The iPhone mini was a commercial flop. The sales numbers were bad. It only accounted for about 3–5% of total iPhone sales. And the product didn't make sense from a business standpoint: it required specialized/miniaturized hardware, took more engineering work than other models to design, cost more to manufacture than a regular iPhone, but had to be sold for less.

From an engineering standpoint, it was the most impressive iPhone Apple had ever made, but that fact doesn't translate to sales numbers.

There's a very vocal group of people online saying they want smaller phones, who make it sound like there's massive untapped demand for these phones, but when you actually give it to them, it turns out they're just a tiny slice of the market.

Just buy iPhone Duo and keep it closed. Same size as mini and incredible battery life.

My grandmother with a 2015 27" iMac and a 2017 12" Macbook just replaced both devices with a 13" Macbook Air and a 27" Dell USB-C monitor. She would have preferred buying a MacBook Air + a 27" iMac, but Apple stubbornly refuses to make one for some reason. The studio display has an A19 chip in it already (more powerful than a MacBook neo!) why not just make it run MacOS?

It may be a break-glass-in-case-of-slumping-sales-numbers option, the same way VW brought out a 4Motion Golf wagon (with a manual[!] with an LSD[!]) in NA after Dieselgate.

I see no point in buying a Mac Studio. I would buy a 27" iMac. I would definitely buy a 35" iMac.

I might as well just get some Asus and whatever fancy monitor I can afford (that's not a Mac Studio) if it just has to be a tangle of hardware.

Yeah I can kinda see why Altman is out there trying to shame the public for having compute. The longer they carry those massive debt obligations, the more the models are going to economize.

It would not be surprising that Apple just waits and snatches their compute up from insolvent companies sliding past.

Not to mention the fact that Apple, unlike most of the industry at times, has never seen itself as a software company. Someone needs to build all the devices used to interact with all this AI, and there's no evidence any major "AI company" other than Google, and to a much smaller extent Meta, has any interest in doing so.

If I were Apple and wanted to make a big bet, I'd be dumping money into a top-secret robotics lab.

Models running locally doesn’t benefit Apple unless they have a competitive model of their own. Otherwise they’ll end up being dependent on Google, Meta etc the same way they are today for apps and services. And getting out of that hole won’t be as simple as building a maps app.

> I equate it to partnering with AT&T on the first iPhone.

In terms of strategy, they picked the underdog carrier (Cingular) specifically to avoid having to bundle bloatware and carrier customization at the cost of exclusivity. Likewise, when Apple brought the iPhone to Japan, they did the same thing with the underdog carrier here, SoftBank.

The strategic importance of this was as a bargaining chip with other carriers and fundamentally gave them a lot of control they would not have had if they had gone with Verizon or similar.

> I equate it to partnering with AT&T on the first iPhone. Very inconsistent with Apple’s preference of owning the entire stack

They went to Verizon first but were turned down. Apple needed distribution, which meant partnering with an established carrier.

Regarding "owning the entire stack" didn't make any sense in 2007, especially for a company that was new to the cell phone business.

Three years later, the first iPhone with Apple's silicon was the iPhone 4 with the A4 processor.

Context for Europeans: the US mobile market was basically total vendor lock-in hell up until the mid-2010s. There were only two carriers (AT&T and T-Mobile[1]) you could bring-your-own-phone with, the other two (Verizon and Sprint[2]) only allowed the phones they sold on their network. Phone service and plans were bundled together.

In fact, one of the critical arguments Apple made as to why they weren't a monopoly was "Sure, we demand 30% - but the phone company monopoly we made obsolete used to charge 70%!" Mobile app stores on other platforms were absolutely hell.

One extra wrinkle of this is that Apple didn't actually partner with AT&T, they partnered with Cingular, the smallest national[0] carrier, who only agreed to let Apple ship an unmolested device because they got 5 year exclusivity. Then Cingular got bought out by AT&T. AFAIK AT&T didn't want the iPhone, they wanted the AT&T (insert terrible name here) Powered by AppleTM, with like 20 AT&T services preinstalled and unremovable. 'Cause that's literally what happened with the first Samsung Galaxy phone, every carrier gave it a different name and their own bloatware.

And yes, this hatred was mutual: the 5 year exclusivity meant iPhones were shackled to a terrible network in the US, and there was a significant amount of effort put into baseband jailbreaking just so people could violate Apple's exclusivity agreement and use their iPhone with their choice of carrier - which, to be clear, meant "use it on T-Mobile".

Also, while I'm giving a lot of credit to Apple, the thing that really broke the vendor lock-in was:

1. Google deliberately bidding up spectrum to trigger an FCC open-access pledge on LTE bands, which forced Verizon to allow third-party networks

2. Qualcomm giving up on UMB, forcing Verizon to adopt LTE, and by extension, SIM cards[3]

3. Clearwire / Sprint's WiMAX service totally failing, also forcing Sprint to adopt LTE and SIMs

[0] The US has a few "regional" carriers like US Cellular that only operate towers in some markets and license spectrum outside of that area.

[1] Yes, they were owned by Deutsche Telekom at one point

[2] At one point owned by Softbank, now owned by T-Mobile

[3] Strictly speaking, the SIM card spec includes CDMA/3GPP2[4] support, but the largest CDMA market was the US, and any carrier that wanted to support foreign phones used GSM/3GPP track standards

[4] Yes, Qualcomm was really that petty that they named their 3G standards body "3G 2"

> until iPhone 21 ships with then modern frontier model baked into Apple Silicon.

Citation: It Came To Me In A Dream

Apple is always not-going to have enough compute of their own, they have billions of users and whatever they are investing in datacenters to service them is negligible.

That said renting storage from Google for iCloud reportedly carries an ~80% profit margin, there's no reason they can't also put a 5x markup on what Google charges them for PCC and Siri since they can still prevent rivals from providing the same service in most markets.

i dont think thats what they menat. If Apple went full on with their series and movies content, winning awards left and right, rightfully so, then expectation here is they would release their own, exclusive game titles.

Unfortunately that’s the nature of the mobile marketplace, it’s mostly trash. The same is rapidly taking over PC and to a lesser extent console games, but fortunately the review/visibility systems in place are far more developed.

Well and the consumer is usually a bit more developed as well.

Gilbert Gottfried or Wallace Shawn?

Playstation, Xbox, and Steam charge 30%.

Apple sells 2 TB upgrade to Mac Studio for almost as much as whole Playstation 5 Pro that has 2 TB of storage.

With pricing model that Apple insists on, their console would be laughing stock in terms of storage. (Switch 2 has 256 GB only but it's a) portable, b) has slot for sd express cards.)

Apple rarely updates prices on existing products, outside of price drops on previous-generation iPhones. It was a big deal when they raised prices on everything a few months ago in response to RAM costs.

They waited until AFTER the tariffs went away to raise their prices! :D

Coincidence. They've issued a dividend every quarter for more than a decade.

> Look at the 3 month chart

It took me a while to realize, but Yahoo charts was showing 3% up from Jun 30 to Nov 2. Turns out there was a huge drop on day 1, so where you start counting _really_ matters!

Wait, we shouldn’t be basing our investment decisions today on data from the past and projections from people with a vested interest in the stock going up?