iPHONE 5c FACTORY SHUTDOWN: Foxconn 'halts' mobe rebrand op Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Foxconn is shutting down production of the iPhone 5c in one of its factories in order to shift production to the higher-end iPhone 5s, sources claim. The supply-chain sleuths at DigiTimes say Foxconn is planning to cease production of Apple's plastic, multicolored mobe at its facility in …
Agree. Love or hate iThings, they're a premium brand and the 5C in no way screams "Premium" at you.
One thing's for sure, Jobs would never have made this blunder.
Tim Cook once said something along the lines of "you can't innovate without consultation", despite the obvious fact that Jobs rarely (if ever) consulted anyone since he pulled apple out of the poo in the '90's.
The 5c is the sort of product you get when you do things the Tim Cook way.
Because if you drive a Dacia rather than a BMW, other road users will be less inclined to assume you are an arse who is about to cut them up, and accordingly will be more inclined to treat you with some courtesy on the roads.
Similar reasoning can be applied to iPhone vs any other phone of course...
They are not premium they use 200$ worth of materials whatever they can get at the time.
Some of the others come with 200$ worth of screen at certain times.
They don't even give an option for 500$ of materials (And associated price tag).
Premium stuff whatever you want to pay they are quite happy to let you.
Exactly what the hell phone do you think ships with a $200 screen, or even remotely approaches a $500 BOM?
If you think the Galaxy 4S or Note 3 does, you need to educate yourself. They cost a little more than the iPhone 5S does to make, but only about $30 more, not $300 more! Samsung is getting almost as rich off the fanboys buying their products as Apple is off the fanboys buying theirs!
Premium is a worthless marketing term, like 'professional quality' or 'select'.
In the retail world, 'premium' means the most, or among the most, expensive product within a product category. The term implies quality, but only for people unable to assess a product based on its merits, suitability or even their own preference: They have to have a 'score' to determine a products worthiness.
So, in retail parlance the iPhone is a premium product.
"Apple is so good at upselling that nobody's buying the low-end stuff"
Actually they don't upsell, they simply have a "premium brand", which means people are happy to buy their stuff with a huge profit margin, and still consider they have got a better product than anybody else sells (rightly or wrongly).
What the 5c demonstrates it that a brand has lower limits as well as upper limits. No matter how good Skoda cars now are, many people still wouldn't consider them, so that's an upper limit. Likewise the Aston Martin Cygnet showed a premium car maker trying to work its magic on a small car, and failing, and that's a lower limit. The crucial point is not logic, here, it is emotion and perception. If Skoda made a car that was better in all respects than a competitor, and a bit cheaper, it still wouldn't sway the majority, who rather pay more for a Volkswagen or Audi made from the same parts and designed largely by the same engineers.
The VW group exploit this by owning separate brands, to fill specific niches, but the individual brands are still limited. For Apple this would mean that to tackle the wider cheap market, they need a separate brand, which would be very difficult given that Apple is a hugely unified brand, and that the returns would be lower on cheaper products, which begs the question of why they'd want to diversify into lower return market segments. Samsung don't have this problem because they are already known for diverse product and for producing a range of phones at different price points, Apple have trapped themselves.
The Cygnet was an effort by Aston Martin to reduce their "fleet CO2" emissions, in order to not fall foul of EU legislation on this. Without that legislative pressure, there's no way in Hell they'd have emnbarked on rebranding a Toyota iQ like that...
But to stay with cars for a moment, the 5C is like Maserati doing an entry model of the Quattroporte for £10,000 less, but doing so by dropping the alloy wheels, metallic paint, air-conditioning and leather interior. Yes, it would be a "cheaper" Maserati, but that's only relatively, and if you can afford to buy this one, why not spend the extra for the "real" one.
Here's the problem: The gap in pricing for the iPhone 5C and 5S isn't big enough for the 5C to be considered "low cost", and the form factor and materials used invite an unfavourable comparison with something like Nokia's 520 and 620 Lumia models which are genuinely "unapologetically plastic" in bright colours, but unlike they 5C they come with an unapologetically low price to go with it (around £150 and £200 respectively SIM-free as opposed to £400+ for the 5C).
Each person that wanted the 5C changed their mind immediately after i pointed out the contract price is largely the same (on Three, the cost per month is exactly the same), and the sim-free price is only £70 ish cheaper than the 5S.
It's in this strange no-mans-land where its too expensive to be low cost for people to want (like the Moto G/Nexus 4 etc), but labelled as the "cheaper, low cost" device simply by virtue of not being the 5S.
I never thought the 5C would be hugely successful. I thought it looked cheap and nasty... but it isn't even that cheap. It really isn't too much of a financial stretch to just go all the way and get the better full fat 5S.
Apple really didn't think that through. I predict next year we'll be back to just the one iPhone as always was.
They made a phone that looked cheap but didn't sell it cheap. What exactly where they expecting to happen? They deliberately made the iPhone an aspirational product and then produced a phone that anyone with the more expensive model would snort in derision at. Either go for the cheap market or don't, but don't produce a handset designed to look cheap and then aim it at the select end of the market. And no it doesn't matter how good the phone is internally, it was designed to appeal to a lower financial sector of the market, and it simply doesn't and was never going to.
It's more complicated than that. They were getting pounded by analysts and shareholders to produce a less expensive phone. Now they've done it and it didn't work as its advocates thought. The whole thing gives Tim Cook a lot of leverage to tell nosy people to bugger off.
I'm not saying it was deliberately designed to not do well, but Apple management were destined to win either way this played out.
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