Lots of people disappointed in the new iPhone. The reason I see is simple; Apple has long been outsourced a large fraction of its hardware innovation capabilities to other companies rather than having a full vertical ownership of the production line, unlike its competitors (Samsung, Huawei, etc).
This works very well when most of the required technologies are already there for bringing their idea to the reality so Apple doesn't have to push the state of the art for the manufacturing technologies. Multi-touch, Retina Display, Apple designed SoC were all good examples where this strategy worked out very well.
The trouble is that now most of the low hanging fruits are gone and the rest of innovation opportunities lie within the manufacturer side and require non-trivial investments. For instance, getting rid of notch requires camera under screen technology. This is being developed by Samsung, their competitor. The same thing applies to fingerprint sensor under screen. While all the competitors are shipping 5G in their flagships, iPhone 11 couldn't ship 5G due to their hard dependency on Qualcomm. In short, the current landscape doesn't allow Apple to keep itself on the bleeding edge in the smartphone business.
I'm curious about how Apple will address this problem. Disappointingly, I haven't seen any positive signal to indicate that Apple has a good plan to address this issue. It first tried a high-price, even-more-premium strategy and this turned out to be a disastrous one. Apple now tries to expand into the services business and chooses to be a competitor to its own ecosystem by exercising its dominant position. I'm pretty sure that this plan will work very well, maybe too well sufficient to de-prioritize the iPhone business just enough to keep its marketshare around 3~40% and make no more commitments. I hope I'm wrong.
There will always be lots of people disappointed in the iPhone. We will only know the magnitude of disappointment once financials are posted. Speaking of which, R&D spend shows they are making non-trivial investments. Apple secrecy is what keeps you and I seeing the R&D results before they are ready. "Signals" is not something Apple likes to give, which is probably why you aren't seeing any. I would argue that hardware+software integration is more important than 5G, underscreen fingerprint, or notchless design combined. Apple is the leader in deep integration across hardware and software. Services is just an extension of having a default out of the box experience for the most important experiences on an iPhone. Nothing new here. First it was "notes", "calculator", "stocks", etc. Now they are moving up the services stack to movies, gaming, etc. Next it will be Uber / delivery via Project Titan.
> Speaking of which, R&D spend shows they are making non-trivial investments.
Unfortunately, Apple's R&D spend won't likely enable what they want to do on their phone. A large number of sources consistently suggests that Apple is experimenting various options to get rid of notch, but all those options depends on display manufacturers.
> "Signals" is not something Apple likes to give, which is probably why you aren't seeing any.
Apple definitely wants to prove their iPhone business has more potential to grow; why would they hide the growth potential of the largest business to their investors? The truth is that it doesn't see more potentials on its phone business and this is why Apple is aggressively investing into services business.
> I would argue that hardware+software integration is more important than 5G, underscreen fingerprint, or notchless design combined.
I wouldn't argue on a subjective issue, but just note that iPhone used to have the best hardware, software and their integration during Steve's era, which is not true anymore for hardware and the gap is increasing. As a 10 year iPhone user, this is very disappointing.
I don't think it is so subjective. Look at the customer satisfaction scores. You could certainly correlate those with measurable aspects of the user experience (software crashes, support handling, camera speed, render jank, etc). A lack of good hw/sw integration will show up.
As for not having the best hardware, what can you see about the A* series chips? They are industry leading year after year. Why? Apple took development in house [1]. Apple is now taking modem [2] and display technology [3] in house. They are doing all the right things.
Apple's DNA from the get go is being an integrator.
Wozniak knows how to put it together more efficiently and Jobs scoured catalogs to get the best deals and knew where to source in the valley.
The secret sauce is just the Apple way of putting it together and serving it to you.
The clone wars era taught them to stop doing that but those days have been so far spread to now that this we're finding ourselves repeating similar mistakes.
Additionally there was also the Apple era of just rebranding shit for the sake of establishing halos and ecosystems. There were a period of Apple branded Sony monitors and Apple branded printers. They opted out of that and went with the retail option these days. At least they learned from that.
But yes, Apple got bigger. What once was getting chips from Sunnyvale to Cupertino is now getting chips from Shenzhen to Cupertino. And the milestone we've hit now is Apple today announcing a new camera with phone communication abilities.
I'm thoroughly confused by your comment. Was not Apple's FaceID a full year, if not more, ahead of the competition? Sure they didn't sit in cupertino, stitching together components, but they designed an integration of existing components in a way that saved space and made them work in concert in a way no other competitor had. I don't think they're in as much trouble as you make out
Yes, FaceID is another good example of technology that could be brought to the reality without long-term strategical commitments from other big (possibly competing) companies. I'm not saying that Apple is losing its edge on product technology "design". Apple will still remain to be the best here at least for several more years. But it's also still true that the technological bar for manufacturing components is rapidly going up and Apple doesn't have much controls in this area.
My observation is Apple waits for someone else to make the hardware innovation (e.g., camera under screen being the next example of this), then they do a more polished version of that.
You think that Apple isn't working on putting the camera array required for FaceId under the screen? Of course they are. The problem is that it's the whole sensor array that has to go under the screen. Is that workable? Possibly, but I'm not a hardware engineer.
>Apple has long been outsourced a large fraction of its hardware innovation capabilities to other companies rather than having a full vertical ownership of the production line, unlike its competitors (Samsung, Huawei, etc).
Apart from Samsung which does Full vertical ownership, there isn't any other company which does that. And Huawei uses Foxconn as well, OLED from BOE, NAND and DRAM from Multiple Sources etc. There is nothing from Huawei that shows Full Vertical Ownership.
>While all the competitors are shipping 5G in their flagships, iPhone 11 couldn't ship 5G due to their hard dependency on Qualcomm. In short, the current landscape doesn't allow Apple to keep itself on the bleeding edge in the smartphone business.
Apple wasn't the first with 4G, but they drove 4G adoption. And 5G isn't even ready, all current 5G solution on the market are big, bulky and power hungry. But it is great people are driven into these marketing hype, only by doing so they could recoup some of their R&D investment. For Apple, they will move to 5G when it is ready.
Yes it didn't allow Apple to be on the bleeding Edge of Foldable Screen. Look at what happen to Samsung. Bleeding Edge means nothing. Not everything has a first mover advantage. Innovation doesn't just requires Bleeding edge, that is Invention. Innovation requires Invention that brings Value to masses, and for that to happen, pricing is often an obstacle.
Apple hasn't really been on the bleeding edge for a while now. Android phones had bigger screens, wireless charging, quick charging, NFC payment years before the iPhone had those features.
Apple strengths are in integration, design and marketing. Like mentioned, other phones had NFC payments way before the iPhone, but I'd say mobile phone payment really took off when Apple Pay came out. That's the power of marketing and influence at work.
Well on the hand other the Apple FaceID was in fact on the bleeding edge. Apple introduced it two years ago and we're only going to see it on the Pixel later this year. And for SoC performance I don't think any Android phone can surpass Apple's chips from last year. Apple really is on the bleeding edge for some things. You can't expect them to be on the bleeding edge for everything.
I don't think that's true at all. Apple is the only player that has ownership of the most important parts of software, hardware and services. That's why their products are better than their competitors.
Camera under the screen etc. are gimmicks that don't provide real value to customers. On the other hand, having the most performant SoC combined with the most performant software does provide real value.
This is a surprisingly thought-provoking comment and the theory checks out.
Until Apple are able to break out of this mould I feel they'll be stuck at this combination of
a) uninteresting yearly iterations
b) ever increasing base phone prices for little end user gain
I don't thinkt hey're able to paint themselves out of this corner on the smartphone front.
They have iOS as a decent but certainly not impregnable moat for iPhone. Some brand new groundbreaking product will be needed very soon to prevent the Apple stock price from steadily declining. (It already starting plateauing 15 months ago.)
Did the base phone price increase this year? I thought it stayed the same and improved some of the materials used in regards to toxicity and sourcing concerns.
Sorry, I guess I was super unclear. The new non-budget device is called "iPhone 11 Pro". I think it makes sense to look at the base price of this device, rather than the budget "iPhone 11" device.
This works very well when most of the required technologies are already there for bringing their idea to the reality so Apple doesn't have to push the state of the art for the manufacturing technologies. Multi-touch, Retina Display, Apple designed SoC were all good examples where this strategy worked out very well.
The trouble is that now most of the low hanging fruits are gone and the rest of innovation opportunities lie within the manufacturer side and require non-trivial investments. For instance, getting rid of notch requires camera under screen technology. This is being developed by Samsung, their competitor. The same thing applies to fingerprint sensor under screen. While all the competitors are shipping 5G in their flagships, iPhone 11 couldn't ship 5G due to their hard dependency on Qualcomm. In short, the current landscape doesn't allow Apple to keep itself on the bleeding edge in the smartphone business.
I'm curious about how Apple will address this problem. Disappointingly, I haven't seen any positive signal to indicate that Apple has a good plan to address this issue. It first tried a high-price, even-more-premium strategy and this turned out to be a disastrous one. Apple now tries to expand into the services business and chooses to be a competitor to its own ecosystem by exercising its dominant position. I'm pretty sure that this plan will work very well, maybe too well sufficient to de-prioritize the iPhone business just enough to keep its marketshare around 3~40% and make no more commitments. I hope I'm wrong.