I wonder if Apple have a demographics problem looming. The teeth-gnashing wife probably has had iPhones since the beginning and her reasons for not wanting to s

I wonder if Apple have a demographics problem looming. The teeth-gnashing wife probably has had iPhones since the beginning and her reasons for not wanting to switch are understandable enough. She can also look after her phone and not need so many replacement devices. But the kids who didn't get on the Apple bandwagon when iTunes was a groundbreaking exciting thing with an Apple ecosystem that made it all work wonderfully? I suspect that the kids who expect parents to pay for everything might be burdened with commodity Android devices that cost a lot less than the deluxe Apple phones. Lose the phone too often and it becomes a distinctly mid to low end commodity Android device. If that happens then they get to be outside the Android ecosystem and grow up not needing Apple. Meanwhile, the parents just don't replace their phones often enough as what they have is good enough. Apple can't produce a low-end device as this would cannibalise their premium sales so they are stuck in the realm of hardware and need to push this services model on their customer base. As time goes on an a phone is just a commodity 'hand rectangle' with little class value. Having the latest and greatest doesn't make you one of the cool kids any more than having a fancy laptop makes you special. There are no queues outside the stores on launch day anymore and there is no returning to that. A further problem that Apple have is the amount of markets affected by currencies that have gone south or are protected by tariffs. This affects their competitors too, slowing down the upgrade cycle. The UK is a significant market for Apple and after the Brexit vote the pound lost 20% of value making the latest and greatest iphone cost a pretty penny. Unless you are rich enough for these things to not matter then you do have to ask what you are getting for paying five times as much for a fancy iPhone rather than a similarly sized screen on an Android budget device, particularly when signal strength/battery is a huge part of what the product is.