iPhone 16 demand is so weak that employees can already buy it on discount

I wish that this was seen as a good thing, not a bad thing. Everyone who wants an iPhone already has one, Apple makes good products that last, and new phones these days are incremental updates rather than revolutionary new products, so there’s not a large incentive to upgrade.

Remake the form factor of the 4S and we’ll talk. That’s the last phone that was comfortable to hold.

Why would I upgrade though — my $2K 13 Pro is still state of the art, and tech jobs are collapsing. Who knows whether I’ll need $2K in 3 months time?

If they made a 16 mini I might buy one, but as it is my 13 mini still works fine and anything larger will be an inherent downgrade for me.

Same thing happened with the Vision Pro. They were available for employee purchase almost right away.

The fact that a Pro costs the same as previous generations Pro Max, and Pro Max is 25% over that, might also have something to do with it.

My wife still has iPhone X and as much as she's loving it, she wants some of the AI features for her hobbies and work. When we saw the price here in Eastern Europe we almost had a jaw drop moment. We're still buying it but... frak.

Apple is very openly abusing its monopoly at this point and no, don't tell me there are good competitors. Even the Galaxy S24 Ultra doesn't have as good a software.

Speaking of which, anybody can recommend a good gallery app that has Apple Photos' features?

My plan is to only upgrade when a 13 mini alternative comes out - and only after it’s been out for 2 years so that I can buy it used for an acceptable price.

I understand there’s not as much demand for smaller smartphones, but then again, I would go on a limb and say there’s more demand than the demand Apple get’s to upgrade a device every year.

If they went on a 3 years alternating basis mini>standard>pro that would probably appeal to a very big lot of people.

This article is bunk and misinformation . Employees almost always get a single personal discount on launch day. I’ve managed to score many a launch day product from friends there.

What they don’t get on launch day is their lower tier discount for friends which (unless my friends are uncharacteristically holding out) they don’t have yet either.

How many people got screwed in the last 2 iPhone generations on carriers moving from a 24 month carrier financing model to 36 month carrier financing with "bill credit" promotions?

I fathom a lot of people have a sour taste about wanting to trade in and get stuck with this phone for the next 3 years.

> “One of the key factors for the lower-than-expected demand for the iPhone 16 Pro series is that the major selling point, Apple Intelligence, is not available at launch alongside the iPhone 16 release,” Kuo said.

Well, I might be the minority here, but I don't want a phone that promises to integrate AI and would be very careful that it can be completely removed before I get it. What I'm seeing from people around me, there's quite a few that don't want any AI integration in their devices.

I'm fine interacting with an LLM via browser or command line, a channel where it cannot know anything other than what I give it, but I'm not trusting a product that can be stealthily enshittified without me knowing it.

From the article: "In the first weekend since its debut, Apple sold about 37 million iPhone 16 smartphones".

Crazy that this is a "so weak demand"... and they are not yet available, just for pre-order.

What are the folks on here with logs and telemetry seeing compared to 14 & 15?

I don't how most of the Apple users miss (or do they?) but iOS has been on constant decline for some time. Bloody hell they screwed the Photos app to pathetic. Why would they even do that? Was someone bored?

They locked and coupled "call recording" feature with AI (and transcription as if older users would protested getting just the audio) and hence shrewdly limited to new devices. This was disgusting. The only feature I was really looking forward to.

Why the hell did they add that "colour tint" change for icons? Bloody hell!

And yet, even in iOS 18 you cannot change alert/ringtone settings for different SIM separately. I mean how retarded they at Apple have to be to not realise that two different numbers might actually demand that! Or maybe they will have to overhaul their entire codebase to do that. This seems plausible seeing their track record on Software.

Oh yes, iCloud and iCloud syncing across "various things" still sucks and is still opaque and you just hope it works and you have no idea of knowing what was history, if there was any conflict, did something even sync, where the hell are my tabs from the other device hours and days later, why the hell some tabs remain glued in iCloud Tabs which I removed from a device a fortnight or month ago. Et cetera. Et cetera.

Not to mention there is barely any advancement in the Phone and that too with raised price. No wonder people don't want a new iPhone.

I thought Google would step up - make privacy better et cetera. But no, these companies are in completely harmony and perfect duopoly knowing fully well that they should not try to eat each other's lunches.

We are way past beyond of critical mobile features, phones as platform are good enough, everything else are gimmicks to try to move beyond this.

Time to look elsewhere for profit growth.

Still like my iPhone X. It’s a great phone

There was a line at the not big city Apple Store I visited yesterday. I was in it.

Should’ve lowered rates sooner.

How does bogus clickbait trash like this make it to page 2…

Does qz have leaked internal business reports or something?

Have iPhone XS Max, am I missing anything?

Still like my iPhone X

Perhaps Apple should take a hint that no one wants so-called AI features training on a device with intimate access to their lives.

Whatever the final reality of feature availability, the conceptual damage had been done: Apple was bandwagon leaping and we had no choice.

I will never buy another Apple device for other reasons, not least of which are the short support period and ever increasing enshittification of the operating system.

I have not been a fan of anything developed since roughly steve jobs passing. Touch bar?! No thanks.

The truth of the matter is that i see the light and insist upon a world where open source software, standards compliance, and end user choice MATTER, and matter more than corporate profits for an already too large and corrupt behemoth.

Apple is a company, not your friend