Payments peeps already know what Apple didn’t say yesterday. For all the hoopla a year ago when Apple Pay was announced, when it came to Apple’s mobile ambitions, it was more or less a chorus of crickets save for the occasional cameo appearance of pay-by-phone or commerce via Apple TV in some promotional shots.
But Apple’s Special Event 2015 was, on the whole, a more subdued year than 2014 — and marketplace reactions followed suit.
In 2014, after the launch of the iPhone 6/6Plus and Apple Pay, Apple’s stock price bounced over $100 a share — and almost managed to stay there for an entire year, though the Aug. 21 market meltdown saw Apple briefly drop as low as $94 a share.
In 2015, investors clearly didn’t enjoy quite such a case of the warm and fuzzies. One reporter described the stock market’s reaction to the latest and greatest from Silicon Valley’s varsity innovation team as “a giant yawn.” Apple’s stock price took a 2 percent hit – declining to $110.12 a share. As of the writing of this article, Apple’s stock price was on track to have made up that loss by climbing to a little over $112 a share.
It’s not as if the marketplace was horrified by Apple’s presentation, it just seems as though they weren’t all that thrilled either. There were headline makers – the gigundo iPad, a souped-up Apple TV and the next iteration of the iPhone 6 – but their introductions captured interest and as some have said, “light applause.”
So what was good, bad and ridiculous at Apple’s big show this year? PYMNTS has the rundown.
While the improvements were repeatedly labeled incremental by various commentators, on the whole, the consensus is that people liked what they saw.
The new iPhone is pretty much visually identical to the iPhone 6, unless one is particularly partial to the new rose-gold color. The new “insides” seem to be crowdpleasers, particularly the upgrade from the 8-megapixel camera to the 12-megapixel camera. A frequent complaint against the iPhone over the last few years —particularly when stacked against the Samsung Galaxy line — was that the Apple had been too slow to up that megapixel count. The ability to shoot 4K video has been widely praised as was the new “3D touch” feature, which allows users to not only tap the screen to navigate, but also use various pressure points to control elements of the screen view.
The new “big iPad” was also unveiled. The 12.9-inch Pro edition received high marks, particularly for screen clarity and ease of use, and the optional screen/keyboard has also been hailed as a long overdue improvement, particularly if the iPad is to successfully migrate into a second act as a professional tool.
The price tag — $799 for the tablet alone, plus another $169 for the cover/keyboard (and another $99 for the “pencil,” but more on that in a minute) — is not negligible, but one reviewer at The Next Web noted that when stacked against various “professional precision” tablets in the marketplace which can run into the thousands of dollars, the newly updated iPad actually may make Apple the better bang for certain professionals’ buck.
Most widely praised for the “ain’t it cool” factor were upgrades made to Apple TV, particularly to its remote, which is now enhanced with Siri. Users can very easily make use of voice commands to ask Siri to pull up shows, movies, genres of things or games. And, according to The Wall Street Journal “she” can be pretty granular – if you say “can you find that ‘Friends’ where Chandler gets stuck in the turkey” Siri will pull up all episodes where that description applies.
On the whole, the fanboys and girls were happy, and the rest of the marketplace was mostly satisfied, if not elated.
Mostly.
As with all events, there was some criticism to be had. While the technical achievement behind the voice controlled operating system was universally praised, a lot of watchers wondered if it was really a practical step forward since most people feel weird “yelling at their remote control.” Weird, and a little silly. Google, with the rise and fall of Google Glass has recently proven that it doesn’t matter how technically “neat” something is — if using it makes users feel like they look weird or crazy, it sort of dies.
And then there’s the Apple Pencil.
By all accounts it is a remarkable device that really is different than the stylus of the past. The iPad Pro was reportedly designed to allow a digital pen and to then track said pen 240 times a second as it moves across the screen. The new device can “feel” pressure, tilt, orientation and more to create different strokes or create a virtual ruler.
And while we understand why Apple might have gotten excited about all those advances, it seems they forgot that they were actually sending to market a $100 device called the Apple Pencil. And when one ironically releases something to the market that sounds a bit like a “Saturday Night Live” parody of your actually products, the Internet will unite to mock.
But there’s also the price point: $99 for a stylus isn’t unheard of in the world of Wacom tablets, but it’s pretty high-end. For Apple users that have gotten used to using their fingers —”the best pointing device in the world,” as Jobs famously put it — that’s a lot to throw down.
Twitter’s reaction has not been kind.
One Tweeter calling himself Darth Vader noted “If you see someone using an Apple Pencil – force choke them.”
“Oh my God, I had a stroke and lost 6 months. It’s April Fools right? Wait the pencil is real?”
“Do you think they’re trying to bring Steve Jobs back from the dead by pissing him off?”
That last one is a reference to the the time in 2007 when Steve Jobs introduced the world to the iPhone and said, “Who wants a stylus?”
He also noted if that if a maker had introduced a stylus – they had “blown it.”
But then, the world now is not quite the same one that the iPhone first launched into either – and it is turning out to be much harder to keep consumers’ interest the more used to the digital revolution they get.
Which leads to just one more thing — a small, but interesting, move: Apple decision to let users buy their phones on installment. It is a page from the telecom’s book. Instead of offering up free phone upgrades every two years coupled into a long-term contract, companies are instead asking customers to pay full retail on the phones, but spread it out over 24 months.
Apple is making a similar offer, though with an interesting twist. At the one-year mark, customers can upgrade to the newest Apple model. Apple’s bottom line are those phones — and instead of selling them as goods, it seems Apple might protect those margins by selling iPhones as a service that customers pay a monthly fee to always enjoy the newest edition of.
And that small change could mean some other big changes, particularly for telecom companies that are still using those phones as the primary incentive for keeping customers in long-term relationships.
Which means no matter what comes next, we can probably count on Apple to keep on keeping it interestin
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For more news on Apple Pay adoption, click here.
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