Apple loses its shine in China

[艹艹艹]

Lenovo Moto Z

 

[feilong]

iphone need new innovation. They only copy from Samsung or China huawei will not make them top.

 

[ahojunk]

Why Apple will ditch the iPhone headphone jack, and why that sucks
Henry Cooke

In 2014, a designer I know predicted that the iPhone would soon get rid of the standard headphone port.

At first, I thought he was being dumb. The humble TRS 3.5mm jack is probably the most accepted standard in the world. It's truly international (unlike power plugs) and 100 per cent backwards compatible (unlike USB) — all the way back into last century. Apple love to ditch open standards for proprietary ones, sure, but this would be too much.

Yet the more I thought about it the more it seemed like exactly the kind of aggressive advancement that nobody asks for but Apple can't resist.

If rumours are to be believed — and these are rumours from people with excellent track records — that designer's prediction was right. Apple is expected to announce a new iPhone tomorrow morning without a headphone port. The space saved will be used for a pressure-sensitive Home button.

This will be an incredibly arrogant and dumb move. It's like ripping off a band-aid that is still stopping bleeding: both painful and dumb. But it has to happen some day — and doing it now might make a lot of sense for Apple.

Why this is a horrible idea

Before we get into why Apple might do this, let's just reiterate how utterly annoying this is going to make things.

Let's say you get corded headphones in the box which plug into the Lightning port (some leaks have suggested this).

First off: you're not going to be able charge your phone and listen to music at the same time. If you're at work listening to music on your phone and want to switch to your laptop you'll need two separate pairs of headphones. If you lose your headphones you'll need to shell out fifty or so bucks for an Apple pair, or maybe buy a dorky $30 adaptor for older headphones.

Time to say goodbye to the headphone jack ...

You won't be able to hook into nearly any stereo with a $12 AUX cable any more. You won't be able to even share your headphones between an Apple iPhone and an Apple iPad.

"Bluetooth is s---"

There is the possibility that Apple will ship Bluetooth wireless headphones in the box. While these will technically work with most modern devices, they will be even more of a pain.

As Kiwi Owen Williams eloquently puts it: "Bluetooth is s---"

Pairing devices is a nightmare. Half the time they just plain don't show up. If they do it takes at least a minute to get them going. Sharing one Bluetooth stereo between several phones is even more of a disaster, often involving a full reset of the stereo and the entry of a four digit pin into an interface that only has one button.

This is compared to the current headphone process, where you plug a thing in. Voila. Done.

Even if Apple seriously steps Bluetooth forward, perhaps using NFC for pairing, they are not going to magically fix the battery problem. You're going to have to charge your headphones every night.

This feels a lot like ideology winning over usability. Apple love to ditch ports before everyone else does (see the new Macbook, ethernet, the floppy drive, etc). Boldness is one of the reasons they are so successful as a technology company.

But none of those standards — not ethernet, not floppies, not even the standard USB port — was as widespread as the 3.5mm port. And their replacements (Wi-Fi, CD-ROM, USB-C) were all clearly superior. Wireless Bluetooth headphones are actively worse than wired headphones, both in usability and quality. Wired Lightning headphones might have superior sound quality and could offer new functions, but that will be a huge price to pay for the loss of compatibility.

Why is Apple doing it anyway?

This is a stupid move, but Apple isn't stupid.

The future of technology as they see it has no wires or ports. Jony Ive wants to sell you a smooth seemingly magical block. The moment they nail wireless charging — said to be coming in the 2017 iPhone — they'll look to get rid of the Lightning port too.

Apple is the only company that can get the ball seriously rolling on this. If — and this is an if — Apple can get the technology world to move towards a fully wireless audio world, the temporary anger the firm will receive this year will be worth it.

And boy oh boy, will people be angry. This will be a sticking point that could make "bendgate" look small — because it is by design. Some Apple partisans will celebrate it, but much of the world will be rightfully seething.

Apple's executives will know this. But they might prefer to have customers get angry at them this year, rather than staving off the pain for next year — when they are expected to completely redesign the iPhone for the 10th anniversary of its release.

If they can get the bad press out of the way this year, dampening what is predicted to be a relatively small upgrade from the 6s, then we will all be bored of the topic when September 2017 rolls around. Reviews of their completely new iPhone won't be docked points for the headphone thing, and Apple will attempt to forget all the user hostility it endured this year.

Will this plan work? I'm not sure. Maybe Bluetooth will be fine by next year and we'll all be used to charging our headphones. But until that complacency wears in a lot of people are going to be extremely mad online. And for once, they'll be right.

Stuff.co.nz

 

[gambit]

First...Am not a user of any Apple product.

Now that is out of the way...

https://www.engadget.com/2010/03/10/dont-trust-the-critics-four-apple-products-they-thought-would/

...the critics have been wrong before. Several times, actually, according to The Week, which provides a list of five Apple products the critics thought would fail. Out of those five, only one, the Newton, failed to find mainstream success. The other four were industry-defining products which went on to sell millions of units each.

That is a 7 yr old article.

Since 2010, with each iteration, the iPhone have continued to pull Apple's competitors into following its vision on what a cell phone should be, from looks to functions. Not a single Chinese product have been trendsetter, as in 'industry-defining'. All have been followers. When we see a Chinese CEO tried to dress like Steve Jobs to sell his company's wares...

 

[TaiShang]

Reactions to the iPhone 7 from Chinese netizens

People.com.cn

September 08, 2016


“Good artists copy, great artists steal,” Steve Jobs famously said in 1996. Perhaps the most innovative company in the world still follows this statement. As Chinese netizens point out, the iPhone 7 has copied, err, “learned from,” other major companies, many of which are Chinese companies. Antenna? Meizu. Dual camera? Huawei. No headphone jack? LeEco. Water resistance? Samsung. Static home button? OnePlus. What? No quick charging?

So, what do Chinese netizens think about the iPhone 7? “We pass.”



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@Economic superpower , @Daniel808 , @Raphael , @xunzi , @long_ , @cirr , @AndrewJin

 

[cirr]

Reactions to the iPhone 7 from Chinese netizens

People.com.cn

September 08, 2016


“Good artists copy, great artists steal,” Steve Jobs famously said in 1996. Perhaps the most innovative company in the world still follows this statement. As Chinese netizens point out, the iPhone 7 has copied, err, “learned from,” other major companies, many of which are Chinese companies. Antenna? Meizu. Dual camera? Huawei. No headphone jack? LeEco. Water resistance? Samsung. Static home button? OnePlus. What? No quick charging?

So, what do Chinese netizens think about the iPhone 7? “We pass.”



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**

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@Economic superpower , @Daniel808 , @Raphael , @xunzi , @long_ , @cirr , @AndrewJin

I don't know how the phone looks like and I don't want to find out.

 

[gambit]

“Good artists copy, great artists steal,” Steve Jobs famously said in 1996. Perhaps the most innovative company in the world still follows this statement. As Chinese netizens point out, the iPhone 7 has copied, err, “learned from,” other major companies, many of which are Chinese companies. Antenna? Meizu. Dual camera? Huawei. No headphone jack? LeEco. Water resistance? Samsung. Static home button? OnePlus.

Source: https://defence.pk/threads/apple-loses-its-shine-in-china.448300/#ixzz4JePXy082

Therein lies the problem...

If you make a completely waterproof cell phone, but the other features are sub-standard, people will not place a higher value on a single feature over the entire utility of the cell phone.

How about this...

Is someone going to use a waterproof phone when he is going sailing, then use a phone with a better antenna when indoors, then use a phone with a superior camera when he want to take a picture ?

No. He want ONE phone that can do ALL of the above and do it seamlessly. That is the insight Steve Jobs had about people. And that is why the iPhone dominated the market in terms of sales and philosophy.

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

Why Apple will ditch the iPhone headphone jack, and why that sucks
Henry Cooke

In 2014, a designer I know predicted that the iPhone would soon get rid of the standard headphone port.

At first, I thought he was being dumb. The humble TRS 3.5mm jack is probably the most accepted standard in the world. It's truly international (unlike power plugs) and 100 per cent backwards compatible (unlike USB) — all the way back into last century. Apple love to ditch open standards for proprietary ones, sure, but this would be too much.

Yet the more I thought about it the more it seemed like exactly the kind of aggressive advancement that nobody asks for but Apple can't resist.

If rumours are to be believed — and these are rumours from people with excellent track records — that designer's prediction was right. Apple is expected to announce a new iPhone tomorrow morning without a headphone port. The space saved will be used for a pressure-sensitive Home button.

This will be an incredibly arrogant and dumb move. It's like ripping off a band-aid that is still stopping bleeding: both painful and dumb. But it has to happen some day — and doing it now might make a lot of sense for Apple.

Why this is a horrible idea

Before we get into why Apple might do this, let's just reiterate how utterly annoying this is going to make things.

Let's say you get corded headphones in the box which plug into the Lightning port (some leaks have suggested this).

First off: you're not going to be able charge your phone and listen to music at the same time. If you're at work listening to music on your phone and want to switch to your laptop you'll need two separate pairs of headphones. If you lose your headphones you'll need to shell out fifty or so bucks for an Apple pair, or maybe buy a dorky $30 adaptor for older headphones.

View attachment 332321
Time to say goodbye to the headphone jack ...

You won't be able to hook into nearly any stereo with a $12 AUX cable any more. You won't be able to even share your headphones between an Apple iPhone and an Apple iPad.

"Bluetooth is s---"

There is the possibility that Apple will ship Bluetooth wireless headphones in the box. While these will technically work with most modern devices, they will be even more of a pain.

As Kiwi Owen Williams eloquently puts it: "Bluetooth is s---"

Pairing devices is a nightmare. Half the time they just plain don't show up. If they do it takes at least a minute to get them going. Sharing one Bluetooth stereo between several phones is even more of a disaster, often involving a full reset of the stereo and the entry of a four digit pin into an interface that only has one button.

This is compared to the current headphone process, where you plug a thing in. Voila. Done.

Even if Apple seriously steps Bluetooth forward, perhaps using NFC for pairing, they are not going to magically fix the battery problem. You're going to have to charge your headphones every night.

This feels a lot like ideology winning over usability. Apple love to ditch ports before everyone else does (see the new Macbook, ethernet, the floppy drive, etc). Boldness is one of the reasons they are so successful as a technology company.

But none of those standards — not ethernet, not floppies, not even the standard USB port — was as widespread as the 3.5mm port. And their replacements (Wi-Fi, CD-ROM, USB-C) were all clearly superior. Wireless Bluetooth headphones are actively worse than wired headphones, both in usability and quality. Wired Lightning headphones might have superior sound quality and could offer new functions, but that will be a huge price to pay for the loss of compatibility.

Why is Apple doing it anyway?

This is a stupid move, but Apple isn't stupid.

The future of technology as they see it has no wires or ports. Jony Ive wants to sell you a smooth seemingly magical block. The moment they nail wireless charging — said to be coming in the 2017 iPhone — they'll look to get rid of the Lightning port too.

Apple is the only company that can get the ball seriously rolling on this. If — and this is an if — Apple can get the technology world to move towards a fully wireless audio world, the temporary anger the firm will receive this year will be worth it.

And boy oh boy, will people be angry. This will be a sticking point that could make "bendgate" look small — because it is by design. Some Apple partisans will celebrate it, but much of the world will be rightfully seething.

Apple's executives will know this. But they might prefer to have customers get angry at them this year, rather than staving off the pain for next year — when they are expected to completely redesign the iPhone for the 10th anniversary of its release.

If they can get the bad press out of the way this year, dampening what is predicted to be a relatively small upgrade from the 6s, then we will all be bored of the topic when September 2017 rolls around. Reviews of their completely new iPhone won't be docked points for the headphone thing, and Apple will attempt to forget all the user hostility it endured this year.

Will this plan work? I'm not sure. Maybe Bluetooth will be fine by next year and we'll all be used to charging our headphones. But until that complacency wears in a lot of people are going to be extremely mad online. And for once, they'll be right.

Stuff.co.nz

Keep in mind the standard 3.5mm audio jack (which is a miniaturized 6.35mm...is 1878 tech!!! Yes that is an 18!) in phones is not digital.

However the lightning port IS.
So this is what you get( companies making digital headphones) http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/7/11874706/iphone-7-lightning-headphones-reasons

This is a big sound upgrade.

Remember Apple was scorned for being the first to use that crazy thing called USB and ditching the 3.5 inch drive.

1998:
http://www.osnews.com/story/18/The_iMac_and_the_Floppy_Drive_A_Conspiracy_Theory <- his USB/3.5 drive conspiracy theory was absolutely true (Companies started going crazy making USB devices). We should be thankful.

 

[艹艹艹]

Reactions to the iPhone 7 from Chinese netizens

People.com.cn

September 08, 2016


“Good artists copy, great artists steal,” Steve Jobs famously said in 1996. Perhaps the most innovative company in the world still follows this statement. As Chinese netizens point out, the iPhone 7 has copied, err, “learned from,” other major companies, many of which are Chinese companies. Antenna? Meizu. Dual camera? Huawei. No headphone jack? LeEco. Water resistance? Samsung. Static home button? OnePlus. What? No quick charging?

So, what do Chinese netizens think about the iPhone 7? “We pass.”



**



**

**


@Economic superpower , @Daniel808 , @Raphael , @xunzi , @long_ , @cirr , @AndrewJin

Perhaps we expect too much of apple, but I still hope that Apple will have a new innovative features appear
I still remember when iPhone4 came to bring me the visual impact

 

[xunzi]

First...Am not a user of any Apple product.

Now that is out of the way...

https://www.engadget.com/2010/03/10/dont-trust-the-critics-four-apple-products-they-thought-would/

That is a 7 yr old article.

Since 2010, with each iteration, the iPhone have continued to pull Apple's competitors into following its vision on what a cell phone should be, from looks to functions. Not a single Chinese product have been trendsetter, as in 'industry-defining'. All have been followers. When we see a Chinese CEO tried to dress like Steve Jobs to sell his company's wares...

Eh eh eh LOL. Since the 1st IPhone, it was APPLE that was following other in the mobile industry trendsetter, from phone enlargement, to finger print, to dual camera, to OLED screen, to fast charger. There isn't a single feature that Apple start first. LOL

 

[Jlaw]

The West collectively need to be more innovative to win the heart and mind of the Chinese.

East Asians are more innovative than what the west propaganda would have most believe

Perhaps we expect too much of apple, but I still hope that Apple will have a new innovative features appear
I still remember when iPhone4 came to bring me the visual impact

if you are looking for innovation, look at Huawei. Apple was yesterday's news.

 

[qwerrty]

Eh eh eh LOL. Since the 1st IPhone, it was APPLE that was following other in the mobile industry trendsetter, from phone enlargement, to finger print, to dual camera, to OLED screen, to fast charger. There isn't a single feature that Apple start first. LOL

7 inch tablet, waterproof, pull down notification and many more features stolen from android

 

[TaiShang]

Some greet arrival of iPhone 7 with a shrug
China Daily, September 9, 2016


Wang Wanli, a 26-year-old sales manager in Beijing, has been thinking about upgrading his iPhone 6, which he bought two years ago. To his disappointment, however, Apple's latest product rollout on Thursday morning fell short of his expectations.

He said he had found no big improvement on the iPhone 7, which Apple is banking on to regain the market share in China that it is losing to domestic players.

For example, he is comfortable with Apple's operating system, but he said he thought "the iPhone 7 does not look as cool as the Lenovo Moto Z modular handset".

Wang is not alone. As Chinese smartphone vendors such as Huawei and Oppo scramble to offer alternatives with competitive functions, experts say local consumers are less willing to wait in long lines for a new iPhone.

The iPhone 7 will be available in China on Sept 16, although online ordering begins on Friday. Jin Di, research manager at International Data Corp China, said iPhone 7's routine upgrades on cameras and processors show that hard-ware is no longer Apple's edge.

"The sales of iPhone 7 will be worse than the iPhone 6, which once took China by storm," Jin said.

The declining popularity of iPhones highlights challenges that Apple is facing in China, which was once the company's biggest growth engine but has recently become a source of disappointment.

In the quarter ended in June, Apple saw a 33 percent drop in sales in China, marking its highest decline in all regions, while domestic brands Huawei and Oppo saw surges in shipments of 15 per-cent and 124 percent, respectively.

Huawei said earlier this month that it had sold 4.5 million units of P9 by July, its premium-end smartphone that includes dual cameras and sells for 3,688 yuan ($550). In comparison, the iPhone 7 Plus with similar features starts at 6,388 yuan.

"It will be hard for Apple to regain the crown in China with the iPhone 7 series, given the declining enthusiasm among consumers," said Nicole Peng, research director at Shanghai-based consultancy Canalys.

Canalys forecasts that Apple will see a 12 percent year-on-year decline in smartphone shipments to China this year.

According to Peng, Apple still dominates the above-3,000 yuan handset market, where most consumers remain loyal to the brand.

"But that consumer group is growing very, very slowly. And Apple's growth, in fact, needs to be driven by potential consumers who usually buy smartphones priced from 2,000 yuan to 3,000 yuan. Now, however, such potential consumers have all chosen local vendors," Peng added.

 

[gambit]

Eh eh eh LOL. Since the 1st IPhone, it was APPLE that was following other in the mobile industry trendsetter, from phone enlargement, to finger print, to dual camera, to OLED screen, to fast charger. There isn't a single feature that Apple start first. LOL

Your post is the reason why Apple laughs at people like you.

Where I work, sometimes I get to meet Apple engineers, either personally or thru emails. The vision from Steve Jobs was not about being the 'first' but being the most efficient. That is where Jobs was his most insightful on how people use machines and expect of their machines. It is the same as Google. Was Google the first to come up with the concept of the 'search engine' ? No...

http://www.wordstream.com/articles/internet-search-engines-history

But why did Google became so famous and dominant ? Because their engineers made their product more efficient than others'. Not the most efficient but more efficient.

Apple's products were not always market successful, but reviewers who recommended Apple products are neither fools nor techno ignorant. Themselves were successful designers, engineers, and business leaders. They know how to tell the 'good' from the 'great'.

Did the 'candy bar' form factor came from Apple ? No. But Apple made its phone better looking and more pleasant feeling than its competitors.

Who killed the Sony Walkman and its copies ? Apple.

The list of where Apple came from behind and beat others, from design to engineering, is long. We have yet to see anything from China.

 

[Dungeness]

Who killed the Sony Walkman and its copies ? Apple.

The list of where Apple came from behind and beat others, from design to engineering, is long. We have yet to see anything from China.

You have. DJI.