Hello.
It should be noted that I am writing these lines before the Apple presentation and, perhaps, will be put to shame by the fact that Apple will show such (no, SUCH) new products that they will amaze us all. True, the times of “one more thing” have passed, now before the announcement all the details about the new iPhones, those features that the company will bet on in marketing, are leaked. Apple presentations have turned into a kind of tradition, or rather even a cargo cult within the company. The once set presentation format is repeated over and over again, with minor changes in the form of dynamic inserts, when the company’s top managers show off like superheroes, run around the building, jump, and do pull-ups. The more such antics, the higher a person is in the company’s hierarchy, he can afford to order a video with his participation, so that it can be watched around the world. There is no semantic load in such exercises, this is an attempt to liven up the presentation a little, to make it brighter.
And what about the products? Everything is familiar here, and if you watched Apple’s previous autumn presentations, you can roughly imagine what and how they will tell you. A resounding success, new processors are tearing up all synthetic benchmarks, users are lining up, and so on down the list. It would be a sin to scare away such success, so Apple practically does not change the appearance of its smartphones and other devices. The same tradition that does not involve risk, trying out the pen, and so on down the list. Look at the iPhone 16 and try to distinguish it from previous models: is it a completely different device or a repetition of what has been covered?
Smartphones with flexible screens have been on the market for five years now, and they are produced by different companies that have accumulated colossal experience in terms of both the mechanics of such devices, the work of engineers, and software. Progress year after year was visible to the naked eye, today’s models can safely be called mature and very, very interesting. Even Google is already releasing the second generation of Pixel Fold, although it entered this race late. While Apple is still exploring the possibilities and cannot decide on this step.
The reason for Apple’s indecision is obvious: the company has a serious fear of a possible failure of a new product category, where there are already strong competitors. Any comparison of Apple’s flexible smartphone with direct competitors will not be in the company’s favor; they have nothing to give the market, since they missed it. And watching the development of Apple Watch, which diligently copies the achievements of Galaxy Watch, copying certain functions, we can say that a generation of those who are used to peeking at other people’s notebooks while taking an exam, rather than thinking independently, has grown up inside Apple. And these people understand very well that they cannot do anything worthwhile in a new area for themselves.
An attempt to create a new market niche was associated with a virtual reality helmet, which they tried to designate somehow differently, VR from Apple from enthusiastic publications and the usual pumping up of the audience with delight quickly came to complete oblivion, today many cannot even remember the name of the product, although very little time has passed. And this is an excellent illustration of the fear that exists within the company, the fear of trying something new, deviating from the usual routine of life.
The main thing is that everyone inside Apple is happy with it, no one is ready to take risks, the company’s management is focused on the books, but not on innovation. Journalists often ask me how new Apple products will affect demand and stock prices. I have a prepared answer, briefly it sounds very categorical – no way. The Apple phenomenon is that the company, thanks to the efforts of Tim Cook, does not directly depend on the products it releases, it needs to show a more or less digestible line of models, nothing more. In the market, Apple is perceived as a money-making machine, the stock market saturates the company with money. True, many in recent months have thought that everything is not so smooth, and have begun to withdraw their money from Apple shares, but only the smartest have done so. Others are in for a bumpy road and speculation around the stock price. And then there is the state of the stock market as a whole, which is going through hard times.
There is no incentive for Apple to rush into innovation, to build something new. Just like ten years ago, it is a one-product company, the whole future depends on the iPhone, which accounts for more than half of the revenue. New things automatically mean risks, which means they must be avoided at all costs. Remember the Titan project, which was dedicated to self-driving cars? It played a big role for the electronics market, as Chinese companies rushed in Apple’s footsteps, they began to create their own cars. Many without autopilot as such simply consistently went to this market. The same Xiaomi released their car, which attracted the attention of the public. Crooked, with problems, but this is the first generation, and it will clearly get better in the future, in the history of Xiaomi and other companies it has always been like this.
And here, perhaps, we have found a sore point for Apple. The company does not have engineers who can study something new, they borrow the developments of other manufacturers, spy on the market, what is happening, but do not create anything fundamentally new. For example, my friend, who works for Huawei, deals with algorithms for cameras in China, told a curious story over a cup of tea. Over the past two years, he, as well as a number of other employees of the laboratory, have been trying to hire him to work at Apple. It all started with modest statements, like, you will work for the best company on Earth, and other nonsense of the same kind. Then the offers for wages and compensation began to grow, at the moment they have reached indecent amounts, there are six zeros. The only factor stopping the transition is that they almost directly say that it will be necessary to share the company’s developments. Considering that this is industrial espionage and the criminal term in China for stealing secrets can be very long, no one wants to take risks. Money doesn’t make up for life behind bars.
Why is Apple hunting for engineers from China? The answer is obvious: the company does not have its own developers today who can perform at the same level. There is no opportunity to work with a variety of hardware, software and algorithms. Apple’s internal world is extremely limited by the set of solutions that the company uses. While any major Android manufacturer (one way or another, Huawei also works on Android, if someone wants to get attached to the details, well, suddenly) has a greater variety of types. And here it is important to understand that the flow of technologies occurs not only from the flagships down, many solutions from the middle segment are used in subsequent flagships. Algorithms are very diverse, a lot of interesting things are being done in this direction.
Another example that may seem curious to you. The AI algorithm race has captured people’s minds, the same Samsung has placed a bet on them. And we see that the second generation of Galaxy AI is already available, which can do many things more interestingly than at the beginning of the year. Here, not only the algorithm itself is important, but also how it learns. The more people use such algorithms, the faster they learn. There are no exceptions, and Apple must go exactly the same way. It can be sped up a little, but it is impossible to skip the development stage.
Having shown beautiful cartoons, the company promised a very high level of AI algorithms in its devices. But there is a problem, no one has seen working prototypes of the declared functions, they will be available only at the end of this year and only for English. For other languages, they will appear at the end of 2025 at best, and even then it is still a mystery.
Every day of delay with AI for Apple means one more day of algorithm training, competitors moving ahead. At the end of the year we will see the third generation of Galaxy AI, the difference will be noticeable in everything. And the tone here is not set by Apple at all, on the other hand, it will have someone to copy the developments from.
The Android market provides a variety of types and fierce competition, where companies grow due to this. The Apple world is closed within itself, including in terms of hardware and software, there is no such development there. Spying on others does not allow to implement many things. Total lag in new form factors of smartphones, there has been no model with a flexible screen for five years. Think about it! For five years Apple has been thinking and afraid to make its own device to compete with manufacturers who are directly taking away Apple’s sales. After all, smartphones with flexible screens are image models, they are often chosen by those who previously used an iPhone.
I am often criticized and told that I predict Apple’s decline and oblivion, while the company shows sales records in monetary terms. The above clearly demonstrates that Apple has a crisis of ideas, execution, and in general, the same iPhone is an extremely boring luxury product. There is nothing like this on the electronics market, other companies do not try to play in luxury, take 35-40% more for their name. The company will not close tomorrow, but the fact that it has a crisis and falling sales in Russia, China, and other notable markets is an established fact. Now they are trying to embellish reality with various manipulations, habitually promising that the iPhone 16 will be the best and most popular iPhone on the planet. Which, of course, is not true.
I will reveal a terrible secret that all research companies know. Every year we are shown gigantic figures for demand for the latest generation of iPhone. If you try to check sales in key markets, it turns out that it is not the new iPhones that are selling well, but the previous generation devices, they are chosen for their price/quality ratio. A simple trick to combine the incompatible, it looks like all production within a year is recorded for the new generation, and here you have record sales. Moreover, there is no audit, and no one is responsible for the figures. In the end, “independent research companies” report this to us. They are responsible, but since the figures are only interesting in terms of PR, there can be no complaints. It is possible and necessary to embellish reality if it does not cost anything at all.
Source: mobile-review.com
