Apple expected to post fourth consecutive quarterly sales decline Thursday

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 161 points – Apple expected to post fourth consecutive quarterly sales decline Thursday
cnbc.com

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.

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Maybe it's ok that if you're the most valuable company in the entire world that you don't continue growing forever?

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 📈

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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the cheapest one Apple offers is the iPhone SE starting at $429 for a 64 GB model and SoC aside it's just horribly outdated (screen, battery, chassis etc.).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.

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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.

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

How do you install it, what's so great about it? I keep seeing this pop up, but I don't know how it works.

@GrapheneOS is an alternative OS that provides better privacy than the stock Android that can be installed on Pixel devices.

https://grapheneos.org/install/

> GrapheneOS is a private and secure mobile operating system with great functionality and usability.

@Corkyskog

Wait wouldnt that block any and every google service? Seems kind of nuclear to never need maps or anything like that.

Maybe I misunderstand.

The Android Open Source Project (AOSP) is the base for both operating systems.

GrapheneOS actually makes a lot of effort to provide solutions that are mostly better than what stock Android provides.

https://grapheneos.org/features#sandboxed-google-play

@Corkyskog

Cool. So let's pretend I have very little knowledge of how phones work. How difficult would it be for me to install? I assume you have to do the installation over usb-c connected to a laptop?

How long is the process, and how long would it take me to install any basic apps I would want, including sandboxed Google apps?

This video covers most of your questions.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=qxAnWYUvDxg

Alternative 🔗:
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=qxAnWYUvDxg
https://piped.video/watch?v=qxAnWYUvDxg

@Corkyskog

Thanks I watched your links, now my only questions is besides security are there any other reasons for Graphene, like battery life? Just making the decision of getting like a Galaxy 21 or 22 or a pixel. The thing that is most important is battery life for me.

You can get good battery life from a Pixel 6, 7, or 8 series device even with stock Android.

It only gets better when flashing a custom OS, particularly GrapheneOS, because you have more control over which apps can be running or using the network / location chips because radio or location can chew through battery charge very quickly.

@Corkyskog

Is the pixel worse for data gathering than a Galaxy? Or is it just the ability to flash graphene that all the privacy stuff comes in?

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.