More bad news for Apple as Huawei thrives – The Wall Street Journal

DUBLIN — It's been a bad few months for Apple. Sales of its flagship product – the iPhone – are slumping due to a combination of factors. These include an economic slowdown in China, loss of market share to rising new competitors, and an increase in the length of time customers are going between upgrades. At the heart of the problem is a simple fact: smartphones are no longer special. When Apple released the first iPhone, it was a world-changing technology. No one had really seen anything like it and the iPhone essentially invented a new product category and spawned a new microeconomy (the app economy). It was a remarkable development and a remarkable product. But times have changed. These days, the iPhone isn't really all that different from any other phone. I have an iPhone 8 and my husband slums it with an entry-level Huawei smartphone model. My phone takes better pictures, and my screen is bigger so games are more fun. But basically, the devices do the same stuff – they allow us to text, check social media, find our way around, listen to music, and, I guess, make phone calls (if it came to that). The tech inside smartphones has become cheap and ubiquitous and the gap in performance between the best phone and the tenth best phone has shrunk to a matter of a few pixels of screen and photo quality. In this market, Apple has done well to maintain and grow its giant margins. But the future for smartphones is going to be more competition, price wars, and less and less differentiation. When you buy a new toaster, you don't stand in line all night for the latest model. That's where phones are headed. Apple is making bets on other areas, from services to wearables. But the heady days of iPhone ascendancy are gone for good. – Felicity Duncan

Apple Loses Ground to Huawei as China Shipments Slump 20%

By Dan Strumpf

(The Wall Street Journal) HONG KONG—iPhone shipments in China slumped far more than overall smartphone shipments there last quarter, costing Apple further ground against local rival Huawei in the world's biggest smartphone market.

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