Business

Lots of interesting nuggets in this survey. It’s a quick read, a single page. A few highlights:

19% of Android users surveyed indicated they plan on switching to an iPhone in the next year, compared to 12% last year.

The numbers were relatively small, so this might simply be a sampling issue. But if that number proves accurate, that’s a pretty big swing.

I’d be interested in a similar survey showing percentage of iPhone users who plan on switching to Android.

Another interesting point: The percentage of iPhone users who intend to upgrade to a new iPhone was 23% this time last year, and increased to a whopping 48% in the most recent survey. Part of that might be the perceived maturity of the iPhone X and Face ID (i.e., the kinks have been worked out), adding to a natural response to the waves of marketing.

It’s a bit of race to see if the auction hits its reserve or if Apple will throw a spanner in the works and try to have the auction taken down.

Here’s a link to the auction. As I write this, the current bid is $12,400.

Rob Griffiths compares a pair of (nearly) identical photos, taken four years apart, one with a pretty good pocket camera and one with, arguably, one of the best smartphone cameras on the market. To be fair, the pocket camera was a 2011 model, so the pictures might as well have been taken six years apart.

The results were interesting, both to show how far our smartphone cameras have come, but also for the comparison of file size, ISO, f-stop and shutter speed.

[Via Michael Tsai]

Shira Ovide, Bloomberg:

Like Apple’s 2017 iPhone editions, there will be three current year models but with even clearer product and pricing segmentation: good, better and best.

Here’s the thing, though: Apple has never done well selling the “good” phones in its lineup. That has hardly mattered because the more entry-level models effectively serve another duty: They push people to the more expensive versions that Apple increasingly relies on for its sales growth.

This article does a great job explaining Apple’s motivation in steering people to the top of the line models. As shareholders would rightfully expect, it’s all to maximize revenue.

Check out the first chart in the article, which shows Apple’s average revenue from each iPhone sold, on a yearly basis. Back in 2014, that number was $603. In only 3 years, that number skyrocketed to $758. Apple is good at this.

Think about the marketing you’ve seen over the last few years. Almost all of it is dedicated to pushing the top of the line iPhone X. When was the last time you saw a commercial for any other model, let alone the diminutive, in both price and form, iPhone SE.

Fire up Apple’s web site. There’s a gorgeous image of the iPhone X. Of course it makes sense that Apple would focus on the latest and greatest, but there’s also the flip side lesson, few people come to Apple for a budget phone:

This fits with a pattern of Apple’s relatively low-end iPhones not setting the world on fire. Remember the iPhone SE released in 2016? Apple said at the time that some people wanted a relatively smaller smartphone when most phones were getting supersized. It could have been the iPhone for the masses, but the $399 iPhone SE 2 has been relegated to a niche in Apple’s product lineup. The 2013 iPhone 5c was considered a budget alternative at $100 less than the $650 flagship model of the time. It is the Voldemort of iPhones. No one speaks of it.

“The Voldemort of iPhones”. Heh. I like it.

Another one of those interesting, readable articles with an unfortunate headline.

If you can get past the “Apple’s greatest flaws” sensationalism, this is actually pretty interesting.

Katharine Schwab, FastCompany:

It’s been a decade since the British designer Imran Chaudhri first imagined a user interface that would introduce millions of people to the smartphone. Chaudhri joined Apple in 1995, soon rising to become the design director of the company’s human interfaces group–where he was one member of the six-person team that designed the iPhone.

Credentials established.

Very early on, when we first started building prototypes of the phone, a couple of us were lucky enough to take them home… By using the phone and living with the phone, I had friends all over the world who were hitting me up all the time and the phone was pinging and the light was going on, so I realized for us to coexist with this phone, we needed to have something to act as a gatekeeper. Very early on, I designed what ultimately became Do Not Disturb.

And:

Inside, getting people to understand that [distraction] was going to be an issue was difficult. Steve [Jobs] understood it…internally though, I think there was always a struggle as to how much control do we want people to have over their devices. When I and a few other people were advocating for more control, that level of control was actually pushed back by marketing. We would hear things like, ‘you can’t do that because then the device will become uncool.’

And:

You might install about 10 applications on an afternoon and say, ‘yeah, you can use my camera, you can use my location, you can send me notifications.’ Later on down the road, you find out Facebook’s been selling your data. Later on down the road, you realize that you’ve developed a sleep disorder because these things are blinking every night and you actually don’t really care about them until the morning.

These are just snippets, just a taste of what I found to be a truly fascinating interview.