Hey.
For the first time, Apple held an online conference for developers, this is the trend of the times. We know that it doesn’t matter what Apple shows. Each announcement will be accompanied by shouts of joy (amazingly, a masterpiece, this has never happened on the planet), a description of why this has not happened before, and other signs of the existence of the Apple name in a vacuum, when existing technologies are denied, and all merits and inventions are automatically counted. Apple. The great merit of the company – and there is not even a shadow of irony here – is that it has brought up several generations of consumers who have ceased to be interested in the world around them, they live in the world of Apple. For example, when they showed iOS14 and the ability to put widgets on the desktop, people immediately appeared who sincerely and habitually said: “Now widgets will also appear in Android, Google always copies Apple.” The good thing about life in the Apple bubble is that Google and other smartphone manufacturers do not exist in it, and everything happens for the first time and again. This is despite the fact that a year ago, most of the innovations in iOS13 were directly borrowed from Android.
In 2020, the situation repeats itself, and it is very typical for Apple, this is a development strategy that has not changed since Tim Cook came to power. This is squeezing the maximum of funds from a loyal audience, borrowing technologies where possible and trying to present them as our own unique developments. Don’t believe me? Let’s take a look at the loud announcement at WWDC, which Apple fans have already called unprecedented, terrific fundamentals of the universe and further down the list.
During the presentation, they said that a digital key appears on the iPhone, now you can open and start the car using your phone. You can also give out the temporary key to another person by simply sending it from the iPhone. There was no edge to delight, and through the offer, fans wrote that Android will now copy this technology for sure and Apple, as usual, did everyone, they were the first!
Reality has once again tripped up these wonderful people. The automakers joined together in a consortium that develops digital keys several years ago. And such demonstrations were honored in 2018, when it was new. On the other hand, the same BMW has allowed Android smartphones with digital keys since 2018. In the US, this option came by default with some Galaxy S7 (very old device, don’t you think?), Android version had to be 8.0 and higher. In 2019, a friend of mine lent me his car in New York in this way, he just wrote me a digital key. Then I was sincerely surprised that even a discharged smartphone was able to open the car and also start the engine. The main thing is that the key is registered in it.
Mercedes had about the same capabilities in a number of cars, the collaboration with Samsung was shown in 2018, but the technology appeared in 2017. Other car manufacturers have copied these capabilities.
IPhone owners remained outsiders, for them such high technologies were simply not available all these years. This was due to the limited implementation of NFC, and other restrictions on the part of Apple.
Vladimir Nimin believed Apple so much that he even wrote in the text: “So far, only BMW, but Apple is working and hopes that its technology will become the industry standard.”
This is a great illustration of the fact that no technology existed before Apple, it only originated in Cupertino. And this approach has become commonplace, it is widespread in the market. Digital key technology is an industry standard, and we are getting close to the third version of it. And today Apple is joining these developments, but they are not unique to the company, they are borrowing the standards created before. I would not be surprised if later they begin to say that Android copied digital keys, their behavior patterns from Apple, and before that nothing existed. All this was and worked, it is possible that someone simply did not know about it. And here we come to an important point – loyal Apple users, as a rule, do not have an outlook, they sincerely believe that everything in this world is created by Apple and no one else. And if something is not there, then it is not necessary.
Want another example? This is an assessment of how you sleep on your Apple Watch. The watch has finally learned how to do it!
Somehow I missed this moment and could not imagine that this simple and long-time available function on smartwatches is not here. I’m sorry that Apple Watch and its owners have just got used to the standard features. This is how my smartphone shows a dream, the data is obtained from the Galaxy Watch Active 2.
And we see similar borrowing in everything, copying Android and different manufacturers. This is a typical Apple approach, as the company does not have the ability to come up with something of its own. She borrows other people’s work, since she does not have her own and saves on development, inventing something new.
Under Tim Cook, Apple did not come up with anything of its own, the number of new ideas and devices tends to zero. You can remember the same Apple Watch, but the company just spied on watches created by other companies and made its own version. Due to the size of its customer base, this watch has become popular, but it is a companion product that is only available for the iPhone. And de facto there is nothing new in it, this is exactly the same marketing for a loyal audience.
And now it’s time to ask a question, because Apple is successful, its capitalization has exceeded $ 1.5 trillion and is growing by leaps and bounds. So Apple is doing everything right? Alas, this is not the case. It’s a one-product company – the iPhone. All services, services, accessories are built around the success of the iPhone, and it does not feel the best, as it cannot reach the 2015 sales level. The graph shows how iPhone sales are swinging up and down. But the general direction since 2015 is one – sales are falling. Apple even refused to officially announce iPhone sales figures, which upset everyone.
Over the years, Tim Cook has proven that he does not care at all about the quality of the product, he is only interested in money. If you can sell MacBooks with keyboards that keep failing and they make money, why not sell them? For four years, the company chased and abandoned marriage when the cost of legal disputes exceeded its potential income. This is the approach of an accountant who saves on development and does not want to risk in principle, hence the lack of new products and directions.
Services have become a key area for Apple, this is to some extent miracles of reporting, when sales of applications and content were previously recorded in the price of the iPhone, and then they were allocated and shown separately to demonstrate the growth of revenue in this segment. We launched Apple TV +, which became frankly weak against the background of competitors and did not bring anything to the company. So far, these are only losses for the creation of series and other content, maintenance of the service. But smart reporting helps here, free subscriptions are converted into “profit”.
Is everything so black and is Apple so bad? Of course not. The company has a loyal audience that continues to milk and sell old technologies that have long been available from competitors under the guise of revolutionary developments. This is a simple task, people have no idea what is going on around them. The price of Apple products grows every year, while their quality decreases, as well as their relevance to the current market. The link is just one example of how it looks in reality.
An increasing number of people are beginning to guess that they are being deceived and sold at exorbitant prices for something that does not cost so much. And they are changing their iPhones to Android smartphones. Many choose not Samsung at all, as one might expect, but either Huawei / Honor or Xiaomi. And the latter only benefit from this, in Russia, sales of Xiaomi grew by 50% year-on-year. Most of those who came to smartphones of this brand abandoned the iPhone. Of course, some of these defectors will return to the iPhone, it always happens. But most will remain on Android, a trend that has only been gaining momentum since 2015. Tim Cook in those days loved to brag about how many Android users were switching to iPhones, but in recent years he hasn’t responded even when asked a direct question. Why? There is nothing to boast about, sales are falling.
And now we can answer the main question why Tim Cook does this and why the products are of such mediocre quality at such a high cost. The answer lies in the plane of the fact that for Apple the product is money, and not smartphones or something else. This is a game on the stock exchange, the sale of shares and the subsequent redemption, a kind of financial pyramid. The product in this case is deeply secondary, it is not so important. What we see.
Apple will make the best smartphone, so what? The costs for it will be clearly higher than just copying Android with a delay of several years, which means that it will negatively affect Apple’s finances. And the whole logic of decisions is just that. Consider another solution – the move to ARM processors in MacBooks sometime in the future. It is not about creating a new class of devices because of their capabilities. This is saving on components, giving up expensive Intel processors. These MacBooks will be sold at the price of current solutions, and the difference in cost will allow Apple to raise profits. This decision was dictated only by this and nothing else. By the way, the experiments of Qualcomm and Microsoft in this area have been going on for several years, while living, working machines do not look the best. Perhaps Apple will do something better, but they will not be able to compete with conventional x86 systems in the coming years. I will make a reservation that you need to look and feel with your hands, but I have no enthusiasm for such machines – they are slow enough, sharpened only for mobile applications that will be installed on them. And try to create analogs of conventional applications for such machines, and what will happen to the performance, we’ll see, I don’t think it will be at a good level.
You can consider everything written as meaningless whining, because Apple is constantly inventing something new, growing in the stock market, however, the company’s fans claim that it is number one in smartphones in the world! And iPhone sales have never declined, it just can’t be. This beautiful little world of Apple, where the surrounding world is absent, and the reality is completely different, begins to flow. So far, the reality leaks are not very strong, but the stream is gaining strength and will soon begin to hit the brains of those who inhabit the planet Apple.
In no case am I mocking the fans of the company, this is clearly unnecessary. People who piously believe in Apple’s inventions have already punished themselves enough, they have protected themselves from the real world and are constantly paying for it.
As a final word, I want to say that Apple is hitting hard on all fronts. Revenues from their own ecosystem are at risk, since in iOS14 it became possible to assign your applications by default for certain actions. This is a response to the actions of the Federal Antimonopoly Service in Russia, the law that has appeared on the pre-installation of Russian applications. Now it will be possible to choose your browser, email client, and so on, here it will obviously not be without additional restrictions, but this is a step towards breaking Apple’s restrictions, when third-party developers were not allowed on the platform. And this greatly affects the future income of the company, destroys the strategy in the field of software.
You can read the text about the WWDC 2020 announcements with enthusiastic notes at the link. This is a product for Apple fans, they will be satisfied.
In the end, I want to say that the history of Apple does not end at all, the corporation will sink for a long time, this is an obvious fact. It is equally obvious that Apple is drowning, as loyal users at some point open their eyes and realize how they have been robbed all these years. The process is unhurried, but gradually gaining momentum, and 2020 will show this perfectly.
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