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Robo
Formerly Roboman, still
awesome
 
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Portland, OR
 
2019-08-11, 18:42

I really would like to see Apple be hungrier, at the “low end” (which is really the industry’s mid-range). In the US, the lowest “official” price the iPhone ever hit was $349, with the eighteen-month-old iPhone SE, but last year they dropped that entire tier and the iPhone now starts at $449. It’s a little unusual to see Apple retreat from a market segment like that.

Meanwhile, iPads with the same A10 as the $449 iPhone 7 are available from $329 (and have been for nearly eighteen months), and iPods with the A10 are available for $199.

Apple was hungry, with the iPod. They didn’t just go for the high-end, they wanted to own the entire market, and honestly they did. When Jobs announced the $99 iPod shuffle to a shocked crowd, he said “we’re really serious about this,” and they were.

But with the iPhone, it’s like they’ve taken the foot off the gas a bit. Not so much at the high-end (each new iPhone continues to feature a SoC that is at least a year ahead of any other phone, so it’s difficult to say they’re not worth the ask), but at the low end. They seem intent on coasting with year-old and two-year-old models, like they’re okay with the iPhone being like the Mac and just dominating the high-end tier of the market. They were aggressive, with the SE, but then it’s like they backed off and that was just an aberration.

I think that’s a mistake. Especially with all the services Apple is pushing now – Apple Card, Apple TV+, Apple News+, Apple Arcade, and on and on – and especially with the other devices they’re selling that are designed to work with iPhone (Apple Watch), I think it’s worth trying to reach as many people as possible with the iPhone, even if it means making a dedicated midrange model (like the SE) instead of just selling two-year-old iPhones.

Throw in the fact that there are a lot of people who might not even want the XR’s larger size, and the case for new 4.7-inch phones become clearer.

It’s like the iPad. There was a little bit of weirdness, when the iPad Pro first come out, but you can draw a pretty clear line from the $499 iPad in 2010 to the $499 iPad Air 3 in 2019. The iPad Air is their “mainstream flagship” iPad, like the XR is. (It’s the one the iPad mini is based on.) But Apple isn’t content to just sell $499 iPads or even $399 iPad minis, so they introduced the $329 entry-level tier of iPad, which was in some ways a regression from the iPad Air 2 and mini 4 but reached a lower price point. And making a dedicated model for that price point allowed them to add features like Apple Pencil that wouldn’t have been possible if they just sold two-year-old models.

I think it would be worth considering making a midrange iPhone, for the same reasons.

and i guess i've known it all along / the truth is, you have to be soft to be strong

Last edited by Robo : 2019-08-11 at 19:01.
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