Mac sales are doing ok only because Apple had virtually no share and no presence outside the US and maybe a couple of other markets where they were not at 0. The gain in image also helped them gain a bit of share in the US. Plus any Apple buyer is by definition spending without thinking so they upgrade more often. The premium segment where Apple (can't call it high end because Macs are not that) also erodes less since folks that are more careful with their spending are the ones buying other devices instead of PCs. If you factor in all that, Mac sales are not doing well and are just in line with what you would expect (bellow that this quarter since they had Macbook shortages).
As for the Watch units , anyone with a clue and not determined to lie about it will put them at max 2.5 million units but a more realistic number is 2.1 million units. Q1 all other was actually soft on expected ipod poor sales (that's not much revenue) and something that most ignore, poor ipad accessories sales. Problem is that ipod wouldn't drop much from Q1 to Q2 ,same for ipad accessories since those go with ipad sales. Apple also made some funny claims about how June was the strongest month for the watch. Ofc it was since production was the highest and they account for the sale only when they ship . They could even afford to expand to new markets in June. Q3 will be better,they'll expand the watch to more markets and dump a lot of inventory in the channel and then Q4 is where folks will buy it as a gift. After that it will be interesting and they need to have a much much better product early next year.
really? your assumptions are plain wrong. "any apple buyer is by definition spending without thinking so they upgrade more often"? okay, so if somebody values build quality, Mac OS X, and the Mac user experience, they aren't thinking? stop being so arrogant, there are many Mac owners who use the same Mac for many years because Mac OS X doesn't stop working after a couple years and the build quality is high. I haven't purchased a new computer in 6 years, and that's because I use a Macbook Pro. I'm certain I would have had to replace my laptop by now if I had purchased a Windows laptop.
Sure, Macs aren't for everyone, but just because they aren't for you doesn't mean other people are wrong. Go troll somewhere else.
Windows 10 on a 10 year old CPU and 1GB RAM? Unless you’re running simple terminal/non-GUI apps, I would like to see some proof of "runs good". Because "starts up" does not equal "runs good".
OS X doesn’t have an issue with 1GB of RAM. It’s the apps that do. And short of running with a fast SSD, I don’t believe you can do much "desktop computing" with 1GB of RAM these days.
I love a good flame but let's be honest, Yosemite on a 2008 iMac (first gen Al iMac) with 4GB of RAM and no other upgrades runs like crap. Windows 10 on a similar configuration runs great (memory-wise). And @xype, whip out that Yosemite installer, run it on 1GB of RAM and let me know how you came up with your conclusions.
I don't really care if it's the apps or the OS gods. You can't even install MacOSX without enough RAM and you certainly can't work. Even at 4GB it's a test of patience.
Sure, build quality is great if you don't draw the short straw with batches that have one problem or another (screen, GPU, etc). And the "Mac user experience" is something so subjective that referencing it in such a discussion sounds plain ignorant. Do you like simple things that work? Well enjoy the paper-pad experience. ;)
And just as a side note, I appreciate my 6-7years old Lenovo X200 then I do my 1 year old X1 Carbon gen2. All computers nowadays are built to be replaced in 2 years... They fail physically and functionally (like devices with 4GB of soldered RAM).
My gf is running Yosemite on a MacBook Air from 2010 with 2 GB of RAM. She multitasks the shit out of it. How is 4 GB "testing your patience"? I call bullshit!
Some further important Apple News not mentioned here earlier on:
Apple puts iWatch in stores
Maybe some idiot will buy them
Apple mysteriously has enough iWatches on hand to start putting them in its own stores. The iWatch went on sale six weeks ago and at the time Apple did not think it would ever have enough to put it in its own shops. The original plan was to flog them online and in fashion stores, however and Jobs' Mob thought it would never have enough to meet the crushing demand for an out-of-date wearable which was more expensive than anything else on the market. So it appears that suddenly Apple has enough. Of course the Tame Apple Press is trying to keep the story about a shortage going. Potential buyers must first reserve their device online, and some models are still out of stock. But the sport models, which are most popular and the cheapest, are available across the country, while others can be bought in Apple's flagship shops, such as those in London and Manchester. In order to reserve your device, you must pick the Watch you want to buy, choose a store to pick the device up and then choose a time to go and buy it. You can also order the home delivery, but it's not recommended as it takes more than three weeks for the shipment to be delivered. The most expensive models, such as the 38mm yellow gold model with red modern Buckle strap, are still unavailable. As Apple said last week, the 42mm Watch in Space Black with the metal link bracelet is unavailable at all stores for now. Source: http://www.fudzilla.com/news/wearables/38018-apple...
Apple Watch sales fall by 90 per cent
Apple has another lemon
It is turning out exactly as we said – sales of Apple's latest cure for cancer have slumped to a shadow of their initial "glory." While the Tame Apple Press and a big chunk of analysts sung praises for the iWatch, claiming it would sell 70 million in its first year. We pointed out that the gizmo was nearly two years out of date and lacked most of the software which would make it moderately useful and if it succeed it was a triumph of user stupidity and marketing. Lately analysts have been slowly withdrawing the enthusiastic sales figures they gave the watch, and now a new survey has shown that sales have fallen by 90 per cent. Apple is selling fewer than 20,000 watches a day in the US since the initial surge in April, and on some days fewer than 10,000. This is not too bad, but it does suggest that most people who wanted an iWatch have one, and existing users are not managing to win many converts amongst their friends to make it take off. For the record to make the 70 million figure apple would have to sell 195,000 a day. Data collected by Slice Intelligence show that Two-thirds of the watches sold so far have been the lower-profit "Sport" version, whose price starts at $349, according to Slice, rather than the costlier and more advanced models that start at $549. Apple's gold "Edition" model priced at $10,000 or more has only sold 2,000 of them have been sold in the US. The figures are based on the electronic receipts sent to millions of email addresses following purchases. The company conducts market research on behalf of consumer-goods companies, among others, many of them in the Fortune 500. All up though these figures are not bad, but they are not the sort of numbers which Apple needs to convince its investors that it can make mega sales any more. With sales drying up in China, Jobs mob will not have a good bottom line this year. Source: http://www.fudzilla.com/news/wearables/38173-apple...
Apple press gears up for shock results
They will be great honestly
The Tame Apple Press is gearing up to spin tomorrow's financial results, even though there are some suggestions that they will not be that great. Going through all the pre-result articles we have detected a common theme – the results will be great. If they are not great the magazines and newspapers will: 1. Say that it is a slow period anyway because Apple has not got any product out. 2. Blame the slowing Chinese economy rather than the failure of Apple to interest the Chinese. 3. Use the phrase "blockbuster iPhone" even if sales start to fall. 4. Fail to mention the failure of the iPad or the iWatch. 5. Quote figures for the year rather than the quarter. 6. Compare everything to Samsung (which had a shitty year). Below is a quote from CNet so you can see what we mean:
"This time around, Apple's blockbuster iPhone sales likely continued, according to analysts tracking the company. Research firms polled by Fortune estimated Apple sold 49.4 million iPhones in the period, up 40 percent from the same period a year ago. That's not as many as in the past couple of quarters -- including the 61.2 million iPhones sold in the March period. But it's also not shabby compared with rivals such as Samsung, which warned earlier this month that its June quarter profit likely would be lower than expected and would fall for the seventh straight quarter."
But CNet has a problem. The reason that Apple has done well at all is because of sales in China. In April Apple told us that it made a killing in that country. Word on the street is China sales did not hold up for the rest of the year, suggesting that those who could afford an Apple bought it, and those who couldn't, which is the majority of the country didn't. Apple's Chinese problems are unlikely to be because of the county's economic woes either, it is just that the market for overpriced phones in China is limited. Earlier this month, Gartner revised its annual growth forecast for smartphones downward because it sees the market as saturated The other issue is how poorly Apple's iWatch sales have been going. It is hard to see how Apple can get away from this one other than by being creative with how it calculates the sales. The Tame Apple Press has been getting bizarre about the watch in the face of the fact that campaigned for people to buy the white elephant. Time magazine actually ran a story about how 96 per cent of iWatch owners are happy they bought it. A bizarre figure that the rag has to qualify by admitting that the more you knew about technology the less like you were to be satisfied with the iWatch. However 96 per cent is just plane impossible. Slightly saner analysts think that the iWatch will sell very few and it might need some time However Apple might have to fess up that its numbers were not what the Tame Apple Press claimed they would be. It will also have to face slumping iPad sales. Source: http://www.fudzilla.com/news/38274-apple-press-gea...
We were right Apple results are grim
Tame Apple Press is spinning like a mad thing
Yesterday we warned the Tame Apple Press would be spinning what were expected to be bad results and we were right. The results were simply: • Apple made much less than Wall Street expected. • IPad sales are disappearing faster than expected. • IWatch sales so pitiful that Apple did not want to announce them. • IPhone sales up, but dependent on a saturated and dying Chinese market which is about to turn. These are results of a company which has run out of ideas and is coasting on the good name of a single product. Analysts were furious and shareholders dumped their shares believing that Apple has peaked. But you would not get that if you read the papers this morning. Instead you hear how Apple made "boatloads of money" and it was incredible that Wall Street failed to understand how well Jobs' Mob was doing. One of the saddest tries to baffle with bullshit came from Lance Ulanoff at Mashable who tried to prove the iWatch was a success even though Apple was too embarrassed to announce the sales figures. Ulanoff managed to "prove" (and we use the term loosely) that Apple managed to sell slightly more than a million watches which he claimed proved it was a success. The only problem was that Apple, Analysts and the Tame Apple Press were telling us that it would sell 40-60 million and even the most negative was saying 10 million. Apple did better in China in this quarter than we expected. Apparently though most of its sales were in the cash rich and more western Hong Kong market rather than the poorer mainland. Signs from China are that both markets are saturated for high end smartphones. Besides the Chinese economy is depressed and fewer people have money. Even if Apple brings out a new phone, it will have a harder sell in China. What the results do show is that Apple is now dependent on the iPhone and has nothing up its sleeve that can replace it. This is fine for now, if you see the glass as half-full and the Tame Apple Press does. But we are seeing huge problems for smartphones in general and high end ones especially. China, which Apple depends on, is seeing high end phones being decimated by cheaper, lower margin phones which much do the same. These phones are filtering out to the West where they are also making more sense. Smartphones are widely predicted to go the same way as the PC market, once everything matures. Apple fanboys are expecting something which Jobs' Mob always claimed – innovation. But Apple's problem here is that it is not an innovator, it is a copier and no one else has come up with something that could be the next big thing. Wearables, the watch, was always going to be too niche, something that Tim Cook admitted yesterday. He said the watch did better than some in the company expected, in other words some in the company thought that no one would be stupid enough to buy it. Fortunately Apple found a million idiots who are stupid enough to buy a dog turd if it has an Apple logo on it. These results are financially not bad, but they show a company that has stalled and has nowhere to go. Spinning that news by the Tame Apple Press to preserve the reality distortion field will not help Apple. It needs to get a grip on itself and come up with a better plan. Sorce: http://www.fudzilla.com/news/38286-we-were-right-a...
Apple adverts show it has lost its way
Admits that others are doing the same things cheaper
Apple's latest wave of adverts seem dedicated to the fact that its rivals are producing products that are the same and much cheaper The punchline of the advert is "If it's not an iPhone, it's not an iPhone" which is pretty daft. It is a bit like saying "if it is not a pig, it is not a pig." It is equally not good value either. The advert is supposed to show how the app-based ecosystem of the iPhone is brilliant, but it accidently shows how close its rivals are to Apple's product. It is showing a real fear in the Cargo cult that users are finding it difficult to see the difference between Apple and its rivals – other than the logo and the inflated price tag. Apple's rival products, are now better built, better-featured but much cheaper. This is leaving Apple having to define itself by what it's not, rather than by what it is. Unfortunately all it has is the logo and a more expensive price tag. Apple appears to be in fear of its rivals, even if iPhones are still making money. More than 54.2 million have been shipped up to June 2015. The problem is that Apple used to be able to tout itself as an innovator. It was not true of course, it ripped off the same ideas that other people had and stuck them in a nice box, but that was enough to carry it off. But since 2011 it has just been tarting up its own products and when it could not do that any more it started tarting up other people's. The iWatch fiasco was so bad because the company got its product onto the market too late to claim it invented it and the whole thing fell apart. There is a feeling, even amongst fanboys, that things would have been different under Steve Jobs. They might be right, although I doubt that. He might have convinced a few more people that they were wearing a cure for cancer, but he was running out of ideas. The iPad was not revolutionary it was just a big iPhone. So it is obvious an iPhone is an iPhone, it is just that it is not much better than anything else on the block for half the price. Source: http://www.fudzilla.com/news/mobile/38277-apple-ad...
Apple has 75 percent of smartwatch market
That is how miserable the market is
Despite the poor figures Apple Watch is the best player in the awful wearables market. It took Google more than six months to cross the 100,000 figure Android Wear installations and Apple Watch has definitely beating these numbers easily. Google has Samsung, LG, Motorola as the predominant players and according to Strategy Analytics only Samsung managed to sell significant numbers. The problem is that the Smart Watch market is slow especially the Android Wear one. But it is taking off fast. A year ago in Q2 2014 Samsung sold 0.7 million of its watches and everyone else managed to sell 0.3 million watches. There was total of million smartwatches sold in Q2 2014 in a wide range of operating systems. A year later, in Q2 2015 Apple’s iWatch and sold 4 million in three months. This is not a bad number as Samsung sold 400,000 watches while all others managed to ship 900,000 in the whole quarter. What this means is that Apple instantly captured 75.5 percent of total market in Q2 2015. Samsung used to have 73.6 percent of market in Q2 2014. In Q2 2015 it dropped to 7.5 percent. This huge drop was thanks to a great success of Apple Watch. All others dropped a market share from 26.4 percent in Q2 14 to 17 percent in Q2 2015. Total growth of the smart watch market year over year is 457.3 percent. Strategy Analytics admitted it did not use “real numbers” but felt its guess was close to the truth. Source: http://www.fudzilla.com/news/wearables/38295-apple...
Apple Pay's London launch is a disaster
Mind the Gap in expectations
The launch of Apple Pay in the UK has been a complete disaster, the software does not work, the system charges you double, and some leading banks do not support it yet. HSBC was named and shamed for not having the service ready and had hate mail from fanboys as a result. For those who came in late HSBC has won awards for the security on its bank accounts but for some reason it has been slow in allowing Apple pay into its systems. HSBC was originally listed as one of Apple's banking partners at launch, but has since said its account holders won't be able to use Apple Pay until later in July, now confirmed as July 28. The delays frustrated Apple fanboys who flooded twitter to vent their spleen. However it turns out that HSBC's delays might have saved its customers from losing a pile of dosh. Transport for London has warned tube, train and bus passengers paying with Apple Pay on iPhones and Apple Watches not to let their batteries run flat or they could get stuck at gates and face penalty fares. Apple Pay only works if a device has power. It warns that, if the battery runs out in the middle of a journey, a user will not be able to tap out, which means they could be charged a maximum fare. It also warns that receiving a call while attempting to touch into or out of the gates will also cause issues, and that users with multiple cards on their account must remember to use the same one or potentially be charged twice. Early adopters have also complained about the speed of Apple Pay compared to Oyster or contactless. Difficulties using Touch ID to authenticate payments combined with the speed at which a payment is recognised have been causing problems for some. In short Apple did not figure all this out before launch and priming its Tame Apple Press to sing its glory. However the BBC could not even get it buy a cup of coffee. The Beeb put it down to teething troubles, but given the system has been running in the US for a while you wouldn't expect to see so many problems like this. Brandwatch, a company which calls itself an "enterprise social intelligence platform", and which monitors social networks to find out how twitterers feel about things. The company compiled a list of 26,000 online mentions of the Apple Watch UK launch, and so assembled an unwilling focus group of 15,789 people. It is fairly clear that people are struggling with the technology. Brandwatch found that ten per cent of posts are about how to get it to work, with Brandwatch saying that:
"Apple Pay is positioned as being the fastest and easiest way to pay [but] if you think there's a 50 per cent chance it could fail, you'll just reach for your credit card instead."
Apple Pay is not getting much traction in the US, where the big retailers are thinking of coming up with their own ideas. Rival payment services are now starting to look rather more useful. Source: http://www.fudzilla.com/news/mobile/38271-apple-pa...
Lol why you all making this a windows vs mac thing, this article is more apple propaganda... notice how apple shares slid? Apple has become more reliant on the iPhone than ever, iWatch was a total failure, and iPad is again in steady decline. I am glad to see macs gaining.
The first iPhone flop is going to hit apple HARD, and investors are worried.
The iPhone is Microsoft's office, once it dies there just isn't a whole lot left to the company.
I do predict the next iPhone will be the best seller ever though, but it's only a matter of time until people get sick of a one trick pony, it's not IF.... it is a matter of when.
Apple needs to diversify, the position isn't secure, and the stock reflects that.
Anandtech doesn't post negative apple news though, which is why im going to troll the comments repeatedly until they start being honest with thier readers.
Sent from my mac mini, I'm not a hater just a realist.
Some further important Apple News not mentioned here earlier on:
Apple puts iWatch in stores
Maybe some idiot will buy them
Apple mysteriously has enough iWatches on hand to start putting them in its own stores. The iWatch went on sale six weeks ago and at the time Apple did not think it would ever have enough to put it in its own shops. The original plan was to flog them online and in fashion stores, however and Jobs' Mob thought it would never have enough to meet the crushing demand for an out-of-date wearable which was more expensive than anything else on the market. So it appears that suddenly Apple has enough. Of course the Tame Apple Press is trying to keep the story about a shortage going. Potential buyers must first reserve their device online, and some models are still out of stock. But the sport models, which are most popular and the cheapest, are available across the country, while others can be bought in Apple's flagship shops, such as those in London and Manchester. In order to reserve your device, you must pick the Watch you want to buy, choose a store to pick the device up and then choose a time to go and buy it. You can also order the home delivery, but it's not recommended as it takes more than three weeks for the shipment to be delivered. The most expensive models, such as the 38mm yellow gold model with red modern Buckle strap, are still unavailable. As Apple said last week, the 42mm Watch in Space Black with the metal link bracelet is unavailable at all stores for now. Source: http://www.fudzilla.com/news/wearables/38018-apple...
Apple Watch sales fall by 90 per cent
Apple has another lemon
It is turning out exactly as we said – sales of Apple's latest cure for cancer have slumped to a shadow of their initial "glory." While the Tame Apple Press and a big chunk of analysts sung praises for the iWatch, claiming it would sell 70 million in its first year. We pointed out that the gizmo was nearly two years out of date and lacked most of the software which would make it moderately useful and if it succeed it was a triumph of user stupidity and marketing. Lately analysts have been slowly withdrawing the enthusiastic sales figures they gave the watch, and now a new survey has shown that sales have fallen by 90 per cent. Apple is selling fewer than 20,000 watches a day in the US since the initial surge in April, and on some days fewer than 10,000. This is not too bad, but it does suggest that most people who wanted an iWatch have one, and existing users are not managing to win many converts amongst their friends to make it take off. For the record to make the 70 million figure apple would have to sell 195,000 a day. Data collected by Slice Intelligence show that Two-thirds of the watches sold so far have been the lower-profit "Sport" version, whose price starts at $349, according to Slice, rather than the costlier and more advanced models that start at $549. Apple's gold "Edition" model priced at $10,000 or more has only sold 2,000 of them have been sold in the US. The figures are based on the electronic receipts sent to millions of email addresses following purchases. The company conducts market research on behalf of consumer-goods companies, among others, many of them in the Fortune 500. All up though these figures are not bad, but they are not the sort of numbers which Apple needs to convince its investors that it can make mega sales any more. With sales drying up in China, Jobs mob will not have a good bottom line this year. Source: http://www.fudzilla.com/news/wearables/38173-apple...
Apple press gears up for shock results
They will be great honestly
The Tame Apple Press is gearing up to spin tomorrow's financial results, even though there are some suggestions that they will not be that great. Going through all the pre-result articles we have detected a common theme – the results will be great. If they are not great the magazines and newspapers will: 1. Say that it is a slow period anyway because Apple has not got any product out. 2. Blame the slowing Chinese economy rather than the failure of Apple to interest the Chinese. 3. Use the phrase "blockbuster iPhone" even if sales start to fall. 4. Fail to mention the failure of the iPad or the iWatch. 5. Quote figures for the year rather than the quarter. 6. Compare everything to Samsung (which had a shitty year). Below is a quote from CNet so you can see what we mean:
"This time around, Apple's blockbuster iPhone sales likely continued, according to analysts tracking the company. Research firms polled by Fortune estimated Apple sold 49.4 million iPhones in the period, up 40 percent from the same period a year ago. That's not as many as in the past couple of quarters -- including the 61.2 million iPhones sold in the March period. But it's also not shabby compared with rivals such as Samsung, which warned earlier this month that its June quarter profit likely would be lower than expected and would fall for the seventh straight quarter."
But CNet has a problem. The reason that Apple has done well at all is because of sales in China. In April Apple told us that it made a killing in that country. Word on the street is China sales did not hold up for the rest of the year, suggesting that those who could afford an Apple bought it, and those who couldn't, which is the majority of the country didn't. Apple's Chinese problems are unlikely to be because of the county's economic woes either, it is just that the market for overpriced phones in China is limited. Earlier this month, Gartner revised its annual growth forecast for smartphones downward because it sees the market as saturated The other issue is how poorly Apple's iWatch sales have been going. It is hard to see how Apple can get away from this one other than by being creative with how it calculates the sales. The Tame Apple Press has been getting bizarre about the watch in the face of the fact that campaigned for people to buy the white elephant. Time magazine actually ran a story about how 96 per cent of iWatch owners are happy they bought it. A bizarre figure that the rag has to qualify by admitting that the more you knew about technology the less like you were to be satisfied with the iWatch. However 96 per cent is just plane impossible. Slightly saner analysts think that the iWatch will sell very few and it might need some time However Apple might have to fess up that its numbers were not what the Tame Apple Press claimed they would be. It will also have to face slumping iPad sales. Source: http://www.fudzilla.com/news/38274-apple-press-gea...
We were right Apple results are grim
Tame Apple Press is spinning like a mad thing
Yesterday we warned the Tame Apple Press would be spinning what were expected to be bad results and we were right. The results were simply: • Apple made much less than Wall Street expected. • IPad sales are disappearing faster than expected. • IWatch sales so pitiful that Apple did not want to announce them. • IPhone sales up, but dependent on a saturated and dying Chinese market which is about to turn. These are results of a company which has run out of ideas and is coasting on the good name of a single product. Analysts were furious and shareholders dumped their shares believing that Apple has peaked. But you would not get that if you read the papers this morning. Instead you hear how Apple made "boatloads of money" and it was incredible that Wall Street failed to understand how well Jobs' Mob was doing. One of the saddest tries to baffle with bullshit came from Lance Ulanoff at Mashable who tried to prove the iWatch was a success even though Apple was too embarrassed to announce the sales figures. Ulanoff managed to "prove" (and we use the term loosely) that Apple managed to sell slightly more than a million watches which he claimed proved it was a success. The only problem was that Apple, Analysts and the Tame Apple Press were telling us that it would sell 40-60 million and even the most negative was saying 10 million. Apple did better in China in this quarter than we expected. Apparently though most of its sales were in the cash rich and more western Hong Kong market rather than the poorer mainland. Signs from China are that both markets are saturated for high end smartphones. Besides the Chinese economy is depressed and fewer people have money. Even if Apple brings out a new phone, it will have a harder sell in China. What the results do show is that Apple is now dependent on the iPhone and has nothing up its sleeve that can replace it. This is fine for now, if you see the glass as half-full and the Tame Apple Press does. But we are seeing huge problems for smartphones in general and high end ones especially. China, which Apple depends on, is seeing high end phones being decimated by cheaper, lower margin phones which much do the same. These phones are filtering out to the West where they are also making more sense. Smartphones are widely predicted to go the same way as the PC market, once everything matures. Apple fanboys are expecting something which Jobs' Mob always claimed – innovation. But Apple's problem here is that it is not an innovator, it is a copier and no one else has come up with something that could be the next big thing. Wearables, the watch, was always going to be too niche, something that Tim Cook admitted yesterday. He said the watch did better than some in the company expected, in other words some in the company thought that no one would be stupid enough to buy it. Fortunately Apple found a million idiots who are stupid enough to buy a dog turd if it has an Apple logo on it. These results are financially not bad, but they show a company that has stalled and has nowhere to go. Spinning that news by the Tame Apple Press to preserve the reality distortion field will not help Apple. It needs to get a grip on itself and come up with a better plan. Sorce: http://www.fudzilla.com/news/38286-we-were-right-a...
Apple adverts show it has lost its way
Admits that others are doing the same things cheaper
Apple's latest wave of adverts seem dedicated to the fact that its rivals are producing products that are the same and much cheaper The punchline of the advert is "If it's not an iPhone, it's not an iPhone" which is pretty daft. It is a bit like saying "if it is not a pig, it is not a pig." It is equally not good value either. The advert is supposed to show how the app-based ecosystem of the iPhone is brilliant, but it accidently shows how close its rivals are to Apple's product. It is showing a real fear in the Cargo cult that users are finding it difficult to see the difference between Apple and its rivals – other than the logo and the inflated price tag. Apple's rival products, are now better built, better-featured but much cheaper. This is leaving Apple having to define itself by what it's not, rather than by what it is. Unfortunately all it has is the logo and a more expensive price tag. Apple appears to be in fear of its rivals, even if iPhones are still making money. More than 54.2 million have been shipped up to June 2015. The problem is that Apple used to be able to tout itself as an innovator. It was not true of course, it ripped off the same ideas that other people had and stuck them in a nice box, but that was enough to carry it off. But since 2011 it has just been tarting up its own products and when it could not do that any more it started tarting up other people's. The iWatch fiasco was so bad because the company got its product onto the market too late to claim it invented it and the whole thing fell apart. There is a feeling, even amongst fanboys, that things would have been different under Steve Jobs. They might be right, although I doubt that. He might have convinced a few more people that they were wearing a cure for cancer, but he was running out of ideas. The iPad was not revolutionary it was just a big iPhone. So it is obvious an iPhone is an iPhone, it is just that it is not much better than anything else on the block for half the price. Source: http://www.fudzilla.com/news/mobile/38277-apple-ad...
Apple has 75 percent of smartwatch market
That is how miserable the market is
Despite the poor figures Apple Watch is the best player in the awful wearables market. It took Google more than six months to cross the 100,000 figure Android Wear installations and Apple Watch has definitely beating these numbers easily. Google has Samsung, LG, Motorola as the predominant players and according to Strategy Analytics only Samsung managed to sell significant numbers. The problem is that the Smart Watch market is slow especially the Android Wear one. But it is taking off fast. A year ago in Q2 2014 Samsung sold 0.7 million of its watches and everyone else managed to sell 0.3 million watches. There was total of million smartwatches sold in Q2 2014 in a wide range of operating systems. A year later, in Q2 2015 Apple’s iWatch and sold 4 million in three months. This is not a bad number as Samsung sold 400,000 watches while all others managed to ship 900,000 in the whole quarter. What this means is that Apple instantly captured 75.5 percent of total market in Q2 2015. Samsung used to have 73.6 percent of market in Q2 2014. In Q2 2015 it dropped to 7.5 percent. This huge drop was thanks to a great success of Apple Watch. All others dropped a market share from 26.4 percent in Q2 14 to 17 percent in Q2 2015. Total growth of the smart watch market year over year is 457.3 percent. Strategy Analytics admitted it did not use “real numbers” but felt its guess was close to the truth. Source: http://www.fudzilla.com/news/wearables/38295-apple...
Apple Pay's London launch is a disaster
Mind the Gap in expectations
The launch of Apple Pay in the UK has been a complete disaster, the software does not work, the system charges you double, and some leading banks do not support it yet. HSBC was named and shamed for not having the service ready and had hate mail from fanboys as a result. For those who came in late HSBC has won awards for the security on its bank accounts but for some reason it has been slow in allowing Apple pay into its systems. HSBC was originally listed as one of Apple's banking partners at launch, but has since said its account holders won't be able to use Apple Pay until later in July, now confirmed as July 28. The delays frustrated Apple fanboys who flooded twitter to vent their spleen. However it turns out that HSBC's delays might have saved its customers from losing a pile of dosh. Transport for London has warned tube, train and bus passengers paying with Apple Pay on iPhones and Apple Watches not to let their batteries run flat or they could get stuck at gates and face penalty fares. Apple Pay only works if a device has power. It warns that, if the battery runs out in the middle of a journey, a user will not be able to tap out, which means they could be charged a maximum fare. It also warns that receiving a call while attempting to touch into or out of the gates will also cause issues, and that users with multiple cards on their account must remember to use the same one or potentially be charged twice. Early adopters have also complained about the speed of Apple Pay compared to Oyster or contactless. Difficulties using Touch ID to authenticate payments combined with the speed at which a payment is recognised have been causing problems for some. In short Apple did not figure all this out before launch and priming its Tame Apple Press to sing its glory. However the BBC could not even get it buy a cup of coffee. The Beeb put it down to teething troubles, but given the system has been running in the US for a while you wouldn't expect to see so many problems like this. Brandwatch, a company which calls itself an "enterprise social intelligence platform", and which monitors social networks to find out how twitterers feel about things. The company compiled a list of 26,000 online mentions of the Apple Watch UK launch, and so assembled an unwilling focus group of 15,789 people. It is fairly clear that people are struggling with the technology. Brandwatch found that ten per cent of posts are about how to get it to work, with Brandwatch saying that:
"Apple Pay is positioned as being the fastest and easiest way to pay [but] if you think there's a 50 per cent chance it could fail, you'll just reach for your credit card instead."
Apple Pay is not getting much traction in the US, where the big retailers are thinking of coming up with their own ideas. Rival payment services are now starting to look rather more useful. Source: http://www.fudzilla.com/news/mobile/38271-apple-pa...
Some further important Apple News not mentioned here earlier on:
Apple puts iWatch in stores
Maybe some idiot will buy them
Apple mysteriously has enough iWatches on hand to start putting them in its own stores. The iWatch went on sale six weeks ago and at the time Apple did not think it would ever have enough to put it in its own shops. The original plan was to flog them online and in fashion stores, however and Jobs' Mob thought it would never have enough to meet the crushing demand for an out-of-date wearable which was more expensive than anything else on the market. So it appears that suddenly Apple has enough. Of course the Tame Apple Press is trying to keep the story about a shortage going. Potential buyers must first reserve their device online, and some models are still out of stock. But the sport models, which are most popular and the cheapest, are available across the country, while others can be bought in Apple's flagship shops, such as those in London and Manchester. In order to reserve your device, you must pick the Watch you want to buy, choose a store to pick the device up and then choose a time to go and buy it. You can also order the home delivery, but it's not recommended as it takes more than three weeks for the shipment to be delivered. The most expensive models, such as the 38mm yellow gold model with red modern Buckle strap, are still unavailable. As Apple said last week, the 42mm Watch in Space Black with the metal link bracelet is unavailable at all stores for now. Source: http://www.fudzilla.com/news/wearables/38018-apple...
Apple Watch sales fall by 90 per cent
Apple has another lemon
It is turning out exactly as we said – sales of Apple's latest cure for cancer have slumped to a shadow of their initial "glory." While the Tame Apple Press and a big chunk of analysts sung praises for the iWatch, claiming it would sell 70 million in its first year. We pointed out that the gizmo was nearly two years out of date and lacked most of the software which would make it moderately useful and if it succeed it was a triumph of user stupidity and marketing. Lately analysts have been slowly withdrawing the enthusiastic sales figures they gave the watch, and now a new survey has shown that sales have fallen by 90 per cent. Apple is selling fewer than 20,000 watches a day in the US since the initial surge in April, and on some days fewer than 10,000. This is not too bad, but it does suggest that most people who wanted an iWatch have one, and existing users are not managing to win many converts amongst their friends to make it take off. For the record to make the 70 million figure apple would have to sell 195,000 a day. Data collected by Slice Intelligence show that Two-thirds of the watches sold so far have been the lower-profit "Sport" version, whose price starts at $349, according to Slice, rather than the costlier and more advanced models that start at $549. Apple's gold "Edition" model priced at $10,000 or more has only sold 2,000 of them have been sold in the US. The figures are based on the electronic receipts sent to millions of email addresses following purchases. The company conducts market research on behalf of consumer-goods companies, among others, many of them in the Fortune 500. All up though these figures are not bad, but they are not the sort of numbers which Apple needs to convince its investors that it can make mega sales any more. With sales drying up in China, Jobs mob will not have a good bottom line this year. Source: http://www.fudzilla.com/news/wearables/38173-apple...
Apple press gears up for shock results
They will be great honestly
The Tame Apple Press is gearing up to spin tomorrow's financial results, even though there are some suggestions that they will not be that great. Going through all the pre-result articles we have detected a common theme – the results will be great. If they are not great the magazines and newspapers will: 1. Say that it is a slow period anyway because Apple has not got any product out. 2. Blame the slowing Chinese economy rather than the failure of Apple to interest the Chinese. 3. Use the phrase "blockbuster iPhone" even if sales start to fall. 4. Fail to mention the failure of the iPad or the iWatch. 5. Quote figures for the year rather than the quarter. 6. Compare everything to Samsung (which had a shitty year). Below is a quote from CNet so you can see what we mean:
"This time around, Apple's blockbuster iPhone sales likely continued, according to analysts tracking the company. Research firms polled by Fortune estimated Apple sold 49.4 million iPhones in the period, up 40 percent from the same period a year ago. That's not as many as in the past couple of quarters -- including the 61.2 million iPhones sold in the March period. But it's also not shabby compared with rivals such as Samsung, which warned earlier this month that its June quarter profit likely would be lower than expected and would fall for the seventh straight quarter."
But CNet has a problem. The reason that Apple has done well at all is because of sales in China. In April Apple told us that it made a killing in that country. Word on the street is China sales did not hold up for the rest of the year, suggesting that those who could afford an Apple bought it, and those who couldn't, which is the majority of the country didn't. Apple's Chinese problems are unlikely to be because of the county's economic woes either, it is just that the market for overpriced phones in China is limited. Earlier this month, Gartner revised its annual growth forecast for smartphones downward because it sees the market as saturated The other issue is how poorly Apple's iWatch sales have been going. It is hard to see how Apple can get away from this one other than by being creative with how it calculates the sales. The Tame Apple Press has been getting bizarre about the watch in the face of the fact that campaigned for people to buy the white elephant. Time magazine actually ran a story about how 96 per cent of iWatch owners are happy they bought it. A bizarre figure that the rag has to qualify by admitting that the more you knew about technology the less like you were to be satisfied with the iWatch. However 96 per cent is just plane impossible. Slightly saner analysts think that the iWatch will sell very few and it might need some time However Apple might have to fess up that its numbers were not what the Tame Apple Press claimed they would be. It will also have to face slumping iPad sales. Source: http://www.fudzilla.com/news/38274-apple-press-gea...
We were right Apple results are grim
Tame Apple Press is spinning like a mad thing
Yesterday we warned the Tame Apple Press would be spinning what were expected to be bad results and we were right. The results were simply: • Apple made much less than Wall Street expected. • IPad sales are disappearing faster than expected. • IWatch sales so pitiful that Apple did not want to announce them. • IPhone sales up, but dependent on a saturated and dying Chinese market which is about to turn. These are results of a company which has run out of ideas and is coasting on the good name of a single product. Analysts were furious and shareholders dumped their shares believing that Apple has peaked. But you would not get that if you read the papers this morning. Instead you hear how Apple made "boatloads of money" and it was incredible that Wall Street failed to understand how well Jobs' Mob was doing. One of the saddest tries to baffle with bullshit came from Lance Ulanoff at Mashable who tried to prove the iWatch was a success even though Apple was too embarrassed to announce the sales figures. Ulanoff managed to "prove" (and we use the term loosely) that Apple managed to sell slightly more than a million watches which he claimed proved it was a success. The only problem was that Apple, Analysts and the Tame Apple Press were telling us that it would sell 40-60 million and even the most negative was saying 10 million. Apple did better in China in this quarter than we expected. Apparently though most of its sales were in the cash rich and more western Hong Kong market rather than the poorer mainland. Signs from China are that both markets are saturated for high end smartphones. Besides the Chinese economy is depressed and fewer people have money. Even if Apple brings out a new phone, it will have a harder sell in China. What the results do show is that Apple is now dependent on the iPhone and has nothing up its sleeve that can replace it. This is fine for now, if you see the glass as half-full and the Tame Apple Press does. But we are seeing huge problems for smartphones in general and high end ones especially. China, which Apple depends on, is seeing high end phones being decimated by cheaper, lower margin phones which much do the same. These phones are filtering out to the West where they are also making more sense. Smartphones are widely predicted to go the same way as the PC market, once everything matures. Apple fanboys are expecting something which Jobs' Mob always claimed – innovation. But Apple's problem here is that it is not an innovator, it is a copier and no one else has come up with something that could be the next big thing. Wearables, the watch, was always going to be too niche, something that Tim Cook admitted yesterday. He said the watch did better than some in the company expected, in other words some in the company thought that no one would be stupid enough to buy it. Fortunately Apple found a million idiots who are stupid enough to buy a dog turd if it has an Apple logo on it. These results are financially not bad, but they show a company that has stalled and has nowhere to go. Spinning that news by the Tame Apple Press to preserve the reality distortion field will not help Apple. It needs to get a grip on itself and come up with a better plan. Sorce: http://www.fudzilla.com/news/38286-we-were-right-a...
Apple adverts show it has lost its way
Admits that others are doing the same things cheaper
Apple's latest wave of adverts seem dedicated to the fact that its rivals are producing products that are the same and much cheaper The punchline of the advert is "If it's not an iPhone, it's not an iPhone" which is pretty daft. It is a bit like saying "if it is not a pig, it is not a pig." It is equally not good value either. The advert is supposed to show how the app-based ecosystem of the iPhone is brilliant, but it accidently shows how close its rivals are to Apple's product. It is showing a real fear in the Cargo cult that users are finding it difficult to see the difference between Apple and its rivals – other than the logo and the inflated price tag. Apple's rival products, are now better built, better-featured but much cheaper. This is leaving Apple having to define itself by what it's not, rather than by what it is. Unfortunately all it has is the logo and a more expensive price tag. Apple appears to be in fear of its rivals, even if iPhones are still making money. More than 54.2 million have been shipped up to June 2015. The problem is that Apple used to be able to tout itself as an innovator. It was not true of course, it ripped off the same ideas that other people had and stuck them in a nice box, but that was enough to carry it off. But since 2011 it has just been tarting up its own products and when it could not do that any more it started tarting up other people's. The iWatch fiasco was so bad because the company got its product onto the market too late to claim it invented it and the whole thing fell apart. There is a feeling, even amongst fanboys, that things would have been different under Steve Jobs. They might be right, although I doubt that. He might have convinced a few more people that they were wearing a cure for cancer, but he was running out of ideas. The iPad was not revolutionary it was just a big iPhone. So it is obvious an iPhone is an iPhone, it is just that it is not much better than anything else on the block for half the price. Source: http://www.fudzilla.com/news/mobile/38277-apple-ad...
Apple has 75 percent of smartwatch market
That is how miserable the market is
Despite the poor figures Apple Watch is the best player in the awful wearables market. It took Google more than six months to cross the 100,000 figure Android Wear installations and Apple Watch has definitely beating these numbers easily. Google has Samsung, LG, Motorola as the predominant players and according to Strategy Analytics only Samsung managed to sell significant numbers. The problem is that the Smart Watch market is slow especially the Android Wear one. But it is taking off fast. A year ago in Q2 2014 Samsung sold 0.7 million of its watches and everyone else managed to sell 0.3 million watches. There was total of million smartwatches sold in Q2 2014 in a wide range of operating systems. A year later, in Q2 2015 Apple’s iWatch and sold 4 million in three months. This is not a bad number as Samsung sold 400,000 watches while all others managed to ship 900,000 in the whole quarter. What this means is that Apple instantly captured 75.5 percent of total market in Q2 2015. Samsung used to have 73.6 percent of market in Q2 2014. In Q2 2015 it dropped to 7.5 percent. This huge drop was thanks to a great success of Apple Watch. All others dropped a market share from 26.4 percent in Q2 14 to 17 percent in Q2 2015. Total growth of the smart watch market year over year is 457.3 percent. Strategy Analytics admitted it did not use “real numbers” but felt its guess was close to the truth. Source: http://www.fudzilla.com/news/wearables/38295-apple...
Apple Pay's London launch is a disaster
Mind the Gap in expectations
The launch of Apple Pay in the UK has been a complete disaster, the software does not work, the system charges you double, and some leading banks do not support it yet. HSBC was named and shamed for not having the service ready and had hate mail from fanboys as a result. For those who came in late HSBC has won awards for the security on its bank accounts but for some reason it has been slow in allowing Apple pay into its systems. HSBC was originally listed as one of Apple's banking partners at launch, but has since said its account holders won't be able to use Apple Pay until later in July, now confirmed as July 28. The delays frustrated Apple fanboys who flooded twitter to vent their spleen. However it turns out that HSBC's delays might have saved its customers from losing a pile of dosh. Transport for London has warned tube, train and bus passengers paying with Apple Pay on iPhones and Apple Watches not to let their batteries run flat or they could get stuck at gates and face penalty fares. Apple Pay only works if a device has power. It warns that, if the battery runs out in the middle of a journey, a user will not be able to tap out, which means they could be charged a maximum fare. It also warns that receiving a call while attempting to touch into or out of the gates will also cause issues, and that users with multiple cards on their account must remember to use the same one or potentially be charged twice. Early adopters have also complained about the speed of Apple Pay compared to Oyster or contactless. Difficulties using Touch ID to authenticate payments combined with the speed at which a payment is recognised have been causing problems for some. In short Apple did not figure all this out before launch and priming its Tame Apple Press to sing its glory. However the BBC could not even get it buy a cup of coffee. The Beeb put it down to teething troubles, but given the system has been running in the US for a while you wouldn't expect to see so many problems like this. Brandwatch, a company which calls itself an "enterprise social intelligence platform", and which monitors social networks to find out how twitterers feel about things. The company compiled a list of 26,000 online mentions of the Apple Watch UK launch, and so assembled an unwilling focus group of 15,789 people. It is fairly clear that people are struggling with the technology. Brandwatch found that ten per cent of posts are about how to get it to work, with Brandwatch saying that:
"Apple Pay is positioned as being the fastest and easiest way to pay [but] if you think there's a 50 per cent chance it could fail, you'll just reach for your credit card instead."
Apple Pay is not getting much traction in the US, where the big retailers are thinking of coming up with their own ideas. Rival payment services are now starting to look rather more useful. Source: http://www.fudzilla.com/news/mobile/38271-apple-pa...
Well OSX is still the only OS with both a usable shell and professional creative/design apps so it's really the only option for many tech professionals.
Also, the display bonding and soldering/capacitor problems were really industry wide issues so it's not surprising it hit apple when their QC wasn't as good as today's.
I'd rather take my chances with Apple than Lenovo's new "thinkpads" again.
Some further important Apple News not mentioned here earlier on:
Apple puts iWatch in stores
Maybe some idiot will buy them
Apple mysteriously has enough iWatches on hand to start putting them in its own stores. The iWatch went on sale six weeks ago and at the time Apple did not think it would ever have enough to put it in its own shops. The original plan was to flog them online and in fashion stores, however and Jobs' Mob thought it would never have enough to meet the crushing demand for an out-of-date wearable which was more expensive than anything else on the market. So it appears that suddenly Apple has enough. Of course the Tame Apple Press is trying to keep the story about a shortage going. Potential buyers must first reserve their device online, and some models are still out of stock. But the sport models, which are most popular and the cheapest, are available across the country, while others can be bought in Apple's flagship shops, such as those in London and Manchester. In order to reserve your device, you must pick the Watch you want to buy, choose a store to pick the device up and then choose a time to go and buy it. You can also order the home delivery, but it's not recommended as it takes more than three weeks for the shipment to be delivered. The most expensive models, such as the 38mm yellow gold model with red modern Buckle strap, are still unavailable. As Apple said last week, the 42mm Watch in Space Black with the metal link bracelet is unavailable at all stores for now. Source: http://www.fudzilla.com/news/wearables/38018-apple...
Apple Watch sales fall by 90 per cent
Apple has another lemon
It is turning out exactly as we said – sales of Apple's latest cure for cancer have slumped to a shadow of their initial "glory." While the Tame Apple Press and a big chunk of analysts sung praises for the iWatch, claiming it would sell 70 million in its first year. We pointed out that the gizmo was nearly two years out of date and lacked most of the software which would make it moderately useful and if it succeed it was a triumph of user stupidity and marketing. Lately analysts have been slowly withdrawing the enthusiastic sales figures they gave the watch, and now a new survey has shown that sales have fallen by 90 per cent. Apple is selling fewer than 20,000 watches a day in the US since the initial surge in April, and on some days fewer than 10,000. This is not too bad, but it does suggest that most people who wanted an iWatch have one, and existing users are not managing to win many converts amongst their friends to make it take off. For the record to make the 70 million figure apple would have to sell 195,000 a day. Data collected by Slice Intelligence show that Two-thirds of the watches sold so far have been the lower-profit "Sport" version, whose price starts at $349, according to Slice, rather than the costlier and more advanced models that start at $549. Apple's gold "Edition" model priced at $10,000 or more has only sold 2,000 of them have been sold in the US. The figures are based on the electronic receipts sent to millions of email addresses following purchases. The company conducts market research on behalf of consumer-goods companies, among others, many of them in the Fortune 500. All up though these figures are not bad, but they are not the sort of numbers which Apple needs to convince its investors that it can make mega sales any more. With sales drying up in China, Jobs mob will not have a good bottom line this year. Source: http://www.fudzilla.com/news/wearables/38173-apple...
Apple press gears up for shock results
They will be great honestly
The Tame Apple Press is gearing up to spin tomorrow's financial results, even though there are some suggestions that they will not be that great. Going through all the pre-result articles we have detected a common theme – the results will be great. If they are not great the magazines and newspapers will: 1. Say that it is a slow period anyway because Apple has not got any product out. 2. Blame the slowing Chinese economy rather than the failure of Apple to interest the Chinese. 3. Use the phrase "blockbuster iPhone" even if sales start to fall. 4. Fail to mention the failure of the iPad or the iWatch. 5. Quote figures for the year rather than the quarter. 6. Compare everything to Samsung (which had a shitty year). Below is a quote from CNet so you can see what we mean:
"This time around, Apple's blockbuster iPhone sales likely continued, according to analysts tracking the company. Research firms polled by Fortune estimated Apple sold 49.4 million iPhones in the period, up 40 percent from the same period a year ago. That's not as many as in the past couple of quarters -- including the 61.2 million iPhones sold in the March period. But it's also not shabby compared with rivals such as Samsung, which warned earlier this month that its June quarter profit likely would be lower than expected and would fall for the seventh straight quarter."
But CNet has a problem. The reason that Apple has done well at all is because of sales in China. In April Apple told us that it made a killing in that country. Word on the street is China sales did not hold up for the rest of the year, suggesting that those who could afford an Apple bought it, and those who couldn't, which is the majority of the country didn't. Apple's Chinese problems are unlikely to be because of the county's economic woes either, it is just that the market for overpriced phones in China is limited. Earlier this month, Gartner revised its annual growth forecast for smartphones downward because it sees the market as saturated The other issue is how poorly Apple's iWatch sales have been going. It is hard to see how Apple can get away from this one other than by being creative with how it calculates the sales. The Tame Apple Press has been getting bizarre about the watch in the face of the fact that campaigned for people to buy the white elephant. Time magazine actually ran a story about how 96 per cent of iWatch owners are happy they bought it. A bizarre figure that the rag has to qualify by admitting that the more you knew about technology the less like you were to be satisfied with the iWatch. However 96 per cent is just plane impossible. Slightly saner analysts think that the iWatch will sell very few and it might need some time However Apple might have to fess up that its numbers were not what the Tame Apple Press claimed they would be. It will also have to face slumping iPad sales. Source: http://www.fudzilla.com/news/38274-apple-press-gea...
We were right Apple results are grim
Tame Apple Press is spinning like a mad thing
Yesterday we warned the Tame Apple Press would be spinning what were expected to be bad results and we were right. The results were simply: • Apple made much less than Wall Street expected. • IPad sales are disappearing faster than expected. • IWatch sales so pitiful that Apple did not want to announce them. • IPhone sales up, but dependent on a saturated and dying Chinese market which is about to turn. These are results of a company which has run out of ideas and is coasting on the good name of a single product. Analysts were furious and shareholders dumped their shares believing that Apple has peaked. But you would not get that if you read the papers this morning. Instead you hear how Apple made "boatloads of money" and it was incredible that Wall Street failed to understand how well Jobs' Mob was doing. One of the saddest tries to baffle with bullshit came from Lance Ulanoff at Mashable who tried to prove the iWatch was a success even though Apple was too embarrassed to announce the sales figures. Ulanoff managed to "prove" (and we use the term loosely) that Apple managed to sell slightly more than a million watches which he claimed proved it was a success. The only problem was that Apple, Analysts and the Tame Apple Press were telling us that it would sell 40-60 million and even the most negative was saying 10 million. Apple did better in China in this quarter than we expected. Apparently though most of its sales were in the cash rich and more western Hong Kong market rather than the poorer mainland. Signs from China are that both markets are saturated for high end smartphones. Besides the Chinese economy is depressed and fewer people have money. Even if Apple brings out a new phone, it will have a harder sell in China. What the results do show is that Apple is now dependent on the iPhone and has nothing up its sleeve that can replace it. This is fine for now, if you see the glass as half-full and the Tame Apple Press does. But we are seeing huge problems for smartphones in general and high end ones especially. China, which Apple depends on, is seeing high end phones being decimated by cheaper, lower margin phones which much do the same. These phones are filtering out to the West where they are also making more sense. Smartphones are widely predicted to go the same way as the PC market, once everything matures. Apple fanboys are expecting something which Jobs' Mob always claimed – innovation. But Apple's problem here is that it is not an innovator, it is a copier and no one else has come up with something that could be the next big thing. Wearables, the watch, was always going to be too niche, something that Tim Cook admitted yesterday. He said the watch did better than some in the company expected, in other words some in the company thought that no one would be stupid enough to buy it. Fortunately Apple found a million idiots who are stupid enough to buy a dog turd if it has an Apple logo on it. These results are financially not bad, but they show a company that has stalled and has nowhere to go. Spinning that news by the Tame Apple Press to preserve the reality distortion field will not help Apple. It needs to get a grip on itself and come up with a better plan. Sorce: http://www.fudzilla.com/news/38286-we-were-right-a...
Apple adverts show it has lost its way
Admits that others are doing the same things cheaper
Apple's latest wave of adverts seem dedicated to the fact that its rivals are producing products that are the same and much cheaper The punchline of the advert is "If it's not an iPhone, it's not an iPhone" which is pretty daft. It is a bit like saying "if it is not a pig, it is not a pig." It is equally not good value either. The advert is supposed to show how the app-based ecosystem of the iPhone is brilliant, but it accidently shows how close its rivals are to Apple's product. It is showing a real fear in the Cargo cult that users are finding it difficult to see the difference between Apple and its rivals – other than the logo and the inflated price tag. Apple's rival products, are now better built, better-featured but much cheaper. This is leaving Apple having to define itself by what it's not, rather than by what it is. Unfortunately all it has is the logo and a more expensive price tag. Apple appears to be in fear of its rivals, even if iPhones are still making money. More than 54.2 million have been shipped up to June 2015. The problem is that Apple used to be able to tout itself as an innovator. It was not true of course, it ripped off the same ideas that other people had and stuck them in a nice box, but that was enough to carry it off. But since 2011 it has just been tarting up its own products and when it could not do that any more it started tarting up other people's. The iWatch fiasco was so bad because the company got its product onto the market too late to claim it invented it and the whole thing fell apart. There is a feeling, even amongst fanboys, that things would have been different under Steve Jobs. They might be right, although I doubt that. He might have convinced a few more people that they were wearing a cure for cancer, but he was running out of ideas. The iPad was not revolutionary it was just a big iPhone. So it is obvious an iPhone is an iPhone, it is just that it is not much better than anything else on the block for half the price. Source: http://www.fudzilla.com/news/mobile/38277-apple-ad...
Apple has 75 percent of smartwatch market
That is how miserable the market is
Despite the poor figures Apple Watch is the best player in the awful wearables market. It took Google more than six months to cross the 100,000 figure Android Wear installations and Apple Watch has definitely beating these numbers easily. Google has Samsung, LG, Motorola as the predominant players and according to Strategy Analytics only Samsung managed to sell significant numbers. The problem is that the Smart Watch market is slow especially the Android Wear one. But it is taking off fast. A year ago in Q2 2014 Samsung sold 0.7 million of its watches and everyone else managed to sell 0.3 million watches. There was total of million smartwatches sold in Q2 2014 in a wide range of operating systems. A year later, in Q2 2015 Apple’s iWatch and sold 4 million in three months. This is not a bad number as Samsung sold 400,000 watches while all others managed to ship 900,000 in the whole quarter. What this means is that Apple instantly captured 75.5 percent of total market in Q2 2015. Samsung used to have 73.6 percent of market in Q2 2014. In Q2 2015 it dropped to 7.5 percent. This huge drop was thanks to a great success of Apple Watch. All others dropped a market share from 26.4 percent in Q2 14 to 17 percent in Q2 2015. Total growth of the smart watch market year over year is 457.3 percent. Strategy Analytics admitted it did not use “real numbers” but felt its guess was close to the truth. Source: http://www.fudzilla.com/news/wearables/38295-apple...
Apple Pay's London launch is a disaster
Mind the Gap in expectations
The launch of Apple Pay in the UK has been a complete disaster, the software does not work, the system charges you double, and some leading banks do not support it yet. HSBC was named and shamed for not having the service ready and had hate mail from fanboys as a result. For those who came in late HSBC has won awards for the security on its bank accounts but for some reason it has been slow in allowing Apple pay into its systems. HSBC was originally listed as one of Apple's banking partners at launch, but has since said its account holders won't be able to use Apple Pay until later in July, now confirmed as July 28. The delays frustrated Apple fanboys who flooded twitter to vent their spleen. However it turns out that HSBC's delays might have saved its customers from losing a pile of dosh. Transport for London has warned tube, train and bus passengers paying with Apple Pay on iPhones and Apple Watches not to let their batteries run flat or they could get stuck at gates and face penalty fares. Apple Pay only works if a device has power. It warns that, if the battery runs out in the middle of a journey, a user will not be able to tap out, which means they could be charged a maximum fare. It also warns that receiving a call while attempting to touch into or out of the gates will also cause issues, and that users with multiple cards on their account must remember to use the same one or potentially be charged twice. Early adopters have also complained about the speed of Apple Pay compared to Oyster or contactless. Difficulties using Touch ID to authenticate payments combined with the speed at which a payment is recognised have been causing problems for some. In short Apple did not figure all this out before launch and priming its Tame Apple Press to sing its glory. However the BBC could not even get it buy a cup of coffee. The Beeb put it down to teething troubles, but given the system has been running in the US for a while you wouldn't expect to see so many problems like this. Brandwatch, a company which calls itself an "enterprise social intelligence platform", and which monitors social networks to find out how twitterers feel about things. The company compiled a list of 26,000 online mentions of the Apple Watch UK launch, and so assembled an unwilling focus group of 15,789 people. It is fairly clear that people are struggling with the technology. Brandwatch found that ten per cent of posts are about how to get it to work, with Brandwatch saying that:
"Apple Pay is positioned as being the fastest and easiest way to pay [but] if you think there's a 50 per cent chance it could fail, you'll just reach for your credit card instead."
Apple Pay is not getting much traction in the US, where the big retailers are thinking of coming up with their own ideas. Rival payment services are now starting to look rather more useful. Source: http://www.fudzilla.com/news/mobile/38271-apple-pa...
Okay jjj. I'll take you bait. I generally disagree with you but also think generally you make some good points. That said, I think your bit about Mac buyers not thinking about what they are buying to be especially asinine. I bought a MacBook Pro 7 years ago because at that time it offered what I was looking for better than anything else on the market.
I couldn't care less about people who have problems with Apple. But please don't be a jackass because it obscures the genuinely good things you have to say.
I'm not going to address the mac foolishness, but how do you see the watch sales as a failure? They've ALREADY, in three months, and with limited world distribution, sold more smartwatches than the combined total of all previous attempts (720,000 for Android Wear, around a million for Pebble).
You miss the significance of the "June was the strongest month" message. It means that the product did not simply burst out the gate to be sold to the true believers and then fizzle. Instead, as people who did not care enough to put in their internet order the day that went live, encounter the watch on their friends's wrists, they are deciding they like it enough to buy their own. In other words it has legs and is slowly growing momentum.
Tim Cook said during the call something I independently thought a few days ago --- the watch fits in very well as a gift (for the sort of upper 15% Apple targets as customers). Which means it will continue with steady beat of sales for the rest of the year as birthdays unroll, a brief spurt as kids to to college, then a massive blowout over Christmas/Hannukah/Chinese New Year.
I expect the sales for the first year to exceed 10 million.
"Mac sales are doing ok only because Apple had virtually no share and no presence outside the US and maybe a couple of other markets where they were not at 0"
Say what?! Sounds like something coming from an American that does not know anything about the rest of the world?! It sounds like you think Mac:s only sell in US.
"Apple buyer is by definition spending without thinking"?, That comment alone discredits your entire comment. As someone who owns, and have owned Macs AND PCs for a solid 20+ years, I have lived both sides of that argument. Yes some of my Macs can cost 20 to 30% more than my PCs, but they easily last twice as long as the PCs do, which if you're smart enough with a calculator its easy to see which is the better value. There's a reason Apple sticks with the same external Laptop housing for 5+ years without any external changes, just the internal upgrades once or twice a year, All Mac owners care about is performance, mean while, each PC manufacture come out with many different external laptop designs every year, all with the same basic internal, Thats what PC owners want, a shiny new external design, to hell with the performance specs. If you doubt anything I'm saying, just go find the bare facts, Use Google to find them, note how Apple seldom changes the outside of the laptops, They just constantly upgrade the internal, Now look at the PC laptops, Each model changes looks constantly, at the same time, YOU CAN STILL GET A FRICKEN PENTIUM processor in 2015 PC laptops, Damn sure won't see them in any Macs. Your comment holds NO water.
With so much money Apple could create a new equivalent to Bell Labs, and do some serious innovation. They could easily spend several billions per year on blue sky research.
The difference is that Bell Labs were meant to focus on crazy ideas with a large R&D budget and the closest company is actually Google and its moonshot projects.
Apple is focusing on the least amount of markets, working on controlling the overall experience with a refresh of existing ideas. There's a reason Apple is always late to the game with not a lot of new ideas but a better experience.
You're right. Apple has never been one about CRAZY R&D Efforts with low chances to succeed. They've always steadily iterated, and occasionally entered new markets when the time is right.
Wearables are still in their fledgeling stage. Apple Watch is already the most popular wearable, but it could be a lot better, and I think we'll see Version 2 sell like hotcakes!
But innovation would actually help them sell more stuff. As is, iWatch is a pretty mediocre gadget. For example, it can't function without a phone, and even with a phone it does not offer anything groundbreaking. What if they invest $10B into R&D focused on crazy ideas that could produce a new type of a gadget? I'm talking about such inventions as radio, TV, lasers, transistors, holograms, computer mouse, touchscreen, etc. You get the idea. It's not like there's nothing left to invent. The only obstacle is pretty much just funding.
I guess my point is, with so much cash in the bank, Apple can easily afford a large R&D budget. Even if they don't invent anything after spending $10B and 10 years, they're not going to go bankrupt. But the potential rewards are high. So why not do it?
The Watch isn't completely innovation-less, you know. Despite what you may think of it as a device, it contains Apple's new few important focuses all at once. It has the Taptic Engine, which has been very widely praised in every single review for the Watch and the new MacBooks. It has Force Touch, which of course isn't a solution to every interface problem, but is definitely something that will be seen as a jump head and shoulders over the game once people see it in action on a more dynamic touchscreen device. It has an OLED display, which Apple has now shown is up to their standards and ready to arrive in more of their devices in the next couple years.
And that's just the jumps Apple is ready to make in hardware. In software, the Watch starts a new design for Apple, one that starts with their font and reaches out a lot farther with time. No more linen, but no more vanishingly light fonts, either. Simple, clean, and functional.
Even if Apple didn't sell a single Watch, this product wouldn't be a flop, because it's a vanguard of the technology that Apple is putting into all their new hardware and software, and that will bring some much needed improvements in stability, optimization, and better design.
So why, again, does it matter that it's a little limited in functionality? Apple hasn't issued such an effective call to action since the iPhone, and everyone complained even more about that when it came out.
"Even if Apple didn't sell a single Watch, this product wouldn't be a flop, because it's a vanguard of the technology that Apple is putting into all their new hardware and software, and that will bring some much needed improvements in stability, optimization, and better design." ??!??!?!?
Sure, there are some innovations in iWatch. But they seem to be relatively minor, given the potential of Apple as a company. I'm talking about bigger picture: for example, imagine that you could actually talk to the watch like you would talk to a human assistant. As is, their Siri software is mediocre. It's not intelligent. But think of what would it mean if they could make it (more) intelligent? Sure, this is a tough problem, but why can't they at least try? Why would they want to wait for Google, or anyone else to solve it for them? Why not hire 200 PhDs, and give them 5 years to make Siri as intelligent as an average human secretary? Even at $200k of salary per year, this would amount to only $200k x 5 x 200 = $200M. Let's say they would need to build custom hardware to run it, say another $300M. $0.5B - I think we all agree that Apple can afford this kind of budget, especially if this might lead to a killer application for their devices. I hope they are secretly doing that, but looking at their announcements about Siri development since they bought it 5 years ago, I don't think they are serious about it.
1) You’re assuming they aren’t hiring "200 PhDs" and doing all they can—which could very well be wrong (and most likely is). I doubt people at Apple are looking at their tons and tons of money and thinking "We shouldn’t be hiring all those expensive people!". If not more, read the rumors (and confirmed hires) in the automotive space.
2) You’re assuming the "innovations" are easy and Apple’s "potential" has anything to do with how much and how fast they can innovate. The problem with innovation (as we understand it in the computer tech space) is that there are two types of it; one is the pie-in-the-sky, we-have-half-a-prototype-half-working that a lot of companies are doing openly (see Microsoft’s Slate and how everyone thought they’ll kill the iPad in a few months after the concept video was out), the other is the kind of innovation that is actually being manufactured into working, on-sale products that you can actually buy. Apple sits tight in the second camp, and because that is less flashy than half-working "imagine how cool it would be!" concepts, people think they are not innovating or that their innovations are minor.
The thing is, Apple has stuff on sale _right now_. Thinking that whatever they sell is for some weird reason not at the very edge of what’s possible (and possible to manufacture) is assuming Apple is run by retards.
The truth of the matter is that Apple has been leading the industry in achieving the best compromise—sell what’s technically feasible to produce in insanely large quantities at the price people are still willing to pay for it.
It’s just sad that what seems really, really clear and obvious if you look at Apple and their success is something that escapes most "industry professionals" and "analysts".
Nothing Apple sells right now (or has ever sold) is "at the edge of what's possible". Their products are good implementations of good ideas. Nothing less, nothing more. Yes, they are leading the industry, yes, they are successful. What are you arguing with? All I'm saying is their innovations are minor, compared to the best inventions made at companies like Xerox or AT&T.
iWatch is so God damn medicore that it’s the best smart watch out there, according to reviews.
Apple doesn’t speak publicly about their "crazy R&D", that’s the main difference between them and other companies. Microsoft showed a Slate concept video and everyone shit their pants, Apple put the iPad on store shelves and everyone went "medicore, meh"—but just compare that to the Android/Windows tablets that were _shipping_ and tell me they don’t do any R&D.
Seriously, you think they closed down their R&D departments after the iPhone shipped? Do you think the Apple Watch is _trivial_ to make? Why isn’t everyone outdoing Apple, then? Why is Apple’s own A line of CPUs not less than half as good as what others are offering, if that stuff is so easy?
Heck, why don’t other manufacturers constantly beat Apple on build quality, if Apple is not doing any R&D work anyway?
Sure, iWatch is the best smart watch out there. I'm saying that the best smart watch we have today is a mediocre gadget. I went to Apple store, and I played with it, and I'm not impressed with what it can do for me. No one disputes the fact that Apple is good at building and selling good products. What I'm questioning is their blue sky research ambitions.
Depends on what you mean by invent. Most of what exists today in the consumer space is stuff that was figured out decades ago. Compared to when Bell Labs was started, the picture of the physical world is 99.99% painted.
Eerily familiar... E.g., Lord Kelvin circa 1900 "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement." There's some dispute as to the accuracy of the quote but the sentiment was certainly common during that period in Physics, just before relativity and QM took shape. So far at least, every time we think we're close to figuring out everything, mother nature offers up a pleasant surprise.... and that's what keeps us researchers in business :)
The difference between 1900 and 2015: we know just about all that can be known about the physical universe. Once you have the periodic table, relativity, QM, the Bohr model, you've eliminated vectors of uncertainty within the knowledge space. That last bit is the point. Yes, we might be able to make 7nm semi-conductor devices, but that's just engineering, not physics.
Let's see, just in physics: we still don't have a grand unified theory of how things work. We still don't know how QM and gravity are connected. We still don't know much about the dark matter - you know, the stuff that potentially accounts for 90% of the Universe? Quantum computing? Cold fusion? Room temperature superconductors? Yeah, looks like we have nothing left to do...
Nor will they, since we know the laws of physics, which we've proved, mean they can't be done. Even if there is a unified theory, the likelihood that it would lead to consumer products is nil.
He`s an administrator _at best_. Your failure to see something so trivial is rather funny, hence grasping at straws with his race, which has exactly nothing to do with it.
So, not only is he AA (and got promoted to Admin to make the numbers look better), but managed to so mis-understand astrophysics that he's to be ignored?????
Comparing to Mi Band is like saying the iPhone 1 was irrelevant because 220s sold in far larger numbers. Something like the aWatch clearly points to the future, the Mi Band points to the past.
Don't fixate on the category "wearable" --- if you insist on being stupid about that then, hell, the most popular wearables are the sorts of digital watches we've had since 1970. Fixate on the category of "wrist computer".
"You're right. Apple has never been one about CRAZY R&D Efforts with low chances to succeed. They've always steadily iterated, and occasionally entered new markets when the time is right."
The Apple Lisa was the single most innovative PC ever introduced, period.
How do you know that they haven't? You have no idea what they are doing in, for example, AI research. The real complaint you should have is not that they aren't doing the research, but that they aren't publishing anything. This IS a real concern, and one I have made publicly many times. But I fear that it is inevitable. Apple feels that they were ripped off regarding the iPhone, and that the court system was not a viable means of redress, partially because it's so slow and capricious, partially because it lends itself to mockery in the press and on the internet ("patenting round rectangles" and all that nonsense).
So the new strategy appears to be to rely vastly more on trade secrets. They will create a new product family (watch) but they will tell would-be-competitors practically nothing helpful about it. How many sales does it generate? Which models do customers most favor? What do customers want improved? What are the characteristics of the SoC and the CPU? etc etc. Apple is saying nothing about these, and I don't expect that to change. Just like when the A8 came out (and soon enough the A9) Apple said nothing beyond "they're better CPUs".
If Apple adds value prediction to their CPUs (something that has been discussed for years but has never been commercially implemented as far as I know) they will say nothing --- let other people spend a billion dollars doing that research. Likewise if Apple switches from a ROB to a checkpoint architecture, or any of a dozen other types of improvements that all have to build on substantial R&D.
I certainly don't like this development, but I don't see a feasible alternative for Apple. The types of innovations they wish to protect, innovations in "usability" and "design" are easily mocked as obvious and trivial, so they cannot rely on the legal system and have to rely on secrecy. It's not wonderful, but that appears to be the solution our great society has decided upon. The best we can hope for, I think, is that apple's innovations DO leak out over time, as engineers leave the company. Learning how Apple did things five years after the fact is of less competitive consequence to Apple, while still benefiting society at least somewhat.
I don't know if they have. But it's not just they didn't publish anything. They haven't done anything of the kind I'm talking about. For example Siri: in the 5 years since they bought the technology (note: bought, not developed) it hasn't improved much. I occasionally try using it, last time a few months ago, and it's still as dumb as it was in the beginning. In the same 5 years NLP field has made some significant advances: Google came up with word2vec, Facebook developed memory networks, others demonstrated impressive results with seq2seq RNNs, etc. What has Apple done exactly in regards to Siri development?
To claim that Siri has not improved since it was released simply reveals that you either don't know what you're talking about, are not interested in the actual truth, or don't actually use the product, certainly not day to day.
As for AI, you are aware that AI (at the sort of level of Google Now) is THE focus of iOS9? How can you claim Apple is doing nothing in this space when it is THE headline feature of their next version of iOS? The public face of this work is the Siri team, though who knows how much was done by a more "academic" research unit within Apple.
You're welcome to claim (based on utterly no experience, with a product you've apparently never even heard of) that iOS9 sucks, and the rest of us are welcome to claim (based on your previous comments about Siri) that you honestly don't have a clue what you're talking about.
My claims about Siri is based on my experience with it. I don't use it every day precisely because it's not very useful. I do give it a try every few months or so, hoping it improves. From what I see, it hasn't. This is my personal opinion, based on my personal experience with it - nothing less, nothing more. For example, Siri does not even understand my accent most of the time. Google Now understand it much better. That's the first strike. Second, those of my questions it does understand, it just shows me google search results. Last I tried asking it a simple question: who's running for president? It didn't provide a clear answer. Try it, maybe you will have a better luck.
-- Apple feels that they were ripped off regarding the iPhone
Couldn't patent a round cornered rectangle??? boo hoo. Remember, it was Steve who crowed about stealing. And Apple has been brazen in doing so. Sauce for goose, and all that.
balmers attempt to get into the important phone (os) market wasnt exactly unlogic. ballmers belief: people dont want windows phone due to the lack of attractive smartphones running it. now the wheel of knowledge turned ahead once more - people dont seem to not like the platforms on which windows phone is running. they just dont seem to like windows phone, which sounds like a harsh judgement, but as windows phone (like nokia symbian os) wasnt really a bad thing the cheers go to the competitors who make "good" solutions no longer a choice when it comes to the sales. despite that microsoft spent a lot of effort in making it up to the competition but finally never did it (e.g. app store).
"They" lost $50BILLION? I don't think you understand either stock ownership (most Apple stock is not owned by Apple the corporation) or accounting (the only people who lost money yesterday were those who bought at a higher price than they sold).
True statement: Apple's market cap dropped by $50 billion yesterday False statement: Apple lost $50 billion yesterday. Additional true statement: No-one with a brain gives a damn about the momentary gyrations of stock prices. They go up they go down. They were lower than today on July 9, they'll probably be higher than yesterday by September.
Uhh, Apple is a pocket computer company. And soon to be the premier writs computer company. To claim that pocket computers are not important is as stupid as claiming that PCs were not important. Remind me --- how did that work out for DEC?
-- And soon to be the premier writs computer company.
The Watch is hardly a computer. It's just an X-term for the iPhone. Until such time as there's a battery at least twice as dense as today's best, and a SoC that can actually do some compute that's useful on 1 square inch, Watch will continue to be a fancy terminal.
People like you make fun of non-techies, but you're just as blind as them. For fsck's sake --- you have LIVED through the smartphone revolution, you have experienced first hand how fast things improved. But you don't have the imagination to see that the exact same pattern will happen with wrist computers? Only even faster thing time round, because Apple has more money to throw at the problem and more control over the entire process.
It took three years to get from iPhone to iPhone4, the product that was clearly the great leap forward, the iPhone the way it wanted to be --- finally enough RAM, enough CPU and GPU, good enough screen that using it didn't feel like a compromise.
If aWatch does the same thing in three years it will be impressive, but it's quite likely that this time round Apple can do even better; aWatch2 simply fixes the most glaring problems in aWatch (especially since it's probably already fully designed and the manufacturing is being specced out), but aWatch 3 is the chance to redo everything and kick it out the park, everything from a 14nmFF dual core SoC to Apple designed heart rate monitor and touch screen controller to dual microphones, maybe even a camera.
Oh, forgot to add. You're clearly unaware of what's coming in WatchOS2. As soon as September or October, you silly crack about "x-term for the iPhone", a statement that's already false in many ways, will become even more false.
Once again you refuse to learn from history. The first iPhones were, to use your language, "x-terms for iTunes". But every OS release added more autonomy, first native apps, then setup without iTunes, wireless backing up, iCloud support for photos and music, etc etc. And once again, why do you expect the same pattern won't happen with aWatch?
ALREADY we have seen the first step, from the crippled apps of WatchOS 1 (cf Apple's recommendation of web apps for iOS 1) to the watch-hosted apps of WatchOS 2 (cf the native apps of iOS2). People like you seem to have not a clue about how LONG it takes to do anything worthwhile, and so how long the relevant planning has been in place. You seem to imagine something like "Apple learns people want native IOS apps, or Watch apps, and so they reverse course and put together the dev environment and tools in six months". Don't be an idiot. Putting these things together takes years, and they are released on a particular phased schedule.
As I pointed out in another comment, Apple checked into Clang the support for the ARMv7k ISA (the ISA used for WatchOS) in 2011! They were obviously laying the groundwork for the watch project back then 4 years ago (using a Marvel Armada CPU, which supports ARMv7k as a host CPU for the software development, while others designed the SoC). I expect Apple have the large scale plans for their SW and HW laid out at least four years in advance across all their product lines; and believe me, the aWatch 4 years from now is NOT today's aWatch but available in five different anodized colors...
Without twice or thrice the battery, none of that will happen. More to the point, name a Killer App for a 1 square inch display. And, as to all those cool health monitors, there is the minor matter of being able to read such from the top of the wrist.
-- finally enough RAM, enough CPU and GPU, good enough screen that using it didn't feel like a compromise.
Finally??? As if there were some tech impediment??? It was just Steve's Reality Distortion Field convincing sheeple they should overpay. Until that didn't work anymore.
Man these guys are quite the Apple biased fanboys eh? Funny for these "great results" apple stock tanked after their release taking the whole Nasdaq with. Plus wasn't iWatch sales near a standstill? Hmmmm
I recently sold my Apple stock. I dont think a gay man (Tim Cook) can successful lead a corporation over the long term. Apple seems to be struggling, and there will always be a question at the top. Take when they recently capitulated to Tayloir Swift. All I could think was "yeah, Tim Cook probably ordered them too because he's gay and gay men see female artists like Swift as some kind of unassailable, perfect, divas, so he was probably all "oh ma gosh taylor swift! do what she wants imediate-ly!". But the funny thing was if Steve Jobs had dome the same I wouldn't have looked at it that way, it would have been more of a bold business move. Cause Jobs actually had balls, so I would know he wasn't just surrendering, but that it was a strategic decision.
i am disapointed with apple. the new watch, well .. but i thought they would advance and present something like an iphone core or iphone compute which really gets an os to work with. and several extenders like a larger screen dock to make it a tablet, a desktop dock to turn it into a personal computing device or stuff like that. the time of the ipad is over i suppose. things might cumulate into the iphone which happens to be their best selling product. abandoning the old and stepping forward into the future has always been their strength. now they are as scared to inovation like everyone else.
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jjj - Tuesday, July 21, 2015 - link
Mac sales are doing ok only because Apple had virtually no share and no presence outside the US and maybe a couple of other markets where they were not at 0. The gain in image also helped them gain a bit of share in the US. Plus any Apple buyer is by definition spending without thinking so they upgrade more often.The premium segment where Apple (can't call it high end because Macs are not that) also erodes less since folks that are more careful with their spending are the ones buying other devices instead of PCs. If you factor in all that, Mac sales are not doing well and are just in line with what you would expect (bellow that this quarter since they had Macbook shortages).
As for the Watch units , anyone with a clue and not determined to lie about it will put them at max 2.5 million units but a more realistic number is 2.1 million units. Q1 all other was actually soft on expected ipod poor sales (that's not much revenue) and something that most ignore, poor ipad accessories sales. Problem is that ipod wouldn't drop much from Q1 to Q2 ,same for ipad accessories since those go with ipad sales.
Apple also made some funny claims about how June was the strongest month for the watch. Ofc it was since production was the highest and they account for the sale only when they ship . They could even afford to expand to new markets in June.
Q3 will be better,they'll expand the watch to more markets and dump a lot of inventory in the channel and then Q4 is where folks will buy it as a gift. After that it will be interesting and they need to have a much much better product early next year.
defferoo - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
really? your assumptions are plain wrong. "any apple buyer is by definition spending without thinking so they upgrade more often"? okay, so if somebody values build quality, Mac OS X, and the Mac user experience, they aren't thinking? stop being so arrogant, there are many Mac owners who use the same Mac for many years because Mac OS X doesn't stop working after a couple years and the build quality is high. I haven't purchased a new computer in 6 years, and that's because I use a Macbook Pro. I'm certain I would have had to replace my laptop by now if I had purchased a Windows laptop.Sure, Macs aren't for everyone, but just because they aren't for you doesn't mean other people are wrong. Go troll somewhere else.
Michael Bay - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
Ten-year IBM pro notebook owners are laughing quietly.xype - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
I bet the 10 year IBM pro notebook owners are loving all the software updates and security fixes their Windows XP is getting lately.Morawka - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
we are using windows 10. runs good on 1gb ram, how about Yosemite? hows it run on 1gb ram?xype - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
Windows 10 on a 10 year old CPU and 1GB RAM? Unless you’re running simple terminal/non-GUI apps, I would like to see some proof of "runs good". Because "starts up" does not equal "runs good".OS X doesn’t have an issue with 1GB of RAM. It’s the apps that do. And short of running with a fast SSD, I don’t believe you can do much "desktop computing" with 1GB of RAM these days.
close - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
I love a good flame but let's be honest, Yosemite on a 2008 iMac (first gen Al iMac) with 4GB of RAM and no other upgrades runs like crap. Windows 10 on a similar configuration runs great (memory-wise). And @xype, whip out that Yosemite installer, run it on 1GB of RAM and let me know how you came up with your conclusions.I don't really care if it's the apps or the OS gods. You can't even install MacOSX without enough RAM and you certainly can't work. Even at 4GB it's a test of patience.
Sure, build quality is great if you don't draw the short straw with batches that have one problem or another (screen, GPU, etc). And the "Mac user experience" is something so subjective that referencing it in such a discussion sounds plain ignorant. Do you like simple things that work? Well enjoy the paper-pad experience. ;)
And just as a side note, I appreciate my 6-7years old Lenovo X200 then I do my 1 year old X1 Carbon gen2. All computers nowadays are built to be replaced in 2 years... They fail physically and functionally (like devices with 4GB of soldered RAM).
tim851 - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
My gf is running Yosemite on a MacBook Air from 2010 with 2 GB of RAM. She multitasks the shit out of it. How is 4 GB "testing your patience"? I call bullshit!iWatchHogwash2 - Thursday, July 23, 2015 - link
Some further important Apple News not mentioned here earlier on:Maybe some idiot will buy them
Apple mysteriously has enough iWatches on hand to start putting them in its own stores.
The iWatch went on sale six weeks ago and at the time Apple did not think it would ever have enough to put it in its own shops. The original plan was to flog them online and in fashion stores, however and Jobs' Mob thought it would never have enough to meet the crushing demand for an out-of-date wearable which was more expensive than anything else on the market.
So it appears that suddenly Apple has enough. Of course the Tame Apple Press is trying to keep the story about a shortage going. Potential buyers must first reserve their device online, and some models are still out of stock.
But the sport models, which are most popular and the cheapest, are available across the country, while others can be bought in Apple's flagship shops, such as those in London and Manchester.
In order to reserve your device, you must pick the Watch you want to buy, choose a store to pick the device up and then choose a time to go and buy it.
You can also order the home delivery, but it's not recommended as it takes more than three weeks for the shipment to be delivered.
The most expensive models, such as the 38mm yellow gold model with red modern Buckle strap, are still unavailable. As Apple said last week, the 42mm Watch in Space Black with the metal link bracelet is unavailable at all stores for now.
Source:
http://www.fudzilla.com/news/wearables/38018-apple...
Apple has another lemon
It is turning out exactly as we said – sales of Apple's latest cure for cancer have slumped to a shadow of their initial "glory."
While the Tame Apple Press and a big chunk of analysts sung praises for the iWatch, claiming it would sell 70 million in its first year. We pointed out that the gizmo was nearly two years out of date and lacked most of the software which would make it moderately useful and if it succeed it was a triumph of user stupidity and marketing.
Lately analysts have been slowly withdrawing the enthusiastic sales figures they gave the watch, and now a new survey has shown that sales have fallen by 90 per cent.
Apple is selling fewer than 20,000 watches a day in the US since the initial surge in April, and on some days fewer than 10,000. This is not too bad, but it does suggest that most people who wanted an iWatch have one, and existing users are not managing to win many converts amongst their friends to make it take off. For the record to make the 70 million figure apple would have to sell 195,000 a day.
Data collected by Slice Intelligence show that Two-thirds of the watches sold so far have been the lower-profit "Sport" version, whose price starts at $349, according to Slice, rather than the costlier and more advanced models that start at $549. Apple's gold "Edition" model priced at $10,000 or more has only sold 2,000 of them have been sold in the US.
The figures are based on the electronic receipts sent to millions of email addresses following purchases. The company conducts market research on behalf of consumer-goods companies, among others, many of them in the Fortune 500.
All up though these figures are not bad, but they are not the sort of numbers which Apple needs to convince its investors that it can make mega sales any more. With sales drying up in China, Jobs mob will not have a good bottom line this year.
Source:
http://www.fudzilla.com/news/wearables/38173-apple...
They will be great honestly
The Tame Apple Press is gearing up to spin tomorrow's financial results, even though there are some suggestions that they will not be that great.
Going through all the pre-result articles we have detected a common theme – the results will be great. If they are not great the magazines and newspapers will:
1. Say that it is a slow period anyway because Apple has not got any product out.
2. Blame the slowing Chinese economy rather than the failure of Apple to interest the Chinese.
3. Use the phrase "blockbuster iPhone" even if sales start to fall.
4. Fail to mention the failure of the iPad or the iWatch.
5. Quote figures for the year rather than the quarter.
6. Compare everything to Samsung (which had a shitty year).
Below is a quote from CNet so you can see what we mean:
But CNet has a problem. The reason that Apple has done well at all is because of sales in China. In April Apple told us that it made a killing in that country. Word on the street is China sales did not hold up for the rest of the year, suggesting that those who could afford an Apple bought it, and those who couldn't, which is the majority of the country didn't. Apple's Chinese problems are unlikely to be because of the county's economic woes either, it is just that the market for overpriced phones in China is limited.
Earlier this month, Gartner revised its annual growth forecast for smartphones downward because it sees the market as saturated
The other issue is how poorly Apple's iWatch sales have been going. It is hard to see how Apple can get away from this one other than by being creative with how it calculates the sales. The Tame Apple Press has been getting bizarre about the watch in the face of the fact that campaigned for people to buy the white elephant. Time magazine actually ran a story about how 96 per cent of iWatch owners are happy they bought it. A bizarre figure that the rag has to qualify by admitting that the more you knew about technology the less like you were to be satisfied with the iWatch. However 96 per cent is just plane impossible.
Slightly saner analysts think that the iWatch will sell very few and it might need some time However Apple might have to fess up that its numbers were not what the Tame Apple Press claimed they would be. It will also have to face slumping iPad sales.
Source:
http://www.fudzilla.com/news/38274-apple-press-gea...
Tame Apple Press is spinning like a mad thing
Yesterday we warned the Tame Apple Press would be spinning what were expected to be bad results and we were right.
The results were simply:
• Apple made much less than Wall Street expected.
• IPad sales are disappearing faster than expected.
• IWatch sales so pitiful that Apple did not want to announce them.
• IPhone sales up, but dependent on a saturated and dying Chinese market which is about to turn.
These are results of a company which has run out of ideas and is coasting on the good name of a single product. Analysts were furious and shareholders dumped their shares believing that Apple has peaked.
But you would not get that if you read the papers this morning. Instead you hear how Apple made "boatloads of money" and it was incredible that Wall Street failed to understand how well Jobs' Mob was doing.
One of the saddest tries to baffle with bullshit came from Lance Ulanoff at Mashable who tried to prove the iWatch was a success even though Apple was too embarrassed to announce the sales figures. Ulanoff managed to "prove" (and we use the term loosely) that Apple managed to sell slightly more than a million watches which he claimed proved it was a success.
The only problem was that Apple, Analysts and the Tame Apple Press were telling us that it would sell 40-60 million and even the most negative was saying 10 million.
Apple did better in China in this quarter than we expected. Apparently though most of its sales were in the cash rich and more western Hong Kong market rather than the poorer mainland. Signs from China are that both markets are saturated for high end smartphones. Besides the Chinese economy is depressed and fewer people have money. Even if Apple brings out a new phone, it will have a harder sell in China.
What the results do show is that Apple is now dependent on the iPhone and has nothing up its sleeve that can replace it. This is fine for now, if you see the glass as half-full and the Tame Apple Press does.
But we are seeing huge problems for smartphones in general and high end ones especially. China, which Apple depends on, is seeing high end phones being decimated by cheaper, lower margin phones which much do the same. These phones are filtering out to the West where they are also making more sense.
Smartphones are widely predicted to go the same way as the PC market, once everything matures.
Apple fanboys are expecting something which Jobs' Mob always claimed – innovation. But Apple's problem here is that it is not an innovator, it is a copier and no one else has come up with something that could be the next big thing.
Wearables, the watch, was always going to be too niche, something that Tim Cook admitted yesterday. He said the watch did better than some in the company expected, in other words some in the company thought that no one would be stupid enough to buy it. Fortunately Apple found a million idiots who are stupid enough to buy a dog turd if it has an Apple logo on it.
These results are financially not bad, but they show a company that has stalled and has nowhere to go. Spinning that news by the Tame Apple Press to preserve the reality distortion field will not help Apple. It needs to get a grip on itself and come up with a better plan.
Sorce:
http://www.fudzilla.com/news/38286-we-were-right-a...
Admits that others are doing the same things cheaper
Apple's latest wave of adverts seem dedicated to the fact that its rivals are producing products that are the same and much cheaper
The punchline of the advert is "If it's not an iPhone, it's not an iPhone" which is pretty daft. It is a bit like saying "if it is not a pig, it is not a pig." It is equally not good value either.
The advert is supposed to show how the app-based ecosystem of the iPhone is brilliant, but it accidently shows how close its rivals are to Apple's product.
It is showing a real fear in the Cargo cult that users are finding it difficult to see the difference between Apple and its rivals – other than the logo and the inflated price tag.
Apple's rival products, are now better built, better-featured but much cheaper. This is leaving Apple having to define itself by what it's not, rather than by what it is. Unfortunately all it has is the logo and a more expensive price tag.
Apple appears to be in fear of its rivals, even if iPhones are still making money. More than 54.2 million have been shipped up to June 2015.
The problem is that Apple used to be able to tout itself as an innovator. It was not true of course, it ripped off the same ideas that other people had and stuck them in a nice box, but that was enough to carry it off.
But since 2011 it has just been tarting up its own products and when it could not do that any more it started tarting up other people's. The iWatch fiasco was so bad because the company got its product onto the market too late to claim it invented it and the whole thing fell apart.
There is a feeling, even amongst fanboys, that things would have been different under Steve Jobs. They might be right, although I doubt that. He might have convinced a few more people that they were wearing a cure for cancer, but he was running out of ideas. The iPad was not revolutionary it was just a big iPhone.
So it is obvious an iPhone is an iPhone, it is just that it is not much better than anything else on the block for half the price.
Source:
http://www.fudzilla.com/news/mobile/38277-apple-ad...
That is how miserable the market is
Despite the poor figures Apple Watch is the best player in the awful wearables market.
It took Google more than six months to cross the 100,000 figure Android Wear installations and Apple Watch has definitely beating these numbers easily. Google has Samsung, LG, Motorola as the predominant players and according to Strategy Analytics only Samsung managed to sell significant numbers.
The problem is that the Smart Watch market is slow especially the Android Wear one. But it is taking off fast. A year ago in Q2 2014 Samsung sold 0.7 million of its watches and everyone else managed to sell 0.3 million watches. There was total of million smartwatches sold in Q2 2014 in a wide range of operating systems.
A year later, in Q2 2015 Apple’s iWatch and sold 4 million in three months. This is not a bad number as Samsung sold 400,000 watches while all others managed to ship 900,000 in the whole quarter.
What this means is that Apple instantly captured 75.5 percent of total market in Q2 2015. Samsung used to have 73.6 percent of market in Q2 2014. In Q2 2015 it dropped to 7.5 percent. This huge drop was thanks to a great success of Apple Watch.
All others dropped a market share from 26.4 percent in Q2 14 to 17 percent in Q2 2015. Total growth of the smart watch market year over year is 457.3 percent.
Strategy Analytics admitted it did not use “real numbers” but felt its guess was close to the truth.
Source:
http://www.fudzilla.com/news/wearables/38295-apple...
Mind the Gap in expectations
The launch of Apple Pay in the UK has been a complete disaster, the software does not work, the system charges you double, and some leading banks do not support it yet.
HSBC was named and shamed for not having the service ready and had hate mail from fanboys as a result. For those who came in late HSBC has won awards for the security on its bank accounts but for some reason it has been slow in allowing Apple pay into its systems.
HSBC was originally listed as one of Apple's banking partners at launch, but has since said its account holders won't be able to use Apple Pay until later in July, now confirmed as July 28. The delays frustrated Apple fanboys who flooded twitter to vent their spleen.
However it turns out that HSBC's delays might have saved its customers from losing a pile of dosh.
Transport for London has warned tube, train and bus passengers paying with Apple Pay on iPhones and Apple Watches not to let their batteries run flat or they could get stuck at gates and face penalty fares.
Apple Pay only works if a device has power. It warns that, if the battery runs out in the middle of a journey, a user will not be able to tap out, which means they could be charged a maximum fare.
It also warns that receiving a call while attempting to touch into or out of the gates will also cause issues, and that users with multiple cards on their account must remember to use the same one or potentially be charged twice.
Early adopters have also complained about the speed of Apple Pay compared to Oyster or contactless. Difficulties using Touch ID to authenticate payments combined with the speed at which a payment is recognised have been causing problems for some.
In short Apple did not figure all this out before launch and priming its Tame Apple Press to sing its glory. However the BBC could not even get it buy a cup of coffee. The Beeb put it down to teething troubles, but given the system has been running in the US for a while you wouldn't expect to see so many problems like this.
Brandwatch, a company which calls itself an "enterprise social intelligence platform", and which monitors social networks to find out how twitterers feel about things.
The company compiled a list of 26,000 online mentions of the Apple Watch UK launch, and so assembled an unwilling focus group of 15,789 people.
It is fairly clear that people are struggling with the technology. Brandwatch found that ten per cent of posts are about how to get it to work, with Brandwatch saying that:
Apple Pay is not getting much traction in the US, where the big retailers are thinking of coming up with their own ideas. Rival payment services are now starting to look rather more useful.
Source:
http://www.fudzilla.com/news/mobile/38271-apple-pa...
ingwe - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
I'm running Yosemite on a 2008 MacBook Pro and it is running well. I'm sure it wouldn't run with 1GB of RAM but with 4 GB my is doing welldsumanik - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
Lol why you all making this a windows vs mac thing, this article is more apple propaganda... notice how apple shares slid? Apple has become more reliant on the iPhone than ever, iWatch was a total failure, and iPad is again in steady decline. I am glad to see macs gaining.The first iPhone flop is going to hit apple HARD, and investors are worried.
The iPhone is Microsoft's office, once it dies there just isn't a whole lot left to the company.
I do predict the next iPhone will be the best seller ever though, but it's only a matter of time until people get sick of a one trick pony, it's not IF.... it is a matter of when.
Apple needs to diversify, the position isn't secure, and the stock reflects that.
Anandtech doesn't post negative apple news though, which is why im going to troll the comments repeatedly until they start being honest with thier readers.
Sent from my mac mini, I'm not a hater just a realist.
iWatchHogwash2 - Thursday, July 23, 2015 - link
Some further important Apple News not mentioned here earlier on:Maybe some idiot will buy them
Apple mysteriously has enough iWatches on hand to start putting them in its own stores.
The iWatch went on sale six weeks ago and at the time Apple did not think it would ever have enough to put it in its own shops. The original plan was to flog them online and in fashion stores, however and Jobs' Mob thought it would never have enough to meet the crushing demand for an out-of-date wearable which was more expensive than anything else on the market.
So it appears that suddenly Apple has enough. Of course the Tame Apple Press is trying to keep the story about a shortage going. Potential buyers must first reserve their device online, and some models are still out of stock.
But the sport models, which are most popular and the cheapest, are available across the country, while others can be bought in Apple's flagship shops, such as those in London and Manchester.
In order to reserve your device, you must pick the Watch you want to buy, choose a store to pick the device up and then choose a time to go and buy it.
You can also order the home delivery, but it's not recommended as it takes more than three weeks for the shipment to be delivered.
The most expensive models, such as the 38mm yellow gold model with red modern Buckle strap, are still unavailable. As Apple said last week, the 42mm Watch in Space Black with the metal link bracelet is unavailable at all stores for now.
Source:
http://www.fudzilla.com/news/wearables/38018-apple...
Apple has another lemon
It is turning out exactly as we said – sales of Apple's latest cure for cancer have slumped to a shadow of their initial "glory."
While the Tame Apple Press and a big chunk of analysts sung praises for the iWatch, claiming it would sell 70 million in its first year. We pointed out that the gizmo was nearly two years out of date and lacked most of the software which would make it moderately useful and if it succeed it was a triumph of user stupidity and marketing.
Lately analysts have been slowly withdrawing the enthusiastic sales figures they gave the watch, and now a new survey has shown that sales have fallen by 90 per cent.
Apple is selling fewer than 20,000 watches a day in the US since the initial surge in April, and on some days fewer than 10,000. This is not too bad, but it does suggest that most people who wanted an iWatch have one, and existing users are not managing to win many converts amongst their friends to make it take off. For the record to make the 70 million figure apple would have to sell 195,000 a day.
Data collected by Slice Intelligence show that Two-thirds of the watches sold so far have been the lower-profit "Sport" version, whose price starts at $349, according to Slice, rather than the costlier and more advanced models that start at $549. Apple's gold "Edition" model priced at $10,000 or more has only sold 2,000 of them have been sold in the US.
The figures are based on the electronic receipts sent to millions of email addresses following purchases. The company conducts market research on behalf of consumer-goods companies, among others, many of them in the Fortune 500.
All up though these figures are not bad, but they are not the sort of numbers which Apple needs to convince its investors that it can make mega sales any more. With sales drying up in China, Jobs mob will not have a good bottom line this year.
Source:
http://www.fudzilla.com/news/wearables/38173-apple...
They will be great honestly
The Tame Apple Press is gearing up to spin tomorrow's financial results, even though there are some suggestions that they will not be that great.
Going through all the pre-result articles we have detected a common theme – the results will be great. If they are not great the magazines and newspapers will:
1. Say that it is a slow period anyway because Apple has not got any product out.
2. Blame the slowing Chinese economy rather than the failure of Apple to interest the Chinese.
3. Use the phrase "blockbuster iPhone" even if sales start to fall.
4. Fail to mention the failure of the iPad or the iWatch.
5. Quote figures for the year rather than the quarter.
6. Compare everything to Samsung (which had a shitty year).
Below is a quote from CNet so you can see what we mean:
But CNet has a problem. The reason that Apple has done well at all is because of sales in China. In April Apple told us that it made a killing in that country. Word on the street is China sales did not hold up for the rest of the year, suggesting that those who could afford an Apple bought it, and those who couldn't, which is the majority of the country didn't. Apple's Chinese problems are unlikely to be because of the county's economic woes either, it is just that the market for overpriced phones in China is limited.
Earlier this month, Gartner revised its annual growth forecast for smartphones downward because it sees the market as saturated
The other issue is how poorly Apple's iWatch sales have been going. It is hard to see how Apple can get away from this one other than by being creative with how it calculates the sales. The Tame Apple Press has been getting bizarre about the watch in the face of the fact that campaigned for people to buy the white elephant. Time magazine actually ran a story about how 96 per cent of iWatch owners are happy they bought it. A bizarre figure that the rag has to qualify by admitting that the more you knew about technology the less like you were to be satisfied with the iWatch. However 96 per cent is just plane impossible.
Slightly saner analysts think that the iWatch will sell very few and it might need some time However Apple might have to fess up that its numbers were not what the Tame Apple Press claimed they would be. It will also have to face slumping iPad sales.
Source:
http://www.fudzilla.com/news/38274-apple-press-gea...
Tame Apple Press is spinning like a mad thing
Yesterday we warned the Tame Apple Press would be spinning what were expected to be bad results and we were right.
The results were simply:
• Apple made much less than Wall Street expected.
• IPad sales are disappearing faster than expected.
• IWatch sales so pitiful that Apple did not want to announce them.
• IPhone sales up, but dependent on a saturated and dying Chinese market which is about to turn.
These are results of a company which has run out of ideas and is coasting on the good name of a single product. Analysts were furious and shareholders dumped their shares believing that Apple has peaked.
But you would not get that if you read the papers this morning. Instead you hear how Apple made "boatloads of money" and it was incredible that Wall Street failed to understand how well Jobs' Mob was doing.
One of the saddest tries to baffle with bullshit came from Lance Ulanoff at Mashable who tried to prove the iWatch was a success even though Apple was too embarrassed to announce the sales figures. Ulanoff managed to "prove" (and we use the term loosely) that Apple managed to sell slightly more than a million watches which he claimed proved it was a success.
The only problem was that Apple, Analysts and the Tame Apple Press were telling us that it would sell 40-60 million and even the most negative was saying 10 million.
Apple did better in China in this quarter than we expected. Apparently though most of its sales were in the cash rich and more western Hong Kong market rather than the poorer mainland. Signs from China are that both markets are saturated for high end smartphones. Besides the Chinese economy is depressed and fewer people have money. Even if Apple brings out a new phone, it will have a harder sell in China.
What the results do show is that Apple is now dependent on the iPhone and has nothing up its sleeve that can replace it. This is fine for now, if you see the glass as half-full and the Tame Apple Press does.
But we are seeing huge problems for smartphones in general and high end ones especially. China, which Apple depends on, is seeing high end phones being decimated by cheaper, lower margin phones which much do the same. These phones are filtering out to the West where they are also making more sense.
Smartphones are widely predicted to go the same way as the PC market, once everything matures.
Apple fanboys are expecting something which Jobs' Mob always claimed – innovation. But Apple's problem here is that it is not an innovator, it is a copier and no one else has come up with something that could be the next big thing.
Wearables, the watch, was always going to be too niche, something that Tim Cook admitted yesterday. He said the watch did better than some in the company expected, in other words some in the company thought that no one would be stupid enough to buy it. Fortunately Apple found a million idiots who are stupid enough to buy a dog turd if it has an Apple logo on it.
These results are financially not bad, but they show a company that has stalled and has nowhere to go. Spinning that news by the Tame Apple Press to preserve the reality distortion field will not help Apple. It needs to get a grip on itself and come up with a better plan.
Sorce:
http://www.fudzilla.com/news/38286-we-were-right-a...
Admits that others are doing the same things cheaper
Apple's latest wave of adverts seem dedicated to the fact that its rivals are producing products that are the same and much cheaper
The punchline of the advert is "If it's not an iPhone, it's not an iPhone" which is pretty daft. It is a bit like saying "if it is not a pig, it is not a pig." It is equally not good value either.
The advert is supposed to show how the app-based ecosystem of the iPhone is brilliant, but it accidently shows how close its rivals are to Apple's product.
It is showing a real fear in the Cargo cult that users are finding it difficult to see the difference between Apple and its rivals – other than the logo and the inflated price tag.
Apple's rival products, are now better built, better-featured but much cheaper. This is leaving Apple having to define itself by what it's not, rather than by what it is. Unfortunately all it has is the logo and a more expensive price tag.
Apple appears to be in fear of its rivals, even if iPhones are still making money. More than 54.2 million have been shipped up to June 2015.
The problem is that Apple used to be able to tout itself as an innovator. It was not true of course, it ripped off the same ideas that other people had and stuck them in a nice box, but that was enough to carry it off.
But since 2011 it has just been tarting up its own products and when it could not do that any more it started tarting up other people's. The iWatch fiasco was so bad because the company got its product onto the market too late to claim it invented it and the whole thing fell apart.
There is a feeling, even amongst fanboys, that things would have been different under Steve Jobs. They might be right, although I doubt that. He might have convinced a few more people that they were wearing a cure for cancer, but he was running out of ideas. The iPad was not revolutionary it was just a big iPhone.
So it is obvious an iPhone is an iPhone, it is just that it is not much better than anything else on the block for half the price.
Source:
http://www.fudzilla.com/news/mobile/38277-apple-ad...
That is how miserable the market is
Despite the poor figures Apple Watch is the best player in the awful wearables market.
It took Google more than six months to cross the 100,000 figure Android Wear installations and Apple Watch has definitely beating these numbers easily. Google has Samsung, LG, Motorola as the predominant players and according to Strategy Analytics only Samsung managed to sell significant numbers.
The problem is that the Smart Watch market is slow especially the Android Wear one. But it is taking off fast. A year ago in Q2 2014 Samsung sold 0.7 million of its watches and everyone else managed to sell 0.3 million watches. There was total of million smartwatches sold in Q2 2014 in a wide range of operating systems.
A year later, in Q2 2015 Apple’s iWatch and sold 4 million in three months. This is not a bad number as Samsung sold 400,000 watches while all others managed to ship 900,000 in the whole quarter.
What this means is that Apple instantly captured 75.5 percent of total market in Q2 2015. Samsung used to have 73.6 percent of market in Q2 2014. In Q2 2015 it dropped to 7.5 percent. This huge drop was thanks to a great success of Apple Watch.
All others dropped a market share from 26.4 percent in Q2 14 to 17 percent in Q2 2015. Total growth of the smart watch market year over year is 457.3 percent.
Strategy Analytics admitted it did not use “real numbers” but felt its guess was close to the truth.
Source:
http://www.fudzilla.com/news/wearables/38295-apple...
Mind the Gap in expectations
The launch of Apple Pay in the UK has been a complete disaster, the software does not work, the system charges you double, and some leading banks do not support it yet.
HSBC was named and shamed for not having the service ready and had hate mail from fanboys as a result. For those who came in late HSBC has won awards for the security on its bank accounts but for some reason it has been slow in allowing Apple pay into its systems.
HSBC was originally listed as one of Apple's banking partners at launch, but has since said its account holders won't be able to use Apple Pay until later in July, now confirmed as July 28. The delays frustrated Apple fanboys who flooded twitter to vent their spleen.
However it turns out that HSBC's delays might have saved its customers from losing a pile of dosh.
Transport for London has warned tube, train and bus passengers paying with Apple Pay on iPhones and Apple Watches not to let their batteries run flat or they could get stuck at gates and face penalty fares.
Apple Pay only works if a device has power. It warns that, if the battery runs out in the middle of a journey, a user will not be able to tap out, which means they could be charged a maximum fare.
It also warns that receiving a call while attempting to touch into or out of the gates will also cause issues, and that users with multiple cards on their account must remember to use the same one or potentially be charged twice.
Early adopters have also complained about the speed of Apple Pay compared to Oyster or contactless. Difficulties using Touch ID to authenticate payments combined with the speed at which a payment is recognised have been causing problems for some.
In short Apple did not figure all this out before launch and priming its Tame Apple Press to sing its glory. However the BBC could not even get it buy a cup of coffee. The Beeb put it down to teething troubles, but given the system has been running in the US for a while you wouldn't expect to see so many problems like this.
Brandwatch, a company which calls itself an "enterprise social intelligence platform", and which monitors social networks to find out how twitterers feel about things.
The company compiled a list of 26,000 online mentions of the Apple Watch UK launch, and so assembled an unwilling focus group of 15,789 people.
It is fairly clear that people are struggling with the technology. Brandwatch found that ten per cent of posts are about how to get it to work, with Brandwatch saying that:
Apple Pay is not getting much traction in the US, where the big retailers are thinking of coming up with their own ideas. Rival payment services are now starting to look rather more useful.
Source:
http://www.fudzilla.com/news/mobile/38271-apple-pa...
iWatchHogwash2 - Thursday, July 23, 2015 - link
Some further important Apple News not mentioned here earlier on:Maybe some idiot will buy them
Apple mysteriously has enough iWatches on hand to start putting them in its own stores.
The iWatch went on sale six weeks ago and at the time Apple did not think it would ever have enough to put it in its own shops. The original plan was to flog them online and in fashion stores, however and Jobs' Mob thought it would never have enough to meet the crushing demand for an out-of-date wearable which was more expensive than anything else on the market.
So it appears that suddenly Apple has enough. Of course the Tame Apple Press is trying to keep the story about a shortage going. Potential buyers must first reserve their device online, and some models are still out of stock.
But the sport models, which are most popular and the cheapest, are available across the country, while others can be bought in Apple's flagship shops, such as those in London and Manchester.
In order to reserve your device, you must pick the Watch you want to buy, choose a store to pick the device up and then choose a time to go and buy it.
You can also order the home delivery, but it's not recommended as it takes more than three weeks for the shipment to be delivered.
The most expensive models, such as the 38mm yellow gold model with red modern Buckle strap, are still unavailable. As Apple said last week, the 42mm Watch in Space Black with the metal link bracelet is unavailable at all stores for now.
Source:
http://www.fudzilla.com/news/wearables/38018-apple...
Apple has another lemon
It is turning out exactly as we said – sales of Apple's latest cure for cancer have slumped to a shadow of their initial "glory."
While the Tame Apple Press and a big chunk of analysts sung praises for the iWatch, claiming it would sell 70 million in its first year. We pointed out that the gizmo was nearly two years out of date and lacked most of the software which would make it moderately useful and if it succeed it was a triumph of user stupidity and marketing.
Lately analysts have been slowly withdrawing the enthusiastic sales figures they gave the watch, and now a new survey has shown that sales have fallen by 90 per cent.
Apple is selling fewer than 20,000 watches a day in the US since the initial surge in April, and on some days fewer than 10,000. This is not too bad, but it does suggest that most people who wanted an iWatch have one, and existing users are not managing to win many converts amongst their friends to make it take off. For the record to make the 70 million figure apple would have to sell 195,000 a day.
Data collected by Slice Intelligence show that Two-thirds of the watches sold so far have been the lower-profit "Sport" version, whose price starts at $349, according to Slice, rather than the costlier and more advanced models that start at $549. Apple's gold "Edition" model priced at $10,000 or more has only sold 2,000 of them have been sold in the US.
The figures are based on the electronic receipts sent to millions of email addresses following purchases. The company conducts market research on behalf of consumer-goods companies, among others, many of them in the Fortune 500.
All up though these figures are not bad, but they are not the sort of numbers which Apple needs to convince its investors that it can make mega sales any more. With sales drying up in China, Jobs mob will not have a good bottom line this year.
Source:
http://www.fudzilla.com/news/wearables/38173-apple...
They will be great honestly
The Tame Apple Press is gearing up to spin tomorrow's financial results, even though there are some suggestions that they will not be that great.
Going through all the pre-result articles we have detected a common theme – the results will be great. If they are not great the magazines and newspapers will:
1. Say that it is a slow period anyway because Apple has not got any product out.
2. Blame the slowing Chinese economy rather than the failure of Apple to interest the Chinese.
3. Use the phrase "blockbuster iPhone" even if sales start to fall.
4. Fail to mention the failure of the iPad or the iWatch.
5. Quote figures for the year rather than the quarter.
6. Compare everything to Samsung (which had a shitty year).
Below is a quote from CNet so you can see what we mean:
But CNet has a problem. The reason that Apple has done well at all is because of sales in China. In April Apple told us that it made a killing in that country. Word on the street is China sales did not hold up for the rest of the year, suggesting that those who could afford an Apple bought it, and those who couldn't, which is the majority of the country didn't. Apple's Chinese problems are unlikely to be because of the county's economic woes either, it is just that the market for overpriced phones in China is limited.
Earlier this month, Gartner revised its annual growth forecast for smartphones downward because it sees the market as saturated
The other issue is how poorly Apple's iWatch sales have been going. It is hard to see how Apple can get away from this one other than by being creative with how it calculates the sales. The Tame Apple Press has been getting bizarre about the watch in the face of the fact that campaigned for people to buy the white elephant. Time magazine actually ran a story about how 96 per cent of iWatch owners are happy they bought it. A bizarre figure that the rag has to qualify by admitting that the more you knew about technology the less like you were to be satisfied with the iWatch. However 96 per cent is just plane impossible.
Slightly saner analysts think that the iWatch will sell very few and it might need some time However Apple might have to fess up that its numbers were not what the Tame Apple Press claimed they would be. It will also have to face slumping iPad sales.
Source:
http://www.fudzilla.com/news/38274-apple-press-gea...
Tame Apple Press is spinning like a mad thing
Yesterday we warned the Tame Apple Press would be spinning what were expected to be bad results and we were right.
The results were simply:
• Apple made much less than Wall Street expected.
• IPad sales are disappearing faster than expected.
• IWatch sales so pitiful that Apple did not want to announce them.
• IPhone sales up, but dependent on a saturated and dying Chinese market which is about to turn.
These are results of a company which has run out of ideas and is coasting on the good name of a single product. Analysts were furious and shareholders dumped their shares believing that Apple has peaked.
But you would not get that if you read the papers this morning. Instead you hear how Apple made "boatloads of money" and it was incredible that Wall Street failed to understand how well Jobs' Mob was doing.
One of the saddest tries to baffle with bullshit came from Lance Ulanoff at Mashable who tried to prove the iWatch was a success even though Apple was too embarrassed to announce the sales figures. Ulanoff managed to "prove" (and we use the term loosely) that Apple managed to sell slightly more than a million watches which he claimed proved it was a success.
The only problem was that Apple, Analysts and the Tame Apple Press were telling us that it would sell 40-60 million and even the most negative was saying 10 million.
Apple did better in China in this quarter than we expected. Apparently though most of its sales were in the cash rich and more western Hong Kong market rather than the poorer mainland. Signs from China are that both markets are saturated for high end smartphones. Besides the Chinese economy is depressed and fewer people have money. Even if Apple brings out a new phone, it will have a harder sell in China.
What the results do show is that Apple is now dependent on the iPhone and has nothing up its sleeve that can replace it. This is fine for now, if you see the glass as half-full and the Tame Apple Press does.
But we are seeing huge problems for smartphones in general and high end ones especially. China, which Apple depends on, is seeing high end phones being decimated by cheaper, lower margin phones which much do the same. These phones are filtering out to the West where they are also making more sense.
Smartphones are widely predicted to go the same way as the PC market, once everything matures.
Apple fanboys are expecting something which Jobs' Mob always claimed – innovation. But Apple's problem here is that it is not an innovator, it is a copier and no one else has come up with something that could be the next big thing.
Wearables, the watch, was always going to be too niche, something that Tim Cook admitted yesterday. He said the watch did better than some in the company expected, in other words some in the company thought that no one would be stupid enough to buy it. Fortunately Apple found a million idiots who are stupid enough to buy a dog turd if it has an Apple logo on it.
These results are financially not bad, but they show a company that has stalled and has nowhere to go. Spinning that news by the Tame Apple Press to preserve the reality distortion field will not help Apple. It needs to get a grip on itself and come up with a better plan.
Sorce:
http://www.fudzilla.com/news/38286-we-were-right-a...
Admits that others are doing the same things cheaper
Apple's latest wave of adverts seem dedicated to the fact that its rivals are producing products that are the same and much cheaper
The punchline of the advert is "If it's not an iPhone, it's not an iPhone" which is pretty daft. It is a bit like saying "if it is not a pig, it is not a pig." It is equally not good value either.
The advert is supposed to show how the app-based ecosystem of the iPhone is brilliant, but it accidently shows how close its rivals are to Apple's product.
It is showing a real fear in the Cargo cult that users are finding it difficult to see the difference between Apple and its rivals – other than the logo and the inflated price tag.
Apple's rival products, are now better built, better-featured but much cheaper. This is leaving Apple having to define itself by what it's not, rather than by what it is. Unfortunately all it has is the logo and a more expensive price tag.
Apple appears to be in fear of its rivals, even if iPhones are still making money. More than 54.2 million have been shipped up to June 2015.
The problem is that Apple used to be able to tout itself as an innovator. It was not true of course, it ripped off the same ideas that other people had and stuck them in a nice box, but that was enough to carry it off.
But since 2011 it has just been tarting up its own products and when it could not do that any more it started tarting up other people's. The iWatch fiasco was so bad because the company got its product onto the market too late to claim it invented it and the whole thing fell apart.
There is a feeling, even amongst fanboys, that things would have been different under Steve Jobs. They might be right, although I doubt that. He might have convinced a few more people that they were wearing a cure for cancer, but he was running out of ideas. The iPad was not revolutionary it was just a big iPhone.
So it is obvious an iPhone is an iPhone, it is just that it is not much better than anything else on the block for half the price.
Source:
http://www.fudzilla.com/news/mobile/38277-apple-ad...
That is how miserable the market is
Despite the poor figures Apple Watch is the best player in the awful wearables market.
It took Google more than six months to cross the 100,000 figure Android Wear installations and Apple Watch has definitely beating these numbers easily. Google has Samsung, LG, Motorola as the predominant players and according to Strategy Analytics only Samsung managed to sell significant numbers.
The problem is that the Smart Watch market is slow especially the Android Wear one. But it is taking off fast. A year ago in Q2 2014 Samsung sold 0.7 million of its watches and everyone else managed to sell 0.3 million watches. There was total of million smartwatches sold in Q2 2014 in a wide range of operating systems.
A year later, in Q2 2015 Apple’s iWatch and sold 4 million in three months. This is not a bad number as Samsung sold 400,000 watches while all others managed to ship 900,000 in the whole quarter.
What this means is that Apple instantly captured 75.5 percent of total market in Q2 2015. Samsung used to have 73.6 percent of market in Q2 2014. In Q2 2015 it dropped to 7.5 percent. This huge drop was thanks to a great success of Apple Watch.
All others dropped a market share from 26.4 percent in Q2 14 to 17 percent in Q2 2015. Total growth of the smart watch market year over year is 457.3 percent.
Strategy Analytics admitted it did not use “real numbers” but felt its guess was close to the truth.
Source:
http://www.fudzilla.com/news/wearables/38295-apple...
Mind the Gap in expectations
The launch of Apple Pay in the UK has been a complete disaster, the software does not work, the system charges you double, and some leading banks do not support it yet.
HSBC was named and shamed for not having the service ready and had hate mail from fanboys as a result. For those who came in late HSBC has won awards for the security on its bank accounts but for some reason it has been slow in allowing Apple pay into its systems.
HSBC was originally listed as one of Apple's banking partners at launch, but has since said its account holders won't be able to use Apple Pay until later in July, now confirmed as July 28. The delays frustrated Apple fanboys who flooded twitter to vent their spleen.
However it turns out that HSBC's delays might have saved its customers from losing a pile of dosh.
Transport for London has warned tube, train and bus passengers paying with Apple Pay on iPhones and Apple Watches not to let their batteries run flat or they could get stuck at gates and face penalty fares.
Apple Pay only works if a device has power. It warns that, if the battery runs out in the middle of a journey, a user will not be able to tap out, which means they could be charged a maximum fare.
It also warns that receiving a call while attempting to touch into or out of the gates will also cause issues, and that users with multiple cards on their account must remember to use the same one or potentially be charged twice.
Early adopters have also complained about the speed of Apple Pay compared to Oyster or contactless. Difficulties using Touch ID to authenticate payments combined with the speed at which a payment is recognised have been causing problems for some.
In short Apple did not figure all this out before launch and priming its Tame Apple Press to sing its glory. However the BBC could not even get it buy a cup of coffee. The Beeb put it down to teething troubles, but given the system has been running in the US for a while you wouldn't expect to see so many problems like this.
Brandwatch, a company which calls itself an "enterprise social intelligence platform", and which monitors social networks to find out how twitterers feel about things.
The company compiled a list of 26,000 online mentions of the Apple Watch UK launch, and so assembled an unwilling focus group of 15,789 people.
It is fairly clear that people are struggling with the technology. Brandwatch found that ten per cent of posts are about how to get it to work, with Brandwatch saying that:
Apple Pay is not getting much traction in the US, where the big retailers are thinking of coming up with their own ideas. Rival payment services are now starting to look rather more useful.
Source:
http://www.fudzilla.com/news/mobile/38271-apple-pa...
Andromeduck - Friday, July 31, 2015 - link
Well OSX is still the only OS with both a usable shell and professional creative/design apps so it's really the only option for many tech professionals.Also, the display bonding and soldering/capacitor problems were really industry wide issues so it's not surprising it hit apple when their QC wasn't as good as today's.
I'd rather take my chances with Apple than Lenovo's new "thinkpads" again.
You get what you pay for.
iWatchHogwash2 - Thursday, July 23, 2015 - link
Some further important Apple News not mentioned here earlier on:Maybe some idiot will buy them
Apple mysteriously has enough iWatches on hand to start putting them in its own stores.
The iWatch went on sale six weeks ago and at the time Apple did not think it would ever have enough to put it in its own shops. The original plan was to flog them online and in fashion stores, however and Jobs' Mob thought it would never have enough to meet the crushing demand for an out-of-date wearable which was more expensive than anything else on the market.
So it appears that suddenly Apple has enough. Of course the Tame Apple Press is trying to keep the story about a shortage going. Potential buyers must first reserve their device online, and some models are still out of stock.
But the sport models, which are most popular and the cheapest, are available across the country, while others can be bought in Apple's flagship shops, such as those in London and Manchester.
In order to reserve your device, you must pick the Watch you want to buy, choose a store to pick the device up and then choose a time to go and buy it.
You can also order the home delivery, but it's not recommended as it takes more than three weeks for the shipment to be delivered.
The most expensive models, such as the 38mm yellow gold model with red modern Buckle strap, are still unavailable. As Apple said last week, the 42mm Watch in Space Black with the metal link bracelet is unavailable at all stores for now.
Source:
http://www.fudzilla.com/news/wearables/38018-apple...
Apple has another lemon
It is turning out exactly as we said – sales of Apple's latest cure for cancer have slumped to a shadow of their initial "glory."
While the Tame Apple Press and a big chunk of analysts sung praises for the iWatch, claiming it would sell 70 million in its first year. We pointed out that the gizmo was nearly two years out of date and lacked most of the software which would make it moderately useful and if it succeed it was a triumph of user stupidity and marketing.
Lately analysts have been slowly withdrawing the enthusiastic sales figures they gave the watch, and now a new survey has shown that sales have fallen by 90 per cent.
Apple is selling fewer than 20,000 watches a day in the US since the initial surge in April, and on some days fewer than 10,000. This is not too bad, but it does suggest that most people who wanted an iWatch have one, and existing users are not managing to win many converts amongst their friends to make it take off. For the record to make the 70 million figure apple would have to sell 195,000 a day.
Data collected by Slice Intelligence show that Two-thirds of the watches sold so far have been the lower-profit "Sport" version, whose price starts at $349, according to Slice, rather than the costlier and more advanced models that start at $549. Apple's gold "Edition" model priced at $10,000 or more has only sold 2,000 of them have been sold in the US.
The figures are based on the electronic receipts sent to millions of email addresses following purchases. The company conducts market research on behalf of consumer-goods companies, among others, many of them in the Fortune 500.
All up though these figures are not bad, but they are not the sort of numbers which Apple needs to convince its investors that it can make mega sales any more. With sales drying up in China, Jobs mob will not have a good bottom line this year.
Source:
http://www.fudzilla.com/news/wearables/38173-apple...
They will be great honestly
The Tame Apple Press is gearing up to spin tomorrow's financial results, even though there are some suggestions that they will not be that great.
Going through all the pre-result articles we have detected a common theme – the results will be great. If they are not great the magazines and newspapers will:
1. Say that it is a slow period anyway because Apple has not got any product out.
2. Blame the slowing Chinese economy rather than the failure of Apple to interest the Chinese.
3. Use the phrase "blockbuster iPhone" even if sales start to fall.
4. Fail to mention the failure of the iPad or the iWatch.
5. Quote figures for the year rather than the quarter.
6. Compare everything to Samsung (which had a shitty year).
Below is a quote from CNet so you can see what we mean:
But CNet has a problem. The reason that Apple has done well at all is because of sales in China. In April Apple told us that it made a killing in that country. Word on the street is China sales did not hold up for the rest of the year, suggesting that those who could afford an Apple bought it, and those who couldn't, which is the majority of the country didn't. Apple's Chinese problems are unlikely to be because of the county's economic woes either, it is just that the market for overpriced phones in China is limited.
Earlier this month, Gartner revised its annual growth forecast for smartphones downward because it sees the market as saturated
The other issue is how poorly Apple's iWatch sales have been going. It is hard to see how Apple can get away from this one other than by being creative with how it calculates the sales. The Tame Apple Press has been getting bizarre about the watch in the face of the fact that campaigned for people to buy the white elephant. Time magazine actually ran a story about how 96 per cent of iWatch owners are happy they bought it. A bizarre figure that the rag has to qualify by admitting that the more you knew about technology the less like you were to be satisfied with the iWatch. However 96 per cent is just plane impossible.
Slightly saner analysts think that the iWatch will sell very few and it might need some time However Apple might have to fess up that its numbers were not what the Tame Apple Press claimed they would be. It will also have to face slumping iPad sales.
Source:
http://www.fudzilla.com/news/38274-apple-press-gea...
Tame Apple Press is spinning like a mad thing
Yesterday we warned the Tame Apple Press would be spinning what were expected to be bad results and we were right.
The results were simply:
• Apple made much less than Wall Street expected.
• IPad sales are disappearing faster than expected.
• IWatch sales so pitiful that Apple did not want to announce them.
• IPhone sales up, but dependent on a saturated and dying Chinese market which is about to turn.
These are results of a company which has run out of ideas and is coasting on the good name of a single product. Analysts were furious and shareholders dumped their shares believing that Apple has peaked.
But you would not get that if you read the papers this morning. Instead you hear how Apple made "boatloads of money" and it was incredible that Wall Street failed to understand how well Jobs' Mob was doing.
One of the saddest tries to baffle with bullshit came from Lance Ulanoff at Mashable who tried to prove the iWatch was a success even though Apple was too embarrassed to announce the sales figures. Ulanoff managed to "prove" (and we use the term loosely) that Apple managed to sell slightly more than a million watches which he claimed proved it was a success.
The only problem was that Apple, Analysts and the Tame Apple Press were telling us that it would sell 40-60 million and even the most negative was saying 10 million.
Apple did better in China in this quarter than we expected. Apparently though most of its sales were in the cash rich and more western Hong Kong market rather than the poorer mainland. Signs from China are that both markets are saturated for high end smartphones. Besides the Chinese economy is depressed and fewer people have money. Even if Apple brings out a new phone, it will have a harder sell in China.
What the results do show is that Apple is now dependent on the iPhone and has nothing up its sleeve that can replace it. This is fine for now, if you see the glass as half-full and the Tame Apple Press does.
But we are seeing huge problems for smartphones in general and high end ones especially. China, which Apple depends on, is seeing high end phones being decimated by cheaper, lower margin phones which much do the same. These phones are filtering out to the West where they are also making more sense.
Smartphones are widely predicted to go the same way as the PC market, once everything matures.
Apple fanboys are expecting something which Jobs' Mob always claimed – innovation. But Apple's problem here is that it is not an innovator, it is a copier and no one else has come up with something that could be the next big thing.
Wearables, the watch, was always going to be too niche, something that Tim Cook admitted yesterday. He said the watch did better than some in the company expected, in other words some in the company thought that no one would be stupid enough to buy it. Fortunately Apple found a million idiots who are stupid enough to buy a dog turd if it has an Apple logo on it.
These results are financially not bad, but they show a company that has stalled and has nowhere to go. Spinning that news by the Tame Apple Press to preserve the reality distortion field will not help Apple. It needs to get a grip on itself and come up with a better plan.
Sorce:
http://www.fudzilla.com/news/38286-we-were-right-a...
Admits that others are doing the same things cheaper
Apple's latest wave of adverts seem dedicated to the fact that its rivals are producing products that are the same and much cheaper
The punchline of the advert is "If it's not an iPhone, it's not an iPhone" which is pretty daft. It is a bit like saying "if it is not a pig, it is not a pig." It is equally not good value either.
The advert is supposed to show how the app-based ecosystem of the iPhone is brilliant, but it accidently shows how close its rivals are to Apple's product.
It is showing a real fear in the Cargo cult that users are finding it difficult to see the difference between Apple and its rivals – other than the logo and the inflated price tag.
Apple's rival products, are now better built, better-featured but much cheaper. This is leaving Apple having to define itself by what it's not, rather than by what it is. Unfortunately all it has is the logo and a more expensive price tag.
Apple appears to be in fear of its rivals, even if iPhones are still making money. More than 54.2 million have been shipped up to June 2015.
The problem is that Apple used to be able to tout itself as an innovator. It was not true of course, it ripped off the same ideas that other people had and stuck them in a nice box, but that was enough to carry it off.
But since 2011 it has just been tarting up its own products and when it could not do that any more it started tarting up other people's. The iWatch fiasco was so bad because the company got its product onto the market too late to claim it invented it and the whole thing fell apart.
There is a feeling, even amongst fanboys, that things would have been different under Steve Jobs. They might be right, although I doubt that. He might have convinced a few more people that they were wearing a cure for cancer, but he was running out of ideas. The iPad was not revolutionary it was just a big iPhone.
So it is obvious an iPhone is an iPhone, it is just that it is not much better than anything else on the block for half the price.
Source:
http://www.fudzilla.com/news/mobile/38277-apple-ad...
That is how miserable the market is
Despite the poor figures Apple Watch is the best player in the awful wearables market.
It took Google more than six months to cross the 100,000 figure Android Wear installations and Apple Watch has definitely beating these numbers easily. Google has Samsung, LG, Motorola as the predominant players and according to Strategy Analytics only Samsung managed to sell significant numbers.
The problem is that the Smart Watch market is slow especially the Android Wear one. But it is taking off fast. A year ago in Q2 2014 Samsung sold 0.7 million of its watches and everyone else managed to sell 0.3 million watches. There was total of million smartwatches sold in Q2 2014 in a wide range of operating systems.
A year later, in Q2 2015 Apple’s iWatch and sold 4 million in three months. This is not a bad number as Samsung sold 400,000 watches while all others managed to ship 900,000 in the whole quarter.
What this means is that Apple instantly captured 75.5 percent of total market in Q2 2015. Samsung used to have 73.6 percent of market in Q2 2014. In Q2 2015 it dropped to 7.5 percent. This huge drop was thanks to a great success of Apple Watch.
All others dropped a market share from 26.4 percent in Q2 14 to 17 percent in Q2 2015. Total growth of the smart watch market year over year is 457.3 percent.
Strategy Analytics admitted it did not use “real numbers” but felt its guess was close to the truth.
Source:
http://www.fudzilla.com/news/wearables/38295-apple...
Mind the Gap in expectations
The launch of Apple Pay in the UK has been a complete disaster, the software does not work, the system charges you double, and some leading banks do not support it yet.
HSBC was named and shamed for not having the service ready and had hate mail from fanboys as a result. For those who came in late HSBC has won awards for the security on its bank accounts but for some reason it has been slow in allowing Apple pay into its systems.
HSBC was originally listed as one of Apple's banking partners at launch, but has since said its account holders won't be able to use Apple Pay until later in July, now confirmed as July 28. The delays frustrated Apple fanboys who flooded twitter to vent their spleen.
However it turns out that HSBC's delays might have saved its customers from losing a pile of dosh.
Transport for London has warned tube, train and bus passengers paying with Apple Pay on iPhones and Apple Watches not to let their batteries run flat or they could get stuck at gates and face penalty fares.
Apple Pay only works if a device has power. It warns that, if the battery runs out in the middle of a journey, a user will not be able to tap out, which means they could be charged a maximum fare.
It also warns that receiving a call while attempting to touch into or out of the gates will also cause issues, and that users with multiple cards on their account must remember to use the same one or potentially be charged twice.
Early adopters have also complained about the speed of Apple Pay compared to Oyster or contactless. Difficulties using Touch ID to authenticate payments combined with the speed at which a payment is recognised have been causing problems for some.
In short Apple did not figure all this out before launch and priming its Tame Apple Press to sing its glory. However the BBC could not even get it buy a cup of coffee. The Beeb put it down to teething troubles, but given the system has been running in the US for a while you wouldn't expect to see so many problems like this.
Brandwatch, a company which calls itself an "enterprise social intelligence platform", and which monitors social networks to find out how twitterers feel about things.
The company compiled a list of 26,000 online mentions of the Apple Watch UK launch, and so assembled an unwilling focus group of 15,789 people.
It is fairly clear that people are struggling with the technology. Brandwatch found that ten per cent of posts are about how to get it to work, with Brandwatch saying that:
Apple Pay is not getting much traction in the US, where the big retailers are thinking of coming up with their own ideas. Rival payment services are now starting to look rather more useful.
Source:
http://www.fudzilla.com/news/mobile/38271-apple-pa...
Michael Bay - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
Your stereotypes are badly out of date.djvita - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
IBM partnered with apple to provide macs to employees, 50 projected this yearMichael Bay - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
One more nail in the coffin.Notebooks are still good regardless.
xype - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
Are you like a crazy person?ingwe - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
Okay jjj. I'll take you bait. I generally disagree with you but also think generally you make some good points. That said, I think your bit about Mac buyers not thinking about what they are buying to be especially asinine. I bought a MacBook Pro 7 years ago because at that time it offered what I was looking for better than anything else on the market.I couldn't care less about people who have problems with Apple. But please don't be a jackass because it obscures the genuinely good things you have to say.
ingwe - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
Also I hate the lack of an edit button...name99 - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
I'm not going to address the mac foolishness, but how do you see the watch sales as a failure? They've ALREADY, in three months, and with limited world distribution, sold more smartwatches than the combined total of all previous attempts (720,000 for Android Wear, around a million for Pebble).You miss the significance of the "June was the strongest month" message. It means that the product did not simply burst out the gate to be sold to the true believers and then fizzle. Instead, as people who did not care enough to put in their internet order the day that went live, encounter the watch on their friends's wrists, they are deciding they like it enough to buy their own. In other words it has legs and is slowly growing momentum.
Tim Cook said during the call something I independently thought a few days ago --- the watch fits in very well as a gift (for the sort of upper 15% Apple targets as customers). Which means it will continue with steady beat of sales for the rest of the year as birthdays unroll, a brief spurt as kids to to college, then a massive blowout over Christmas/Hannukah/Chinese New Year.
I expect the sales for the first year to exceed 10 million.
RT81 - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
Thanks for your insightful analysis. What would I ever do without it? /shanssonrickard - Monday, July 27, 2015 - link
"Mac sales are doing ok only because Apple had virtually no share and no presence outside the US and maybe a couple of other markets where they were not at 0"Say what?!
Sounds like something coming from an American that does not know anything about the rest of the world?! It sounds like you think Mac:s only sell in US.
MacDaddy100 - Tuesday, August 4, 2015 - link
"Apple buyer is by definition spending without thinking"?, That comment alone discredits your entire comment. As someone who owns, and have owned Macs AND PCs for a solid 20+ years, I have lived both sides of that argument. Yes some of my Macs can cost 20 to 30% more than my PCs, but they easily last twice as long as the PCs do, which if you're smart enough with a calculator its easy to see which is the better value.There's a reason Apple sticks with the same external Laptop housing for 5+ years without any external changes, just the internal upgrades once or twice a year, All Mac owners care about is performance, mean while, each PC manufacture come out with many different external laptop designs every year, all with the same basic internal, Thats what PC owners want, a shiny new external design, to hell with the performance specs.
If you doubt anything I'm saying, just go find the bare facts, Use Google to find them, note how Apple seldom changes the outside of the laptops, They just constantly upgrade the internal, Now look at the PC laptops, Each model changes looks constantly, at the same time, YOU CAN STILL GET A FRICKEN PENTIUM processor in 2015 PC laptops, Damn sure won't see them in any Macs.
Your comment holds NO water.
p1esk - Tuesday, July 21, 2015 - link
With so much money Apple could create a new equivalent to Bell Labs, and do some serious innovation. They could easily spend several billions per year on blue sky research.MikhailT - Tuesday, July 21, 2015 - link
The difference is that Bell Labs were meant to focus on crazy ideas with a large R&D budget and the closest company is actually Google and its moonshot projects.Apple is focusing on the least amount of markets, working on controlling the overall experience with a refresh of existing ideas. There's a reason Apple is always late to the game with not a lot of new ideas but a better experience.
WinterCharm - Tuesday, July 21, 2015 - link
You're right. Apple has never been one about CRAZY R&D Efforts with low chances to succeed. They've always steadily iterated, and occasionally entered new markets when the time is right.Wearables are still in their fledgeling stage. Apple Watch is already the most popular wearable, but it could be a lot better, and I think we'll see Version 2 sell like hotcakes!
p1esk - Tuesday, July 21, 2015 - link
But innovation would actually help them sell more stuff. As is, iWatch is a pretty mediocre gadget. For example, it can't function without a phone, and even with a phone it does not offer anything groundbreaking. What if they invest $10B into R&D focused on crazy ideas that could produce a new type of a gadget? I'm talking about such inventions as radio, TV, lasers, transistors, holograms, computer mouse, touchscreen, etc. You get the idea. It's not like there's nothing left to invent. The only obstacle is pretty much just funding.p1esk - Tuesday, July 21, 2015 - link
I guess my point is, with so much cash in the bank, Apple can easily afford a large R&D budget. Even if they don't invent anything after spending $10B and 10 years, they're not going to go bankrupt. But the potential rewards are high. So why not do it?modulusshift - Tuesday, July 21, 2015 - link
The Watch isn't completely innovation-less, you know. Despite what you may think of it as a device, it contains Apple's new few important focuses all at once. It has the Taptic Engine, which has been very widely praised in every single review for the Watch and the new MacBooks. It has Force Touch, which of course isn't a solution to every interface problem, but is definitely something that will be seen as a jump head and shoulders over the game once people see it in action on a more dynamic touchscreen device. It has an OLED display, which Apple has now shown is up to their standards and ready to arrive in more of their devices in the next couple years.And that's just the jumps Apple is ready to make in hardware. In software, the Watch starts a new design for Apple, one that starts with their font and reaches out a lot farther with time. No more linen, but no more vanishingly light fonts, either. Simple, clean, and functional.
Even if Apple didn't sell a single Watch, this product wouldn't be a flop, because it's a vanguard of the technology that Apple is putting into all their new hardware and software, and that will bring some much needed improvements in stability, optimization, and better design.
So why, again, does it matter that it's a little limited in functionality? Apple hasn't issued such an effective call to action since the iPhone, and everyone complained even more about that when it came out.
retrospooty - Tuesday, July 21, 2015 - link
I just vomited a little in my mouth as I read that. OMG people are weird.kspirit - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
I know right?"Even if Apple didn't sell a single Watch, this product wouldn't be a flop, because it's a vanguard of the technology that Apple is putting into all their new hardware and software, and that will bring some much needed improvements in stability, optimization, and better design." ??!??!?!?
HAHAHAH
whatsa - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
right up there with belief in fairies, if it doesn't exist( for people) its just the ramblings of the deluded brethenp1esk - Tuesday, July 21, 2015 - link
Sure, there are some innovations in iWatch. But they seem to be relatively minor, given the potential of Apple as a company.I'm talking about bigger picture: for example, imagine that you could actually talk to the watch like you would talk to a human assistant. As is, their Siri software is mediocre. It's not intelligent. But think of what would it mean if they could make it (more) intelligent? Sure, this is a tough problem, but why can't they at least try? Why would they want to wait for Google, or anyone else to solve it for them? Why not hire 200 PhDs, and give them 5 years to make Siri as intelligent as an average human secretary? Even at $200k of salary per year, this would amount to only $200k x 5 x 200 = $200M. Let's say they would need to build custom hardware to run it, say another $300M. $0.5B - I think we all agree that Apple can afford this kind of budget, especially if this might lead to a killer application for their devices.
I hope they are secretly doing that, but looking at their announcements about Siri development since they bought it 5 years ago, I don't think they are serious about it.
mdriftmeyer - Tuesday, July 21, 2015 - link
Imagine a stranger punching you in the face for being such a douchebag talking into your watch.xype - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
I disagree politely on two points:1) You’re assuming they aren’t hiring "200 PhDs" and doing all they can—which could very well be wrong (and most likely is). I doubt people at Apple are looking at their tons and tons of money and thinking "We shouldn’t be hiring all those expensive people!". If not more, read the rumors (and confirmed hires) in the automotive space.
2) You’re assuming the "innovations" are easy and Apple’s "potential" has anything to do with how much and how fast they can innovate. The problem with innovation (as we understand it in the computer tech space) is that there are two types of it; one is the pie-in-the-sky, we-have-half-a-prototype-half-working that a lot of companies are doing openly (see Microsoft’s Slate and how everyone thought they’ll kill the iPad in a few months after the concept video was out), the other is the kind of innovation that is actually being manufactured into working, on-sale products that you can actually buy. Apple sits tight in the second camp, and because that is less flashy than half-working "imagine how cool it would be!" concepts, people think they are not innovating or that their innovations are minor.
The thing is, Apple has stuff on sale _right now_. Thinking that whatever they sell is for some weird reason not at the very edge of what’s possible (and possible to manufacture) is assuming Apple is run by retards.
The truth of the matter is that Apple has been leading the industry in achieving the best compromise—sell what’s technically feasible to produce in insanely large quantities at the price people are still willing to pay for it.
It’s just sad that what seems really, really clear and obvious if you look at Apple and their success is something that escapes most "industry professionals" and "analysts".
p1esk - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
Nothing Apple sells right now (or has ever sold) is "at the edge of what's possible". Their products are good implementations of good ideas. Nothing less, nothing more. Yes, they are leading the industry, yes, they are successful. What are you arguing with? All I'm saying is their innovations are minor, compared to the best inventions made at companies like Xerox or AT&T.xype - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
iWatch is so God damn medicore that it’s the best smart watch out there, according to reviews.Apple doesn’t speak publicly about their "crazy R&D", that’s the main difference between them and other companies. Microsoft showed a Slate concept video and everyone shit their pants, Apple put the iPad on store shelves and everyone went "medicore, meh"—but just compare that to the Android/Windows tablets that were _shipping_ and tell me they don’t do any R&D.
Seriously, you think they closed down their R&D departments after the iPhone shipped? Do you think the Apple Watch is _trivial_ to make? Why isn’t everyone outdoing Apple, then? Why is Apple’s own A line of CPUs not less than half as good as what others are offering, if that stuff is so easy?
Heck, why don’t other manufacturers constantly beat Apple on build quality, if Apple is not doing any R&D work anyway?
p1esk - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
Sure, iWatch is the best smart watch out there. I'm saying that the best smart watch we have today is a mediocre gadget. I went to Apple store, and I played with it, and I'm not impressed with what it can do for me.No one disputes the fact that Apple is good at building and selling good products. What I'm questioning is their blue sky research ambitions.
FunBunny2 - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
-- It's not like there's nothing left to invent.Depends on what you mean by invent. Most of what exists today in the consumer space is stuff that was figured out decades ago. Compared to when Bell Labs was started, the picture of the physical world is 99.99% painted.
q_ex - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
Eerily familiar... E.g., Lord Kelvin circa 1900 "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement." There's some dispute as to the accuracy of the quote but the sentiment was certainly common during that period in Physics, just before relativity and QM took shape. So far at least, every time we think we're close to figuring out everything, mother nature offers up a pleasant surprise.... and that's what keeps us researchers in business :)FunBunny2 - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
-- Eerily familiar...The difference between 1900 and 2015: we know just about all that can be known about the physical universe. Once you have the periodic table, relativity, QM, the Bohr model, you've eliminated vectors of uncertainty within the knowledge space. That last bit is the point. Yes, we might be able to make 7nm semi-conductor devices, but that's just engineering, not physics.
p1esk - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
Let's see, just in physics: we still don't have a grand unified theory of how things work. We still don't know how QM and gravity are connected. We still don't know much about the dark matter - you know, the stuff that potentially accounts for 90% of the Universe? Quantum computing? Cold fusion? Room temperature superconductors? Yeah, looks like we have nothing left to do...FunBunny2 - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
-- Yeah, looks like we have nothing left to do...Nor will they, since we know the laws of physics, which we've proved, mean they can't be done. Even if there is a unified theory, the likelihood that it would lead to consumer products is nil.
Dark matter and dark energy are MacGuffins.
p1esk - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
Lol, I'm glad you have it all figured out. I guess our best physicists didn't get the memo...Michael Bay - Thursday, July 23, 2015 - link
Stop listening to Tyson.FunBunny2 - Thursday, July 23, 2015 - link
-- Stop listening to Tyson.Yeah, he's just an affirmative action physicist? Right?? Mod: that's sarcasm, if you're too dumb to see it.
Michael Bay - Friday, July 24, 2015 - link
He`s an administrator _at best_. Your failure to see something so trivial is rather funny, hence grasping at straws with his race, which has exactly nothing to do with it.FunBunny2 - Tuesday, July 28, 2015 - link
-- He`s an administrator _at best_.So, not only is he AA (and got promoted to Admin to make the numbers look better), but managed to so mis-understand astrophysics that he's to be ignored?????
Sagan was his mentor and idol. Ignore him, too?
Shadow7037932 - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
> Apple Watch is already the most popular wearablNo it's not. The most popular *wearable* is hands down the Xiaomi Mi Band which sells a few million units each month.
xype - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
Interesting, but would make sense. Got any reliable link to the numbers?name99 - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
Comparing to Mi Band is like saying the iPhone 1 was irrelevant because 220s sold in far larger numbers.Something like the aWatch clearly points to the future, the Mi Band points to the past.
Don't fixate on the category "wearable" --- if you insist on being stupid about that then, hell, the most popular wearables are the sorts of digital watches we've had since 1970. Fixate on the category of "wrist computer".
nafhan - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
The iWatch is a wrist computer, and my Nintendo Wii is living room computer. Technically both statements are true.Oxford Guy - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
"You're right. Apple has never been one about CRAZY R&D Efforts with low chances to succeed. They've always steadily iterated, and occasionally entered new markets when the time is right."The Apple Lisa was the single most innovative PC ever introduced, period.
FunBunny2 - Thursday, July 23, 2015 - link
-- The Apple Lisa was the single most innovative PC ever introduced, period.Well. It just stolen from the Xerox Star.
Oxford Guy - Thursday, July 23, 2015 - link
Cute, but stupid.sligett - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
They spent over $2 billion on research last quarter. It can't all have been about better trackpads.Oxford Guy - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
It takes a lot of effort to find and utilize tax loopholes to the fullest extent. Ask Microsoft.name99 - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
How do you know that they haven't? You have no idea what they are doing in, for example, AI research.The real complaint you should have is not that they aren't doing the research, but that they aren't publishing anything. This IS a real concern, and one I have made publicly many times. But I fear that it is inevitable. Apple feels that they were ripped off regarding the iPhone, and that the court system was not a viable means of redress, partially because it's so slow and capricious, partially because it lends itself to mockery in the press and on the internet ("patenting round rectangles" and all that nonsense).
So the new strategy appears to be to rely vastly more on trade secrets. They will create a new product family (watch) but they will tell would-be-competitors practically nothing helpful about it. How many sales does it generate? Which models do customers most favor? What do customers want improved? What are the characteristics of the SoC and the CPU? etc etc. Apple is saying nothing about these, and I don't expect that to change. Just like when the A8 came out (and soon enough the A9) Apple said nothing beyond "they're better CPUs".
If Apple adds value prediction to their CPUs (something that has been discussed for years but has never been commercially implemented as far as I know) they will say nothing --- let other people spend a billion dollars doing that research. Likewise if Apple switches from a ROB to a checkpoint architecture, or any of a dozen other types of improvements that all have to build on substantial R&D.
I certainly don't like this development, but I don't see a feasible alternative for Apple. The types of innovations they wish to protect, innovations in "usability" and "design" are easily mocked as obvious and trivial, so they cannot rely on the legal system and have to rely on secrecy. It's not wonderful, but that appears to be the solution our great society has decided upon.
The best we can hope for, I think, is that apple's innovations DO leak out over time, as engineers leave the company. Learning how Apple did things five years after the fact is of less competitive consequence to Apple, while still benefiting society at least somewhat.
p1esk - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
I don't know if they have. But it's not just they didn't publish anything. They haven't done anything of the kind I'm talking about.For example Siri: in the 5 years since they bought the technology (note: bought, not developed) it hasn't improved much. I occasionally try using it, last time a few months ago, and it's still as dumb as it was in the beginning. In the same 5 years NLP field has made some significant advances: Google came up with word2vec, Facebook developed memory networks, others demonstrated impressive results with seq2seq RNNs, etc. What has Apple done exactly in regards to Siri development?
name99 - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
To claim that Siri has not improved since it was released simply reveals that you either don't know what you're talking about, are not interested in the actual truth, or don't actually use the product, certainly not day to day.As for AI, you are aware that AI (at the sort of level of Google Now) is THE focus of iOS9? How can you claim Apple is doing nothing in this space when it is THE headline feature of their next version of iOS? The public face of this work is the Siri team, though who knows how much was done by a more "academic" research unit within Apple.
You're welcome to claim (based on utterly no experience, with a product you've apparently never even heard of) that iOS9 sucks, and the rest of us are welcome to claim (based on your previous comments about Siri) that you honestly don't have a clue what you're talking about.
p1esk - Thursday, July 23, 2015 - link
My claims about Siri is based on my experience with it. I don't use it every day precisely because it's not very useful. I do give it a try every few months or so, hoping it improves. From what I see, it hasn't. This is my personal opinion, based on my personal experience with it - nothing less, nothing more.For example, Siri does not even understand my accent most of the time. Google Now understand it much better. That's the first strike. Second, those of my questions it does understand, it just shows me google search results. Last I tried asking it a simple question: who's running for president? It didn't provide a clear answer. Try it, maybe you will have a better luck.
FunBunny2 - Thursday, July 23, 2015 - link
-- Apple feels that they were ripped off regarding the iPhoneCouldn't patent a round cornered rectangle??? boo hoo. Remember, it was Steve who crowed about stealing. And Apple has been brazen in doing so. Sauce for goose, and all that.
id4andrei - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
China is the biggest contributor to this quarter and has been ever since Apple struck a deal with China Mobile.stefstef - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
balmers attempt to get into the important phone (os) market wasnt exactly unlogic. ballmers belief: people dont want windows phone due to the lack of attractive smartphones running it. now the wheel of knowledge turned ahead once more - people dont seem to not like the platforms on which windows phone is running. they just dont seem to like windows phone, which sounds like a harsh judgement, but as windows phone (like nokia symbian os) wasnt really a bad thing the cheers go to the competitors who make "good" solutions no longer a choice when it comes to the sales. despite that microsoft spent a lot of effort in making it up to the competition but finally never did it (e.g. app store).TEAMSWITCHER - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
40% margins and nearly 50 billion dollars in revenue. There is simply nothing to argue about here. Apple is Awesome!imaheadcase - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
They also lost like 50BILLION yesterday in stock market selloff.name99 - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
"They" lost $50BILLION?I don't think you understand either stock ownership (most Apple stock is not owned by Apple the corporation) or accounting (the only people who lost money yesterday were those who bought at a higher price than they sold).
True statement: Apple's market cap dropped by $50 billion yesterday
False statement: Apple lost $50 billion yesterday.
Additional true statement: No-one with a brain gives a damn about the momentary gyrations of stock prices. They go up they go down. They were lower than today on July 9, they'll probably be higher than yesterday by September.
WaltC - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
Let's face it, Apple is a cell-phone company today. Yawn...;)name99 - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
Uhh, Apple is a pocket computer company. And soon to be the premier writs computer company.To claim that pocket computers are not important is as stupid as claiming that PCs were not important. Remind me --- how did that work out for DEC?
FunBunny2 - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
-- And soon to be the premier writs computer company.The Watch is hardly a computer. It's just an X-term for the iPhone. Until such time as there's a battery at least twice as dense as today's best, and a SoC that can actually do some compute that's useful on 1 square inch, Watch will continue to be a fancy terminal.
name99 - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
And you don't think that will happen soon?People like you make fun of non-techies, but you're just as blind as them. For fsck's sake --- you have LIVED through the smartphone revolution, you have experienced first hand how fast things improved. But you don't have the imagination to see that the exact same pattern will happen with wrist computers? Only even faster thing time round, because Apple has more money to throw at the problem and more control over the entire process.
It took three years to get from iPhone to iPhone4, the product that was clearly the great leap forward, the iPhone the way it wanted to be --- finally enough RAM, enough CPU and GPU, good enough screen that using it didn't feel like a compromise.
If aWatch does the same thing in three years it will be impressive, but it's quite likely that this time round Apple can do even better; aWatch2 simply fixes the most glaring problems in aWatch (especially since it's probably already fully designed and the manufacturing is being specced out), but aWatch 3 is the chance to redo everything and kick it out the park, everything from a 14nmFF dual core SoC to Apple designed heart rate monitor and touch screen controller to dual microphones, maybe even a camera.
name99 - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
Oh, forgot to add. You're clearly unaware of what's coming in WatchOS2. As soon as September or October, you silly crack about "x-term for the iPhone", a statement that's already false in many ways, will become even more false.Once again you refuse to learn from history. The first iPhones were, to use your language, "x-terms for iTunes". But every OS release added more autonomy, first native apps, then setup without iTunes, wireless backing up, iCloud support for photos and music, etc etc. And once again, why do you expect the same pattern won't happen with aWatch?
ALREADY we have seen the first step, from the crippled apps of WatchOS 1 (cf Apple's recommendation of web apps for iOS 1) to the watch-hosted apps of WatchOS 2 (cf the native apps of iOS2). People like you seem to have not a clue about how LONG it takes to do anything worthwhile, and so how long the relevant planning has been in place. You seem to imagine something like "Apple learns people want native IOS apps, or Watch apps, and so they reverse course and put together the dev environment and tools in six months". Don't be an idiot. Putting these things together takes years, and they are released on a particular phased schedule.
As I pointed out in another comment, Apple checked into Clang the support for the ARMv7k ISA (the ISA used for WatchOS) in 2011! They were obviously laying the groundwork for the watch project back then 4 years ago (using a Marvel Armada CPU, which supports ARMv7k as a host CPU for the software development, while others designed the SoC). I expect Apple have the large scale plans for their SW and HW laid out at least four years in advance across all their product lines; and believe me, the aWatch 4 years from now is NOT today's aWatch but available in five different anodized colors...
FunBunny2 - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
-- Oh, forgot to add. ...Without twice or thrice the battery, none of that will happen. More to the point, name a Killer App for a 1 square inch display. And, as to all those cool health monitors, there is the minor matter of being able to read such from the top of the wrist.
FunBunny2 - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
-- finally enough RAM, enough CPU and GPU, good enough screen that using it didn't feel like a compromise.Finally??? As if there were some tech impediment??? It was just Steve's Reality Distortion Field convincing sheeple they should overpay. Until that didn't work anymore.
Oxford Guy - Wednesday, July 22, 2015 - link
Waaaaaaaaa!(Just post this at the top of the comments in any Apple-related article and save everyone all the trouble of reading and posting.)
kmmatney - Thursday, July 23, 2015 - link
The improvements to the iPad have been too incremental to spur sales. They just need to come out with a 12" model, and sales will be up again.bill5 - Friday, July 24, 2015 - link
Man these guys are quite the Apple biased fanboys eh? Funny for these "great results" apple stock tanked after their release taking the whole Nasdaq with. Plus wasn't iWatch sales near a standstill? Hmmmmbill5 - Friday, July 24, 2015 - link
I recently sold my Apple stock. I dont think a gay man (Tim Cook) can successful lead a corporation over the long term. Apple seems to be struggling, and there will always be a question at the top. Take when they recently capitulated to Tayloir Swift. All I could think was "yeah, Tim Cook probably ordered them too because he's gay and gay men see female artists like Swift as some kind of unassailable, perfect, divas, so he was probably all "oh ma gosh taylor swift! do what she wants imediate-ly!". But the funny thing was if Steve Jobs had dome the same I wouldn't have looked at it that way, it would have been more of a bold business move. Cause Jobs actually had balls, so I would know he wasn't just surrendering, but that it was a strategic decision.Oxford Guy - Saturday, July 25, 2015 - link
Your satire is overdone.FunBunny2 - Saturday, July 25, 2015 - link
-- Your satire is overdone.Left wing satirists **here**??? Now, that's real satire.
stefstef - Monday, August 10, 2015 - link
i am disapointed with apple. the new watch, well .. but i thought they would advance and present something like an iphone core or iphone compute which really gets an os to work with. and several extenders like a larger screen dock to make it a tablet, a desktop dock to turn it into a personal computing device or stuff like that. the time of the ipad is over i suppose. things might cumulate into the iphone which happens to be their best selling product. abandoning the old and stepping forward into the future has always been their strength. now they are as scared to inovation like everyone else.