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Apple Finds Its Next Big Business: Showing Ads on Your iPhone

(www.bloomberg.com)
115 points miles | 6 comments | 14 Aug 22 18:36 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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tailspin2019 ◴[14 Aug 22 19:04 UTC] No.32461939[source]▶
Apple needs to be very careful that they don’t erode the things that most differentiate them from their competition.
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JKCalhoun ◴[14 Aug 22 21:33 UTC] No.32463142[source]▶
Agree. But I believe Apple thinks they also need to move harder into "services" and, I suppose, now ads. I think Apple recognizes that the high-margin hardware business is not not sustainable. Especially as everyone who would want an iPhone already owns one. Apple needs to grow somewhere.
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1. bergenty ◴[14 Aug 22 23:49 UTC] No.32464290[source]▶
Everyone that owns an iPhone cycles them out every 2-3 years. It’s a perpetual cash cow.
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2. colejohnson66 ◴[14 Aug 22 23:55 UTC] No.32464331[source]▶
That’s not true. A lot of people wait until their phone no longer works to upgrade.

And also, something being a cash cow at the moment does not mean that thing will continue to be one. Since the iPhone 6ish, iPhones have become “good enough”; there’s not much to differentiate each model from the previous as there was with, say, the iPhones 3GS and 4. The iPhone 13 just doesn’t have much going for it compared to the 12.

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3. bergenty ◴[15 Aug 22 00:17 UTC] No.32464446[source]▶
Apple is still selling a million iPhones a day.
4. tomjen3 ◴[15 Aug 22 04:11 UTC] No.32465813[source]▶
That was the case, now its more like 4-5.
5. TheLoafOfBread ◴[15 Aug 22 07:33 UTC] No.32466852[source]▶
I stopped cycling when they removed headphone jack. Back to the Android.
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6. dont__panic ◴[15 Aug 22 12:45 UTC] No.32468962[source]▶
Likewise. I wonder if we'll ever see them restore the headphone jack on the SE models simply because there's a good 10-20% chunk of the market who won't buy a phone without one.

A Mini-chassis-based SE with a headphone jack and a touchID home button would be a day 0 buy for me -- I wouldn't even wait for reviews.

Unfortunately I think Apple's treating the headphone jack (on iOS devices) like USB-A, not like the SD card slot or the HDMI port (on the Mac) -- the backlash hasn't been strong enough for them to backtrack.

Of course, that leaves me trapped in the failed evolutionary path of my touchID, small-sized, headphone-jacked 2016 iPhone SE that's losing iOS support this fall. The Zenfone 9 has me intrigued as a modern SoC with solid cellular band coverage and most of the features I want. But it's still bigger than I'd like.