Welcome to Apple doom watch (not to be confused with the Apple Watch doom watch). We are now on day…
Uh, Siri? How many days has it been since April 1, 1976?
Writing for MarketWatch, Jurica Dujmovic brings us another day closer to the inevitable.
“Keep focusing on bling, Apple, and you will continue to decline.” (Tip o’ the antlers to Neil and Craig.)
Because Apple’s declining.
I used to love Apple.
But not anymore. There goes your biggest fan ever, Apple. Again. Way to go.
Anyway, now Apple sucks.
Most of it comes down to the company losing ground to its competition due to the lack of innovation, which is especially evident in the realm of smartphones.
OH, CAN YOU BE MORE SPECIFIC, JURICA?
[The iPhone X’s] most highlighted feature, edge-to-edge screen, was already done before, most notably on the Samsung Galaxy S8, plus and Note 8, all of which came out before the iPhone X.
So, other vendors were first to have things that Apple has subsequently introduced. And this is somehow supposedly new.
As elderly Android fans shaking their canes at you from Our Mother Of Open’s Home For Unsupported Phandroids could tell you, none of this is new. Did you know (did you know?) that the iPhone was not the first touch-screen smartphone? It’s true. Everything you once knew is a lie.
Unless you actually knew that, which you might have because jerktastic Apple haters have been pointing it out since 2007 at least. Apple was also not first with 3G, LTE, fingerprint readers or any number of other features. They usually just wait until the technologies are mature enough instead of rushing them to market and then tend to implement them better.
One thing that separates good display quality from mediocre is the screen resolution, measured in PPI, or pixels per inch; the more pixels you have per inch, the more crisp the image looks and less “blocky” it is.
Pixels. How do they work?
iPhone X features 458 PPI, resulting in a 2436×1125 resolution. By comparison, Samsung’s S8, which is half the cost of iPhone X has 2960 x 1440 resolution (571 PPI).
Yes, the iPhone X is positively Atari-esque.
While iPhone X’s face recognition (Face ID) solution might seem innovative at first glance, it’s strikingly similar to iris recognition, a feature that Samsung S8 had seven months before Apple’s latest flagship was released. Besides, Face ID comes with a slew of its own issues, ranging from recognition performance to privacy concerns.
Say what? These are not Face ID’s “own issues.” If there are privacy concerns—and there are some in terms of law enforcement—the Macalope will assure you they are worse on the platform that simply cares less about your privacy. And that platform is not Apple’s. This is not a matter of opinion, it’s simply a fact. That Dujmovic tries to portray one of Apple’s biggest advantages as a disadvantage is pretty much all you need to know about this piece.
Dujmovic goes on to recount the S8’s many “advantages” including…
Bixby, the smarter AI.
Oh, really?
USA Today: “Samsung’s Bixby, its Siri rival, stammers at the start.”
CNet: “Samsung’s Bixby assistant needs to grow up. Fast.”
TechCrunch: “A disappointing debut for Samsung’s smart assistant, Bixby.”
And the Macalope’s favorite:
The Verge: “Samsung needs to kill Bixby on the Galaxy S9.”
The tagline on that piece by Vlad Savov is “How about an Android flagship without any self-inflicted wounds?”
Sounds great. And it gets even better.
I set out my feelings about Bixby at length back in September: I consider Samsung’s personal assistant software to be a form of structural bloatware that’s using up valuable development time within Samsung and even more valuable goodwill among its users. Bixby is intrusive without being helpful (remember Clippy?), with the pinnacle of its irritant powers being the way it demands you activate it every time you turn on the phone’s camera.
Here’s how Dujmovic describes it:
For example, it makes your phone smarter, especially the camera…
Mmm-hmm.
The Macalope hates to interrupt Dujmovic’s Samsung fan fiction, but we need to get to that supposed decline mentioned in the headline.
KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo predicts that Apple may “kill off” the iPhone X this summer due to the poor sales.
This is, of course, not exactly what Kuo said. And, since that report, we’ve seen some contradictory reports about the iPhone X’s performance. Kantar Worldpanel said “iPhone X boosts Apple OS share in key markets”, Counterpoint Research claimed “Apple Sells a Record 22 Million iPhones in USA During 4Q17” and AppLovin said “The iPhone X sees 51% growth going into 2018”. Not to mention the fact that selling iPhone Xs means Apple is making even more revenue than before per iPhone sale.
If the current trend keeps up, I believe Apple is up for a slow but continuous decline.
Just like it has been for the last 40 years.