I’d be surprised if we get anything more than a cosmetic update. It’s so underpowered compared to the new model. Maybe it will get access to Apple Music (I wouldn’t mind that tbh), but all the fancy stuff will be the upgrade carrot.
If it gets a Kodi app it’s a no brainer for me. I’ll get two of them! If it gets Plex, then I’ll probably get one and test Plex out again (as much as I’ve tried, I just can’t get into Plex, I’m still stuck in the simplicity of XBMC and it’s 100% local decoding of a list of files so you don’t need to transcode anything or have any power at the server side).
I like the concept of the iPhone program and as someone who has had every model iPhone it’s attractive. The real story will be the price. If it’s iPhone cost divided by 24 months that would just about align with the market (ie you get back about 50% 12 months on).
I wonder what proportion of the market would move to this sort of structure (which is essentially buying outright) vs those who would only get a phone on a plan from a carrier. For most I think that would come down to the subsidies offered by the carriers and what plans are offered.
To put that in perspective, I looked at a iPhone 6, 64GB as a mid range offering, I then tried to get it on Telstra or Optus on a plan vs a BYO offering.
Telstra
Medium Plan with 2.5GB Data and $1000 talk is $102 / month.
On a BYO 12 month plan that same deal is $50/month which means you’re paying $52 / month extra for your iPhone. So your subsidised iPhone 6 64GB is actually costing $52 x 24 = $1,248 (vs $1,079 for an outright purchase today). To be fair, maybe they haven’t revised their prices… but it’s still a pretty shitty deal with you paying MORE than the outright cost.
Optus
On optus it’s $85 / month with unlimited calls and 3GB data. which is listed as a $60 My Plan + $25 handset but in reality you can get 3GB (currently 4GB) data and unlimited calls on a $45 BYO phone plan which makes the REAL handset payment more like $40 / month or $960 over 24 months. That’s a $119 discount for signing up for 24 months. Hardly a compelling offer.
Of course the wild card is if you can afford the lump sum (although if you are selling the old phone it’s only 50% finance). GE will give you 12 months interest free on an iPhone too so it’s plausible already that you buy a phone, pay off as what you can after you sell your old handset then divide the remainder by 12 to not pay interest.
Now I’ve gone off on a tanget here, but the point is the devil is in the detail.
We bought outright for my wifes phone last time as it gets heavily used for work and it was way cheaper to do that. She can get it pretax as well that way.
Has anyone else noticed the large jump in price for the iPad’s?
I purchased a 128GB iPad Air 2 in April and the RRP was $859. The AppleStore gave it to me for $809 as Officeworks were doing a deal at the time.
I noticed that the 128GB Wifi only iPad Air 2 is now $959. Ouch.
Looks like resale on these models will be quite good.
Probably to do with the atrocious exchange rate.
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Similarly, iPhone resale value has also jumped up a bit — you may have paid $999 or whatever the rate was this time last year, but there’s a pretty good chance you’ll get more than you were expecting if you sell your device this time around, again due to the higher price for a new unit.
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ATP have a pretty good wrap up (as well as showing their comically bad knowledge of fashion). One thing I don’t get, the Apple TV has an application size limit of 200 MB and applications aren’t allowed to store persistent local data (everything’s assumed to be safe to be deleted). Who’s going to need a 64 GB Apple TV?
Also it’s interesting that only the 128 GB iPad Pro has the data option.
The iPad Pro tiers are flat-out weird. 32GB, then a jump to 128GB with nothing in between, although I suppose if you’re going to want more than 32GB of storage you might as well go for the 128GB for however much it turns out to be.
And finally… apparently those new iCloud storage tiers and price drops exist only in the keynote, because I haven’t seen anything that mentions the new storage tiers or pricing anywhere.
I believe everything will pretty much be streamed. It’s bizarre. I was thinking that maybe it was future proofing for caching lots of 4K content but then I remembered it doesn’t do 4K (unless the hardware can handle it but they haven’t got the software quite right and plan on unlocking it in the future)
This completely changes the iPad. It’s gone from a tablet to a laptop replacement. I bought a new MacBook Pro earlier this year, I can see myself in my next laptop replacement cycle (3-4 years time) replacing it with an iMac, and iPad Pro.