[Apple iOS] New iPhone & watch OS

On September 10 2015 09:35 CorsairHero wrote:
just cracked the screen on my HTC one M7 and will be keeping on eye on the 6S. Other phones I'm keeping an eye on will be the: oneplus two, xperia z5 and the new nexus 5!

Premium phones under 5 inches are so rare these days and that just might be enough to convert myself to my first iphone.

Thousands of iPhone 6 users claim they have been left holding almost worthless phones because Apple’s latest operating system permanently disables the handset if it detects that a repair has been carried out by a non-Apple technician.

Relatively few people outside the tech world are aware of the so-called “error 53” problem, but if it happens to you you’ll know about it. And according to one specialist journalist, it “will kill your iPhone”.

The issue appears to affect handsets where the home button, which has touch ID fingerprint recognition built-in, has been repaired by a “non-official” company or individual. It has also reportedly affected customers whose phone has been damaged but who have been able to carry on using it without the need for a repair.

But the problem only comes to light when the latest version of Apple’s iPhone software, iOS 9, is installed. Indeed, the phone may have been working perfectly for weeks or months since a repair or being damaged.

After installation a growing number of people have watched in horror as their phone, which may well have cost them £500-plus, is rendered useless. Any photos or other data held on the handset is lost – and irretrievable.

Tech experts claim Apple knows all about the problem but has done nothing to warn users that their phone will be “bricked” (ie, rendered as technologically useful as a brick) if they install the iOS upgrade.

On March 22 2016 05:29 Pandemona wrote:
Yeah the new mobile phone market kind of died for me after nothing has changed with them of note in the last 12-18 months. There is a million different phones to get and my Samsung S5 of 2 years old does nothing less than the new S7 released 1 month ago.

Oh well TT

Two years, four years, 13 years, 18 years—with bad news piling up for Apple investors, the historical analogies keep getting stretched back further and further.

Apple shares dropped to $91.85 in mid-day trading on Friday, the lowest they’ve been in nearly two years. The decline also brings the tech giants share to a level they first hit in 2012, meaning all the gains the stock has made in the past four years have been wiped out. The shares recovered a bit during the day and closed at $92.72, still down 0.6% on the day.

Two other business lines, Mac computers and iPad tablets, are also shrinking. And while debate rages over how characterize the performance of Apple’s Watch, no one sees it as replacing the iPhone as the next hit product out of its Cupertino, Calif. headquarters.

In retrospect, much of the iPhone’s growth came in spurts from Apple entering key new markets. In the last two years, the addition of larger iPhone screens and gaining direct access to customers through a partnership with China Mobile, the biggest wireless carrier in the world, goosed sales to extreme levels.

There may not be another untapped market left. The company has targeted India, where its market share is low, but investors are skeptical because of the fractured retailing system for phones there and the extreme poverty in that country.

But another big part of Apple’s current struggles are less numerical and more psychological. As the stock price was rising, Apple triggered alarm bells that have signaled peaks for the stock prices of other large companies over the decades. Apple became the most highly valued public company, was added to the Dow Jones Industrial Average index, and set about building a massive–and massively expensive–grand headquarters.

Most recently, Apple CEO Tim Cook and his team have struggled to maintain their credibility with investors. One sore spot was Cook’s recent push to get investors to focus more on the company’s growing services revenue from app sales, movie downloads, and iCloud storage. That may be a legitimate yardstick for Apple, but with all those service revenue still dependent on declining iPhone sales, Cook’s efforts reminded many of similar efforts by other companies with shrinking hardware revenues in the past, like Xerox, to emphasize service revenue.