Apple is in trouble... again. Tim Cook says people aren't buying iPhones. He blames a lot of factors, but I don't think he's really being honest.
I'm one of those folks who didn't buy an iPhone again. Why? Too darn expensive for one. I was generally good on price points up to $500 when I could see incremental value on the next iteration of the phone. But dropping up to $1000 on a cell phone? Nope. I can get a decent laptop for that.
I moved over to Android and found some Motorola (Moto) phones in the $200 to $300 price range, unlocked, with more storage and decent features. I've taken that $1000 and bought three different Motorola phones in the past 18 months or so to find out what works for me. The android world is full of options -- and many of those options are at really good price points.
I use a cell phone to make a few calls, look at email and my calendar, do some internet searches, take an occasional picture, and poke at some apps from time to time. Yeah, I'd like my iTunes, but I still have an iPad and I get iTunes there when I travel.
So why are people really not buying iPhones?
1) Cost. Reaching in your wallet for $500 to $1000 every couple years, times the number of phones in your household, is just a non-starter for most people. And adding $30+ a month to your bloated cell phone bill to pay for a new phone is also a non-starter.
2) Functionality and innovation (or lack thereof). What does the new phone do that the old one didn't do? Not very much. Maybe the CPU is a little faster or there are more pixels in the pictures, but I'm not wowed by the feature set anymore. There's nothing that I must have in a new phone.
3) Saturation. Most everyone has a smartphone, so first time buyers are few and far between and phones being purchased are generally replacements for dead or lost phones. You're not going to give your ten-year-old a $1000 iPhone.
In moving to Android and Motorola, what are some of the things that I really like?
1) MicroSD cards. I have a phone with 32 GB of storage onboard, but I've added 128GB of storage in a MicroSD card -- so no futzing with storage issues.
2) Dual SIMs. Not a huge thing, but I've played with this on a couple phones and it is a feature that some people likely must have.
3) The Google ecosystem. Say what you want about Google, but if you have the Chrome browser, Gmail and Google Drive in your life, an Android phone makes a lot of sense. And setting up an Android phone is a breeze. Couple in ChromeOS devices, and you can move from screen to screen with little difficulty.
Apple also has an ecosystem. But I don't find it as mainstream as Google, particularly when you look at email and browsing. That is the sole saving grace, outside of people who simply worship all things Apple. For people with (literally) a huge investment in iTunes, I suspect that is a driving factor, but I haven't found much more. I know that my daughter loves moving from iPhone to her Mac pretty seamlessly, but that isn't me.
Apple is at the same place plenty of other companies have been at. I was at Motorola when the RAZR fell off the cliff. Motorola was printing money with the RAZR and got stupid, failing to invest in R&D for the next big thing. Steve Jobs came and learned how to make cell phones and the rest was history. All Motorola could do at that point was come up with new colors for the RAZR. I'd argue that RIM / Blackberry had the same experience. RIM owned the "smartphone" space, but made it too much of a walled garden as people started to want more consumer functionality. RIM would have been smarter to become a software company rather than try to do both hardware and software.
Is Apple in the same place? Well, when your CEO starts making fairly lame excuses for why people don't buy your product, I'd say so. Apple is a bit of a walled garden because it ties the OS to the hardware and reserves certain applications (iTunes in particular) to its mobile OS. On the one hand, you're not waiting for a hardware manufacturer to sort out getting an OS update released, but you're now solely tied to Apple's determination of a product lifecycle. When Apple decides the device is EOL, that's that. And I think that is another factor to consider. While I don't think that Apple has started to compress the product lifecycle, there is a consideration to be made there for when someone buys a device. If you wait until an iPhone model is no longer the latest and greatest, you likely have allowed a year or so to go by. Apple currently says that it will maintain a five to seven year lifecycle, but that assumes you buy the device when released. Instead of making the next generation of devices compelling to buy (from both feature set and cost), the new phones don't have any significant innovation and might sit at prices points that are .5X to 2X what the consumer paid for the now obsolete device that is only a few years old.
There are also considerations for product serviceability. If you can't easily replace a worn out battery on a device that is only a couple years old, you're going to have a bad attitude about that product.
The same thing happening to Apple also happened in the personal computer space. In the early 1990's, computer CPUs were popping out almost annually, with more power and speed. There was a new OS every year and software was being developed at an incredible pace. You couldn't afford to not upgrade every couple years. There always was something new under the sun. Now, PCs are sold mostly as replacements for ones that break down or simply can't handle whatever application the user needs to have. There are always some enthusiasts who need to have the latest and greatest, but most users buy a computer and keep it until it dies.
The net of this is that Tim Cook really isn't being honest and needs to find the next big thing. That was the one thing that Steve Jobs was simply ruthless about.
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