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I copied this amazing comment from a HN user a few days ago. I'll shamelessly paste it here since it's relevant to your comment: Lots of people disappointed i
by cheeko1234 7y ago
I copied this amazing comment from a HN user a few days ago.
I'll shamelessly paste it here since it's relevant to your comment:
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.