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Will your feelings be hurt if I tell you that all your concepts are wrong? Apple needs to do only one thing:

1) Raise prices on the November 2019 iPhone X replacement to make them more exclusive and limited in nature.

Apple is a luxury brand and they thrive when they make luxury items. When they go the budget route, when they try to discount, when they cheapen the product, when they try to go for a larger market share, things often don't go well.

See, we wealthy don't like it when any average Joe making $50K a year can have the same smartphone that we have.

You ain’t wealthy. You probably don’t even know what that means. And the “wealthy” certainly can give a **** if the phone they use is used by people who make less than them. Btw, the notch doesn’t make the XR a premium device, it makes it an ugly one. iPhone 8 all the way!!!!!
 
Especially this. Every maker out there is doing everything they can to give you new/better usability features. Apple give you Animoji by the truck load

1) Face ID, 2) Larger OLED Display, 3) Wireless Charging, 4) Longer Battery Life.

Those are the 4 breakthru features that last year drove iPhone X to become the best selling smartphone in history, especially notable for those of us who (raises hand) were still using the iPhone 6 and waited 3 years for Apple to come through with something different enough to justify the purchase.

The issue Apple is facing now is that a scant year ago 50 million iPhone 6 and iPhone 7 owners found a reason to upgrade and there aren't enough 7S and 8 owners left out there to repeat that kind of success. A year or two from now, Apple will come out with another great flagship iPhone with great new features and that will get all the X people excited again. 3 year cycle. With $1000+ prices and no carrier subsidies, that's how it is now.
 
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1) Face ID, 2) Larger OLED Display, 3) Wireless Charging, 4) Longer Battery Life.

Those are the 4 breakthru features that last year drove iPhone X to become the best selling smartphone in history.

Those are breakthrough features if you only live in Apple land and never look outside to see what the rest of the world is doing. Not one of the features you listed is truly breakthrough and has existed with other brands for a long time.

Apple makes good phones, no question about it. But they have not been a "breakthrough" company for a while.
 
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I'm pretty sure the iPhone X was not the best selling iPhone in history on a unit basis - that probably goes to the 6
 
It is silly thinking that Apple offers the best phones in the market, they simple don’t anymore... competition has surpassed Apple in some aspects and is a matter of time to start seeing something really interesting from them (or should I say we already have?), I cannot keep that mentality of “Apple sells the best, I can’t go outside my ecosystem, Apple is a luxury brand”.
 
It is silly thinking that Apple offers the best phones in the market, they simple don’t anymore... competition has surpassed Apple in some aspects and is a matter of time to start seeing something really interesting from them (or should I say we already have?), I cannot keep that mentality of “Apple sells the best, I can’t go outside my ecosystem, Apple is a luxury brand”.
Not true at all

In terms of performance/eco system/support and overall experience it’s for many the best out there

Android do amazing devices but for me the iPhone is still the best overall experience on a smart phone that syncs perfectly with all your devices
 
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1) Face ID, 2) Larger OLED Display, 3) Wireless Charging, 4) Longer Battery Life.

Those are the 4 breakthru features that last year drove iPhone X to become the best selling smartphone in history, especially notable for those of us who (raises hand) were still using the iPhone 6 and waited 3 years for Apple to come through with something different enough to justify the purchase.

The issue Apple is facing now is that a scant year ago 50 million iPhone 6 and iPhone 7 owners found a reason to upgrade and there aren't enough 7S and 8 owners left out there to repeat that kind of success. A year or two from now, Apple will come out with another great flagship iPhone with great new features and that will get all the X people excited again. 3 year cycle. With $1000+ prices and no carrier subsidies, that's how it is now.

Face ID is the only one innovation which was differentiative from the competition which is as inconsequential to the user as touch ID. most users did NOT see face ID as an attractive feature to buy the phone, they just saw it as a replacement which caused NO must buy impulse.

Users need a differentiative factor from the competition. You know what Google did? they brought in nightsight which was an OS feature which users thought of as a must have feature. they had this feature which allowed the phone call to be transcribed as the call was being made live.

Users want features which makes the iPhone an impulse buy and NO feature since iPhone 6 has done that. NONE
 
1) Face ID, 2) Larger OLED Display, 3) Wireless Charging, 4) Longer Battery Life.

Those are breakthrough features if you only live in Apple land and never look outside to see what the rest of the world is doing. Not one of the features you listed is truly breakthrough and has existed with other brands for a long time.

You mean it negatively but you just summed it up perfectly; innovations don't matter to iPhone owners unless those innovations are in an iPhone. I am proud of the fact that I don't have a clue what Android is doing and never having been driven by financial constraints to need to resort to a budget handset like that.

Furthermore, it's a point that is meaningless and gets beaten to death, this concept of Apple lacking innovation. To the 50,000,000 of us who were in iPhone 6's and 7's last year those four features were new to us and that's all that mattered. Out came $1000+, welcome iPhone X. I bought 4 of them.
 
Wow, Google has sold maybe 5 million Pixels, that’s around 0.1% of all smartphones! That’s like ultra-premium luxury territory!

Man, do you even know what luxury-class products are? Apple has dabbled only once, it was a $10,000 gold watch. Never again. Maybe you should check out a Vertu.

I think you’re confusing high earners with actual rich people. Even straight up middle class people can buy the same stuff you do pretty easily in a single paycheck or two. If you don’t have many bills, a $1k phone is nothing to someone bringing in a mere $2-3k a month. Poverty line folks just need to save up a few more months, or pay in installments.
Super luxury
 
Face ID is the only one innovation which was differentiative from the competition which is as inconsequential to the user as touch ID. most users did NOT see face ID as an attractive feature to buy the phone, they just saw it as a replacement which caused NO must buy impulse.

Users need a differentiative factor from the competition. You know what Google did? they brought in nightsight which was an OS feature which users thought of as a must have feature. they had this feature which allowed the phone call to be transcribed as the call was being made live.

Users want features which makes the iPhone an impulse buy and NO feature since iPhone 6 has done that. NONE
Great subjective post that makes for great opinions on an internet discussion board.

I bought the max on an impulse buy due to the screen size "feature". Additionally the 2x optical zoom, smart hdr and outstanding dynamic hdr video "features" helped the sale along.

Appreciate your "opinions".
 
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Remember the old days with lines of people waiting at the Apple Store. All the hype, etc.

That's all gone.

Everything most of you are talking about is wrong. You are trying to make some kind of objective statement on what's right without the market research.

The market research says people want the current lineup of phones.

Problem is, giving people what they want (or think they want) doesn't excite anyone.

True innovators like jobs know this. What people want is 9/10 the wrong thing. People with a clear vision know what the right thing is and when you show them (or sometimes force it down their throat) then people get truly excited.

When you have a clear vision of what's right, excitement in trying to create that vision comes with it. As a developer, builder, engineer, what have you, that excitement gets cooked directly into the product weather you like it or not.

This will sound egotistical but in my own line of work I understand this and have brought things no one has seen before and changed the landscape of things. The truth is it's because I knew from the start the way things should be and didn't compromise on those ideas (well not too much). I bet the founders of amazon, eBay, etc would tell you the same thing.

I don't know the first thing about what the ultimate right iteration for the next iPhone should be. What I do know is that Apple seems to be missing the person who would know. All the products seem to be the result of market research which always leads to the same ******** downward spiral. You see it across industries and across time.

I hope Apple finds their mojo but as it looks to me from the outside, there is no excitement cooked into their products anymore.

They seem to be seeking some form of robotic perfection based on market research. Exciting things are always flawed, far far from perfect but you can always sense of feel the excitement that went into creating the product.

For some simple analogies to all this, for car fans BMW used to be a brand for people who loved cars and driving. Then the company decided to chase the Chinese market and now they make the most soulless cars you can buy and car enthusiasts are running day by day.

Put yet another way you can imagine the perfect looking girl or perfect wife but as great as she is you won't be as excied around her when compared to the average looking girl you met who hangs on your every word when you first meet her and the butterflies were everywhere...
 
They need to realise that their cash cow (the iPhone) is on the decline and focus on other services.

Generally speaking, Services has actually been on the rise for Apple in the most recent. But yes, You are correct. Tim Cook mentioned ‘boosting future sales through trade-in program marketing, monthly pricing options, and more focus on in-store services.’ Apple needs more structure here to appeal to the customer on *why* they would consider upgrading to a newer iPhone with a price point that is manageable (Keyword).
 
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In other words, even further price themselves out of the market?

Apple hasn't priced itself out of the market.

A year ago there were respected market analysts predicting that the iPhone X $1000+ pricepoint was a disaster, Ming-Chi Kuo who is supposedly some guru was predicting that the X was going to be the fastest discontinued iPhone in Apple history, you had every tech commentator on CNN, MSNBC, FOX, and Reuters predicting doomsday for Apple. Respected posters in this very forum were throwing darts at Apple, puffing their chests in victory, declaring the X an epic fail.

And what happened?

They were all wrong. Ridiculously wrong. iPhone X became the best selling smartphone in history, Apple's revenue skyrocketed, profits hit an all-time high.

Turns out, there is a luxury smartphone consumer who is tired of the commonplace Android's and old iPhone's seen everywhere who wants something more elegant and more advanced and they are willing to pay 10x what they were used to paying to get it. And we're still here. Loving our iPhone X's a year after its launch and in no rush to replace it. We're smart enough to know that innovation has maxed out and we're on a 3+ year replacement cycle.

So, yeah, things are going to be lean for Apple in 2019 and 2020 because all the luxury buyers and their pent-up demand shot out of a cannon last year and what's left now are the budget types who were waiting Apple out for a cheaper X. But eventually Apple will come out with a new flagship design with a handful of new features at a price near $1500 and the same people who are loving their X's right now will be buying them in droves once again and Apple's value will jump back up. Stop listening to Ming-Chi Kuo and listen to customers like me. We know what's what.
 
Every industry and corporation wishes it had its consumers begging them to release new unspecified ideas to sell them new products to replace their adequate existing gear.
 
I bought a Xr. A week later I returned it.
For me it was a terrible experience. A huge device that barely fit my pockets. Uncomfortable to use with one hand, it really annoyed me. Somehow its design also felt a bit less thought through than with previous iPhones. Although the big screen was nice to look at, it really didn't add much value to me.
I bought a second hand iphone SE and couldn't be happier with the decision. Saved a lot of money, and I just do the same thing in a more comfortable way.

For me the way forward for Apple to increase sales is to go back to smaller phones!
 
The way forward is to lower the prices and stop selling old tech (phones, computers, etc) at today's prices.
 
Stop. We all tend to view the world through our own lens and our own experiences. I've been to the 'real' China and it's not Shanghai. Here in the US I'll see more people with an iPhone 4 each day than I do with an iPhone 7 let alone an iPhone X. I'm comfortable financially yet my wife and I get the X and my teen daughter gets the 8. Most of her friends are fortunate to own a 6.

$1000 is a lot of money to a lot of people. Especially those going through post-subsidy sticker shock where they used to get a new iPhone every two years for $99 and weren't asked to plunk down $1200 cash or pay a monthly lease payment.

This is now the second or third consecutive "S" cycle that has disappointed Wall Street. It's no longer an anomaly, it's reality. The big spenders on the non-S cycle are a different group of consumers than those on the S cycle who wait out the year-old model hoping for a cheaper price. Apple has to stop catering to these S types otherwise they'll alienate the non-S group and wind up where no luxury brand wants to be- the middle.

Yeah, I was one of those people that used to get a free iPhone by signing up for one of those 2 year agreements. With the rise of prepaid, the days of "free" phones and contracts are over. So being asked to pay 1k for a new iPhone? Thanks, but no thanks. Apple needs an affordable phone. They had SE, but it's getting long in the tooth. Need am SE 2.
 
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Yeah, I was one of those people that used to get a free iPhone by signing up for one of those 2 year agreements. With the rise of prepaid, the days of "free" phones and contracts are over. So being asked to pay 1k for a new iPhone? Thanks, but no thanks. Apple needs an affordable phone. They had SE, but it's getting long in the tooth. Need am SE 2.

Apple is going further upscale. It’s what luxury brands do in a mature product category.

They don’t need a more affordable phone. They need a 2020 sequel to the iPhone X that is more exclusive and more expensive so as to satisfy the 50M luxury buyers who propelled the X and Apple to record results a scant year ago.
 
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Apple can justify their prices by bringing more to the table. The number 1 reason people aren't paying for an upgrade is because it doesn't offer as much as previous phones.

The XR is a good value, but it's not entirely better than the 8. The XR makes sense if you're coming from an older iPhone. I dare say if you're coming from a 7 or 8 and pick up an XR, then I question you as to why.
 
I once saw our friend BJ here make a post about a watch and it was a photo of a watch attached to what was unquestionably the sickly hairless forearm of a pasty sixteen year old waif.

Anyway, Apple needs cheaper prices to increase sales. My wife's Xs isn't worth a grand or anywhere near it and is a sorry excuse for a luxury product, because I recognize that it isn't and don't try to fake it like it is. Knowing a $1000 iPhone isn't even close to a luxury product for society's upper crust such as myself, now that's straight wealth right there. It's still amateur hour over at BJ's house I guess if he thinks a product a mere one dollar into the four figure realm is a luxury product, lol.
 
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Apple is going further upscale. It’s what luxury brands do in a mature product category.

They don’t need a more affordable phone. They need a 2020 sequel to the iPhone X that is more exclusive and more expensive so as to satisfy the 50M luxury buyers who propelled the X and Apple to record results a scant year ago.
And what if the vast majority of those getting the X weren't "luxury buyers"?
 
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