Apple expected to post fourth consecutive quarterly sales decline Thursday::Analysts haven’t missed Apple’s lack of growth this year and want to see the company thriving again.
Maybe it’s ok that if you’re the most valuable company in the entire world that you don’t continue growing forever?
Hard agree. I love Apple to death but the whole idea that a company must be more and more profitable every quarter/year needs to go. There are simply too many other important factors that can’t be ignored (climate, quality, human rights, etc).
In a finite world the system of capitalism demands unlimited growth.
Plus, i mean, it’s a phone. There isn’t much more to can do after a certain point.
Now that would set a bad precedent. Smaller companies would see that and think that they don’t have to lay off half of their staff every few years to keep line going 📈
Some may say this is due to lack of innovation and while that’s probably true so some extent, there’s only so much you can innovate in a given product category.
I think part of the “problem” are their more and more confusing product lineups. In many cases it feels like the lower tier products only exist so they can upsell a potential customer to a higher end product.
For the iPhone, once you align the storage size, the base and the Pro model are like $200 apart. That’s a lot of money, but relatively speaking in the $1000 area, it’s not a huge gap. If you want a cheap phone, the cheapest one Apple offers is the iPhone SE starting at $429 for a 64 GB model and SoC aside it’s just horribly outdated (screen, battery, chassis etc.). I’d like to have a cheap iPhone to recommend to people, but $429 isn’t really cheap (it looks even worse in European prices) and it’s so gutted you wouldn’t recommend it to your worst enemy.
Same with the base iPad. It’s no longer a cheap device, it’s quite expensive. And when you look at it, it’s basically a worse version of the iPad Air 4 at about the same pricing the Air 4 originally had. The screen isn’t laminated and their Pencil solution is a complete joke. Few weeks ago they launched a third pencil, so now you have to choose between three damn pencils and it’s just confusing. Oh, and of course the base iPad and the current iPad Air 5 (and the mini) start at 64 GB, with the next step being 256 GB. This is obviously on purpose because I bet many people would want 128 GB (64 GB is barely usable nowadays, with iOS already taking a big chunk out of it), but they have to get 256 GB. The base 128 GB Pro is only $100 more than the Air 256 GB, so you’ll probably be inclined to get the Pro.
The new base model M3 MacBook Pro is a stripped-down version of the previous entry model, and while it’s cheaper at $1599, it’s also so gutted with its 8 GB of RAM that you’ll likely upgrade anyways, and once you upgrade to 16 GB you’re so close to the “M3 Pro” model (yes, both the SoC and the device itself can have the same “Pro” suffix, so there is an M3 MacBook Pro and an M3 Pro MacBook Pro) which is just so much better (faster CPU and GPU, one more USB-C port, supports more external screens etc.). Their RAM and SSD upgrade pricing for their Macs is a complete joke to be honest. It either stagnated or got more expensive for many, many years while the rest of the industry moved on and SSDs especially are dirt cheap normally.
It’s confusing and it’s obvious that models below the best/most expensive one only exist to upsell customers to said most expensive one. Sure, upselling has been a big part of Apple’s strategy for quite some time now, but at least their cheaper products felt like complete packages. The iPad Air 4 was solid, and the current base iPad in the same price region is just silly with the Pencil setup. The white MacBook was quite solid, even when there was a 13" Pro model that was obviously better, the base white one was still good and a decent amount cheaper if you didn’t need specific features. The iPhone SE 2020 was competitively priced to what was out there in the $300-400 market back then, the current SE competes in pricing with the likes of the Pixel 7a, which is just so much better.
It’s obviously greed, they’re testing the waters, seeing how far they can push it.
There’s no innovation coming from them anymore. They keep releasing the same devices with updated and pricier technology and people are bored of it.
Personally I think it’s simply market saturation in the smartphone industry. Vision Pro is an innovative new product in a new product segment—and yeah of course it won’t be perfect right out the gate—but at least they’re opening doors for their future.
Yeah, everybody who wants an iPhone has one, and most people aren’t upgrading every year, despite what the stereotypes say.
And as far as the Mac goes, most people who wanted Apple Silicon upgraded when the M1 was the hot new thing. People held off on buying a new Mac in the latter half of the 2010s because of the keyboard and thermal issues, and once Apple Silicon was announced at WWDC in 2020, we knew the Intel Macs’ days were numbered. Most of us bought an M1-based Mac once the model we wanted came out, since the M1 models essentially fixed what was wrong with the Mac.
The Mac is the big one. iPhone sales are strong, stronger than pretty much everyone else in the smartphone market which is down as a whole, but Mac sales are down double digits.
Even then they’re expecting a 1% decline YoY for this quarter, and 5% growth YoY for Q1 which ends in December.
It’ll pick up again, I’m sure. The M1 family fixed almost everything wrong with the Mac, so people were eager to get it, and now we’re set for a while. I’m personally going to hold onto my M1 Pro for at least a couple more years.
Yeah I’ve got an M1 air and I’m set for a long time. M3 intrigues me but I don’t actually have the need for it.
Apple silicon was such a jump that we’re seeing the pig in the python for a while. Everyone who could use it upgraded it with M1. Nobody needs the upgrade other than the bleeding edge users. And for them it’s worth it. But for everyone else it isn’t.
So we’re only gonna see people that just love to spend money, or people where the incremental advance will save money over the next year.
So I’d expect for M3 to still see declines, though smaller. But in a year when M4 is announced and we start seeing people with M1s start upgrading, we’ll see things tick back up overall slightly. M5 I think will be the next big jump, beause it will be the next big bump when people that bought M1s will start upgrading.
I agree. I definitely noticed that the event (correctly) targeted people who are still on Intel. A few YouTubers laughed about the Intel references, comparing them to breaking up with an ex, but I think that was the right call.
Apple very rarely even acknowledges other companies’ existence in general. So that’s not a surprise.
They targeted people on Intel Macs specifically because they’re the last ones that haven’t moved to Apple silicon yet.
They targeted people on Intel Macs and M1 specifically, because those are the people that don’t upgrade often and openly buy new when performance dictates. Everyone else upgraded with M1 and M2. M3 is getting everyone else on board, plus some M1 upgrades.
I would bet that internally Apple doesn’t expect a big jump until M5 in a few years, when the base M1 users start upgrading en masse. M4 will be getting the last Intel holdouts over onto Apple silicon.
This, and they’ve positioned themselves as a luxury brand in a cost of living crisis. Look at B&O etc. I remember when ibooks came out that were cheaper than the previous year.
But they’re a conspicuous luxury, which many people clearly feel the pressure to own, even if it means sacrificing more basic needs.
Baltimore and Ohio Railroad?
Body and odour. It’s a new deodorant line.
B&O
Maybe they mean Bang & Olufsen?
What are you talking about?? They made stupid cartoon emojis that no one uses.
/s
I was strongly considering an iPhone this year. It would have been my first time since the iPhone 4S. Ultimately the overall cost of the Pixel 8 was nearly half of what it would have cost me to get the iPhone. I couldn’t justify the extra cost for not really gaining anything extra.
I hear a lot about pixels on here, yet everyone I know owns a Samsung. What are the benefits of a pixel over let’s say one of the last few years models of galaxies?
GrapheneOS
No shutter lag. I was considering an S23 before settling on a Pixel 7 cos of that.
The September quarter isn’t Apple’s biggest or slowest quarter of the year and only includes about a week or so of iPhone 15 sales. The December quarter is Apple’s biggest of the year by revenue — right now, analysts expect $122.97 billion in sales, or 5% growth, even versus a quarter last year that included an extra week because of fiscal calendars.
So this article is a complete nothing burger. They’re expecting a 1% decline this quarter compared to the same quarter last year, while expecting the next quarter to show 5% growth over last year.
Which is unsurprising. Last year the iPhone 14 released on September 16, while this year the 15 lineup wasn’t released until September 22nd.
I thought it was telling that they released a new iPhone this year and the only thing they could think to promote about it was that it had titanium in it.
They have some of the best marketing people out there and that was literally the only selling point of their new model of their flagship device.
I feel like it’d be hard to buy a phone that didn’t do everything you’d want it to do in 2023. I don’t feel like we’ve advanced the way that we’re using them or what we’re using them for in years.
I guess aside from how to serve us ads, in which case they should be paying us.
Yeah bruh, I don’t think aapl is gonna be a bad buy for anyone with a mid to long horizon.
