Crazy idea week continues on our coverage of all that’s insane in the world of Apple. Today we see the return of an old classic, one which apparently never goes out of style for the people who are permanently, congenitally out of style. The style the Macalope is referring to is, of course, making a lick of sense. Just one lick! Is that too much to ask for?! But… no licks.
Writing for Barrons, Tiernan Ray feeds us the unbearable lightness of being a big-shot analyst.
“Apple Should Open iOS to China as Another iPhone Cut Looms, Says Rosenblatt.”
What to do with a discredited idea from the 1990s that makes even less sense now when everyone is just giving their operating systems away for free? Why, keep recycling it. It’ll probably be right eventually, right? Or not. Whatever. Who cares? Is this thing even on?
“It is in our view that an iPhone hardware upgrade will not bring any advantages going forward,” concludes [Rosenblatt Securities’s Jun] Zhang, arguing “Apple should rather open up its OIS [sic] platform and license various versions to Chinese OEMs.”
The Macalope doesn’t usually comment on typos, but when you can’t spell the name of a three-letter platform correctly… well, it really doesn’t matter because your basic idea about licensing it has run out of gas on the interstate between Crackertown and Bananaville anyway.
Can you imagine sitting down to write up your hot take and thinking “You know who makes a lot of money in the smartphone biz these days? People who rake in those sweet licensing fees on smartphone operating systems, that’s who. Imma write that up.”? No, you can’t. Because you still have control of all of your cognitive functions. Please take this sack full of various highly regulated hallucinogenics to continue.
According to Zhang, Apple simply faces too much competition to sell more iPhones because:
…Samsung will launch a foldable screen smartphone and Chinese OEMs will launch a curved panel smartphone in 2017…
Everyone wants garbagey gimmick phones with no discernible use case these days. That’s where all the growth went in the market. Look around. All you see are projector phones, 3D phones and ironic mid-20th century German rotary dial smartphones (Portland only).
Apple is facing a growth problem with the iPhone, mostly because growth in the market is difficult to find anywhere. But just because your alfalfa farm isn’t giving you higher and higher yields it doesn’t mean burning it all to the ground and salting the earth is the right way to go.