Not to mention, at the price apple is selling their 27 inch display, i am doubtful anyone buying them want to make do with the base M chip. But if not the base chip, that will add even more inventory cost
From an engineering standpoint, it was the most impressive iPhone Apple had ever made, but that fact doesn't translate to sales numbers.
There's a very vocal group of people online saying they want smaller phones, who make it sound like there's massive untapped demand for these phones, but when you actually give it to them, it turns out they're just a tiny slice of the market.
But when I looked up the sales numbers for all of the smaller phone versions I had to admit I must be pretty far outside the normal buyer. The market really spoke on this.
It turns out that the reachable nature of it wasn’t really that much of a benefit compared to the downsides: short battery life (going from the 12 mini to 13 mini helped, barely), small text/interface (my eyes literally started hurting), reduced area to see content while typing, compromised cameras compared to the Pro models.
Add a $30 PopSocket to your phone and all the problems with a bigger phone are resolved.
The iPhone mini competed with a $30 accessory.
So every ipad , watch, mac sku that sells < 5% of the overall product line is immediately taken out back to the wood shed?
I guess, but when my iPhone is no longer supported, I’m migrating my entire family on to something else. 3 watches, 3 ipads and 2 phones…so its not always about the % sold.
Looking at the earlier smaller iPhones and the budget SE line, at least the “miniaturized” part isn’t very convincing.
It was, to the contrary, the non-mini iPhone 12 that introduced a new resolution and required adjustments.
Compared to the iPhone Duo now in the lineup? And the iPhone Air was announced with some pride from the Apple hardware team for its special miniaturized hardware.
There may not be a market for an iPhone Mini-sized device when looking at the buyers, but the custom hardware and tweaks to software aren't a clear consideration for Apple when you look at their behavior with other products.
I think with the iPhone Duo you at least have a larger screen that the user can utilize. On the iPhone mini the screen was as big as it was going to get.
If the experience of using a specific app is bad, the user can open the phone.
I might as well just get some Asus and whatever fancy monitor I can afford (that's not a Mac Studio) if it just has to be a tangle of hardware.
And what does “hardware and performance is there” mean? The latest Apple TV 4K has an A19 chip, same as the base iPhone 17. What console market are they eating alive with that exactly?
Well and the consumer is usually a bit more developed as well.
Apple was never good at that, and looking at their track record with the gaming industry, will probably never be.
(you fool should be read in the voice of Gilbert Gottfried)
People can and do write apps for iOS. So a lot of people hit the issue, and some complain loudly.
Most people don't write apps/games for gaming consoles. Those who do already knew the deal they were getting into.
It's sad that one can be a victim of one's own success. Not saying we should feel bad Apple (or any tech giant for that matter) but the idea of justice and fairness when administered by public sentiment is a funny thing...
With pricing model that Apple insists on, their console would be laughing stock in terms of storage. (Switch 2 has 256 GB only but it's a) portable, b) has slot for sd express cards.)
The AI data center is analogous to the mainframe.
If I can run Qwen 3.8 Flash Next on my DDR4 closet server with a $500 16GB GPU at 50 tok/s (which I can) then I just about guarantee you that in 2-3 years a pretty acceptable AI model is going to be running off of iPhones and M7/M8 Macs.
The other option that reduces Apple’s long-term risk is that they could just buy an AI company.
It would not be surprising that Apple just waits and snatches their compute up from insolvent companies sliding past.
> Apple is cutting down Google Gemini's massive models into smaller and more secure parts through distillation, to create elements that are more suited to on-device Apple Intelligence processing.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/03/25/apple-is-distilli...
In terms of strategy, they picked the underdog carrier (Cingular) specifically to avoid having to bundle bloatware and carrier customization at the cost of exclusivity. Likewise, when Apple brought the iPhone to Japan, they did the same thing with the underdog carrier here, SoftBank.
The strategic importance of this was as a bargaining chip with other carriers and fundamentally gave them a lot of control they would not have had if they had gone with Verizon or similar.
They went to Verizon first but were turned down. Apple needed distribution, which meant partnering with an established carrier.
Regarding "owning the entire stack" didn't make any sense in 2007, especially for a company that was new to the cell phone business.
Three years later, the first iPhone with Apple's silicon was the iPhone 4 with the A4 processor.
In fact, one of the critical arguments Apple made as to why they weren't a monopoly was "Sure, we demand 30% - but the phone company monopoly we made obsolete used to charge 70%!" Mobile app stores on other platforms were absolutely hell.
One extra wrinkle of this is that Apple didn't actually partner with AT&T, they partnered with Cingular, the smallest national[0] carrier, who only agreed to let Apple ship an unmolested device because they got 5 year exclusivity. Then Cingular got bought out by AT&T. AFAIK AT&T didn't want the iPhone, they wanted the AT&T (insert terrible name here) Powered by AppleTM, with like 20 AT&T services preinstalled and unremovable. 'Cause that's literally what happened with the first Samsung Galaxy phone, every carrier gave it a different name and their own bloatware.
And yes, this hatred was mutual: the 5 year exclusivity meant iPhones were shackled to a terrible network in the US, and there was a significant amount of effort put into baseband jailbreaking just so people could violate Apple's exclusivity agreement and use their iPhone with their choice of carrier - which, to be clear, meant "use it on T-Mobile".
Also, while I'm giving a lot of credit to Apple, the thing that really broke the vendor lock-in was:
1. Google deliberately bidding up spectrum to trigger an FCC open-access pledge on LTE bands, which forced Verizon to allow third-party networks
2. Qualcomm giving up on UMB, forcing Verizon to adopt LTE, and by extension, SIM cards[3]
3. Clearwire / Sprint's WiMAX service totally failing, also forcing Sprint to adopt LTE and SIMs
[0] The US has a few "regional" carriers like US Cellular that only operate towers in some markets and license spectrum outside of that area.
[1] Yes, they were owned by Deutsche Telekom at one point
[2] At one point owned by Softbank, now owned by T-Mobile
[3] Strictly speaking, the SIM card spec includes CDMA/3GPP2[4] support, but the largest CDMA market was the US, and any carrier that wanted to support foreign phones used GSM/3GPP track standards
[4] Yes, Qualcomm was really that petty that they named their 3G standards body "3G 2"
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/google...
Apple isn't renting; they distilled Gemini to create their own model for "broad world knowledge". Some of this runs on Google's infrastructure because Apple didn't have enough compute.
All of the personal context stuff is Apple's Foundation Models.
That said renting storage from Google for iCloud reportedly carries an ~80% profit margin, there's no reason they can't also put a 5x markup on what Google charges them for PCC and Siri since they can still prevent rivals from providing the same service in most markets.
Similar to Apple (and everybody else) using Google maps. They survived.
They’re the bridge to the frontier models until iPhone 21 ships with then modern frontier model baked into Apple Silicon.
Citation: It Came To Me In A Dream
I am sure this time the Ruby and Terraform script kiddies will hold back progress just like all those BSD admins staved off Linux like they promised to do on Slashdot 30 years ago
Now that this site has no social moat to boast from the other side of, how out of touch yall are is ridiculously obvious
Glad I went with applied physics, electronic and computer engineering degrees. Will take hands on skill setting up experimental research of propagation of information through various physical materials at various power levels over skill in copy paste of ultimately meaningless syntax.
Google gets a small discount on how much they pay Apple to be the default search engine on Safari.
this is not how it works.
Look at the 3 month chart. Strong quarter. Certainly doesn’t look like a deal I want to get in on
Now look at the 2yr 5yr and 10yr charts. Looks like historically high values
5% dips after hours is nothing
It took me a while to realize, but Yahoo charts was showing 3% up from Jun 30 to Nov 2. Turns out there was a huge drop on day 1, so where you start counting _really_ matters!
In other words, the money consumers used to pay Trump's tariffs was not refunded to the consumers, but went straight to Apple's bottom line instead.
Wonder how much of this is due to shitty ads everywhere. (App Store, Maps, Sports.app, ...)
Edit: I forgot Apple News...
dividend = interested in long-term performance and institutional investment, not pump-and-dump for the next quarter.