Apple's press conference arrived as scheduled.
After a warm short film, Cook, as always, opened this technology feast outdoors. At the press conference, the iPhone 15 series, Apple Watch Series 9, and Apple Watch Ultra 2 appeared one after another.
This time, the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus are mainly "successful island landing" and changing the USB-C interface; The biggest highlight of the iPhone 15 Pro two models is the titanium alloy body and the redesigned A17 PRO chip. As for the price - iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus starting prices are 5999 yuan and 6999 yuan respectively, iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max are 7999 yuan and 9999 yuan respectively.
When young people are less and less willing to change mobile phones, major mobile phone brands have appeared to varying degrees of slow sales. The iPhone 15 is coming, will you still buy it? This challenge also faces Apple.
The iPhone 15 is coming
All series of flexible islands, starting from 5999 yuan
The most concerned is still the iPhone 15 series of mobile phones.
This time, Apple officially released four iPhone 15 phones - iPhone 15, iPhone 15 Plus, iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max. From the color point of view, the iPhone 15 standard version is mainly pink, yellow, green, white, black macaron color, pink becomes the C position. The iPhone 15 Pro uses a new titanium black, blue and silver color scheme.
In terms of configuration, iPhone 15 almost fully follows the functions and design of iPhone14 pro - among which the "Spirit Island" that appeared on the iPhone 14 pro, this time the entire series of iPhone15 is equipped with a Spirit Island design, which also means that the ugly bangs of Apple's mobile phone have become history. It is reported that the flexible island equipped with the iPhone 15 series does not affect the display of screen content, remains active, can control music, maps, etc., and also supports more third-party apps to synchronize messages.
As for the core performance part, the iPhone 15 basic version continues to use the A16 chip of the iPhone 14 pro. In terms of image, the iPhone 15 series uses a 48-megapixel main camera, which takes ultra-high-resolution HEIF photos with 48MP resolution by default, and can display 2x lossless cropping and zooming. In terms of material, Apple insists on using renewable raw materials, the body is made of 75% renewable aluminum, the battery is made of 100% cobalt, and the mobile phone also uses 100% copper foil.
If anything, the iPhone 15 adds Roadside Assistance via satellite calls. This means that even without a signal, users can get help on the road when they need to.
The highlight is the iPhone 15 pro series, which Cook rated as "the most pro series to date". Externally, the iPhone 15 pro series of new titanium body has a brushed surface treatment to make it lighter while enhancing durability. The frame has wavy edges for a more comfortable feel; The bezels around the display are also noticeably thinner.
The core part is that the iPhone 15 pro chip directly skips the A17 and directly carries the more powerful A17 pro. This represents Apple's most advanced chip technology, made of 19 billion transistors in a 3-nanometer process. It is understood that the A17 Pro chip is equipped with a six-core CPU, twice the performance and four times the efficiency of the A16 Bionic, which can accelerate machine learning, such as more accurate auto-correction or extracting topics from images, and can process up to 35 trillion operations per second. "This should be the most brilliant result of this year's Apple conference." So said a tech blogger.
Thanks to the 20% increase in speed of the six-core GPU, users can create more detailed environments in mobile games that consume less power and are smoother. The press conference also demonstrated the scene of using the iPhone 15 pro to play mobile games, and Tencent's "Honor of Kings" and Mihayou's two games "Genshin" and "Honkai: Star Dome Railway" have appeared.
In terms of imaging, the iPhone 15 Pro is equipped with a 120mm telephoto lens for the first time, using a quadruple reflective prism design, and optical zoom of up to 5x. In addition, Apple said that users can also use the iPhone 15 Pro ultra-wide camera and normal camera to shoot spatial video, creating 3D videos that can be enjoyed in Vision Pro, and photos and videos will look "lifelike."
The iPhone 15 Pro series also has a small innovation - the mute paddle has been eliminated in favor of the Action button. Users can use the Action button to enable the camera, record screen, open a note-taking app, or specify an app to open, depending on their preference, or set it to mute the switch to switch ringtone/vibration mode.
It is worth mentioning that the iPhone 15 series officially switched from the Lightning interface to the USB-C interface. This marks the end of Apple's 11-year Lightning interface era. This caused cheers from netizens: "In the future, you can finally take Apple and Huawei out without two charging cables!" ”
Finally, back to the price issue that everyone is most concerned about. Apple's official website shows that the iPhone 15 starts at 5999 yuan, the iPhone 15 Plus starts at 6999 yuan, and the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max start at 7999 yuan and 9999 yuan respectively.
As everyone evaluates, "increase the amount without increasing the price". The new iPhone will be pre-ordered at 8 p.m. on September 15 and will be released on September 22. Will you rush this time?
The years when the iPhone swept through China
"It's like watching a European and American skit and environmental protection promotion meeting." Some people in the circle of friends sighed. This Apple conference, the release time is one and a half hours, the scene is constantly switching in the beautiful scenery, but also mixed with self-directed and self-acted short dramas and environmental protection low-carbon propaganda, in short, the real time to talk about the product is not long.
In addition to the iPhone series, Apple also brought two products - Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2. In terms of price, the starting price of Apple Watch Series 9 is 2999 yuan (aluminum shell), the starting price of the stainless steel shell version is 5799, and the starting price of Apple Watch Ultra 2 is 6499 yuan.
A common feeling is that until the end of the conference, everyone has not seen an epoch-making product like the iPhone 4, and it is inevitable that there will be some loss.
Unknowingly, Apple has been in the Chinese market for three decades. Especially in the past ten years, Apple's conference has swept the technology circle almost every year, witnessing the history of China's mobile phone development and change, and also carrying the youth memories of countless people.
Apple opened its first office in China in 1993, but it hasn't been loud since. On January 9, 2007, Jobs released the first iPhone in San Francisco, ushering in an era of miracles. At that time, the Chinese mainland far away was still a little hindsighted.
It wasn't until 2008 that Apple opened its first retail store in Sanlitun, Beijing. A year later, the iPhone 3G officially landed on Chinese mainland. Many senior fruit fans still remember that on the night of October 30, 2009, it rained lightly in Beijing, but there were still crowds under the big screen of the World Trade Terrace, and China Unicom held the iPhone 3G first sales ceremony with great fanfare, which also means that the iPhone officially entered the Chinese mainland market.
The following year, the iPhone4, which was regarded as an epoch-making work, was born, swept the world, and also triggered a rush to buy in China. The Los Angeles Times once reported the scene when Apple's new products were first sold: signing a two-year contract to buy an iPhone 4, in order to combat scalpers, it had to use a real-name purchase machine. Data show that when the first Apple Store in Shanghai opened, the number of customers on weekends alone exceeded 100,000, which was the first time Chinese saw the "iPhone whirlwind".
In the years since, from the iPhone 4s to the iPhone 5s, the popularity is still the same. At the same time, Apple has opened three stores in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong Plaza within a year, creating the most eye-catching retail stores in the most core areas of first- and second-tier cities. So far, Apple has opened 55 stores in China.
Thirty years have passed. Apple has driven the development of the domestic mobile phone supply chain industry, OEM industry and electronic information industry. Correspondingly, China has also become one of Apple's largest international markets. Counterpoint reported that in the second quarter of this year, China surpassed the United States for the first time to become the largest market for iPhone shipments.
It's just that behind the bright data, it is difficult to hide the crisis. When domestic mobile phone brands rose, when the iPhone began to become a ubiquitous "arcade", the technology giant gradually ushered in a decline in the Chinese market.
340 billion evaporated last night
Apple is being shorted
Just like after the conference, Apple must not think that it is stable.
By the close of U.S. stocks, Apple's stock price fell another 1.71%, and its market value disappeared by more than $47 billion (about 340 billion yuan). A week ago, Apple's market value lost $189.8 billion (about 1.4 trillion yuan) in just two trading days.
In fact, before the conference, the founder of the hedge fund Satori Fund directly declared war on Apple, planning to short Apple before and after the release of the new iPhone 15, that is, Eastern Time on September 12, and said that Apple is now their largest single stock short position.
Why Apple? Hedge fund Satori Fund issued an analysis, because Apple is about to launch the new iPhone 15, from the historical precedent to buy Apple's stock will be a good short-term deal, but the latter is now highly valued, so it is not recommended for long-term investors to buy. In the end, the other party came to a conclusion: given Huawei's breakthrough in its new Mate60 Pro smartphone technology, Apple will face increased competition.
This time, Huawei did not sell the Mate 60 series mobile phone first, and the competitive pressure should not be underestimated. On the morning of September 8, Huawei Mall suddenly launched new mobile phones such as Huawei Mate60Pro+ and MateX5, and the first batch of pre-sale "seconds" was launched. Obviously, Huawei will affect the future pattern of China's high-end mobile phone market, which is also an opponent that Apple cannot avoid.
Analysts at investment firm Oppenheimer said that due to the launch of Huawei's new mobile phones, Apple's iPhone shipments in 2024 may decrease by 10 million units, which is equivalent to about 4.5% of Apple's shipments in 2022.
Indeed, in addition to the "external trouble" of the strong recovery of competitors, the lack of innovation has always been an "internal worry" that Apple cannot ignore in recent years.
Not long ago, Luo Yonghao once ridiculed Apple's upcoming iPhone new products in a live broadcast: "Based on my understanding of my 'subsidiary', I don't think there will be any difference between iPhone 15 and iPhone 14, except that the sequence (column) number has changed." And Musk also complained on social media, he wasn't sure what was the difference between the iPhone he was using now and the previous version, "The camera is 10% better?" ”
Although while revenue declined for three consecutive quarters, Apple's research and development expenses hit a new high this fiscal year. As of the third quarter of fiscal 2023, Apple's R&D spending for the current fiscal year has reached $22.61 billion, about $3.12 billion higher than the same period last year. But the result of high R&D investment is that consumers have not seen the revolutionary changes brought by the iPhone for a long time. In other words, the iPhone lost its reason to surprise most people.
Over the past 12 years, Cook has led Apple to create one myth after another of sales and market capitalization. But in the eyes of the outside world, Cook always lacked the innovation and enthusiasm that Jobs had. Perhaps, he never pretended to be or intended to be Jobs.
Remember Steve Jobs once said, "Great companies often begin to decline after they achieve a monopoly, the pace of innovation slows down, and the products they make become an afterthought." Today, the same applies to Apple. #apple##下一部手机你还会买苹果吗? ##苹果iphone 15##苹果发布新产品#