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Apple is basically a smartphone company at this point, and smartphone sales are plummeting. And I think they're plummeting for the same reason desktop sales plu

Apple is basically a smartphone company at this point, and smartphone sales are plummeting. And I think they're plummeting for the same reason desktop sales plummeted. We went from a time where a new PC was a bit dated in 3 months and obsolete in 2 years, to modern times where a desktop from a decade ago is good for pretty much everything, even including high end gaming if you started with a high end card. The exact same thing's happening to phones. I have a 6 year old phone that was cheap when it was new, and it still runs 100% of what I use my phone for, and most people use their phones for, perfectly. Tech hardware as a recurring business model only works when there's perceived significant improvements between generations. Trying to sell a few more pixels, or a fraction of a cm thinner case or whatever just isn't worth it for most people. So, as typical with corporations in this spot, they start flailing to try to maintain revenue, let alone growth. Microsoft became a 'cloud' company paired with a side gig of spyware marketed as an OS. It'll be interesting to see what Apple transforms into.

gizajob 1y ago
Nokia.
drob518 1y ago
Yep. And this is why “liquid glass” is the hot new thing this year. That’s basically all we have left to drive the refresh cycle that tech is addicted to.
- Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
  It surprises me that this is what apple has essentially boiled down to. Yes there are people stuck in the walled garden but they were willingly stuck there tbh. They liked apple vision and felt different. But if apple is just going to lose on all fronts ("AI","vision?","This year innovation=liquid-glass") Yeah, they might not be in a good state..., Also most people I see want an iphone just rebuy old iphones and those phones themselves are still in good conditions.
  - drob518 1y ago
    Well, I’m pretty entrenched in Apple’s ecosystem because I value the iCloud integration between my devices, but all my devices are a couple years old and I tend to keep them until they are no longer supported (M1 Air, iPhone 14, iPad Air M1, etc.). In particular, I don’t drive my iPhone hard. As long as it can do phone and texting and run a browser and the Kindle app, I’m good. Needless to say, I won’t be upgrading devices for liquid glass.
- supertrope 1y ago
  Just like the new fashion season, car model year updates, and spectator sport video games roster updates. Change for the sake of driving sales. Has anyone done fashion as a service (FaaS)?
Workaccount2 1y ago
Probably more hardware while trying to recreate the "your friends and family will leave you out" effect of iMessage.
- rrr_oh_man 1y ago
  not outside NA
sillyfluke 1y ago
>I have a 6 year old phone that was cheap when it was new, and it still runs 100% of what I use my phone for What's especially annoying about iphones is that my decade old andriod phones without any os updates work more robustly on the modern web than a 2021 iphone with its original os. You can blame it on chrome dominance. but it's pretty much bullshit if you're a company with Apple's treasure chest and you are no longer able to push out any buy-me features to make up for your outdated build and release cycle.
- Spooky23 1y ago
  You’re an outlier. Apple has arguably the best lifecycle in the personal computing space in all of its categories. They support most devices for 5-7 years, and have a strong incentive to do so as there is a pipeline of used devices into developing markets and their branding and segmentation means their devices have strong resale value. With your old android, you’re either running an open source stack of some sort, which is out of the reach of most users, or operating on an ancient os that Google or your carrier (or both) has long abandoned that leaves you vulnerable to a variety of issues.
  - hermanzegerman 1y ago
    > They support most devices for 5-7 years That's the bare minimum under the new EU Ecodesign Rules. Also for phones this is long, but for PCs/Notebooks this is rather short. >With your old android, you’re either running an open source stack of some sort, which is out of the reach of most users, or operating on an ancient os that Google or your carrier (or both) has long abandoned that leaves you vulnerable to a variety of issues. That completely misses the point that old Android Devices still get updated and recent Apps that work well, while Apple blocks their users from enjoying that. No more iOS Updates on Apple usually means no more App Installs/Updates after a short time
  - sillyfluke 1y ago
    >They support most devices for 5-7 years You're not responding to the case I'm specifically talking about. As new major iOS or Android releases have features I could care less about, I primarily only care about critical security releases for the OS I have. Why is it thatI have to install a new OS just to get a updated version of Safari? Whereas I seem to be able to download usable browsers on older Android phones (with older Android versions installed) from the play store? These phones are not my primary phones, so I'm less concerned with security and more concerned about them turning into bricks of trash sooner rather than later. A phone that can stay usuable for longer without any os updates versus one that requires os updates to stay usuable should get some points in that category. And it's been my experience that battery life of older phones are negatively affected after os updates anyway, as they are not the targete phones for new OS.
ericmay 1y ago
> I have a 6 year old phone that was cheap when it was new, and it still runs 100% of what I use my phone for, and most people use their phones for, perfectly. Just to be clear your suggesting that your 6 year old iPhone runs a suit of social media apps, full graphics games like Minecraft (or whatever the hell people play these days I don’t know), fitness apps, connects to the latest audio devices like Apple’s AirPods Pro (as an example), works with CarPlay/Android Auto, has wireless charging capability, can place 3D objects in a room to help you plan out a new design, and allows you to use payments features like tap to pay? Plus equivalent camera and video quality? Because if your phone doesn’t do all of those things and perform as well and have great battery life too, your 6 year old Android phone doesn’t really do what most people use their phones for today.
- BlueTemplar 1y ago
  > full graphics games like Minecraft Lol, this is a terrible example. Have you *seen* Minecraft ?!? (A game that came out 16 years ago and could already run on cheap hardware back then.) > or whatever the hell people play these days I don’t know Well, better, but then this will still be mostly simple 2D games like Candy Crush or Balatro : https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/balatro-review https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/balatro-review
- xyzzyz 1y ago
  I don’t know anyone who uses their phone to play full graphics games or use it to plan out interior design, and for everything else, a 6 year old iPhone can most definitely do all of that. I know, because I did all of these things on an iPhone 11 up until earlier this year, and I only replaced it because the charging port was damaged.
  - lightedman 1y ago
    "I don’t know anyone who uses their phone to play full graphics games or use it to plan out interior design" I use mine to design mines so people underground don't get killed - way more intensive than interior decorating.
iwontberude 1y ago
2015 Nvidia GTX 970 is such a piece of shit card, no you couldn’t do modern gaming. It has relatively few pipelines, low bandwidth and has no frame generation capability to make anything new playable.
- HighGoldstein 1y ago
  Op said "if you started with a high end card". The GTX 970 was Nvidia's mid-range at the time, and not a great one at that. A 980 Ti or Titan X can still perform reasonably well for a 10 year old card. Even with the 970, the real problem is its low VRAM (and the 3.5+0.5GB fiasco). The AMD RX 480 8G which was comparable but with much more VRAM can still run most games, even if you have to make some compromises.
  - BlueTemplar 1y ago
    Indeed, some compromises. A 2015 high-end is in 2025 a midrange at best. Especially since in 2015 that likely still meant FullHD in SDR, while in 2025 high end would be UHD-1 with HDR.
- gausswho 1y ago
  And yet it can capably power many classics. Skyrim. Portal 2. Witcher 3. The same argument made above about phone hardware is largely true for gaming. The hallmark of modern gaming (and increasingly television) is sadly one of eschewing artistic creation in favor of monetizing eyeballs and the construction of social phenomena, artificial scarcity.
  - Tradenko 1y ago
    The comment they replied to was that a ten year old PC can do high end modern gaming. Skyrim and Portal 2 are 14 years old, and Witcher 3 is 10. I don't think a 970 could run Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.
- Spunkie 1y ago
  You absolutely can do modern gaming on it. I literally have 2 friends in our gaming group that are still rocking 970 in their desktops. They have had to replace the fans on the graphics card a few times and a repaste but other than that they are chugging away. Also solid lol on "frame generation". Marketing fluff/features like that only exists but because they have run out of real generational performance gains to sell cards with.
steveBK123 1y ago
Agree they have a huge taste problem, but even besides that Apple has a huge incumbent problem now really. Smartphones ate the world, and they ate the majority of profit in the space. We are now 20 years on and the software is no longer driving the urgency of the hardware upgrade cycle it used to. Apple gets the majority of its revenue from iPhones and related services. Note that services category includes all sorts of App Store extortion payment stuff that they are slowly losing court cases over. iPhones are so big for them, no other product category created since is even in the same order of magnitude. Partially I think thats on Apple, but I look across the consumer electronics space and don't really see anything new categories they aren't already dominating anyway (tablet, smart watches, etc). One "moat" they probably do have is that in the US at least, theres not a lot of other physical retailers to go try out consumer electronics. 20+ years ago Apple Store were filled with 3rd party products, now its all Apple everything.
- wat10000 1y ago
  Apple’s MO, at least in recent decades, is to let others blaze the trail into a new space, then do their own version that gets it right. Smartphones were a big deal before the iPhone. People would talk about how they were addicted to checking email on their “crackberries.” But they were niche. You could see that they were going to be big, but they weren’t there yet. Then the iPhone catapulted smartphones from a popular niche to a ubiquitous product. Before the iPhone, they did the same thing with portable music players. Afterwards, it was the same story for tables and smart watches, although not with the same degree of ubiquity. Arguably it was the same for PCs (“personal computers,” not IBM-compatible machines, of course) and GUIs, way back when. What big upcoming thing would they do this with now? As you say, there really isn’t anything. Maybe VR/AR, but that isn’t even in the “popular niche” stage yet, the technology isn’t there yet, and it’s far from certain that it will ever be more than a tiny niche. Otherwise, what? Self-driving cars? That’s not a new market, that’s a product feature in an existing large, mature market. AI? That’s also looking like a feature rather than a new product category.
  - steveBK123 1y ago
    You're 100% right, Apple as a fast-follower "getting it right" tech company, and there's nothing to fast follow right now. IoT/smarthome has been a niche/fad going nowhere since day 1. Smart speakers are commodities. They dabbled in an EV project, canned it. They've dabbled in AR with the VisionPro but really it's too early, if it will ever work. AI is software not hardware. Apple smartphones/tablets/watches have essentially killed 10x more hardware categories than have come into existence since. They sell a lot of headphones I guess. The only consumer electronics I buy now outside Apple are basically higher end niche hobbyist stuff in for example music or photography. Nothing that would ever sell at the price levels ($200-1000) or volumes (billions) to move the needle for Apple.
hedora 1y ago
As far as I’m concerned, they don’t make smartphones anymore. Sent from my iPhone 13 mini. It it breaks, I’ll replace it with a refurbished 13 mini or SE 3. (My smartphone replacement budget is $1200.)
hliyan 1y ago
Maturity/commoditization of technology (a good thing) can only be seen as problematic in a world where steady-state businesses with steady profits are seen as "stagnant", and only companies that delivers (or at least promises) perpetual growth are seen as successful. Apple has been wildly successful. There has to be a world in which such a company can benefit from a demand spike without betting its entire future on that demand continuing.
- surgical_fire 1y ago
  > Maturity/commoditization of technology (a good thing) We are in a forum were more than once I have seen people deriding mature companies as "mediocre" because of "moderate profits". This idea that line must eternally go up and growth must be infinite is pervasive, no matter how destructive it is. The result is this unholy abomination of a union of hustle-culture and rent-seeking.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  That doesn't work when shareholders demand exponential growth year after year, with consequences, layoffs or whatever, when those numbers aren't met.
JimDabell 1y ago
> Apple is basically a smartphone company at this point, and smartphone sales are plummeting. iPhone sales aren’t plummeting at all: https://www.statista.com/statistics/263401/global-apple-iphone-sales-since-3rd-quarter-2007/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/263401/global-apple-ipho... https://www.demandsage.com/iphone-user-statistics/ https://www.demandsage.com/iphone-user-statistics/
- cjbgkagh 1y ago
  There seems to have been a downward trend for smartphones since 2017. Growth is either from an expanding market or an expanding market share, since it’s not an expanding market that leaves the market share. I would image there is some substitution, with iPhones lasting longer on average it becomes more cost effective to switch to iPhones so they capture more market share. But if the general market doesn’t expand then it’s a fairly safe assumption that the new converts are going to wait before upgrading meaning that a decrease in sales is already partially baked in. My anecdotal datapoint is 4 iPhones in 16 years which makes them rather cheap on an annual basis. Edit: I had assumed that parent was correct, but as the peer pointed out iPhone sales have declined
- wohoef 1y ago
  This is missing the last 7 years of data…
- andy99 1y ago
  The graph I see on that link goes only to 2018 and seems to show slight decline. What is the takeaway meant here?
  - JimDabell 1y ago
    Sorry, added a second source with more up to date data.
    - autobodie 1y ago
      the second source shows sales have been increasing.
andy99 1y ago
If they are offering value add services, I'd much rather pay for them directly than have them subsidized be ads, sort of analogous to MS Office 365 (ideally with better privacy). Maybe a direct pay model doesn't have enough reach for a big company in which case hopefully we'll get a Kagi-style paid phone OS from someone.
- michaelt 1y ago
  Unfortunately even if you're paying for the hardware, and paying monthly for iCloud, and paying 30% of every app and in-app purchase Apple still won't give you an ad-free experience. The cash brought in by ads is concrete, quantifiable, and can be attributed to specific people. The lost sales and eroded brand trust are almost impossible to measure or attribute. This means it's very easy for businesses to (inadvertently) incentivise managers to destroy brand trust in pursuit of profit. Nobody's every gotten a bonus for their restrained and tasteful decision not to put ads into something.
  - hylaride 1y ago
    On top of that, Apple users tend to be in the upper half of the income distribution - like in the USA iPhones are 55-60% of the market, but that skyrockets to well over 80% in the upper income half. There's a reason advertisers salivate at that (and why Google gives Apple billions to default to Google search).
Apofis 1y ago
I still have my iPhone 12 Pro that I preordered and got in release day and it still does everything I can ask of it, though the latest Call of Duty runs a bit slow, which is making me want to upgrade. Them not releasing a smart Siri that answers to more than just basic prompts is really hurting them and I can see why investors sued them. There's no reason for me to have to use ChatGPT on an iPhone, I should be able to talk to Siri like she's an actual personal assistant and not just an easier way to check the weather and set a timer.
hopelite 1y ago
I would say it’s simpler than that. Between Wall Street demanding “growth” and the executives’ stock options being tied to meeting those numbers, they always pull out any and all stops to push “growth”. As others have implied, with people like Jobs and others gone, there is also no cultural resistance based on core values that created Apple to push back on shameless debasement. It is also what is happening all over the western world in general as “growth” sacrifices the indigenous cultures and people at the altar of money for the executives, ie aristocrats, and anyone resisting or even just objecting is silenced, including here, because resistance to growth at all costs is futile.
- supportengineer 1y ago
  All you can do is be an executive, or failing that, be a shareholder
- pas 1y ago
  > resistance to growth at all costs is futile humans want to improve their (material) conditions, it's pretty much the thing we do at this point (that other species don't really) the issue that was a bit of an inconvenience, a mere side-effect of our culture is nowadays burning down the whole shebang we overvalue short-term gains (thus we have serious agent-principal and integrity issues), we have a laundry list of cognitive biases, and we managed to invent the weaponized cognitive-bias-exploitor and immediately tried it out on ourselves, and ... since the good old days of pamphlets and religious wars we are engaged in all kinds psyops. we are both great and terrible at "winning hearts and minds" (that's why it works, but unfortunately it works much better at turning people into crazy self-destructive antisocial trolls than courageous prosocial reformers)
  - roody15 1y ago
    “ we overvalue short-term gains (thus we have serious agent-principal and integrity issues),” Agree and would even make the argument that Chinas rise in some is a response to short term with patience. China is willing to move mountains and allow western corporations 8-10 years of ridiculous low labor costs and promote incredible profits. They then learn the process and the tech and now companies like TP-link, Huawei, BYD, tencent, and so forth are all legit and make good products. This approach can even be seen in their military. With all the talk of China invading Taiwan… the reality is it just won’t happen. China will patiently build the largest Navy and infiltrate the political landscape of Taiwan until they just peacefully transfer back into the fold. Not sure what the answer is here but perhaps we could learn something back ?
supportengineer 1y ago
You missed an important use-case. If my phone lasts for six years and I’m extremely pleased with it, then of course I’m going to buy another one. I’m going to keep doing that indefinitely.
- cronelius 1y ago
  6 year customer cycles are not recurring revenue. they want your money monthly and annually
scarface_74 1y ago
There is no evidence from Apple’s breakout of iPhone revenue that sales or “plummeting”. They are stagnant. And statistics show that the average person buys a new phone every 3 years. Apple’s laptop sales are also stagnate and not declining. Most people use laptops - not desktops. There is no six year old laptop that has the combination of speed, battery life, quietness and lack of heat that a modern M series Mac has.
deadbabe 1y ago
Apple is an ecosystem company.
heavyset_go 1y ago
Apple wants to be a services company that sells smartphones.
v5v3 1y ago
>Apple is basically a smartphone company at this point Not entirely correct. Apple is a software sales platform. Apple have stated that even older phones and iPads and macs will get the new OS26. Apple realised a long time ago that, as you said, consumers don't have a need to upgrade. So rather than taking the approach of others, which is to stop OS updates and then also security updates, which would result in compatibility issues. Apple are trying to maintain the largest possible user base. So they can sell to all of them.
- Tijdreiziger 1y ago
  Google tries to maintain a large user base as well. The problem Google has is that they’re dependent on phone OEMs to release OS updates, but OEMs mostly don’t make money off software. They ‘solved’ this by pushing a lot of security and OS features into Google Play Services, so they can update them independently of the OS. Today, you can get new apps and OS features even on older Android versions.

gizajob 1y ago

Nokia.

drob518 1y ago

Yep. And this is why “liquid glass” is the hot new thing this year. That’s basically all we have left to drive the refresh cycle that tech is addicted to.

Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
It surprises me that this is what apple has essentially boiled down to. Yes there are people stuck in the walled garden but they were willingly stuck there tbh. They liked apple vision and felt different. But if apple is just going to lose on all fronts ("AI","vision?","This year innovation=liquid-glass") Yeah, they might not be in a good state..., Also most people I see want an iphone just rebuy old iphones and those phones themselves are still in good conditions.
- drob518 1y ago
  Well, I’m pretty entrenched in Apple’s ecosystem because I value the iCloud integration between my devices, but all my devices are a couple years old and I tend to keep them until they are no longer supported (M1 Air, iPhone 14, iPad Air M1, etc.). In particular, I don’t drive my iPhone hard. As long as it can do phone and texting and run a browser and the Kindle app, I’m good. Needless to say, I won’t be upgrading devices for liquid glass.
supertrope 1y ago
Just like the new fashion season, car model year updates, and spectator sport video games roster updates. Change for the sake of driving sales. Has anyone done fashion as a service (FaaS)?

Workaccount2 1y ago

Probably more hardware while trying to recreate the "your friends and family will leave you out" effect of iMessage.

rrr_oh_man 1y ago
not outside NA

sillyfluke 1y ago

>I have a 6 year old phone that was cheap when it was new, and it still runs 100% of what I use my phone for What's especially annoying about iphones is that my decade old andriod phones without any os updates work more robustly on the modern web than a 2021 iphone with its original os. You can blame it on chrome dominance. but it's pretty much bullshit if you're a company with Apple's treasure chest and you are no longer able to push out any buy-me features to make up for your outdated build and release cycle.

Spooky23 1y ago
You’re an outlier. Apple has arguably the best lifecycle in the personal computing space in all of its categories. They support most devices for 5-7 years, and have a strong incentive to do so as there is a pipeline of used devices into developing markets and their branding and segmentation means their devices have strong resale value. With your old android, you’re either running an open source stack of some sort, which is out of the reach of most users, or operating on an ancient os that Google or your carrier (or both) has long abandoned that leaves you vulnerable to a variety of issues.
- hermanzegerman 1y ago
  > They support most devices for 5-7 years That's the bare minimum under the new EU Ecodesign Rules. Also for phones this is long, but for PCs/Notebooks this is rather short. >With your old android, you’re either running an open source stack of some sort, which is out of the reach of most users, or operating on an ancient os that Google or your carrier (or both) has long abandoned that leaves you vulnerable to a variety of issues. That completely misses the point that old Android Devices still get updated and recent Apps that work well, while Apple blocks their users from enjoying that. No more iOS Updates on Apple usually means no more App Installs/Updates after a short time
- sillyfluke 1y ago
  >They support most devices for 5-7 years You're not responding to the case I'm specifically talking about. As new major iOS or Android releases have features I could care less about, I primarily only care about critical security releases for the OS I have. Why is it thatI have to install a new OS just to get a updated version of Safari? Whereas I seem to be able to download usable browsers on older Android phones (with older Android versions installed) from the play store? These phones are not my primary phones, so I'm less concerned with security and more concerned about them turning into bricks of trash sooner rather than later. A phone that can stay usuable for longer without any os updates versus one that requires os updates to stay usuable should get some points in that category. And it's been my experience that battery life of older phones are negatively affected after os updates anyway, as they are not the targete phones for new OS.

ericmay 1y ago

> I have a 6 year old phone that was cheap when it was new, and it still runs 100% of what I use my phone for, and most people use their phones for, perfectly. Just to be clear your suggesting that your 6 year old iPhone runs a suit of social media apps, full graphics games like Minecraft (or whatever the hell people play these days I don’t know), fitness apps, connects to the latest audio devices like Apple’s AirPods Pro (as an example), works with CarPlay/Android Auto, has wireless charging capability, can place 3D objects in a room to help you plan out a new design, and allows you to use payments features like tap to pay? Plus equivalent camera and video quality? Because if your phone doesn’t do all of those things and perform as well and have great battery life too, your 6 year old Android phone doesn’t really do what most people use their phones for today.

BlueTemplar 1y ago
> full graphics games like Minecraft Lol, this is a terrible example. Have you *seen* Minecraft ?!? (A game that came out 16 years ago and could already run on cheap hardware back then.) > or whatever the hell people play these days I don’t know Well, better, but then this will still be mostly simple 2D games like Candy Crush or Balatro : https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/balatro-review https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/balatro-review
xyzzyz 1y ago
I don’t know anyone who uses their phone to play full graphics games or use it to plan out interior design, and for everything else, a 6 year old iPhone can most definitely do all of that. I know, because I did all of these things on an iPhone 11 up until earlier this year, and I only replaced it because the charging port was damaged.
- lightedman 1y ago
  "I don’t know anyone who uses their phone to play full graphics games or use it to plan out interior design" I use mine to design mines so people underground don't get killed - way more intensive than interior decorating.

iwontberude 1y ago

2015 Nvidia GTX 970 is such a piece of shit card, no you couldn’t do modern gaming. It has relatively few pipelines, low bandwidth and has no frame generation capability to make anything new playable.

HighGoldstein 1y ago
Op said "if you started with a high end card". The GTX 970 was Nvidia's mid-range at the time, and not a great one at that. A 980 Ti or Titan X can still perform reasonably well for a 10 year old card. Even with the 970, the real problem is its low VRAM (and the 3.5+0.5GB fiasco). The AMD RX 480 8G which was comparable but with much more VRAM can still run most games, even if you have to make some compromises.
- BlueTemplar 1y ago
  Indeed, some compromises. A 2015 high-end is in 2025 a midrange at best. Especially since in 2015 that likely still meant FullHD in SDR, while in 2025 high end would be UHD-1 with HDR.
gausswho 1y ago
And yet it can capably power many classics. Skyrim. Portal 2. Witcher 3. The same argument made above about phone hardware is largely true for gaming. The hallmark of modern gaming (and increasingly television) is sadly one of eschewing artistic creation in favor of monetizing eyeballs and the construction of social phenomena, artificial scarcity.
- Tradenko 1y ago
  The comment they replied to was that a ten year old PC can do high end modern gaming. Skyrim and Portal 2 are 14 years old, and Witcher 3 is 10. I don't think a 970 could run Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.
Spunkie 1y ago
You absolutely can do modern gaming on it. I literally have 2 friends in our gaming group that are still rocking 970 in their desktops. They have had to replace the fans on the graphics card a few times and a repaste but other than that they are chugging away. Also solid lol on "frame generation". Marketing fluff/features like that only exists but because they have run out of real generational performance gains to sell cards with.

steveBK123 1y ago

Agree they have a huge taste problem, but even besides that Apple has a huge incumbent problem now really. Smartphones ate the world, and they ate the majority of profit in the space. We are now 20 years on and the software is no longer driving the urgency of the hardware upgrade cycle it used to. Apple gets the majority of its revenue from iPhones and related services. Note that services category includes all sorts of App Store extortion payment stuff that they are slowly losing court cases over. iPhones are so big for them, no other product category created since is even in the same order of magnitude. Partially I think thats on Apple, but I look across the consumer electronics space and don't really see anything new categories they aren't already dominating anyway (tablet, smart watches, etc). One "moat" they probably do have is that in the US at least, theres not a lot of other physical retailers to go try out consumer electronics. 20+ years ago Apple Store were filled with 3rd party products, now its all Apple everything.

wat10000 1y ago
Apple’s MO, at least in recent decades, is to let others blaze the trail into a new space, then do their own version that gets it right. Smartphones were a big deal before the iPhone. People would talk about how they were addicted to checking email on their “crackberries.” But they were niche. You could see that they were going to be big, but they weren’t there yet. Then the iPhone catapulted smartphones from a popular niche to a ubiquitous product. Before the iPhone, they did the same thing with portable music players. Afterwards, it was the same story for tables and smart watches, although not with the same degree of ubiquity. Arguably it was the same for PCs (“personal computers,” not IBM-compatible machines, of course) and GUIs, way back when. What big upcoming thing would they do this with now? As you say, there really isn’t anything. Maybe VR/AR, but that isn’t even in the “popular niche” stage yet, the technology isn’t there yet, and it’s far from certain that it will ever be more than a tiny niche. Otherwise, what? Self-driving cars? That’s not a new market, that’s a product feature in an existing large, mature market. AI? That’s also looking like a feature rather than a new product category.
- steveBK123 1y ago
  You're 100% right, Apple as a fast-follower "getting it right" tech company, and there's nothing to fast follow right now. IoT/smarthome has been a niche/fad going nowhere since day 1. Smart speakers are commodities. They dabbled in an EV project, canned it. They've dabbled in AR with the VisionPro but really it's too early, if it will ever work. AI is software not hardware. Apple smartphones/tablets/watches have essentially killed 10x more hardware categories than have come into existence since. They sell a lot of headphones I guess. The only consumer electronics I buy now outside Apple are basically higher end niche hobbyist stuff in for example music or photography. Nothing that would ever sell at the price levels ($200-1000) or volumes (billions) to move the needle for Apple.

hedora 1y ago

As far as I’m concerned, they don’t make smartphones anymore. Sent from my iPhone 13 mini. It it breaks, I’ll replace it with a refurbished 13 mini or SE 3. (My smartphone replacement budget is $1200.)

hliyan 1y ago

Maturity/commoditization of technology (a good thing) can only be seen as problematic in a world where steady-state businesses with steady profits are seen as "stagnant", and only companies that delivers (or at least promises) perpetual growth are seen as successful. Apple has been wildly successful. There has to be a world in which such a company can benefit from a demand spike without betting its entire future on that demand continuing.

surgical_fire 1y ago
> Maturity/commoditization of technology (a good thing) We are in a forum were more than once I have seen people deriding mature companies as "mediocre" because of "moderate profits". This idea that line must eternally go up and growth must be infinite is pervasive, no matter how destructive it is. The result is this unholy abomination of a union of hustle-culture and rent-seeking.
pjmlp 1y ago
That doesn't work when shareholders demand exponential growth year after year, with consequences, layoffs or whatever, when those numbers aren't met.

JimDabell 1y ago

> Apple is basically a smartphone company at this point, and smartphone sales are plummeting. iPhone sales aren’t plummeting at all: https://www.statista.com/statistics/263401/global-apple-iphone-sales-since-3rd-quarter-2007/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/263401/global-apple-ipho... https://www.demandsage.com/iphone-user-statistics/ https://www.demandsage.com/iphone-user-statistics/

cjbgkagh 1y ago
There seems to have been a downward trend for smartphones since 2017. Growth is either from an expanding market or an expanding market share, since it’s not an expanding market that leaves the market share. I would image there is some substitution, with iPhones lasting longer on average it becomes more cost effective to switch to iPhones so they capture more market share. But if the general market doesn’t expand then it’s a fairly safe assumption that the new converts are going to wait before upgrading meaning that a decrease in sales is already partially baked in. My anecdotal datapoint is 4 iPhones in 16 years which makes them rather cheap on an annual basis. Edit: I had assumed that parent was correct, but as the peer pointed out iPhone sales have declined
wohoef 1y ago
This is missing the last 7 years of data…
andy99 1y ago
The graph I see on that link goes only to 2018 and seems to show slight decline. What is the takeaway meant here?
- JimDabell 1y ago
  Sorry, added a second source with more up to date data.
  - autobodie 1y ago
    the second source shows sales have been increasing.

andy99 1y ago

If they are offering value add services, I'd much rather pay for them directly than have them subsidized be ads, sort of analogous to MS Office 365 (ideally with better privacy). Maybe a direct pay model doesn't have enough reach for a big company in which case hopefully we'll get a Kagi-style paid phone OS from someone.

michaelt 1y ago
Unfortunately even if you're paying for the hardware, and paying monthly for iCloud, and paying 30% of every app and in-app purchase Apple still won't give you an ad-free experience. The cash brought in by ads is concrete, quantifiable, and can be attributed to specific people. The lost sales and eroded brand trust are almost impossible to measure or attribute. This means it's very easy for businesses to (inadvertently) incentivise managers to destroy brand trust in pursuit of profit. Nobody's every gotten a bonus for their restrained and tasteful decision not to put ads into something.
- hylaride 1y ago
  On top of that, Apple users tend to be in the upper half of the income distribution - like in the USA iPhones are 55-60% of the market, but that skyrockets to well over 80% in the upper income half. There's a reason advertisers salivate at that (and why Google gives Apple billions to default to Google search).

Apofis 1y ago

I still have my iPhone 12 Pro that I preordered and got in release day and it still does everything I can ask of it, though the latest Call of Duty runs a bit slow, which is making me want to upgrade. Them not releasing a smart Siri that answers to more than just basic prompts is really hurting them and I can see why investors sued them. There's no reason for me to have to use ChatGPT on an iPhone, I should be able to talk to Siri like she's an actual personal assistant and not just an easier way to check the weather and set a timer.

hopelite 1y ago

I would say it’s simpler than that. Between Wall Street demanding “growth” and the executives’ stock options being tied to meeting those numbers, they always pull out any and all stops to push “growth”. As others have implied, with people like Jobs and others gone, there is also no cultural resistance based on core values that created Apple to push back on shameless debasement. It is also what is happening all over the western world in general as “growth” sacrifices the indigenous cultures and people at the altar of money for the executives, ie aristocrats, and anyone resisting or even just objecting is silenced, including here, because resistance to growth at all costs is futile.

supportengineer 1y ago
All you can do is be an executive, or failing that, be a shareholder
pas 1y ago
> resistance to growth at all costs is futile humans want to improve their (material) conditions, it's pretty much the thing we do at this point (that other species don't really) the issue that was a bit of an inconvenience, a mere side-effect of our culture is nowadays burning down the whole shebang we overvalue short-term gains (thus we have serious agent-principal and integrity issues), we have a laundry list of cognitive biases, and we managed to invent the weaponized cognitive-bias-exploitor and immediately tried it out on ourselves, and ... since the good old days of pamphlets and religious wars we are engaged in all kinds psyops. we are both great and terrible at "winning hearts and minds" (that's why it works, but unfortunately it works much better at turning people into crazy self-destructive antisocial trolls than courageous prosocial reformers)
- roody15 1y ago
  “ we overvalue short-term gains (thus we have serious agent-principal and integrity issues),” Agree and would even make the argument that Chinas rise in some is a response to short term with patience. China is willing to move mountains and allow western corporations 8-10 years of ridiculous low labor costs and promote incredible profits. They then learn the process and the tech and now companies like TP-link, Huawei, BYD, tencent, and so forth are all legit and make good products. This approach can even be seen in their military. With all the talk of China invading Taiwan… the reality is it just won’t happen. China will patiently build the largest Navy and infiltrate the political landscape of Taiwan until they just peacefully transfer back into the fold. Not sure what the answer is here but perhaps we could learn something back ?

supportengineer 1y ago

You missed an important use-case. If my phone lasts for six years and I’m extremely pleased with it, then of course I’m going to buy another one. I’m going to keep doing that indefinitely.

cronelius 1y ago
6 year customer cycles are not recurring revenue. they want your money monthly and annually

scarface_74 1y ago

There is no evidence from Apple’s breakout of iPhone revenue that sales or “plummeting”. They are stagnant. And statistics show that the average person buys a new phone every 3 years. Apple’s laptop sales are also stagnate and not declining. Most people use laptops - not desktops. There is no six year old laptop that has the combination of speed, battery life, quietness and lack of heat that a modern M series Mac has.

deadbabe 1y ago

Apple is an ecosystem company.

heavyset_go 1y ago

Apple wants to be a services company that sells smartphones.

v5v3 1y ago

>Apple is basically a smartphone company at this point Not entirely correct. Apple is a software sales platform. Apple have stated that even older phones and iPads and macs will get the new OS26. Apple realised a long time ago that, as you said, consumers don't have a need to upgrade. So rather than taking the approach of others, which is to stop OS updates and then also security updates, which would result in compatibility issues. Apple are trying to maintain the largest possible user base. So they can sell to all of them.

Tijdreiziger 1y ago
Google tries to maintain a large user base as well. The problem Google has is that they’re dependent on phone OEMs to release OS updates, but OEMs mostly don’t make money off software. They ‘solved’ this by pushing a lot of security and OS features into Google Play Services, so they can update them independently of the OS. Today, you can get new apps and OS features even on older Android versions.