Apple leaks new thinner, lighter iPad ... revenues

Re: you really got to admire apple

Apple is just selling their phones better than Google (Pixel) or Samsung (S7/S8 etc)

All are around the same price these days. I looked at getting a Pixel and it was exactly the same price as the iPhone. Funny that.

As for SIM and SD card slots, the majority of users don't really care about them any longer. A phone with 256Gb of storage (incidentally the same as the new laptops announced by MS yesterday) is good enough for IMHO, 99.999% of customers.

I'll make do with a 16Gb device and even then, there is 5Gb free.

Re: you really got to admire apple

Services (including the App Store and Apple Pay) accounted for $7.04bn on the quarter, an 18 per cent increase.

Not any more. They have retargeted quite successfully to fleece the punters from services:

Services (including the App Store and Apple Pay) accounted for $7.04bn on the quarter, an 18 per cent increase.

That is where the growth is. They can continue to produce flat (or even reduced) sales in hardware for decades. As long as that keeps the punters locked in into their services model that particular line in the balance sheet will continue to increase. It is already pulling in about the same amount of money as the iPad and the Mac combined.

Re: you really got to admire apple

>>quite comparable smartphone from any other manufacturer<<

Not comparable at all. If you look at comparable offerings, price difference is usually within $50.

Re: I would buy an iPad but…

If you want an iPad Pro then look in the pawn brokers and secondhand dealers. You will get a bargain there.

Re: Other Products group ... boosted revenues by 31 per cent

I guess that's where Apple's highly-lucrative dongles division hangs out.

Re: I'm not surprised iPhone sales are going flat

I got a set of Plantronics Bluetooth headphones for US$54. If you can afford an iPhone 7, you can get a pair of these and not break the bank. I am sticking with the 6s+ for a few more years, just to do it, but the kid has a 7s+ and is quite fond of it. The lack of a headphone jack did not stop the purchase for them. And I don't really use the jack very much, other than using headphones at work "so I can listen to my music as a reasonable volume between the hours of 9 and 11."

Speaking of Mac, I just picked up the mid-range Mac Mini to replace an almost fully functioning older Mini, and it's quite a good upgrade. Compared to the old one it is shorter and wider, but it has yet to cast off heat like the old one does. The lack of a Super Drive does not matter, external USB drives are dirt cheap. The only thing is trying to introduce my media library, in the form of a copy of my Kodi library, to iTunes. It was not as smooth as it worked last summer. I think it may be confused by having a cloud backup, then trying to do a local backup over that and before syncing iTunes to the cloud first. Who knows? It should be fine once it syncs locally. My new PS4 is doing much better. The ability to download updates and other junk while playing another game or watching streams is good. The Xbox360 was such a pain in the ass about such things. Many times we were thwarted from playing an already installed game due to not having an OS update, download, reboot, download, reboot again, and then an update for the game, download, wait, why am I playing this thing again? It was pretty easy to pick that over the Xbox One, despite the clever marketing via the South Park Black Friday Trilogy.