I was interested to hear that the prospects of Apple and other cell phone retailers are looking somewhat worse at the moment.  That is because, with subsidies for buying phones have not gone down over the years, people are taking longer and longer to upgrade.  Apparently, Apple owners upgrade every 2.5 years and owners of other brands upgrade every 2.7 years, but people are not feeling the need anymore to upgrade every single year.  That in turn is obviously hurting their profits, because they are just not selling as much as they used to and I think that the iPhone X has been the first sort of surprise for them – where it just has not sold as many as they would think. 

I would give another perspective – and my perspective is of someone who does get a new phone every year and who in recent years has felt that quite honestly, the upgrades to the phones and the video cameras, while good, have not been as good as I would have hoped for or expected.  As an example, my professional camera takes pictures that are 55Mb big, which obviously allows amazing detail and clarity.  Phones were catching up all the time, but they are miles behind that – at most, excluding a pano picture, which of course you can make huge, and even then it is only 20Mb, most photographs are topping out at about 5Mb.  They don’t have the same sort of clarity and detail I would have expected by now on the basis that if it was 4Mb last year it would be 8Mb this year and 16Mb next year, etc, etc, just doubling each year and that has not happened in the last few years.  Yes, the portrait mode on the iPhone is superb and really does allow you, with the different light settings that you can choose, to take far more professional pictures than previous models of the phone would, but that in itself is never going to be a major selling point to a huge number of people.  Yes, they seem to last an hour longer each year than the year before – but I think people want more than that – they want to see something more dramatic.  A lot of the phones in recent years just have not had that type of “you have to have it” feature and I think as a result, while of course these brands continue to be world leading and making billions of dollars in profit, the sales are beginning to slow down.   I obviously should also correct myself by saying that of course Apple is not just a company that sells phones – it sells iPads, Apple watches, and it increasingly makes a lot of its money through the sale of apps and music on its various stores.  It is definitely not just a one trick pony type of business!