Wired
“Amazing”-Cook still uses this vocabulary to evaluate his own products, and all the new models are directly on 5G.
The iPhone 12 mini, iPhone 12, iPhone 12 Pro and iPhone 12 Pro max all support 5G frequency bands and 5G millimeter wave in the US market.
Looking at the global mobile phone market, the iPhone launched 5G mobile phones nearly two years later than Samsung, Huawei, etc. In the domestic market, the price of 5G mobile phones has even dropped to the thousand yuan level.
In an interview with Tencent News last September, Cook bluntly said: “I think 5G is still a bit ahead. We researched the market and found that the entire market, whether it is infrastructure or chips, is not mature enough and not enough. To launch a high-quality product.”
According to Lan Xi, a senior self-media person, Apple is waiting for operators to pave the way. This is Apple’s consistent style. Apple will choose the time when the industrial supporting facilities are at least completed to the pass line before adapting to the upgrade of communication functions. Products and services are mutually exclusive. Can’t survive in isolation.
To a large extent, this shows Cook’s calm side.
During Cook’s nine years in charge of Apple, a large part of Apple’s innovation in almost every generation of models has been placed on technologies that are not intuitive for users. Of course, this has also led to more and more voices from the outside world about “Apple without innovation” in the past few years.
Cook believes that innovation is not necessarily change, but better.
Returning to specific products, the appearance design of the iPhone series this time has returned to the “right-angle metal middle frame + double-sided glass” design opened by the iPhone 4-it can be said to more directly deny the curved screen that Android devices have been engaged in , Waterfall screen.
The classic design of Steve Jobs applied to the iPhone 4 has returned, which can also be seen in the iPad product line. The iPad Air released last month also applied a right-angle frame design.
According to a deep web report, Apple’s design change occurred after the chief designer George Ivey left. George Ivey has been leading Apple’s design team since 1996 and is considered to be the soul of Steve Jobs’ strategy and Apple’s design philosophy. On June 28 last year, George Ivey resigned from Apple.
After abandoning the rounded corner design from the iPhone 6 series to the iPhone 11 series, Cook re-selected the design scheme left by Jobs in the past, which is quite a tribute to Jobs. But under the more radical product iteration logic of the iPhone 12 series, it also revealed Cook’s efforts to change Apple.
Cook is undoubtedly a qualified CEO. He is obvious to all of Apple’s contribution to the business achievements of this company, and has made great achievements for Apple’s two trillion market value.
But so far, he has not done what Jobs did to bring groundbreaking changes to Apple. In most people’s perception, Cook is just completing his CEO’s work step by step, and he has not shown Jobs’s ability to change. And this transformative ability that can bring profound changes to Apple may be exactly what Cook wants to show to the outside world.
There may not be so much time left for Cook to prove himself. According to foreign media PhoneArena, Cook’s ten-year term is approaching at the end of next year. There is no news about whether Cook will continue to lead Apple.
The iPhone 12 may be Cook’s best opportunity.
As the first batch of iPhone 5G series phones, it is not surprising that Cook gave the iPhone 12 a milestone. Thanks to Apple’s strong brand effect, even if the iPhone released 5G phones two years later than the market, there was a time The confidence to turn over.
US telecom operator Verizon CEO Hans Weisberg even mentioned this when introducing the 5G process at the press conference: When Apple began to release 5G mobile phones, the 5G era had arrived.
This statement is inevitably exaggerated, but you must know that in the past development of smartphones from 3G to 4G, the iPhone was not the first market pioneer, but it still showed strong market competitiveness.
So when we discuss the meaning of iPhone 12 to Apple, we might as well analyze it from two dimensions, one is the product side, and the other is the market side. Regarding the analysis on the market side, we will discuss in Part B.
All products support the 5G frequency band. Apple said that it has carefully customized high-sensitivity, high-efficiency antennas and antenna components so that the iPhone 12 can support as many 5G frequency bands as possible. According to Tiger Sniff, the iPhone 12 series supports as many as 17 5G frequency bands, more than any mainstream Android mobile phone products currently on the market, and all three major domestic operators support.
For users’ concerns about the high power consumption of 5G networks, the iPhone 12 series provides a solution through the framework of “Smart Data Intelligent Switching Technology” and “Optimized IOS”: users can switch between 4G and 5G according to the application’s broadband usage.
In Apple’s historical strengths of the A series of processors, the iPhone 12 series uses the A 14 Bionic chip, which is the world’s first 5nm process. This chip processor was the first to be released at the iPhone’s previous press conference.
According to Apple, the A14 processor chip integrates 11.8 billion transistors, a 6-core CPU, a 4-core GPU, and a 16-core neural network engine. In terms of experience, neural network computing power will increase by 80%, CPU performance by 50%, GPU performance by 50%, and ML acceleration by 70%.
We don’t need to say anything about Apple’s traditional strengths. It’s worth noting that Apple has worked hard on the shooting function this time. In the past few years, the camera function has become a battleground for all, and Apple was once left behind by brands such as Huawei and Samsung in this regard.
The three-camera combination of wide-angle main camera, ultra-wide-angle and telephoto used in iPhone 12 Pro/iPhone 12 Pro max has also been upgraded. Both the wide-angle main camera and the ultra-wide-angle lens support night mode. In addition, these two products also added a LIDAR original deep-sensing camera similar to the iPad Pro 2020, that is, a lidar scanner with depth-sensing function, which is mainly used to enhance the ability of shooting and AR applications, and improve the focusing ability.
For the iPhone 12 Pro max, Apple also designed a set of anti-shake solutions that only move the photosensitive element to make the lens more stable than before, that is, sensor displacement optical image anti-shake.
It can be said that the collaborative upgrade between software and hardware has made the iPhone’s shortcomings in the shooting function be filled, and it is no longer so easy for other manufacturers to want to dominate Apple in this regard.
On the other hand, this step taken by Apple in the shooting function has also caused direct pressure on the new mate series that Huawei will release on October 22.
After all, in recent years, whether Huawei’s mate flagship series or P series, the shooting function has been regarded as a core selling point, even the most important core selling point.
On the 10th, Yu Chengdong also warmed up the Mate 40 series on Weibo, saying that Mate 40 “will be the most powerful Huawei mobile phone in history.”
But now that the shooting function is catching up by Apple, the mate 40 series is in front of the iPhone 12 series. Whether the cards it can play is not easy to say.
However, in recent years, Apple’s dominance in the high-end market has gradually weakened. In the second quarter of 2018, Apple’s global shipments were overtaken by Huawei for the first time, falling to the third place in the world. Data from GfK, a third-party market research organization, also shows that in the past four years, Apple’s share of high-end models in the mainland China market above 4000 yuan fell from 84% in 2016 to 65% in 2019, while Huawei’s share dropped from 2. % Increased to about 30%.
Since the beginning of this year, domestic mobile phone brands have also entered the high-end market one after another, and the user’s choice is increasing. In contrast, the market’s dependence on Apple is shrinking.
From this point of view, the importance of the iPhone 12 to Apple is self-evident: Apple needs to gain a foothold and lead in the 5G market through this series of products, further expand its leading position in the high-end mobile phone market, and regain lost ground.
According to data from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, as of the end of May 2020, my country’s 5G mobile phone shipments were 15.643 million units, accounting for 46.3% of domestic mobile phone shipments, which is about 71 times that of August 2019. The overall proportion is showing an upward trend. The market penetration rate of mobile phones is rising.
However, at present, the potential energy of 5G smartphones has not been fully released globally. IDC predicts in the “IDC Global Smartphone Tracking Report” that in 2020, global 5G mobile phone shipments are expected to be about 240 million units, of which the Chinese market The contribution will exceed 160 million units, accounting for approximately 67.7%.
Given that the mobile phone market is still on the eve of the 5G outbreak, this is a good opportunity for any mobile phone brand to grab market share.
A very interesting thing is that last year’s Strategy Analytics research report “US 5G Awareness & Smartphone Brand Preference” showed that one in five people think they already have a 5G mobile phone. Even among Apple fans, 27% believe that their flagship device is already 5G.
This can reflect to a certain extent that 5G has not really gained enough recognition and recognition on the market side, Apple’s brand loyalty is still very high, and Omdia’s data can also show that Apple’s unparalleled competitiveness: 2020 IPhone11 shipments reached 37.7 million units in the first half of the year, surpassing the total of the second, third, and fourth places. The fifth, sixth, seventh, and tenth iPhones are all other models of Apple’s own iPhone. This shows that the iPhone is on the market How competitive is it.
On the other hand, many of the flagship models of Chinese Android manufacturers have even exceeded the starting price of Apple’s new models in the same period, plus Apple’s Trade In redemption program.
Under this strategy, Apple’s new users are not only from the old iPhone, but the price range of “small, medium, large, and oversized” also expands the user coverage of the new iPhone.
This is also directly related to Apple’s new story. Apple is not only a hardware company. In the process of transforming to a service ecosystem, hardware is still the most important means for Apple to acquire customers-iPad, MacBook, Apple Watch, and even Apple One services. , The same continues to “increasing and reducing prices”, the purpose is to obtain customers.
This also reflects that Apple has not lost much in the delayed 5G strategy.
Backward compatibility of technology is a conscience, and it is the duty of seeking truth from appeals. The iPhone’s determination to plunge into AR is more radical than Android manufacturers.
For example, Apple’s LiDAR Scanner (LiDAR Scanner) on the iPhone 12 Pro and iPhone 12 Pro max models is designed to provide a more immersive AR experience. Snapchat also confirmed today that it will be the first iOS application to apply this new technology.
Apple briefly explained this technology at the press conference, saying that lidar is a scanner that measures the time it takes for light to reach an object and reflect it back. Together with the iPhone’s machine learning capabilities and development framework, it helps the iPhone to help users understand their surroundings. world. Reflected in the above two products, this technology has been applied to enhance night shooting functions.
This is also a key step in Apple’s deployment of AR. According to IDC, with the help of 5G, Apple’s application examples of AR technology based on LiDAR and 5G networks in architecture, design and other related industries will also be brought to the industry from the level of application scenarios. New ideas.
From a deeper level, the “start of the new iPhone era” mentioned by Cook may be that Apple does not want to make performance “stacking” iterations of old functions such as game support and camera photography. Breaking new paths alone on AR or similar applications, unique outside the Android camp.
The development of smart phones has already entered the stage of stock game. Almost all players in the market have fallen into an innovation bottleneck-nothing more than upgrading and upgrading of some old functions.
This step taken by the iPhone 12 may not be great, but it is not easy.
Jobs
The two different styles of leaders differ in many places in their management philosophy for Apple. In many cases, Cook operates Apple as a “betrayer”.
For the way to mobilize enthusiasm, Jobs used to let the team and managers compete with each other, similar to the “horse racing mechanism”, while Cook emphasized more teamwork and cross-departmental collaboration.
Jobs has no interest in charity. He once publicly stated that the biggest charity he can do is to increase the market value of Apple, but Cook attaches great importance to this, saying that the philanthropy that Apple wants to participate in is “new and exciting.”
For another example, Cook has always attached great importance to Apple’s environmental protection work. This time the release of the iPhone 12 series, Apple is the industry’s first, and no longer comes with mobile phones with chargers and white headphones. Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of environmental, policy and social initiatives, explained at the press conference that Apple is looking for ways to reduce waste and use fewer materials to reduce carbon emissions and avoid mining and using precious materials.
This is the difference between Cook and Jobs. Cook is not only good at speaking beautiful words, but also good at making money with beautiful words.
When Jobs was in office, a series of Apple decisions were very harmful to the environment. “The Biography of Tim Cook” writes that from 2000 to 2009, many reports from the non-governmental environmental organization Greenpeace had severely criticized the destructive effects of Apple on the environment.
Today, “Betrayer” Cook has shown a different attitude. The design concept of the iPhone 12 series has returned to the Jobs era.
At the same time, at the end of his ten-year tenure, Apple under Cook began to show a strong signal of “change” to the outside world. This change stems from the arrival of the 5G era, from Apple’s current situation, and from the library. Ke made the ambition of leading Apple to achieve “world-breaking” progress, as Jobs did.
To a certain extent, this is another return of Cook and his last stubbornness.