网易100天---5、Where is Apple Heading for?

苹果公司未来发展不容乐观
Why I’m Skeptical about Apple’s Future

You release a basic product and let the market tell you how to make it better. There is no time to get it perfect; it may become obsolete even before it is released. This is the way innovation happens now.

Apple hasn’t figured this out yet. It maintains a fortress of secrecy and its leaders dictate product features. When it releases a new technology, it goes to extremes to ensure elegant design and perfection. Steve Jobs was a true visionary who refused to listen to customers — believing that he knew better than they did about what they needed. He ruled with an iron fist and did not tolerate dissent of any type. People in one division of Apple also did not know what others in the company were developing, that is the type of secrecy the company maintained.

Jobs’s tactics worked very well for him and he created the most valuable company in the world. But without Jobs — and given the dramatic technology changes that are happening, Apple may have peaked. Consider that its last major innovation — the iPhone — was released in June 2007.

Since then, it has been tweaking its components, adding faster processors and more advanced sensors, and releasing this in bigger and smaller form factors—as with the iPad and Apple Watch. All it seems to be doing is playing catch up with Samsung, which offers tablets and phones of many sizes and has better features.

By now, Apple should have released some of the products that we heard rumors about: TV sets, virtual reality headsets, and cars. It could also have added the functionality of products such as Leap Motion and Kinect, with the iPhone functioning as a Minority Report motion detector and projector.

Instead of innovating, Apple has been launching frivolous lawsuits against competitors such as Samsung. It could have spent this money on acquisitions of companies which would give it a real edge.

Will Apple release some products later which blow us away? I am skeptical and doubtful. I expect we will only see more hype and repackaging of tired old technologies.

Passage 2
也许消费者决定着苹果公司的未来发展
Apple’s Future Success Relies on People Simply Paying More

From QUARTZ · 502 words · 6 mins

Apple is one of the most successful companies of all time, having sold over 1 billion iPhones, tens of millions of other products, and recently passing the $1 trillion valuation mark.

But things may not be as rosy as they appear. In recent years, Apple has not actually been selling more products than it has in the past. Rather, it’s been charging more.

When comparing quarterly shipments of Apple’s three main hardware categories—the iPhone, Mac computers, and the iPad—against shipments from the same quarter a year earlier, it looks like Apple’s sales have more or less stagnated:

But after a recent tumble into negative territory in 2016 and 2017, Apple’s revenue has actually been growing recently. So how is Apple growing if it’s not selling more products? There are a few answers.

First, the company’s services business —which includes sales of apps, games, movies, books, subscriptions, and AppleCare—has been on a tear for a while now. In the last four quarters alone, it’s generated more than $35.7 billion in revenue—that’s enough to make it a Fortune 100 company in its own right, generating more than the likes of Coca-Cola, Nike, and 3M in that same time period.

With iTunes, the App Store, Apple Pay, Apple Music, and iCloud, Apple has perfected the art of getting customers to keep spending money with the company long after they’ve bought their devices.

Apple’s Other Products business line—which includes sales of accessories, including the Apple Watch, Beats products, and AirPods—has also seen strong growth recently. But it’s not just services and accessories revenue that’s buffeting Apple. The company is also just charging more for products than it did previously.

For years, the average price of an iPhone hovered around $650, but after Apple started to offer a wider range of more expensive models, the price started to creep up. The top end of all its major product lines now cost over $1,000.

So right now, Apple is doing well because it’s convinced people that it’s a luxury brand, and can continue to charge increasingly high premiums for its products. It’s a smart move for Apple to grow its accessories business—there’s even a case to be made that the most exciting things that Apple is making these days aren’t its phones, but its peripherals —as it’s allowed it to lock in consumers to ever more purchases around their phones, as the App Store has also done. And more cell phone providers, as well as Apple itself, are pushing subscription models for its costly phones, which likely makes the high prices more palatable for consumers. Still, its lofty valuation was built on the back of iPhone, Mac, iPod, and iPad sales, so the issue of declining sales is undoubtedly real.

Apple likely has more tricks up its sleeve that can drive new sales for the company. But if consumers aren’t buying any more Apple products right now, how long can Apple continue to increase its prices before they start to look elsewhere?