supply of components every once in a while. But those examples really don't apply anymore, IMO. There were NAND supply back when smartphone sales were quadrupling year over year and a lot of players were taken by surprise. But things aren't quite that crazy anymore. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted September 21, 2015 Share Posted September 21, 2015 I think that's probably right, and that's certainly my favored explanation. But I think the supply issue is also possible, I just don't know what kind of issues they could be facing there, at that scale. Maybe they would have stretched it a bit to last year but were planning to transition this year and couldn't, I don't know. They also wanted to do more with sapphire apparently but couldn't get the supply up (GT Advanced screwed up). They're also constantly waiting on Intel for new Macs because Intel can't deliver on its promised timetables; maybe flash suppliers are also behind on their promises... Wouldn't be unheard of. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
innerscorecard Posted September 21, 2015 Share Posted September 21, 2015 If this is really the last year (which the announced starting memory of the new Apple TV shows - especially in juxtaposition with Gurman's early sources) for 16 GB starting iPhones, then it will be interesting to see whether the increasing percentage of Plus phones sold will at all make up for falling ASPs from people buying 32 GB phones instead of 64 GB phones. It would certainly be weird to go from 16-64-128 to 32-64-128. I think in that situation, very few people would buy the middle tier. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
innerscorecard Posted September 21, 2015 Share Posted September 21, 2015 To me, the Xcode incident is an example of how the Great Firewall and other consequences of running services in China will create surprises, probably mostly bad. Apple services really are quite slow in China, so it's not at all surprising to me that Chinese developers would download a compromised version of XCode hosted on third-party Chinese sites. In China, there is also far less emphasis on data security. In Android, you can see it clearly because there are so damn many App Stores, and none of them are really safe. It really is unfortunate that these compromised apps hit the Chinese iOS App Store. A significant blow to Apple's reputation in China, in my eyes, though probably not a lasting one if it's just a one-off. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
johnny Posted September 21, 2015 Share Posted September 21, 2015 Apple services really are quite slow in China, so it's not at all surprising to me that Chinese developers would download a compromised version of XCode hosted on third-party Chinese sites. Wow, thanks for the info on their delivery issues. Really never considered that. I was just recently wondering what the hell could have possibly convinced these devs to download xcode from untrustworthy sources. I think its a good example that Apple faces many unique risks in China. It's not all roses and if they want to ride the wave of another doubling of Chinese smartphone users they're going to face a lot of challenges, including the state. What has state media coverage of the XCode compromise been like? I feel like we can make inferences about the current relationship based on that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted September 21, 2015 Share Posted September 21, 2015 Some worried that the iOS 8 launch bug would turn off many from updating quickly. Looks like that's not the case: "Apple also announced the fastest iOS adoption ever, with more than 50 percent of devices already using iOS 9." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted September 21, 2015 Share Posted September 21, 2015 For what that's worth: http://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-speeds-up-electric-car-work-1442857105 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted September 21, 2015 Share Posted September 21, 2015 To go back to the earlier discussion, this guy has some thoughts about the S cycle: http://www.aboveavalon.com/notes/2015/9/21/the-pixar-iphone Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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