iPhone Duo & Siri AI Raise APPL Interest: Will it Boost Sales?

0:00for more on the event and the new product lineup. We are joined by Daniel Rubino, the editor in chief at Windows Central. Daniel great to talk to you. Glad you could find the time to take a look at some of these new products. Now of course the iPhone duo dominating the headlines today. People very excited about this highly anticipated foldable phone. Is that your biggest takeaway from the event yesterday? Or is it something else? No, it's absolutely the duo. It is something that I'm going to talk about. People are very interested in it. It's to talk in the town. I think it's going to be some questions around affordability of the device, but it is definitely caught the interest. And as it should, it's new for Apple. But if you follow the consumer tech space, you know foldables have been around for a half a decade at this point. So Samsung, especially United States has been making these devices. Google makes the pixel. So these Apple took their time with it, but they did a really nice job of

1:01coming out with a Gen 1 product that basically beat sort of where Gen 7 and Gen 8 products are currently for Samsung. And so as we look at this, I mean, you mentioned this is dominating the conversation Alex coffee was talking to me earlier, saying he had friends talking to him about the duo and he hasn't thought of any release from Apple in a long time where there's been a conversation around it. So does this then spur a new upgrade cycle? With the duo here or do they have more to do still to convince users to upgrade? Because as you mentioned, affordability is a concern here. Yeah, I think it's going to be don't give me wrong. This device will sell well. It will sell out, but that's also I think partly because there's going to be some supply constraints here on making such a complicated device. But I think it will take a couple of generations for people to get on board. You know, it does start at $2,000, which is much more than what people are used to with phones. Now, you can make the argument, hey, I'm in the market for a new iPhone and I usually like having an iPad mini.

2:01You know, you can just get one device now basically and do all that. So for those people does make sense. But if you're just coming from the last gen iPhone, you know, this is a big ask for a lot of people. So I think it's going to, we'll see a big increase. It's going to help the foldable category as a whole. But I still think that this is a little while for your average person to sort of get on board with that. And then let's look just broadly at the new iPhone lineup with the 18 pro, the 18 max. We got that price increase $100 higher on each of those. There was an expectation that they would be higher, but I saw several analysts notes this morning saying that they were concerned that there wasn't enough increase to offset any margin pressure. So what were your expectations in terms of the price point here? And in how much pricing power and pricing pressure does Apple really have here? My guess is that Apple is actually eating a lot of the costs here. And raising the prices on its mac books and iPads and other devices.

3:01Versus trying to increase the prices as much as they can on the iPhone because the iPhone makes up over 50% of their business. So they don't really want to jack up to cost too much. I think $100 is not a lot percent of the price. So I think that's a big difference. So it's not a lot per say compared to some other companies, but it is an increase, right? But it could have been a lot more, could have been $200 more, which would have been more significant. So I think they're just moving the numbers around here that trying to keep the iPhone line as affordable as it can, considering the circumstances. Certainly, and I want to talk about AI too before we have to say goodbye because they did announce an upgraded AI, the new operating system. A lot of capabilities here, personal context, this ability to show your photo is authentic and not AI created. How are you looking at this AI release because Apple's pretty widely discussed as the laggard in the AI race, but there's an argument to be made that they may be catching up here. I do believe they're catching up.

4:02I'll also say just in general with the consumer market AI really hasn't been a big seller for a lot of these devices. It's not a reason to upgrade. I do think the AI authentication of images is actually kind of a cool idea that they're doing. And I think that helps the conversation. I don't think it's a reason why people are going necessarily upgrade outside of a very niche group of people who need that sort of functionality. But the AI here, I think, is interesting, but I don't think it's a reason for people to upgrade. There are some other good reasons to get the new iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max, for instance. And, Dino, I had a guest yesterday tell me that they really felt that this AI release was the headline everybody was missing because of the personal context. Because there are two and a half billion devices in the Apple ecosystem, we trust the ecosystem already. I've stored all my personal data in here. How potentially large of an opportunity is it if people do embrace the AI usage with personal context for Apple to get a further stickiness in its ecosystem? Because I don't have to feed it the information it already has it right there.

5:02Yeah, so the question is going to be about usability and functionality, right? So a lot of times they see show demonstrations of like someone text you and it's like, oh, it's going to go make a reservation for you at a restaurant. And it's kind of neat, but your average person actually isn't really kind of doing that kind of stuff. So I think this comes down to what is the kind of killer feature that people learn that they can't live without. And so far when it comes to AI, we really haven't seen that in the consumer space. And the price is a bit different. So I'm a little cautious about this. I think Apple isn't a good position financially both to pursue AI because they're really good at it. And I think that's the reason why I think Apple is a good position. I think that's why I think Apple is a good position financially both to pursue AI, because they're not as invested as some other companies are. But at the same time, we really haven't seen that many killer products or reasons to upgrade to these devices for those features. And I think there's just something to watch that may change in a couple of years, but right now it's not much there right now. Well, Apple having a nice response to this release. And John Turnis' first event as CEO. They're up 2.5%. Daniel really appreciate you taking the time to be with us today. Daniel, we're being out editor in chief over at Windows Central.