spinonlinefree| iPhone, the top seller, fell out of the top 5

Author | Sun Pengyue

Editor | Gale

IPad, who has been absent for 18 months, has finally made a new appearance.

At 22: 00 on May 7, Beijing time, Apple officially released the new iPad series, and iPad Pro and iPad Air were updated respectively.

Apple CEO Tim Cook said at the press conference.Spinonlinefree"this is the most important day since the launch of iPad."

Although Cook is so serious, it is clear that the iPad family does not account for a large proportion of Apple's entire business system. The one who can resist the banner of Apple will always be iPhone.

Unfortunately, today's iPhone is no longer what it used to be.

In the Chinese smartphone market in Q1 2024, Apple took 13.Spinonlinefree.7 per cent of the market share fell out of the top five, joining the "others" (others).

This is unprecedented for Apple. Last year, according to IDC, apple sold 234.6 million units, accounting for 20.1% of the market share, overtaking Samsung as the top-selling brand in 2023.

A year later, iPhone fell off her underwear after being turned upside down.

1. The collective decline of Apple's business

In the new year, Apple's hardware shipments keep falling.

The biggest pain for Apple is that its core business, the iPhone15 series, has plummeted in Chinese mainland.

According to the latest data released by market research firm TechInsights on May 6, China shipped 63.3 million smartphones in the Q1 quarter of 2024, up 1% from a year earlier, ending 11 consecutive quarters of decline. Apple fell out of the top five with a market share of 13.7% to join the "others" (others).

The top five brands with market share are all local Chinese manufacturers, followed by OPPO / OnePlus (17.1%), Glory (16.7%), Huawei (16.6%), vivo (16.1%) and Xiaomi (15.0%).

Apple is not the only market research organization to bad-mouthed Apple, and the best-known Canalys also released a report on April 26. Apple suffered the biggest decline among headphone makers in the Q1 quarter of 2024, ranking fifth with 10 million units shipped, down 25 per cent from a year earlier.

Apple released its results for the second quarter of fiscal 2024 (as of March 2024) in the early hours of May 3, revealing the current decline in iPhone business.

Apple reported revenue of $90.8 billion in the quarter, down 4.3% from a year earlier. Revenue from the core iPhone business was $46 billion, down 10.5% from a year earlier. The average shipping price for iPhones was about $917, down 1.3% from a year earlier.

To sum up Apple's iPhone business in a word, it sells less and cheaper.

With the exception of iPhone, the business income of the iPad family, which has not been updated for 18 consecutive months, is $5.6 billion, down 16.7% from a year earlier and below market consensus expectations of $5.91 billion.

In 2023, the iPad business has been in decline, selling 8.995 million iPad units for the whole year, down 10% from a year earlier and the biggest decline among all tablet brands.

Apple's hardware business has suffered a serious decline, with iPhone, iPad, wearable and other hardware businesses declining to varying degrees, except for the 3.9% year-on-year growth in Mac business.

2. IPhone, which is no longer advanced

The iPhone was once known as the "performance ceiling" of the mobile phone industry, and each generation of A-Series SoC is a hot topic of discussion throughout the year, and the Android camp is the goal of collective catch-up.

Since Apple began to rate iPhone, iPhone has completely lost the concept of "advanced performance".

Starting with the iPhone14 series, the general version uses only the previous generation SoC,Pro series to use the state-of-the-art A-Series SoC. Although this move has helped the iPhone business to increase gross margin and increase the purchase intention of product classification, there is no doubt that consumers' reputation has collapsed.

The Wall Street Journal has specifically reported that iPhone is out of favor in the Greater China region: "some Chinese consumers no longer regard Apple's flagship products as the most technologically advanced products" and "Huawei outperforms Apple in terms of cameras, battery life, phone signals, and so on."

Indeed, in the past year, the hard core technologies brought by Huawei's Mate60 and Pura70 series, such as superfocused telescopic cameras, Beidou satellite communications, Black Tortoise architecture, and Kunlun glass, have pushed smartphones up several levels.

Still using iPhone on the 60hz screen, which is directly linked to "outdated".

In addition to the hardware configuration, AI is also an unavoidable "must option" in the smartphone field.

Since Huawei's Mate60 series boarded the Pangu model for the first time last year, players of major mobile phone brands have all bet on AI, either built-in AI models or equipped with AI voice assistants.

Samsung, which has been battling Apple for many years, directly regards the AI as the key card to surpass Apple.

Cristiano Amon, president and CEO of Qualcomm, said in an interview that 2024 will be the first year of global AI phones, and generative AI is entering phones "very quickly".

Canalys predicts that 5 per cent of smartphone shipments will be AI phones by 2024, rising to 45 per cent by 2027.

Under the influence of the recognized conclusion of "AI= advanced", Chinese mobile phone manufacturers have never been absent from the wave of AI.

In addition to Huawei Pangu model, Xiaomi mobile phone announced that it is equipped with the world's first AI large model computing photography architecture Xiaomi AISP; "Blue and Green Factory" vivo and OPPO, and launched the Blue Heart Model and Andean Model, which are directly connected to the self-research systems OriginOS 4.0 and ColorOS 14; Honor launched AI full scene operating system MagicOS 8.0 and Magic Big Model.

I have to say, although the large model of AI on the side of the phone is not strong for ordinary people. But the biggest use of AI is to create sales gimmicks, increase the selling points of goods and encourage consumers to change their phones.

After all, in recent years, both the iOS camp and the Android camp have collectively fallen into a bottleneck, and there are no eye-catching subversive innovations except for daily upgrades to SoC, camera heads, screens and other hardware.

The lack of innovation means that the homogenization is serious, the functions of mobile phones are cumbersome and more or less the same, and the average replacement cycle for users has exceeded 31 months. Shipments in the entire mobile phone market are at their worst level in a decade.

The last smartphone replacement craze dates back to the advent of the 5G era.

This is also the greatest significance of the existence of AI: to stimulate user consumption.

3. Apple, which lags behind AI, still has two cards.

After a year of hot AI models on the phone's side, Apple woke up and gave up the car-building project to focus on the AI field, frequently releasing its own AI process in the market.

Since 2023, Apple has acquired more than 30 AI startups in a row, making it the largest number of acquisitions among tech giants.

Guo Mingyi, a well-known Apple whistleblower expert, previously reported that Apple is expected to spend $4.75 billion on more than 20,000 servers in 2024 to support its AI technology development, a capital expenditure that far exceeds the $620 million in 2023.

Spending money on people and devices shows how determined Apple is to take the lead in AI.

But compared with Microsoft, Nvidia, Google and Meta, Apple looks like a toddler. Even in AI, Apple may not be as good as Samsung.

Using AI to increase shipments of all Apple's hardware devices is also a must for what Cook calls a long-term plan. Cook repeatedly said in public: "whether iPhone, iPad, Mac, or Vision Pro, we all want to introduce AI into it."

But the long-term plan doesn't help Apple's current predicament, and you need to start right now if you want to increase the overall shipments of the iPhone business.

Fortunately, Apple has two more trump cards, namely, the upcoming 618 and September product launches.

Since 2022, the 618 e-commerce promotion has become Apple's lowest discount day of the year, and the iPhone series has been among the top three in the list of mobile phone sales on all major e-commerce platforms.

Discount promotion is the best solution to increase shipments at any time. It is believed that Apple's iPhone shipments will be greatly increased after June 18 this year.

The second killer mace is the launch of the new iPhone around September every year.

The upcoming iPhone16 series is full of gimmicks and is said to be equipped with Google's Gemini model and OpenAI ChatGPT.

If the news is true, then the iPhone16 series will be the most popular Apple product in recent years.

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: zinc Finance (ID:xincaijing), author: sun Pengyue

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